The Senate easily confirmed financier and donor John Phelan to be the next Secretary of the Navy on Monday evening.
The vote was 62-30.
All Republicans present voted for Phalen.
The 11 Democrats in favor included the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Ranking Member Jack Reed (R.I.) and other committee members Jacky Rosen (Nev.), Tim Kaine (Va.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), and Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.). In addition, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), also on SASC, supported the nomination.
Other Democrats supporting Phalen included Chris Coons (Del.), Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), John Hickenlooper (Colo.), and Mark Warner (D-Va.).
Eight senators missed the vote: John Cassidy (R-La.), John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Peter Welch (D-Vt.).
During his confirmation hearing, Phelan said he would focus on improving shipbuilding and incentivizing the industrial base, while he also noted he would look into specific contracts of programs with production issues to see where they can be changed (Defense Daily, Feb. 27).
“The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps remain the most formidable expeditionary force in the world, but the U.S. Navy is at a crossroads, extended deployments, inadequate maintenance, huge cost overruns, delayed shipbuilding, failed audits, subpar housing and sadly, record high suicide rates are systemic failures that have gone unaddressed for far too long. And, frankly, this is unacceptable,” he said.
Phelan argued his role will be to use his outside experience to “step outside the status quo and take decisive action with a results-oriented approach.”
President Trump originally announced Phelan, a significant fundraiser for the Trump campaign, as his pick to be the top civilian of the Navy Department in November (Defense Daily, Nov. 27, 2024).
He has no experience in government or the military, having been the founder and chairman of Rugger Management LLC. Phelan previously served as a co-founder and managing partner of the investment firm that oversaw the fortune of Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell.
The Trump administration’s temporary halt to sharing commercial space imagery with Ukraine was a major concern for the affected companies who are worried that other international customers might not see the U.S. as a reliable partner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Tuesday.
In addition to the commercial space industry, other U.S. technology companies have said the stoppage in imagery sharing “has sent and enormous chill” through the commercial sector, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said during the committee’s annual hearing with senior intelligence community officials on the global threats the U.S. faces.
“Who’s going to hire an American commercial space company, government or foreign business with the ability to have that taken down so arbitrarily?” Warner said in his opening statement.
The U.S. early in March briefly paused providing military aid and intelligence data to Ukraine after a contentious White House meeting in late February failed to result in a commitment by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to a cease fire with Russia. Zelensky later committed to a partial ceasefire and the U.S. resumed aid to Ukraine (Defense Daily, March 11).
Warner said that the U.S. commercial space industry, including communications, launch vehicles, and remote sensing, has a “record lead” and “is second to none” but “overnight this administration called into question the reliability of American commercial tech industry.”
Warner specifically mentioned “Maxar and other commercial space companies” being directed to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine.
Maxar owns and operates a fleet of remote sensing electro-optical satellites and also operates the Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery program for the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to provide satellite imagery to the U.S. government and other partners.
While the information sharing pause was in effect with Ukraine, Maxar on March 8 said “Ukraine is not a direct Maxar customer, and any disruption would be the result of another customer’s individual decision to change its intelligence sharing policy.” The company also sought to assuage concerns of its international customers.
“As a private, global company, we continue to support these customers as they work towards delivering on their sovereign priorities,” the company also said on March 8.
Two former Defense Department officials from the first Trump administration last week argued a new person and organization should be put in charge of the White House’s new Golden Dome initiative, rather than the Missile Defense Agency (MDA).
“This is a new and more comprehensive enterprise. So saying that a legacy enterprise like MDA can automatically up its game and be in charge of the architectural and acquisition and technical thinking that’s required, I think, is probably wrong,” Michael Griffin, former Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, said during a March 19 Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance event.
Michael Griffin, former undersecretary of defense for research and engineering (Photo: Department of Defense)
He added that while there is a great deal of technical expertise at MDA, the Space Development Agency, in Space Force and at the Navy Aegis and Army THAAD and Patriot teams, they should be pulled into a new organization.
“I would not hand it to any existing agency,” Griffin continued.
Likewise, his former deputy, Lisa Porter, elaborated that “I think one of the biggest cultural barriers [MDA has] is the way they think about command and control…[the challenge] here is just not going to permit the standard way that they think about this problem with centralized control and command in the middle, that just doesn’t work.”
She added the right people should be pulled out of MDA into a separate group empowered to do the right thing “as opposed to having to go back and please their boss, because there are, you know, rice bowls at risk if they actually speak truth to power.”
Griffin agreed, noting that the DoD knows how to build interceptors, sensors and provide fire control quality information that works.
“Can argue about cost. We don’t yet know how to do the kind of distributed, autonomous command and control that is going to be necessary for an actual Golden Dome.”
He emphasized they need a fresh start since the new effort for more missile defense over the U.S. extends to offensive forces, for a more complex and integrated problem than any service or agency has had to deal with so far.
Griffin noted it includes navigating the details of if it is offensive or defensive action to use a potential future U.S. satellite weapon that can use microwave weapons to disable but not physically destroy an opponents’ satellite when navigating next to it.
MDA logo.
Porter added the new manager particularly needs people who understand the problem to be able to work on it “without concerns about the equities that are challenged if they bring truth to power.”
Relatedly, Griffin and Porter said the new Golden Dome leader should be either a four-star flag officer or an appointed and Senate-confirmed civilian who is experienced enough to work through bureaucratic issues but young enough to see the future.
Porter said this person should be akin to a 40-year-old Griffin. “You need somebody with enough scars that’s actually been to this show before but is young enough you really see the future.”
Alternatively, they said the leader should be like how the first Trump administration worked on quickly getting COVID-19 vaccines developed and approved within nine months, led by former four-star Army Gen. Gustave Perna as chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed.
“It’s the equivalent of in Trump One when we had a COVID problem, and [Trump] was like, we got to fix this. We got to get a vaccine. What did he do? He put a get-stuff-done guy in charge,” Porter said in reference to Perna.
Perna previously served as commanding general of United States Army Materiel Command.
“It’s amazing. That’s what we need. This is the equivalent of that. This is like the COVID vaccines. Nobody thought we could do that in nine months, nobody,” Porter added.
“If you want a golden dome and you want it in a timely way, they have to have the money, they have to have the authority, they have to have the chops,” Griffin said.
Two former Trump administration weapons technology development officials recently shot down the idea that boost-based missile defense from interceptors based in space is even physically and technically possible.
During a Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance (MDAA) event on March 19, Michael Griffin, former Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering under the first Trump administration, said while he is a supporter of President Trump’s Iron Dome/Golden Dome executive order, he is concerned about attempts at boost-phase missile defense.
Northrop Grumman graphic representation of how Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) satellites are meant to operate and enable targeting of enemy missiles. (Image: Northrop Grumman).
“In most cases you do not have a shot from space at an ICBM in the boost phase. You can’t get to it with reasonable probability, and by reasonable probability I would say greater than a percent or so,” Griffin said.
Trump’s late January executive order pushed the Pentagon to quickly develop a reference architecture to develop a multi-billion dollar project, initially called Iron Dome for America, to protect again ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missile threats to the U.S. This includes using space-based interceptors (Defense Daily, Jan. 28).
The executive order included incorporating the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) layer plus “proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept,” then underlayer and terminal-phase intercept capabilities to defeat a potential countervalue nuclear weapons attack.
Countervalue refers to a nuclear weapons targeting strategy of targeting a country’s civilian population and economic base rather than exclusively military and nuclear targets.
Griffin said given his experience going back to 1980s missile defense studies, most people think of boost-phase defense as interceptors but space-based interceptors ICBM have less than a one percent chance of getting a shot at an ICBM booster.
He claimed the most feasible chance such a system would have ever had was only against a Soviet SS-18 long-burn liquid-booster ICBM that carried about 10 warheads. “Just a monstrous weapon that flew long enough that you could get a shot at it with not a very high probability, but some probability.”
Lisa Porter, Griffin’s former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the Trump administration, added the problem with boost-phase space-based missile defense “is physics, this is not engineering, this is physics. You can’t overcome the laws of physics no matter how good an engineer you are.”
Griffin said the government needs to spend money on what is actually doable and having participated in these studies for over 40 years, “ it is not worth spending your money on a space interceptor constellation that is targeting the boost phase.”
Griffin argued from the point as someone who is not against space-based defenses and “I want to shoot at what you can shoot at,” so he argued what is actually feasible for space-based defense is shooting against midcourse objects.
He said a constellation of space-based interceptors targeting midcourse objects have a “good probability” of reaching it in the 15- or 20-minute flight time window.
“In that period of time, 20 percent of a space-based constellation will sweep through the battlespace.”
Figure 1 from the June 2024 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the Missile Defense Agency’s Next Generation Interceptor program. (Image: GAO)
However, Griffin highlighted the main problem at that stage is discriminating between actual weapons and decoys released by an ICBM.
When MDAA founder and chairman Riki Ellison pushed that by now most people would think the U.S. was better at discrimination of decoys in space, Griffin warned, “I would not agree that we’re much better at that than we ever were….I just wouldn’t agree that we know a lot about discrimination.”
Instead, he said the midcourse interception issue is a trade of “do I want to do that from space, go against a midcourse object; do I want to do it from the ground; do I want to do it from both to confuse and confound the enemy and give them more problems to solve. Those are legitimate problems to ask.”
Griffin also said airborne and space-based laser defenses for ballistic missiles are also not realistic.
“I just don’t think that as weapons, those are credible. I don’t think they’re technically credible.”
He added that the very low chances of being able to hit an ICBM booster from space is even lower for submarine-launched ballistic missiles because they do not get high enough for long enough while boost-phase defense against hypersonic vehicles are “not possible at all, you’re just not going to get it, it flies too low.”
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and U.S. Space Force on Monday successfully launched and delivered into orbit a national security payload aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle from Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla., the agency said.
The launch of the NROL-69 mission at 1:48 pm EDT was the first NRO mission launch with SpaceX using the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 contract awarded in August 2020. United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing [BA] and Lockheed Martin [LMT], was the other awardee for the second phase.
NROL-69 is the first NRO mission launched with SpaceX from the NSSL Phase 2 contract awarded in August 2020.
Following delivery of the NRO payload to orbit, the Falcon 9 reusable booster landed safely to Landing Zone 1 at the Cape.
The NROL-69 million was the fifth NRO launch so far in 2025—about a dozen are planned—and follows closely on the heels of the successful NROL-57 mission last Friday morning from Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., also aboard a Falcon 9 rocket (Defense Daily, March 21). NROL-57 is the eighth in NRO’s proliferated architecture.
For the Defense Department and industry achieving the Trump administration’s goal of a comprehensive homeland missile defense system will be ensuring that current and future technologies deployed are networked with each other across all domains, the vice chief of space operations said last week.
Much of what is necessary for Golden Dome for America is in place but these capabilities have not been connected, Gen. Michael Guetlein said at the annual McAleese Conference.
“We are very good at building stovepipe capabilities for the Space Force, for the Air Force, for the Army, for the Navy, for Missile Defense Agency,” he said. “The real magic in Golden Dome is going to be our ability to integrate across all of those organizational boundaries into a seamless capability that is going to require the integration of space with missile defense that we haven’t traditionally done, the integration of missile defense with the air layer, integration of the air layer with the sea layer. That’s going to be our biggest challenge.”
The Space Development Agency, an acquisition arm of the U.S. Space Force focused on developing a new Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, is developing and fielding data transport and missile detection and tracking spacecraft in low Earth orbit that would be an integral part to a future Golden Dome system of systems.
Asked during the event how industry can help, Guetlein said the “kit” that will make up Golden Dome is still being discussed but the network integration will require technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, data orchestration processing, and “reliable” all-domain communications.
Industry can also help by taking advantage of its customer networks to ensure different customers are aware of what the others are doing related to a homeland missile defense system, Guetlein said.
“You may think I know what the Navy up to,” he said. “I will tell you I don’t have any idea what the Navy is up to. But if you said, ‘Hey, you need to call, you know, general or admiral or commander such and such,’ that would be a huge service to us, to get us talking about how to connect these pieces better together.”
HII [HII] will develop and test a prototype high-energy laser (HEL) weapon system to defeat unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) with a goal to transition into production under a contract with an Army office focused on expediting prototyping and fielding critical capabilities sought by combatant commanders.
The value and period-of-performance of the HEL award were not disclosed. The laser work is new for HII’s Mission Technologies segment.
HII said its HEL weapon system will feature an open architecture, be capable of fixed-site defense and integration into Army vehicles, and acquire, track, and destroy Group 1, 2, and three UAS, which includes drones with a maximum gross takeoff weight less than 1,320 pounds. The company said the system would be used in multi-domain operations.
The award was made by the Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office with the eventual aim to transition the HEL system to the Army’s Program Executive Office for Missiles and Space, HII said. The system will be field tested and if successful, “is expected to transition into low-rate initial production,” HII said.
As part of the open architecture plans, HII said it will provide data to compete subsystems and key components in support of the Army’s goals for interoperability, affordability, scalability, supply chain resilience, and rapid innovation.
“The weapon system will allow the Army to interchange subsystems and software as the weapon evolves to meet national security demands,” HII said.
The Army has awarded Lockheed Martin [LMT] $213 million for production of 12 more Sentinel A4 radars, with deliveries to begin in early 2027.
The latest low-rate initial production (LRIP) order arrives as the Sentinel A4 continues through initial operational test and evaluation, with a full-rate production and subsequent contract award expected next year.
Sentinel A4. Photo: Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed Martin’s Sentinel A4 is the Army’s replacement for the Sentinel A3, built by Thales and RTX [RTX], and the first five radars were delivered to the service in late May 2022 (Defense Daily, June 10 2022).
The upgraded version of the Sentinel radar, which provides air surveillance and fire control data, transitions the system to Active Electronically Scanned Array technology and is designed to identify and track multiple threats simultaneously, including cruise missiles, unmanned aerial systems, rotary wing and fixed wing aircraft, and rocket, artillery, and mortar threats.
A total of 10 Sentinel A4 radars have been delivered to date, an Army spokesperson confirmed to Defense Daily.
The Army in the summer of 2023 awarded Lockheed Martin an initial LRIP contract for 19 additional Sentinel A4 radars (Defense Daily, Nov. 7 2023).
David Kenneweg, Lockheed Martin’s director of multi-mission air defense programs, previously told Defense Daily that initial deliveries of those 19 radars will begin in the second half of 2025 and that some will be used for the defense of Guam.
The Missile Defense Agency has noted that the future Guam Defense System will include the Lockheed Martin Aegis combat system, RTX’s Standard Missile (SM)-3 and SM-6 missiles and the Northrop Grumman [NOC] Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS) as well as the Sentinel A4 as one of its key sensors (Defense Daily, March 29 2022).
Chandra Marshall, Lockheed Martin’s vice president of radar and sensor systems, has said the Army’s plan is to work on integrating Sentinel A4 into the IBCS architecture in the 2026 timeframe, while Kenneweg adding that Lockheed Martin has already vetted out the radar’s software interface to ensure integration with the future air and missile defense command platform.
General Dynamics Land Systems [GD] next week will unveil a version of the Pandur 6X6 combat vehicle outfitted with a short range air defense (SHORAD) capability, which it sees as a solution to meet the Army’s potential requirement for a lighter platform to protect dismounted maneuver forces.
Ray Moldovan, a U.S. business development manager for GD Land Systems, told
Defense Daily the decision to pursue the Pandur SHORAD concept followed the Army’s release of a Request for Information last year for the fourth increment of its Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (M- SHORAD) effort.
Pandur SHORAD. Photo: General Dynamics Land Systems.
“[That’s] where the Army is looking for a lighter weight solution for lightweight formations,” Moldovan said. “We thought, in terms of design maturity, competence and its high level of survivability, protection and mobility, that [Pandur] seemed like a good fit to address the joint forcible entry mission and lighter formation support in SHORAD-based platform.”
GD Land Systems currently delivers the Army’s M-SHORAD Inc. 1, the Stryker-mounted “SGT Stout” platform designed to take down unmanned aircraft systems, rotary-wing and fixed-wing threats, as well as cruise missiles.
Leonardo DRS supplies the mission equipment package for SGT Stout, which includes the Moog [MOG.A] Reconfigurable Integrated-weapons Platform (RIwP) turret, the XM914 30mm cannon and M240 machine gun, Stinger and Hellfire missiles and Rada USA’s Multi-Mission Hemispheric Radar.
Last May, the Army released an RFI seeking industry’s input on potential solutions for an M-SHORAD Inc. 4 solution that could be integrated on lighter vehicles and ground robots to support dismounted maneuvers (Defense Daily, May 10 2024).
“Candidate solutions to deliver M-SHORAD Increment 4 capability to dismounted maneuver, joint forcible entry (JFE) and light mounted maneuver forces must be supported by current demonstrated company experience,” the Army wrote in the RFI.
Moldovan noted the Pandur SHORAD, set to be shown for the first time at next week’s AUSA Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, will have the same turret and payload package as the SGT Stout and the SHORAD version of its Tracked Robot X-Ton (TRX) robotic vehicle the company brought to the same conference in 2023 (Defense Daily, March 23 2023).
“Just like we did with TRX SHORAD in showing we can integrate this fielded capability on a different platform, we took this approach with Pandur as well,” Moldovan said. “There’s a lot of benefit, I think, to our Army customer in not having to qualify and field these different types of turrets and capabilities onto different platforms. So we have a little bit of commonality there.”
The Pandur 6×6 EVO, built by GD’s European Land Systems business, has a gross vehicle weight of around 40,000 pounds, about 20,000 pounds lighter than a Stryker, which Moldovan said would allow for “increased inter-theater transportability and increased mobility” for light formations.
Moldovan noted the Pandur SHORAD also includes additional space for robotic systems operating stations inside the vehicle.
GD Land Systems is planning to bring both the Pandur SHORAD and TRX SHORAD to Army’s Maneuver and Fires Integrated Experiment (MFIX) at Fort Sill in Oklahoma this July, which will be showcasing the ability to control robotic and uncrewed vehicles from inside the Pandur.
“And that gets after increased combat power without increasing troop count. So there’s a force multiplication factor that we have with this system of systems,” Moldovan said.
The second increment for M-SHORAD is the DE M-SHORAD effort, with RTX [RTX] providing a 50-kilowatt laser and beam director that Kord Technologies integrates on Stryker vehicles.
The Army’s third increment for M-SHORAD is the NGSRI program, with Lockheed Martin [LMT] and RTX working on the Stinger missile replacement effort (Defense Daily, March 28 2023).
In announcing Boeing [BA] as the winner of the Air Force’s F-47 Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) manned fighter, President Trump said U.S. allies are interested in the sixth-generation aircraft and that they might be able to buy some.
“Our allies are calling constantly,” he said last Friday at the White House. “They want to buy them also, and we’ll certain allies will be selling them. Perhaps toned-down versions.” In his rambling way, the president was saying the U.S. will sell F-47s to “certain allies.”
Having a toned-down export version of the sixth-generation F-47 air superiority would be a hedge in case current allies are not U.S. allies in the future, Trump said.
“We like to tone them down about 10 percent, which probably makes sense because someday maybe they’re not our allies, right?” the president said.
Some NATO allies operate U.S. fighter aircraft, including the fifth-generation F-35 multi-role fighter. The Air Force’s current F-22 air superiority fighter, the fifth-generation F-22, is no longer in production and was never exported. Lockheed Martin [LMT] builds the F-35 and built the F-22, which is still being upgraded.
But NATO allies are concerned that under Trump, and maybe beyond his final four-year term, the U.S. will not defend Europe if Russia attacks it. These concerns have also prompted U.S. allies in Europe to begin to wean themselves off of some advanced defense systems they acquire from the U.S.
Trump has frequently suggested that the U.S. would not come to the aid of NATO if it gets into a war, namely with Russia. The president has threatened new tariffs on European allies, and Canada, which is also a NATO member, while at the same time withholding aid from Ukraine to get that country to agree to a ceasefire with Russia.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 unprovoked but Trump usually parrots Russian President Vladimir Putin’s theme that Ukraine is at fault. In pressing Ukraine to negotiate a ceasefire, Trump has not threatened Russia with any new measures.
The value of the engineering and manufacturing development contract with Boeing was not disclosed. The first aircraft are expected to fly in the next few years.
“We’re given an order for a lot,” Trump said. “We can’t tell you the price, because it would give way to some of the technology and some of the size of the plane. Good sized plane.”
