Japan’s Defense Ministry announced Wednesday, June 7, that it had signed four contracts worth 314.7 billion yen ($2.3 billion) with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) and Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI) to develop their own missiles.
Tokyo is striving to acquire counter-strike capabilities as soon as possible amid rising tensions in the region over China’s assertive behavior, North Korea’s relentless nuclear and missile development and Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine.
Among the four contracts, the one that the ministry has awarded to KHI for 33.
Author: Michael
The latest progress report on major weapon systems from the U.S. government’s supreme audit institution sheds light on the reasons why the U.S. Air Force has, so far, only received two F-15EX Eagle II fighter jets. A combination of wrangling over the planned acquisition totals and production issues with the first batches of jets has pushed the timeline to the right.
The Pentagon’s repository for government-funded research and engineering information is set to experiment with Microsoft’s new service that enables cloud computing customers to access and apply sophisticated artificial intelligence models — built by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI — to its vast arsenal of defense data.
Trained by massive amounts of data from across the internet, the large language models can predict convincing, but not always correct, conversational responses based on prompts from humans.
On Wednesday, South Korea held an official presentation ceremony for the first FA-50GF light attack aircraft for the Polish Armed Forces, symbolically displaying the two countries’ growing cooperation in the arms industry.
Under the theme “Firm Commitment, Secure Future,” the ceremony took place at the headquarters of Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI), South Korea’s sole aircraft manufacturer, in Sacheon, about 300 kilometers south of Seoul.
Following flight tests that will take place until next month, KAI plans to deliver 12 FA-50GFs to Poland before the end of the year.
The Ministry of Defense of the Netherlands announced the selection of H225M Caracal (formerly Eurocopter EC725) helicopters from Airbus Helicopters, ordering 14 such machines. These helicopters are intended to replace the Eurocopter AS532 Cougar (renamed H215M), which has been flying since the mid-1990s.
The price of the contract has not been announced, but the delivery dates are extremely delayed and are not expected to start until 2028. Therefore, the AS532 Cougars will be upgraded to be in service until 2030. The new vehicles are to be used by special operations forces.
Japanese MoD
Japan has kicked off a project to field a new coastal, anti-ship cruise missile as part of the country’s Defense Buildup Program. The “new SSM [surface-to-ship missile]” represents one of many new missile projects, including hypersonic missiles, recently announced by Japan’s Ministry of Defense specifically for “island defense.” It’s likely the new missile will be used on Japan’s southern islands, including around the Senkakus, to deter Chinese military aggression against what is known as the First Island Chain.
The Space Development Agency has awarded Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) a $64 million contract to develop and maintain the agency’s application factory that will automate battle management networks, SDA announced Thursday.
The Battle Management Command, Control and Communications (BMC3) Application Factory is a cloud-based environment that will allow users to test and quickly deploy software through a DevSecOps process to the Space Development Agency’s constellation in low-Earth orbit known as Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA).
The Naples Prosecutor has registered eight people in the register of suspects in the framework of an investigation into weapons called Colombiagate.
It is an attempt to sell Italian-made military ships and aircraft to the Colombian government. Specifically, the Alenia Aermacchi M-346 Master aircraft manufactured by the Leonardo group, along with corvettes, small submarines and shipyard equipment manufactured by Fincantieri.
The value of the agreement exceeded 4,000 million euros.
The suspects are charged with a crime of aggravated international corruption.
U.S. Cyber Command has deployed a team of defensive operators to a Central or South American nation for the first time, according to a Cybercom official.
The deployment is part of so-called hunt-forward operations, which involve physically sending defensively oriented cyber protection teams from the U.S. military’s Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) to foreign nations at their invitation to look for malicious activity on their networks.
GA-ASI
Taiwan’s defense ministry has denied that it’s currently part of tripartite plans to share intelligence gathered by naval surveillance drones with the United States and Japan. In an unusual step, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) moved to rebuff the contents of an article that suggested that, in particular, its forthcoming MQ-9B Sea Guardian drones would be used in this way. But whatever platforms were being used, this kind of intelligence-sharing has implications in peacetime, and especially were China to launch an offensive against the island.