Valerie Insinna

Lockheed Martin and Raytheon had been closing watching the Army's Lower-Tier Future Interceptor program, but the cancelation of that effort comes as little surprise, company officials said.

Lockheed CEO Jim Taiclet said it was “essential for the health of [its] lower tier suppliers” to keep F-35 production going at pace, even if the company has to use its own money for now.

As post-COVID-19 supply chain issuses persist, General Dynamics Electric Boat has "outpaced" some key suppliers, forcing out-of-sequence work that's driving up costs and delaying construction.

“Clearly our core of commercial airplanes and defense systems are going to stay with the Boeing Company for the long run,"Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said in an earnings call.

“We are running the facility without big orders coming from FMS [foreign military sales],” Bosco da Costa Jr., chief executive of Embraer's defense unit, told Breaking Defense. “We are facing a gap of production there."

“Our aim is not merely to maintain America's edge, but to sharpen it and lay the foundation for continued U.S. leadership in critical technologies and capabilities that will define the battlespace of the future,” Pentagon acquisition executive Bill LaPlante wrote in a foreword to the new National Defense Industrial Strategy Implementation Plan.

The smallsat maker — now known as Terran Orbital, a Lockheed Martin Company — will report to Lockheed’s space unit and serve as a merchant supplier to other major space primes, Lockheed said.

In a note to investors, J.P. Morgan analyst Seth Seifman said the company's third quarter results and withdrawal of its cash flow guidance was "a worse outcome than we expected."

While analysts told Breaking Defense a Trump administration would likely be a more unpredictable one, they also said that equally, if not more important, will be whichever party controls the houses of Congress where the defense budget is crafted.

Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), which represents about 33,000 Boeing workers mostly in Washington state and Oregon, voted in a 59 percent majority to end the strike and will return to work on Nov. 6.