Author Archives: Crawford Thompson

Companies such as BAE Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, L3Harris and General Atomics are among the more than 1,000 firms the Pentagon has selected to potentially work on its Golden Dome missile defense shield program, or other projects.

The Missile Defense Agency on Tuesday announced the first phase of staggered awards under its Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense, or SHIELD, contract is going to 1,014 qualifying offerors. The indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract could be worth up to $151 billion over a decade, MDA said in its contract announcement.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon released an open call to industry to rapidly obtain and deploy over 300,000 small one-way-attack drones — with the Pentagon hoping to put them into the field at such a pace that operators can learn to use them within two hours.

The $1 billion initiative aims to have the one-way attack drones in the hands of service members by 2028.

The financial performance of the commercial aerospace value chain has rebounded. While that sounds like a reason to cheer, the data reveals a troubling development: Profitability has never been so concentrated.

AlixPartners has tracked the commercial aerospace sector’s profit pool for 14 years. Our latest analysis shows that amid the signs of supply chain recovery, imbalances must be addressed to maintain the increased production momentum.

Although rewarding well‑run companies is the hallmark of a healthy market, in an interconnected industry like commercial aerospace, misaligned incentives and a lack of investment capacity among weaker players inevitably spread cracks through the supply chain—and, in time, even the strongest feel the shock.

The direct-to-device (D2D) satellite communications sector has reached a pivotal moment as technology collides with the geopolitical realities of expanding from a promising niche into a mass consumer market.

The rapidly growing population of satellites in low-Earth orbit is being expanded with birds dedicated to D2D service as the target market shifts beyond basic messaging and use by first responders into the mass market of mobile devices. 

Crucially, many governments now view some form of indigenous satellite connectivity capability as a sovereign priority tied to economic and national security. Such prioritization has triggered a flurry of dealmaking as the satellite industry, telecom operators, and national interests converge.

The US military is close to fielding two new weapons designed to temporally jam Chinese and Russian intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites, giving the Pentagon three counter-space capabilities, according to new Space Force data.

The weapons, called Meadowlands and Remote Sensing Terminals, will join a larger and less mobile “Counter Communications System” jammer — an upgraded big dish that was declared operational in 2020.

U.S. President Donald Trump guaranteed the country’s commitment to providing nuclear submarines to Australia as part of the AUKUS agreement on sharing nuclear-powered submarine technology with Australia and the United Kingdom, ending uncertainty following a Pentagon review.

Trump joined Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in a joint press conference in Washington, D.C., on Monday and affirmed that the submarines pledged to Australia as part of the deal are currently under construction.

Boeing is planning a new single-aisle airplane that would succeed the 737 MAX, according to people familiar with the matter, a long-term bid to recover business lost to rival Airbus during its series of safety and quality problems.

Hours after an Atlantic hurricane came for Appalachia, many residents of rolling, tree-lined western Asheville, North Carolina, had nothing to do and nowhere to go. More than 1,000 roads were closed, including key highways. There was no cell service. Water and food were limited. No one knew when they’d be able to buy gas again.

Survivors began reaching out to one another, gathering to assess the damage and reconnect with friends and neighbors. Adam Charnack and his wife, Mara Breindel, did what people have done in the face of life-altering change throughout history: They went to the bar.

China’s Victory Day parade in September showed off a new, uncrewed submarine the size of a semi-truck — meant to keep tabs on US vessels and seafloor cables — and shined a spotlight on Beijing’s investment in the undersea domain.

The US submarine industry, by contrast, is struggling to get out of drydock after years of delays, rising costs and a weakened industrial base.

At the vanguard of the efforts to turn things around are people like William Kaisen, a 39-year-old Marine Corps veteran, who spent months in a US Navy training facility in southern Virginia this year learning computer-directed machining. He and the other trainees are part of Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing, a program meant to deliver skilled workers to an industry gripped by crippling labor shortages and a lack of facilities.

Executives from Boeing, opens new tab and Airbus, opens new tab dampened speculation of imminent decisions to replace their best-selling narrowbody models, telling a major audience of investors that it would take time to achieve the required jump in performance.
The Wall Street Journal reported last Monday that Boeing was in the early stages of developing a 737 successor. But marketing chief Darren Hulst told the International Society of Transport Aircraft Trading that a launch is “some way off” while a senior Airbus executive said it would “take a bit of time” to achieve the efficiency gains needed to attract the market.