Pentagon acquisition guru Kenneth Krieg has told Congress that DOD must continue the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle program despite the fact it has exceeded its cost by more than 25 percent, reports Reuters news service. Krieg must officially declare that a program is “essential” once it hits a Nunn-McCurdy breach. According to Reuters, Krieg told lawmakers that the Pentagon would restructure the program and limit production to five a year until initial operational testing is complete. The latter requirement would seem rather superfluous, considering the development models and now production models have been in heavy operational use since the beginning of the war on terror.
The Space Force is playing midwife to a new ecosystem of commercial satellite constellations providing alternatives to the service’s own Global Positioning Service from much closer to the Earth, making their signals more accurate and harder to jam.
