WASHINGTON — Under current estimates, the U.S. Air Force will reach a tipping point where projected F-35 sustainment costs become too expensive, forcing the service to either cut its planned buy of the Lockheed Martin-made jet or drastically reduce flying hours, the Government Accountability Office found in a new report.
As the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps’ F-35 operations reach their…
WASHINGTON — Raytheon Technologies will get up to $2 billion to develop the U.S. Air Force’s Long Range Standoff Weapon system, a new nuclear-capable, air-launched cruise missile that will be carried by B-52 and B-21 bombers.
The service on July 1 awarded Raytheon a…
WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has emerged victorious in Switzerland’s $6.5 billion fighter competition, beating out entrants from Eurofighter, Dassault and Boeing.
Over the course of the program, Switzerland plans to spend up to 6 billion…
WASHINGTON ― House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith on Tuesday criticized Lockheed Martin and other contractors over the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and its exorbitant lifecycle costs.
“There’s no question that everyone involved ― certainly Lockheed Martin ― could be doing a better job on getting sustainment costs down,” Smith, D-Wash., told the Defense Writer’s Group.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army continued its yearslong tradition of not funding the procurement of the latest variant of the CH-47F Chinook cargo helicopter in favor of future programs in its fiscal 2022 budget request, but House appropriators are pushing back.
Some…
WASHINGTON — Bell’s future vertical lift technology demonstrator, the V-280 Valor tiltrotor, has finished its flying career, according to a June 24 company announcement.
The demonstrator was built for the U.S. Army Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator program and…
LONDON — The high costs of supporting F-35s and a failure to quickly integrate the MBDA Meteor missile to the aircraft could slow British plans to buy more of the jets, defence secretary Ben Wallace warned June 23.
Wallace told Britain’s Parliamentary defence select committee that he had the budget to buy more than the 48 jets the military has already ordered, but wanted to see progress…
A U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook departs from Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, Dec. 27, 2009. (Francisco V. Govea II/U.S. Air Force)
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WASHINGTON – One of the U.S. Navy’s first major projects under a 20-year shipyard modernization effort is facing cost-overruns and schedule slips, an unexpected circumstance which the Navy is hoping to learn from as it continues through the $20-billion Shipyard…
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army is planning to field its first mobile medium-range missile battery no later than September 2023 with three more batteries to follow, according to FY22 budget justification documents.
Defense News was first to report that the Army was pursuing a Mid-Range Capability (MRC) to fill the gap in the service’s fires portfolio between the Precision Strike Missile’s…
