By Colin Clark
In space warfare one man’s refueling or repair capability can look an awful lot like another man’s ability to destroy or cripple your satellite. Now one Chinese satellite has approached another and, apparently, bumped its target and changed the orbit. U.S. analysts of Chinese space efforts seem to agree, so far, that this was not an anti-satellite test.
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Raytheon and Boeing took a step closer last week to qualifying their prototype Joint Air to Ground Missile for the next acquisition milestone in the $5 billion program with what company officials say was a visually spectacular test. The missile, which had no explosive warhead, struck a working T-72 tank after a 4-kilometer flight and destroyed the tank, driving it half a foot across the ground, sending a several hundred pound road wheel flying through the air and leaving White Sands Missile Range with nothing much left to shoot at, said Mike Riley, Raytheon business development manager for JAGM.
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In an exclusive interview with DoD Buzz, Lockheed Martin CEO Bob Stevens says he hopes Congress looks favorably on the Obama administration’s proposed arms export control reforms because it will make U.S. companies more competitive, help generate U.S. jobs and better protect crucial U.S. technology.
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Britain’s Conservative government, faced with enormous deficits, may launch its Queen Elizabeth class carriers without airplanes to put on them as it considers early retirement for its Harrier jump jets. The two 65,000 ton carriers are built into the UK’s defense budget, but new airplanes are not. Scrapping the Harriers early, combined with delays to the Joint Strike Fighter short takeoff version, could leave the UK temporarily dependent on the U.S. for F/A-18s and V-22s. That raises the prospect of one country deploying carriers and then relying on another country to supply the airplanes to fly from them.
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The United States has spent $2 trillion since 1998 on wars and regular defense spending and has been left “with a smaller Navy and Air Force and a tiny increase in the size of the Army,” argues Winslow Wheeler, defense analyst at the Center for Defense Information. If Defense Secretary Robert Gates is serious about restructuring the military and what it buys, then he better get going or he’ll be a “wasted asset,” Wheeler says.
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Lockheed Martin, with just a five-week headstart, has completed 60 percent of LCS 3, compared to Austal, whose LCS 4 is only 26 percent complete. We hear Lockheed recently attached the bow to the rest of the ship. Given how close the competition is between Lockheed and the Amero-Australian shipbuilder, the bigger company’s ability to produce ships with greater speed and fewer delays might raises questions in the minds of U.S. Navy officials about Austal’s ability to regularly deliver ships.
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