Raw Intel

The U.S. Army has picked five winners in a competition to test how commercial humanoid robots could be used by the military, including a two-legged robot called Alex that is built to take hits and carries ballistic protection. The Army announced the xTechHumanoid winners on Sept. 11, two days after nine finalists demonstrated their technology […]View the full article

I won’t lie, I really wanted the successor to the Grumman Iron Works, Northrop Grumman, to get the award…just to have that legacy back on the flight deck…but…I am not emperor. Boeing it is, …the Department of War announces a contract awarded by the U.S. Navy to Boeing for the Sixth-Generation F/A-XX Strike Fighter under the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. The contract is valued at more than $20B for the full-scale development phase. The contract procures multiple test aircraft for ground, airworthiness, systems, and weapons integration testing. Boeing already has the USAF’s F-47 contract…so I will assume there will be a fair bit of commonality. Perhaps a sim…

The U.S. Army has picked five companies to build competing prototypes of a new Precision Strike Missile that can be fired from a HIMARS truck and hit moving ships and relocatable land targets 1,000 km (620 miles) or more away. Anduril, Castelion, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, Mach Industries and RTX each received a […]View the full article

The Kremlin said on Sept. 30 that Russia’s official policy documents provide for a nuclear response if NATO countries try to blockade Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea wedged between Poland and Lithuania. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russian diplomats were reminding “hotheads in Europe” of those documents after what he described as […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy will buy 10 of Saronic’s Marauder autonomous ships, a 55-meter (180-foot) uncrewed vessel built in Louisiana, after the ship passed at-sea testing under the service’s new Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel program. Saronic announced the production award on Sept. 30, a day after the U.S. Navy said it had given production agreements for […]View the full article

Raytheon has won a $247.1 million contract to build, upgrade and overhaul Phalanx close-in weapon systems for the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army, covering the shipboard gun, its land-based counterpart and the missile-armed SeaRAM, the U.S. Department of War announced. Naval Air Systems Command awarded the firm-fixed-price contract to the RTX business without competition. It […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy has paid Boeing $16.7 million to plan the shutdown of the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler production lines, including a full inventory of the government-owned tools and equipment used to build the jets. The firm-fixed-price order, placed by Naval Air Systems Command against an existing Boeing ordering agreement, covers planning, analysis, […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy has ordered another $123.4 million worth of Lionfish small underwater drones from HII, exercising contract options for more vehicles, support equipment and related gear, the U.S. Department of War announced. Naval Sea Systems Command awarded the firm-fixed-price modification to HII’s Unmanned Systems business on Sept. 24. Nearly all of the work, 99%, […]View the full article

The U.S. Army has awarded 10 companies counter-drone contracts with a combined ceiling of $4.15 billion, lining up commercial radars, cameras, jammers and weapons to detect and defeat hostile drones, the U.S. Department of War announced. Seven companies received ceilings of $500 million each: Allen Control Systems of Austin, Texas; Digital Force Technologies of San […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy has picked Boeing to build F/A-XX, its first sixth-generation carrier-based strike fighter, choosing the company over Northrop Grumman and awarding a development contract valued at more than $20 billion. The U.S. Department of War announced the award on Sept. 29. The contract covers the full-scale development phase and buys multiple test aircraft […]View the full article

Mack Defense will display a hybrid-electric heavy tractor it built for the U.S. Army’s Common Tactical Truck program at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Oct. 12-14. The truck is Mack’s on-road entry for the program and is designed to replace older highway haulers such as the M915 Line […]View the full article

BAE Systems’ new identification friend or foe system for the F-16 has been certified by the U.S. Department of War, clearing it for use on U.S. Air Force fighters, the company said Sept. 29. The AN/APX-127(V)1 Combined Interrogator Transponder received AIMS certification, the approval that shows an identification system meets U.S. and NATO standards and […]View the full article

Argentina’s armed forces have formally taken on their first IWI ARAD 5 and ARAD 7 rifles from Israel, the start of a program to replace the FN FAL and M-16 rifles now carried by troops in all three services. Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Carlos Presti presided over the Sept. 29 ceremony after the Joint Staff […]View the full article

The Pentagon’s counter-drone task force has awarded Israeli company Smart Shooter a contract worth up to $150 million for its SMASH rifle sights, which help soldiers shoot down small drones with their regular service weapons. The U.S. Department of War’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401, known as JIATF-401, announced the three-year award on Sept. 29, […]View the full article

Ukraine’s F-16 pilots have shot down more than 3,150 Russian aerial targets, including 666 cruise missiles and about 2,500 drones, the commander of Ukraine’s Air Force said during a meeting with Lockheed Martin. Lt. Gen. Anatolii Kryvonozhko gave the figures when a Ukrainian Air Force delegation he led met with representatives of the U.S. company, […]View the full article

A Russian Tu-95MS strategic bomber crashed in the Amur region of Russia’s Far East on Sept. 29, killing six of the seven crew members on board. The bomber went down near the village of Krasnoyarovo after an engine failure during takeoff, according to sources in the Russian military. The sole survivor was taken to hospital. […]View the full article

I have an affection for all the ships I have been on, and the Big E is one of my girls. I like to keep an eye on her. She’s the ship that keeps on giving, in a lot of ways. I am quite sure that when the USS Enterprise (CVN 65) was laid down during the Eisenhower Administration just 13 years after the end of WWII, someone had to have thought, “How are they going to deal with all the radioactive bits when they decommission her in the next century?” I’d place a pretty good bet that in hushed tones, the general response was, “We’ll be dead by then. That will be someone else’s problem.” Maybe not. Back then they probably thought we’d do something responsible like, “Oh, they’ll…

The U.S. Navy is paying Raytheon up to $30.2 million to line up additional suppliers for key parts of the AIM-9X Sidewinder air-to-air missile, including the cooling engine for its heat-seeking sensor and its warhead components. The undefinitized contract modification, announced by the U.S. Department of War, covers engineering work to qualify new manufacturing sources […]View the full article

The United States will supply the Philippine Coast Guard with three secondhand King Air 350 turboprop aircraft, two of them fitted with surveillance sensors, under a $39.6 million contract that finalizes a deal the two countries signed in February. The U.S. Department of War announced the firm-fixed-price award to Technology Service Corp., a small business […]View the full article

The Pentagon has ordered another $52.3 million worth of L3Harris proximity fuzes that turn laser-guided APKWS rockets into drone killers, more than doubling the value of a fuze contract signed just four months ago. The firm-fixed-price modification, announced by the U.S. Department of War, adds to a contract the Naval Surface Warfare Center Indian Head […]View the full article