As officials described how they'll spend billions on America's nuclear arsenal and presented rosy outlooks, California's Rep. John Garamendi retorted, "The fact of the matter is every single one of these systems are behind schedule and over budget, every single one of them."
The Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, Columbia-class ballistic submarine and B-21 bomber could all face delays under a yearlong continuing resolution, service officials said.
The GPS network continues to prove its unmatched reliability, and it’s only getting stronger.
To facilitate the pivot to the Great Power competition against adaptive enemies with advanced capabilities, the Navy is developing the flexibility to decentralize its forces while remaining fully networked.
The HAC report rebukes the Air Force for a lack of transparency in shifting spending on prototyping of hypersonic missiles.
Most observers had expected an increase in the Navy's shipbuilding accounts with this budget, especially after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, said that, even as an Army general, he would support budget increases for the Navy and Air Force in light of the Chinese threat. But this budget decommissions 12 ships and buys relatively few replacements.
"I am worried about the state of the readiness of the nuclear triad," Deputy SecDef nominee Kath Hicks tells the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning, “and, if confirmed, that is an area I would want to get my team in place and start to look at right away.”
Knowing when to build on commercial systems and when to develop something new can be the difference between parity and information dominance.
Raytheon has won the LRSO design competition, but it remains uncertain whether it will nab the prime contract to actually build the next-generation cruise missile or be forced to share that with Lockheed Martin.
It's a major shift after decades in which submarines focused on projecting power ashore, with their only anti-ship weapons being their rarely-used torpedoes. Driving the change: increasing anxiety about China.
The push from Capitol Hill follows a year of the Pentagon promising to do more, and do it quickly, when it comes to developing and buying next-generation technologies.