Defense Tech

Giants and the Myth of America’s New Defense Consolidation – War on the Rocks– warontherocks.com

pgnewser June 5, 2025 0

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America’s defense industrial base is in the throes of major change. For the first time in 40 years, major power war is a real possibility. Conflicts in Ukraine and Israel are providing a harrowing glimpse of what that war might look like. Technology is evolving at a dizzying pace. Instead of peacetime efficiency, governments are prioritizing wartime surge capacity. The “China shock” and COVID-19 have destabilized global supply chains.

Amid these daunting realities, a new generation of defense technology companies has emerged. Anduril Industries — which was founded in 2017 and which I joined in 2020 — is one of them. Of course, defense technology companies aim to make money. But these companies also aim to disrupt and transform American defense by changing culture, attracting new and better talent, harnessing commercial technologies, championing software, bolstering competition, reforming acquisition practices, and more. Only time will tell if they are successful. But perhaps not as much time as one might think. As more defense technology companies scale to compete with traditional defense primes, the contours of a new defense industrial base are emerging.

Changes to this scope, speed, and scale naturally lead to questions, anxieties, and fears. To wit, these pages recently carried a warning about an impending “new era of defense giants.” According to this view, defense technology companies are engaging in corporate acquisitions that mirror the defense industry consolidation carried out by the traditional defense primes after the end of the Cold War. This new consolidation is hurting small businesses and making America’s defense industrial base less diverse, resilient, and innovative.

As US Nuclear Status Slides, China Has Learned a Terrifying Nuclear Lesson from Russia– www.cbn.com

pgnewser May 28, 2025 0

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Most Americans assume the United States is the world’s unrivaled nuclear superpower. The truth is, America’s nuclear stockpile has shrunk significantly. Meanwhile, China is building nuclear weapons at a rapid pace, and arms experts believe the world’s security is now at serious risk due to the communist regime’s expansionist schemes.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has dramatically reduced the number of nuclear weapons it has deployed or in storage. That arsenal today is roughly 85 percent smaller than at the height of the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and the number of operational nukes is tiny compared to 40 years ago.

America’s nuclear stockpile has fallen to levels not seen since the 1960s, while China has embarked on an unprecedented nuclear buildup.

North Korea, Which Regularly Threatens to Nuke U.S., Condemns Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’– www.breitbart.com

pgnewser May 28, 2025 0

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The communist regime of North Korea published an outraged screed on Tuesday denouncing President Donald Trump’s plan to implement a “Golden Dome” missile defense system over the United States, and potentially other parts of North America.

President Trump campaigned throughout 2024 on investing in a missile defense system covering the entire United States designed to protect America from the threat of hypersonic, ballistic, and other advanced missiles, referring to it as akin to Israel’s “Iron Dome” system. A week after taking office for his second term, Trump issued an executive order requiring a plan from the incoming secretary of defense within 60 days for a missile defense architecture of this type.

The White House announced last week that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had indeed selected an architecture for the missile defense system, called the “Golden Dome.” President Trump described the system as featuring “next-generation technologies across the land, sea, and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors” and indicated that the scope of the project is so large that the government of Canada is also interested in participating in the project.

North Korea latest adversary to criticize Trump’s Golden Dome– www.washingtonexaminer.com

pgnewser May 27, 2025 0

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North Korea, much like China and Russia in recent weeks, issued a scathing rebuke on Tuesday of President Donald Trump‘s pursuit of his Golden Dome missile defense system.

Trump has made the Golden Dome — a comprehensive air defense system that, once operational, will be able to intercept various missiles fired from land, sea, and space — a signature of his military policy early in his second term in office.

North Korea‘s foreign ministry said that Trump’s plan is the “height of self-righteousness, arrogance, high-handed and arbitrary practice, and is an outer space nuclear war scenario supporting the U.S. strategy for uni-polar domination with the preemptive establishment of the outer space-based military substructure, not a ‘defensive measure’ to cope with the ‘threat’ from someone.”

The ministry accused the U.S. of being “hell-bent on the moves to military outer space,” while claiming that the plan for the Golden Dome, as outlined by the Trump administration, “is also the expression of another attempt to militarize outer space coming from the past strategies for dominating outer space and the epitome of revealing the criminal past of the U.S. which plunged the whole world into the nightmare of the outbreak of a nuclear war.”

Why Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ Won’t Shield the U.S. from Nuclear Strikes– www.scientificamerican.com

pgnewser May 23, 2025 0

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During a briefing from the Oval Office this week, President Donald Trump revealed his administration’s plan for “Golden Dome”—an ambitious high-tech system meant to shield the U.S. from ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missile attacks launched by foreign adversaries. Flanked by senior officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the project’s newly selected leader, Gen. Michael Guetlein of the U.S. Space Force, Trump announced that Golden Dome will be completed within three years at a cost of $175 billion.

The program, which was among Trump’s campaign promises, derives its name from the Iron Dome missile defense system of Israel—a nation that’s geographically 400 times smaller than the U.S. Protecting the vastness of the U.S. demands very different capabilities than those of Iron Dome, which has successfully shot down rockets and missiles using ground-based interceptors. Most notably, Trump’s Golden Dome would need to expand into space—making it a successor to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) pursued by the Reagan administration in the 1980s. Better known by the mocking nickname “Star Wars,” SDI sought to neutralize the threat from the Soviet Union’s nuclear-warhead-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles by using space-based interceptors that could shoot them down midflight. But fearsome technical challenges kept SDI from getting anywhere close to that goal, despite tens of billions of dollars of federal expenditures.

Trump announces ‘Golden Dome’ missile defence system plan– www.euronews.com

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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US President Donald Trump has unveiled a scheme to build a $175 billion (€154bn) missile defence system called the “Golden Dome”, claiming it could be “fully operational” by the end of his presidential term.

The announcement on Tuesday came roughly four months after Trump signed an executive order, instructing the Pentagon to draw up plans to defend the US against “catastrophic” aerial attacks.

Although the exact scope of the Golden Dome project remains unclear, Trump said the system would involve “next-generation” technologies, including space-based sensors and interceptors.

“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they are launched from space,” Trump claimed.

China’s Expanding Navy Is A Threat To U.S. National Security– thefederalist.com

pgnewser May 5, 2025 0

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On April 24, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a report on China’s naval modernization, noting that, “China’s navy is, by far, the largest of any country in East Asia, and sometime between 2015 and 2020 it surpassed the U.S. Navy in numbers of battle force ships …” The CRS report then quotes the DOD, that China’s navy “is the largest navy in the world …”

As an Asian land power, why would China be rapidly expanding its navy?

A benign view of China’s naval buildup is that it is driven by its economic and security needs. As the world’s second-largest economy, it relies on maritime trade routes for energy and raw materials imports and exports of finished goods, making sea lane security paramount. Though, one might ask, security against what threat?

Of note, even though China has a base in Djibouti on the Red Sea, its navy has been wholly absent in keeping the vital waterway and path to the Suez Canal open in the face of piratical Houthi attacks on shipping. In fact, the U.S. government has credibly accused a Chinese satellite company of providing real-time intelligence to the Houthis to aid in their targeting of shipping, including the U.S. Navy. That China’s naval buildup and China’s increasing bellicosity align with paramount leader Xi Jinping’s vision of national rejuvenation linked to maritime command of the seas — far beyond Taiwan’s rocky shores.

Could U.S. Subs One Day be Repurposed as Hypersonic Missile Launchers

pgnewser March 11, 2025 0

The Navy Could Turn Ohio-Class Subs and Nimitz Carriers Into Hypersonic Missile Trucks – 19FortyFive
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Key Points and Summary: The U.S. Navy’s hypersonic Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) missile offers rapid strikes at 2,200 nautical miles in just 30 minutes, significantly outpacing existing Tomahawks and aircraft. However, planned CPS deployment on Zumwalt destroyers and Virginia-class submarines alone is insufficient to counter China’s expanding hypersonic missile arsenal.

-To address this, the Navy could repurpose retiring Ohio-class submarines and Nimitz-class carriers into dedicated hypersonic missile platforms, dramatically increasing strike capability.

China’s Anti-Ship Missiles ‘Sink’ British $7.8B Aircraft Carriers In Wargames; Are Flattops Getting Obsolete?

pgnewser November 20, 2024 0

An anonymous UK official told Eurasia Times that British war games pitting their carrier task force groups against China’s long-range ballistic missiles called “aircraft killers” show “the carriers get sunk” most of the time. The key to their threat lies both in their new class of long-range ballistic missiles and its use of Over the Horizon (OTHR) sites, a cold-war technology that gives it the ability to locate and target carriers well off their shores.

China’s Anti-Ship Missiles ‘Sink’ British $7.8B Aircraft Carriers In Wargames; Are Flattops Getting Obsolete? – Eurasiatimes.com
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Wargames have shown that the constant technological evolution has made aircraft carriers vulnerable to modern missiles.

An official familiar with the wargames has been quoted in the media that “the carriers get sunk” in most of the iterations.

China’s long-range ballistic missiles, which have earned the sobriquet “aircraft carrier killers,” have challenged the naval power projection of Western countries, and the UK is no exception.

Royal Navy strategists are seized with the huge progress in the Chinese anti-ship missile arsenal. The missile technology has made it capable of locating and tracking Britain’s naval fleet.

China has also been reviving Cold War-era technology by building large Over the Horizon Radar (OTHR) sites, which can be used to locate the sites of its adversary’s fleet from a great distance. Two types of OTHR can be deployed: a skywave and a surface wave. Both systems were used during the Cold War era but lost their importance to modern-day radars.

The OTHR is set to make a comeback as it can address the range limitations of current radars. OTHRs’ range can extend into thousands of miles as they consist of an extensive array of antennae spread out over an area, with the transmission and receiving equipment placed geographically away from each other.

China’s latest missile in the arsenal is the DF-17, which is equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle. The missile is fast and long-range, with a high-precision strike capability, leaving enemies with little time to react. The hypersonic glide vehicles have higher maneuverability and lower altitudes, making them harder to track and predict their flight path.

During the wargames, the Royal Navy’s ‘ability to survive’ is ‘stretched to the limit,’ with a scenario eventually arising whereby a carrier would be sunk.

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The Middle East Has ZERO U.S. Aircraft Carriers

pgnewser November 19, 2024 0

For the second time in a little over a year, the Middle East will be without an U.S. Aircraft Carrier presence. After the USS Abraham Lincoln left the region, the number of aircraft carriers available fell to zero. The quickest a carrier might re-enter the region would be in a few weeks, but even that is likely as most experts believe the Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group that just deployed from California is most likely headed to the Pacific for duty.

The U.S. Navy Has No Aircraft Carriers in the Middle East Right Now – nationalinterest.org
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What You Need to Know: The USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) has left the Middle East, marking only the second time in over a year that no U.S. Navy aircraft carriers are present in the region.

-The USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) has deployed to the Pacific, while the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) may head to the Middle East after completing NATO exercises in the Arctic and Mediterranean.

-Despite the absence of carriers, the U.S. has bolstered its presence with B-52 bombers, F-16s, F-22s, A-10s, and the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp (LHD-1).

-Additionally, the USS Georgia (SSGN-729) submarine remains in the region, ensuring significant firepower to counter threats from Iran and its proxies.

The United States Navy announced on Monday that the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group departed from the Middle East and entered the U.S. 7th Fleet of operations, USNI News first reported.