Mississippi’s burgeoning defense industries must be drooling over the Pentagon’s proposed $1.5 trillion budget request. More ships, more missiles, more aircraft, more drones, all mean more lucrative production contracts.
As Sid Salter recently wrote, with Sen. Roger Wicker chairing the Senate Armed Services Committee and Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith joining the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Mississippi companies stand to benefit from increased defense spending.
Our pantheon of defense industries has surged. The fastest growing sector appears to be in aerospace systems. As MDA now touts, “We produce 3x the national average of rocket engines.”
Firehawk in Crawford is establishing a rocket-system manufacturing and integration facility to make rocket motors, rockets, and munitions using proprietary 3D-printed propellant technology.
Anduril in McHenry is expanding its solid-rocket-motor capacity from approximately 600 to more than 6,000 tactical-scale solid rocket motors annually.
General Atomics is expanding its Shannon operation to produce next-generation defense systems such as the Bullseye precision-guided strike missile and 155mm-class Long-Range Maneuvering Projectile.
Airbus in Columbus is developing the unmanned MQ-72C Lakota Connector based on its H145/UH-72 helicopter platform.
RTX/Raytheon in Forest is a major defense manufacturing site that produces advanced radar, electronic warfare, and sensor systems for U.S. and allied military platforms.
The GE Aerospace facility in Batesville recently expanded capacity to produce parts for military fighter jet and helicopter engines.
Stark Aerospace in Columbus produces and supports missile systems and related components.
Aurora Flight Sciences, a Boeing subsidiary in Columbus, produces components and assemblies for military aircraft and related systems.
Northrop Grumman in Iuka produces critical components for launch vehicles such as the Antares, Pegasus, and Minotaur rockets.
Lockheed Martin at its Stennis Space Center facility in Hancock County produces propulsion systems and related military equipment.
Military experts are now thinking to layer systems with lots of mass-produced, relatively inexpensive autonomous weapons and defenses at the base level – cheap drones, missiles and unmanned aircraft plus electronic warfare systems. Above that would be a less robust layer of inexpensive missiles. Above that would be a limited layer of exquisite, expensive weapons.
Those Mississippi defense industries thriving on that top layer now will need to be ready to adapt to this shift.
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” – Ecclesiastes 3:1.
Crawford is an author and syndicated columnist from Jackson.
4 comments:
While it is always great to see America on the cutting edge of any tech. It is foolish to buy disposable weapons with short expiration dates on your grandkid's credit. Peace would be a far better investment for our children and grandchildren. But I understand that won't make the rootless cosmopolitan central bankers or Israel very happy at all. And their grandkids won't be the ones paying for it either.
As usual, it seems Crawford is hoping Mississippi defense contractors fail.
"13 Fools base their thoughts on foolish assumptions, so their conclusions will be wicked madness; 14 they chatter on and on. No one really knows what is going to happen; no one can predict the future. 15 Fools are so exhausted by a little work that they can't even find their way home".
Ecclesiastes 10:13
When your economy can't even keep the roads paved or make a decent fuckin' $2 broomstick anymore, but multi-billion dollar killing machinery, fuck, yeah. Cue Lee Greenwood.
Whoa.....what's the magic touch you have that allows KF to let your post go through? Brilliant and true post....but rarely allowed, if ever.
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