The U.S. Navy tested a new subsonic aerial target last month with the USS Barry destroyer at the Japan-based Pacific Missile Range Facility, Detachment-Far East.

The BQM-177A target underwent back-to-back test flights from Sept. 9th to 10th as the Navy seeks to achieve the technology's full operational capability this year, Naval Air Systems Command said Monday. Kratos Defense and Security Solutions produced the target.

BQM-177 is designed to simulate anti-ship cruise missiles flying at subsonic speeds from land, air, surface or underwater locations. 

“We learned a lot from these events and to scale this capability in the future to other surface ships we now know how to move forward,” said Don Blottenberger, program manager of the Navy's aerial target program office known as PMA-208.

Air Combat Command (ACC) and its maintenance partners have completed the final flight test exercise required to certify the B61-12 bomb‘s nuclear design.

A pair of F-35A units dropped B61-12 joint test assemblies during the aircraft’s first full weapon system demonstration, ACC said Monday.

Pilots dropped the JTAs at Tonopah Test Range while observing operationally realistic flight envelopes. The test’s completion concludes the B61-12 design’s on-aircraft testing and has produced data for further analyses by the departments of Defense (DOD) and Energy (DOE).

“The B61 series weapons are tactical gravity nuclear weapons that can be used on dual-capable aircraft like the F-15E and F-16C/D,” said Lt. Col. Daniel Jackson, division chief of strategic deterrence and nuclear integration at ACC’s headquarters.

“Adding ‘nuclear capable’ to a 5th-Gen fighter that already brings several conventional-level capabilities to the table adds strategic-level implication to this jet,” Jackson added.

The Department of Defense’s (DOD) office of inspector general (OIG) conducted an audit of DOD's use of the middle tier of acquisition (MTA) pathway and found that acquisition personnel employed the MTA approach for 11 reviewed programs in accordance with the department's guidance to rapidly build and deploy technologies to meet the needs of warfighters.

The OIG said in a Sept. 28th report that the use of MTA pathways helped streamline acquisition processes and accelerate prototyping and fielding efforts, leading to increased effectiveness and efficiencies.

There are two MTA types and the first is the Rapid Prototyping Pathway, which focuses on innovative tech platforms to accelerate the development of fieldable prototypes to address emerging military requirements. The Rapid Fielding Pathway deals with proven systems to deploy production quantities of updated or new platforms.

The inspector general also found that acquisition executives at DOD backed the use of MTA pathways, while program managers and program management offices employed the flexibilities that MTA pathways offer.

According to the report, DOD components had 69 programs using MTA pathways valued at approximately $31.1 billion as of Sept. 30, 2020. Of those programs, 56 are rapid prototyping initiatives and the rest are using the Rapid Fielding Pathway.

“Because the MTA programs are still in the early stages of execution and DoD acquisition reform remains a work in progress, the DoD must continue to balance management and oversight of these programs with the risk involved to ensure the efficient delivery of needed, useful, capabilities at a fair and reasonable cost,” the report reads.