WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration has told U.S. lawmakers it is delaying a planned $53 million arms sale to Bahrain, a key Gulf ally, pending the outcome of a local investigation into alleged human-rights abuses since an uprising in February.

The handling of the issue is sensitive because of U.S. security interests in Bahrain, host of U.S. naval headquarters in the Gulf for more than 60 years and a pivot for U.S. efforts to deter Iran.

The State Department, in an October 14 reply to members of Congress, said it would hold off until it could review the findings of a Bahrain “Independent Commission of Inquiry” due to report to the nation’s king on October 30.

The department said it expected the report to be made public shortly. It would then assess the government’s efforts to implement the recommendations and make “needed reforms.”

King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa convened the five-member commission in June to investigate the violent crackdown on the mainly Shi’ite protesters who rose up after the revolt that overthrew Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on February 11.

“We will weigh these factors and confer with (the U.S.) Congress before proceeding with additional steps related” to the proposed arms sale notified to Congress on September 14, David Adams, assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, wrote to Senator Ron Wyden and others who had questioned the deal and its timing.

The sale has become unusually controversial in Congress because, critics say, it reflects a double standard compared to the U.S. response to the 2011 unrest in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Oct 18 (Reuters) – The Pentagon has delayed until December the award of a contract that could unseat Boeing Co as the current prime contractor for the U.S. long-range missile shield.

A team led by Lockheed Martin Corp and Raytheon Co is vying with Boeing to expand and maintain the Ground-based Midcourse Defense, or GMD, hub of layered antimissile protection.

The award has slipped to December “because evaluation won’t be completed until then,” Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, said in an emailed reply to Reuters.

In June, the agency had announced it was postponing the selection of a winner until November. It said then that more time was needed to weigh the rival bids.

The GMD contract’s value to Boeing will have been about $18 billion from January 2001, when it formally became the system’s prime contractor, through the end of this year, Jessica Carlton, a company spokeswoman, said in an email.

Boeing is teamed for the competition with Northrop Grumman Corp , which has designed and deployed the systems’s command-and-control apparatus.

GMD uses radars and other sensors plus a 20,000-mile fiber optic communications network to cue interceptors in silos in Fort Greely, Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

WASHINGTON, Oct 18 (Reuters) – The United States has invited Russia to use its own radars and other sensors to size up one or more U.S. missile-defense flight tests as part of a new push to persuade Moscow that the system poses it no threat, a Pentagon official said on Tuesday.

The idea is to let Russia measure for itself the performance of U.S. interceptor missiles being deployed in and around Europe in what Washington says is a layered shield against missiles that could be fired by countries like Iran.

“These are smaller missiles,” Army Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly, director of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, told a forum hosted by the Atlantic Council. He referred to current and planned Standard Missile-3 interceptors built by Raytheon Co .

They would be ineffective as anti-missile interceptors against a country like Russia, whose strategic deterrent missiles are launched from deep inside its territory, he said. The SM-3 interceptor, to be based on land and at sea, “can’t reach that far.”

President Barack Obama pleased the Kremlin in 2009 by scrapping his predecessor’s plan for longer-range interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar installation in the Czech Republic, a move that helped to improve U.S.-Russian ties.

WRITTEN ASSURANCES

But Moscow says that Obama’s revised version, which includes participation by Romania, Poland, Turkey and Spain, could undermine Russia’s security if it becomes capable of neutralizing Russia’s nuclear deterrent and has warned of a new arms race if its concerns are not met.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is still crafting a legal framework to guide any offensive moves in cyberspace, months after the Pentagon unveiled a broad cyber strategy, the head of the military command responsible for such operations said on Tuesday.

Deliberations on military doctrine and legal framework are “ongoing,” Air Force General Robert Kehler, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, told a defense writers’ group. “I would say it’s not completed.”

Kehler has overall responsibility for the U.S. Cyber Command, a sub-unit that began operating in May 2010.

Its mission is to protect Defense Department networks and, if ordered, to go on the offensive to make sure the United States retains the ability to use digitally networked systems on land, at sea and in the air.

He said the military was still looking at “what kinds of options would we want to be able to offer” policymakers for going on the offense.

One of the issues is what constitutes “active defense” in cyberspace, he said, equating it with actions that a ship’s captain is authorized to take at sea to protect a ship.

“Is active defense really offense in cyberspace?” Kehler asked. “I would argue that it really is not. It does not have to be, for sure. But those are the issues that we are trying to work our way through.”

WASHINGTON, Oct 17 (Reuters) – An advanced guidance system on a Raytheon Co warhead failed during a December intercept test of the U.S. ground-based missile defense system because of a design flaw that could be detected only in outer space, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency said Monday.

“The design issue could only reveal itself in the environment of outer space, not during ground testing,” Richard Lehner, an MDA spokesman, said in an email. He said he could not be more specific.

Integration of components and deliveries of the so-called Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle, or EKV, were suspended early this year.

They are still on hold at least until a post-mission assessment of a non-intercept flight test planned for next spring, Lehner said.

John Patterson, a spokesman for Raytheon’s missile systems business unit, referred a request for company comment back to MDA.

The EKV’s guidance system had a fault related to “outer space-related dynamic environments” that caused the warhead to fail in the final seconds of the Dec. 15 test, an independent “failure review” board found, according to an MDA statement.

“There is no indication of any quality control problem as the cause of the failure,” it said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Defense Department said Friday it had terminated Boeing Co’s top U.S. Army radio program, kicking off an expected new round of cutbacks as the Pentagon trims spending in an austere budget climate.

Full-rate production of the Joint Tactical Radio System’s “Ground Mobile Radio” was once estimated to be worth nearly $20 billion.

But the Boeing contract was merely for development and to certify two companies to compete to produce the radio.

“Our contract specifically restricted Boeing from production,” said Matthew Billingsley, a company spokesman.

The program was canceled in line with the Nunn-McCurdy statute, said Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Melinda Morgan, a Pentagon spokeswoman. The statute was triggered after the planned purchase was slashed over the summer from 86,209 radios to 10,293.

The law calls for a program’s termination once unit-procurement costs exceed the original estimate by 25 percent unless it is deemed essential to national security.

In this case, the Pentagon also would have had to certify the lack of a viable alternative and that problems that led to the cost growth are under control.

WASHINGTON, Oct 14 (Reuters) – A precision-strike missile that has been a star of the U.S.-led war on al Qaeda and its allies is about to get deadlier.

The cylindrical, 108-pound (49-kg) missile, known as Hellfire II, has been the weapon of choice on remotely piloted aircraft such as the General Atomics MQ-1A Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper.

These drones have been hunting U.S. foes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistani tribal areas. Among the recent targets of a CIA-operated drone was U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was a top U.S. anti-terrorist target until he was killed in northern Yemen on Sept. 30.

Now an even more lethal version of the missile is close to being fielded.

It wraps all of the killer applications of previous Hellfire II models into a single warhead for greater operational flexibility, according to its maker, Lockheed Martin Corp .

“One missile for many missions,” said a promotional sheet next to a Lockheed missile mock-up at an annual meeting and arms bazaar of the Association of the United States Army, held in Washington this week.

The new missile is designated the AGM-114R, or Hellfire Romeo. Tipped with a “multi-purpose” warhead behind its domed nose, it is designed to knock out “hard, soft and enclosed targets” with a single Hellfire missle load, says Lockheed, the Pentagon’s No. 1 supplier by sales.

WASHINGTON, Oct 5 (Reuters) – The United States should boost spending on cyber security and advanced capabilities to hit distant enemy targets even as military spending shrinks with new budget constraints, the Pentagon’s No. 2 civilian said in a farewell speech.

“We should trim modernizations but preserve increases in key areas, such as cyber security and long-range strike,” Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn said Wednesday on his last day in office after a long Pentagon career.

Drawing conclusions from four previous post-World War Two defense cutbacks, Lynn said the nation must make hard decisions early on what to cut from the $530 billion-plus core defense budget.

Lower-priority programs that are eventually canceled, or curtailed, divert scarce resources, he told an audience at the Center for American Progress, a public policy group that bills itself as politically progressive.

“The net result is wasted spending and less capability. It is better to have a smaller but ready force, and fewer but healthy programs,” he added.

Lynn said in reply to a question that increasingly sophisticated computer-launched attacks had the potential to threaten power grids, other networks and military capabilities.

As a result, there is “some urgency” for U.S. public-private partnerships to deploy more robust defenses, particularly around critical infrastructure, he said.

WASHINGTON, Oct 5 (Reuters) – A multibillion-dollar missile defense system built by Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) successfully completed its most challenging test so far, downing two short-range targets in quick succession, the company said on Wednesday.

It was the first test of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, under what the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency described as “operational” conditions.

Since advanced THAAD testing began in 2006, the system is a perfect nine for nine in intercepts attempted, said Richard Lehner, an agency spokesman.

The use of two interceptors was a first for the system, designed to protect against multiple ballistic missile salvos of the type that countries like Iran or North Korea could launch.

“It was, by far, THAAD’s most challenging flight test to date and demonstrates the system’s advanced capabilities,” Tom McGrath, Lockheed Martin’s THAAD program manager, said in a statement.

The test was carried out at the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii. THAAD is said by experts to be the only system capable of thwarting short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles both inside and outside Earth’s atmosphere. Raytheon Co (RTN.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) builds its radar.

THAAD is part of an emerging, layered U.S. shield against ballistic missiles that could be tipped with chemical, biological or nuclear warheads.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration is weighing fresh arms sales to Taiwan as part of a sweeping effort to deter any Chinese attack on the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own, administration officials told Congress on Tuesday.

Such supplies would be on top of plans sent to Congress on September 21 to sell Taiwan $5.85 billion in new hardware and defense services, including upgrades for Taiwan’s 145 F-16 A/B fighter aircraft.

Beijing deems Taiwan arms sales a grave interference in its domestic affairs and the biggest obstacle to improved relations between the world’s two largest economies.

“We are consulting with Taiwan on a full range of capabilities so they’re aware of the threat and they can undertake the defensive preparations,” Peter Lavoy, acting assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs, testified before the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.

Lavoy declined to discuss details of a potential follow-up sale. But he said the administration was still considering Taipei’s standing request for 66 new late-model Lockheed Martin Corp F-16 fighter aircraft, valued at $8.3 billion, in addition to the pending upgrade of its old F-16s sold in 1992.

Beijing’s sustained investment in armed forces across from Taiwan continued to shift the military balance in its favor across the Taiwan Strait, he said.

China has deployed as many as 1,200 short-range ballistic missiles and growing numbers of medium-range ballistic missiles plus land-attack cruise missiles opposite the island, Lavoy added.