Pax Americana, Technological Readiness and broken weapons systems

[AdamG]

Foreign arms sales are growing in importance to the top line of big defense firms and may get an added boost this year due to initiatives by President Donald Trump.
Sales to allies and other friendly countries also have allowed American defense companies to extend production lines that otherwise might be shuttered or downsized.
Trump's personal involvement in defense sales also hasn't gone unnoticed, whether touting $350 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia last May or suggesting in November that Japan should buy more U.S.-made equipment to shoot North Korean missiles "out of the sky."
Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, two defense companies with upcoming earnings reports, stand to benefit from increased international sales over the next few years, according to analysts. A lot of the recent growth in U.S. defense sales is in missile defense systems and Lockheed's F-35 stealth fighter jets.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/comp...ush/ar-AAv8mXq

[AdamG]

The U.S. military’s latest test of its Standard Missile 3 Block IIA ballistic missile interceptor has reportedly failed. So far, it’s unclear what happened, and the weapon is still in development, but it does come amid months of escalating tensions between the United States and North Korea and reports that authorities in Pyongyang are planning a parade with hundreds of ballistic missiles, likely in no small part to dissuade the U.S. government from considering a limited "bloody nose" strike.

CNN was first to report the apparent failure on Jan. 31, 2018. The test launch would be the fifth for the weapon, commonly referred to as the SM-3 Block IIA, and the third in which it attempted to actually intercept another missile. The last such experiment, which occurred in June 2017, also failed, but this was because a U.S. Navy sailor accidentally triggered the missile’s self-destruct function.

http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone...istic-missiles

Relevant backgrounder thread (currently locked).
http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ht=interceptor