Lockheed Martin and the Taiwanese government-owned Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation last week inked an agreement to cooperatively upgrade Taiwan’s F-16A/B fighter fleet, announced AIDC. “We are confident this collaboration effort will position both of our companies to better support our Taiwan customer,” said Roderick McLean, Lockheed Martin’s F-16 vice president, in AIDC’s July 12 release. The two companies, which formalized their collaboration at the Farnborough Air Show outside London on July 11, will upgrade Taiwan’s F-16s with active electronically scanned array radars, modern air-to-air missiles, and structural improvements to extend their service lives. The United States last fall granted Taiwan a $5.3 billion foreign military sale for these upgrades. In its version of the Fiscal 2013 defense authorization bill, the House also supported a proposal to sell Taiwan 66 new build F-16C/Ds, something to which the Obama Administration has not yet committed.
Combining the National Reconnaissance Office with the Space Force's Space Systems Command could help turbocharge national security space acquisition, argues Mark Berkowitz, the Trump administration's nominee to be assistant secretary of defense for space policy, in a newly published essay he coauthored.