Latest news with #StandardMissile
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
L3Harris breaks ground on new rocket motor plant in Virginia
CULPEPER, Va. — L3Harris has begun clearing forest and carving out roads deep in the Virginia countryside, breaking ground on a major expansion at its Orange County facility to produce small and medium solid rocket motors – key components for the Javelin antitank weapon. As part of the Defense Production Act used to boost the replenishment of weapons sent to Ukraine, L3Harris' Aerojet Rocketdyne is building state-of-the art facilities for solid rocket motor production, such as casting and assembly, and for mixing and grinding operations while upgrading its testing plant. The U.S. has sent Ukraine over 10,000 shoulder-fired Javelin systems since Russia invaded in February 2022 and is now working to replenish its depleted stock. Javelin is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Aerojet Rocketdyne supplies the rocket motors for the weapon. Lockheed Martin aims to boost annual production from 2,400 Javelin missiles to nearly 4,000 by 2026, and Aerojet will need to contribute to meet the demand. Aerojet is constructing five new buildings that will move all work it does to build small and medium rocket motors, primarily Javelin, from Camden, Arkansas, to Orange county. It is primarily funded using a portion of the $215 million in Defense Production Act funding the company received for capacity ramp up efforts. The aim is to complete construction in the third or fourth quarter of 2026 and then begin moving into production in early 2027, Scott Alexander, L3Harris' missile solutions president, told reporters. The company has been tucked in the Shenandoah hills for 30 years, making a number of rocket motors for major programs including the Standard Missile, the Trident II D5 and the jettison motor for NASA's Artemis program. The area is also home to its center of excellence for propellant research and SRM production and has a robust testing facility that includes work on ramjet and scramjet technology development. L3Harris has also broken ground on new facilities in Camden, Arkansas, including a 60,000 square foot setup to concentrate on ramping up production of the rocket motors used in the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System that is fired from the Army's High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, another critical weapon sent to Ukraine to help it beat back the Russian invasion. And it is shifting all of its inert components like motor cases to Huntsville, Alabama. Overall, the company has doubled its internal investment in Aerojet's SRM production since acquiring it in 2023, Alexander said. The new buildings will leverage 'a lot of automation, robotics,' Julie Wikete, Aerojet's Orange site director, told reporters May 21 at the facility. 'How do we improve the overall experience here? And especially with building these new, we're able to leverage a lot of that more future factory approach that's going to lend ourselves directly to increasing the overall output of Javelin.' The new facilities will allow the company to increase its overall production capacity for Javelin solid rocket motors by 20% through strategic building and production line designs that cut the distance traveled across the facility during various stages of the process by 90%, Wikete said. 'We are reducing the overall time to build, which just immediately translates to faster out the door,' she noted. The expansion represents significant growth, although the number of new employees that will be needed at the facility is still being evaluated. 'We're always hiring,' Wikete said. 'Javelin is one program that is coming here … we are also growing in other areas,' she said. 'We'll continue to evaluate that as programs come online and more and more jobs will be opened up at that point.' With the addition of new production practices like robotics and automation that will enhance the process, the benefits include 'statistical reliability in what you're building and how you're building,' Alexander said. 'You take a lot of the human factor out of that, but also it is more efficient and so ultimately that is going to affect the cost per round in terms of it being economical.'
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's Plans for the Rest of the World Are Truly Unhinged
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. President Trump spent only 15 minutes of his nearly two-hour speech Tuesday night on foreign policy—but those minutes were as full of falsehoods, distortions, and personal insults as the rest of what must be the most angrily divisive presidential address to a joint session of Congress. His first lie on the subject was that, because he and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had removed 'wokeness' from our military, recruitment rates are higher than any time in the last 15 years. In fact, according to a headline in Fox News, of all places, 'Army recruiting is up, but data show trend began before the election.' According to that data, there were more recruits in August 2024, three months before the election, than there were in December, one month after the election (a lot more: 7,415 compared with 5,877). Nor did recruitment in January 2025 surpass the numbers of August 2024. The reason is that, back in 2023, the military put 1,200 more recruiters in the field and set up a six-week pre-boot camp to help lower-performing recruits meet the required standards. This highlights an ominous fact for the future: the nation is having a hard time recruiting physically and mentally fit men and women to join the military. However, steps to adjust for that were taken in the final year-and-a-half of the Biden administration—and higher numbers were met in that time than in the time since Trump was elected. The second howler of the night was Trump's characterization of what he is now calling the Golden Dome system to defend the United States from nuclear attack. He said that President Ronald Reagan wanted to create such a defense, but the technology didn't exist. 'Now we have the technology,' Trump claimed, 'it's incredible, actually. And other places—they have it, Israel has it. Other places have it. And the United States should have it too.' All of those sentences are false. Israel's Iron Dome program is designed to intercept missiles with a range of 40 miles traveling at twice the speed of sound. The sorts of missiles that would attack the United States would fly at a range of 6,000 miles, traveling at 10 times the speed of sound. The technology required for the one is completely different from the technology required for the other. The U.S. already has plenty of air- and missile-defenses at least as good as Iron Dome—the Patriot, the Standard Missile, and others. No country has a defense of the sort that Reagan had, and Trump has, in mind. We have spent more than $10 billion a year for the last 40 years trying to develop such a defense, to little avail. At best, we are now able to hit one mock warhead with one anti-missile missile in a carefully planned test. The test managers have never even tried to hit two with two, or a dozen with a dozen—because they know they cannot. The third distortion came with Trump's announcement that he would create an office of shipbuilding in the United States. He didn't say what such an office could do that the U.S. Navy could not. We'll wait for details. But then he segued, as if it followed that promise, with a pledge to reclaim the Panama Canal, which he said President Jimmy Carter gave away. In fact, the biggest defenders of the treaty that Carter signed, transferring the canal to the country of Panama, were the top U.S. military officers, because they knew they could not easily defend the canal in the face of rising anti-American sentiment—and they knew actual ownership of the canal wasn't necessary to use it. Trump has said in recent months that China has taken over the canal's ports and that U.S. ships have been overcharged while transiting through. Neither claim is true. He then said that he was putting Secretary of State Marco Rubio in charge of getting the canal back. 'Good luck, Marco,' he said, to laughter. 'Now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong.' As if Rubio hasn't experienced enough humiliation in the first six weeks on the job, his failure to make progress on this task—all the while realizing, deep down, that it's a mad mission—may eclipse all prior demoralization. Then came Greenland. At first, Trump seemed to soften his earlier commitment to 'get' Greenland. He said, as if speaking to that country's citizens, 'And if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America. We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And we're working with everybody involved to try and get it. But we need it really for international world security. And I think we're going to get it.' Then he added, 'one way or the other, we're going to get it,' thus renewing his threat. Greenland does occupy potentially valuable geostrategic territory, near the Arctic, alongside possible ship and submarine routes by Russia or other adversaries. However, Greenland and its present owner, Denmark, are both NATO members. The U.S. has a massive military base on Greenland and other bases nearby. There are no local protesters to U.S. presence. The U.S. does not need to own the place. The Ukraine portion of Trump's speech was filled with exaggerations. He said the U.S. has donated $350 billion to Ukraine, while all of Europe—which should have a higher stake on the country's defense—has given only $100 billion. In fact, the U.S. has given $175 billion—half as much as Trump claimed—of which $66 billion was in military aid, much of which was paid to American defense manufacturers. Meanwhile, the European Union and its member states have provided about $200 billion—more than the United States. But then came an interesting, possibly hopeful twist—the only one in the entire speech. He read parts of a letter from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky saying he is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible, ready to work under President Trump's strong leadership. 'I appreciate that he sent this letter,' Trump said, signaling a possible do-over of the Oval Office meeting last week where he and Vice President J.D. Vance screamed at Zelensky for being insufficiently thankful to his hosts. Trump then said he'd spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who told him that Russia is ready for peace too. 'Wouldn't that be beautiful?' Trump mused. We'll see what kind of peace Putin wants. We'll also see if Zelensky's letter moves Trump to reverse his decision to halt all arms transfers to Ukraine—even the arms in the pipeline. That would be less likely. When he itemized (though incorrectly) the billions that the U.S. has spent on arms for Ukraine, many Democrats started applauding—for the first and only time in the speech. Trump looked over to them and muttered, 'You like that?' Then he said, 'Pocahontas says yes'—Pocahontas being his belittling nickname for Sen. Elizabeth Warren. To her credit, the camera showed her smiling and nodding in response. As usual, Trump spent more time and energy chiding Warren, other Democrats, and especially former President Joe Biden—calling him 'the worst president,' among other insults—than he spent criticizing any of the country's adversaries. To any foreigners watching the speech to glean Trump's priorities, that said it all—and it wasn't at all assuring.
