The company chose a space next door to Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, home to the program office and testing and development for Army aviation, in 2021 and designed and built a facility intended to produce large numbers of the drones.

“The work we have done to date, not only with the development of the vehicle, but preparing for major acquisition and production of these vehicles, has been a huge focus for us,” Cummings said. “We’re really excited that we are now at manufacturing readiness level 7.”

The classification equates to a defined production workflow at the facility and the establishment of work instructions for building the air vehicles.

Hellhound, weighing less than 25 pounds, flew faster than 350 miles per hour at full throttle while passing distances of 20 kilometers using just 50% of its fuel, according to the company.

The air vehicle is the first major end-to-end weapon system developed by Cummings Aerospace, a Native American woman-owned small business founded in 2009 as an aerospace engineering outfit with expertise in design, development, production and sustainment of capabilities, including missiles, radars and command-and-control system technologies.

Hellhound will be demonstrated in several upcoming events with special operations, the U.S. Navy and even abroad in the U.K. this summer, according to Cummings.

“We’re using these demo opportunities, in addition to our flight tests, to ultimately execute low-rate production,” Cummings said. “We’re talking about quantities of 12 to 14 vehicles for these demos,” she added, “but it’s really allowing us to fully vet our production process.”

The military is changing the way it acquires weapon systems and, in many cases, requires companies to prove they can build systems at scale as part of competitive acquisitions. Historically, a weapon system might be chosen for its performance on the battlefield without much attention paid to the amount of work it would take to build a system or even how stable the supplier base was.

Cummings Aerospace wrapped up flight tests of its turbo-jet-powered, 3D-printed kamikaze drone earlier this year and is readying the S3 version of its man-portable Hellhound for submission to the U.S. Army’s Low Altitude Stalking and Striking Ordnance, or LASSO, competition set to kick off later this year.

The competition would require the company to build 135 munitions total and would expect companies chosen to build 35 prototypes right out of the gate.

In Cumming’s opinion, the war in Ukraine and tensions in the Indo-Pacific have underscored the need to ensure production capacity and understand the supply chain and its risks.

“That’s what’s driven the whole modular design and making sure that we have an open systems architecture and be able to swap in technologies very readily,” Cummings said.

A large portion of the air vehicle is made using commercially available 3D printers in-house and buying commercially available standard parts that are not unique to just a few suppliers, Cummings said.

“If you think about low-cost solutions — that’s part of the strategy — is we have to design something that we can get screws from multiple vendors, we can get 3D print material from multiple vendors,” she said. “We talk about exquisite payloads, that’s a different challenge, but electronics, we have to make sure we can source them from multiple vendors.”

And to surge even further, Cummings said there are other solutions that are easy to implement like licensing the design to other suppliers to go and produce using standard 3D printers to help expand production capacity.

For the Huntsville facility, Cummings said her goal is to produce at least 100 air vehicles a month.

“Payloads obviously drive some of that,” she noted, but added that there is room to grow beyond that, whether it’s next door or using the supplier base to ramp up demand.

The expectation now is “not just a new, novel technology or capability, but prove that you can make it,” Cummings said. “So we’re proving we can make them and make them at scale.”

Developed for the Missile Defense Agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor program, HBTSS, the L3Harris satellite has been on orbit since February 2024. According to MDA, the spacecraft is providing important test data and imagery of hypersonic test events.

Speaking with reporters April 9 at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Ed Zoiss, president of space and airborne systems at L3Harris, said the company is ready to start producing the HBTSS sensor in high volumes.

“The sensor has proven itself out, and we need to start full-rate production,” he said. “We’re ready to do it now.”

In an executive order signed just one week into his second term, President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon to start making plans for a Golden Dome missile defense capability made up of advanced sensors and interceptors designed to track and neutralize both traditional and high-end missile threats.

In response, the Space Force, Missile Defense Agency, National Reconnaissance Office and other Defense Department agencies have been crafting options for achieving that vision. They’ve also reached out to the defense industry for ideas.

Zoiss said L3Harris proposed increased HBTSS production as part of its response to DOD’s call for input.

“We put in an architecture that we recommend for HBTSS and how we would see it to have global coverage,” he said. “We’re waiting to see what comes back.”

Space Development Agency launches study on Trump’s Iron Dome order

An increase in HBTSS production would be a shift in how DOD officials have envisioned the sensor’s role in space-based missile defense — at least publicly. MDA launched the capability in partnership with the Space Development Agency, which is building out a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit that can detect and track hypersonic and ballistic missile threats.

That constellation will include tracking satellites equipped with wide-field-view sensors — built by L3Harris, Northrop Grumman and Sierra Space — and a smaller number of medium-field-of-view sensors like HBTSS, designed to track dimmer targets and send data to interceptors.

SDA is buying the tracking satellites in batches, or tranches, and has awarded contracts for Tranche 0, 1 and 2. Zoiss said the medium-field-of-view sensors SDA is buying for Tranche 1 and 2 are essentially copies of the HBTSS capability.

In a speech Wednesday at the symposium, MDA Deputy Director Maj. Gen. Jason Cothern said the agency looks forward to the capability being “operationalized” by the Space Force and integrated into SDA’s architecture.

Cothern said HBTSS has, to date, demonstrated “remarkable capability essential for missile defense.” MDA has used the satellite to track two separate hypersonic test flights and the sensor has collected more than 650,000 images of tailored test events and “interesting real-world events,” he added.

Missile Defense Agency satellites track first hypersonic launch

As DOD considers how HBTSS might fit into its Golden Dome strategy, MDA has begun work on a follow-on capability, a Discriminating Space Sensor, or DSS.

Whereas HBTSS was designed to track dimmer targets than traditional missile-warning sensors, DSS will help the Defense Department distinguish missile targets from enemy countermeasures, which are meant to make their advanced weapons harder to identify.

MDA plans to launch a prototype by the end of the decade, though Cothern said budget deliberations — which will be informed by the department’s Golden Dome approach — could shorten that timeline.

“The whole intent is to, like HBTSS, do an on-orbit demonstration of these discriminating capabilities to inform the future space-based architectures and what we need for next-generation missile defense,” he said.

MDA Director Heath Collins said last year DSS had completed ground concept testing and was ready to move into the on-orbit demonstration phase. The agency requested funds for DSS in its fiscal 2025 budget, but the documents don’t specify how much it asked for.

Like HBTSS, the agency will lead prototype development and then work with the Space Force to transition DSS for operational use.

The firms — co-prime contractors to create the next generation of electronic warfare aircraft — expect the market for Compass Calls to continue growing in years to come. In a Monday call with reporters, BAE and L3 officials said they see growing potential to sell Compass Calls to international customers and that the Air Force could increase its purchase of the planes.

The EA-37B is a heavily adapted Gulfstream G550 business jet loaded with electronic warfare equipment. It is designed to jam enemy communications, radar and navigation signals and allow airmen to defuse roadside bombs wirelessly. It will also block the ability of enemy air defenses to transmit information between sensors, control networks and weapons, allowing U.S. and partner aircraft to get closer to their targets.

It is replacing the Vietnam-era EC-130H Compass Calls, which were heavily used during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and are now being retired. The Air Force had 15 EC-130Hs in 2017, but that fell to four in 2024 and is set to keep dropping. The new Compass Call is projected to fly 40% faster than the EC-130H and cover twice the range, and have a top altitude that is nearly 15,000 feet higher than the older aircraft, L3Harris said.

The growing sophistication of the potential adversaries the U.S. and its allies might fight requires an electronic attack aircraft like the Compass Call, which is capable of countering multiple threats, L3 and BAE officials said.

“The [potential battlefield] environment is getting more and more complex every day,” Dave Harrold, vice president and general manager for countermeasure and electronic attack solutions at BAE, said. “When you think about countering enemy kill webs, it’s no longer a one-versus-one thing — it’s about being to persecute a variety of threats simultaneously.”

The State Department in October 2024 approved a $680 million sale of Compass Call planes to Italy. Harrold pointed to that foreign military sale as a sign of the plane’s expanding market.

“This isn’t just an important United States Air Force platform,” Harrold said. “It’s an ideal platform for our important allies as well. … We see the opportunity for that to be even more prolific internationally.”

Jason Lambert, L3Harris’s president of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, said other unnamed international partners have expressed interest in buying their own Compass Calls. This would help improve interoperability between the U.S. and NATO fleets, he said.

However, the government’s studies have shown the planned fleet of 10 Compass Calls may not be enough to counter the projected future threats facing the Air Force, L3 and BAE officials said, and may need to be doubled to 20.

“The common message that we’re hearing, regardless of the study or regardless of the customer organization we speak with, 10 is not enough,” Lambert said.

BAE, L3Harris and Gulfstream proposed adding four new Compass Calls to the planned fleet, with the first two of those included in the Air Force’s unfunded priorities list in 2026.

Using the G550 business jet as the foundation of the Compass Call will make it easier to sustain and keep jets ready to fly, Lambert said. There are more than 600 G550s fielded worldwide, he said, and a well-established sustainment and spare parts network that can service planes in under 30 hours. He predicted this would result in aircraft availability in the high 90% range.

BAE builds the electronic attack components for the new aircraft. L3Harris focuses on converting the G550 jets into Compass Calls and integrates the equipment at its Waco, Texas, facility.

The final five Compass Calls are now having their outer mold lines modified to make room for the electronic attack equipment at Gulfstream’s Savannah, Georgia, facility, according to Lambert. The sixth Compass Call is expected to move to L3Harris’s Waco facility for further work in the second quarter of 2025.

Aircraft six, seven and eight are projected for delivery to the Air Force in 2027, and the final two are on track for a 2028 delivery, Lambert said.

The first two EA-37Bs that were delivered to the Air Force are now undergoing testing, according to Harrold. The third arrived at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona — the new fleet’s future home — in August 2024, and airmen are now conducting pilot training with it. The fourth Compass Call is also now at Davis-Monthan, Harrold said.

The fifth Compass Call has been delivered to the Air Force, Lambert said, but is now receiving an upgrade.

Leonidas H2O “was effective against vessel motors at record ranges” during the U.S. Navy’s Advanced Technology Exercise Coastal Trident event in Crane, Indiana, held in August 2024, according to the announcement. The system knocked out four commercially available vessel motors, varying in horsepower from 40 to 90 “at a multitude of ranges,” it noted.

The Pentagon “has spent years of research and development and spent tens-of-millions of dollars into developing a non-kinetic vessel stop solution, with no operational system deployed to date. With Leonidas H2O, we are bringing forth a technology with demonstrated effectiveness to fill this capability gap, today,” Epirus CEO Andy Lowery said in the statement.

The California-based company debuted its ground-based system designed to protect forward operating bases from incoming swarm threats in 2020 and has since proven Leonidas can adapt to other platforms, including being mounted on a drone in a pod.

“Leonidas, by its nature, it’s just an old-fashioned platform. We’ve made force fields … of electromagnetic energy,” Lowery told Defense News. “Whether that electromagnetic energy spoils a drone’s electronics from working correctly or spoils a boat’s motor, or use your imagination, anything with little computers in it and stuff, is susceptible to these persistent fields of energy.”

The recent Navy exercise proved the system — scaled down to a third of its original size — could go up against “a whole bunch of different types of boat motors out there,” Lowery said. It did so despite testing restrictions at the range limiting it from operating at full strength and from using certain frequencies.

Lowery noted that the system was effective up to nearly 100 meters working at half power.

The technology would come in handy at ports and close to coastlines, where kinetic defenses would not be a good option, Lowery said.

Adapting Leonidas for marine operations meant the company took into account that it would endure the corrosive effects of salt water, but otherwise, “the system works more or less the same,” Lowery said. “Except for one item,” he added. “It kind of uses the water as a mirror, and so [we] can use the water to our advantage, that is it hits certain spots in even further distances by using reflections off the water.”

Because of the beams’ behavior on water, the company made adaptations to the software, he noted.

One limitation of the system is that it does not work under water.

“The frequencies just don’t propagate under water. They just stop dead in like an inch of travel,” Lowery said.

Epirus continues to work to get the capability into the hands of service members. There are two systems deployed with the Army in the U.S. Central Command area of operations and a few others going to another operational area, Lowery said.

US Army could soon have a high-power microwave to destroy small drone swarms

“Operational commanders probably have the strongest voice on hitting a gas pedal and getting us moving a lot quicker,” he added.

A Navy solution, Lowery said, could be delivered “expeditiously.” The system could be packed in a container to fit on a vessel like a Littoral Combat Ship or a Coast Guard cutter, he noted.

“They can very easily put one of these on long fantail ships. Even some of these same fantail ships are in the Black Sea trying to do sort of escort control for merchants and other things running through that region,” Lowery said. “Another excellent idea is to try to hit some of the surface missiles that the Houthis and stuff are sending out. We could try our hand at disrupting some of those things as well.”

Lowery said he often points to how the Russian invasion of Ukraine in recent years has left Russia with roughly 50% of its navy capabilities destroyed, sunk or damaged beyond use by Ukrainians, with no navy, using unmanned weapons.

“We’re back into this war of the machines. We’re back into this kind of guerrilla warfare where the first wave of battle ends up becoming machines on machines,” he said. “We can have a system that has a very deep magazine that can build force fields out and take care of these, not only unmanned air vehicles, but unmanned surface vessels and unmanned ground vehicles.”

Rheinmetall plans to convert production at Hagedorn-NC to military-grade cellulose in coming months, though existing civilian customers will continue to be supplied “for the time being,” it said in a statement on Monday.

The purchase closes a strategic shortage in the supply chain, the company said.

“The acquisition helps us to overcome a strategic bottleneck in propellant production,” Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger said. “It gives us an important source of raw materials and continues the vertical integration along the entire value chain in the production of ammunition.”

Europe’s artillery ammunition makers have scrambled to boost output after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, with industry and the European Union jointly spending more than €1.5 billion ($1.6 billion) to add capacity for explosives, propellant and shells. The EU now expects the bloc to produce 2 million artillery shells in 2025, from estimated annual capacity of 230,000 rounds in early 2023.

Firing all those shells relies on nitrocellulose, which is the raw material for the charges that can propel a 155 mm grenade from a modern howitzer to distances of 40 kilometers (25 miles) or more. Gunners typically use modular charges, stacking more propellant to fire greater distances.

Rheinmetall is among those that has been ramping up production of large-caliber ammunition, and the company aims for capacity to produce up to 1.1 million 155 mm artillery shells annually by 2027. Hagedorn-NC will give Rheinmetall a fourth nitrocellulose production site, in addition to factories in Switzerland, Spain and South Africa, the company said.

The purchase comes after Prague-based defense firm Czechoslovak Group (CSG) in November snapped up the nitrocellulose business of U.S.-based International Flavors & Fragrances in Walsrode, Germany. The Czech firm plans to add production of nitrocellulose for ammunition over time, in addition to industrial applications such as wood coatings and nail polish.

Nitrocellulose is produced from either cotton linters or wood pulp, using nitrating acids to convert cellulose. The EU has banned export of nitrocellulose to Russia since April 2022, and of its precursor cotton linter pulp since June 2023.

The Hagedorn-NC acquisition is subject to antitrust approval, Rheinmetall said. The company said the purchase will strengthen its position as a leading supplier of large-caliber ammunition within NATO and ensure long-term and independent supply of essential components.

Rheinmetall didn’t immediately respond to e-mailed questions regarding financial details, production capacity and any remaining bottleneck issues in nitrocellulose.

The company says its acquisition of Hagedorn-NC will add 90 employees. Meanwhile, CSG said more than 350 people work in the Walsrode nitrocellulose plant and associated industrial park the company is buying.

New or additional production capacity for explosives and artillery propellant is arising or being planned across Europe, after Ukraine’s shell shortage in its fight against Russia and NATO’s inability to deliver enough ammunition raised the alarm for military planners and policymakers.

France last month restarted explosive powder production at Eurenco in Bergerac, in the southwest of the country, having halted domestic manufacture of propellant in 2007. Meanwhile, Denmark in March picked Norway’s Nammo to restart an ammunition plant that had been shut down in 2020.

Polish lawmakers in November agreed to invest around 3 billion zloty ($760 million) in local ammunition production, particularly of 155 mm shells. The government signed a letter of intent with fertilizer maker Grupa Azoty and defense manufacturer Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa earlier that month to set up nitrocellulose and propellant production in Poland.

Rheinmetall currently makes nitrocellulose through the Nitrochemie joint venture with RUAG MRO Holding at a site in Wimmis, Switzerland, as well as at sites in Murcia in Spain and Welllington in South Africa.

Hagedorn-NC is based on Osnabrück in northwest Germany, with a production site in Lingen, and currently makes nitrocellulose specifically for industrial applications, particularly lacquers and printing inks.

The awards are part of the service’s National Security Space Launch program, or NSSL, which it uses to acquire nearly all military launch missions. Under the deal, SpaceX will receive $5.9 billion to fly 28 missions, ULA $5.3 billion to launch 19 and Blue Origin $2.3 billion to conduct seven.

While ULA and SpaceX are both NSSL incumbents, Blue Origin is a new entrant to the program. Its New Glenn rocket has not yet completed the Space Force’s certification process, but following its first flight in January, it became eligible to compete.

“Today’s award culminates nearly three years of government and industry partnership to increase launch resiliency and capacity,” Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, program executive officer for assured access to space, said in a statement. “The result is assured access to space for our national security missions, which increases the military’s readiness.”

The Space Force expects to launch 84 missions between fiscal 2027 and 2032 — nearly double the number of missions it launched the previous five years. To meet that demand and create a path for more companies to compete, the service adopted a new strategy for this next batch of missions.

Under that approach, the Space Force created two lanes in which companies can compete. Lane 1 is for commercial-like missions and is geared toward new providers, and Lane 2 — which was awarded Friday — is reserved for firms whose rockets meet more stringent security and performance requirements.

SpaceX, ULA and Blue Origin were also selected to compete for Lane 1 missions, along with Stoke Space and Rocket Lab, which are both developing new rockets slated to fly this year.

The service expects to release its first request for proposals for Lane 1 launches later this spring and companies will have a chance to compete for additional missions in fiscal 2026.

The pitch: Europe wants to redouble its efforts to make steel “green” – producing the key ingredients for tanks, shells and ships in an environmentally conscious way.

The European Steel and Metals Action Plan, released on March 19, represents Brussels’ most comprehensive strategy yet to shore up an industry facing multiple existential threats: Chinese overcapacity, crippling energy costs, and the looming shadow of new American tariffs — all while fostering its transformation to climate neutrality.

The steel industry is one of the largest producers of greenhouse gases globally, responsible for roughly a tenth of total CO2 emissions. This is because it takes immense amounts of heat and, by extension, energy to melt the metal in blast furnaces.

But with European rearmament en vogue and free international trade out of fashion, the continent is set to experience a boom in demand for steel as a key ingredient in its buildup of its armed forces.

A strategic shift

The plan’s linking of industrial policy to defense readiness represents a significant shift in how Brussels frames its economic priorities. Commission officials explicitly linked the question of steel production to defense readiness amid rising tensions with Russia and uncertainty about long-term American security guarantees.

The European Commission, headed by Ursula von der Leyen, serves as the executive branch of the European Union. It was the commission that floated the ambitious plan to rearm Europe, which promises to see Europe mobilize close to a trillion dollars for its defense sector in the next five years. Just days after that plan was announced, the EU followed up with its ambitious metals plan.

The EU, at its core, was built on steel, growing out of the European Coal and Steel Community established in the aftermath of World War 2. And indeed, domestic production still covers 90% of the continent’s current consumption, the European Commission said. The situation is “more worrying,” in the EU’s words, for aluminum and nickel, where domestic production covers only 46% and 25% of Europe’s demand, respectively.

“All these metals are essential for defense,” the EU’s paper reads. It goes on to list out the requirements for specific armaments: “A main battle tank contains 50 to 60 tonnes of high-quality steel; a self-propelled artillery system up to 100 tonnes; a fighter aircraft 3 tonnes of aluminium.”

A new start

Europe’s metals industry has been squeezed from multiple directions. Energy costs following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have skyrocketed, with European producers paying up to five times more for gas and three times more for electricity than their American counterparts, the European Commission conceded in its report. Meanwhile, imports from Asia have nearly tripled over the past decade, with every third ton of steel in the EU now coming from elsewhere.

“The foreign trade policy proposals are a step in the right direction,” said Kerstin Maria Rippel, CEO of Germany’s Steel Industry Association. She said that it “is only logical in view of the increasing import pressure and the consequences of the confrontational U.S. trade policy.”

The EU’s six-pillar action plan hopes to alleviate some of the other ailments, too, by addressing energy costs, carbon leakage prevention, industrial capacity protection, metal recycling, job protection, and providing investment support in addition to protectionism.

Most notably, it includes a plan for a €100 billion ($108 billion) Industrial Decarbonisation Bank and a €1 billion pilot auction in 2025 aimed at electrification and low-carbon steel production.

It places “green steel” firmly at the heart of the European metals strategy. Using electrical furnaces and hydrogen, the emissions from the steel industry can be cut by as much as 95%. When burning hydrogen instead of coal or gas, the byproduct produced is water steam rather than CO2.

European steel producers have generally welcomed the plan. It demonstrates “understanding of the urgency surrounding the situation and a readiness to address key structural challenges,” praised Aditya Mittal, the CEO of ArcelorMittal, Europe’s largest steel producer. And the European Steel Association’s president, Henrik Adam, echoed the sentiment, saying that “the European Commission is sending a clear message: a strong European Union needs a strong European steel industry.”

However, both executives stressed that energy costs remain “the elephant in the room,” with Adam noting they are “dragging down entire European industrial value chains.”

Greener pastures

Electricity costs, for instance, stubbornly hover at double or four times the price of other steelmaking locations. With the transition to electric arc furnaces, electricity consumption is expected to roughly double, industry associations say, further magnifying a cost disadvantage.

Nonetheless, electricity and producing renewable hydrogen may be a more suitable way forward for Europe than relying on old methods. Gas is used during pig iron production in blast furnaces, which account for about 60% of EU steel production but has been a sticking point since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. During the 2022 energy crisis, energy costs reached 80% of total production costs for European steel producers.

While fossil fuel deposits cannot be conjured from thin air, renewable energy is seen by some as the solution to the continent’s energy woes, with solar, hydro and wind power available in ample quantities and ready for additional exploitation.

The third age of nuclear, still in its infancy, may play a role, too. Poland, for example, is progressing in its plans to build the country’s first nuclear power plant, with a final contract to be concluded this year. Nuclear power, while not strictly renewable, does not emit any harmful gases because no fuel is burnt. The electricity from these environmentally conscious sources can then be used to either power electric arc furnaces directly, or to split water to produce “green hydrogen,” the theory goes.

Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor Ukraine has brought to the fore the importance of energy resilience for the European Union. The European Defence Fund – an EU mechanism to support research and development with military applications – specifically designed this field as a “priority area” for defense investment in its 2025 work program.

The Union has called climate change “a priority for the EU’s security and defense policies” for years. It goes well beyond simply weaning the bloc off of foreign sources of gas. EU bodies warn that rising temperatures will have knock-on effects on security as societies struggle to adapt to a growing water scarcity and lower agricultural output.

The European Union’s diplomatic branch, the External Action Service, believes that “this will increasingly undermine peace and security, especially in fragile countries.” The EU estimates that 5.5% of global CO2 emissions may stem from the defense industry.

DIU Director Doug Beck announced the Blue Manufacturing Marketplace last year as a way to overcome some of the barriers to leveraging advanced manufacturing capabilities like digital engineering, 3D printing and automation across the defense industrial base. Now, DIU is accepting proposals from vendors who have specific expertise across six areas, including automated metal machining for parts production, composite or ceramic additive manufacturing and 3D-printed tooling.

Beck told Defense News in an interview Wednesday that this is the first of many solicitations designed to help smaller firms developing cutting-edge, dual-use technology partner with advanced manufacturing firms that can help them scale their products. Rather than award contracts like it might for other programs, DIU’s role through the marketplace is to vet these manufacturing companies to make sure their supply chains are secure and provide a venue for those firms to find one another.

“It’s about creating the marketplace effectively for these folks to find those companies and encouraging them each to find one another in order to do their scaling,” Beck said.

The Pentagon over the last few years has emphasized the need for rapid production and scaling as a means both to replenish depleted weapons stocks and field low-cost systems like throw-away drones en masse. Innovative manufacturing techniques are one way to get after that challenge.

In its 2024 National Defense Industrial Strategy, the Defense Department called for greater adoption of advanced manufacturing and automation throughout the defense industrial base, identifying these technologies as a key enabler for not only increasing capacity but for making production processes more efficient.

“Many elements of the traditional [defense industrial base] have yet to adopt advanced manufacturing technologies, as they struggle to develop business cases for needed capital investment,” DOD said in its report. “This directly impacts DOD’s ability to reduce manufacturing lead times and lifecycle costs and to increase readiness.”

Pentagon’s first industrial strategy calls for ‘generational’ change

Beck emphasized that the Blue Manufacturing Marketplace is just one part of a broader umbrella of DOD efforts to better leverage advanced manufacturing throughout the defense industrial base. However, he said, it has the potential to be a game changer.

“Five years down the road, this might be one of the most important things that DIU helped to make happen,” Beck said.

Travis Demeester, DIU’s lead for the marketplace, told Defense News his team has spent much of the last year talking to manufacturing companies about the roadblocks they face in working with customers in the defense sector and figuring out how the new venue might address them. Many firms cited difficulty in establishing trust and verifying that their supply chains and executive boards aren’t funded by or linked to U.S. adversaries, he told Defense News in an interview. They also pointed to the lengthy vetting process that comes with integrating their capability into another company’s supply chain.

Demeester said DIU already provides vetting for companies entering the defense industrial base and is well positioned to help create a “shortcut” for onboarding manufacturing companies. In fact, the marketplace’s name is a nod to another DIU program, Blue UAS, that helps vet commercial drones for compliance with U.S. policies that restrict DOD from buying uncrewed systems or technology originating from Chinese firms.

DIU’s role in helping create a bridge between commercial firms and the complexities of DOD’s acquisition and procurement processes also means it has mechanisms in place to both onboard new capabilities and identify partnerships between firms with complementary technologies, Demeester said. In the case of the Blue Manufacturing Marketplace, that means connecting tech-focused firms with manufacturing capacity.

Defense Innovation Unit picks four firms to test one-way drones

“The big focus of what we want to do here is make it a lot easier for companies like that to scale,” he said. “And so, by identifying these exceptional manufacturers and making them available to those companies, that’s the approach that we’re taking.”

Today’s rollout is the first of many steps toward building out the marketplace, Demeester noted. Rather than spend years on the front-end defining what it will be, DIU wants industry to inform that process in real-time.

And practically speaking, he noted, DIU doesn’t yet have the resources to fully implement its vision for what the marketplace could become. For now, Demeester’s team is small and agile and doesn’t have a formal budget allocation.

One potential future growth area is in certification and qualification of additive-manufactured parts — a need expressed by the military services as they increasingly look to non-traditional vendors to supply certain capabilities. Demeester said he also expects future solicitations to target manufacturing companies with expertise in particular technology areas, like hypersonics or autonomy or firms that are based in different geographical regions.

“This isn’t a matter of putting all of our chips into the first effort, but in terms of how we resource it, how we grow it, programmatically, etc., we’re going to keep a close eye on it and be agile about that,” Demeester said.

Under Shift5′s contract with Naval Air Systems Command, or NAVAIR, the Marine Corps will run the company’s manifold technology on Osprey’s flown by its operational test squadron. This will allow the V-22 Joint Program Office to test how well continuous operational data monitoring works on the tilt-rotor aircraft, and how to develop rules for detecting maintenance problems that need to be quickly addressed, the company said in a release Wednesday.

“Given the criticality of solving some of these life-threatening issues that are happening on the V-22, it really is all about providing real-time insights to the crew for situational awareness so they can make better decisions,” said Shift5 chief executive and co-founder Josh Lospinoso.

Perhaps most critically, Lospinoso said, the predictive maintenance technology could help the military understand how problems called “hard clutch engagements” happen. Hard clutch engagements occur when an Osprey’s clutch connecting the engine to a propeller’s rotor gearbox briefly slips and then reengages. This can cause the aircraft to lurch and damage crucial components, which, in some instances, has been a factor in fatal Osprey crashes.

Five Marines died in a June 2022 Osprey crash in Southern California, which was later attributed to a hard clutch engagement. Multiple other Ospreys have experienced hard clutch engagements that alarmed Air Force leaders and have, at times, caused aircrews to cut flights short.

An Air Force CV-22B Osprey also crashed off the coast of Japan in November 2023, killing eight airmen and prompting a military-wide grounding of the tilt-rotor aircraft that lasted for months. The Air Force concluded that a critical gear in that Osprey’s proprotor gearbox failed and caused the crash.

Shift5′s manifold device will help build a dataset of clutch engagements, analyzing whether such engagements are becoming more aggressive and contributing factors, Lospinosa said.

“That really is the Holy Grail that NAVAIR has been after,” he said in an interview with Defense News.

Shift5′s device, a four-pound box that will be plugged into the Osprey’s data network, will upgrade how the aircraft collects data and make it more readily available to aircrews via a tablet-like display, Lospinoso said. Until now, he said, the most important data on hard clutch engagements have typically been only able to be accessed after the aircraft lands and investigators dive deep into the aircraft’s inner workings.

“It’s, in some cases, literally just taking data that already exists on a data bus and presenting it to the user,” Lospinoso said.

That data can include precise readings on the intensity and frequency of vibrations within the gearbox, for example, Lospinoso said.

The device could also give Osprey pilots reminders about the many actions they need to take and environmental factors they need to monitor, he said, which could reduce the chances of human error.

“Being an Osprey pilot is probably the most challenging job flying any aircraft of any kind,” Lospinoso said. “If they forget to take [certain steps], it can be extremely dangerous, but there’s nothing in the cockpit alerting them to [the fact that] these conditions exist. [The Shift5 device’s alerts are] almost like the equivalent of a seat belt reminder.”

According to Lospinoso, Shift5′s device will just be tested by the Joint Program Office for now. Eventually, the company hopes to have them installed in all of the military’s Ospreys, which he said would require a phased approach of taking some Ospreys down to install the devices during maintenance. He hopes the military and Shift5 might be able to start working towards full fielding of the device in the next quarter.

“There’s probably a headquarter somewhere today at an exercise where an intel officer is going to write everything down on a piece of sticky note that came out of his intel system, walk across the [Tactical Operations Center], hand it over to the fires guy who has to type it into the fires system to make it work,” he said in a Monday press briefing at the Pentagon. “We realize this is just not the approach to speed that we need in the United States Army.”

The Army’s command-and-control, or C2, architecture, which enables commanders to plan, decide and execute missions, was cobbled together over 20 years during the Global War on Terror. Most warfighting functions used separate stove-piped systems, amounting to a total of 17 programs of record, according to Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer.

“We had built up a lot of technical debt and process debt,” Miller said during the briefing. “As technology evolved and as commercial industry really got into the edge processing game and data analytics and cloud, we had processes in place that didn’t allow us to change fast,” Miller said, calling it “60 years of policy archeology.”

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George recognized getting command-and-control right was imperative to future battlefield success and decided to embark on a program to fix the service’s C2 capabilities to avoid operational disruption while creating the necessary clean-sheet system from scratch.

The Army’s effort to overhaul its command-and-control ecosystem, dubbed Next-Generation C2, is one of the top priorities for Army modernization — if not the highest.

“If you cannot command and control your formation, nothing else matters,” Army Futures Command commander, Gen. James Rainey said last week at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

‘Astronomically fast’

A year ago at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, soldiers at the Army’s experimentation event Project Convergence and industry partners, including Google, Anduril and Palantir, demonstrated a proof-of-concept at the unclassified level for what a Next-Generation C2 system, or NGC2, might look like.

Walking through a cluster of adobe buildings and pitched tents in a quiet desert village in the middle of the Mojave Desert, George saw commanders and unit leaders using just a laptop or tablet and headset to communicate, plan, conduct reconnaissance and targeting and execute fires operations.

Using just their vehicles as operations centers, the units decreased both their signature in the electromagnetic spectrum and Tactical Operations Centers footprints, which typically stick out like sore thumbs, and planned and executed their missions more efficiently.

Then the service took the capability to another experimentation exercise called NetModX in September.

“We took that commercial architecture, the software side of that, the data flow inside of that, put it on real Army systems, on the real radios that we have or might want, satellites, all that. Ran that system, jammed them, knocked people off of it, tested it,” Ellis said.

Fast-forward to Project Convergence, held earlier this spring at the National Training Center. There, the Army gave the capability to an entire armored battalion, put it in a brigade headquarters and had real soldiers employing the technology.

“There wasn’t an Army of contractors following vehicles around,” Ellis noted. “The soldiers were actually using it a lot, really quality feedback there.

For instance, Ellis said that he climbed on top of a tank for 45 minutes talking to soldiers using NGC2. They showed how they could flip through intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance feeds, examine vehicle maintenance data and supplies status and make better decisions in real time.

“Climbing off that tank I realized we hadn’t once talked about how complicated it was to access that data, how hard it was to log in, the transport problems they were having,” Ellis said. “We were talking about what they’re actually doing with the data, which is exactly what our goal is.”

The Army took one year to go from a proof-of-concept to capability validation, a timeline Miller called “astronomically fast.” Normally, such a process would take five to seven years, he said.

“We went from characterization of need with industry, government and industry together, to things in the hands of soldiers that I am actually pretty confident that if war broke out tonight, they could use in real-time.”

Logging in

The Army has now enabled a process through a software acquisition strategy to try and buy commercially available technology more agilely. The service has also moved away from giving industry a set of rigid requirements to adhere to when developing a capability to, instead, provide them with a problem and a short, broad statement outlining the Army’s needs.

Industry has already helped significantly to shape the effort.

“We’re not just talking about stovepipes anymore,” Ellis said, “We’re actually talking about how to approach it from a whole stack, everything from software, the applications, all the way down to the data transport layer.”

A major part of the effort is developing an integrated data layer on which the service can build applications over the top, according to Ellis. Like applications on smartphones, the Army’s systems can use that same data. Rather than relying on “complicated spaghetti charts” to flow data, an integrated data layer puts data all in one place, Ellis said.

The service will soon release a request to industry for solutions that will filter into its brand new, clean-sheet approach to Next-Gen C2 to build on the progress made over the last year and begin to scale the capability across the operational force, Lt. Gen. Rob Collins, the military deputy to the Army’s acquisition chief, said. The Army will never stop iterating its C2 capability going forward and will rely heavily on soldier feedback to build the system, he noted.

The major endeavor also presents an opportunity for the service to work differently with industry, Joe Welch, the deputy to the Army Futures Command commander, said during Monday’s media briefing.

“We’re moving away from this concept of an industry integrator into more of a team of teams, but on our side, we need to be a better customer. It’s not just handing industry a problem statement and then walking away, waiting for them to deliver and then holding them accountable if they don’t,” Welch said. “That partnership means that we need to understand where we have shared incentives, where we have different incentives and then kind of acknowledging those directly and understanding how to work through that.”

The Army plans to scale the system to an entire division by the next iteration of Project Convergence, expected to take place in the summer of 2026. The Army chief has chartered the developers to field to both a division and corps.

While the service typically takes about five years to field a capability to the entire Army, Miller said once the first division gets the core software and data pieces that will be cloud-based, multiple divisions will be able to log in at the same time.

The Army also plans to use funding freed up by ending legacy capabilities to pay for Next-Gen C2 to the tune of “billions of dollars,” Welch said.

“There’s no room for things that won’t win,” Miller said. “Being able to stop and adjust and use the money that taxpayers gave us more efficiently, that’s the name of the game. That’s how we’re going to pay for Next-Gen C2.”

As the Army contributes a large portion of the in-development air and missile defense architecture for Guam, it is looking to adapt those capabilities for a Golden Dome application, Maj. Gen. Frank Lozano told Defense News in an interview at Redstone Arsenal on Wednesday amid the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

Some of the Army’s major contributions to the Guam Defense System include new modernized radars, an emerging Indirect Fire Protection Capability and its new Integrated Battle Command System, or IBCS.

“What we’re trying to do is three things,” Lozano said. “We’re wanting to integrate more AI-enabled fire control so that will help us reduce the manpower footprint. We’re wanting to create more remotely operated systems so that we don’t have to have so many operators and maintainers associated with every single piece of equipment that’s out there.”

And, he said, “We need to have more autonomously operated systems.”

Currently, the Army typically has a launcher with a missile and a launcher crew consisting of at least two to three soldiers.

“In the Golden Dome application, we would likely either have containerized missiles — think box of rockets — or we might actually put rockets and missiles in the ground,” Lozano said. Those systems would require less frequent upkeep, as a smaller manpower footprint means status checks might only happen every couple of weeks, and test checks would be conducted remotely, he said.

In order to work on such capability, the Army is planning to use what it learns from maturing the Guam Defense System, which will become operational in roughly 2027 with Army assets. The service will also pivot its Integrated Fires Test Campaign, or IFTC, from a focus on testing the Guam architecture incrementally to how to inject autonomy and AI into those systems for Golden Dome beyond 2026.

The IFTC in 2026 is considered the Guam Defense System “Super Bowl,” Lozano said. Then, beyond 2027, he said, “If we’re called upon to support Golden Dome initiatives, we need to have those advanced AI, remotely operated, autonomous-based formations and systems ready to go.”

To begin, the Army will be focused on defining the functions that human operators perform at all the operator terminals within an IBCS-integrated fire control center or at a particular launching station, Lozano said.

Once those functions are defined, Lozano said, the Army will have to define the data sources that drive action.

“We have to create the decision rubric that assesses and analyzes that data that then drives a human decision, and then we have to code AI algorithms to be able to process that information and make the right decision,” Lozano said. “There will be trigger points where the software has to say, ‘I’m not authorized to make that level of decision. It’s got to go back to the human and deliver.’”

For the first time, the Army’s Program Executive Office Missiles and Space is interacting with many new market entrants in the AI realm to work on the effort.

For example, Lozano said he met this week at the Global Force Symposium with the French defense firm Safran. Safran, known for its assured position, navigation and timing capabilities, is planning a significant U.S. expansion.

The defense firm provides capability for various Army missile programs, including Patriot air and missile defense systems and IBCS, as well as Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System and Precision Strike Missile programs.

Lozano told the company he is looking for ways to reduce humans having to perform actions, such as verifying that timing data is synchronized with satellite timing.

The Army has also begun discussions with Anduril, which, in early January, acquired the U. S. defense company Numerica, which happens to write the Army’s IBCS fire control software. The service has discussed with Anduril how it can start looking at integrating more AI fire control functionality into its major air and missile defense command-and-control system.

Part of the plan is focused on engaging with some nontraditional industry, such as venture capitalists and newly established small companies tackling these challenges, according to Lozano.

The Army will spend the next six to nine months defining what it wants to look for from industry and then will begin hosting industry days and issuing requests for information, he said.

The Lower-Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, or LTAMDS, “is a huge, significant capability,” Lozano said in an exclusive interview with Defense News at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. “We anecdotally say it doubles legacy Patriot radar capability and not only does it double it, it provides you 360-degree capability.”

The radar is a major modernization element for the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense system along with a fully modernized command-and-control capability called the Integrated Battle Command System, which is already fielded.

Building the radar rapidly – the Army awarded a contract to Raytheon in 2019 to deliver prototypes over five years – “was always going to be incredibly technically challenging,” Lozano said.

So, Lozano said he asked former Army acquisition chief Doug Bush for another year to mature the system. “I said, ‘Sir, we’re really close, but we’re just not there yet. I’m not exhibiting the level of performance that I would feel comfortable coming in for a Milestone C production decision,’” he said. Bush, who had the authority to grant such a request, did so, according to Lozano.

The office continued to keep Army and Pentagon leadership apprised of the effort and now, following several successful flight tests, including one that combined other major air and missile defense elements over last fall and early this year, the system is deemed ready for low-rate initial production, Lozano said.

While an Inspector General report recently criticized the program for lacking proper due diligence, Lozano disagreed with the characterization. “We did provide the requisite oversight and so much so that we, as leaders, knew we needed a little bit more time for the system to mature. We got the time. We did the maturation.”

The program office provided Army decision makers with a brief advocating to approve LTAMDS’ for production at the end of February. “It’s our intent to have that signed in the next week or two,” he said.

The Army’s low-rate production lot will be roughly 10 radars. The service plans to build 94 radars total over the course of the program. Raytheon will also be building Poland’s 10 LTAMDS radars on order simultaneously. Poland is the first foreign customer for the system.

Currently the time to build an LTAMDS is about 40 months on the production line, Lozano said. But the Army is working with Raytheon and has hired the Boston Consulting Group to help work on supply chain management in order to make that 36 months, which is the formal program objective.

“From a cost perspective, I think there’s a huge win here,” Lozano said. The program’s estimated cost is now $13 billion across its life. “It’s a huge program, and it’s likely going to be within the Army inventory for multiple decades. Because it’s a digital radar that is software driven, it’s going to mature and keep pace with the evolving threat,” he said.

Lozano also noted that with the cost of microelectronics coming down and the efforts to miniaturize components, the level of efficiency will increase, capabilities will increase and costs will continue to come down for the system.

“We build the legacy Patriot radar for $110-$115 million a copy,” he noted. “Right now the initial cost of the LTAMDS radar is about $125-$130 million a copy. That cost will continue to come down. We’re building the newest, most advanced radar at almost the same exact price that we’re building the legacy radar.”

The Army low-rate production period will last roughly two-and-a-half years. The service is planning for the LTAMDS initial operational test and evaluation to take place in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026.

After that assessment, the service will send one of the sensors to Guam, which will join two other LTAMDS that are about to be delivered to the island in the coming months. The systems will be a part of a larger air and missile defense architecture there.

The Army plans to reach full-rate production in 2028, Lozano said.

The current state of American shipbuilding, however, is sorely in need of a complete overhaul if that plan is to be achieved, according to recent testimony and a new government watchdog report.

“It is way past time that we get after it,” Dr. Brett A. Seidle, acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

“Simply put, we need more ships delivered on time and on budget and we are challenged in both of these arenas. Costs are rising faster than inflation and schedules on multiple programs are delayed one to three years late.”

The same day as Seidle’s testimony, the Government Accountability Office released a report detailing 20 years’ of lackluster progress in U.S. shipbuilding. Not enough ships are being built, newly constructed ships are failing to function as expected and ships are being delivered up to three years later than ordered, the report said.

While the Navy nearly doubled its shipbuilding budget during the last two decades, it failed to reach its planned ship count, according to GAO.

Seidle offered ideas for solutions during his testimony Tuesday, including “increased modernization, infrastructure investment, better workforce hiring and retention, and improved supply chain performance.”

In a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Shelby S. Oakley, a director at GAO, said that unrealistic expectations of costs and timing has diverted resources and introduced delays in shipbuilding, with the result that Navy programs and shipbuilders have been “effectively made to operate in a perpetual state of triage.”

“We found that Navy ships cost billions more and take years longer to build than planned while often falling short of quality and performance expectations,” Oakley said.

Since 2015, GAO has made 90 recommendations to the Navy to improve shipbuilding. Only 30 of those have been partially or fully addressed to date.

Shipyards, military clinics exempted from Pentagon hiring freeze

Shipbuilding is a complex process. To build a ship takes eight phases on average, from the award of a contract to design and construction phases, and eventually ending in launch and delivery of the vessel. The Navy currently has 92 ships under contract with 56 actively undergoing construction, according to the Defense Department.

The GAO’s grim report comes at a time when the current administration has announced plans to create a new White House Office of Shipbuilding, and the DOD has prioritized a focus on the Indo-Pacific region across all branches.

In February, the cruiser San Diego made a historic visit to the Japanese port of Ishigaki to strengthen ties, while throughout March and April, the U.S. Army’s Project Capstone 5 exercise is expanding its focus to include scenarios about the Indo-Pacific region.

The U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain also hosted Vigilant Resolve, a “first-of-its-kind” exercise involving mass casualty, a shelter-in-place order and the evacuation of noncombatants — preparing naval personnel and U.S. partners for a large-scale international emergency response.

“I fervently believe our Navy has never been more important than it is right now,” Seidle told lawmakers this week. “The United States projects its presence around the globe via our blue-water Navy, impacting geopolitical decisions on a daily basis and helping to maintain our way of life.”

“Vulcan certification adds launch capacity, resiliency, and flexibility needed by our nation’s most critical space-based systems,” Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, Space Systems Command’s program executive officer for assured access to space, said in a statement.

To achieve certification for National Security Space Launch, or NSSL, missions, companies must complete a rigorous, yearslong process tailored to their rocket’s unique capabilities. For Vulcan, that process started in 2016. Since then, the Space Force and ULA validated the rocket met 52 certification criteria, including 18 subsystem design and test reviews and 114 audits of the spacecraft’s hardware and software.

The final steps of that process featured two Vulcan launches, the first in January 2024 and the second last October. During the second mission, the rocket suffered an anomaly involving its Northrop Grumman-provided solid rocket booster. In February, ULA CEO Tory Bruno told reporters the issue was found to be a manufacturing defect involving a booster component.

The investigation into that root cause appears to have delayed the Space Force’s certification process, which was expected to wrap up by the end of 2024.

In a statement Wednesday, Bruno said the Space Force’s long-awaited sign-off positions Vulcan to meet the service’s “expanding spectrum of missions.”

“This next-generation rocket provides high performance and extreme accuracy while continuing to deliver to our customer’s most challenging and exotic orbits,” he said.

ULA and SpaceX are the only companies with rockets certified to fly NSSL missions. For years prior to the certification of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, ULA with its legacy Atlas V and Delta IV rockets — which the company is retiring — was the sole provider of military launch services. In 2020, SpaceX won a 40% share of those missions slated to fly between fiscal years 2022 and 2027 with ULA maintaining the remaining 60%.

Vulcan’s certification means SpaceX’s line of Falcon rockets should have at least one competitor for future launches, though several other companies are lining up behind the two firms. One of those contenders is Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which conducted its first certification flight in January.

A handful of other firms are further behind in their launch vehicle development. Rocket Lab hopes to fly its Neutron rocket by December 2025 and Relativity Space plans to launch its Terran R sometime next year. Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman and Firefly Aerospace have partnered to develop the Medium Launch Vehicle and are also targeting a 2026 debut.

Speaking March 20 at a virtual Defense One conference, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said the service is encouraged by the number of companies looking to break into the military space launch market.

“It was only about 10 years ago when we had one provider and just a few rocket systems,” Saltzman said. “I think we’re on the right trajectory.”

In one instance, a local duck hunter got out of his boat, grabbed his shot gun and waded right into the protected area of a munition site, Brig. Gen. Ronnie Anderson, Joint Munitions Command commander, said Tuesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

These 13 operating sites under the purview of Joint Munitions Command have also seen 42 drone incursions, Anderson said, without specifying the timeframe.

“What are they doing? We don’t know. Is there anything nefarious or is it just someone who’s curious? We don’t know because we don’t have the ability to interrogate the [unmanned aircraft system] or the person who’s operating.”

The worst-case scenario, Anderson said, is a hobbyist could crash a drone into an operating site where there are explosives being moved between Point A and Point B.

Although installations have inner perimeters providing security, McAlister Army Ammunition Plant in Oklahoma, for example, which is larger than the District of Columbia, has an outer perimeter of three-strand barbed wire cattle fencing.

Fencing, however, can be costly. A recent estimate to construct fencing around Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas was $80 million, according to Anderson.

“For less than $5 million, we can have an AI-enabled mobile trailer with sensors, cameras, radar and communicate back through an IT network, back to the control center, that senses, it alerts the [emergency operations center] of something that either is a threat or is not a threat,” Anderson said.

Solutions would also be able to properly address unmanned aircraft systems incursions. The AI capability would be able to learn, allowing it to identify an unmanned aircraft system, communicate the type of system back to the Army and then start to interrogate the system, Anderson said.

The Army has engaged three industry partners who are experimenting now at Bluegrass Army Depot in Kentucky with applying artificial intelligence-enabled wide-area security, he said, adding that the service is also initiating another experiment at Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Missouri.

These security issues are critical to address now, Anderson said.

“In the next conflict, when the continental United States is a contested area, we have to be able to sense and we don’t have these resources to put armed guards on patrol every corner of all of our thousands and thousands of acres.”

“If you’re familiar with the rocket pods we have for [guided multiple launch rocket systems], I would like to fill those rocket pods with 50 to 100 rockets,” Gen. James Rainey, Army Futures Command commander, said Tuesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. “What we could put in that box … it’s not as good as [guided multiple launch rocket systems], but it can visit a lot of hate on the enemy in the right conditions.”

Rainey said the Army is engaging industry right now and is not just talking to companies that make rockets but industry that could disrupt manufacturing processes to build thousands of rockets or companies that can mass produce energetics, replacements for rocket motors or use additive manufacturing to produce rapidly.

The service is moving quickly, Rainey noted.

“We don’t have a few years,” he said, adding that the service has an emerging requirements document, which formalizes a new requirement and jumpstarts development. “We’re asking companies to mass produce — in the thousands — fires capabilities, counter-[unmanned aircraft systems] capabilities at a lower price point.”

Mass-producing rockets is one way to tackle the cost curve of countering drones, Maj. Gen. Frank Lozano, program executive officer for Missiles & Space, told Defense News in an interview at Redstone Arsenal outside Huntsville on Wednesday.

One way is to continue to refine electronic warfare technology. The other is to take out drones like the Iranian-developed Shahed loitering munition that costs over $50,000 a pop with cheap rocket systems. For example, the Army’s Hydra rocket costs roughly $45,000 per system.

“You’re finally getting to a one-on-one,” he said.

The service Program Executive Office Missile and Space is working with Army Development Command’s Aviation and Missile Center and the Long-Range Precision Fires Cross-Functional Team on direct support fires technology. The Army is looking to have a low-cost rocket that can be put into a multiple launch rocket system, or MLRS, family of munitions launcher, with 30 of those rockets with warheads that the service could mass “at a very high rate of fire” with a range in excess of 30 to 40 kilometers, Lozano said.

“We’re being very aggressive in that area to try to deliver capability so that whatever [large-scale combat operations] situation we find ourselves in, whether it’s [European Command] or Iranian or Korea fight, [Indo-Pacific Command] fight, we can give the warfighter this mass, high rate of fire capability that they need,” Lozano said.

The Army is taking a new look at its fiscal 2026 budget request and its five-year funding plan, but when funding is allocated, the hope is to make the effort a three- to five-year program, with more emphasis on three years because Army leadership wants rapid, aggressive action to deliver capability, according to Lozano.

Industry is already looking at how it can answer the call for large amounts of cheap rockets. While Lockheed Martin is developing the Joint Reduced Range Rocket for training to replace the legacy system it also builds, it is eyeing the potential to adapt the rocket for other missions.

“We’re definitely looking at [direct support fires technology] and how we could be a competitor in that market,” Dave Griser, vice president of guided multiple launch rocket systems at Lockheed Martin, told Defense News. “We think we can play there in terms of how we produce, our production and our experience that’s unique to [MLRS family of munitions] and what we do. We think it’s a good fit for us.”

The new five-inch rocket has a modular payload and the tubes can be reused and reloaded in the field, according to Griser.

The Army also recently chose Anduril Rocket Motor Systems to develop a new 4.75-inch solid rocket motor for long-range precision rocket artillery.

With LOAD — short for Low-Cost Air Defence — the European aerospace giant seeks to address one of the main challenges in modern air defense: the massive cost of intercepting cheap threats.

Executives announced the drone design at an unmanned systems trade show in Bonn, Germany, on March 26. It will be based on a platform from the early 2000s, the Do-DT25, an unmanned aerial system used for target practice. Because of that use case, it was designed to be both cheap and disposable, according to the manufacturer.

The modified UAV will be able to carry three guided missiles. According to Airbus, its operational range will be 100 kilometers or about 160 miles, and it will be launched via catapult. After a successful mission, the drone is designed to return to base and land by parachute, ready to be reused. A prototype with two missiles will fly by the end of the year, the company said, with the final product ready two years from now, by 2027.

While no details have been provided for LOAD specifically, the Do-DT25 on which it is built is 3.1 meters long and has a 2.5-meter wingspan. Its top speed is 300 knots, and it can stay airborne for about an hour.

From Airbus’ promotional materials, it appears that LOAD will somewhat straddle the line between a loitering munition and air combat drone. The UAV will be “supervised from a ground control station,” the company’s press statement reads. It “coordinates the drones on the basis of radar data or air situation images and can therefore autonomously search for, detect and – following the approval of their engagement – combat enemy kamikaze drones.”

For years, experts have raised concerns over growing autonomy in defense and questioned whether provisions to keep a human in the loop when making kill decisions — as Airbus promised in this case — will hold up when push comes to shove.

The autonomous capability promised for LOAD likely builds on Airbus’s previous work with the Do-DT25 platform. In March 2023, the company demonstrated the autonomous guidance and control of several DT-25 drones from an A310 MRTT tanker aircraft, showcasing advances in precise relative navigation, in-flight communication and cooperative control algorithms.

As a further step, Airbus plans to integrate LOAD with other unmanned airborne platforms, such as the company’s Eurodrone project. According to the company, this would allow LOAD to operate in regions “not yet fully covered by ground-based air defense radars.”

In line with Europe’s push to decouple from a dependency on the United States, the new drone contains no U.S. technology, Airbus boasted in its press release. This means it will be ITAR-free, referring to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations imposed by Washington, leaving future export decisions solely to European user nations.

The company said it had successfully deployed its Saildrone Voyager, a 33-foot USV, in Jordan, with new hardware and software algorithms, allowing it to operate in GPS-denied environments.

“Due to regional events, GPS jamming and spoofing have hindered unmanned operating systems in the area – following intensive testing by our engineers to create a resilient positioning system, Saildrone now has the ability to autonomously operate in spoofed maritime environments,” a company statement reads.

The U.S. Navy’s Task Force 59 has used Saildrone USVs for several years as part of experiments with unmanned systems and artificial intelligence carried out across the U.S. Fifth Fleet area of operations, which include the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea.

Key challenges identified in these waters include piracy as well as smuggling of weapons and drugs.

A more recent threat to regional maritime security has been GPS interference, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO), which tracks intrusion reports in these areas.

The agency has received further corroborating reports from vessels experiencing jamming in the Strait of Hormuz, with disruptions lasting several hours, affecting navigation systems and requiring vessels to rely on backup methods, it said in a March 10 statement.

The upgrades made to the Saildrone USV exploit different forms of localization to allow the systems to operate without relying exclusively on satellite signals.

The boat carried out missions in contested environments during the International Maritime Exercise (IMX) 2025, the largest maritime exercise in the Middle East, last month.

“Satellite positioning and connectivity can no longer be relied upon in potential future conflicts,” Richard Jenkins, founder and chief executive officer at Saildrone, said in a statement.

In recent years, there has been increased pressure for U.S. forces to train without relying on GSP for positioning, navigation and timing information (PNT).

In a 2022 article for the U.S. Naval Institute, U.S. Navy Lt. Anthony Carrillo noted that a major vulnerability of the country’s naval weapons is that nearly all of them rely on GPS.

The Pandur vehicle comes from GDLS’ sister company — European Land Systems company Steyr-Daimler-Puch Spezialfahrzeuge — and was developed in the 1980s. Yet, “while it was developed over 40 years ago, it’s gone through several iterations and generational changes and updates of technologies and requirements changes,” said Ray Moldovan, GDLS business development manager. The new version is called Pandur Evolution, or EVO for short.

GDLS already provides the Stryker combat vehicle for the Army’s fielded Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense system, the Sgt. Stout. There is a counter-unmanned aircraft systems version of the Stryker, as well.

While there are similarities to the Stryker, the Pandur EVO is “highly mobile, highly survivable, scalable,” and has ballistic protection, Moldovan told Defense News. “It does have a smaller footprint, it’s lighter weight.”

The Army is pursuing a number of M-SHORAD modernization efforts following the service’s rapid fielding of an interim solution.

Development of the M-SHORAD system took place in record time as the result of an urgent operational need identified in 2016 for the European theater. The Army received the requirement to build the system in February 2018. It took 19 months from the time the service generated the requirement to the delivery of prototypes for testing in the first quarter of 2020.

The M-SHORAD is a Stryker combat vehicle-based platform that includes a mission equipment package designed by Leonardo DRS and RTX’s Stinger vehicle missile launcher. The first platoon to receive it deployed to Europe in 2021.

The Army fielded its third Sgt. Stout battalion at Fort Cavazos, Texas. The first M-SHORAD battalion remains in Germany, and the second is based at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

US Army’s short-range air defense efforts face review board

The service is working on a version of the capability with a laser weapon that is not yet a program of record but has been deployed to the U.S. Central Command theater. It is also working to replace the Stinger missile. Two teams are competing for that work.

The Army released a request for information to industry for a lighter SHORAD solution in the summer of 2024 and is expected to finalize a directed requirement this year. The RFI asks for solutions “to provide air defense capability to protect dismounted maneuver forces in the near, mid and far terms.”

The request also notes there will be a focus on systems that can be transported by C-130 and are able to be airdropped or sling loaded. They should also be capable of defeating unmanned aircraft systems both small and large, as well as helicopters and fixed-wing close support aircraft.

While the Pandur has a weight rating of about 20 tons, it is roughly 10 tons lighter than the Sgt. Stout, Moldovan noted. The vehicle still has room for a vehicle commander, gunner, SHORAD operator and robotic systems operator in the troop compartment.

The Pandur SHORAD system uses the same Moog RIP turret that is on the Sgt. Stout. The same turret has been integrated on GDLS’ robotic combat vehicle called TRX.

General Dynamics unit puts short-range air defense on robotic vehicle

GDLS will be taking the vehicle to the Army’s MFIX, or the Maneuver Fires Integrated Experiment, at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in July. The company responded to the Army’s RFI with both the Pandur and 10-ton TRX options, according to Moldovan. TRX will also be present and operated in tandem at MFIX.

The Pandur was developed for the Austrian army, and Portugal, Belgium, Slovenia and the Czech Republic are also customers. While the vehicle is foreign, GDLS built Pandurs in Michigan in the mid-1990s, said Kendall Linson, company business development manager. The company could restart that line again if the Army settled on the option, he noted.

“I think Pandur would align with a counter-UAS capability simply because of the weight of the vehicle and the utility and survivability of the vehicle,” Linson said. “A lot of counter-UAS, basically the solutions that they’re looking at don’t provide that survivability that the Pandur would offer.”

The Army held demonstrations for self-propelled howitzers in 2021 at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, but decided to prioritize an investment in the development of its Extended Range Cannon Artillery, or ERCA, system. The system used a 58-caliber gun tube on an M109 Paladin howitzer chassis, aiming to fire out to 70 kilometers — roughly double current cannon ranges.

When it decided to cancel the ERCA program, the Army acknowledged it still had a requirement for a long-range cannon, and so it gave industry the opportunity last fall to show readily available and fielded systems abroad. A team traveled to Germany, South Korea, Sweden and Israel to see those systems in action.

Now, the service is planning another Yuma-based demonstration for January 2026. The Army plans to award each industry team roughly $5 million to bring in artillery systems for a nine-month evaluation process before nailing down requirements and developing a strategy, according to a draft solicitation on the government contracts website Sam.gov.

The official solicitation for the evaluation was expected to be posted weeks ago but had yet to be released as of Monday.

While some might argue the future demonstration is a repeat of the 2021 round, industry is seeing the effort as an opportunity to show more capability. It opens the aperture for systems to be demonstrated that might not have existed just a few years ago.

Artillery modernization has been moving at full force as cannon warfare plays out in Ukraine. Several of the systems likely to be demonstrated at Yuma have now had a chance to prove their capabilities in the country fighting against the Russian invasion that began in 2022.

This time the Army is looking not only at the range and mobility of the cannons, but emphasizing a thorough evaluation of the rate of fire and the ability to shoot, move, shoot again, and then be resupplied.

Why the Army is looking abroad to close a widening artillery gun gap

“They’re asking us to demonstrate rate of fire, not just on the howitzer, but the ability to reload the howitzer, so now you have ammunition-carrying vehicles with some reload capability that helps them get after, ‘How fast can this thing actually do what it’s supposed to do on the battlefield?’” BAE Systems’ company vice president Jim Miller told Defense News.

“We always had rate of fire on the howitzer. But, you know, I was a battalion commander in the early 2000s. I was pretty comfortable that I could win the first couple fights, but I wasn’t going to get a resupply of ammo fast enough to do anything in the second fight, right? And so that’s the challenge they’re going to pursue,” Miller added.

BAE Systems is submitting its Archer system for the demonstration, which it demonstrated in 2021.

Elbit Systems America, which submitted its Atmos self-propelled howitzer system in 2021, demonstrated its newer Sigma howitzer last year.

New competitors are likely to be present at the demonstration, too. General Dynamics Land Systems, Rheinmetall and Hanwha all demonstrated capability in November and December for the U.S. Army and plan to submit systems for the upcoming evaluation effort.

It’s possible others could emerge as the Army opens up the aperture. The previous demonstration in 2021, for example, locked out Hanwha’s K9 tracked system because it required the systems be wheeled. Companies with smaller vehicles and different gun systems could be considered.

“You can’t maneuver without artillery,” Gen. James Rainey, commander of Army Futures Command, told reporters last week at a conference in Arlington, Virginia. “That’s the Army’s main contribution to the joint force.”

Army artillery needs more range, mobility and autonomy, study finds

High explosive artillery “is indisputably the number one killer on both sides. So that is not going away, so modernizing, transforming our tactical cannons … towed artillery is problematic,” Rainey said. “There’s some partners, we have some allies who have really, really good, interesting mobile cannons that we’re looking to partner with.”

The demonstration will also serve as a way to look again at the Army’s overall plan for fires capability. According to several industry sources, a fires strategy was presented to the Army vice chief of staff in January, but he rejected it because it was limited to one solution and didn’t consider things like rockets. The vice sent the strategists back to the drawing board.

Who will play at Yuma round two?

The Army plans to select teams for the demonstration in the first quarter of fiscal 2026. While those companies will get some government dollars to attend, there is a pay-to-play element, as the teams will still need to provide some funding to get the systems to Yuma and provide all ammunition.

And many of the systems will need to be borrowed from the companies or even other governments. Artillery systems are in high demand amid the war in Ukraine.

South Korea’s Hanwha wants to bring both a tracked and wheeled version of its K9 howitzer, if they’re available, according to company officials.

The tracked version is fielded among over 10 allied countries, six of which are NATO members. The wheeled version is in development.

“Our goal and intent is to fully be ready to deliver both a tracked and a wheeled platform,” Jason Pak, Hanwha Defense USA’s director of business development, told Defense News. The company is “full steam ahead in terms of accelerating the production of a wheeled variant,” he said.

US Army mobile howitzer shoot-off participants emerge

Additionally, while the K9 A1 variant requires three or four people to crew the system, the K9 A2 will allow the crew to drop to two with the introduction of an autoloader said Carl Poppe, Hanwha Defense USA business development director. The Korean Army will field the first A2 unit in 2027, and it will enter production shortly, he added.

BAE Systems would bring back Archer, but it could bring the system on a new MAN truck, which is what the Swedish government has ordered as part of its modernization of the system, according to Miller. The company has swapped out the system’s ride, even demonstrating it on a vehicle from Oshkosh Defense.

Additionally, the company continues to present the option to the Army — separately from the demonstration effort — of a PIM howitzer with a 52-caliber gun tube, Miller said. The current gun is a 39-caliber cannon tube.

Elbit, which demonstrated Sigma in the fall, is expected to bring the system to Yuma. Sigma is in full-rate production in Charleston, South Carolina, and Elbit is fielding the cannon system to the Israeli Defense Forces, according to Luke Savoie, the company’s president and CEO.

American Rheinmetall Vehicles plans to bring what it demonstrated in Germany last fall: the RCH 155, a howitzer developed through a joint arrangement between the company and KNDS and created from an association of Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and Nexter. The system is integrated onto a Boxer armored fighting vehicle.

US Army scraps Extended Range Cannon Artillery prototype effort

GDLS is submitting its Piranha system on a 10x10 platform using the same 52-caliber gun mounted on the KNDS-Rheinmetall RCH 155.

“It’s fully automated,” Kendall Linson, the US business development manager for GLDS, said in a recent interview. “The crew size is reduced significantly from what we currently have, of five to six people, down to two or three. The vehicle could handle two ... It’s all fully automated.”

The team is confident that with the ammunition it will bring, it could achieve desired ranges from the ERCA program, Linson noted.

As a new team in the mix, Linson said, “We’re really happy about that opportunity to get into that adjacent market … a market that we’re not in right now.”

Such a doctrine should take shape along four approaches: Polluting large language models for negative effects; using Conway’s Law for guidance to exploitable flaws; exploiting bias of adversary leadership to degrade AI systems; and using RF Weapons to cascade AI supporting computer hardware.

These systems might seem on their face to be insurmountable. Well, maybe not. As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Thus, perhaps a look into the past will help envision the future.

Polluting large language models to create negative effects

Generative AI can be expressed as the extraction of statistical patterns from an extremely large data set. It is important to understand that a large language model, or LLM, developed from such a data set using “Transformer” technology allows a user to access it via a “prompt” — a natural language text that describes the function which the AI must perform. The end result is a generative pre-trained, or GPT, large language model.

Thus, there are at least two approaches to degrade such an AI system: Pollute data or attack “Prompt Engineering” — a term of art within the AI community describing the process of structuring instructions that can be understood by the generative AI system. A programming error, as noted below, will cause the AI LLM system, in another AI term of art, to “Hallucinate.”

A historical analogy from World War II validates the crucial importance of countermeasures when an enemy has unilateral access to information about the battlespace.

The development of RADAR — Radio Azimuth Detecting And Ranging — was, in itself, a method of extracting patterns from an extremely large database. In the vastness of the sky, an echo from a radio pulse gave an accurate range and bearing of unseen aircraft.

To defeat it, as described by R.V. Jones in Most Secret War, it was necessary to put information into the German radar system, thus causing gross ambiguity. Jones turned to a physicist at the Technical Research Establishment, Joan Curran, who developed the optimum size and shape of aluminum foil strips — called “Window” by the Brits and “Chaff” by the Americans — used to create thousands of reflections which overloaded and blinded German radars.

In much the same way, the U.S. military and intelligence communities can create ambiguities and obscurations within generative AI systems, especially when trying to deny access to information about weapons and tactics.

This can be done by assigning names to said weapons and tactics, designed to be both ambiguous and non sequitur. For example, such “naturally occurring” search ambiguities include the following:

• A search for “Flying Prostitute” reveals data about the B-26 Marauder medium bomber of World War II.
• “Gilda” and “Atoll” retrieves a photo of the Mark III nuclear bomb that was dropped on Bikini Atoll in 1946, upon which was pasted a photo of Rita Hayworth.
• “Tonopah” and “Goatsucker” retrieves the F-117 stealth fighter.

Since a contemporary computer search is easily fooled, it would be possible to grossly skew results of an LLM function by deliberately using nomenclature which occurs in very large iterations and is extremely ambiguous.

Perhaps the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter could, in such an attempt, be renamed something like “Stormy Daniels.” One can imagine the consternation Chinese officers and NCOs would experience when their young soldiers expend valuable time meticulously examining images that have no relation to the desired search.

Even “Air Gapped” systems like those being used by U.S. intelligence agencies can be affected when systems update information from online sources.

Such an effort must actively and continuously pollute data sets, much like chaff confusing a RADAR system, by generating content that would populate the model and force the adversary to consume it.

A more sophisticated approach would use key words like “eBay” or “Amazon” as a predicate, and then common words like “Tire” or “Bicycle” or “Shoe.” Contracting with a commercial media agency to promote the “items” across traditional and social media would tend to clog a Large Language Model.

Using Conway’s Law for guidance to exploitable flaws

Melvin Conway is an American computer scientist, who, in the 1960s, conceived the eponymous rule stating: “Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

In response, de Caro’s Corollary states: “The more dogmatic the design team, the greater the opportunity to sabotage the whole design.”

Consider Google Gemini. The February 2024 launch of Google’s would-be answer to ChatGPT was an unmitigated disaster that dumped Google’s share price and left the company a laughingstock. As the Gemini launch went forward, its image generator “Hallucinated” — and created images of Black Nazi soldiers and female Asian Popes.

In retrospect, the event was the most egregious example of what happens when Conway’s Law collides with organizational dogma. Historically ignorant programmers myopically led their company into a debacle.

But, for those interested in confounding China’s AI systems, the Gemini disaster is an epiphany!

If the programmers at the “Googleplex” campus in Mountain View, California, can screw up so immensely, what kind of swirling vortex of programming snafu is being created by the indoctrinated young members of the People’s Liberation Army who work on AI?

A solution to beating China’s AI systems may be an epistemologist who specializes in the cultural communication of the PLA. By using de Caro’s Corollary, such an expert could lead a team of computer scientists to replicate the Chinese communication norms and find the weaknesses in their system — leaving it open to spoofing or outright collapse.

It also should be noted that when a technology creates an existential threat, the individual developers of that technology become strategic targets. For example, in 1943, Operation Hydra utilized the entirety of the RAF British Bomber Command of 596 bombers, with the stated mission of killing German rocket scientists at Peenemunde. The RAF had marginal success and was followed by three U.S. 8th Air Force raids in July and August of 1944.

In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) dispatched multi-lingual agent and polymath Mo Berg to assassinate German scientist Werner Heisenberg, if Heisenberg seemed to be on the right path to build an atomic bomb. Berg decided, correctly, that the German was off track, and letting him live would keep the Nazis from any success.

It is also no secret that five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated — allegedly — by the Israelis in the last decade. Advances in AI that could become existential threats may be dealt with in similar fashion.

Exploiting bias of adversary leadership to degrade AI systems

Often, entities funding research and development skew results because of bias. For example, aforementioned German scientist Werner Heisenberg was limited in the paths he might follow toward a Nazi A-Bomb because of Hitler’s perverse hatred of “Jewish Physics.”

This attitude was aided and abetted by two prominent and antisemitic German scientists, Phillip Lenard and Johannes Stark, both Nobel Prize winners who reinforced the myth of “Aryan Science.” The end result effectively prevented a successful German nuclear program.

Again, there is epiphany here: Bias from the top affects outcomes.

As Xi Jinping continues his move toward authoritarian rule under himself, he brings his biases with him. This eventually will affect, or infect, Chinese military power.

In 2023, Xi detailed the need for China to meet world class military standards by 2027, the 100th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army. Xi also spoke of “informatization” (read AI) to accelerate building “a strong system of strong strategic forces, raise the presence of combat forces in new domains and of new qualities and promote combat oriented military training.”

It seems that Xi’s need for speed, especially in “informatization,” might be the bias that indicates a weakness that can be exploited.

Using gyrotrons to cascade chips in computers supporting AI

Artificial Intelligence is dependent on extremely fast computer chips whose capacities are approaching their physical limits. They are more vulnerable to lack of cooling and electromagnetic pulse.

In the case of large, Cloud-based data centers, cooling is an absolute necessity. Water cooling is the most economical and therefore the most prevalent; but pumps, backup pumps and inlet valves usually are not hardened, and thus are extremely vulnerable. No pumps, no water. No water, no cooling. No cooling, no Cloud.

The same for primary and secondary electrical power. No power, no Cloud. No generators, no Cloud. No fuel, no Cloud.

Autonomous airborne drones or ground mobile vehicles are moving targets — small and hard to hit. However, their chips are vulnerable to electromagnetic pulse. We now know that a lightning bolt with gigawatts of power isn’t the only way to knock out an AI robot. High-Power Microwave Systems such as Epirus, Leonidas and Thor can burn out AI systems at a range of about three miles.

An interesting technology not yet fielded is the gyrotron. It is a Cold War era Soviet-developed, high-power microwave source, halfway between a klystron and a free electron laser. It creates a cyclotron resonance in a strong magnetic field that can produce a customized energy bolt with a specific pulse width and amplitude. Theoretically, it could reach out and disable a specific chip, at greater ranges than a “You fly ‘em, We fry ‘em” high power microwave weapon now in early test stage.

Obviously, without functioning chips, AI doesn’t work.

The headlong Chinese AI development initiative could provide the PLA with an extraordinary military advantage in terms of the speed and sophistication of a future attack upon the homeland of the United States.

Thus, the need to develop AI counter measures — now — is paramount.

In World War I, the great Italian progenitor of airpower, General Giulio Douhet, very wisely stated, “Victory smiles upon those who anticipate the changes in the character of war, not upon those who wait to adapt themselves after the changes occur.”

In terms of the threat posed by Artificial Intelligence as it applies to warfare, Douhet’s words could not be truer today.

Chuck de Caro was an IW researcher for the late Andrew W. Marshall, director OSD/Net Assessment; de Caro is the progenitor of the world’s first virtual military organization, the 1st Joint SOFTWAR Unit (Virtual).

The submarine sonar contract is the first in 15 years for Thales outside its core underwater markets of France, the U.K., the U.S. and Australia, said Emmanuel Michaud, vice president for submarines and surface vessels at Thales. The sensor suite for the four Dutch submarines will form the basis for Thales’s export offer for other upcoming submarine programs, he said.

The contract “is our stepping stone to a new generation of export-contract submarine systems,” Michaud said. “That’s why this contract is absolutely key for us, because that’s the first one of hopefully a long series of contracts. The market is pretty active now in the submarines.”

Thales signed an agreement with Naval Group to supply the four sonar suites, with a contract value somewhere between €100 million ($109 million) and €1 billion, according to Michaud, who declined to give an exact price. “Let say that we are extremely happy with this contract.” Thales won a contract from BAE Systems in 2020 to provide the sonar system for the U.K.’s four Dreadnought nuclear submarines with a value of £330 million ($428 million).

The sensor suite will be “heavily derived” from the system equipping the French Suffren-class nuclear attack submarines, according to Michaud. The same Thales team working on delivering the last three of the six submarines in the Suffren class will work on the Dutch contract, he said.

The Netherlands a year ago picked Naval Group to build four conventionally-powered attack submarines in a project worth as much as €5.65 billion to replace the country’s aging Walrus-class subs. The Dutch boats will be based on the same Barracuda program from Naval Group that produced the Suffren class.

“We had Barracude, we invested a lot thanks to the French MoD and French Navy, and this gives us a competitive edge,” Michaud said. “We keep improving our product with this export-contract submarine with very, very tough requirements from the Dutch Navy.”

Most of the products included in the sonar suite for the Dutch submarines already exist, and are being progressively improved with regards to hardware and software, he said.

The first two submarines in the Dutch contract are scheduled to be delivered by 2034, and “we are working full speed already to be on time for the delivery of the first submarine,” Michaud said. He said that given the complexity of everything that needs to be assembled, “I will be happy in 2034 when everything is delivered.”

Thales says it’s the world leader in sonar, equipping around 50 submarines and with a share of around 50% of the accessible market. Customers include the French, British and Austalian navies, as well as Singapore, Chile and Malaysia.

Thales will delivery “the full array of what can be installed on a submarine as far as acoustics are concerned” for the Dutch boats, including main antennas such as the bow-mounted cylindrical array and the flank array sonar, according to Michaud. Other equipment will include an intercept array on the top of the submarine and a mine and obstacle-avoidance sonar that can also do seabed mapping

The French company is working with Dutch company Optical11 to develop a towed linear antenna using optical technology that would be included in the Thales sonar suite. The Amsterdam-based firm says it’s the world leader in fiber optic sensing technology for ultra-sensitive early warning systems.

The technology readiness level for the optical array “is not yet at a stage that would allow us to go full production from day one,” Michaud said. Thales and Optical11 agreed on a feasibility study in November that will last most of 2025, with the goal of including the technology on the Dutch submarines. “It’s a very challenging technology, but very promising.”

“If this is successful, and we are working hard to make it successful, we will definitely adopt this technology or this product for our export-country contracts,” Michaud said. He said that France’s defense ministry is also developing a optical towed array, however this is proprietary “and we will never be able to export this.”

The Dutch submarines will be fitted with a double row of flank array sonar as a cost-effective way to increase the sensor surface and improve detection, as developing a new array would have been “extremely expensive” and would have taken too long, Michaud said.

Regarding a plan by Poland to buy submarines, Michaud said Thales doesn’t comment on market opportunities led by Naval Group. He said the Thales strategy is to offer a “very versatile” sonar suite that can fulfill the requirements of many customers, and avoid additional development that would increase cost, time and risk.

The issue of shipyard workers has become a rallying point for numerous advocates and lawmakers in recent days, especially after President Donald Trump vowed in his address to Congress earlier this month to establish a new office of shipbuilding within the White House in order to protect the industry.

Last week, sixteen Democratic lawmakers from districts with links to shipbuilding firms sent a note to the White House and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asserting the civilian defense employee hiring freeze had caused “chaos and uncertainty,” which in turn has hurt “the important growth that is needed at our shipyards.”

Pentagon leaders agreed. In a memo over the weekend, Hegseth clarified shipyard workers should be exempted from the hiring freeze, even as other areas see potential job cuts designed to “optimize our federal workforce, reduce inefficiencies, and align our resources with the president’s top national security priorities.”

Trump to launch new White House office focused on shipbuilding

Officials previously said critical needs areas would not be precluded from hiring vacant spots, but the new memo specifies shipyards, depots and military medical sites as among that group.

“DoD will only hire mission-essential employees into positions that directly contribute to our warfighting readiness,” the memo stated.

The news drew praise from both Republicans and Democrats, the latter of whom have been fiercely critical of the administration’s federal workforce cutbacks.

“I’m relieved that the administration heard our calls to protect jobs that are vital to national security at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and at shipyards across the country from ill-considered hiring freezes,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. and the second-ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement.

“While I’m glad that President Trump and Secretary Hegseth now understand our shipyard workforce to be an essential component of our national defense and preparedness, it should have never come to this in the first place. And the uncertainty that has swept through shipyards in the last two months has done real damage.”

White House officials have yet to announce specifics of the new office to oversee the shipbuilding industry. Several lawmakers have offered legislation to codify such an oversight agency, but it is not clear if those plans would align with Trump’s vision for the office.

Earlier this year, officials from the Congressional Budget Office said the Navy would need to spend more than $40 billion annually for 30 years for the service to fulfill its proposed plans to expand its battle force fleet.

There are currently 295 battle force ships in the fleet, with that number expected to drop to 283 ships by 2027 because of planned retirements. The service has stated it hopes to grow the fleet to 381 ships by 2054.

Defense Department officials have said that even with the exemptions, they plan to trim the civilian defense workforce by up to 8%, or 60,000 workers, in coming months, in keeping with broader administration plans to scale back the size of the federal bureaucracy.

The maker of Aster air-defense interceptors, the SCALP-EG/Storm Shadow cruise missile and Exocet anti-ship weapon expects missile production to double this year from the 2023 level, Chief Executive Officer Éric Béranger said at a press conference here on Monday.

MBDA orders have surged since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with European countries spending billions to strengthen their air defenses as well as help Ukraine. The company may stand to gain further over concerns whether the U.S. is a reliable supplier of weapons for Europe, as President Donald Trump threatens to withhold NATO security guarantees, increasingly aligns with Russia and talks of annexing Canada and Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark.

“This is a little bit a moment of truth for Europe,” Béranger said. “We have all the technological capabilities that we need, we have the brains, which means that it is really a matter of what we want to do in Europe, what position we want to reach. This is the reason why the moment is absolutely historic.”

MBDA is the only Western company besides American firms capable of producing “the full range of complex weapons,” Béranger said. The company makes short, medium and long-range air-defense missiles, cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles and anti-tank munitions, and is developing a hypersonic interceptor.

The company is a pan-European joint venture between Airbus, the U.K.’s BAE Systems and Italy’s Leonardo, and is based in a suburb southwest of Paris. Local units in the U.K., France, Germany and Italy allow governments there to shield some national defense interests from the group.

MBDA’s orders jumped to a record €13.8 billion (US$15 billion) last year from €9.9 billion in 2023, and compared to €5.1 billion in 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine. Meanwhile, sales rose to €4.9 billion from €4.5 billion a year earlier. The order backlog end-December reached €37 billion, the highest ever, from €28 billion at the end of 2023.

The war in Ukraine and attacks by Houthi rebels on ships in the Red Sea since 2023 have raised the profile of MBDA products, several of which now carry the “combat proven” tag.

Béranger mentioned the downing of a Sukhoi fighter jet by Ukraine using a French-Italian SAMP/T system with Aster missiles, and Ukraine’s use of SCALP/Storm Shadow. French and British warships have used Aster to down anti-ship ballistic missiles in the Red Sea, and the CEO said the Italian Navy has also used the interceptor there.

“In 2024 you may have seen that the MBDA products were used in a number of theaters and were used in a very reliable way,” Béranger said.

Denmark last week shortlisted SAMP/T for a planned purchase of air defense systems, in competition with the U.S. Patriot system, to cover the high end of the threat spectrum. For the lower end, MBDA’s VL MICA system is facing off with Kongsberg’s NASAMS, the IRIS-T SLM from Diehl Defense, and the U.S. IFPC.

France, Italy and the U.K. last week confirmed an order for an additional 218 Aster missiles, including the Aster 30 B1 variant for the three countries’ navies and French and Italian SAMP/T systems, and the shorter-range Aster 15 for the French Navy. That follows a French-Italian order in December 2022 for 700 Aster missiles.

Béranger said with regards to buying European or non-European, the priority should be to keep the design authority in-house. That’s what allowed MBDA to adapt Storm Shadow and SCALP missiles to Ukrainian Sukhoi aircraft within only a few weeks, he explained.

“It was absolutely not foreseen for this, but because we did have the design authority in Europe, we had the knowledge, and we had the authority to decide how to do it,” Béranger said.

The CEO declined to say which MBDA products are subject to U.S. export regulations or contain U.S.-sourced components, but said “every time our customers want us to be desensitized, we can do that, and we are doing that.” The company worked in 2019 to rid SCALP of parts subject to the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulation, after the U.S. blocked the sale of the cruise missile to Egypt in 2018.

The company is set to invest €2.4 billion through to 2029 to accelerate production, and targets 2,600 new hires this year. That’s after recruiting 2,500 people in 2024, increasing the workforce to more than 18,000 employees.

“The world has changed, meaning that basically MBDA needs to industrialize more itself in order to deliver higher pace and higher volumes,” Béranger said. “This is happening in all our sites.”

The company is pre-assembling some missile parts and subsystems before receiving orders to be ready to deliver a number of missiles “very quickly” if asked to do so.

MBDA is “very, very much ahead” of schedule on plans to raise Aster production by 50% in 2026 compared with 2022, according to Béranger. He said the company reached a target to quadruple monthly output of the Mistral short-range air defense missile already in 2024, rather than this year.

“We are ahead of time on each of those targets that I mentioned last year, and this is true for a number of capabilities,” the MBDA CEO said, saying that also applies to the Akeron anti-tank missile, CAMM air-defense missile and Enforcer infantry weapon.

MBDA is working with startups to develop drones and loitering munitions, and is talking to some industries including automotive about potential mass production, should the need arise. “This is really a domain where we are teaming, because MBDA is not a drone manufacturer.”

Béranger said laser weapons are coming, but will complement rather than replace missiles. “It will be an interesting complement, because indeed, firing a laser of course is not very expensive. Building a laser is expensive, but firing a laser can be pretty cheap.”

The U.K., France, Germany and Italy are working on separate laser-weapon projects, and MBDA is involved in all four countries, Béranger said. Making laser weapons truly effective will still require a lot of work and resources, and the CEO said he expects countries to start cooperating at some point, and MBDA is positioned for that.

The company is working on two missiles as part of the Future Cruise/Anti-Ship Weapon program as successors for both SCALP/Storm Shadow and Exocet. For now, the timetables for the high-speed maneuverable RJ10 missile and the stealth subsonic TP15 are consistent, with the missiles expected in the early 2030s, according to Béranger.

The systems in question amount to an integrated solution from both companies, featuring Elbit’s DESEAVER MK-4 decoy control and launching system (DCLS), along with a range of Rafael’s countermeasures.

Rafael’s passive and active decoy countermeasures were designed to neutralize threats such as advanced Anti-Ship Missile (ASM) seekers, the companies said in a statement. And Elbit’s equipment provides a maritime electronic warfare capability for repelling complex missile attacks.

The integrated system “fires various types of decoy rounds from multiple launchers to counter simultaneous threats, positioning it as the fourth generation of naval EW dispensing systems that enhance soft-kill anti-missile defense capabilities,” the firms said.

The announcement did not name the buyer governments nor the deal amount, and company officials declined to elaborate. But the announcement mentions that the contract is set to be executed over a period of four years, and that it includes the delivery of systems for 5 vessels.

One possible client combo is the Netherlands and Belgium. The two countries announced a purchase of two anti-submarine frigates each in April 2023, built by Damen shipyard and Thales for the electronics.

The first Dutch frigate is scheduled for delivery at the end of 2029, while Belgium is scheduled to receive its first vessel in the second half of 2030.