Here are the programs that made the biggest news over the past week:
Fiscal 2015 budget will hit F-35 hard — The F-35 program will soon feel the pinch of budget cuts, with
multiple reports indicating that the Defense Department will request only as many as eight fewer jets in fiscal 2015, instead of the 42 originally planned. It’s at least more than the 29 requested in fiscal 2014, but comes at a time when the program is trying to establish stability. In 2015, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Japan, and Israel are all scheduled to order F-35 fighters.
V-22 grabs headlines — The V-22 made waves around the world last week: at the the Singapore Airshow with reports indicating that the Air Force was considering a gunship variant of the aircraft, at West 2014 in San Diego with USNI News reporting that the Navy was only a year away from selecting a replacement for the C-2 carrier supply aircraft, and a report from Seapower Magazine noting that the Marine Corps’ reserve CH-46E unit had begun transitioning to the Osprey.
Aegis BMD arrives in Europe — The Phased Adaptive Approach to missile defense in Europe announced years ago by the Obama Administration is finally starting to come to fruition, with the first of four DDG-51 destroyers equipped with the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system arriving in Rota, Spain, as part of one of the early phases of the plan, we reported last week. The Pentagon is working on getting permanent land-based missile defense shields installed in Europe by the end of the decade, which will be based on the system currently on destroyers.
MQ-8C sea testing approaches — The newest version of MQ-8 Fire Scout is almost ready to get its sea legs under it, but some testing work remains. We reported last week that the second MQ-8C airframe has entered testing at the Navy’s Point Mugu base in California. Testing on the platform began late last year leading up to tests aboard a ship at sea in the summer, when the Navy will be able to really see what the aircraft can do beyond its smaller cousin, the MQ-8B, which has already been on several deployments.