Author: Defenceline Webdesk

Jack Hunter, Modern Age Young Washington tells an underdog tale for the ages. Source link

Terumi Tanaka was 13 when on one fine day the sky above Nagasaki was suddenly flooded with blinding white glare; “a blazing inferno” he would recall years later. At 97 now, he still carries memories of sitting next to the window. His home was hit suddenly by a flash, then thunder, followed by an unbearable silence. Within moments, his city was reduced to ash.  “It was literally hell,” he said in his eyewitness account. With the average age of the hibakusha (atomic bombing survivors) reaching 87, there will soon be no one left to provide such first-person testimony. As humanity…

Riley Ceder, Navy Times The U.S. Navy

WASHINGTON — The first Trump-class battleship could cost $23.4 billion, with the 14 subsequent ships the Navy plans to purchase averaging $18 billion, a new Congressional Budget Office report released today said.  This would bring the battleship program total to $275 billion for 15 nuclear-powered battleships, each weighing roughly 35,000 tons, the report said. A 35,000-ton battleship would clock in as the biggest surface combatant in the world at roughly three and half times the size of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, all while adding “considerable firepower to the Navy’s fleet,” according to the report.   However, the Navy’s budget request justification…

John Hill, Naval Tech. Raytheon is making headway with the rollout of new generation air and missile defence radars onto US Navy ships Source link

Rocket Lab’s announcement that it would launch suborbital rockets from Alaska could ultimately give the Pentagon a much-needed new option for national-security launches, the company and space experts told Defense One.Last week, the Space Force’s acquisitions arm announced a $266 million, multi-launch contract with the California-based rocket company. That will cover 12 to 18 launches, which will start this year and “primarily take place from a new Rocket Lab location at the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska (PSCA) in Kodiak,” the company said. These missile-defense missions will be handled by the company’s HASTE rocket, a suborbital variant of its Electron. Both rockets “use the…

Stephen Losey, Air & Space Forces The Air Force’s X-62 autonomous test… Source link

WASHINGTON — The Space Force has granted task orders worth a total of $615 million to develop satellites to detect fast-moving targets in the air to three companies: Rocket Lab, STR and a company whose name was not disclosed due to “operational security,” according to Space Systems Command (SSC). The awards represent the second round of task orders under the service’s April-issued indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) Space-Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator (SB-AMTI) contract vehicle, SSC said in a press release Tuesday. The contract is being managed by SSC’s Space-Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio office. The first task order, worth a…

The Pakistan Navy’s (PN) emerging anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) posture will draw on the timely convergence of two developments: the operational experience coming from the wars in Ukraine and Iran, and Pakistan’s domestic industry increasingly leaning into uncrewed platforms, one-way attack (OWA) or loitering munitions, and conventional surface-to-surface missiles (SSM). Essentially, there is no apparent ‘lag’ between the following emerging warfare trends and the Pakistani industry’s ability to provision solutions. Therefore, the PN can leverage existing and planned indigenous solutions to steer its A2/AD efforts to leverage the following: (1) uncrewed aerial, surface, and sub-surface platforms (2) loitering munitions and…

Reuters Lockheed Martin is in talks to buy supplies of two critical minerals from U.S. mines Source link