Pituffik Space Base commander Col. Susan Meyers was removed from command “for loss of confidence in her ability to lead,” the Space Force said in a statement Thursday evening.

“Commanders are expected to adhere to the highest standards of conduct, especially as it relates to remaining nonpartisan in the performance of their duties,” the Space Force said.

Military.com reported Thursday that Meyers sent an email to Pituffik personnel on March 31, days after Vance’s visit to the base, that seemed intended to foster solidarity between U.S. service members and personnel stationed there from other countries, including Denmark and Greenland.

“I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the U.S. administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base,” Meyers reportedly wrote.

Meyers also reportedly wrote that over the weekend, she thought a great deal about “the actions taken, the words spoken [during Vance’s visit], and how it must have affected each of you.”

Meyers pledged in the message that as long as she is in charge of the base, “all of our flags will fly proudly — together.”

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell retweeted Military.com’s story on the email and added a screenshot of the announcement of Meyers’ firing.

“Actions to undermine the chain of command or to subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated at the Department of Defense,” Parnell wrote on X.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has intensified his desire to take control of Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory partially governed by Denmark. Greenland is strategically located, and has significant resource reserves including oil, natural gas, minerals and rare earth elements.

In his March 28 visit to Pituffik, Vance rankled Danish allies by alleging “Denmark hasn’t done a good job at keeping Greenland safe.”

“Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance said. “You have underinvested in the people of Greenland and you have underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful landmass filled with incredible people. That has to change.”

Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen made his displeasure with Vance’s comments known in a video on social media later that day.

“We are open to criticism,” Rasmussen said. “But … we do not appreciate the tone in which it’s being delivered. This is not how you speak to your close allies, and I still consider Denmark and the United States to be close allies.”

Rasmussen said Denmark and Greenland remain open to discussing a greater U.S. military presence in Greenland.

Meyers became commander of the installation and the 821st Space Base Group in July 2024.

Col. Shawn Lee is now in command of the base, the service said. Meyers was fired by Col. Kenneth Klock, commander of Space Base Delta 1 at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado.

“Something is not working,” Trappier said in a hearing of the National Assembly defense committee here on Wednesday. “So it needs to be reviewed. It’s not up to me to do that, it’s up to the states to get together to figure out how to better manage this ambitious program.”

France, Germany and Spain in December 2022 awarded Dassault Aviation, Airbus, Indra Sistemas and Eumet a €3.2 billion ($3.6 billion) contract for phase 1B of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), covering research, technology and overall design. That’s after Dassault and Airbus reached agreement on the next-generation fighter earlier that month, after more than a year of squabbling.

Dassault is the prime contractor for the new generation fighter or NGF at the heart of the combat system, with Airbus the main partner on behalf of Germany and Spain. After the development phase, the next step will be building a demonstrator in phase 2, which France has previously said would be announced in 2026, for a first flight scheduled in 2029.

Wrangling between the partners over how to share the workload is causing delays, and reaching agreement on Phase 2 “is still going to take time, that’s for sure,” according to Trappier.

The French executive is typically outspoken, and has previously criticized how work on FCAS is organized. He has previously commented on working with Airbus, saying in a parliamentary hearing in May 2023 that FCAS was difficult with three partners, though the executive said at the time he was “very confident in our capability to jointly develop a demonstrator.”

In a response to his new testimony this week, Airbus said the FCAS program has made “strong progress,” including the concept selection review achievement within the phase 1B contract. “We are now on our way to phase 2 contracts,” the company said in an emailed statement to Defense News.

“We are committed to FCAS, which represents the backbone of the European defense industry and strategic autonomy,” Airbus said. “We do believe in FCAS as a collaborative European industrial program, even more so in the current geopolitical context. That is our commitment from the beginning, to pursue a system of systems that goes beyond a future European fighter.”

Meanwhile, Germany’s new government said this week it plans to swiftly continue development of FCAS, according to the coalition agreement between the conservative CDU/CSU and the center-left SPD.

Trappier said the fragmented work methodology of FCAS is a cause of delays, as “each time we reopen pointless, endless discussions” with a push for more co-development and cooperation. Trappier said he disagrees with that model, and focus should be on prioritizing the best skills.

While Dassault is the prime contractor, the French company weighs for only a third in decision making, with Airbus having two-thirds of the vote on behalf of Germany and Spain, Trappier said. That means the lead company on the NGF can’t divvy up the work as it sees fit, the CEO complained.

“We have to constantly accommodate, constantly negotiate. It’s what’s called permanent negotiation. I hope we will reach an agreement to move forward,” he said.

Calculations on the shape of the future aircraft have been completed, “we know how to manufacture it, get it flying as quickly as possible,” the CEO said. “I would be very much in favor of speeding things up.”

Trappier mentioned the French-led nEUROn drone project as an example of what cooperation should look like, with six countries successfully developing an “ultra stealthy” combat drone on a tight budget. The CEO said Dassault as manager of the program didn’t compromise on the product for the sake of “geo return,” the practice of guaranteeing nations a work share proportional to their investment, which Trappier called “absolutely deadly for setting up a European cooperation.”

While cooperation was successful on nEUROn, “we don’t have that today on the NGF and I’m very sorry about that,” the executive said. He said Dassault finds itself alone against two partners, having to “persuade even more in order to reach decisions. It just takes a little more time.”

Trappier said some FCAS partners such as Thales are leaders in the field of defense electronics due to France’s history of seeking strategic autonomy, “so when you implement the geo return at every phase, it’s difficult.”

Meanwhile, when Dassault Aviation wants to work with German partners, certain technology derived from the Eurofighter is off-limits unless something “high-level” is provided in return, according to Trappier.

“Well, that doesn’t work. So we’re constantly bumping into these difficulties of work share,” he told lawmakers.

Dassault Aviation makes France’s Rafale fighter, while Airbus builds the Eurofighter in use in Germany and Spain. Both aircraft have roots in a multinational collaboration in the early 1980s on a future European fighter, with France opting to go it alone on the Rafale after disagreements over design authority and operational requirements.

France wants a next-generation aircraft capable of fulfilling the nuclear-deterrence role, able to perform its missions “without any constraints from any foreign country whatsoever,” and anything else would be a reason to stop the FCAS program, according to Trappier. The French fighter also needs to be able to operate from an aircraft carrier.

Trappier said that if France chooses a path of mutual dependency with allies, “there’s no going back,” an argument that may resonate with French lawmakers attached to the country’s policy of strategic autonomy in defense matters.

“We have to weigh what we are giving up to our allies, which may be normal in European cooperation and in a desire for European integration,” Trappier said. “But that also means we will depend on each other.”

Trappier was asked whether Dassault could go it alone should the FCAS program fail, and be able to provide France with a stealth-capable aircraft within a reasonable time frame.

“I don’t want to sound arrogant at all, but whose capabilities do I need other than my own to make a combat aircraft?” Trappier said. “So I’m willing to cooperate and share. I’m not against it, but I’m the one with the skills.”

Trappier said the future fighter doesn’t compete with the Rafale, which will operate alongside the new air combat system at some point. FCAS will be for beyond the 2040s, “more like 2045,” the CEO said.

Dassault is working on the future F5 standard for Rafale for 2030-2035, with a focus on connectivity and networking, and plans for a stealthy combat drone based on nEUROn as a loyal wingman.

“What we are trying to look at next is how we could make a future combat aircraft. Who with, that’s the question.”

The French state is committed to cooperation on FCAS to free up more resources and to contribute to “a slightly more united Europe,” Trappier said. “The problem is that when it comes down to the nitty gritty of the contracts, it’s more complicated.”

“We will do the NGF, as for with who, that’s not for me to answer,” Trappier said. “That’s up to the state, up to the politicians to say whether we should work with our traditional allies or not.”

He told lawmakers that if the future combat aircraft is produced as it is conceived today, with three partners, “Rafale will seem cheap to you.”

France in January 2024 announced the purchase of 42 Rafale jets for more than €5 billion, or a cost of at least €119 million per aircraft.

French President Emmanuel Macron said in March he intends to order more Rafale fighters, with plans for two squadrons at the air base of Luxeuil-Saint-Saveur, which currently doesn’t host the aircraft.

Trappier said Dassault would welcome additional French orders, though the company hasn’t received any yet.

That’s the vision Deputy Commandant for Aviation Lt. Gen. Bradford Gering shared Tuesday at the Navy League’s annual Sea-Air-Space Exposition.

“So, what does modernization look like in the Marine Corps? It’s an all-fifth-gen tactical air force of F-35s augmented by collaborative combat aircraft,” Gering said. “It’s a full fleet of CH-53K helicopters for the heavy lift mission.”

Gering added that the MV-22 program will have finished its platform midlife upgrades over the remainder of the next five-year budget cycle.

AI, advanced tech central to new Marine Corps aviation plan

Also involved in the Corps’ aviation wing will be its drone fleet of MQ-9 Reapers, which are flying today. Those will eventually see major payload and sensor upgrades, Gering said.

On the larger side of the aviation equation, the Corps expects to complete purchasing of the 95 total KC-130J cargo planes it needs for its transport fleet.

Two training squadrons and nine operational squadrons are now flying the F-35 Lightning II jet, a fifth-generation fighter. Over the next five years the Corps will build another seven active duty squadrons, which will be supplemented by two Reserve squadrons.

At the end of the F-35 transition there will be 18 active squadrons, a dozen flying the F-35B and six flying the F-35C. The two Reserve squadrons will fly the C variant, which is built for aircraft carrier takeoff and landing. The B variant can conduct vertical takeoff and landing.

Gering said the Corps also wants to be able to maintain and close kill webs and all enemy air assets through an airborne command and control and an “aviation ground support structure that is scalable and can conduct expeditionary operations and work in a distributed aviation environment.”

In its aviation plan, released in January, the Corps provided more details on its airborne assets.

The Marines shifted their F-35 plans to buy more carrier-based F-35Cs and fewer short takeoff and vertical landing F-35Bs. The total number of Joint Strike Fighters the service plans to buy remains 420.

The Corps will eventually fly 280 F-35Bs and 140 F-35Cs, more than doubling the number of F-35Cs included in the 2022 plan, which called for 353 F-35Bs and 67 F-35Cs.

British tabloids made the allegations after reports that the M-346 was being considered as a replacement for aging BAE Hawk T1 jets flown by the U.K.’s Red Arrows display team.

Leonardo worked jointly on the design of a jet trainer with Russian firm Yakovlev from 1993 to 2000 before the team-up was dissolved and each firm went on to produce their own trainers.

That did not stop the UK Sun newspaper reporting the M-346 was “Russian designed” in an article titled “Air Farce” on Monday. The daily quoted James Cartlidge, the defense spokesman for the UK’s Conservative opposition party saying, “When the Red Arrows perform their brilliant air displays, their red, white and blue vapor trails represent the Union Jack — not the Russian tricolor.”

As other tabloids picked up the story, British prime minister Keir Starmer was asked on Monday to guarantee that the Red Arrows’ next jet would not be designed by Russia.

“I can give you that guarantee – it’s very, very important that we don’t have Russian influence in Red Arrows or anything else for that matter,” said.

A spokesman for Starmer said there was no procurement plan in place to replace the Hawks.

Leonardo fought back, claiming, “The M-346 was designed, developed and produced in Europe to the most stringent NATO standards.” The Italian firm pointed out that pilots from around Europe, as well as the U.K., have already trained on the jet in Italy.

Aermacchi, the Italian jet trainer builder later purchased by Leonardo, racked up 300 flights while working on a prototype jet trainer with Russia’s Yakovlev.

But in 2000 the firms ended their collaboration when Yakovlev refused to consider using a U.S. Honeywell engine.

“There was a total disagreement – the Russians would not accept an American engine on a Russian military plane,” said Paolo Mezzanotte, who worked at Aermacchi at the time.

When the firms went their separate ways, Italy built the M-346 while Yakovlev built the Yak-130.

“The Russians went on to copy the Honeywell engine after the split, ironically producing it in Ukraine,” Mezzanotte said.

He said that the outside form of the two aircraft was similar, but the similarities stopped there.

“The manufacturing technology, the general systems, the mission systems, the propulsion and the flight control system on the M-346 is totally different. Italy did acquire the Yakovlev documentation about the plane but then redesigned it completely,” he said.

“Yakovlev had great engineers but their manufacturing at the time was at the level of Italian manufacturing in the 1950s,” he added.

F/A-XX will include new capabilities and technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, Rear Adm. Michael Donnelly said at the Navy League’s Sea Air Space conference. The upgrades will provide more battlespace awareness and improve how naval aviators make decisions.

Those technological advancements could help bring the Navy into a new era where piloted and unmanned aircraft operate more closely together, such as with the Navy’s planned AI-operated drone wingmen, known as collaborative combat aircraft, or larger, unmanned platforms that might come in the future.

“It could be our last tactical manned fighter that we operate out of the Navy,” Donnelly said. “It will actually be at a point where we are more man-on-the-loop than man-in-the-loop, and be the bridge to fully integrating towards the hybrid air wing [combining crewed and uncrewed platforms] in the future, in the 2040s.”

Donnelly said the F/A-XX will allow the Navy to operate in contested environments and outmatch adversaries in ways that surpass the Navy’s current fighters.

“We do that today, but we do it at parity because of the capabilities we have fielded today,” Donnelly said. “So F/A-XX is going to be that next improvement.”

Navy officials would not say when an announcement on F/A-XX would be made, but it could come soon. The Air Force’s counterpart to the Navy’s F/A-XX — the Boeing-made F-47 Next Generation Air Dominance fighter — was announced by President Donald Trump in an Oval Office event March 21. Breaking Defense reported last month that Lockheed Martin had been eliminated from the running for F/A-XX, leaving Boeing and Northrop Grumman as the remaining competitors.

At the Sea Air Space event, Donnelly told reporters that F/A-XX is expected to be able to fly more than 25% farther than Navy’s current fighters before having to top up with a refueling tanker.

The F/A-18 Super Hornet has a combat range of about 1,275 nautical miles, and the carrier-based F-35C Joint Strike Fighter can fly more than 1,200 nautical miles.

“That’s a core attribute of the F/A-XX,” Donnelly told reporters. “It will definitely have longer inherent range, and then with refueling, you could say that’s indefinite, as long as refueling is available.”

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.

As part of the exercise, F-35 aviators assigned to Marine Fighter Attack Squadrons 122, 225 and 311 partnered with four F-22 Raptor crews at the division’s Joint Simulation Environment, or JSE, in Patuxent River, Maryland.

The March 24-27 exercise saw aviators practice fifth generation fighting in 17 simulated combat missions comprising advanced warfighting scenarios, according to division commander Rear Adm. John Dougherty IV. Lessons learned after each mission were assessed via post-training evaluations of cockpit video and audio recordings reviewed by the pilots.

“This milestone is a game-changer that ushers in a new era of interoperability for aviation’s combat community and served as a pivotal exercise getting NAWCAD ready to make this joint training standard for Navy and Air Force fighters,” Dougherty said.

Integrated into the Navy’s TOPGUN program, the JSE is one of the most technologically sophisticated training environments the Defense Department has to offer. It includes “domed simulators with actual defense hardware, software, and adversary aircraft” that allow pilots to sharpen skills in a realistic threat environment, according to the release.

The Defense Department is seeking to expand JSE capabilities and training, meanwhile, across additional warfighter programs, according to NAWCAD.

Current expectations are that the JSE will soon welcome the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, an all-weather, carrier-capable tactical airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft designed to detect incoming airborne threats, such as missiles and enemy aircraft, and conduct ground and maritime surveillance.

Next year, the JSE plans to add the F/A-18 Super Hornet strike fighter and the EA-18G Growler, the release said.

“At the end of the day, it’s going to be the people that win our nation’s wars,” VMFA-225 pilot Maj. Patrick Kaufer said in the release. “Having those person-to-person connections between the Air Force, the Navy and the Marine Corps [in the JSE] is the most important part and biggest objective that we’re able to achieve.”

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.

The fifth-generation F-35A is the Air Force’s premier fighter, which includes stealth capabilities and advanced sensors and can carry a variety of air-to-air and air-to-ground guided weaponry.

The Pentagon previously surged the fighters to the Middle East amid the conflict in Gaza, while trying to contain a full regional war. While there, the fighters conducted airstrikes against the Houthis during the Biden administration’s campaign to reopen shipping lanes.

How Trump’s team flipped on bombing the Houthis

More than two weeks into the Trump administration’s intensified airstrike campaign in Yemen, Hegseth has rushed further military assets to U.S. Central Command. He’s extended the deployment of the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group in the Red Sea and announced the carrier Carl Vinson and its strike group would soon join it. The Pentagon has also sent multiple A-10 Warthogs to the region and at least six B-2 stealth bombers to Navy Support Facility Diego Garcia, a U.S. base in the Indian Ocean.

That means that roughly half of the Air Force’s B-2 fleet that is able to carry out missions is now deployed to Diego Garcia. The Air Force has 20 total B-2 Spirits, but only about 55% of them were mission-capable in 2024, according to service statistics.

At the same time, the U.S. has redirected multiple scarce air defense systems from South Korea to the Middle East, including two Patriot batteries and one Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, battery.

“Secretary Hegseth continues to make clear that, should Iran or its proxies threaten American personnel and interests in the region, the United States will take decisive action to defend our people,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement Tuesday evening.

The posture changes send a clear signal to Iran, the Houthis’ main backer and America’s top adversary in the region. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened Tehran in recent weeks to cut its support for the group or risk American retaliation.

“The choice for the Houthis is clear: Stop shooting at U.S. ships, and we will stop shooting at you. Otherwise, we have only just begun, and the real pain is yet to come, for both the Houthis and their sponsors in Iran,” Trump posted on his Truth Social app on Monday.

The Houthis have been one of the most resilient parts of Iran’s regional proxy network, badly damaged after attacks from Israel over the last year.

Shortly after Israel’s war in Gaza began in the fall of 2023, the group began targeting commercial ships transiting the Red Sea with missiles and aerial drones. The Houthis continued those attacks despite repeated American strikes and a U.S.-led coalition launched to protect global maritime trade, which eventually rerouted elsewhere.

Still, despite two weeks of renewed U.S. strikes on Houthi sites across Yemen — hitting over 100 command posts, stockpiles, launch sites and even leaders — the group has not backed down and commercial shipping companies have not returned to the Red Sea.

Editor’s note: After publication of this story, an Air Force official called to inform Defense News that the country previously said to be hosting the fighters was incorrect. The official shared the true location, which is left out due to its sensitivity. The story has been updated to reflect the information.

The official notice of the sale follows U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s trip to the Philippines last week, and it comes ahead of the annual Balikatan exercises, a joint military drill between the long-time treaty allies.

Hegseth’s visit came amid the U.S.’s growing tension with China and as part of what experts and geopolitical watchers describe as Washington’s pivot to Asia. During the visit, Hegseth said Washington plans to “re-establish deterrence” and strengthen its allies in the region.

The proposed aircraft sale to the Philippines will be “helping to improve the security of a strategic partner that continues to be an important force for political stability, peace, and economic progress in Southeast Asia,” the Defense Security Cooperation Agency stated.

The package includes 16 F-16C Block 70/72 aircraft and 4 F-16D Block 70/72 aircraft, which will be fully equipped with 88 LAU-129 guided missile launchers, 22 M61A1 anti-craft guns with 20 installed upon delivery, 12 AN/AAQ-33 sniper advanced targeting pods, radio systems, AESA radars, and navigational devices.

The package also includes: 112 advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles (AMRAAMs) or AIM-120C-8 or equivalent missiles; 36 guided bomb units; 40 AIM-9X Block II Sidewinder missiles with 32 AIM-9X Block II Sidewinder Captive Air Training Missiles (CATMs); 60 MK-84 2,000-lb general-purpose bombs; and 30 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) KMU-572 tail kits for GBU-38 or Laser JDAM GBU-54.

The State Department indicated that offset agreements will be “defined in negotiations between the purchaser and the contractor.”

Lockheed Martin is the principal contractor for the package.

The Philippines has had no frontline fighter jets since it retired its fleet of Northrop F-5 A/Bs in 2005. Negotiations to refresh its fleet hark back to the 1990s, but negotiations did not materialize.

In 2021, the State Department approved the sale of 10 F-16C Block 70/72 and 2 F-16D Block 70/72 aircraft in a $2.43 billion package which did not come through as the Philippines had only earmarked $1.1 billion for the acquisition.

Last year, Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said the country plans to acquire 40 fighter jets as part of the new Horizon 3, the final phase in a massive push to modernize the military.

President Ferdinand Marcos approved the new Horizon 3 under a 1.89 trillion pesos ($33.6 billion) budget, which will be subject to congressional approval in the next ten years.

Also during last year’s budget deliberations, Teodoro told reporters that the department solicits offers with flexible and spread-out financing terms for the 40 jets, adding the military is allotting as much as 400 billion pesos ($6.9 billion) for the acquisition.

The Philippine government has yet to decide on its chosen fighter jets, which is expected to boost its Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept, an external defense strategy to protect Philippine territories including its exclusive economic zones in what the Philippine government calls the West Philippine Sea.

“The P-1 is is one of the possible options available,” Italian Air Force chief Luca Goretti told reporters on Friday when asked how Italy aimed to fill gaps in its maritime patrol capability.

“We have a great relationship with Japan,” he added.

A four engine platform designed from scratch as a maritime patrol aircraft, the P-1 has been in service in Japan since 2013. While export efforts to date have not been successful, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force now operates 33 aircraft.

As Italy retired the last of its long serving Atlantique maritime patrol planes in 2017 it acquired ATR 72′s jointly built by Airbus and local firm Leonardo to fill the role, operated by mixed Air Force and Navy crews.

But while offering electronically scanned radar, the aircraft lacked anti-submarine warfare capabilities and were only considered a gap filler.

A new purchase to fill that gap would coincide with renewed naval activity in the Mediterranean by friendly and hostile powers.

Acquiring the P-1 instead of the US P-8 aircraft would follow years in which Italy has looked to the U.S. for imported aircraft including B767 tankers, C-130s, Gulfstream sensor aircraft, F-35s and Reaper drones.

Italy has recently boosted ties with Japan as the two countries team with the U.K. on the GCAP sixth-generation fighter program.

In 2023, Leonardo also pitched its M-346 jet trainer to Japan to replace Tokyo’s Kawasaki T-4 trainers after Japanese pilots were dispatched to train on the M-346 in Italy.

In an address to the Italian parliament about the GCAP program on March 13, Air Force chief Goretti said working with Japan on the sixth-generation jet was prompting discussion about other possible team-ups.

“Right now there is an Italian delegation in Japan because there are other chances for growth with (Japan) including the development of a trainer for them as well as a joint patrol aircraft,” he said. “Our collaboration has opened other horizons which were unthinkable until very recently,” he added.

Goretti’s suggestion of an Italian jet trainer deal with Japan and a Japanese patrol aircraft deal with Italy hinted at a possible trade-off which recalls how Italy sold the M-346 to Israel in 2012 in return for buying Israeli sensor-laden Gulfstreams and an Israeli surveillance satellite.

In his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Troy Meink, who previously served as the deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, also told lawmakers the department needs to act faster to innovate its weapon systems and streamline its acquisition systems.

The Air Force is working on replacing its arsenal of about 450 50-year-old Minuteman III nuclear missiles — the land-based portion of the nation’s nuclear triad — with a new Northrop Grumman-made ICBM called the LGM-35A Sentinel.

But Sentinel’s projected future costs increased dramatically from what Northrop and the Air Force originally expected, triggering a cost overrun process called a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach. The Air Force launched a review of the program to find ways to bring its costs down, which concluded Sentinel is essential and cannot be canceled.

Meink told lawmakers that if confirmed, he planned to review the results of the Sentinel Nunn McCurdy breach study. He also intends to continue overseeing the B-21 Raider stealth bomber program, which will be a key portion of the nation’s air-based segment of the nuclear triad.

Michael Duffey, the administration’s nominee for undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, called nuclear modernization the “backbone” of the nation’s strategic deterrent in Thursday’s hearing.

“Ensuring that we have a modern, capable nuclear enterprise that not only includes the B-21 — which is a successful acquisition program, by all accounts — but the Columbia-class submarine and the Sentinel nuclear ICBM are critical,” Duffey said, referring to the U.S. Navy’s next-generation nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine.

He pledged to work with the National Nuclear Security Administration and lawmakers to ensure the nation keeps high-quality systems needed for the safe and secure use of nuclear weapons.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, raised concerns that the Air Force won’t have the budget necessary to carry out its conventional missions while also being on the hook to fund two simultaneous nuclear modernizations.

Meink said the Air Force is now in a historically unique situation as it is conducting modernization programs across all of its core mission areas, including the nuclear upgrades.

“Those systems are pretty expensive,” Meink said.

If confirmed, Meink said, one of his first priorities will be to review all the service’s modernization efforts and readiness needs and see what additional resources it might need to pay for those. Meink plans to come back to Congress with that information to further discuss what needs to be done.

Cotton also pressed Meink on the service’s longstanding pilot shortage, which he said is now about 1,800 pilots.

Meink — who served in the Air Force as a KC-135 Stratotanker navigator — promised to look at how to fix that years-long problem. The solution is not just a matter of raising pilots’ pay, he said, but looking for ways to improve their quality of service and ensure they get enough time flying the jets that are their passion.

“We’ve got to make sure — not just with pilots, but across our highlight skilled areas within our workforce — that they have the opportunity to do what they’ve been trained, what they love to do,” Meink said. “Since I was a navigator, we’ve always struggled with maintaining pilot levels. It is much larger than just the funding.”

The Next Tactical Aviation Capability Set or nTACS project will provide a joint capability to be fielded by the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Canadian Army, and Canadian special forces.

In addition, Canada is also planning an upgrade of its existing fleet of Chinook heavy lift helicopters, according to a Feb. 25, 2025, briefing on Canada’s vertical lift capabilities.

The document noted that Canada will spend $12.9 billion (CA $18.4 billion) on new tactical helicopters. The briefing was prepared by RCAF Brig. Gen. Brendan Cook, director general of air and space force development, and provided to Defense News by the Department of National Defence.

The briefing pointed out that the nTACS project is in the options analysis phase but that discussions with industry are expected to begin sometime this summer.

Department of National Defence spokesman Kened Sadiku told Defense News that the exact timing for soliciting industry bids was still up in the air.

But the briefing noted that initial operating capability for nTACS would be expected in 2033.

The new fleet would replace the existing CH-146 Griffon helicopter fleet. But it would provide even more by revitalizing Canadian tactical aviation capabilities to “address capability gaps in Firepower, C4ISR, Mobility, and Support to Special Operations Forces,” according to Cook’s briefing package, compiled for use in industry presentations.

The project would provide a “return to a balanced fleet concept,” the briefing added.

Sadiku did not provide further details on the breakdown of the estimated cost or where the nTACS helicopters will be based in Canada. Such details will be covered in the options analysis which is expected to be completed in the next several months.

“This will consider the possible market options for nTACS, their platform capabilities, and this will then inform basing decisions,” Sadiku noted.

The Canadian Armed Forces currently operates 82 CH-146 Griffon helicopters. That helicopter is a variant of the Bell 412EP.

Canada also operates 14 CH-147F Chinook medium to heavy lift helicopters. Cook’s briefing deck noted that a mid-life block upgrade project is planned for that helicopter. Initial operating capability would be in 2032 with full operating capability in 2033.

No cost estimates or further details were provided for that upgrade.

Meanwhile, the Royal Canadian Air Force is in the midst of receiving modernized CH-146s to extend the fleet’s service life.

In May 2022 the Canadian government awarded Bell Textron Canada Limited of Mirabel, Quebec, a contract worth $560 million (CAN $800 million) for the work.

The project is replacing a number of the aircraft’s avionics systems, including communications radios and cryptographic equipment, cockpit voice and flight recorders, navigation systems, automatic flight control systems, and control display units, according to the Canadian military.

Engines will also be upgraded and sensor systems will be integrated. The upgrade will allow the fleet to continue flying until at least 2031.

Full operational capability for the modernized helicopter fleet is set for 2027.

Bell Textron Canada Limited announced last June that it had completed first successful flight of one of the modernized CH-146 Griffon helicopters. The first upgraded Griffon completed is expected to be delivered to the Canadian government in 2026 pending military certification, according to the government.

Danish Chief of Defence Gen. Michael Hyldgaard has recommended Denmark become a partner in the six-nation Multinational Multi-Role Tanker Transport Fleet, initially through the purchase of flight hours for air refueling, followed by negotiations to buy a share in the pool equivalent to two refueling aircraft, the Ministry of Defence said on March 25.

Aerial refueling is one of several critical defense enablers where Europe partly relies on U.S. capacities, a dependency that appears increasingly risky as the American government disengages from Europe. The stakes may be even higher for Denmark, as U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory.

The Danish air force operates F-16 and F-35 fighter jets.

The tanker capacity will strengthen the air defense of Denmark and “increase the fighting power of the Danish defense, including our national operational needs,” Danish Minister of Defence Troels Lund Poulsen said. “For example, air refueling capacity creates the precondition for operations with combat aircraft in the Arctic and the North Atlantic.”

The Danish government in February agreed to allocate an additional 50 billion kroner to defense over the coming two years, boosting defense spending to more than 3% of GDP in 2025 and 2026.

The multinational tanker fleet consists of nine MRTT aircraft, owned and managed by NATO, pooling the resources of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Norway, Belgium and Czechia. The six European countries have one more tanker on order for delivery in 2026.

Poelsen said “there is good potential for Nordic cooperation in the field” of air refueling.

The fleet is operated from Eindhoven in the Netherlands, with aircraft also stationed in Cologne, Germany, both around 460 kilometers southwest of the Danish border. The joint tanker fleet was first proposed in 2012, and initiated by the European Defence Agency to address what NATO calls a “long-standing shortfall” in European air-to-air refueling capacity.

The Airbus A330 MRTT is a multirole aircraft that in addition to carrying 110 metric tons of kerosene can also be used to transport passengers or cargo, with a 45-ton payload capacity. The aircraft can use a boom to refuel aircraft including the F-16 and F-35, and a probe and drogue system for Eurofighter, Tornado, F-18, Gripen and Rafale.

Germany is the biggest user of the joint tanker fleet in terms of flight hours, ahead of Belgium and the Netherlands. The fleet started with the Netherlands and Luxembourg jointly buying two A330 MRTTs in 2016, with five additional aircraft ordered in 2017 after Germany and Norway joined the project, with additional tankers ordered in following years after Belgium and Czechia joined.

In addition to the six-nation pool, the other A330 MRTT operators in Europe are France with a fleet of 12 of the aircraft and three more on order, and the U.K. with 14 tankers, according to Airbus data at the end of February.

Denmark’s chief of defense also proposes to invest around 4.7 billion kroner in the 2025-2033 period to accelerate the buildup of the Army’s 1st Brigade into a heavy brigade by three to five years, with the construction of two infantry companies, a tactical drone section, a mechanical engineering company and off-road trucks.

Denmark said it established an air-defense wing at the Flyvestation Skalstrup military facility, ahead of the acquisition of ground-based air defenses, according to a separate statement on Wednesday. The country officially decommissioned the air defense units operating Hawk missile systems there in 2005.

The government said it will look for an interim air-defense solution that can be delivered as early as this year or next year, and pick the system for a permanent solution this year, with a target to finalize the contract by the end of 2025.

Denmark earlier this month shortlisted the French-Italian SAMP/T and the U.S. Patriot system to cover the high end of the threat spectrum in its planned purchase of air defense systems, while MBDA’s VL MICA system, Kongsberg’s NASAMS, the IRIS-T SLM from Diehl Defence and the U.S. IFPC. are in competition for the lower end.

The sixth-generation fighter, which will replace the F-22 Raptor, will be designated the F-47, Trump said. It will have “state-of-the-art stealth technologies [making it] virtually unseeable,” and will fly alongside multiple autonomous drone wingmen, known as collaborative combat aircraft.

“It’s something the likes of which nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said in an Oval Office announcement with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin and Lt. Gen. Dale White, the Air Force’s military deputy for acquisition, technology and logistics. “In terms of all the attributes of a fighter jet, there’s never been anything even close to it, from speed to maneuverability to what it can have [as] payload. And this has been in the works for a long period of time.”

“America’s enemies will never see it coming,” he continued.

Allvin said in a statement the F-47 will be “the most advanced, lethal and adaptable fighter ever developed.”

“We are not just building another fighter,” Allvin said. “We are shaping the future of warfare and putting our enemies on notice.”

The competition for NGAD was between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, after Northrop Grumman announced in 2023 that it would not compete for the program as a prime contractor.

“We recognize the importance of designing, building a sixth-generation fighter capability for the United States Air Force,” Steve Parker, the interim president and chief executive of Boeing Defense, Space and Security, said in a release. “In preparation for this mission, we made the most significant investment in the history of our defense business, and we are ready to provide the most advanced and innovative NGAD aircraft needed to support the mission.”

Lockheed Martin said in a statement that it is disappointed by the result of the NGAD competition but is “confident we delivered a competitive solution.”

Lockheed did not say whether it was considering a protest of the award.

“We will await further discussions with the U.S. Air Force on any next steps,” the company said.

The F-47 will be the heart of the NGAD concept’s “family of systems,” which also includes collaborative combat aircraft and cutting-edge sensors, weaponry and other technology that will allow it to better connect with satellites and other aircraft. Air Force officials have consistently said NGAD will be necessary to counter an advanced adversary, such as China.

General Atomics and Anduril are building their own CCA candidates — the RFQ-42A and RFQ-44A, respectively — to be the first iteration of drone wingmen flying alongside the F-35 or F-47. Subsequent generations are on their way. The Air Force wants CCAs to be relatively cheap, piloted with autonomous software and have the ability conduct recon, strike missions, electronic warfare and decoy missions.

They are also expected to have advanced adaptive engines, dubbed NGAP or next-generation adaptive propulsion, that shift to the best configuration for any given situation for the best thrust and efficiency. General Electric Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney are in the running to build NGAP.

Boeing’s victory will likely help strengthen the defense industrial base, said Doug Birkey, executive director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. It means all three of the U.S. military’s prime aerospace contractors now have deals to build fifth- or sixth-generation stealth penetrating aircraft. Lockheed builds the fifth-generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and Northrop has touted its B-21 Raider as the world’s first sixth-generation plane.

“For the country, that’s a really important thing, to have that innovation, that competition and frankly, the volume production,” Birkey said. “Our ability to turn stuff en masse — which is what the future world is going to require — has been limited, and we need to rebuild the defense industrial base that the current environment demands. We’ve been slow to get there. This is an important step in rounding that corner.”

But Boeing has struggled company-wide in recent years on both civilian and military aircraft. Nearly 350 people died in a pair of crashes of the company’s 737 Max airliners, and last July, the company agreed to a plea deal with the Justice Department to avoid a felony fraud trial related to the crashes. The door plug of another 737 Max blew out in midair in January 2024, and videos from the harrowing scene went viral. Boeing’s machinists also went on strike for nearly two months last year amid a contract dispute.

The aerospace giant’s T-7A Red Hawk trainer, KC-46A Pegasus tanker and Air Force One programs have struggled with quality problems and delays, and the company has lost billions of dollars in cost overruns. In September 2024, Boeing fired the head of its defense sector, Ted Colbert, amid steep losses.

Amid that turmoil, Birkey said, this was an important win for Boeing — and now the company must show it can produce.

“It’s up to Boeing to make this opportunity a win,” Birkey said. “Only time will tell on that.”

The engineering and manufacturing development contract awarded Friday is structured as a cost-plus incentive fee deal, an Air Force official said. Under such a deal, the government pays the contractor to cover expenses as it develops a system, and the contractor also receives a fee that can be adjusted based on how well it performs. That is the same structure used for the early development of Northrop Grumman’s B-21 Raider stealth bomber.

Under this contract, the official said, Boeing will mature, integrate and test all parts of the NGAD crewed fighter, and it will produce a handful of test aircraft.

Boeing’s contract also includes “competitively priced” options for building low-rate initial production models of the F-47, the Air Force said.

Allvin said in a statement Friday that experimental versions of the NGAD have been flying for the last five years, “flying hundreds of hours, testing cutting-edge concepts and proving that we can push the envelope of technology with confidence.”

Allvin said the significant advance experimentation and work on the F-47 will allow the service to fly the jet by the end of Trump’s administration. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency helped conduct the early experimentation to refine NGAD, the Air Force said.

“The F-47 has unprecedented maturity,” Allvin said. “While the F-22 is currently the finest air superiority fighter in the world, and its modernization will make it even better, the F-47 is a generational leap forward. The maturity of the aircraft at this phase in the program confirms its readiness to dominate the future fight.”

Allvin also scoffed at China’s claims last December to have test flown its own sixth-generation fighter, the J-36.

“Despite what our adversaries claim, the F-47 is truly the world’s first crewed sixth-generation fighter, built to dominate the most capable peer adversary and operate in the most perilous threat environments imaginable,” Allvin said. “While our X-planes were flying in the shadows, we were cementing our air dominance — accelerating the technology, refining our operational concepts, and proving that we can field this capability faster than ever before.”

Allvin said the F-47 would cost less than the F-22 and “be more adaptable to future threats.” The Air Force will have more NGAD fighters in its fleet than Raptors, he added. The Air Force now has about 180 F-22s, which cost $143 million apiece.

Trump declined to disclose the price of NGAD, saying that would reveal some of the jet’s highly classified technology and size. But the Air Force expects to spend $20 billion on NGAD between 2025 and 2029.

The price of NGAD has presented a major vulnerability to the program, one which placed it in jeopardy last year. Former Air Force Sec. Frank Kendall paused the program in May 2024 after cost estimates came in around triple that of the F-35, or as much as $300 million per tail.

The pause was needed, Kendall said, to reconsider whether NGAD was the right concept and look for ways to bring its costs down through a redesign. A review of the program concluded that NGAD was necessary, but after the presidential election, Kendall chose to leave the final decision on how to proceed to the incoming Trump administration.

The Air Force said decisions on basing the F-47 and other program elements will be made in years to come, as the fighter comes closer to becoming operational.

Trump also left the door open to selling versions of NGAD to allies — though he said those might be “toned-down” versions.

“Because someday, maybe they’re not our allies, right?” Trump said.

This year’s summer program was notable for two reasons.

Firstly, the Air Force utilized a new aircraft platform – in addition to usual Lockheed Martin LC-130H Hercules “skibirds” and Boeing C-17A Globemaster IIIs – to fly to one of the world’s most remote spots.

Lt. Col. Jack Smith, Commander of the 304th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, Antarctic Operations, explained to Defense News why these C-130Hs of the Nevada Air National Guard put in an appearance, performing around ten missions to the frozen continent.

“There’s a C-17 gap season, from about the 5th of December through the third week of January, where we don’t operate because the runway gets too soft,” he said. “But the C-130 can start operating earlier because they’re smaller and lighter, so that they have an option to move passengers north and south during those gap periods.”

While the C-17 can carry much more cargo, Smith explained the C-130Hs out of Reno are cheaper to operate too. “It’s a small airplane, less fuel.” They are also more efficient than the LC-130, the world’s largest ski-equipped aircraft. In fact, that plane’s skis so badly affect aircraft aerodynamics that they consume 25% more fuel compared to a C-130H.

The second new aspect to this year’s Operation Deep Freeze – the name given to Antarctic support operations that started in 1955 – was the effort to rebuild a pier at McMurdo Station where ships offload cargo and supplies. This saw the C-17s carrying heavy cargo such as cranes and big drilling rigs, explained Smith.

Navy Seabees are in charge of rebuilding this vital pier, which previously shattered in half and will take two years to construct. Bulk supplies and fuel arrive by icebreaker ships. Last year the U.S. moved 90 million pounds of cargo to the continent, of which 85 million arrived by sea.

Air Force aircraft brave harsh conditions to fly personnel, equipment and supplies to Antarctica. Describing the challenges of flying in this frigid environment, Smith said the weather was definitely the biggest headache. Conditions at McMurdo can change rapidly, or an aircraft may develop technical hitches.

This results in “boomerangs”, where an aircraft in midflight returns to Christchurch. “They reach a point, we call it a point of safe return, you get to that point and you have to make a decision based on the weather forecast,” Smith said.

The summer season lasts from the start of October through to early March. Smith explained, “So the LC-130s will be here pretty much that whole time operating, and they’re mostly doing intra-theater airlift,” shuttling between McMurdo Station and other ski ways in the south. Meanwhile, Smith said of the C-17s, “Our focus is Christchurch to and from McMurdo.”

He said there can also be communication challenges. “HF [high-frequency] radios may or may not work once you get pretty far south. So radio issues, getting weather forecast updates, sometimes can be a challenge.” Spatial disorientation is also possible if pilots cannot identify the horizon.

The only airfield where the heavy C-17s can land at is Phoenix at McMurdo, this being made from compacted ice. However, is landing and taking off on an ice runway challenging? “It’s not that different, to be honest,” Smith said. “It’s similar to a wet runway – so if the runway here in Christchurch is wet, that’s pretty similar to what we experience at Phoenix.”

Occasionally the aircraft might airdrop emergency supplies to the South Pole, but that did not happen on the summer rotation just completed.

A Hercules takes around 8 hours to reach Antarctica, compared to 5 hours for a C-17. Therefore, an average Globemaster mission to Antarctica and back is 16-18 hours. A typical C-17A flight crew is four pilots, four loadmasters and two flying crew chiefs. Smith said these flights also help upgrade and qualify crews.

C-17s performed 24 missions in October-November 2024, plus another eight in early 2025. One aircraft will also return to New Zealand do a couple of midwinter missions in August, when darkness rules in the deep south. At the peak, 5-8 Air Force flights south occur per week, including the Hercules.

Smith’s squadron is part of the 62nd Airlift Wing stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash. The formation, and the LC-130s and C-130Hs, fall under jurisdiction of the Hickam, Hawaii-based Joint Task Force - Support Forces Antarctica while supporting Operation Deep Freeze.

Smith commanded 38 personnel on the C-17A side of the operation this year. The Air Force only selects qualified instructor pilots and instructor loadmasters for these missions. “We want people who are already pretty experienced with C-17 operations, and then we allow home station squadrons to nominate who they send.”

Because so many personnel wish to participate, it is regarded as a commander’s incentive program. “They use it as kind of a reward to their top performers within their squadrons back home. So we build a team out of all the high performers each rotation from back at McChord. So it makes my job easy – I have a bunch of really, really talented folks working out here,” Smith enthused.

The New York Air National Guard’s ten ski-equipped LC-130H Hercules are getting long in the tooth, and a replacement is needed. According to an Air Force source, the replacement will likely be based on the C-130J. However, regular Air Force C-130Js cannot fly to Antarctica because American models do not possess wing fuel tanks.

New Zealand is not restricted in this way. The country’s air force has already flown its new C-130J-30s to Antarctica, because these have a longer-range fuel capacity thanks to wing tanks.

The Pentagon may be changing priorities for the military, but there is little chance of the Air Force’s role in Operation Deep Freeze being affected.

For scientists working in Antarctica, there is absolutely no other way of getting urgent supplies. This was illustrated when Smith, in one of the final flights of the season, captained an emergency C-17 mission to medically evacuate someone from McMurdo.

Officials from both governments signed the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement in 2021, and it took effect the following year. Despite recent tensions between the Trump administration and European nations, the pact between the two countries remains alive and is thriving, Norwegian State Secretary Andreas Flåm told Defense News.

“Norway and the U.S. have enjoyed close defense cooperation for more than 75 years, both bilaterally and within NATO – the SDCA remains an important framework for further developing bilateral defense cooperation,” he said.

Under the agreement, U.S. forces and contractors have “unimpeded” access to a total of 12 agreed Norwegian areas, which involve key military sites such as the Evenes and Sola air stations as well as the Ramsund Naval Station.

The designated facilities are to be used in part for training, maneuvers, transits, refueling of aircraft, bunkering of vessels, contingency operations, landing and recovery of aircraft, and staging or deploying forces and materiel.

Another site included is the Rygge airport, where some of Norway’s F-35s are kept. In 2023, the Norwegian Ministry of Defense revealed that Washington was investing $188 million into the expansion of the air station to build four fighter hangars, and warehouses, increase capacity for ammunition storage and fenced parts around it with a patrol road.

Flåm says infrastructure plans are moving forward and expects the first contract to be announced this summer.

Earlier this month, Norway received three new F-35A aircraft, marking the delivery of 49 fighters, with the remaining three planned to be shipped before the summer time.

In recent weeks, defense experts and lawmakers have voiced concerns over the possibility that the U.S. could block allies from using or maintaining their F-35 fleets. These worries came about after President Trump appeared to be increasingly aligned with Russia and has repeatedly threatened to annex both Canada and Greenland.

Norwegian officials, for their part, are not fearing a freeze in relations.

“The F-35 is a vital component of our national defense capability, the cooperation and dialogue with the U.S. continue to support the development and use of this high-end platform – we expect this to continue into the future,” Flåm said.

The bombers were taking part in a task force mission dubbed Viking Nebula, alongside a pair of Swedish JAS 39 Gripens. The Swedish fighters escorted the B-52s to Vidsel Test Range, where the bombers released GBU-30 joint direct attack munitions.

Joint terminal attack controllers from both the U.S. and Swedish militaries were on the ground supporting the drops, the Air Force said, and helped the forces practice how air and ground units work together with one another to deliver precision strikes.

Vidsel is located about 580 miles north of Stockholm, and is the largest land proving ground in Europe. The Air Force said this was the B-52s’ first live weapons drop in Sweden since the country joined NATO last year.

The B-52s and their crew are deployed to RAF Fairford in England as part of the 69th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron’s Bomber Task Force 25-2 deployment.

That expeditionary squadron, which contains four B-52s, air crew and other airmen needed to support the bombers, deployed from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota in February to train alongside NATO allies and partners in the region. Viking Nebula was the 11th operation this bomber task force completed.

And on Friday, a B-52 that is also part of the bomber task force conducted a low pass over Oslo, Norway as part of a mission dubbed Tower Blockhouse. That B-52 was escorted by two Norwegian F-35 fighters.

The Air Force regularly rotates B-52s through Europe on temporary deployments — as part of bomber task forces — to deter Russian aggression and show U.S. commitment to NATO’s collective defense and Europe’s regional security.

But this task force comes as the war in Ukraine, the largest conflict in Europe since the end of World War II, grinds into its fourth year. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine alarmed much of Europe, and prompted Sweden to cast off its traditionally neutral stance toward conflicts and seek NATO membership.

President Donald Trump has upended the U.S.’ long-established support of NATO, casting doubt on the value of the longstanding alliance and publicly suggesting America may not come to the defense of NATO members he feels are not spending enough on their own defense.

Col. Corey Klopstein, program executive officer for Operational Test and Training Infrastructure at Space Systems Command, said his team started discussions last year with the Air Force’s Advanced Training Capabilities Division about how the Space Force could be involved with the effort, known as the Joint Simulation Environment. The Space Force has since joined the JSE user group and is working with the program office to find ways to bring space capabilities into the simulation environment and eventually develop an advanced test and training capability of its own.

“The Space Force needs to provide space effects to the joint warfighter to ensure the joint warfighter can validate in their training events and their exercises, whether or not they’re going to be effective,” Klopstein said March 5 at the Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. “The Space Force also needs a high-fidelity environment to be able to validate not just our system performance in the threat environment that we anticipate, but also our tactics, and validate our tactics.”

The JSE is typically associated with the F-35 because the Navy and Air Force developed it as a high-end test capability for the advanced fighter jet. Though there’s currently just one JSE system located at Patuxent Naval Air Station in Maryland, the program is weeks away from flipping the switch at a second site at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada and plans to eventually host the capability at all of its F-35 bases.

As the services expand their JSE footprint, the goal is for the system to become the premier combat training environment for U.S. and coalition partners. As part of that process, they’re working with the Space Force to integrate simulated space capabilities and scenarios into the environment to help make training more representative. That could include things like space-enabled electronic warfare, navigation or communications.

Klopstein described that work as “ongoing,” noting that the Space Force is funding an effort to develop standards and specifications to bring those capabilities to the JSE.

Longer term, the Space Force is crafting a plan for an advanced simulation capability of its own. The service has training devices, but for the most part they’re not interconnected, meaning that guardians assigned to different missions can’t train together.

Klopstein said the Space Force is in the process of creating distributed — or cross-mission — and high-end training systems. On the distributed side, it has been using a system called Swarm for large, tactical training exercises like Space Flag.

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Realistic simulation is also key for the Space Force’s testing enterprise, which relies heavily on virtual systems to validate that satellites and other space capabilities work as envisioned. Unlike the other services that can test their ships on the water or their aircraft in flight, the Space Force can’t validate most of its systems in the space environment, which makes the quality of its ground-based testing infrastructure even more important.

Klopstein stressed that as space becomes more congested and adversaries increase their threats against U.S. systems, the service needs an advanced simulation capability that factors in a changing space environment.

“We’ve got to make sure that our systems can survive in a threat environment that we haven’t had to consider in the past,” he said. “Gathering quantitative data that is representative of our systems that gives us the confidence level that the systems can perform in this threat environment is something that we’ve got to do going forward.”

The service hasn’t decided what a JSE for space could look like and hasn’t announced any specific timeline in that regard, but Klopstein said the service wants to learn from the Air Force’s work on the program and carry those learnings into a future system.

“The partnership that we’ve started ... is only going to continue to broaden going forward,” he said. “We are looking to be able to prototype and partner with [the Air Force] to leverage that work that’s been done and potentially build out the Space Force synthetic and high-fidelity training environment that we need.”

“It’s in the interest of all of us to make sure that the F-35 program remains operational, that it remains as successful as it is right now, and I don’t see any signs of the United States backtracking,” Brekelmans said in a press briefing at the Paris Defence and Strategy Forum on Tuesday, in response to a question citing concerns the U.S. could remotely ground aircraft operated by allies.

“So, I don’t think we should speculate on this,” he added.

Some European researchers and lawmakers expressed concern in recent weeks that America might block allies from using their F-35s, as U.S. President Donald Trump appears to increasingly align with Russia and has threatened to annex Canada and Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark.

European F-35 operators collaborate with the U.S. to prepare the mission data files critical to operating the jet, and many rely on a U.S.-hosted cloud-based software system for maintenance and updates.

The Netherlands as of September had received 40 F-35s out of 52 ordered. That same month, the Dutch announced plans to buy another six of the jets and officially retired their fleet of F-16s.

Defense bill for 2025 would delay F-35 deliveries

Brekelmans pointed out that the F-35 program relies on parts from partner countries, echoing an argument made by Belgian Minister of Defence Theo Francken in a television interview Monday.

Francken dismissed comments about a hypothetical F-35 “kill switch” as “scaremongering stories,” also saying that if the U.S. would stop supplying parts, that would “immediately completely shut down” the business of the entire U.S. defense industry in Europe.

The U.S. is the “biggest partner, and we need to have them on board in order to have a successful F-35 program, but other countries also play a key role,” Brekelmans said, noting the stealth jet has some “essential parts that only we produce.”

“In the end, it is good also for the strength of the United States and for NATO and all of us that we have the most modern air force in the world,” the Dutch minister said. “That means we should all be fully committed. And so far, that’s what I also see from the partners in the F-35 program.”

Lockheed Martin said in a statement last week that the company delivers “all system infrastructure and data required for all F-35 customers to sustain the aircraft.”

The F-35 capabilities against Russian air defenses cannot currently be replaced or replicated with other platforms, Justin Bronk, senior research fellow for air power at the U.K.’s Royal United Services Institute, wrote in a social media post on Monday.

“On the F-35 fears, I get it — there is real dependency,” Bronk said. He added, however, that if countries rely on the U.S. for targeting capacity — beyond line-of-sight communications, ISR and munitions to fight a war — then dependency on the U.S. for mission data files and software “isn’t your main problem.”

Norway earlier this month received three more F-35 aircraft, bringing its fleet to 49 jets out of 52 the country has ordered. Denmark has received 17 fighters out of 27 ordered. Belgium has been less advanced in building up its fleet, receiving its first F-35 in December, with a total of 34 on order. Poland, meanwhile, started training on its first F-35s in February.

The Netherlands continues to see the U.S. as a reliable NATO ally, but the Americans expect European countries to step up and “do much more” on defense, according to Brekelmans.

”They do not expect burden sharing, they do expect burden shifting,” Brekelmans said. “We should take that message seriously, but we should not speculate on any further steps that the United States is taking because we simply cannot guarantee our security without the U.S. at this moment. That is the reality that we have to work with.”

Brekelmans added that the Netherlands is prepared to “seriously talk” about sending troops to Ukraine to safeguard any peace agreement with Russia. The minister said he doesn’t believe a U.S. backstop is off the table, even if there will be no American boots on the ground.

“There are also other ways in which you can provide a backstop,” Brekelmans said. “And it’s not only nuclear. In this escalation ladder, there are many steps in between, and we need to make sure that we create those steps.”

Any mission in Ukraine would need to be clearly defined and have “robust military capabilities” to realize the defined goal, Brekelmans added.

The Dutch minister said “it’s very good” that French President Emmanuel Macron last week floated the idea of expanding the French nuclear deterrent to European allies. With China investing in nuclear capabilities and Russia issuing nuclear threats, “we also need to have this conversation,” he said.

“These conversations are very much in early phases and exchange of statements and ideas,” Brekelmans added. “It’s not [like] right now ... with ministers of defense, that we have sessions about nuclear capabilities or something.”

As part of this year’s bigger budget discussion, the Dutch government will assess whether to raise defense spending above 2% of its GDP, according to Brekelmans. An additional percentage point would mean an additional €10 billion to €12 billion of spending, which “for the Netherlands is a serious amount of money.”

The biggest capacity shortages for the Netherlands are in the land forces, and while the Dutch government is planning to buy tanks, “the number we invest is relatively low,” Brekelmans said. “We need to make sure that our land forces become bigger and stronger, with more heavy equipment and heavier weapon systems.”

The war in Ukraine has shown that Dutch Army battalions and brigades need to be able to keep up the fight longer than three months, which means investing in enablers such as supply chain, logistics and medical equipment will be a priority, the minister said. Air defense will be another focus.

“We need to make sure we have more air defense systems, more missiles, more of everything.”

Defense News reporter Stephen Losey contributed to this report.

As a result, the NTSB is recommending helicopter flights be immediately prohibited on “Route 4″ — where the fatal crash occurred — between Hains Point and the Wilson Bridge along the Potomac River when planes are landing or taking off on runways 15 and 33 at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA).

The board is also recommending an alternative helicopter route between Hains Point and the Wilson Bridge when that segment of Route 4 is not open to rotary-wing traffic.

The on-scene investigation of the collision between the American Airlines flight from Wichita, Kansas, and a UH-60 Black Hawk over the Potomac River concluded Feb. 14

When the aircraft collided, the fuselage of the commercial jet broke apart in three places and was discovered inverted in waist-deep water in the Potomac. The helicopter wreckage was found nearby. All 64 people aboard the passenger jet and all three Army crew members aboard the Black Hawk — Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, Cpt. Rebecca M. Lobach and Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara — were killed.

Meanwhile, the investigation continues off-site in various labs and other secure locations, according to Jennifer Homendy, NTSB chair. The preliminary report lays out what happened but not how or why the crash happened, Homendy said in a briefing Tuesday.

“For this investigation, we’re reviewing airport operations and prior incidents, including near midair collision events,” Homendy said, using information from voluntary safety reporting programs and the Federal Aviation Administration.

That data shows that from 2011 through 2024, a “vast majority” of reported incidents occurred on approach to landing, and initial analysis found that at least one Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System, or TCAS, Resolution Advisory was triggered per month at DCA due to a helicopter’s proximity, Homendy said.

Unlike traffic advisories, which are issued when an intruding aircraft is about 20 seconds or 0.3 nautical miles from the closest point of approach, TCAS resolution advisories signal a collision threat and require immediate action, Homendy said.

In over half of the encounters from 2011 to 2024, the helicopter may have been flying above the route altitude restriction, which is limited to a ceiling of 200 feet above the ground, Homendy said. Two-thirds of the events happened at night.

From October 2021 through December 2024, there were 944,179 commercial operations at DCA with 15,214 “close proximity events” between commercial planes and helicopters “in which there was a lateral separation distance of less than one nautical mile and vertical separation of less than 400 feet,” Homendy said.

Of those 15,214 events, there were 85 very close calls involving lateral separations of less than 1,500 feet and less than 200 feet of vertical separation, according to Homendy.

Through evaluation of the crash, the NTSB found that the Black Hawk was not flying in the very limited area it should have been flying near DCA.

“At the maximum altitude here of just 200 feet, a helicopter operating over the eastern shoreline of the Potomac River would have just 75 feet of vertical separation from an airplane approaching runway 33,” Homendy said.

Following the accident, the U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy immediately restricted helicopter traffic from operating over the Potomac River at DCA until March 31.

“As that deadline nears, we remain concerned about the significant potential for a future midair collision at DCA, which is why we are recommending a permanent solution today,” Homendy noted.

Homendy acknowledged that fully closing Route 4 between Hains Point and the Wilson Bridge when runways 15 and 33 are in use would restrict a key aviation corridor for Coast Guard patrols, law enforcement and government operations.

However, she noted that requiring controllers to hold helicopters north or south of DCA during those times could also add to controllers’ workload and increase risk. To that end, NTSB is recommending the FAA establish an alternative helicopter route between Hains Point and the Wilson Bridge when that segment of Route 4 is closed.

Although the preliminary report is out, Homendy said her team “has a lot of work to do,” including simulations, visibility studies and additional interviews related to helicopter operations and air traffic control.

When asked in the briefing whether the NTSB would call the resulting crash an oversight, Homendy said, “I mean, it’s stronger than an oversight, right? … The data we have pulled is from a voluntary safety reporting system that FAA could have used anytime. That data from October 2021 through December 2024, they could have used that information any time to determine that we have a trend here and a problem here and looked at that route.

“That didn’t occur, which is why we’re taking action today, but unfortunately, people lost lives and loved ones are grieving.”

Presented by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces Eva Högel, the annual paper outlines the military’s status quo while highlighting key shortcomings. Her office was created to ensure parliamentary oversight over the German armed forces.

Since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Germany has undergone a deep transformation in how it approaches its armed forces. It has come with a major cash injection to the tune of hundreds of billions of Euros and a more assertive role for its fighting force internationally.

Symbolizing this, last fall, the country ratified an agreement for its first-ever brigade permanently stationed abroad, which will be 5,000 strong and whose facilities are currently being built in Lithuania.

The Bundeswehr’s navy, meanwhile, for the first time ever fired live rounds in a combat setting. It was the frigate Hessen that saw the engagement while on an EU mission in the Red Sea to protect the region’s vital shipping routes against attacks by the Yemeni Houthi rebels.

For the first time in recent years, Germany’s defense spending in 2024 reached the NATO goal of 2% of GDP, the report says, with military expenditures amounting to more than €69 billion, or $75.4 billion USD.

Roughly a quarter of this was funded from the special one-off cash injection announced by Chancellor Scholz in the form of a “Sondervermögen” — a special fund — worth €100 billion ($109 billion) that was created in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Only about 18% of this funding source is remaining, the commissioner said.

The government’s budgetary committee approved a record 97 major procurement decisions last year, up from 55 the year before. Several of these large purchase decisions fall in the domain of air defense, which is itself a key priority highlighted in this year’s report.

In 2024, Germany decided to buy both the Skyranger 30 from Rheinmetall and the Arrow 3 from Israel. The country also ordered new Leopard main battle tanks and 22 self-propelled howitzers to replace those the country sent to Ukraine.

But money alone cannot solve some things, and one of the most stubbornly persistent issues plaguing Germany’s armed forces remained a central topic in 2024: Staffing.

While recruitment increased by 8%, bringing in more than 20,000 new people last year, over a quarter of them chose to leave after their six-month probationary period. Meanwhile, nearly 20% of non-enlisted and 28% of enlisted positions remained vacant. The Bundeswehr is 21,826 heads short of its 203,000 active personnel target, the report laid out.

There was a significant structural reform to report, too. The cyber warfare arm last year was elevated to become a full branch of the German military, alongside the Luftwaffe, navy and land forces.

On a touchier subject, the report included several pages discussing cases of neo-Nazi sympathies among the ranks and institutional shortcomings in addressing and successfully investigating these situations. In one case, a soldier had reportedly played an SS song for comrades. Only after several years did the case make it to trial; by then, the witnesses professed not to be able to recall whose phone had been playing the song or who had put an end to it.

A new enforcement mechanism became available in 2024 following an amendment to the Soldiers Act passed the year prior that sought to accelerate such proceedings. While only a “small minority of soldiers” harbored extremist views, this mechanism was touted as being a necessary and “sharp and effective means against identified enemies of the constitution in the Bundeswehr.”

Germany’s incoming governing coalition of conservatives and social democrats has promised to continue down the path of revitalizing and building up the country’s military might.

To do so, incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz has suggested exempting defense spending from the country’s constitutionally enshrined debt ceiling, a move that would have been largely unthinkable in notoriously fiscally frugal Germany until recently. While this particular proposal is still mired in a political tug-of-war at present, the more militarist tone of the past few years appears here to stay.

The drone is a 115-pound, battery-powered twin prop-rotor aircraft that the company said can be scaled larger, “requiring hybrid-electric propulsion.”

The company designed the vertical take-off and landing aircraft to “fly faster and farther than traditional helicopters,” Rich Benton, Sikorsky’s vice president and general manager, said in a statement.

The drone development took place over the course of a year with the company’s rapid prototyping group – Sikorsky Innovations — moving through preliminary design, simulation and tethered and untethered flight.

In January 2025, Sikorsky Innovations successfully completed more than 40 take-offs and landings with the 10.3-ft composite wingspan aircraft, according to the statement. Sikorsky said the aircraft also performed 30 transitions between helicopter and airplane modes, calling it the “most complex maneuver demanded of the design.”

The drone also reached a top cruise speed of 86 knots.

“Our rotor blown wing has demonstrated the control power and unique handling qualities necessary to transition repeatedly and predictably from a hover to high-speed wing-borne cruise flight, and back again,” Igor Cherepinsky, Sikorsky Innovations director, said. “New control laws were required for this transition maneuver to work seamlessly and efficiently. The data indicates we can operate from pitching ships decks and unprepared ground when scaled to much larger sizes.”

The company envisions future applications for the aircraft in search and rescue, firefighting monitoring, humanitarian response efforts and pipeline surveillance, the statement notes.

Larger versions could perform long-range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and manned-unmanned teaming.

Sikorsky will incorporate its MATRIX flight autonomy system in all variants of the drone, according the statement.

The company is also developing a 1.2-megawatt hybrid-electric tilt wing demonstrator called HEX that is large enough to carry passengers or cargo on longer-haul flights.

Sikorsky plans to demonstrate HEX’s hover capability in 2027.

Sikorsky’s technological advancements over the last year come on the heels of the U.S. Army’s abrupt cancellation of its Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, or FARA. The company was competing for the program with a coaxial rotor blade aircraft called Raider X.

The company had, over a year prior to the cancellation, lost the Army’s other future aircraft competition to Bell. Sikorsky and its Boeing teammate had submitted another larger version of Raider X called Defiant.

Since then, Sikorsky hasn’t scrapped the promise of its X2 coaxial helicopter technology and continues to pitch it to other potential customers. The company is pursuing a next-generation helicopter for Italy and the NATO Next-Generation Rotorcraft Capability, among others. Lockheed, Airbus and Leonardo were awarded contracts in July 2024 to help NATO develop a new helicopter.

The fleet-wide mission capable rate of 62% is the lowest in recent memory. It comes as the Air Force’s arsenal of more than 5,000 planes is aging and the service finds it increasingly difficult to keep some in the air.

The Air Force provided statistics on how many of each kind of aircraft it had in 2024, as well as the percentage of time each aircraft was ready to carry out its mission. Those stats were first reported by Air and Space Forces Magazine.

To come up with a fleet-wide mission-capable rate, Defense News calculated a weighted average of all airframes. Using a weighted average places more emphasis on airframes that the service has more of — such as the C-17 Globemaster, F-16 Fighting Falcon and the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter — and less emphasis on rarer airframes.

With the Air Force’s fleet at 5,025 — the smallest in the service’s 78-year history — a 62% mission-capable rate equates to roughly 1,900 planes being out of commission at any given time.

Heather Penney, a former F-16 pilot and senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said the figures are concerning, and suggest the situation is likely getting even worse this year.

“Readiness is often a lagging indicator,” Penney said. “And those aren’t even today’s MC rates,” which she predicted will be even worse when 2025 is done.

The Air Force, along with other services, has for years struggled to pull up its mission-capable rates. President Donald Trump’s first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, in 2018 set an ambitious goal of 80% readiness for F-16s, F-22s and F-35s — which went unmet.

And judging by a similar metric — aircraft availability — the true state of the fleet may even be worse.

According to a 2019 paper by analysts at the Air Force Institute of Technology and Air Force Materiel Command, mission-capable rates do not consider aircraft that are awaiting depot maintenance or are otherwise not possessed at the unit level. Those analysts said aircraft availability rates are a truer measure of how the Air Force’s planes are doing.

In his Monday keynote address to the Air and Space Force Association’s AFA Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin used that aircraft availability statistic to sound perhaps the strongest alarm yet about the state of the service’s fleet.

Allvin displayed a chart showing the increasing trouble facing the Air Force’s planes. The chart tracked a steady growth of the average aircraft age in the fleet — from about 17 in 1994 to nearly 32 in 2024 — while aircraft availability plummeted from 73% to 54%.

Allvin praised the service’s maintainers, who work long hours in tough conditions to keep their planes flying.

“You wouldn’t know this on the front lines,” Allvin said of the growing availability problems, “because of the miracles that are going on from our maintainers and those who are sustaining [airplanes]. … We’re eating into whatever margin we had.”

Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have proclaimed a focus on improving the military’s “lethality,” firing top brass they perceive to be standing in the way. Fresh budget cuts to the Defense Department have had the services clamoring to be spared from measures that would bring down readiness rates further.

In this environment, Penney said, poor aircraft readiness rates make top Air Force leaders vulnerable.

Even more worrying to Penney is that there’s no simple way to turn the situation around.

“It’s complex, because it’s spares, maintenance manpower, maintenance experience levels [and] depots, which are so behind right now,” Penney said.

‘Tired iron,’ even more exhausted

The Air Force’s current predicament, as Penney sees it, is largely due to the lack of enough major aircraft modernizations. Much of the Air Force’s fleet was around during the Cold War, and there are several air frames — such as the B-52 Stratofortress, C-5 Galaxy and KC-135 Stratotanker — that were around during the Vietnam War.

Air Force officials commonly refer to such planes as “tired iron,” and quip that they “find new and interesting ways to break.” Without enough modernizations to replace those planes with new airframes, the service is forced to sustain them longer and longer, trying to scrounge up spare parts to fix them.

In the case of the Air Force’s 76 B-52Hs, which have been flying since the early 1960s, some companies that originally made spare parts are no longer in business. This often forces the service to find new sources for those parts, custom make the parts itself, or “cannibalize” parts from other Stratofortresses that are even more broken.

The situation results in a slow and steady decline in the B-52′s availability. In 2021, the bomber had a 59% mission-capable rate, but that has now slid to 54%.

The overall numbers show a swift decline in aircraft readiness over the last few years, driven by some of the service’s most crucial airframes, such as the F-35A.

The Air Force’s overall mission-capable rate was nearly 78% in 2012, but steadily slid as the decade progressed to a then-low of slightly below 70% in 2018. Two years later, that fleet-wide figure had risen to 72.7%, and then dropped to 71.5% in 2021.

The Lockheed Martin-made F-35A — the cornerstone of the service’s fighter fleet and one of the most expensive military programs in history — has been plagued with reliability and availability issues. In 2021, the fighter was available nearly 69% of the time, according to the Air Force.

But the F-35A’s mission capable rates have since plunged, and the jet was ready 51.5% of the time in 2024.

The Joint Strike Fighter’s lagging availability has become such a problem that its program executive officer, Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt, in 2023 announced a “war on readiness” that seeks to improve how often the F-35 can fly.

The Government Accountability Office in 2023 released a report on the entire F-35 fleet’s maintenance challenges, which said services lacked spare parts and technical data needed to repair the fighters. Maintainers were also not properly trained, GAO said, and an effort to expand repair depots was falling behind.

Chauncey McIntosh, a Lockheed vice president and general manager of the company’s F-35 program, said in an interview at AFA that he is focused on improving the jet’s mission readiness, and is working with the F-35 Joint Program Office to do so.

Most parts in the F-35 are lasting longer than expected, McIntosh said, and the company is focused on improving those parts that are less reliable, which the program refers to as “degraders.”

“We’ve been able to drive down those top degraders, and there’s only really a few left that we’re focused on now,” McIntosh said.

The next major issue to tackle, he said, will be to ensure that repair depots have all the spare parts they need to fix F-35s.

“As we get the right parts, and get the right [funding from Congress for them], then we’ll be able to go procure those parts, put those parts on the shelf,” McIntosh said. “This is a growing fleet, so we need to make sure that the [spare parts inventory] keeps up with the fleet size — for not only the U.S., but all of our international partners.”

Readiness drops across the fleet

Other key airframes that dropped precipitously in recent years include the A-10 Warthog, the CV-22 Osprey, the F-16 fighter, the KC-46 Pegasus tanker and the T-38C Talon jet trainer.

• Mission-capable rates for the Air Force’s Ospreys were at about 51% in 2021, but by 2023 plunged to 46% and then to 30% in 2024. The Osprey, which is also flown by the Navy and Marine Corps, has been plagued in recent years by faulty components, clutch problems and fatal crashes that led to multiple groundings.
• The A-10 Warthog’s readiness rate slid from 72% in 2021 to 67% in 2023 and 2024.
• The F-16C fell from almost 72% in 2021 down to 64% in 2024; while the two-seater variant, the F-16D, dropped even more precipitously during that time, from 69% to 59%.
• The KC-46′s mission capable rates dropped from 71% in 2021 to 61% in 2024.
• The T-38C’s availability also declined from 63% in 2021 to 55% in 2024. The Air Force is buying new T-7A Red Hawk trainers from Boeing to replace the nearly 60-year-old T-38. But the T-7 has repeatedly fallen behind schedule, which will require the Air Force to keep flying — and maintaining — T-38s years longer than originally expected.

The lack of enough mission-capable aircraft has forced the Air Force to make tough choices on how to use its working planes. The service has for years prioritized its ability to carry out operational missions over other missions like training. This means it front-loads its working aircraft to units overseas or that otherwise carry out operations, but stateside units are more likely to have shortages of working aircraft.

U.S. Air Forces Central Command, which for decades has flown aircraft such as the A-10, F-15, F-16 and F-35 in the Middle East to project American airpower, is one example of a command that is prioritized in such a way.

But even getting to the head of the line for things like spare parts doesn’t automatically solve all of AFCENT’s problems, commander Lt. Gen. Derek France told reporters at AFA. Sometimes logistical hurdles mean spare parts still take a while to get to the deployed jets that need them, he said. And environmental factors such as heat and sand — particularly in summertime — can wear on the aircraft, France said.

And most of all, he said, AFCENT’s planes are growing old, just like the rest of the service’s aircraft.

“The fact of the matter is, we’ve got an aging fleet,” France said. “Our AFCENT airmen do heroic work in keeping them in the air. The things that I have seen, with our airmen, to be able to put together the parts, and get after the things they need to, has been impressive in our [area of responsibility], for sure.”

France could not quantify readiness rates for AFCENT planes, but said “our airmen meet mission when they need to.”

A critical part of being AFCENT commander, he said, is forecasting when his units will need to surge aircraft and put large numbers of jets in the air, and when they can pull back. Those “pull back” phases give maintainers time and space to work more intensely on AFCENT’s planes and “get our jets healthy again,” France said.

In his speech at AFA, Allvin stressed how important it is for the Air Force to fix this problem once and for all.

“Our Air Force continues to be the most dominant on the planet,” Allvin said. “I don’t want to be here next year, or have the next chief, say we’re no longer [dominant]. So we’ve got to work on this.”

The CCAs, which are being built by Anduril Industries and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., are the first aircraft the Air Force has dubbed fighter drones. General Atomics’ CCA is now known as the YFQ-42A, and Anduril’s is the YFQ-44A, Allvin said in his keynote address at the Air and Space Forces Association’s AFA Warfare Symposium here.

In Air Force nomenclature, fighter aircraft are given an F designation, and Q stands for drones. Prototype aircraft are also given a Y prefix, which these CCAs will drop once they enter production.

“For the first time in our history, we have a fighter designation in the YFQ-42 Alpha and YFQ-44 Alpha,” Allvin said. “It may just be symbolic, but we are telling the world we are leaning into a new chapter of aerial warfare.”

CCAs are autonomous drones that will one day fly alongside crewed fighters like the F-35, or perhaps the future Next Generation Air Dominance fighter the Air Force is considering. The Air Force is heavily investing in CCAs as a way to expand airpower and provide strike capabilities, conduct reconnaissance, carry out electronic warfare operations, or even act as decoys.

Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in 2023 that the service plans to have about 1,000 CCAs, but the exact number of the future fleet is not yet known.

The Air Force awarded contracts to Anduril and General Atomics in April 2024 to build the first iteration of CCAs; further so-called “increments” are in the works.

Until now, General Atomics has referred to its CCA drone as Gambit, and Anduril’s CCA has been called Fury.

In his keynote address, Allvin said CCAs and their core technologies will be crucial for the Air Force to win wars to come.

“Embracing and leaning into human-machine teaming, understanding what autonomy can do for us,” Allvin said. “We know that’s got to be a part of our future.”

Anduril and General Atomics heralded their aircrafts’ designations as signs their work is bearing fruit.

“These aircraft represent an unrivaled history of capable, dependable uncrewed platforms that meet the needs of America’s warfighters and point the way to a significant new era for airpower,” said David Alexander, president of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc.

“The designation is evidence of the program’s progress, and we continue to work tirelessly to deliver a capability that will expand the United States’ ability to project combat airpower,” Jason Levin, Anduril’s senior vice president of engineering, was quoted as saying in a company statement.