WASHINGTON: Four years after Lockheed Martin inked a $11.2 billion deal to sell Saudi Arabia an upgunned variant of its Littoral Combat Ship, the company is starting work on the first vessel later this year, a company official confirmed Wednesday. The work on four Multi-Mission Surface Combatants will take place at Fincantieri-owned Marinette Marine in… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: After years of delays, budget fights, and searing debates over the role that the ship will play, three Littoral Combat Ships will head out on their first deployments this year. “We’re deploying LCS this year. It’s happening. Two ships are going on the West Coast, one ship is going on the East Coast,” said… Keep reading →

Croatia, a NATO member, was ready to sign off on the largest defense deal in its history: $500 million for 12 Israeli F-16 fighters. But the State Department didn’t like the looks of the deal.

After years of secrecy and CGI, we’re finally getting to see the Sikorsky-Boeing dream team’s SB>1 Defiant ultra-high-speed helicopter in real life. Now they just have to prove it works.

It’s a major shift after decades in which submarines focused on projecting power ashore, with their only anti-ship weapons being their rarely-used torpedoes. Driving the change: increasing anxiety about China.

While Bell’s rival V-280 uses tiltrotor technology, proven in widespread service on the V-22 Osprey since 2007, the Defiant uses Sikorsky’s revolutionary compound helicopter technology, which promises superior agility — but which has only actually flown in two experimental aircraft, the X2 and S-97 Raider, both of which are much smaller than Defiant.

By 2021, plans call for Japan to have eight Aegis destroyers, four of them capable of launching the SM-3 Block IIA missiles, whose second successful test in a row comes as a vindication after two previous failures.

WASHINGTON The F-35 program office announced today the aircraft had finally reached its initial operational test & evaluation phase, which is expected to wrap up next September. That’s three months behind previous projections for mid-summer — the result of the program’s first crash (fortunately non-fatal) and a subsequent grounding — and 16 months behind the… Keep reading →

AOC: The top Pentagon buyer said today the operating cost for the F-35 has to come down at the same time that mission capable rates must ramp up by double-digits. And it needs to happen in less than a year. “Cost per flight hour needs to come down to fourth-generation [aircraft] levels and the availability… Keep reading →

A British defense official talked up the good news about British defense spending in DC this week — including on many US-built weapons — but some dark clouds hang over the ambitious plan.