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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The French Directorate General for Armament is looking to identify the technical solutions that will enable a demonstration firing in a year’s time, the defense-procurement agency told Defense News in a written reply to questions.

The DGA is working with a consortium of Safran and MBDA and another of Thales and ArianeGroup to develop a tactical strike capability in the 150 kilometer (93 mile) range.

Time is running out for France to replace its Lance-Roquettes Unitaire, a modified version of the M270 multiple launch rocket system, with the Army’s nine remaining systems set to reach the end of their service life in 2027.

Lawmakers and military brass have been pushing to develop a domestic option rather than buy abroad, in line with French policy for autonomy in defense matters.

“Service withdrawal of the LRU is approaching, and retention of the capability will be an issue at that point,”said Léo Péria-Peigné, a researcher at the Paris-based Institut Français des Relations Internationales specializing in armament capacity.

“The urgency is relative – we have hardly ever used this capacity in the past 30 years.”

Safran and MBDA are on track for the “ambitious” DGA schedule, confirming their target for a test firing in mid-2026, they said in a joint statement to Defense News. Thales and ArianeGroup didn’t comment on timing, with Thales saying the companies have been working as an integrated team for several months to offer a “pertinent solution” for the armed forces.

France’s 2024-2030 defense spending plan has budgeted €600 million ($663 million) for the rocket-artillery program, called Frappe Longue Portée Terrestre or FLP-T for short, with a goal of buying at least 13 systems by 2030 and 26 systems to equip a battalion by 2035.

The schedule to replace the LRU “is proceeding nominally” and within the timetable set by the defense spending law, according to the DGA.

Meanwhile, there’s still the option of a foreign purchase if things end up taking to long. That decision is on the calendar for next year, the directorate said.

German rocket artillery pick tests the waters on US arms dependence

The long-range tactical strike capability is “essential” and a niche that needs to be filled, French Army Chief of Staff Gen. Pierre Schill told lawmakers in an October hearing, noting that many other European countries have a rocket artillery capability.

Europe lacks a home-made HIMARS equivalent, and European armies shopping for rocket artillery in recent years either picked the U.S. option, the PULS launcher by Israel’s Elbit Systems, or Hanwha Aerospace’s Chunmoo.

Elbit is working with KNDS on a Europeanized version of PULS, while Germany’s Rheinmetall and Lockheed Martin in 2023 joined forces to develop the GMARS system.

Other than France, European countries still in the market for rocket artillery include Sweden and Norway. The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Spain already picked PULS, Poland acquired Chunmoo and HIMARS, while the Baltic countries, Romania and Italy are HIMARS customers. Meanwhile, the U.K. is considering expanding its fleet of M270 multiple launch rocket systems.

That leaves a narrow commercial window for French-developed rocket artillery, though a push by the European Union’s executive arm for member states to spend more of their defense budgets within the 27-nation bloc may provide a tailwind for a European solution.

Safran and MBDA said their rocket-artillery system, dubbed Thundart, is based on “mature and mastered subsystems,” and an initial operational capability could be produced before 2030.

In the already saturated marketplace, “there will be no export market for a French system that will not be ready before 2030,” said Péria-Peigné.

The DGA signed innovation partnerships with the two consortiums in November, providing a first round of financing for the FLP-T program. The partnership contract allows the procurement office to buy the system at the end of the development phase without a new competitive tender, provided the armament meets performance requirements.

The innovation partnership includes a “significant degree of self-financing” by industry, Safran Electronics & Defense CEO Franck Saudo said in a parliamentary hearing in November.

Each consortium will carry out a firing of its demonstrator, after which the French government will make a choice, the DGA said. At the end of the current 18-month contracts, the consortiums will submit a proposal that will allow the government to choose between various solutions, including off-the-shelf equipment, according to the directorate.

DGA head Emmanuel Chiva had told the Sénat foreign affairs committee in November that if the industrial partners would “work well,” the first orders might be placed in late 2025 or early 2026. That now appears to have been pushed back by several months.

Safran and MBDA said the geopolitical context and changing artillery requirements reinforce the interest of a sovereign solution for France in particular, but also for other European countries, with Thundart the only rocket artillery system designed and built in Europe, free of U.S. arms-trade restrictions, and with independent manufacturing that provides control over the production pace.

The companies started working together on designing the new system at the end of 2023, and presented a mock-up of their Thundart 227 mm long-range guided-artillery rocket at the Eurosatory defense show in June 2024, as a first step in the FLP-T program. The rocket has 150-kilometer accuracy, according to Matthieu Krouri, MBDA’s head of land combat systems.

MBDA has production capacity adapted to the size of the tactical munitions required in France’s Centre-Val de Loire region, where final assembly will take place, the companies said. For its part, Safran has “strongly” increased production of AASM Hammer guided bombs, which have a guidance kit “very similar” to that of the Thundart munition, according to the consortium.

“Safran and MBDA are convinced of the relevance of this solution and have already invested heavily in this project,” the companies said. “The collaboration between Safran and MBDA on Thundart is a long-term project, which is already well advanced.”

Meanwhile, Thales and ArianeGroup teams are “fully mobilized” to propose a sovereign fire-support system that can deal with high-value targets, either surface or point targets, Thales said, without providing further details.

The new system will replace nine M270s on a Bradley tracked chassis, one of the rare pieces of U.S.-origin combat equipment still serving with the French Army, whose force is built around French-developed and manufactured tanks, armored vehicles and tube artillery.

Replacing the decades-old LRU is a priority for the army, according to the 2025 defense budget, with a sovereign solution preferred as long as it can be achieved rapidly and with controlled costs.

Army engineers may be able extend the lifespan of the LRU by another two to three years, but not much longer, according to Péria-Peigné at IFRI.

The goal of a sovereign solution had “not been abandoned,” French Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Thierry Burkhard told a National Assembly hearing in October.

Chiva said in November the LRU replacement “must be sovereign, and we are working towards this,” with the project taking some time due to the need to define Army requirements and “a certain confusion” in the requests.

The urgency of the capacity requirement may dictate having to turn to a foreign system after all, National Assembly special budget rapporteur Christophe Plassard said in October.

At the same time, HIMARS may not be a solution, as stress on production lines means delivery of the U.S system might not be possibly starting in 2027, the National Assembly’s defense committee wrote in an evaluation of the 2025 defense budget published in October.

“There is internal tension between supporters of the off-the-shelf solution and those in favor of national development,” Péria-Peigné said.

The military planning law calls for a system that could have a longer range than the LRU, in particular by allowing integration of hypersonic missiles with a range of several hundreds of kilometers. The DGA has asked both consortiums to study the cost and feasibility of including a future operational capability for strikes at ranges of 500 kilometers and 1,000 kilometers.

The rocket-artillery project is separate from the European Long-range Strike Approach, which concerns strikes at a distance of several thousands of kilometers, Burkhard said in November. Still, the envisaged future development of the FLP-T project has “strong adherence” with ELSA, according to the DGA.

Development of a long-range land-based strike capability beyond 1,000 kilometers is less urgent, with systems not expected until the 2030-2035 time frame, according a supplement to the 2025 defense budget discussing preparation for the future. Studies on strategic long-range strike were ongoing based on solutions proposed by ArianeGroup and MBDA, according to the October report.

MBDA has proposed its Land Cruise Missile, a land-based version of its company’s Missile de Croisière Naval, as a short-term solution for ELSA.

The 155 mm howitzers will equip a new artillery battalion within the planned Finnmark brigade being set up to bolster Norway’s defenses in the high north, according to a government proposal published on Friday. The purchase plan is part of 17 billion kroner in proposed spending that also includes more sea mine-clearing capability, new military trucks and spending on facilities.

Norway already has 28 tracked K9 howitzers as well as 14 K10 ammunition resupply vehicles, and will exercise an option in its contract with Hanwha for the additional purchase, the government said. The spending plan still needs to be approved by the Norwegian parliament, the Storting.

“We are in a serious security policy situation,” Minister of Defence Tore Sandvik said. “Therefore, we will now ask the Storting to approve significant investments in various parts of the Armed Forces to strengthen Norway’s defense capability, in line with the ambitions of the long-term plan presented last year.”

The Norwegian government in October last year proposed to raise the country’s 2025 defense budget by 19.2 billion kroner to 110.1 billion kroner. The budget for the additional howitzers includes the guns as well as spare parts, according to the spending proposal.

The acquisition of additional artillery pieces “will contribute to significantly strengthening the Army’s firepower,” the government said.

The extra howitzers increase the total budget for the Norwegian 155 mm artillery project to 11.1 billion kroner, according to the government proposal. Other K9 operators in the Baltic region are Poland, Finland and Estonia.

The government also plans to spend an additional 3.9 billion kroner on maritime mine countermeasures, increasing the total budget for that project to 8.74 billion kroner. The plan for the Norwegian Navy’s future mine-clearing capability, first approved in 2023, will include unmanned and autonomous systems.

The previously approved mine countermeasures capability was assessed as too small in relation to the operational needs of a new security situation, according to the government. Expanding the scope of the project will ensure sufficient resources to safeguard “freedom of movement in Norwegian waters even in a crisis or war,” the government said.

“This will help to ensure that our own vessels and allies can sail safely and freely in Norwegian waters,” Sandvik said. “In addition, it can help to secure critical underwater infrastructure.”

After a lengthy delay as the Army and Navy struggled to test a jointly developed hypersonic glide body capability, the Army said earlier this year that it would field its ground-launched missiles to the first unit by the end of fiscal 2025.

In fact, the Army is forecasting that the first unit to get the hypersonic capability will begin receiving the rounds at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, in the May time frame, Maj. Gen. Frank Lozano said.

The 1st Multidomain Task Force, 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 17th Field Artillery Brigade unit at JBLM received all equipment for the LRHW capability except for the actual live rounds in 2021. The unit was supposed to get the missiles in the fall of 2023 but several aborted test events forced the Army to push back its fielding plans.

The Army is working to transition the LRHW program from the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) to Program Executive Office Missiles & Space, but it won’t formally join the portfolio until the first round is delivered, Lozano noted.

Lockheed Martin, the lead weapon integrator for the truck-launched capability, is wrapping up work on the first round at its facility in Courtland, Alabama, according to Lozano.

Leidos’ Dynetics manufactures the common hypersonic glide body that will be supplied to both the Army and Navy versions of the weapon.

The Army unit at JBLM will continue to receive rounds as they come off the production line throughout the year.

The Army plans to couple a test firing of the round with soldiers from the unit at the console as part of their operational training in December because the rounds are “very expensive,” Lozano said. “We’re trying to be efficient.”

The U.S. is in a race to field the capability and develop systems to defend against hypersonic missiles, as China and Russia are actively developing and testing hypersonic weapons.

Hypersonic weapons can fly faster than Mach 5 — or more than 3,836 miles per hour — but their ability to maneuver between varying altitudes sets them apart. Their maneuverability makes them much harder to detect and defeat.

The Army conducted a successful end-to-end flight test of its hypersonic missile at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii in May 2024, bringing the initial fielding to the first unit closer to the horizon.

The Army and Navy completed another successful all-up round test in December at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, of the Common Hypersonic Glide Body, or C-HGB. The test provided additional confidence to move forward with the system, which consists of a weapon’s warhead, guidance system, cabling and thermal protection.

The Navy’s version, dubbed Conventional Prompt Strike, will be launched from ships.

While the plan to field the weapon to the Army has taken nearly two years longer than planned, Army officials have been quick to point out that missile development programs typically take about 10 years. The LRHW program is just beyond the five-year mark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Astronomically fast’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Logging in

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

Industry has already helped significantly to shape the effort.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example, the service will send two of its Lower-Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensors, or LTAMDS, to Guam, Lozano told Defense News in an exclusive interview at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama.

Additionally, the Army will send an Indirect Fire Protection Capability platoon with prototype launchers to South Korea and will also send some of its Integrated Battle Command System capability to Europe to modernize a Patriot air defense battalion there.

Lozano had been tasked by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George to examine the possibility of sending new air and missile defense capabilities still in the prototype phase to global hotspots.

Both the Raytheon-developed LTAMDS and Leidos’ Dynetics-made IFPC have seen successful test events over the past year, leading to George’s push for testing advanced technology in real-life formations even before the development phase has formally concluded.

LTAMDS is nearing a production decision and will then go into initial operational test and evaluation that will wrap up in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026. Another LTAMDS radar will be sent to Guam in 2027, which will put three of the powerful, 360-degree radars on the island as part of complete air and missile defense architecture there.

The Army is taking its two best performing prototypes, which are now being spruced up after developmental testing with Raytheon, and will begin preparing to ship the radars to Guam in May. They should arrive in June, Lozano said.

The service developed LTAMDS to replace the current radar in Patriot air and missile defense systems, improving its detection and discrimination capability and giving it the ability to see threats from 360 degrees.

The IFPC platoon will go to South Korea to help the Army work on concepts to create a composite air- and missile-defense battalion. This effort is being led by Brig. Gen. Pat Costello, commander of the 94th Army Air and Missile Defense Command in the Pacific theater.

The IFPC system is designed to detect, track and defeat cruise missiles and drones as well as rockets, artillery and mortars at fixed and semi-fixed sites. It currently fires AIM-9X missiles but the Army is pursuing alternative interceptor options.

The Army is also taking some of its pre-low-rate initial production IBCS capability, which is a new command-and-control system for the service’s Patriot air and missile defense system, to modernize the 5-7 Patriot Air Defense Battalion in the 10th AAMDC in Europe.

IBCS equipment is now on a ship and will arrive next month, Lozano said.

While this is the first IBCS capability to be received by a unit outside of the United States, Poland was the first to get the system for its own Patriot forces in 2023.

The Army will deploy its second battery and will fire an SM-6 missile from the system’s launcher, he told Defense News in an exclusive interview at Redstone Arsenal amid the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium.

The other Typhon battery, also referred to as the Mid-Range Capability missile system, was transported to Luzon, Philippines, in the spring of 2024 as part of the Salaknib exercise, marking the first time the new capability, deemed vital to the U.S. Army’s Indo-Pacific strategy, was deployed.

The mobile, ship-sinking system has remained in the country since then, much to the disapproval of China.

The Typhon launcher traveled more than 8,000 miles from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, aboard a C-17 Globemaster cargo aircraft on a 15-hour flight.

The Army has not conducted any live-fire exercises with the system in the Philippines yet and does not plan to do so during this year’s Salaknib or Balikatan, which will kick off later this spring.

The Lockheed Martin-built system, consisting of a vertical launch system that uses the Navy’s Raytheon-built Standard Missile-6 and Tomahawk missiles, can strike targets in the 500- to 2,000-kilometer range. The complete system has a battery operations center, four launchers, prime movers and modified trailers.

Defense News first reported the Army’s plan to pursue the midrange missile in September 2020. The Army fielded the capability in less than three years.

While the first Typhon battery belongs to the 1st Multidomain Task Force in the Pacific, the second battery is for the 3rd MDTF.

The Army is building these formations to be dedicated to specific theaters and designed to address specific military needs in those regions. There will be five MDTFs in total and three will be dedicated to the Pacific. The 2nd MDTF is in Europe and the 5th, which has yet to be formed, will be stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and will be designed for rapid deployment where it is needed.

The first two batteries were fielded to JBLM and the Army is now getting ready to take receipt of the third battery from its producers, according to Lozano. That battery will go to Europe’s 2nd MDTF.

The service obligated funds last year to build the fourth battery, he noted.

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.

Oshkosh Defense unveiled the newest iteration of the Remotely Operated Ground Unit for Expeditionary Fires, or ROGUE-Fires, at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, this week.

The payload-agnostic platform, carried by the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, or JLTV, allows for long-range fires, autonomous resupply and logistics operations, according to a company release.

Ship-sinking missile for Marines headed to test fire

“As the battlefield continues to evolve, we are leveraging the mature and proven Oshkosh families of vehicles to design payload-agnostic autonomous platforms that deliver unmatched flexibility, enabling forces to outpace emerging threats and maintain operational dominance,” said Pat Williams, chief programs officer at Oshkosh Defense.

The Marines first awarded a $40 million contract to Oshkosh to build the unmanned missile launcher after a prototyping phase ended in September 2023.

Developers removed the JLTV cab and attached a missile launcher to build a mobile firing platform that can be operated autonomously.

Until this newest variant, the focus of the ROGUE-Fires platform had been to house the Naval Strike Missile, the Marines’ key to knocking out enemy ships to protect and gain access for U.S. Navy ships in littoral regions.

The multiple launch rocket system family of munitions, or MFOM, gives the platform a new capability on top of existing features such as long-range precision fires, autonomous resupply and logistics operations.

The company has also developed a power train that can be adapted for hybrid-electric power, which allows for silent modes of operation and fuel savings as well as electrical charging for devices and other platforms.

Williams told Military Times that the company unveiled this new variant at an Army show in part because the system also fits Army needs, which include mature systems that have autonomous features and multipayload options.

The original concept evolved out of a previous program known as “leader follower,” which uses autonomy to drive ground vehicles.

The Army used the same software in the ROGUE platform for its own autonomous driving in both the Expedient Leader Follower and Autonomous Ground Resupply programs, according to a 2021 Army release.

The software allows for one manned vehicle to lead a series of unmanned vehicles in a convoy operation.

The Marines awarded Oshkosh Defense the contract to add an off-road, self-driving package developed by Forterra, a ground-based autonomy company, to the ROGUE Fires vehicle in January, Defense News previously reported.

The AutoDrive system gives the ROGUE Fires Oshkosh-built vehicle off-road, self-driving technology in “nearly any environment,” which moves “beyond Leader-Follower capabilities,” Forterra said in a Jan. 13 statement.

The first test fire of the Naval Strike Missile from the platform happened in June 2020. The project sought to give Marines the punch needed for long range, anti-ship fires on a platform more mobile and able to hit moving targets than the legacy High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS.

The missile has a range beyond 750 kilometers, which aligns with Marine warfighting concepts in which Marine units, some platoon or squad-sized, seize terrain for short periods and conduct sea control and sea denial for naval commanders.

The soldiers, all part of 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, have been missing since early Tuesday, when they were conducting a maintenance mission to recover another Army vehicle during a training exercise, according to U.S. Army Europe and Africa. The training site is the General Silvestras Žukauskas Training Area near Pabrade, north of the capital Vilnius, Lithuania.

Search and recovery efforts have continued without pause since the soldiers were reported missing, the Army said in a statement Thursday. The initial search included military helicopters, Lithuanian diving teams and hundreds of U.S. and Lithuanian soldiers and law enforcement officers looking through thick forests and swampy terrain.

Now, personnel are focusing on the area where the armored vehicle was found.

“We are leveraging every available U.S. and Lithuanian asset to coordinate for and provide the required resources for this effort,” U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, the commanding general of 1st Armored Division, said in a statement.

As of Thursday, thick mud and soft ground were keeping emergency personnel from accessing the vehicle and complicating and slowing the recovery efforts, the Army said. Engineers were creating berms to establish a contained area, from which water and mud could be dredged away to better stabilize the ground.

“Due to the terrain, this is an incredibly complex engineering effort. The team on the ground is working to remove enough water and mud for rescue teams to safely reach, stabilize, and access the vehicle,” Maj. Robin Bruce, 1st Armored Division Engineer, said in a statement. “The team is exploring every available option to speed up this process.”

Families of the soldiers are being updated about the recovery efforts, the Army said. The service has not yet released the names of the four troops.

NATO on Wednesday clarified comments Secretary-General Mark Rutte made earlier that day, when he suggested the soldiers had died, even though the U.S. Army said their fate was not yet confirmed.

“The search is ongoing,” NATO said in a statement posted on X. “We regret any confusion about remarks @SecGenNATO delivered on this today. He was referring to emerging news reports & was not confirming the fate of the missing, which is still unknown.”

During a trip to Warsaw, Rutte told reporters that he had received word of the deaths of the four soldiers while he was delivering a lecture, and that his thoughts were with their families and with the United States.

“This is still early news so we do not know the details. This is really terrible news and our thoughts are with the families and loved ones,” Rutte said in Warsaw.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The service is moving quickly, Rainey noted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marines with 7th Engineer Support Battalion, 1st Marine Logistics Group, used funds to conduct in-house repairs instead of hiring contractors to do basic maintenance on the facilities, according to a Marine release.

“There was a lot of help from everybody in the command when we first started to plan what was needed at first, which cut down in delays with the work that needed to be done,” said Sgt. Martin Torres, 7th ESB barracks manager. “The whole battalion took a couple days off their schedule to come down to provide hands and people for Operation Clean Sweep.”

Marines tackle barracks repairs with elbow grease and outside expertise

Operation Clean Sweep has highlighted long-standing barracks problems and prioritized the need for ongoing improvements, according to the release.

Deferred maintenance and funding shortfalls have beleaguered Marine housing for decades. The conditions led to “wall-to-wall” inspections of the Corps’ more than 60,000 barracks rooms last year as Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith’s launched a barracks overhaul initiative.

The inspections found that half of all barracks rooms were “partially mission capable,” which means the rooms were deficient in at least one of the regulated living standards, Marine Corps Times previously reported.

As part of the initiative, the Corps will consolidate Marines in the better buildings and demolish the worse ones, hire professional barracks managers and increase funds for barracks restoration.

Assistant Commandant Gen. Christopher Mahoney previously said initial inspections were the “baseline” for understanding where the Corps should focus.

The “Barracks 360 Reset,” which includes Operation Clean Sweep, is a local initiative between I Marine Expeditionary Force and Marine Corps Installations-West to address immediate issues as the Corps works on its larger Barracks 2030 plan.

Barracks 360 seeks to address some low-level fixes by pairing experts in areas such as drywall repair, window screen replacement and air conditioning installation with Marine staff to make minor repairs.

I Marine Expeditionary Force and Marine Corps Installations-West are investing nearly $9.6 million in housing maintenance and repairs, as of 2024. Operation Clean Sweep II was funded by Headquarters Marine Corps at a cost of $6.27 million. Headquarters contributed another $4 million in quality of life improvements not directly tied to the second operation, 1st Lt. Troy Garza, IMEF spokesman, told Marine Corps Times in an email statement.

More than half of the funding was spent on a “surge” to clear backlogged maintenance. Remaining money was spent on air-conditioning units.

The Marines have also identified housing rights and responsibilities and minimum acceptable standards for barracks rooms in a “resident’s guide.”

“Marines now feel the barracks have become an actual home, transforming it from a ‘prison cell,’ as some described it, into a more comfortable space to look forward to after the workday is over,” Torres said.

Current plans call for IMEF, and subordinate units such as 1st Marine Logistics Group, to hold such clean sweeps twice a year, according to the release.

In October, Marines at Camp Pendleton, California held a two-week standdown to address barracks housing problems across the base, Marine Corps Times previously reported.

In a separate effort, the Corps rolled out the QSRMax system in July, which allows Marines to submit maintenance requests to USMCMax through a QR code on their phone. QSRMax then sends requests to barracks and building managers on the base, Marine Corps Times previously reported.

Marine housing conditions had deteriorated as the Corps prioritized spending on weapons and training over the past two decades during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“So, again, I can’t apologize for previous generations of Marines to prioritize training and equipping over quality of life,” Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said in May 2024. “But now the tide has to turn, and we have to get back to quality of life.”

A 2023 Government Accountability Office report found “mold, dysfunctional plumbing, and poor heating and cooling” in many Marine barracks.

As of 2024, an estimated 87,000 Marines live in barracks, Maj. Gen. David Maxwell, head of Marine Corps Installations Command, wrote in a Marine Corps Gazette article.

The article noted that 17% of the Corps’ 658 barracks buildings were listed as in “poor or failing condition.”

As of March 2023, an estimated 17,000 Marines, or 20%, lived in barracks that fell short of military standards regarding privacy and room configuration, according to the GAO report.

Recently, the Corps has spent an average of about $200 million annually for barracks maintenance.

The Corps requested $274 million in its fiscal 2025 budget to address barracks conditions, a $65 million increase over fiscal 2024. The service’s total fiscal 2025 budget was $53.7 billion.

An internal memo obtained by Marine Corps Times in 2024 showed that the service estimates it will need about $1.5 billion each year to bring all its barracks up to “good/fair” condition.

As of 2024, the Corps’ deferred maintenance amounted to more than $15.8 billion, according to Navy budget documents.

*CORRECTION: This article has been updated to accurately reflect funding figures and sources of funding.

The Army’s massive experimentation event, Project Convergence, is not going away. The service’s capstone event will happen in the summer of 2026, but leading up to that, a series of experimentation events will integrate warfighting functions in new ways to address how the service will fight in the future, Hodne said Tuesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

The Army has long held experimentation efforts within its Centers of Excellence, such as the Maneuver Fires Integrated Experiment, or MFIX, at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and the Vanguard exercise primarily focused on intelligence capability, among others.

“We’ve reorganized how we’re going to do those experiments,” Hodne said.

The Army will first conduct its annual Title 10 war game in November 2025 and then move into a command-and-control, or C2, experiment in the early spring that will test the full range of C2 and counter-C2 capabilities and will be organized to test capability from the theater to brigade level, Hodne said.

Next, the service will conduct a cross-domain fires experiment at Fort Sill that will include “all manners of fires, launched effects, rockets, cannons” in both live and simulated environments.

The last integrated experiment will focus on expanded maneuver at Fort Benning, Georgia, also in the spring, according to Hodne.

“That will include expanded launched effects, autonomous systems, human-machine integrated formations and layered on top of all of them will be formation-based layered protection,” Hodne said. This would involve air defense systems and survivability systems from higher echelons to the brigade and below.

The Army also plans to conduct two Future Studies Programs that will incorporate all of the learning from the three concept-focused experiments.

The service then plans to conduct its capstone Project Convergence event in the summer.

Overall, the effort offers “a more coherent approach to our experimentation,” Hodne noted.

The new designs for experimentation events will also help industry partners understand how to support them because they will be more focused, according to Brig. Gen. Zachary Miller, Army Joint Modernization Command commander.

Additionally, the Army is looking to help industry by consolidating its call for proposals to participate in experimentation efforts which are currently posted “all over the place,” Miller noted.

“I think that’s going to be a lot more coherent starting in FY26 and that those events then will help us inform what we’re going to do in the big capstone in July and make sure that we’ve got the capabilities that are really helping us meet those needs,” Miller said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who will play at Yuma round two?

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

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

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

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

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

US Army mobile howitzer shoot-off participants emerge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the months leading up to the Army’s Operation Lethal Eagle, the division formed the 302nd Division Intelligence Battalion, 21st Division Signal Battalion and 326th Division Engineer Battalion to help push mass into the fight as the Army prepares for a division-level fight.

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The units, still considered in their initial operational capability phase, were used extensively throughout the exercise at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Col. Travis McIntosh, the division deputy commander, told Army Times.

The three battalions worked their respective assets — intelligence, signals and engineers — as assets for the larger division during this year’s exercise, which featured large-scale movements and maneuvers with force-on-force fighting drills down to the squad level and company live-fire ranges, McIntosh said.

“That 21-day division-level exercise gave us the opportunity to take a little more than 7,000 of our soldiers into the field,” McIntosh said.

This year’s Operation Lethal Eagle, held from Feb. 19 to March 10, included 82nd Airborne Division soldiers and assets from joint forces such as the Marine Corps and Air Force.

The exercise saw 1,100 soldiers attack by three separate air assaults using 34 helicopters, McIntosh said.

The “Geronimo,” or opposition force that the soldiers faced, used their own drones and technology to mimic what observers are seeing in the Russia-Ukraine war, McIntosh said. That turned part of the exercise into a hide-and-seek mission for each side’s command post — the first spotted was usually the first targeted and likely destroyed.

But the work wasn’t limited to standard training, according to McIntosh. Troops integrated 65 new pieces of technology, a move inspired by the service’s larger Transformation in Contact effort to modernize and ready its troops while keeping units in the deployment cycle.

Transformation in Contact, or TIC, efforts previously focused on three separate brigades, one each with the 101st, 10th Mountain Division and 25th Infantry Division, respectively.

But the Army has pushed the experimentation up the chain to the division level, in what Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Randy George has called “TIC 2.0.”

Soldiers participating in this year’s Operation Lethal Eagle got a taste of what their 10th Mountain counterparts experienced during a recent rotation of their TIC brigade and associated units to Germany: freezing weather.

And then some.

Over the three-week exercise, McIntosh said soldiers endured weather ranging from minus-6 degrees and five inches of snow to 60 degrees with flooding and 40- to 50-knot winds.

To haul the gear they needed alongside the 1,100 air assault troops and their accompanying units, the 101st called on the Air Force’s 61st Airlift Squadron out of Little Rock, Arkansas, McIntosh said.

That’s because, much like a real-world event, the 101st will rely on joint and partner forces and is likely going to need to resupply and reinforce by air only, the colonel said.

Beyond the big platforms, the division started 3D printing and experimenting with new drones ahead of the event, ultimately building and flying 105 unit-made drones during the exercise.

Those flights, however, weren’t without their hiccups.

The colonel estimated that eight to 12 of the drones crashed at some point but were operational and back in the fight within 24 hours, after some quick maintenance.

Soldiers are using lessons learned from the drone printing and employment to build a better, 2.0 version of their “Eagle” drone for the next exercise, McIntosh said.

That work will focus on the division’s 1st Brigade, which is set for a Joint Readiness Training Center rotation at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, in May, according to McIntosh.

“We are not planning to conduct live-fire in the Philippines right now,” Maj. Gen. Jeffrey VanAntwerp, deputy chief of staff of operations, plans and training at U.S. Army Pacific, told reporters in a media briefing Thursday.

The news comes almost a year after the Army’s 1st Multi-Domain Task Force transported a Typhon launcher to Luzon, Philippines, as part of that year’s Salaknib exercise — marking the first time the new capability, deemed vital to the U.S. Army’s strategy in the Indo-Pacific, had been deployed. The missile system traveled more than 8,000 miles from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, aboard a C-17 Globemaster cargo aircraft on a 15-hour flight.

Typhon has since remained in the country, angering China, which has criticized the move and warned it could destabilize the region. Officials have yet to fire the missile system in the Philippines.

It is unclear how long Typhon will remain in the Philippines or if it will go elsewhere in the Pacific theater.

In response to a question on where the system might be headed next, VanAntwerp said, “We’re making plans, but I have to defer to [the Office of the Secretary of Defense].”

The Lockheed Martin-built system, consisting of a vertical launch system that uses the Navy’s Raytheon-built Standard Missile-6 and Tomahawk missiles, can strike targets in the 500- to 2,000-kilometer range. The complete system has a battery operations center, four launchers, prime movers and modified trailers.

The missile system is capable of sinking ships, hitting land targets at long ranges and is “mobile and survivable,” VanAntwerp said.

As part of this year’s Salaknib and Balikatan military drills between the U.S. and the Philippines, the Philippine Navy plans to fire C-Star, Spike Non-Line-of-Sight and Mistral missiles. The country’s military will not fire its Brahmos medium-range ramjet supersonic cruise missile, which has a higher price point per shot.

Typhon’s presence in the Philippines has prompted other countries in the Pacific region to inquire about the possibility of hosting the weapon system, a U.S. defense official recently told Defense News.

The Army knew Typhon would have a strong deterrent effect, but didn’t expect it to have an effect as great as has been observed over the past year, the official said, particularly in rattling China.

The biggest challenge now is transporting the capability around the Pacific — if the desire is to rotate it in and out of countries — due to the high costs of moving equipment, the official said.

Meanwhile, the Army’s 3rd MDTF, headquartered in Hawaii, is slated to soon receive its Typhon battery, which the service has certified at JBLM.

“We’re constantly looking for opportunities to exercise capability like that forward in theater,” Col. Michael Rose, the 3rd MDTF commander, said recently. “We learn enormous lessons by bringing capability into the theater.”

Rose said the Army anticipates the Typhon supporting Operation Pathways, a series of year-round exercises designed to strengthen cooperation with regional allies and deter China.

Noah Robertson and Leilani Chavez contributed to this report.

Anduril Industries moved into the solid rocket motor business when it acquired Adranos in 2023, which allowed it to start supplying solid rocket motors to companies that make hypersonic weapons, missiles and other propulsion systems.

While the rocket motor industry has grown — and now includes L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne, Northrop Grumman and Nammo — there is still a shortage of solid-rocket motors to outfit all of the missiles. The U.S. has ramped up its missile production to resupply its own stockpiles after providing weapons to Ukraine and to ensure it has enough to handle future contingencies that may demand the firepower.

“Ongoing global conflicts have only underscored the urgency of increasing industry capacity,” retired Army Lt. Gen. Neil Thurgood, Anduril Industries’ senior vice president, wrote in a company blog post. “SRMs are essential components of munitions and hypersonic weapons, making it critical to scale production and replenish this depleted resource.”

Earlier this week, Army Futures Command Commander Gen. James Rainey said the service’s exquisite and precise weapon systems are necessary to penetrate deep into enemy territory and go up against enemy air defenses, but there is also a need for “boxes of rockets, cheap rockets, that we can fire in the hundreds.”

When it comes to air defense or offensive long-range fires, “we are seeing companies that are coming in at price points, the ability to scale. It’s very promising and present,” Rainey said at the McAleese and Associates’ defense conference in Arlington, Virginia.

“Anduril’s solution will increase magazine capacity while maintaining the range, effectiveness, and lethality required on today’s battlefield,” Thurgood said in his post.

The 4.75-inch size “potentially” allows for up to 30 guided rockets to be configured in a single High Mobility Artillery Rocket System pod, Thurgood said, “drastically improving the loadout within existing launcher constraints.”

Anduril “is one of the first companies developing rocket motors in this form factor to meet the Army’s need for increased volume and affordability,” he added.

The company will build and test rocket motors using both traditional aluminized propellant and its “advanced ALITEC fuel,” according to Thurgood. ALITEC improves munition range in a smaller package while using less power, he noted.

“We anticipate that ALITEC-powered SRMs will achieve ranges comparable to significantly larger rocket motors, providing long-range strike capability in a smaller and more efficient design,” Thurgood writes.

Additionally, the company is using its recent $14.3 million Defense Production Act award to improve manufacturing methods, including “applying single-piece-flow manufacturing, powered by bladeless high-speed mixer.”

The company is also investing $74 million internally to produce large amounts of SRMs at a lower cost, Thurgood said.

The service posted design illustrations on several social media platforms Wednesday for the Mariner and Mountaineer Badges, which will recognize proficiency in mariner operations at three different levels of skill and proficiency in mountaineering operations, respectively.

The badges were created to “promote retention and professional development,” according to the announcement.

The Mariner Badge, whose design depicts a ship’s steering wheel on top of an anchor per an illustration from the release, will be awarded to soldiers with expertise in watercraft operations. Watercraft operators, watercraft engineers, marine deck officers, and marine engineering officers who served at least one year on an Army vessel will be eligible for the badge. Senior- and master-level versions of the badge will be awarded based on higher certifications and more years of service.

The Mountaineering Badge, on the other hand, will be distributed to soldiers who finish the Army Mountain Warfare School’s mountaineering courses. The badge’s potential design includes a ram with golden horns, in front of what appeared to be a knife, or sword, and an ice axe.

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“The badge highlights the importance of mountain warfare training in preparing soldiers for combat operations,” the announcement read.

The Army Mountain Warfare School is located in Jericho, Vermont, and while a website for the school was not immediately accessible, an Instagram page shows soldiers scaling mountains, skiing through heavy snow, and braving the elements of the great outdoors across the seasons.

Previously, the Ram’s Head Device was awarded to soldiers who completed the two-week Basic Mountaineering Course at the school, according to an Instagram post from the Army Mountain Warfare School. But it wasn’t “authorized for wear cross the Army enterprise” until Wednesday.

The Institute of Heraldry, which oversees insignia for U.S. military branches and government agencies, has 60 days from the day of the announcement to tinker before completing the badge designs. The badges will be available for purchase at Army and Air Force Exchange Service stores within approximately 120 days, though the message did not specify when that period begins.

President Donald Trump’s administration has made it clear it is not supportive of actions addressing climate change, despite the president’s close advisor owning an electric car company. During his first week in office, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, which commits countries to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He has also frozen funding related to initiatives on climate change.

Lawmakers’ recommendations in the 181-page document, obtained by Defense News, align solidly with the White House’s desire to abandon efforts addressing climate change, initiatives championed during former President Joe Biden’s administration.

The fiscal 2025 appropriations process has not been standard. A six-month stopgap spending bill passed by Congress last week may lower defense spending, but it also grants the Defense Department far more authority to decide how to spend its budget.

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In the document crafted by the House and Senate appropriators, they recommended the Pentagon carve out $377.35 million worth of climate change initiatives and allocate that funding elsewhere, sending the message that funding related to those efforts is no longer supported by the people in power on Capitol Hill.

The majority of the cuts would take place within the Army’s research, development, test and evaluation portion of the budget, where efforts related to climate change initiatives could be cut from things like soldier lethality, ground, air and soldier system technology development.

Nearly half of the amount — a total of $167.2 million — was intended for funding hybrid-electric vehicle development work.

Lawmakers recommend zeroing out $100.25 million in funding for a Light Tactical Wheeled Vehicles HEV prototype effort, as well as $38 million for another emerging technology HEV prototype initiative and $27 million to pursue prototypes for an HEV variant of the Army’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.

Another $66.9 million would be cut from efforts to modify service equipment with electric or hybrid propulsion systems, and $11.5 million would be cut from Medium Tactical Vehicles development work on hybrid power options.

The Army has long tinkered with the idea of making some of its vehicles electric or hybrid, and while the technology has become commonplace in the commercial vehicle industry, the service has yet to follow.

Companies have continued to put technology in front of the service in order to show the purported benefits, arguing that the technology is ready for prime time in the Army’s modernization plans.

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The Army has evaluated the possibility of converting combat vehicles like the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle for hybrid propulsion, an effort led by the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office.

Army leaders have maintained that just because it hasn’t fully committed to hybrid capabilities in tactical or combat vehicles doesn’t mean the service is disinterested.

“It’s not a hard sell to anyone in the Army,” former Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told Defense News last fall. “I think wheeled vehicles is our biggest opportunity. It’s the same exact tech that’s all over the commercial sector now. A lot of people drive these cars. It’s becoming kind of normal.”

The Army is “just working on carving out the money to do it,” Bush said at the time.

While the investment is significant up front, “the long-term payoff, even a 10 to 15% fuel reduction, multiplied times a bazillion vehicles, is huge,” Bush said. “If we do this right, it’ll free up money down the road because we’re being more efficient with the vehicles.”

The capabilities a hybrid vehicle would bring are also becoming increasingly important in the modern battlefield, where silent watch and silent drive help U.S. troops evade detection by increasingly sophisticated sensors.

Additionally, the Army intends to make its Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle replacement a hybrid system, and companies competing to ultimately build the vehicle have created designs answering that requirement. The vehicles were expected to be introduced around 2030.

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Lawmakers are suggesting the Army cut nearly $45 million in funding for Next-Generation Combat Vehicle technology that addresses climate change initiatives.

Other technology development areas, such as Future Vertical Lift — costing roughly $10 million — and soldier lethality — another $15 million — would see cuts to their climate change work if the Army were to take the lawmakers’ recommendations.

The Army has been working on a variety of efforts that would align with its official climate strategy that address everything from installations in the U.S. all the way to the tactical edge of the battlefield. It is unclear if the strategy itself still stands or if it will be scrapped.

The Pentagon is already busy canceling work related to climate change, including studies that look at whether a warmer Earth could lead to increased instability and insecurity in certain places around the world.

In a recent post on X, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote, “The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.”

The Army embarked on an effort last year to weed through its mountain of formal requirements for any equipment or resources, from networks to weapons, that it might want to discard due to their stale or outdated nature.

Requirements describe desired capabilities that the military wants to have. There’s a sizable bureaucracy in the armed forces devoted to creating and refining requirements, passing them to acquisition specialists as the basis for eventual programs. Lousy requirements have led to billions of dollars wasted in the Army and elsewhere in the U.S. military.

The service’s new process is essentially an Army Requirements Oversight Council, or AROC, event — but in reverse. Instead of approving new requirements, as the panel usually does, the service approves their removal. The Army is calling it CORA, which is coincidentally a backwards “AROC,” but stands for Continuous Objectives Requirements Analysis.

“What we are doing is we are actually using some automated tools to go back and take a look and see what’s still relevant with all these requirements documents,” Gingrich said at the McAleese Defense Programs conference in Arlington, Virginia. “Often, old requirements are still associated with some operations and sustainment funding, which can be allocated elsewhere.”

As the Army validates new requirements coming online, the service is looking to identify requirements on the books that are rendered invalid as a result of new or changing requirements, Gingrich explained.

“We are becoming more sophisticated,” Gingrich noted. The service is now able to — when writing new requirements — dive into old requirements using the CORA process and align resources from old requirements that are tied to new ones.

For instance, the Army is working to completely overhaul its command and control architecture through an effort called Next-Generation Command-and-Control. The previous capability consisted of a variety of essentially disparate systems. The Army was able to identify old requirements that established those “vertical systems” and off-ramped the money applied to those requirements.

“We will bring it into Next-Gen C2 in the future so that we ensure there’s no money out there going toward legacy systems,” Gingrich said.

The Army has two certified and fielded Typhon batteries, also known as Midrange Capability missiles, stationed out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, Col. Michael Rose, the 3rd MDTF commander, told reporters in a media roundtable Friday.

The 3rd Multidomain Task Force, or MDTF, headquartered in Hawaii, will officially receive its Typhon battery at JBLM this year, according to Rose.

The Lockheed Martin-built system, consisting of a vertical launch system that uses the Navy’s Raytheon-built Standard Missile-6 and Tomahawk missiles, can strike targets in the 500- to 2,000-kilometer range. The complete system has a battery operations center, four launchers, prime movers and modified trailers.

Defense News first reported the Army’s plan to pursue the midrange missile in September 2020. The Army fielded the capability in less than three years.

The Army deployed its first Typhon missile launcher to the Philippines in 2024 as part of the joint exercise Salaknib, where the 1st MDTF transported it 8,000 miles via a C-17 Globemaster cargo aircraft. The system has remained on the island of Luzon.

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“We’re constantly looking for opportunities to exercise capability like that forward in theater,” Rose said. “We learn enormous lessons by bringing capability into the theater.”

Rose said the Army anticipates the Typhon supporting Operation Pathways, a series of year-round exercises designed to strengthen cooperation with regional allies and deter China.

China criticized the first deployment of the Typhon in 2024, warning it could destabilize the region. Officials have yet to fire the missile system in the Philippines.

When asked if his unit might conduct a live-fire exercise with the Typhon system, Rose said, “We’re always looking for opportunities to do live-fire with the system. It gives us enormous benefit to be able to do that, so we’re looking for the opportunity to do that at any time in our campaigning activities to include the next 12 months.”

Meanwhile, the Army is working to field another three batteries to the remaining multidomain task force units between fiscal 2026 and 2028, the service’s Program Executive Office Missiles & Space, told Defense News. The Army plans to next field a battery to the 2nd MDTF based in Europe in fiscal 2026.

The service is also working to build out its MDTF structure by fiscal 2028.

Established at JBLM around 2018, the Army’s first MDTF was experimental, but the service has since made it operational and will ultimately build four more. Multidomain task force units have since participated in U.S. Indo-Pacific Command exercises that have helped inform the Army’s Multidomain Operations warfighting concept, which has now evolved into doctrine.

The Army’s fourth MDTF, stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado, will focus on the Pacific theater and is anticipated to be established in full by fiscal 2027. The 5th MDTF will be stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where it will concentrate on regions as determined. It will be operational by fiscal 2028.