Tag: defense contractors

Space-Based Missile Interceptors For Golden Dome Being Tested By Northrop

Northrop Grumman is conducting ground-based testing related to space-based interceptors as part of a competition for that segment of the Trump administration’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative. Interceptors deployed in orbit are currently billed as a critical component of the overall Golden Dome plan, but actually fielding this capability presents significant technical challenges.

Kathy Warden, Northrop Grumman’s CEO, highlighted the company’s work on space-based interceptors, as well as broader business opportunities stemming from Golden Dome, during a quarterly earnings call today. Golden Dome is presently envisioned as a multi-part anti-missile architecture incorporating a swath of existing and future capabilities in space and within the Earth’s atmosphere, which will start entering into operational service by 2028. Golden Dome was originally dubbed Iron Dome before the name was changed earlier this year. It is also now being managed by an office that reports directly to the deputy secretary of defense.

“As we look to Golden Dome for America, we see Northrop Grumman playing a crucial role in supporting the administration’s goal to move with speed and have initial operating capability in place within the next few years,” Warden said today. “This includes current products that can be brought to bear, like IBCS [Integrated Battle Command System], G/ATOR [AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar], Triton [drones], and programs in our restricted portfolio, just to name a few. It will also include new innovation, like space-based interceptors, which we’re testing now.”

“These are ground-based tests today, and we are in competition, obviously, so not a lot of detail that I can provide here,” Warden added. “It is the capability that we believe can be accelerated and into the time frame that the administration is looking for.”

Warden declined to respond directly to a question about how the space-based interceptors Northrop Grumman is developing now will actually defeat their targets. TWZ has reached out to the company for additional information.

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Pentagon Awards Contracts To 4 Artificial Intelligence Developers

The U.S. Department of Defense announced on July 14 that it has awarded contracts to four U.S.-based artificial intelligence (AI) developers to address national security challenges.

Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI will each receive a contracting award with a ceiling of $200 million, according to a statement shared by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office.

The office said these four companies would help “develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas.”

“Agentic AI” refers to systems designed to operate with minimal human input.

Formed in 2021, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office is responsible for speeding up the military’s adoption of AI systems.

OpenAI was the first of the four contract awardees to announce its contract with the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office.

In June, the company unveiled “OpenAI for Government” and said its first partnership under the new initiative would help the Pentagon office identify and prototype new AI tools for administrative operations.

Anthropic has developed the Claude family of AI chatbots.

In June, Anthropic announced the development of custom “Claude Gov” models intended for national security clients.

The company said agencies operating at the highest level of the U.S. national security sector are already using these AI models.

Formed by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk in 2023, xAI serves as a parent to X Corp., which operates the social media platform X. Among its services, xAI has developed the Grok AI chatbot.

On July 14, xAI announced “Grok for Government” and confirmed that the service holds contracts with the Department of Defense and the U.S. General Services Administration.

Google Public Sector Vice President Jim Kelly said in a July 14 blog post that the new AI announcement with the Department of Defense would build on a long-standing partnership between Google and the U.S. military.

Kelly said his company would give the military access to its Cloud Tensor Processing Units, which power Google’s current AI applications.

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“Snuff videos as a sales pitch”. Rafael boasts of human testing in Gaza death camps

Australia’s government awards rich contracts to Israeli drone maker Rafael, which skite to investors about killing Palestinians. Stephanie Tran reports.

Israeli weapons manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defense Systems has posted a video showing an unarmed man being stalked and killed by a drone in Gaza, using the footage to advertise the weapon responsible for his death.

The video, posted to the company’s official account on X, shows a Spike Firefly loitering munition drone as it hovers above a man walking alone through the rubble of a heavily bombed area. The drone silently tracks the man before detonating directly above him, killing him instantly. 

Meanwhile, a young Palestinian girl, Hala, was executed yesterday with a bullet to the the head fired by a quadcopter drone. It is even more grotesque that Israeli weapons manufacturers are crowing about their human testing labs – which are the killing fields of Gaza.

The Spike Firefly drone, first unveiled by Rafael in 2018, is a lightweight, soldier-deployed loitering munition designed for urban combat. Weighing just three kilograms, the drone is launched from a canister and can fly silently above a target for up to 15 minutes before striking with high precision.

The drone can be operated remotely with a tablet, and its camera feed allows operators to stalk targets in real time.

According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has increasingly relied on drones like the Firefly to kill civilians in Gaza since October 7, 2023, with quadcopters being deployed in densely populated residential areas and refugee camps. Their report documents multiple instances of drones being used to assassinate individuals in violation of international humanitarian law.

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Trump’s BBB busts the budget to benefit arms makers, AI warlords

Trump’s bill slashes spending on veterans to boost corporate welfare for the Big Five arms manufacturers and surging AI spying firms like Palantir.

Originally published at Antiwar.com.

The Senate is on the verge of passing the distinctly misnamed “big beautiful bill.” It is, in fact, one of the ugliest pieces of legislation to come out of Congress in living memory. The version that passed the House recently would cut $1.7 trillion, mostly in domestic spending, while providing the top 5% of taxpayers with roughly $1.5 trillion in tax breaks.

Over the next few years, the same bill will add another $150 billion to a Pentagon budget already soaring towards a record $1 trillion. In short, as of now, in the battle between welfare and warfare, the militarists are carrying the day.

Pentagon Pork and the People It Harms

The bill allocates tens of billions of dollars to pursue President Trump’s cherished but hopeless Golden Dome project, which Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists has described as “a fantasy.” She explained exactly why the Golden Dome, which would supposedly protect the United States against nuclear attack, is a pipe dream:

“Over the last 60 years, the United States has spent more than $350 billion on efforts to develop a defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles]. This effort has been plagued by false starts and failures, and none have yet been demonstrated to be effective against a real-world threat… Missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for keeping the U.S. safe from nuclear weapons.”

The bill also includes billions more for shipbuilding, heavy new investments in artillery and ammunition, and funding for next-generation combat aircraft like the F-47.

Oh, and after all of those weapons programs get their staggering cut of that future Pentagon budget, somewhere way down at the bottom of that list is a line item for improving the quality of life for active-duty military personnel. But the share aimed at the well-being of soldiers, sailors, and airmen (and women) is less than 6% of the $150 billion that Congress is now poised to add to that department’s already humongous budget. And that’s true despite the way Pentagon budget hawks invariably claim that the enormous sums they routinely plan on shoveling into it — and the overflowing coffers of the contractors it funds — are “for the troops.”

Much of the funding in the bill will flow into the districts of key members of Congress (to their considerable political benefit). For example, the Golden Dome project will send billions of dollars to companies based in Huntsville, Alabama, which calls itself “Rocket City” because of the dense network of outfits there working on both offensive missiles and missile defense systems. And that, of course, is music to the ears of Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), the current chair of the House Armed Services Committee, who just happens to come from Alabama.

The shipbuilding funds will help prop up arms makers like HII Corporation (formerly Huntington Ingalls), which runs a shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the home state of Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss).  The funds will also find their way to shipyards in Maine, Connecticut, and Virginia.

Those funds will benefit the co-chairs of the House Shipbuilding Caucus, Representative Joe Courtney (D-CT) and Representative Rob Wittman (R-VA). Connecticut hosts General Dynamics’ Electric Boat plant, which makes submarines that carry ballistic missiles, while Virginia is home to HII Corporation’s Newport News Shipbuilding facility, which makes both aircraft carriers and attack submarines.

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The Pentagon spent $4 trillion over 5 years. Contractors got 54% of it.

Advocates of ever-higher Pentagon spending frequently argue that we must throw more money at the department to “support the troops.” But recent budget proposals and a new research paper issued by the Quincy Institute and the Costs of War Project at Brown University suggest otherwise.

The paper, which I co-authored with Stephen Semler, found that 54% of the Pentagon’s $4.4 trillion in discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 went to military contractors. The top five alone — Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion) – received $771 billion in Pentagon contracts over that five year period.

This huge infusion of funds to arms makers comes at the expense of benefits for active duty personnel and veterans of America’s post-9/11 wars. Despite pay increases in recent years, there are still hundreds of thousands of military families who rely on food stamps, live in subpar housing, or suffer from other financial hardships.

Meanwhile, there are plans to cut tens of thousands of personnel at the Veterans Administration, close Veterans health centers, and even to reduce staffing at veteran suicide hotlines. And many of the programs veterans and their families depend on — from food stamps to Medicaid and more — are slated for sharp cuts in the budget bill signed by President Trump earlier this month.

It would be one thing if all of the hundreds of billions of dollars lavished on weapons contractors were being well spent in service of a better defense. But they are not. Overpriced and underperforming weapons systems like the F-35 combat aircraft and the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) have shown themselves to be quite effective at consuming taxpayer dollars, even as the run huge cost overruns, suffer lengthy schedule delays, and, in the case of the F-35, are unavailable for use much of the time due to serious maintenance problems.

The problems with the Sentinel and the F-35 are likely to pale in comparison with the sums that may be wasted in pursuit of President Trump’s proposal for a leak-proof “Golden Dome” missile defense system, a costly pipe dream that many experts feel is both physically impossible and strategically unwise. In the more than four decades and hundreds of billions of dollars spent since Ronald Reagan’s pledge to build an impenetrable shield against incoming ICBMs, the Pentagon has yet to succeed in a test conducted under realistic conditions, and has even failed in a large number of the carefully scripted efforts.

And Golden Dome is more ambitious than Star Wars — it is supposed to intercept not just ICBMs, but hypersonic missiles, low-flying drones, and anything else that might be launched at the United States.

The good news is that if you are a weapons contractor, whether from the Big Five or the emerging military tech sector in Silicon Valley, Golden Dome will be a gold mine, regardless of whether it ever produces a useful defense system.

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Hegseth presses defense industry to ramp up munitions amid depleted stocks, China threat

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gathered some of the leaders of America’s largest military contractors for a closed-door meeting at the Pentagon last week, urging them to ramp up the production of critically needed munitions amidst depleted weapons stocks and a growing threat from China, Just the News has learned.

A senior Trump administration official, who declined to be named in order to describe a private discussion, told Just the News that the main reason for Thursday’s closed-door meeting with defense company leaders — which included well-known firms such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BAE Systems — was to seek to hold munitions manufacturers accountable so that U.S. warfighters are equipped to face 21st century threats.

The closed-door meeting came shortly after Hegseth gave an impassioned defense of the powerful U.S. military strikes against Iranian nuclear sites earlier in June.

The official also told Just the News that Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, who was also at the meeting with the industry leaders, are working to fix the inefficiencies enabled and ignored by their predecessors, and that the duo encouraged the defense company executives to rise to the moment to meet the significant challenge.

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Russian Strikes Damage Boeing Building in Ukraine

A large Russian drone and missile barrage damaged a building in Ukraine where Boeing operates. Last year, the American company and Kiev signed a memorandum agreeing to step up arms production.

The Financial Times reported speaking with Ukrainian officials and reviewing images that confirmed the Boeing building sustained damage on Sunday night. The strike comes as the American arms maker has been building a relationship with Kiev that would see more weapons produced in Ukraine.

In February, Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov and Boeing president Steve Parker discussed joint “manufacturing ammunition and aerial strike systems.” A top Boeing official said the damage to the building did not cause “operational disruption.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha said the attack on a US firm should convince Washington to provide more support to Kiev. “Russian strikes on American companies in Ukraine are yet another example of Putin’s disregard for US peace efforts,” he told the outlet. “The fact that Russia targets American businesses emphasises the importance of continued US involvement – both in peace efforts and in the security of Ukraine and the rest of Europe.”

Russia has stepped up attacks in recent weeks following a Ukrainian operation in Russia that destroyed or damaged several of Moscow’s strategic bombers.

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Whistleblower claims Lockheed Martin eliminated whites from bonuses – ‘and they wrote it all down’

A whistleblower has come forward claiming America’s largest defense contractor has been awarding bonuses based on skin color rather than merit.

The whistleblower told right-wing DEI expert Christopher Rufo that they were preparing year-end bonus recommendations for Lockheed Martin’s aeronautics division in 2022 when they were told their “comp adder” list contained too many white people.

“I got a call from [human resources director] La Wanda [Moorer] last night regarding diversity stats on comp adder,” top Lockheed Martin official Santiago Bulnes wrote to the whistleblower in an email, according to a report published by Rufo at City Journal.

“They took a run at getting your few approved and we’re told that we need to fit in the box. I asked her to send you the list of diversity names to simplify the task of finding the best in the group,” he added.

Afterward, other officials in Lockheed’s human resources department reportedly told the whistleblower to add over a dozen minorities to the “comp adder” list and remove an equal number of white people, never mind whether or not the people deserved to be on the list or not.

The whistleblower was reportedly outraged that Lockheed was requiring managers like them to reward bonuses “on the basis of their [employees’] skin color alone and contrary to documented performance.”

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Raytheon delivers advanced radar to U.S. for tracking hypersonic threats

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency has received the first AN/TPY-2 advanced radar system to defend against next-generation threats.

The new AN/TPY-2 system was built by Raytheon and comes equipped with a complete Gallium Nitride, or GaN, populated array, giving it greater sensitivity to missiles and expanding surveillance capacity while supporting the U.S.‘s hypersonic defense mission, according to the company.

“This is the most advanced version of AN/TPY-2 that Raytheon has built, leveraging years of investment and innovation to produce superior capability at a lower cost to the U.S. armed forces,” Sam Deneke, president of air and space defense systems at Raytheon, said in a statement. “As demand increases for missile defense of the homeland, the AN/TPY-2 radar is ready to meet the mission.”

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Trump, Saudis secure $600B investment deal to include billions in US defense weapons

President Trump on Tuesday secured a $600 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the United States along with a multibillion-dollar defense partnership following a meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh.

The investment, according to a White House fact sheet, will strengthen energy security, defense, technology and access to global infrastructure and critical minerals. It includes a $142 billion defense and security deal that equips Saudi Arabia with state-of-the-art war equipment provided by dozens of U.S. firms.

The equipment includes air and missile defense and air force and space advancements.

The White House called the deal “historic and transformative for both countries” and said it brings in “a new golden era of partnership.”

Days after Trump’s inauguration, the crown prince first announced the Arab nation would invest $600 billion in the U.S. over the four years of Trump’s second term. The White House is detailing those investments following the meeting in Saudi Arabia.

As part of the deal, Saudi Arabian company DataVolt is moving forward with plans to invest $20 billion in artificial intelligence data centers and energy infrastructure in the U.S., and top companies such as Google, Oracle, Salesforce and Uber, among others, are investing $80 billion in technologies in both countries.

Also included in the deal are infrastructure projects American companies Hill International, Jacobs, Parsons, and AECOM are taking on in Saudi Arabia, including at King Salman International Airport, to total $2 billion in U.S. services exports.

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