Welcome to The Hill's Defense & NatSec newsletter {beacon} Defense &National Security Defense &National Security The Big Story Pentagon inks 7-year deals to bolster interceptor production The Pentagon announced on Monday that it reached…
Page A3From§Eachthe supper edition — 31 August 2026
Navy unveils missile named MALICE as Pentagon locks in seven-year interceptor production contracts.
As it ran on the front
You cannot make a serious argument to me that a government agency named a weapons system 'MALICE' by accident. Somebody in a room signed off on that acronym, on purpose, on the record, and then the Navy put out a press release about it like it's a product launch — extreme range, strike enemy aircraft, all the specs, none of the shame.
And it lands the same stretch as the Pentagon locking in seven-year contracts to bolster interceptor production — seven years, that's not a purchase, that's a mortgage. That's money committed past the term of whoever's signing it now, past the next election, maybe the one after. You don't lock in seven years on something you think you might not need.…
…(cont) Put those next to each other and you get the whole racket in two sentences: they name the offense something honest for once, and they lock in the defense contracts for a decade like it's already been decided there's a reason to need both. Nobody asked the public which one they'd rather pay for. Nobody has to. The money's appropriated either way, and the guy paying for it finds out from a press release with a menacing acronym in the headline.
That's the whole system in miniature: name it honestly once a decade, fund it forever, and let the invoice arrive quietly, unitemized, at the address of whoever's still paying taxes when the interceptors ship. Nobody's hiding it — it's right there in the acronym, right there in the seven-year term, printed plain in two separate press releases that never once mention each other. They didn't have to. The guy at the end of the bar can do that math without a calculator, and so can you, once somebody points at both stories at the same time instead of one at a time, which is exactly why they never run on the same page unless somebody makes them.
The receipts
Raytheon is developing a new 1,500-pound long-range missile, the AIM-424 LRAAM, to extend the reach and survivability of Navy and Marine aviators.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.