The contract period runs May 1, 2024, through April 30, 2029, with an option to extend it to April 30, 2034.

“This contract will accelerate innovation and continue leading the development of the Command and Control, Battle Management and Communications (C2BMC) system,” Lockheed said in a statement. “Under the new C2BMC-Next scope, the system will be upgraded with the latest 21st Century Security technology for faster, multi-domain coordinated responses to emerging threats.”

The C2BMC system connects a wide variety of systems and radars that together form a global missile defense architecture that protects the homeland as well as U.S. and allied forces worldwide from long-range missile attacks.

Work under the new C2BMC Next contract includes bringing in allies and partners, according to the company.

“Part of C2BMC-Next will be enhancing global integration, exploring possibilities of linking this decades-long proven, operationally-fielded system with allied nations for the first time,” the American firm’s statement noted.

“With C2BMC’s already well-established lines of reliable communication — operating 24/7, 365 days a year in more than 30 locations across the world — the ability to securely collaborate with other countries, across multiple domains, from any location in near real-time will be a game changer for the defense industry,” according to Erika Marshall, Lockheed’s vice president for C4ISR, which stands for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

The effort under the contract will also include providing C2BMC with technology “that will provide greater Space Domain Awareness,” according to the company’s statement. “Through the connection of sensors, and diffusion of data at a level that hasn’t been done before, this enhancement will allow operators to see a complete view of the battlespace around the world.”

Lockheed has been the prime contractor for C2BMC since 2002. The system, first fielded in 2004, has gone through numerous upgrades, which are spiraled in to adapt to threats. C2BMC was designed to focus from a strategic level down to an operational level.

Recent upgrades since 2021 gave the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, or GMD, system a single, composite, real-time picture of threats by tying into and fusing data from a broader set of sensors to include satellites as well as ground- and ship-based radars, according to the company.

The GMD system is a U.S.-based capability designed to defend the homeland against intercontinental ballistic missile threats, particularly from North Korea and Iran. The system is made up of interceptors buried in the ground at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

MDA also linked C2BMC to the Army’s Integrated Battle Command System, which provides threat pictures down to the tactical level, as part of recent upgrades. IBCS, which reached full-rate production in 2023, is the command-and-control system for the Army’s air and missile defense architecture.

More enhancements included giving C2BMC the capability to pass data back-and-forth with IBCS and other sensors, including space sensors.

The recent upgrades and upcoming development work done under the contract over the next several years will help the system support the Joint All-Domain Command and Control initiative. JADC2 is the Pentagon’s warfighting strategy focused on building an overarching network to fight advanced adversaries like China and Russia. This would require high-bandwidth, resilient communications as well as the ability to share massive amounts of data to help commanders rapidly make decisions.

Lockheed will perform the majority of its work under the new contract in Huntsville, Alabama, and Colorado Springs, Colorado.

The office estimated an 18-ship LSM program would cost between $6.2 billion and $7.8 billion in 2024 inflation-adjusted dollars, or $340 million to $430 million per ship. This is three times more than the Navy’s comparable estimate of $2.6 billion total, or $150 million per ship.

The CBO, in a report released April 11, noted the program would cost between $11.9 billion and $15 billion in 2024 dollars if the service ultimately buys 35 ships, as the Marine Corps has pushed for.

The report outlined the challenges in predicting the cost of the program, given remaining questions about what the platform will look like and how it will be used, and cited inconsistencies over time between how the Navy and Marine Corps each talk about the future of this program.

For example, the Marine Corps originally proposed LSM in its Force Design 2030 modernization plan in spring 2020, calling for a vessel that would be built to commercial standards to keep costs low and to help it blend in with commercial shipping.

The Navy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, however, have pushed for higher standards for safety and survivability, leading to a back-and-forth over design, cost and quantity.

“A central issue that remains unclear is the LSM’s concept of operations. Specifically, do Navy and Marine Corps leaders expect the ships to deploy and resupply their marines only before a war has started, such as when a crisis is building? Or would the ships also redeploy and resupply marine units during a conflict, when those ships would be potentially vulnerable to detection and attack by opposing military forces?” the report asked.

“A ship that is not expected to face enemy fire in a conflict could be built to a lesser survivability standard, with fewer defensive systems than a ship that would sail in contested waters during a conflict. Recent experiments by the Marine Corps suggest that the naval services are still determining what the capabilities of the LSM will be,” it continued.

The answers to these questions will directly affect cost.

The CBO created a cost estimate based on a hybrid military-commercial ship design, as Navy and Marine Corps leaders have indicated they’ll pursue.

Using strictly military standards associated with traditional amphibious warships would add $2 billion to $3 billion to the cost of an 18-ship program, and $5 billion to $6 billion to the price of a 35-ship program, the report noted.

The use of commercial standards would lower the cost estimate by $4 billion to $8 billion for an 18-ship program, and by $5 billion to $10 billion for a 35-ship program, the report added.

Additionally, the CBO report noted uncertainty over how many ships the Navy will ultimately buy. The service has discussed buying 18, while the Marine Corps insists it needs 35.

“The total cost of the program — as opposed to the average cost of individual ships — will largely be determined by the number of LSMs the Navy ultimately buys,” the report noted.

The cost will also depend on how many shipyards the Navy puts on contract to build LSMs and at what annual rate. This might look different if the services hurried to get as many out as quickly as possible, versus if they stick to the current plan of buying one or two per year for the first five years.

The Navy originally planned to begin buying LSMs in fiscal 2023, but that was pushed back to fiscal 2025 for budgetary reasons. The Navy has awarded contracts to five companies to help refine the requirements for the ship type, and in January the service released a request for proposals to industry for the contract to design and build the first LSMs.

The vessels will have a draft of 12 feet, be 200-400 feet long, be able to transit 3,500 nautical miles at a speed of 14 knots, beach themselves to load and unload vehicles and supplies, have a crew of 70 sailors, and embark 50 Marines, among other specifications.

Speaking at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference here on Monday, Lt. Gen. James Bierman, deputy commandant for plans, policies and operations, laid out challenges the U.S. military faces in the Western Pacific and moves the Marines are making to address those gaps.

The three key challenges are “time, space and access,” Bierman said.

“Much as they might like to think so, the (People’s Republic of China) is not 10-feet tall,” Bierman said. “That’s not to say they’re not worthy of respect, and we do respect them, they’re working very hard, they’re building lots of capacity, but they struggle with doubt and uncertainty and we’re purposefully campaigning and posturing to maintain and magnify their doubt and unease.”

Marines build two littoral regiments to fight peer threats with a third on the way

To meet those challenges, Bierman said, the Corps has focused efforts on its units both already within the U.S. Navy fleet and those inside of the first island chain and “weapons engagement zone.”

The island chain refers to a string of islands from the Kuril Islands in the north, sweeping south through Okinawa, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines, paralleling Russian, North Korean and Chinese shores.

Partner and allied nations in that same chain are training alongside Marines in new ways, focused on detecting, targeting and striking enemy naval vessels.

“They’re very much seeing the problem the same way,” Bierman said. “Which is how in distributed naval terrain do you sense and make sense; do you synchronize and coordinate in combined operations. How do you establish the right linkages for command and control?”

The Marines think they have the answer: the Marine littoral regiment.

In recent years, the Corps has developed the littoral regiment as purpose-built for littoral combat, or fighting in the shallower reaches where land, islands and archipelagos meet ocean.

The 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment operates out of Hawaii. The 12th Marine Littoral Regiment was redesignated in 2023 in Okinawa, Japan, and another regiment is planned to form in Guam in 2027.

The regiments hold 2,000 Marines each, about the size of a Marine expeditionary unit, but with different capabilities. They have fewer infantry but contain their own air control and air defense units, a medium missile battery instead of conventional artillery and more advanced logistics capabilities.

Bierman said that military partners and allies in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines are either copying elements of the littoral combat concept or were working toward these moves even as the Corps began developing it.

Following the panel discussion, he told Marine Corps Times that each nation is taking its own approach, some weighting the units more toward sensing capabilities, others toward lethal strike capabilities. He declined to discuss specific equipment, platforms or capabilities by country.

The three-star stressed that success in any potential conflict will involve a combination of Marine littoral regiment assets and more traditional formations, such as the Marine expeditionary unit or other capabilities from the Marine expeditionary force.

The 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment has been participating in various exercises, chiefly with the Philippines’ armed forces, since 2022. The 12th Marine Littoral Regiment, still under construction, will primarily work with the Japanese military.

The Japanese military developed its first amphibious rapid deployment brigade in 2018. In March, it activated the 3rd Regiment within the brigade for defense of its southwest region, U.S. Naval Institute reported. It also formed and deployed an electronic warfare unit to Yonaguni Island, Japan, in March.

Bierman previously served as commanding general of III Marine Expeditionary Force, the only forward-deployed Marine expeditionary force, and lead force in the Pacific.

“Our allies and partners are all in,” Bierman said. “They are feeling the heat, they’re tired of getting pushed around in their own backyards.”

In January, the Philippines announced its Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept, a shift to join its army, air force and navy in an external security focus instead of its previous concentration on external security. The move has been described as a move to counter Chinese military aggression and incursion into the nation’s territorial waters.

Bierman noted an uptick in various military exercises. The large-scale, multinational naval exercise Rim of the Pacific, the U.S.-Australia annual Talisman Sabre exercise and the U.S.-Philippines exercise Balikatan have grown steadily in size and scope in recent years.

And those exercises are not simple live fires. The Marine littoral regiment is working sensing and ship targeting, passing data and conducting command and control alongside host nation partners.

Bierman emphasized the realism of the exercises and their effect on adversaries.

“The exercise the operations we’re doing, everything we walk back from an existing war plan,” Bierman said. “It is a rehearsal of an existing war plan with the actual joint partners, allies and partners we will fight with more often than not on the terrain we will operate with at the specific high risk time of year.”

Using these exercises to highlight how the U.S. and its partners are working on shared aims for another target ― deterrence.

“Everything we do in INDOPACOM is done with an eye toward cognitive impact on potential adversaries,” Bierman said. “Nothing sends a message of deterrence and unsettles our adversaries like true interoperability.”

The air-launched weapon can reach speeds up to Mach 10, which equates to about 7,700 mph.

Less than a month earlier, the U.S. had sent a Patriot air defense system to Ukraine to help it fend off the barrage of complex missiles Russia was using. But the system had never proved itself against a missile like the Kinzhal.

Even so, the Patriot system blocked the incoming missile, defusing the weapon and several others, according to U.S. officials.

Since then, the Patriot system has continued to successfully intercept a wide range of Russian weaponry. It has shot down Russian aircraft like Su-34 fighters flying nearly 100 miles away, and intercepted missiles as far as 130 miles away, according to Oleksandr Musiienko, head of the Kyiv-based nongovernmental organization the Center for Military and Legal Studies.

The success of the RTX-made Patriot system in Ukraine comes as the U.S. Army aims to replace the Patriot with an integrated air and missile defense system better able to connect with other equipment on the battlefield and equipped with a more capable radar.

But the Patriot system’s dominance in Ukraine has attracted fresh attention and potential customers from around the world. What might have looked like an aging system not long ago now appears to be a workhorse that could be used for years to come.

“Patriot has prove[d] to be a very reliable system,” said Ben Hodges, a retired three-star general who commanded U.S. Army forces in Europe following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. “The Ukrainians learned very quickly how to operate it, and even more impressively they learned very quickly how to employ it to great effect.”

“Nations are much more alive to the [air and missile defense] threat,” he added.

The successor

The Patriot system was first introduced to counter threats to the United States during the Cold War. But it faced significant battle when forces deployed the system in the Middle East during the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War.

In those early years, the Patriot experienced major failures. In 1991, for example, the system failed to intercept an Iraqi Al Hussein Scud missile, which hit barracks in Saudi Arabia and killed 28 U.S. soldiers. The system was then involved in three friendly fire incidents in 2003 during the Iraq War; in one case, a Patriot shot down a British Royal Air Force Tornado jet, killing its two crew members.

Despite these failures, the U.S. Army has long relied on the system. Indeed, its Patriot units for years maintained the highest operational tempo across any units in the service with the longest deployments. Despite the incidents in Iraq, it was heavily used there and successfully countered ballistic missile threats.

And plenty of other countries also use the system, which is made up of eight truck-mounted launchers, a ground radar, a control station and a power generator. The launchers can each hold four interceptors.

According to Raytheon, an RTX company that manufactures the Patriot system, 19 countries have purchased the weapon and there are more than 250 Patriot fire units around the world. Tom Laliberty, Raytheon’s president of land and air defense systems, told Defense News in a recent interview the U.S. owns 85-90 of those, with the rest distributed among the other 18 customer countries.

“The system has just been continually improved based on feedback we get from the now 19 countries that use Patriot,” he said.

Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea led to a sales burst. Eastern European countries jumped to buy Patriot systems to enhance their own defenses. Romania, Poland and Sweden signed on as new customers in the years between Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

But during the same time, the U.S. Army started making plans to replace the Patriot, seeking a capability with a more flexible command-and-control system and a radar capable of full coverage. The Patriot radar’s existing configuration creates blind spots for the system.

The Army is slated to build a new Patriot battery to replace the one sent to Ukraine and to secure one more battalion’s worth of systems. But the service will gradually replace individual elements of the Patriot system over the next several decades. Eventually, all of those upgraded elements will become a new system known as Integrated Air and Missile Defense.

The first piece to be replaced will be the Patriot’s command-and-control system, which will be swapped out with the Northrop Grumman-developed Integrated Battle Command System. IBCS, approved for full-rate production last year, will enable the system to connect with a variety of other sensors and shooters on the battlefield.

Next, the Patriot system’s radar is slated to be replaced with the Raytheon-developed Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, or LTAMDS. The first set of prototype radars is undergoing tests with the Army; they are expected to offer 360-degree coverage.

In recent months, the sensor completed four successful live-fire demonstrations at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.

The Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense system will be designed to tie into a broader air defense architecture using IBCS. The service is also expected to be able to easily improve the technology through software updates.

Patriot heats up

But the system’s success in Ukraine has made clear there remains interest for the Patriot in its current state.

Switzerland purchased five batteries and 75 missiles in November 2022, and Romania plans to buy additional fire units. At least two other European countries are close to announcing plans to buy Patriot, according to Laliberty, who declined to identify them.

Germany announced in March it would buy more Patriot systems to augment its air defense capabilities. Raytheon won a $1.2 billion contract that buys radars, launchers, command-and-control stations, spares and support, according to a company statement.

Slovakia has publicly expressed interest in buying Patriot systems following a NATO-owned Patriot system’s deployment to the country in 2022.

Raytheon’s production lines are churning out five fire units for the contract with Switzerland, Laliberty said, and the company anticipates an additional 12 will be under contract within the next 18 months.

“Given that our capacity supports the production of 12 fire units a year, there is sufficient capacity to support current as well as future contracts as they materialize,” he noted.

Raytheon also received a contract in January to replace the U.S. Patriot battery donated to Ukraine. That was paid for with fiscal 2023 supplemental funding approved by Congress.

Now, the company is focused on boosting production of the missiles the Patriot system uses as interceptors. The PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement weapons, made by Lockheed Martin, are the most capable missile variant used by the system.

In 2018, Lockheed’s annual rate of building those missiles was 350. The company planned to increase that to 500 annually. But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has put new pressure on this effort, and the U.S. Army has provided funding to get Lockheed to 550 missiles per year. In December, the firm said it reached a rate of 500 per year.

The company built an 85,000-square-foot facility equipped with automated systems to build PAC-3 MSE missiles and is now preparing to produce 650 a year by 2027.

Boeing, which supplies the seeker for the PAC-3 MSE, is also planning to accelerate production, according to Jim Bryan, the company’s director of integrated air and missile defense.

Bryan said Boeing last year added 35,000 square feet to its factory, enabling a 30% production increase.

Many of the expansion efforts by Lockheed and its suppliers preceded government funding. The companies are banking on both an increase in U.S. government spending in the coming years as well as a rise in orders from international customers.

“From a demand future, we continue to see it. We meet with customers all the time, and we think we’ll be adding new customers to the MSE line,” Brenda Davidson, Lockheed’s vice president of PAC-3 programs, told Defense News. “The areas of Asia-Pacific and the Middle East continue to be very, very important to us.”

‘Patriot has a place’

Indeed, those two regions have existing Patriot customers that continue to rely on the system. And geopolitical hot spots, such as the Taiwan Strait and the Red Sea, are driving demand for air defense more broadly — regardless of which system is available.

Increasingly savvy ballistic missiles and emerging hypersonic missiles are creating new challenges for air defense systems. The U.S. Army has named air defense one of its highest priorities, and is adjusting its funding accordingly.

In the fiscal 2025 budget released in March, the Army asked for $602 million in research and development efforts for Integrated Air and Missile Defense and $2.8 billion in procurement, which covers modernized capabilities beyond the Patriot system.

For Patriot modifications alone, the Army planned to spend $1.7 billion between FY24 and FY28, according to FY24 budget documents. Now, the Army is requesting an additional $2.29 billion across the same time period to modify and upgrade its Patriot capability, according to FY25 documents.

The head of U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey, said the service has sought to reduce pressure on Patriot air defense units, but has been stymied by today’s demands.

“Prior to the recent increase in deployments, we were continuing to move along a path to regain some of that readiness,” he told Defense News in March. The “demand has limited our ability to regain a lot of that readiness back.”

He said the Army hopes international allies will help as they increasingly buy air defense capabilities.

“It’s going to be a challenge as long as we have the high demand moving forward on our soldiers. But leveraging our partners and leveraging our modernization goals are the ways that we can eventually, sometime in the future, start alleviating some of that pressure,” Gainey added.

Hodges, however, said there remains just one U.S. Patriot battalion committed to Europe.

“I have seen and heard a lot more conversation about” air and missile defense integration among allies and partners in Europe, he noted, “but I have not seen marked increases in capabilities, nor have I seen a large-scale, theaterwide, joint, multinational air [and] missile defense exercise that presents the same sort of challenge a Russian attack would bring.”

“None of us has enough capacity to defend much of what must be protected. So integration and regional approaches are necessary,” Hodges added.

For his part, Gainey said some European countries are interested in adopting the U.S. Army’s modernized capability, including the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor as well as the Integrated Battle Command System. Poland, for example, is the first country to field the latter.

“Patriot has a place,” Gainey said. “They will still operate out there hand in hand until we fully modernize the air and missile defense force.”

The United States, where Patriot manufacturer RTX is based, is trying to contend with the rapid use of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement missiles in its military operations while ensuring it has enough stockpiled in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. (Beijing considers the island nation a rogue province and has threatened to take it back by force.)

Missile production is increasing in the U.S., particularly the Lockheed Martin-made PAC-3 MSE missiles, the most capable variant. The company is making hundreds of them over the next two years.

Lockheed was building 350 MSE missiles a year in 2018 and was working to ramp up its production to 500 missiles a year prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Lockheed is now fully funded by the U.S. Army to build 550 missiles a year at its Camden, Arkansas, production line. In December, Lockheed hit a rate of 500 per year, Brenda Davidson, the company’s vice president of PAC-3 programs, told Defense News.

The business built a new 85,000-square-foot facility to make PAC-3 MSE missiles complete. The location features a variety of automated systems that make production a smoother and more efficient process, Davidson said.

While the Army has yet to fund another missile production increase, Lockheed decided in the latter part of 2022 that it would continue to invest internally to be able to build 650 a year. “Lockheed could see the demand out there,” Davidson said, adding that the company plans to hit that number in 2027.

Additionally, Lockheed has worked to stabilize its supply chain as much as possible, Davidson said. Aerojet Rocketdyne supplies the solid-rocket motor and is co-located in the same industrial park as Lockheed in Camden. Boeing supplies the seeker and has spent its own capital to keep up with demand.

Lockheed has also added a variety of second-source suppliers to mitigate risk in the supply chain, Davidson said, and is funding sub-tier suppliers to ensure they have the right tooling and test equipment — and are on the same page in terms of what the program requires.

It’s unclear if the U.S. Army sees a need to ramp up its Patriot missile production beyond 650 missiles a year. But Emily Harding, deputy director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Pentagon must encourage industry to continue investments that allow for the rapid production of much-needed missiles.

The department, she explained, should essentially tell industry: “Even if, let’s just say for a second, that peace breaks out across the globe tomorrow, we will still fulfill those contracts, so please build them.”

During a December defense conference in Washington, D.C., Army acquisition chief, Doug Bush, sent out a subtle signal, stating that while the draw on Patriot “has been manageable for Ukraine because they have other systems that are helping as well ... the long-term challenge of just having Patriot missiles for a Pacific scenario is the other reason we are asking Congress for support of that investment.”

The Army is “providing stuff out of stock. The build-back time is the concern,” he added.

The service needs supplemental funding, Bush said, in order to ramp up capability like the PAC-3 MSE weapon, noting the pending supplemental request to replenish American stockpiles of weapons and equipment sent to Ukraine includes $750 million to help Lockheed increase capacity by more than 100 a year over its current capacity.

The Senate passed a supplemental funding bill, which included a Ukraine aid package, that would contribute to ramping up the PAC-3 MSE capability, but the legislation is held up in the House.

While stalled during the first half of the fiscal year, the Army will be able to move forward to cement a multiyear contract for PAC-3 MSE missiles through the recent passage last month of the fiscal 2024 defense appropriations bill.

Lockheed continues to place its bet through internal investments and work with suppliers that have long-lead times to deliver subcomponents and parts, Davidson said. And the company continuously talks to the Army about how much more the business could and should ramp up production, she added.

Even without Army funds, “demand for PAC-3 MSE just continues to increase,” Davidson said, noting the company signed six letters of approval last year from international customers.

Lockheed is also pitching the PAC-3 MSE to the U.S. Navy, and is spending $100 million to integrate the missile with the service’s Aegis combat system.

The company plans to test this spring whether it can fire the missiles from a vertical launch system tied into Aegis’s command-and-control technology and the SPY-1 radar. If successful, the hope is the Navy or Pentagon will conduct further tests that could lead to an initial operational capability on a ship.

Seeker supply, rocket motor boost

Boeing, which supplies the seeker for the PAC-3 MSE missile, is also spending money internally to align with Lockheed’s production increase plans, according to Jim Bryan, Boeing’s director of integrated air and missile defense programs.

While Boeing had made some incremental expansions, the company decided last year that “the demand signals were strong enough that [it] went out ahead of any government funding to invest” in a 35,000-square-foot factory expansion for its seekers, which equates to a 30% production capacity increase, Bryan said.

Bryan added that Boeing can build seekers to keep up with the planned 650 missile production rate using the facility it has, but the new location will feature added efficiencies such as the addition of a variety of automated systems to include inspections and robotic soldering.

The new facility also sets up the company to meet “much higher” demand signals above 650, Bryan added.

Meanwhile, orders for solid-rocket motors used on a wide variety of munitions is straining current suppliers Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne. However, the solid-rocket motor industry is growing with some newcomers.

Still, PAC-3 MSE production is weathering that flex in supply and demand, according to Davidson. Aerojet Rocketdyne makes the solid-rocket motors that go with PAC-3 MSE missiles right next door to Lockheed’s missile production line in Camden.

Aerojet opened a 51,000-square-foot facility in the same industrial park in 2022, where it is producing the PAC-3 MSE propulsion system. All of those manufacturing activities are under one roof and is positioning the company, acquired by L3Harris Technologies in July 2023, to significantly increase production rates, Aerojet Rocketdyne has said.

“As we continue to modernize and expand, we have been building in the ability to surge beyond current requirements, including adding manufacturing space and equipment,” Ross Niebergall, Aerojet Rocketdyne’s president, told Defense News in a written statement.

Aerojet has increased rocket motor production from about 70,000 in 2021 to 115,000 in 2023 — a more than 60% increase — the company said. These motors range from ones that can fit in the palm of your hand to the size of a small car. The increases, the company stressed, are tied to contract requirements.

Challenges still remain, Niebergall added. “Solid rocket motor production relies on several important components and materials, and regardless of the number of solid rocket motor providers that exist, we each require these same components and materials — and more significantly, the suppliers who produce them.”

The company is working to partner with suppliers to come up with solutions and ensure they have what they need in terms of capacity and flexibility to support production, according to Niebergall, and it is spending money to support suppliers.

“Thanks to significant internal and government investments, we’re expanding and modernizing key production locations across the country, investing in digital engineering, and pursuing collaborations,” Niebergall said.

Foreign contribution

Meanwhile, in Europe, countries have realized amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that they need a greater magazine depth for air defense forces, according to Tom Laliberty, Raytheon’s president of land and air defense systems.

Four NATO countries — Germany, Romania, Spain and the Netherlands — are coming together to buy 1,000 PAC-2 GEM-T missiles and will do a large amount of production in those countries, primarily Germany.

By pooling their resources, the countries get an economic order discount, and since they are being bought collectively, the missiles will be distributed based on priority of need, Laliberty explained.

Raytheon went under contract at the beginning of the year with NATO. While some components will still be made stateside, Raytheon is expanding its supplier base in Europe to build critical GEM-T components and will build an all-up round integration and test facility with Germany’s MBDA.

MBDA subsidiary Bayern-Chemie will become a new rocket motor manufacturer for the missile, and another company in Spain will build a new control actuation system.

Overall, Raytheon’s production of PAC-2 GEM-T missiles is ongoing, with a contracted backlog of approximately 1,500 missiles, including the NATO order and an estimated near-term demand of an additional 1,000 missiles. The company is producing roughly 20 missiles a month and, with the added capacity being through international initiatives, is on a path to reach 35 missiles a month by the end of 2027, according to Laliberty.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti said she and Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Eric Smith signed a letter to their three-star officers who oversee plans and operations, calling for a deep dive on ship readiness and requirements for the training and certification of ship groups and the Marines who embark on them.

Franchetti, who spoke to a group of reporters following remarks at the Navy League’s annual Sea-Air-Space conference here, acknowledged the amphibious assault ship Boxer deployed last week several months later than planned. To make up for its delay — caused by a maintenance challenge, as reported by Military.com — fellow Boxer Amphibious Ready Group ship Somerset deployed in January, taking on missions solo until its two fellow vessels and their embarked Marines could join it in the Pacific Ocean.

She said the Navy is also eyeing potential delays for the amphibious assault ship Wasp, which recently began basic at-sea operations following a lengthy maintenance availability.

“We’re trying to look ahead to make sure that we can, I want to say, nip this in the bud,” she explained. “Many of our amphibious ships are older. Also, they’re getting the [Joint Strike Fighter] modifications, so that’s taking time when they go in for their upgrades, and that’s taking a little bit longer than expected.”

The chief of naval operations called this study a “proactive approach” to help “get ahead of potential delays” in maintenance, and ensure ship crews and embarked Marines are properly trained and certified to respond to contingencies and deploy on time, even if maintenance runs long.

She said the group will report back next month with the “terms of reference” for the study, which will outline what to look at and how.

Franchetti emphasized she’s committed to the amphibious fleet, noting the recent fiscal 2025 budget request reflects that with money to buy new amphibious assault ships, amphibious transport docks and landing ships medium.

Amphibious ships have been a point of contention between the Navy and Marine Corps in recent years. Some of the oldest Whidbey Island-class dock landing ships have required an increasing amount of time and money for maintenance. And yet, in some cases, they have struggled to be ready enough to deploy.

The Navy has argued it should stop throwing money at these ships that aren’t combat-credible. The Marine Corps has argued that decommissioning the ships early would put it further from its required 31-ship amphibious fleet — a number Congress passed into law in 2022. The Corps says it needs a minimum of 31 ships to ensure Marines are sufficiently trained and can maintain a regular presence around the world.

The issue was exacerbated by a Pentagon-driven effort last year to pause buying amphibious transport docks and reconsider what, if any, design the Navy should buy in the future. That debate now appears to be over, with the Navy’s FY25 spending plan showing the continued purchase of amphibious transport docks as originally planned.

In at least one case, an Australian company has even opened up a location inside the gates of a U.S. Army arsenal.

Indeed, Australian defense executives say the AUKUS agreement not only offers the opportunity to expand into the world’s largest defense market, but also a chance to transfer those benefits back to a growing Australian defense industry ready to help if a large-scale conflict breaks out in the Indo-Pacific region.

“All of a sudden America and Australia’s industrial bases naturally just need to be linked,” Rob Nioa, chief executive of Australian munitions company Nioa Group, told Defense News. “Where we ultimately want to be is a company operating in the U.S. munitions base with forward-deployed, production-ready capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region.”

The AUKUS collaboration, unveiled in September 2021, is organized into two pillars of effort. The first focuses on nuclear-powered submarines; the second covers critical technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hypersonics and autonomy.

Already, Australia has received $1.6 billion in U.S. defense contracts within the context of AUKUS, and Australia is “significantly investing in the United States to support the delivery of these contracts,” Paul Myler, deputy head of mission at the Australian Embassy in the U.S., said during an April 5 Center for Strategic and International Studies event.

The AUKUS pact “is not about making it easier for Australia to buy U.S. kit,” he added. “If we only look at it through a purchase-sale transaction lens, we have failed. This is a radical reimagination.”

But barriers to working together remain, Cynthia Cook, CSIS’ Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group director, told Defense News.

“Some of these relate to challenges that all companies have when marketing to the government, which is getting insight into government requirements and matching their products to a government demand,” she said. “Companies in partner nations can have challenges seeing tenders. And there is the simple challenge of the ‘tyranny of distance’ and the different time zones.”

Building a U.S. footprint

Nioa’s father founded Nioa Group in 1973 out of the back of a gas station in Queensland as a regional sporting firearms shop.

Over the years, the company expanded its customers to law enforcement and defense and its focus to munitions production. The company today provides all of the Australian Army’s artillery ammunition.

Nioa Group also has a business in New Zealand and a joint venture with Germany’s Rheinmetall called Rheinmetall Nioa Munitions, which recently established a munitions shell forging factory in Australia to supply the German military.

Roughly a year ago, the company established the Australian Missile Corp. under a contract with the Australian government to develop a domestic guided weapons enterprise.

Nioa Group has partnerships with some U.S. companies like Northrop Grumman and, in 2023, it purchased Murfreesboro, Tennessee-based Barrett Firearms, which produces the only shoulder-fired 50-caliber gun, the primary anti-personnel sniper rifle used by the U.S. Army and Special Operations Command.

Now, Nioa Group has signed a long-term lease at Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey, home to the U.S. military’s guns and ammunition development, making it the first foreign company with a footprint on Picatinny’s property. The company took up its tenancy in late November 2023 to collaborate on a variety of armaments supply needs.

“We have existing work that would see us wanting to be inside the wire working with them,” Nioa said.

And Nioa will have the chance to work more with other U.S. companies based there, including Northrop, General Dynamics, Winchester and BAE Systems. Nioa recently named Dan Olson, formerly Northrop Grumman’s weapons systems division vice president, a Nioa advisory board member focused on developing its U.S. strategy.

“Aspirationally, we want to grow in the U.S. market,” Nioa said. “What we now need to do is develop an ammunition footprint in the U.S., and that path is not 100% clear to us, but it will likely come out of us understanding the supply chain constraints in the U.S. and where the U.S. government needs more production for the allied effort.”

Nioa Group is interested in acquiring companies already in the supply chain, he added, and will seek to work with or acquire components that would be needed in Australia as well, Nioa said, which could lead to easier co-production.

While AUKUS is making it easier to establish direct relationships with the U.S. government and partner more deeply with U.S. industry, he said, it’s still too early to see technology being transferred.

“People are a little nervous that actually when it comes time for transferring missile technology or something that despite it being agreed to at a policy level, actually the documents and authorities which will allow the physical transfer, they think is still going to be entrenched,” he said. “There’s a lot of inertia around existing systems.”

Another Australian company is taking a similar approach in the U.S., seeking to expand the technology development work it is doing in Australia in the U.S. and with U.S. partners.

EOS Defence Systems opted to establish a production footprint in Huntsville, Alabama, in 2018 “in response to an ever-increasing U.S. military requirement for [remote weapon station] systems,” according to a company announcement at the time.

The company is perhaps best known for its common remote weapons stations and previously supplied some to the U.S. military in the 1980s. It lost the latest contract to Norwegian company Kongsberg, according to EOS chief executive Andreas Schwer, but the company has three other business sectors it hopes to grow in the U.S.

EOS has been working on lower kilowatt directed energy solutions that could be considered for integration on smaller systems like armored vehicles. He said the company is close to signing two contracts for lasers with international customers and then plans to migrate that technology to the U.S.

EOS also has developed over the last 20 years a ground-based laser that can blind satellites. The company is now developing capability to also disable satellites’ sensors and ultimately the satellite itself. “We see huge export potential,” he said.

AUKUS is allowing conversations and collaboration that would have been very difficult beforehand and giving the company the ability to participate in classified programs, Schwer said.

“AUKUS will make our life easier in terms of exchange of product data or product information, software codes, but also even the hardware to push back and forth, demonstrators, prototypes and stuff like that,” Schwer said. “We have more commercial reason to do more in the U.S.”

Like Nioa Group, EOS already has some partnerships with U.S. companies like Northrop Grumman, but the company is also looking for acquisition opportunities and partnerships, Schwer said.

“We are ready to bring laser technology to the U.S. or our satellite terminals, maybe even under another brand name,” he suggested. “We are currently checking all opportunities before we undertake a formal decision.”

Small business breakthrough

Smaller and newer Australian companies are also evaluating opportunities in the U.S.

3ME Technologies, an Australian company specializing in electrification, is now making a more global push, but hopes to focus on the AUKUS countries, according to chief executive Justin Bain.

The company has converted the Australian Defence Force’s Bushmaster vehicle into a hybrid-electric variant and has worked on projects delivering the battery system and power solutions for counter-drone and directed energy systems. The company particularly specializes in battery safety, critical both in the mining industry and the defense industry, Bain said.

3ME has now begun preliminary discussions with a number of U.S. prime contractors, which could help it grow in the U.S. The firm plans to make its U.S. trade show debut at Sea Air Space this month.

Enabling 3ME’s conversations with U.S. primes is an Australian government program called Going Global, which assists companies that want to link up with U.S. defense prime contractors.

Bain said he sees a strong role for the company potentially establishing a robust high-end battery and electrification supply chain in the Indo-Pacific as the U.S. considers logistics operations in a contested environment in the priority theater.

“The key theme we’re getting out of the U.S. is we need to shore up supply chain in INDOPACOM. We need more support in INDOPACOM. It’s the fact that we exist, we’re here in Australia with the experience and that’s why we want to focus in this area,” Bain said.

Ellen Lord, who served as the Pentagon’s acquisition chief during the Trump administration, said during the CSIS event in April, that working with small Australian companies “is where the real challenge is.”

“What we’re missing is the engagement strategy to bring all these small companies together to understand the art of the possible, to have the contracting officers know what to do with it, because we don’t always do a great job in the Department of Defense in terms of motivating and incentivizing individuals to lean forward and do something differently,” she said.

Hugh Jeffrey, the Australian Department of Defence’s deputy secretary of strategy, policy, and industry, said during a March 5 CSIS event in Canberra, Australia there’s a long history of trying to link the Australian and U.S. defense-industrial bases.

There has been “only limited success,” Jeffrey said, but said he’s optimistic this time will be different.

Already, he noted, the U.S. Congress made significant export control reforms in the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which will enable faster sharing of defense industrial resources with Australia and the U.K. and “most crucially” establish a national exemption for AUKUS countries from some U.S. export control licensing requirements. The U.S. State Department still needs to grant the exemption, contingent on Australia and Britain enhancing their own export control laws.

“My view is that the consensus has emerged on both sides of the Pacific on this issue, that we do need to change things up and that’s why it’s so exciting to see the US and Australia commit to a generational shift in mindset around industrial base integration,” he said.

The company announced the deal April 3 without providing details about contract length. A spokesperson declined to say how much the agreement is worth.

Robotic combat vehicles are unmanned systems envisioned to work alongside soldiers, schlepping supplies or surveilling adversaries with sophisticated sensors. The RCVs are also part of a larger Army overhaul dubbed Next Generation Combat Vehicle, which includes the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle, formerly the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle.

Anduril’s digital effort will enable RCV variants to navigate terrain, swap and adopt government-owned and third-party autonomy stacks, and allow remote management of a vehicle’s equipment, according to its announcement.

“Integrating disparate hardware and software is a critical step in the development and validation of any autonomous system,” Zach Mears, an Anduril senior vice president, said in a statement.

Anduril attack drone deemed ‘accurate and effective’ in Dugway trials

The Army in September tapped General Dynamics Land Systems, McQ, Oshkosh Defense and Textron Systems to build RCV prototypes, marking the start of a competition. The service later said it would no longer seek separate light, medium and heavy models, instead pivoting to a single sized platform that could tote specialty equipment such as smokescreen dispensers and electronic warfare tools.

“As the Army evaluates potential payloads, software modules, and autonomy stacks for the RCV program, developing a robust and flexible integration framework will prove critical to the program’s success,” Mears said.

The RCV endeavor is one of growing importance, as Army leadership pushes man-and-machine collaboration.

The service’s fiscal 2025 budget request included millions of dollars for human-machine integrated formations, or H-MIF. Robots and other machinery programmed to execute a machine, or with control beamed in from afar, could significantly reduce risk to humans, potentially reducing casualties.

“We have assessed over the course of the last couple of months that Russia has almost completely reconstituted militarily,” said Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell at an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security.

Campbell’s assessment seems to contradict those of the Pentagon and America’s allies in Europe.

At a meeting of countries that support Ukraine late last month, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that Russia had suffered more than 315,000 casualties during the war. With a drop in American aid, leading to ammunition shortages on Ukraine’s front lines, Russian forces have advanced. But those too have been costly, the Pentagon has said.

In an interview earlier this year, the chair of Lithuania’s national security committee estimated it would take Russia between five and seven years to reconstitute its forces for a full-scale war.

Still Moscow has surged defense spending since 2022 — up to 6% of national GDP in its 2024 budget. The rise is part of a larger effort by the Kremlin to move its economy, and in particular its defense industry, onto a wartime footing.

Part of its success comes from China’s support, along with that from North Korea and Iran. Both Campbell and another senior administration official, speaking with reporters this week on the condition of anonymity, said that China has helped its partner endure economic and military setbacks in the last two years.

“We’ve really seen the [People’s Republic of China] start to help to rebuild Russia’s defense industrial base, essentially backfilling the trade from European partners” that lapsed when Russia invaded, the official said.

President Joe Biden addressed this concern in a call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping Tuesday, according to a White House readout.

Moscow’s success has added pressure to the government in Kyiv, which this week lowered the draft age from 27 to 25 amid losses on the front lines. Ukraine is still hoping for a giant infusion of American aid still held up in Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson has so far refused to call that national security supplemental for a vote, though he recently signaled one could come under certain conditions.

Without it, Ukraine’s armed forces will continue needing to ration ammunition and air defense on the front lines and around the country. Still, that doesn’t mean the front lines are verging on collapse, said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff CQ Brown.

“Does it make it more complicated, more challenging for the Ukrainians without the supplemental — yes,” said Brown at an event hosted last week by the Defense Writers Group. “But they’ve been able to defend fairly well.”

Among its total inventory, the Army is equipped with Javelin anti-armor missiles, 105mm light guns, and eight-wheel drive light armored vehicles each featuring a 25mm gun. Recently introduced equipment includes the 5.56mm MARS-L rifle and the Australian-made four-wheel drive Bushmaster infantry vehicle.

Like the country’s naval and air forces, the Army has suffered severe attrition in recent years, partly due to remuneration and the state of military housing. Nevertheless, the finance minister announced in January 2024 that government agencies must identify annual savings, including 7.5% from the Defence Ministry and 6.5% from the military, ahead of the budget, due May 30.

In February, the armed forces said that amid gaps in end strength, they were worried about the remaining staff who are “shouldering significant burden” to ensure major equipment and platforms remained at the ready.

Then on March 25, the chief of the defense force, Air Marshal Kevin Short, announced that Boswell will retire June 9.

During his 40 years of service, Boswell served with the United Nations in Angola, East Timor and the Middle East. Defense News recently connected with the Army chief to discuss the state of the force, ongoing modernization programs and the lingering effects of the pandemic. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

What were your goals as Army chief?

On assuming command, I focused the Army’s effort very clearly toward becoming a modern, agile, highly adaptive, light combat force. Modernization involved giving momentum to the Network Enabled Army and Protected Mobility Capability programs as well as continuous improvement through the ongoing soldier modernization program.

Agility is the need for an army — even a small one — to provide the government with options across the spectrum of conflict while maintaining force structures able to task, organize, and — if required — reorganize as quickly as possible and as often as needed to meet changing requirements.

Our operating concept was to be framed by highly professional, highly capable special forces and light infantry, artillery and armor supported by agile, responsive combat support and combat service support.

How is the Network Enabled Army program coming along?

The program is a foundational requirement to achieving a networked, combat-capable force able to operate in a multidomain, multinational combat environment. It will provide the Army with a range of capabilities with which it can collect, transmit, manage and disseminate data in the contemporary operating environment.

Significant progress has been made in this space as we identify and introduce into service the equipment and systems that will enable our Army to better meet the challenges of an increasingly complex and uncertain security environment.

What are the easiest and most challenging aspects of your job?

The smoothest was, without question, having the support of incredibly competent commanders and staff at all levels across the Army. We really are fortunate with the caliber of people within the Army, and having the opportunity to lead them was both humbling and an honor.

With respect to the most challenging aspect of my time as the chief of the Army: the COVID-19 period, and the Army’s decisive commitment to our nation’s COVID-19 response, which was significant. [The pandemic had] wide-ranging impacts on the Army — mostly negative.

Challenges with retention, the generation and maintenance of individual and collective capabilities, and the effective introduction into service of new equipment, vehicles and infrastructure have all been impacted. A lot of work took place in the last 12 or so months to give energy, purpose and direction to the Army’s post-COVID-19 regeneration, but we still have some ways to go.

Without question, the toughest thing to deal with has been how environmental factors have, in a relatively short space of time, impacted the number of experienced professionals within the Army. For the vast majority of our command and specialist appointments, we can’t recruit directly and have to attract, train and retain these people.

In the last three years our Army has lost some absolute treasure due to disillusionment with our role during COVID-19, a lack of operational deployments, and external employment opportunities offering more variety and significantly better remuneration.

Commanders at all levels, both within Army and across the New Zealand Defence Force, have worked hard to shift the dial in this space. We are now seeing the results of that effort. It is, however, a circumstance we won’t quickly recover from and are going to have to remain focused on.

How is the hiatus on training and operations that took place during the pandemic still affecting the force?

We are still able to provide the government with immediate response options across the spectrum of conflict, should it choose to commit the Army to an operational theater. Sustaining those commitments for an extended period is problematic because of the gaps we currently have, post-COVID-19, in key specialist, trade and command appointments.

What is foremost on your wish list for the Army, in terms of personnel and equipment?

With respect to personnel, the chief people officer, with support from across the New Zealand Defence Force, including the Army, is leading a range of initiatives reviewing remuneration, conditions of service and allowances. Landing this effort and then resourcing it accordingly will not be easy, but it has to happen, and it has to happen quickly.

From an equipment perspective, giving real momentum to the Network Enabled Army, Protected Mobility Capability and soldier modernization programs will both enable aging capabilities to be replaced and ensure the force is equipped to operate effectively in the contemporary environment.

How does the Army contribute to the defense of its Western allies?

The New Zealand Defence Force is a combat-capable military force, trained, equipped and ready to respond every hour of the day, every day of the year. We contribute to international peace and security and the rules-based order through deployments of importance to New Zealand.

The New Zealand Army has a bilateral service cooperation plan, dubbed Plan Anzac, with the Australian Army. How has that impacted your force?

Plan Anzac reflects a broader defense relationship, one that is open, based on mutual respect and is enduring. It reflects the value of land power to both nations, and the value that interoperability between the Australian and New Zealand armies brings to combined joint operations.

The agreement makes sure both armies can work as efficiently as possible, complementing each other’s capabilities and capacity. It provides a focus and framework to take ongoing conversations and engagements between allies and mates, and then formalize these to improve existing cooperation.

We are able to better share lessons across capability development, doctrine for training, and many other areas related to the generation and — in the New Zealand Army’s current case — the regeneration of land combat capability.

Is the New Zealand Army’s culture at risk amid Australian input, or vice versa?

We have much more in common than we have differences, but we will always be who we are as Kiwis. And our Aussie mates will always be who they are. Ultimately we are a pretty potent mix and always the better off when we come together in pursuit of a common cause.

How will the military recover from attrition and a lack of experience before the next conflict breaks out?

The New Zealand Defence Force recognizes it will take some years to fully recover the workforce due to the time needed to train suitably qualified and experienced personnel. Despite this, the program to retain, recruit and reenlist people is showing dividends, with the regular force’s attrition reducing from over 15% this time last year to 10.3% as of Feb. 29, 2024.

Over the past year or more, specific targeted payments to critical trades, and a general forcewide retention payment, have been made as part of a range of initiatives to address attrition rates. These payments have been largely funded from unspent personnel expenditure. When facing workforce challenges, steps need to be taken to address them, so prioritization has been given to critical areas of need across the New Zealand Defence Force.

Are the public and politicians adequately aware of national security threats?

New Zealand is becoming more aware of the geostrategic challenges that we face as a nation. Without question, various agencies of government have a key role to play in monitoring and advising security threats. But equally it is important to recognize the role that other institutions play, such as academia and the media.

Is the military making the best use of domestic industry and academia?

Like anything we do, there is always room for improvement. The New Zealand Defence Force’s relationship with both industry and academia is no different and will only keep going from strength to strength, given the mutual respect and positive engagement that occurs between all parties.

How does climate change affect the balance between training for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief and practicing for combat?

The primary focus of the Army’s training is and always will remain combat. Forces led, trained and equipped for combat can rapidly adjust to the requirements of support operations when the need arises.

Who are your heroes?

My family. They have sacrificed so much to allow me to serve for as long as I have and in the way that I have. I owe them a debt of thanks that I’m not sure I can ever repay.

“We’ve incorporated two new NATO allies. So what does that mean for the High North in particular, and is there an expansion on the horizon for the High North from an [Army pre-positioned stock] standpoint?” Lt. Gen. Chris Mohan told Defense News in a March 27 interview at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium here.

Army Materiel Command would be in charge of placing the service’s pre-positioned stock in the region, should the strategy dictate such a move. The command is contributing to the decision-making process, Mohan said, but the Army’s Pentagon-based team in charge of plans, operations and training is in charge of developing an Army pre-positioned stock strategy for the region.

Storing equipment and weapons in the region near the Arctic Circle would mean the Army could learn more about how extremely cold weather impacts materials and what the service would need to do in order to winterize capabilities, Mohan said.

Whether or not the Army decides to place stock in Scandinavia, it is still expanding its pre-positioned stock on the continent to reach a division-sized set.

Fiscal 2025 budget documents show the Army plans to spend $536 million to enhance the pre-positioning of its stock with the division set to include corps-level enablers with two armored brigade combat teams, fires, air defense, engineer, sustainment and medical units.

In order to build out a division-level set, Mohan said, continued expansions will be made at existing Army pre-positioned stock locations. He noted the service will modernize equipment as new capability becomes available, such as tube-launched artillery. The Army will also consider other locations for expansion.

Some of the equipment, like tube-launched artillery and rocket artillery sent to Ukraine, is being back-filled into the Army’s pre-positioned stock as it comes off the production line, Mohan added.

The Europe-based stock has received a heavy workout since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Initially the U.S. Army moved a heavy brigade set from southern Germany to four positions in Poland as well as sites in the Baltic region for the 3rd Infantry Division to use, according to Mohan. The effort included multiple virtual rehearsals, which contributed to a streamlined process, he noted.

While that capability has since gone back to Germany, the Army is permanently moving an entire brigade set of equipment to Powidz, Poland, to a base built and funded by the host country and NATO. The infrastructure at the base was already significant; there is an airfield that is big enough to land a space shuttle, Mohan said.

But for the U.S. Army’s pre-positioned stock, Poland built a state-of-the-art facility there, upgraded rail lines and power infrastructure, and will conduct some standard maintenance on the equipment, he said.

The service is now preparing to issue its pre-positioned stock for this year’s Defender Europe, a large-scale annual U.S. Army exercise in Europe.

The Army’s pre-positioned stock historically has been designed so troops can rapidly draw from it in response to a regional conflict, but the service took a new approach roughly five years ago to use the equipment in military exercises in order to train more effectively how to draw the equipment as well as move it across challenging distances and a variety of borders.

“We want to focus [Army pre-positioned stock] as much on great power competition, to use those stocks in great power competition as much as we had planned on using those stocks for great power conflict,” Gen. Edward Daly, then-Army Materiel Command chief, said in 2020. He explained that meant the Army would exercise its pre-positioned stock much more.

Losses for some other self-propelled or towed systems in Ukraine’s war with Russia amount to nearly 30%, the company said in a statement to Defense News, without providing specifics.

The French-built Caesar is the world’s lightest 155mmm self-propelled gun at 18 metric tons, according to Nexter. The howitzer can fire six shells within a minute before packing up and moving away, an artillery tactic known as shoot-and-scoot, and evolving battlefield threats mean that mobility is the Caesar system’s best protection rather than the cannon’s range, Nexter said.

“Use of drones and loitering munitions has become a real threat 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the front, where the Caesar operates,” Nexter said in the statement. “Its light weight and ability to leave its position in less than a minute to avoid counter-battery fire are therefore major assets.”

Ukraine has received 55 of the truck-mounted systems, with 36 supplied by France, including six purchased this year, and another 19 donated by Denmark. Besides the French cannon, Ukraine operates 155mm artillery systems including the towed American M777 and self-propelled systems such as the German Panzerhaubitze 2000, the Polish Krab and Sweden’s Archer.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu visited the Nexter site in Versailles outside Paris on Tuesday to discuss the French-U.S.-led coalition to supply artillery and ammunition to Ukraine.

France, Denmark and Ukraine have agreed on financing the purchase of 78 Caesar systems for Ukraine in 2024 as part of the coalition, Lecornu said last week. That includes the six already delivered this year.

Nexter has increased monthly Caesar production to six from two before the war, and the target “in the time to come” is 12 cannons per month, Lecornu said in a press conference following the visit. The target is to reach the new capacity within a year, and Nexter has already made investments to boost the output of the system’s components, the company said.

“For the time being, all Caesar production is earmarked for Ukraine and for replenishing stocks of the French Army, which may decide to make further divestments to Ukraine,” Nexter said.

France in December ordered 109 new-generation howitzers from Nexter for about €350 million, with first delivery expected in 2026. The updated cannon will have an armored cabin to protect against mines and small-caliber arms, based on the feedback from French deployments in Afghanistan and Africa’s Sahel region.

The Caesar MkII will get a new 460 HP engine more than double as powerful as the previous 215 HP one, a new six-wheel chassis from military-vehicle maker Arquus, and updated fire control software. The howitzer will keep its 155mm cannon, with a range of more than 40 kilometers, and will remain air-transportable, according to France’s armaments directorate.

After a Ukrainian advantage in artillery fire in the summer of 2023, Russia gained the upper hand, and Lecornu said in January the shell ratio was nearly one-to-six in favor of Russia. Artillery has been the greatest killer in the war in Ukraine, accounting for more than 70% of casualties.

Ukraine’s artillery deficit contributed to recent setbacks on the frontline, including the withdrawal from the city of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region in February. A stronger artillery capability is one of Ukraine’s key needs to win the war, Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said in January.

Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante signed a memorandum establishing the Guam Defense Systems Joint Project Executive Office, which RCCTO will manage, Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, said in a March 27 interview at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Ala. It will consist of members from all of the services, he noted.

The office is already forming and fiscal 2024 money is being realigned to get it started, he said.

The Army last year was assigned to lead the acquisition and execution plan for the Guam architecture and the new office within RCCTO will focus on bringing the technology together to create a joint integrated air and missile defense fires capability to protect the strategic Pacific island.

“As we start bringing to bear defense of Guam Army systems, Navy systems and MDA systems, that sensing layer is going to thicken,” he explained. “And we think we have a lot to learn on how to assimilate or fuse that information from air defense perspective and that’s a really hard domain to get right. So if we can get it right there, [we] think that will scale very quickly to the other domains that don’t quite have the same latency [or] time requirements on it for them to execute their mission.”

Pentagon leaders, focused on China as a growing threat, say 2024 will be a key year for the Army to bolster defense around Guam. During this year, the service plans to have in place a foundational capability to help stave off a potential attack.

The Missile Defense Agency and the Army sought a combined $1.5 billion in FY24 budget to begin preparing the island by moving assets into place and integrating capabilities. The effort is a test for the Army, which decision-makers have at times overlooked amid the focus on air and naval power in the Indo-Pacific region.

Success in Guam could help cement the Army’s air and missile defense role in the region. The first wave of defenses will include radars, launchers, interceptors, and a command-and-control system.

The Army requested $638 million for FY24 for three Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensors, multiple Patriot air defense systems, and an assortment of Mid-Range Capability missile launchers and Indirect Fire Protection Capability launchers. Additionally, the service plans to use the Northrop Grumman-made Integrated Battle Command System to connect the right sensors to the right shooters on the battlefield.

The Navy will provide technology and capability from its Aegis weapon system; the service holds jurisdiction over the sites where it will place the technology.

Additionally, FY24 funding requests are meant to cover the installation along the island’s periphery of four high-end, solid-state, mobile AN/TPY-6 radars, which are new sensors that use technology from the Long Range Discrimination Radar in Clear Space Force Base, Alaska.

“It’s the synchronizing of all of that at one point in time, or to arrive at one point in time, on Guam so you actually have a capability – not just delivering a radar to a location where there’s no power, there’s no place to put it, or we don’t have any maintenance setup for it,” Rasch said. “So a lot of our efforts, other than building this integrated layered capability, is making sure that all of the pieces and parts make a capability, not just a material thing.”

Three of the Army’s Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense systems, or DE M-SHORAD, are in Iraq so the service can experiment with the capability in relevant operational environments. The fourth and last prototype will join the other three after getting some work done, said Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office director.

“All four will be downrange supporting our soldiers in the fight today,” he said. “What we’re giving up a little bit is our ability to learn how to integrate that capability into the maneuver force, so we have some work to do on the back end. We’re still capturing data; [the Army Test and Evaluation Command] is downrange with us.”

Additionally, the Army will learn from two other 50-kilowatt laser platforms while the first platoon-set of prototypes are away, he explained.

The Army had originally planned to finish the DE M-SHORAD prototyping effort and transition it to Program Executive Office Missiles and Space in 2023. That office had planned to run a competition for the program of record.

But Rasch’s office decided in 2022 that the directed-energy effort needed more time in development, and planned for a fiscal 2025 transfer instead.

The first prototypes consist of a 50-kilowatt laser from Raytheon on a Stryker combat vehicle. Kord Technologies is the lead integrator.

The two new 50-kilowatt platforms the Army will also evaluate, when they are arrive next year, are one option from Washington state-based nLight and another from Lockheed Martin, Rasch said. The designs are different, he added, so aspects like beam quality, affordability and reliability are also expected to differ.

The Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office now plans to spend approximately two years to evaluate options before deciding on a way forward.

“We’ve got a few different designs, so we’ll take the data from what we’ve received already, the data that we collect off these other two systems, and combine that together to tee up for the senior leaders, probably late ’26, early ’27 time frame,” Rasch said.

“We want to maintain competition, so it doesn’t really help if we spent a lot of money and almost unfair if we kind of load the deck and we pass off a program decision to, say, PEO Missiles and Space, and it really isn’t a decision; you’ve got one vendor who’s viable,” Rasch said. “Competition makes everybody better.”

While this effort means moving even slower, Rasch did say he “would have loved to have had them all done and be programs of record, but we probably couldn’t have afforded them all anyway. So this gives us a little time to really set up a better competitive space for that next phase affordability.”

With the DE M-SHORAD systems downrange, he added, the Army will learn about lethality and reliability.

“We’ve tested these in labs for decades,” Rasch said. “Now we’re learning some new lessons on what happens when you operationalize these, when you put them in a really ugly, dirty environment that our soldiers put them in.”

The Army is investing about $100 million a year as it prepares to make a recommendation to Army leadership on a strategy, he noted.

Right now, his office is evaluating 10-, 20-, 50- and 300-kilowatt options for a wide variety of threats and missions. The 300-kilowatt laser is designed for the Indirect Fire Protection Capability, which is a system that will use kinetic, laser and high-powered microwave weapons to destroy threats including rockets, artillery, mortars, drones and cruise missiles. The Army is to receive that laser weapon next year.

Not every laser capability we be at the range at the same time, but the service plans to collect data on power, lethality, affordability and reliability across directed-energy weapons through an integrated test campaign to inform senior leaders, Rasch said.

The process will help the service save some money from a testing perspective and, through operational assessments with the user, capture enough data to help the Army pin down the sweet spot for what it will need to counter threats in various environments, he explained.

The Air Force’s original plan for modernizing its ICBM enterprise included keeping nearly all its existing copper cabling in place to be reused for the upcoming LGM-35A Sentinel. That’s roughly 7,500 miles’ worth of copper cabling, connecting 450 half-century-old Minuteman III ICBM silos scattered through the Great Plains region with launch control centers and other facilities.

But the company official, who spoke with reporters on the condition that he be identified only as an official familiar with the Sentinel program, said the Air Force concluded it is necessary to upgrade the copper cables with a higher-performing fiber-optic network. That decision apparently came after the service awarded the engineering and manufacturing development contract to Northrop Grumman in 2020, and during the company’s work on the program’s early design phase.

The Air Force also realized that the original designs for Sentinel’s launch facilities — the massive concrete-encased silos from which the missiles would launch — would not work and had to be changed, the Northrop official said. Those original concepts were drawn up during the technology maturation and risk-reduction phase as well as the early engineering and manufacturing development step.

And with hundreds of launch facilities dotting the Great Plains region, often in 1-acre plots, and thousands of miles of cable stretching across farmland and other privately held property that now must be dug up, the cost of these changes swiftly added up, the Northrop official said.

“As we’ve worked through those changes. That’s led to a design that’s different than the one that they [the Air Force] started with,” the official explained. “When you multiply that by 450, if every silo is a little bit bigger or has an extra component, that actually drives a lot of cost because of the sheer number of them that are being updated.”

In a statement to Defense News, the Air Force said the Pentagon is still studying what exactly caused the severe cost overruns, which triggered a review process known as a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach.

“In accordance with statute, [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] will determine what factors caused the cost growth that led to a critical breach via the Nunn-McCurdy process, which is currently underway,” an Air Force spokesperson said. “Early estimates indicate that a large portion of the Sentinel program’s cost growth is in the command and launch segment, which is the most complex segment of the Sentinel program.”

‘Unknown unknowns’ on $96B program

Sentinel is a massive program to replace the Air Force’s aging LGM-30G Minuteman III ICBMs, which now make up the land-based portion of the U.S. military’s nuclear triad. In 2020, Northrop Grumman received a $13.3 billion cost-plus-incentive-fee contract for Sentinel’s engineering and manufacturing development phase.

The program was expected to run about $96 billion, with the total per-unit cost amounting to $118 million when its most recent cost, schedule and performance goals were set in 2020. But the price tag has skyrocketed at least 37%, and the per-unit cost is now about $162 million.

In a congressional hearing this month, Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., pegged Sentinel’s current cost at more than $130 billion.

That triggered the Nunn-McCurdy breach, and the Pentagon is now reviewing Sentinel to figure out how to get it back on track as well as where to find funds to keep it going. Top Air Force officials have publicly said that with Minuteman III well past its originally expected life span, the service has no choice but to replace it with a new, more reliable model — and will find money to pay for it.

Sentinel, which was originally supposed to reach initial operational capability in 2029, is now expected to fall two years behind schedule. The nuclear missile’s first flight test, which had been expected to take place in 2024, is now likely to come in February 2026, according to the Air Force’s budget documents.

The Air Force said in an email to Defense News that the Sentinel’s first flight was pushed back due to longer lead times for components in its guidance computer. But the delayed flight test is not a factor in the program’s Nunn-McCurdy breach, the service said.

In a March hearing held by the House Armed Services Committee’s sea power and projection forces panel, Garamendi voiced his displeasure to Air Force officials over the Sentinel’s cost overruns, as well as the service’s inability to explain potential “trade-offs” to keep the program alive.

Garamendi questioned the need for the United States to spend vast sums of money on Sentinel, arguing the belief that the nation must maintain a triad of nuclear weapons has become a “religious issue, having very little to do with the world in which we’re now living.”

The Northrop Grumman official told reporters Monday that the company’s work on Sentinel continues, despite the Nunn-McCurdy breach and ensuing review process.

“We don’t have a pause on our EMD [engineering and manufacturing development] work,” the official said. “We’re continuing to make progress on developing the missile and iterating the designs for all the facilities.”

In a discussion last fall, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said given it’s been so long since the service created an ICBM, early cost estimates for Sentinel were based on “a huge uncertainty.”

“There are unknown unknowns that are surfacing, that are affecting the program,” Kendall said during a November 2023 event with Center for a New American Security think tank. Kendall also said the Sentinel program was “struggling.”

The Northrop Grumman official highlighted such comments — including Kendall’s about the uncertainty that went into the program’s cost estimates — and said some estimates that went into the 2020 baseline review turned out to be incorrect.

Mock-up silo

Northrop also said the company’s effort to game out how a conversion process might work also showed problems with the original plan.

Before it received the Sentinel contract in September 2020, the firm started building a full-scale mock-up of a Minuteman III silo in Promontory, Utah, which it completed in spring 2021. The project was a major undertaking, and on Northrop Grumman’s dime. But the company saw it as a worthwhile investment in its bid to win the lucrative Ground Based Strategic Deterrent contract, as the program was then known.

Northrop didn’t have direct access to the Minuteman III silos — and likely won’t until the government hands them over for conversion into Sentinel silos — since the missiles must remain ready for launch at all times. And so the company considered its construction project the best way to understand how the massive retrofitting process might work — and to find where the biggest risks might lie.

The company’s team, alongside the Air Force, pored through the nonoperational mock-up and started to lay out components akin to what Sentinel would require. But as they did so, the Northrop official said, the group found some of the original conversion plans weren’t going to work.

Other design processes, including computer-aided design work, also helped the Sentinel team map out how much square footage various configurations would take up. In the process, some of the unknown factors that led to the original shaky estimates were cleared up. Still, it became clearer that the costs would be much higher than originally believed.

“They learned, along with us, things that needed to be potentially different or changed from the design,” the official said.

Five programs in one

In January, top Air Force official Kristyn Jones compared the Sentinel project to five major acquisition programs rolled into one. But the nuclear missile itself “is not an area of concern,” said Jones, who is performing the duties of undersecretary of the Air Force.

The Northrop official said the Sentinel missile will not just be a new iteration of the Minuteman series of ICBMs — “it’s not a Minuteman IV,” the official said — but a brand-new weapon top to bottom.

Its solid-rocket motors will be made of composite materials instead of the steel used on the Minuteman III, he explained, and it will have a more advanced guidance system.

Its design also includes modular components that allow the Air Force and Northrop Grumman to more easily add new technology as it becomes available.

And airmen are expected to be able to more easily maintain the Sentinel than its predecessor, with key components accessible without the need to delve too deeply into the missile and bring along a massive security detail while it is opened up.

Sentinel will be slightly larger and lighter than the Minuteman III, which will allow it to carry more propellant and payload, he said. And it is being designed to last until at least 2075 — far longer than the decade Minuteman III was originally supposed to last.

The infrastructure for Sentinel — including the silos themselves, the launch control centers where airmen control the ICBMs, and supporting infrastructure — will also be refurbished.

That portion — which Jones called “essentially a civil works program” — is especially challenging, particularly with issues such as inflation, the supply chain and labor force shortages.

The service and Northrop Grumman plan to reuse the existing Minuteman III silos as much as possible. But that will require a great deal of new construction and equipment updates to ensure the Sentinel silos can keep operating through disruptions such as power outages.

Old computers in launch centers — some of them 1980s-era terminals with green screens — will receive updates with modern equipment.

But not all Minuteman III silos were built in the same configuration, the Northrop official said, which will further complicate their conversions.

With the nation’s roughly 400 Minuteman IIIs spread out across nearly 32,000 square miles in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska, that makes the Sentinel program a massive real estate project, requiring the government to negotiate easements and, in some cases, property purchases with numerous landowners.

All of that adds up to “one of the most large, complex programs I’ve ever seen,” Kendall said of Sentinel in November 2023. “It’s probably the biggest thing, in some ways, that the Air Force has ever taken on.”

There’s also another factor at play: What happens if the Air Force and Northrop Grumman look deeper within the existing Minuteman III silos and find they’re in worse shape than expected?

The condition of the silos is a potentially high-risk area for the program, the Northrop official acknowledged, but the program still expects to be able to reuse existing ones. A “handful” of LiDAR — or light detection and ranging — scans of current ICBM sites already took place, he said, and there have been reviews of silos decommissioned in the 2000s.

But deeper, destructive testing — “breaking apart the concrete to see what’s behind it and what the conditions are” — has not occurred on existing silos, the official said, since they have to remain operational.

Minuteman III silos have concrete liners as well as mechanical launch tubes and missile suspension systems that hold the current ICBMs. The tubes and suspension systems will be replaced, the official said, and the concrete liners underneath will undergo inspection to determine if repairs need done and what is reusable.

The government has contingency plans if the silos’ foundations prove to be seriously cracked or damaged, the official said. That could include remediation work such as patching cracks or replacing portions of the concrete.

If a site is too far gone to fix, however, drilling may have to take place for an entirely new silo.

“There’s currently no plan to dig new holes,” the official said. “But given the site conditions of the land, [there is] certainly the potential that when they get to investigating more of the silos, they may find that [reusing] some of them might not be possible.”

Though the Nunn-McCurdy review process is still underway, the Northrop official said the company is talking to the Air Force about ways to bring down costs. One idea under discussion, he noted, is potentially changing the way mechanical rooms are constructed to build them in a more modular way, which could lower expenses.

But no matter how difficult or expensive Sentinel becomes, or what trade-offs are made to pay for it, the Air Force is adamant it must happen.

Lt. Gen. Richard Moore, the service’s deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, said at the January appearance alongside Jones that extending the Minuteman III missile significantly longer is “not a viable option.”

“We will find the money,” Moore said. “Sentinel is going to be funded. We’ll make the trades to make that happen.”

The VKS has directly lost approximately 16 fighters over the past eight months. However, this does not account for the imputed losses, which arise from an aircraft accruing more flight hours than planned, reducing its overall life. Based on updated information, the VKS is on track to suffer approximately 60 imputed aircraft losses this year from overuse. That is equivalent to losing 26 new airframes. Meanwhile the VKS currently procures only about 20 total Su-30, Su-34 and Su-35 aircraft per year.

The air war has mostly maintained a steady state since mid-2023, with the exception of February 2024, when the VKS flew approximately 150 sorties per day in support of the Avdiivka offensive. Given that Russia also has been using longer-range glide bombs and devoted more aircraft to air-to-ground roles, the average sortie duration has also likely decreased, reducing the accelerated aging. Still, slightly more than half of the VKS’ tactical airframes are more than 30 years old; these have far fewer flight hours left.

The accelerated aging may be shaping Russia’s combat operations. The majority of VKS fighters operating (and lost) over Ukraine are the newer Su-30, Su-34 and Su-35 aircraft with occasional reported sightings of Su-25s.

The older MiG-31s and Su-27s have been relegated to supporting hypersonic Kinzhal strikes and air patrol at a distance. With an estimated average remaining airframe life of less than 20% and 35% respectively, these older aircraft can be used for this war, but likely have insufficient life to support Russia’s potential future invasions.

Russia’s air-to-air warfare MiG-29s are totally absent, even from air-patrol missions. Given their age, these aircraft may be either unserviceable or are being kept in reserve for a final mission. Regardless, whether due to lack of upgrades, survivability or age, these are effectively paper airplanes.

The Su-24s, on the other hand, were used extensively in the invasion of Ukraine. But there have been no reports of Su-24 losses thus far in 2024. How much are they still flying? These aircraft are old; the newest models were manufactured in 1993. The VKS may have chosen not to configure them for their new FAB-1500 glide bombs, which would also hint at the fact that the Su-24s may be reaching the end of their useful lives.

Ukraine, which is short on air defense munitions, has a few options to accelerate Russian air losses. Attacking air bases would likely reduce VKS sortie rates by more than 20% by disrupting operations and forcing the VKS to fly from more distant bases. The greatest opportunity remains the effect of forthcoming F-16 jets (and possible Gripens) to divert VKS sorties from ground-attack to air-to-air efforts.

Which fighter jet is best for Ukraine as it fights off Russia?

Regardless, more air defense munitions and fighters will be critical to Ukrainian success. Russia is relying on only about 300 combined Su-30, Su-34 and Su-35 aircraft for its operations over Ukraine, including delivering the hugely destructive glide bombs. From a strategic perspective, shooting down these newest VKS aircraft imposes a larger cost to Russia and would have the greatest overall impact on the VKS’ ability to perform strikes. It would also improve the odds of survival of the 45 F-16s allies promised to Ukraine.

The VKS has fewer than 650 tactical aircraft when accounting for end-of-life aircraft; it has even less when accounting for accelerated usage. But these numbers are unlikely to change its behavior, based on Russia’s exhibited willingness to accept high losses even for trivial gains.

In comparison, NATO has roughly 800 fifth-generation aircraft, with another 100 or more arriving every year. This is more than sufficient to counter the VKS in the air and conduct targeted ground strikes, especially given the poor performance of Russian surface-to-air missiles in Ukraine.

To be sure, NATO should expand its production of air-to-air and surface-to-air munitions to deter further Russian aggression and support Ukraine. But with the VKS currently shrinking, the alliance can afford to donate more munitions to Ukraine now without worrying about its immediate strategic reserves.

Michael Bohnert is an engineer at the think tank Rand. He previously worked as an engineer for the U.S. Navy and the Naval Nuclear Laboratory.

“The Navy is moving forward on their test, which isn’t a launch out of ground support equipment, but just off a stool launch, so we get another look at the missile,” Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch told Defense News in a March 27 interview here at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium.

The Navy’s test of the Common-Hypersonic Glide Body will lead into an Army test of the missile in the summer from a ground-based launcher, he said. “Right now, if things go as planned, we’ll be out at the range this summer.”

Hypersonic weapons are capable of flying faster than Mach 5 — or more than 3,836 miles per hour — and can maneuver between varying altitudes, making them difficult to detect. The C-HGB is made up of the weapon’s warhead, guidance system, cabling and thermal protection shield.

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

The test in the spring is focused solely on missile performance and is conducted using a test stand that eliminates ground support equipment, canister and launcher.

“It’s more of a command to the missile to ignite and watch the missile go through stage one, stage two, payload adapter, hypersonic glide body separating and do its thing,” Rasch said.

The test is to ensure the services understand the missile performs as intended, he said.

The Army, at the same time, is ensuring that the ground support equipment for its Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, or LRHW, works correctly and will then marry up the missile and launcher in the later test, Rasch explained.

If the Navy test is successful, “that is a decision point for the Army to allow the vendor to begin putting those tactical rounds together. We’ve got them lined up, ready to go, in different stages of completeness,” Rasch said. The Army has been holding out in order to “see the end-to-end performance,” Rasch said.

The Army has spent several years working with Leidos’ Dynetics to build the industrial base for the hypersonic weapon glide body that will be used by both the ground service and the Navy because the domestic private sector had never built a hypersonic weapon.

The service also separately produced launchers, trucks, trailers and the battle operations center necessary to put together the first weapon battery. Lockheed Martin is the weapon system integrator for the Army’s hypersonic capability that will be launched from a mobile truck.

If the Army test is successful, Rasch said, the rounds will be ready to go to the first unit equipped with the capability.

The service completed its delivery of the first hypersonic weapon capability, minus the all-up rounds, to I Corps’ 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 17th Field Artillery Brigade unit at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state two days ahead of its end-of-FY21 fielding deadline.

The original plan was to train on the equipment and receive those rounds in the fall of 2023, but based on a series of failed or aborted tests, that timeline has slid further down the road.

The Army and Navy last year had to abort flight tests in March, October and November due to “challenges at the range,” Rasch said.

“Every time we do these tests, even if it’s a no-test, obviously, we learn,” Rasch said. “But in this case, the round had to go back and get a little work done on it. These challenges weren’t with the round, but just the process of firing those up, it takes some work.”

The pause in testing while the rounds were evaluated, “gave us a little time to stop and kind of reflect on where we had not done enough developmental testing. Obviously a program that’s moving as fast as RCCTO has on hypersonics, there’s risk involved in going fast,” Rasch said. “You’re doing acquisition and running with scissors at the same time.”

The Army looked at earlier component level testing and figured out where the service may have missed things, he added.

“And we’ve done a series of walk-ups over the last several months to try to make sure we understood exactly what is going on, what’s the phenomena going on and how do we replicate that repeatedly so we know that’s the error,” Rash said.

Even this week, Rasch said, the Army is conducting high-fidelity testing with the ground support equipment, simulating every aspect of the shot to make sure it’s captured “all the phenomena to allow us to get back out to the range.”

While the program is delayed, the speed at which the Navy and the Army are moving is extremely fast for a program of this nature, Rasch noted.

The service went from a blank piece of paper in March 2019 to delivering hardware in just over two years, including an operations center, four transporter-erector-launchers and modified trucks and trailers that make up the ground equipment of the LRHW.

“This is a hard problem. If you look at the history of missile programs, most of them in this space are 10 to 12 years in duration,” he said. “Not only is this a new missile, it’s a new technology of missile and, oh by the way, we had to build new ground support equipment, we had to build new command-and-control capabilities within it. So that was a monumental task.”

The company brought an AMPV complete with a 30mm unmanned turret from Elbit Systems to the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium being held this week in Huntsville, Alabama, to demonstrate the capability.

BAE took the original top off the AMPV and put on its own internally funded and developed top plate to create the External Mission Equipment Package, or ExMEP. The design is based off of a study of turrets “of all kinds, all over the world,” Megan Mitchell, BAE’s business development director for Army combat systems, said in an interview at the event.

The ExMEP “enables [the AMPV] to be able to accept over 30 different sized turrets,” she added. “The idea behind this is it allows the Army to basically widen their scope of what they’re able to do with the AMPV.”

The Army’s AMPV, designed to replace the M113 armored personnel carrier and which reached full-rate production in 2023, comes in five variants either being fielded or planned: General purpose; medical evacuation; medical treatment; mission command; and mortar carrier.

“We’re now in full-rate production with the first five variants and that allows us a little bit more latitude to be able to see what it can do next,” Mitchell said. “This is an extremely versatile platform and it’s already doing five very different mission roles, and to be able to expand that capability ... there’s a lot more M113s out there than just what the five variants can do.

“What we really wanted to look at is where is the Army’s need and what could we possibly create that will allow us to work with the Army, to say, ‘Oh, if you need a counter-UAS, we can integrate that. If you need this kind of turret, we can integrate that,’” she said.

The company last year demonstrated it could rapidly integrate a Moog-developed counter-unmanned aircraft system turret onto the AMPV and successfully tested the capability in a live-fire event in Arizona. BAE said it hit both ground and air targets in the November 2023 test just 15 months after beginning the ExMEP development effort.

In cooperation with the Army, where both BAE and the Army funded a portion of the effort, the company integrated Patria’s 120mm unmanned turreted mortar capability using its ExMEP, Mitchell said. BAE turned over the vehicle to the Army in January for testing that will take place at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona in the spring and summer. More testing will continue into the fall.

A flexible top plate enabling integration of a wide array of turrets is not just targeted toward the U.S. Army, Mitchell noted, but creates options for potential foreign customers who might have specific requirements that go beyond the U.S. Army’s AMPV variants.

Speaking at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Symposium here, Gen. James Rainey said the Army will achieve these improvements by incorporating robotics into systems, improving artillery rounds and pursuing readily available mobile howitzer options.

The service began working last year on a conventional fires study intended to lead to a new strategy. Rainey said at the time the review would consider the existing capability and capacity and future Army needs. It was also going to assess new technology to enhance conventional fires on the battlefield, such as advances in propellant that make it possible for midrange cannons to shoot as far as longer-range systems.

The study has already influenced one program. The Army, after also conducting a prototyping effort for an Extended Range Cannon Artillery system, concluded the platform was not the right approach.

The service plans to focus instead on extending the range of current artillery systems with innovative munitions still under development as part of the ERCA program, Rainey said.

“We are in a resource constrained environment,” he added. “You can go after an exquisite system or you can take a more holistic approach.”

The Army was able to conduct a variety of successful tests with ERCA prototypes, including hitting a target 70 kilometers, or 43 miles, away at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, in December 2020 using an Excalibur extended-range guided artillery shell.

The problems with the cannon were mostly related to the length of the gun tube and its ability to withstand a large number of projectiles without excessive wear.

The Army is planning to deliver a better armored howitzer, Rainey said. “There are some great capabilities out there.”

However, towed howitzers may not have a clear future with the Army, he said, adding “the future is not bright for towed artillery.”

Rainey said he’s “very interested in autonomous and robotic cannon solutions” for joint forcible entry formations like the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions.

The Army is pursuing mobile, indirect fires capabilities for light infantry and Stryker formations as well, he noted.

The All-Domain Sensing Cross-Functional Team will grow out of the Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing/Space CFT, taking its current staff and director, Michael Monteleone, and expanding the mission to focus on broad deep-sensing capabilities.

The APNT/Space CFT has “solved the very hard problem and that is transitioning to [program managers] and [program executive offices] now, so that created some headspace,” Rainey said March 26 at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium.

Monteleone and four to five newly created billets will be added in Washington, D.C., because “that is kind of the center of gravity of all-domain sensing,” Rainey said. However, the majority of the team will remain in Huntsville, Alabama, where APNT/Space CFT was based.

The All-Domain Sensing CFT is expected to reach initial operational capability within six months, Rainey added.

While many details aren’t yet finalized, Rainey said the team will “work on the sensing architecture inside the Army and inside the joint force.”

“We have found ourselves in a situation where we actually don’t have a sensing problem, we have a ‘doing something’ with all the sensing that is happening problem across the joint force,” he explained.

Another area of focus includes processing and disseminating data coming off of a large proliferation of different sensors in order to rapidly make sense of the battlefield, which in turn helps leaders quickly make operational decisions, Rainey said.

“The Army cannot continue to build human analysts to keep up with the amount of data. We have to bring [artificial intelligence] and machine learning to bear,” he added. “Not to replace humans, but how do we take a thousand pictures that might be a tank and get it down to 10 or 100 that then our humans can discern?”

Rainey noted that industry can help.

Deep sensing will also improve reconnaissance and surveillance as well as long-range fires targeting.

Platforms could also include things like high-altitude, fixed-wing, solar-powered platforms, other unmanned aircraft or crewed spy planes with more capable sensors. The Army is experimenting with all of these capabilities.

The service is currently reviewing capabilities like high-altitude balloons to determine where they might reside within formations and how units might use them at places like the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. For example, the Army is experimenting with high-altitude balloons at the service’s major experimentation capstone event Project Convergence this month.

The Army will continue to review and evolve cross-functional teams as it continues to modernize and take programs from development into fielded systems.

Army Futures Command, which was established more than five years ago to tackle the service’s toughest modernization challenges, set up cross-functional teams to focus on different capabilities the service needs to fight in a multidomain environment against high-end threats and advanced adversaries.

The original teams focused on long-range precision fires; next-generation combat vehicles; future vertical lift; the network; positioning, navigation and timing; air and missile defense; soldier lethality; and the Synthetic Training Environment. The idea was to convene a whole range of Army officials, from training and doctrine writers to sustainment experts to acquisition officers to system operators, to ensure the success of a program.

The new site is part of a global manufacturing push from the Swedish company to quadruple its global capacity to produce its ground combat weapons, Erik Smith said in a recent interview.

“We certainly see a very broad and very large market opportunity for the kind of products that we have today and the kinds of products that are being developed right now,” Smith said. “As this facility ramps up, what you will see is a combination of products that Saab is very well known for and some new products that really haven’t hit the market yet.”

The facility will feature advanced manufacturing capability and an innovation center to enhance munitions production capacity stateside, according to Smith. He also said it will support the production of components for the Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb, or GLSDB, system as well as close combat weapons.

Saab is in the process of selecting a site, having issued a request for proposals. Six states are in the running, although Smith decline to identify candidates. He said the company plans to choose a site and break ground by the end of 2024, with plans to begin production by 2026.

The company has rapidly expanded its locations across the U.S. in recent years. Last year, the company established two facilities focused on unmanned underwater vehicles in Rhode Island and Massachusetts as well as in California to support its work with U.S. Marine Corps training.

In 2021, Saab opened an advanced aerostructure manufacturing facility in West Lafayette, Indiana, where it builds the rear fuselage for Boeing’s T-7 trainer aircraft.

The company is based in Syracuse, New York, and runs its surveillance side of the business there.

“We’ve had pretty substantial growth in our land systems portfolio,” Smith said, including winning a large contract in 2021 to provide a next-generation force-on-force training system to the Marine Corps.

Additionally, the Air Force awarded a contract to Saab and its partner Boeing for the GLSDB system, which the company began to deliver to the service in 2023.

A year ago, the U.S. pledged to send the GLSDB to Ukraine. The bomb has a range of 93 miles and can be launched from mobile artillery systems like the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System.

For the new facility, the plan is to follow a similar model to what Saab did with its West Lafayette site. In that case, the first engineering and manufacturing development fuselages were built in Sweden, then, in parallel, Saab built the Indiana plant with high-end technology to produce the fuselages beginning with low-rate initial production, Smith explained.

“We’re going to take advantage of some of the advanced technologies that are out there in manufacturing today and the evolution of the manufacturing space and capability since many, including our weapons and ammunition factories, were built many, many years ago,” Smith said. “You can imagine there’s some significant opportunities for efficiency improvement and … capability improvement overall, in terms of building these kinds of systems.”

The facility will not just produce systems but will also have capability to test and integrate capability, he added.

The facility in West Lafayette is about 100,000 square feet and is one of Saab’s larger facilities in the country, but the footprint needed for land combat systems is expected to be “significant,” Smith said.

“I would envision this facility employing hundreds of people,” he added. And like in West Lafayette, the land secured for the facility will allow for a large amount of growth over time, he added.

Saab is the 33rd largest defense contractor in the world, according to Defense News’ Top 100 list.

The drone, an Anduril Industries’ Ghost-X, paused and then rose higher, disappearing into the clouds. Another followed.

Seemingly small and unthreatening, the drones were serving as the eyes of an infantry company concealed by the surrounding mountains and readying to reclaim a village held by the enemy.

And those drones were not alone.

All at once, an overwhelming group of air- and ground-based machine fighters burst onto the scene. An “octocopter” lumbered through the sky with precision munitions and other robots attached to its belly, dropping three 60mm mortar rounds on a roof and other small, hand-held, cylindrical “throwbots” on the ground.

Robotic combat vehicles rolled into view, armed with .50-caliber and M240 machine guns, firing on enemy positions and providing cover for troops maneuvering into the village.

Meanwhile, a four-legged dog robot stepped out from a thick cloud of smoke, giving the soldiers monitoring from afar another view.

The scene was the culmination of a U.S. Army effort to understand how it can use humans and machines together on the battlefield. Service leaders descended on Fort Irwin, California — home to the National Training Center — in March for a large exercise known as Project Convergence.

The demonstration was a glimpse of the Army’s future, according to top officials. Gen. James Rainey, who leads Army Futures Command, expects the service’s future force to be so integrated with machines that humans will face a much lower risk.

“We will never again trade blood for first contact,” he frequently says, promising to deploy robots instead.

But getting these formations right won’t be easy, leaders acknowledge. For human-machine integration to work, a functional and user-friendly network must underpin it, it requires protection from cyberattacks, and the systems must have the right amount of autonomy.

Leaders also say it’s not technology that will prove the most difficult factor, but rather breaking from antiquated acquisition processes that prevent rapid purchases and slow down deliveries to soldiers.

“The pace of the threat and the pace of technology — the evolution is much faster, and there’s no way that we’re going to succeed if we continue to acquire technology or even choose to develop” it at the usual pace, Joseph Welch, the Army’s C5ISR Center director, said at the March event.

Forward progress

The Project Convergence exercise followed months of effort focused on integrating humans and machines into service formations. It was a chance to see what works and what doesn’t as the Army prepares for a fight against adversaries with advanced capabilities.

The service insists it’s now ready to move forward with human-machine integrated formations.

The fiscal 2025 budget request marks the first time the Army has included funding for these formations, also called H-MIF. It’s seeking $33 million for the first step, which provides an initial human-machine integration capability to infantry and armor formations. The Army was experimenting with both at Project Convergence.

The service wants machines in these new formations to “offload risk” and provide soldiers with “additional information for decision making,” according to the service’s budget documents.

The Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office is spearheading the effort for Futures Command. The office is creating prototypes using existing air and ground robotic programs and payloads while incorporating common architecture, communications and network capabilities.

The FY25 funding, the Army has said, will fund the movement of concepts through prototyping as well as enable soldiers to evaluate them in exercises and experiments.

At the Project Convergence event, the Army flooded the battlefield with robots, sensors and other machines meant to help soldiers in complex flights. The experiment included air and ground robots with reconfigurable payloads, tethered drones, counter-drone systems, and a ventriloquist decoy emitter that emulates radio frequency traffic to confuse the enemy.

The service used more than 240 pieces of technology, including capabilities from allied militaries in the U.K., Canada, Australia, France and Japan.

The pressure to transform

The decision to rely more on robots isn’t a choice, according to Alexander Miller, who is now serving as chief technology officer to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George.

George and Miller both watched the experiment in March; Miller carried a cellphone with an app demonstrating the Army’s new Tactical Assault Kit. The app superimposes the location of soldiers and robots as well as enemy positions in real time.

The service knows it has to do this, or “we will fall radically behind,” Miller said of human-machine integration. “There are bad people who are willing to use robotics, and if we don’t figure it out we will be behind the curve, we will put men and women in harm’s way.”

Integrating robots into formations is also accelerating because “there has been a cultural shift,” Miller said. “It’s been 12-18 months where we have stopped treating robots as a one-for-one augmentation for soldiers and started saying: ‘What are the dull, dirty, dangerous, disruptive things that robots can really do that are not just combat power? How do we augment them without taking a single rifleman off or multiple riflemen off the line to control a robot?’ ”

At the March experiment, for instance, the Army sent a ground robot with a mine-clearing line charge to deploy along enemy lines. As it fights the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian military is using these to disarm enemy minefields and trenches, but transporting them in crewed vehicles.

At the experiment, the robot shot the line charge out of a small launcher. The line didn’t explode as intended.

Army leaders said glitches are common and making this work would provide a much safer way for soldiers to clear mine fields.

Also enabling new models for human-machine integration is the progress of commercial technology, according to Welch. “That has accelerated tremendously across many different technical domains,” he said.

Artificial intelligence is getting smarter; sensors are getting smaller, lighter and more versatile; connectivity solutions are more abundant; and air-, ground- and space-based capabilities are easier to use.

Obstacles ahead

Army leaders acknowledge there is plenty of work ahead to integrate robots and soldiers on the battlefield. The experiment itself illustrated “just how complicated it’s going to be ... where we really proliferate lower-cost, cheaper options and we clutter the environment intentionally,” Miller said.

At one point during Project Convergence, the Army jammed itself, causing a friendly drone swarm to fall out of the sky. The service fixed the problem by turning on a capability allowing smart routing management for its Wi-Fi, Miller said.

Beyond technical challenges, George said, the Army must convince Congress to alter the procurement process so the service can acquire or adapt capabilities within broader funding lines. The goal, he explained, is to be more responsive to what is working for soldiers and to be able to rapidly buy small amounts of that equipment.

He said he’s working with Congress “so that we can move money a little bit.”

“We want and need the oversight, [but] it’s a matter of how we go back to them and tell them, ‘Here’s what we’re going to buy inside that funding line, and here’s how we’re doing it,’ and get feedback,” George added.

Indeed, one focus is on marking sure the Army can change systems without needing reprogramming authorization or new funding.

The technical and operational ways the Army is going to employ human-machine integrated formations today “doesn’t mean that’s how we’re going to employ it two years from now,” said Mark Kitz, the service’s program executive officer for command, control, communications-tactical.

“We don’t historically treat robotics as a software program. It’s really a software program,” Kitz explained. “So how do we use some of our unique acquisition authorities then to build that flexibility upfront?”

Miller said another potential obstacle is ensuring sufficient U.S. production of components.

“We have to have components that are approved and valid and we aren’t scared to employ because they were made by an adversary,” he said. Welch noted the Army is working with U.S. government labs to address some of the component concerns.

The service is also working internally to revamp its approach to finding capabilities.

“There’s a much tighter coupling ... not only externally with our industry partners and other key stakeholders, whether it be over on [Capitol] Hill or up in [the Office of the Secretary of Defense], but also internally,” said Lt. Gen. John Morrison, the Army’s deputy chief of staff in charge of command, control, communications, cyber operations and networks. “We’ve got requirements with acquisition, with testers, and they’re all centered around soldiers, getting that direct feedback.”

Benjamin Jensen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank where he focuses on wargaming, said he’s “optimistic” about human-machine integration but that it may take longer than the service expects.

“Most people overestimate the speed at which you can develop new concepts of employment around even proven engineering,” he said. “It often takes years outside of a major war to build entirely new formations and structures.”

The agreement for the Main Ground Combat System, to be formalized in late April as a memorandum of understanding, caps years of wrangling over national preferences for the two main industry actors: the joint venture of France’s Nexter and Germany’s Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, known as KNDS; and Germany’s Rheinmetall.

The deal foresees a central role for KNDS in the project.

During Friday’s joint news conference in Berlin, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius and his French counterpart Sébastien Lecornu announced the deal and praised the pact as “historic,” which brings together two countries with comparable and competing defense industries under a single major defense program.

For his part, Lecornu noted the bilateral work leads to “interoperability” for two nations that share a continent and are members of NATO.

Italy, the Netherlands and others have expressed interest in joining the MGCS program, Pistorius said in September after a meeting with Lecornu to discuss the project.

Manufacturers are to develop the tank from scratch, the ministers said, with drones and directed-energy weapons augmenting the platform. Those additional technologies for the tank are currently experimental.

The program aims to replace Germany’s Leopard tanks and France’s Leclerc fleet sometime in the 2040s, with a demonstrator expected around 2030. The French target is to have a successor to its Leclerc main battle tank closer to 2040 than 2050, though.

The future system will be much more than a successor to existing tanks, Lecornu said, describing the MGCS as a step beyond what exists today in terms of technology, with a “particularly impressive” level of innovation regarding connectivity, electronic warfare, drone integration, armor and self-defensive measures.

The countries have agreed on eight pillars within the program, each with a 50-50 work share, including the tank platform, main gun, new weapons, communication technology and combat-cloud system.

Germany will award contracts for a total of up to several hundred million euros for the pre-demonstrator phase by the end of the year. In addition to a significant part for Nexter, the French share is expected to include Thales, Safran and MBDA as well as smaller firms, while German companies beyond Krauss-Maffei Wegmann will include Rheinmetall and others.

France and Germany also said KNDS will create a unit in Ukraine to locally produce ammunition as well as spare parts for French and German systems in use in the country. In time, there would be a possibility to produce entire systems in Ukraine, Lecornu said.

KNDS systems operating in Ukraine include Leopard 2 tanks, the wheeled Caesar 155mm howitzer, the tracked PzH 2000 howitzer and the Gepard self-propelled anti-aircraft gun.

The Army earlier this year sent several laser weapons mounted to Stryker combat vehicles to the Middle East. It was unclear at the time exactly where the prototypes were stationed, but the move was in advancement of the service’s short-range air defense goals.

Gen. Michael Kurilla, the CENTCOM boss, on March 21 told Congress he has “three 50-kilowatt lasers that are Stryker-based” inside Iraq “right now.” Experiments are underway, he added, to identify their best application. He did not disclose preliminary results. A request made to the command for additional information was not immediately answered.

High-energy lasers and related high-power microwave weapons are capable of downing incoming threats in unorthodox ways and at a fraction of the cost of traditional munitions. Lasers can fire at the speed of light and burn holes through material, but are susceptible to weather conditions and particles in the air, such as sand. Microwaves can fry electronics en masse, but their efficacy is stunted at greater distances.

US sees ‘footprints’ of Iran-backed group in Tower 22 drone attack

Both are considered critical elements of layered defense, or having multiple countermeasures ready to thwart different threats in different situations.

“Directed energy is not the panacea,” Kurilla said at the House Armed Services Committee hearing. “What I tell all the services: Give me systems, we will experiment with them, and we will tell you if it works in a real, live environment.”

The Army is increasingly concerned with overhead threats, including unmanned aerial vehicles that can spy on troops, augment targeting and deliver explosives. A drone attack in late January killed three Americans at Tower 22 in Jordan, near the Syrian border.

U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Colorado Republican, urged Kurilla during the committee hearing to take advantage of directed energy wherever he can. At least 31 directed-energy initiatives are underway across the military, according to a National Defense Industrial Association study.

“I know it’s not perfected yet, but it has great capabilities against drones and things like that currently,” Lamborn said. “I’d hate to see a repeat of Tower 22, for instance.”

The role of assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy was established by the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act.

Sulmeyer in the past served as a senior director of cyber policy at the National Security Council and as a senior adviser at Cyber Command. He was also the director of the cybersecurity project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

The move comes a little more than a week after the Defense Department rolled out its fiscal 2025 budget blueprint, which included $14.5 billion for cyber activities. The figure is about $1 billion more than the Biden administration’s previous ask. It is also up from FY23, when it sought $11.2 billion.

U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican, last year said the Senate was ready to “rapidly confirm” a nominee.

Gallagher leads the House’s Cyber, Information Technology and Innovation panel.