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.

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.

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.

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.

Stand on the edge of the Everglades with the August sun beating down on your head, the summer humidity wrapping your skin and the thunderous beat of 43,000 pounds of power causing your chest and the very ground beneath you to thrum. I waggled my jaw a couple of times so the seal on the hearing protection broke and my ears absorbed the awesome roar of the test engine firing about 100 feet away, hung high in the air. That’s what it’s like to experience testing of Pratt & Whitney’s F135 STOVL engine for the Joint Strike Fighter. And there was lots of politics discussed as well.

With the stroke of a pen Air Force Secretary Mike Donley engaged one of the most complex bureaucratic challenges faced by the service: how to buy, build and manage satellites and the rockets that move them into space. In perhaps the biggest change, Donley vested the service’s undersecretary, Erin Conaton, with the responsiblity for guiding all space policy activities overseen by the Air Force. The assistant secretary for acqusiution will now lead all space acquisition, combining traditional fighter, bomber and other service acquisition with space.

The U.S. aid effort to Pakistan, which has been relatively small so far, may well last more than four months and, if indications from the Pentagon are correct, will also grow in scale.

The man managing the Marine’s response, Brig. Gen. David Berger, said he and his team had been operating on the presumption that the operation would last 30 to 60 days. Now, the head of Marine operations told reporters, the planning window looked more likely to be 90 to 120 days. And the Marines may bring the Osprey in to help, he said.

When you buy a car, usually one of a family’s most expensive purchases, you get a warranty if it’s new or “certified.”

When the Pentagon buys weapons it rarely gets any kind of warranty. After all, these are complex systems, using advanced technology and they are, well, going to be used in war zones. So when the head of the Missile Defense Agency told reporters that Lockheed will offer a warranty on the THAAD anti-missile system we could barely swallow our applewood bacon.

It was the top story in the Wall Street Journal — China looks set to become the world’s second largest economy. But the New York Times put it on the front page of the business section, seeming to indicate this story was less a milestone and more a technical correction. The need for analysis was obvious so we asked a Chinese expert at the Heritage Foundation to give us a better idea of just how important this fact is and why. Dean Cheng’s conclusion: the PLA must still fight for its share of the pot, but a growing pot will probably drive a demand for greater deference from China to those who share its neighborhood.

The Pentagon’s head of acquisition signed an Acquisition Decision Memorandum last week telling the Air Force to plow ahead and develop plans for a new weather satellite, one replacing the ill-fated NPOESS program. Ironically, the requirements for the new satellite — to be known as the Defense Weather Satellite — are the same as they were for NPOESS, according to a congressional aide

As they comb the Hill and pitch the benefits of the second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter, General Electric is pushing one set of ideas particularly hard in the face of skepticism from the Navy and some other Pentagon sources: the F136 will not substantially increase maintenance costs. The company shared some of its Hill talking points.

The United Kingdom began its hunt for military savings the weekend after the Farnborough Air Show and the search has ranged throughout the defense establishment. One of Britain’s most precious capabilities, the one that gave rise to the famed Special Air Services regiment, is its Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols. Most of this capability resides within the 21 Special Air Services regiment known as the Artists. There are rumors that the British may consolidate one of its three squadrons, which happened once before.

UAVs aren’t going to be as useful as they have been in Afghanistan and Iraq because, in the next real war, they are much more likely to face armed opposition from the ground and from the air. The outgoing commander of US air assets in Europe, Gen. Roger Brady, told a recent UAV conference maneuverability and stealth limitations are arguments against UAVs in contested airspace. It turns out the folks at General Atomics have been listening and looking ahead.

The rumor mill is racing with reports that Gen. Hoss Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will soon leave his post and be replaced by Gen. Norton Schwartz, Air Force chief of staff. Schwartz’s ascension has Air Force sources beaming. It has been some time since an Air Force officer has been blessed with promotion to the innermost command circle. “I’m happy [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates is expressing some confidence in my poor, beleaguered Air Force.

UPDATED: Lockheed Details Test Results; Raytheon Faring Better So Far

Put $5 billion on the table, factor in shrinking budgets, add the fact that you are competing for what is likely to be the last tactical missile competition for the next quarter of a century and you’ve got one hell of a fight for the Joint Air to Ground Missile (JAGM). On one side of the missile corral stands mighty Lockheed Martin. Facing the largest defense company in America is a team of Raytheon and Boeing. JAGM is a test for the companies, as well as the Pentagon, being the first of two programs set up by former head of acquisition John Young as a test of his prototyping approach.

Buzz readers will know that we have largely refrained from writing about the efforts by a tiny U.S. company to wiggle its way into the KC-X competition, but our friends at Aviation Week have come up with such a wonderful denouement that we have to write something. As Amy Butler reports, the folks at U.S. Aerospace, teaming with the Russian giant Antonov, missed the deadline for delivery of the bid by 5 minutes. On top of that, the company has filed a protest with the GAO.

Requirements creep. Bloated requirements. Overly ambitious requirements. Few things get blamed as often for rising costs and schedule delays to major weapons as requirements. So imagine an effort by the Big Army that went from idea to fruition in less than three months. That was the payoff of the Apps for the Army competition, which also overcame historic military reluctance to run a contest and actually rewarded people for doing innovative and effective work. This whole approach may spread, with the Air Force and Marines keeping a close eye on the Army’s effort.

One of the glories of attending an air show like Farnborough is that, sometimes, you get a few hours to poke about the great museums that mark the cultural capitals of Europe. During Farnborough this year, I snuck off with my wife for a few hours before the show to stroll through my favorite art musuem, the Tate on the Embankment. There, to my great surprise and delight, I stumbled (well, it’s pretty hard to stumble on things this big) two fighter aircraft displayed as art.

The post-Afghanistan future of the Marines is a bright one, Navy Undersecretary Bob Work said today at CSIS. The same probably cannot be said for the Marine’s armored amphibian, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), which received a very tepid endorsement from Work who said it was a very costly machine. The Navy is pressuring shipbuilders to lower the price tags on new amphibious assault ships, he said.

The talk on Capitol Hill is that major interagency reform — a new look at the interagency legislation and executive orders undergirding US national security — may be the hottest and hardest to address of the recommendations of the independent QDR panel led by Bill Perry and Stephen Hadley. The panel called for a substantial revamp of the national security structure, saying it was created during the Cold War and was best suited to that era, not to today.They also called on Congress to fix its own house and reduce the overlapping jurisdictions that slow and complicate everyone’s ability to act.