Michael Marrow covers air warfare for Breaking Defense. He holds a BA in history from the University of Virginia and started out as a freelance reporter covering local news in Fairfax County, Virginia and policing in Charlottesville, Virginia. Michael previously reported on the Air Force and Space Force for Inside Defense, where he tracked major acquisitions, policy changes and modernization efforts.
Through the deal, Boeing’s litigation with supplier GKN Aerospace will be dropped, and the aerospace giant will take possession of a St. Louis-area factory it used to own.
“To the extent we can get a good price for what we’ve identified as non-core [businesses], we’ll do it. But too many of the offers are coming in low and people think we’re desperate to sell, and I can assure you we’re not,” said L3Harris CEO Chris Kubasik.
The two vendors emerged successful from an original pool of five and are expected to carry their drone designs through a prototyping phase that will build and test aircraft.
“The thing with the H-20 is when you actually look at the system design, it’s probably nowhere near as good as US LO [low observable] platforms, particularly more advanced ones that we have coming down,” said a DoD intelligence official.
“The potential for machine learning in aviation, whether military or civil, is enormous,” said Air Force Col. James Valpiani. “And these fundamental questions of how do we do it, how do we do it safely, how do we train them, are the questions that we are trying to get after.”
While the Pentagon now expects the plane to fly until 2088, GAO found the services are planning to slash flight hours, which can help hold down the program’s topline.
“On their aircraft and their ground units, they’ll be able to talk directly to us with Link 16 to our Tranche 0 satellites that are on orbit now,” Derek Tournear said at the 2024 Space Symposium.
“Just the idea of this being more available and so people can find it and try to exploit it, that’s something we just have to bake in and understand,” Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb said of commercial services like SpaceX’s Starlink constellation.
“[W]e’ve heard proactively from the Chinese twice on two things they wanted to talk to us about with space safety related issues,” said SPACECOM Commander Gen. Stephen Whiting. “We think that is very positive … ”
