This effort will include finalizing a vision for what role the Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel will play, with the range and payload capacity to do much more than the small drones currently conducting surveillance missions in the Middle East and Latin America, he said during a panel discussion at the Navy League’s annual Sea-Air-Space conference

The service is continuing down a path to incorporate unmanned technologies into routine fleet operations. One year into operating a hybrid manned-unmanned fleet, U.S. 4th Fleet is using unmanned surface vessels to map patterns of behavior and common trafficking routes in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said in a keynote speech at the event.

Rear Adm. James Aiken, the 4th Fleet commander, said during a panel discussion that these operations are beneficial.

“We’re putting unmanned vessels in the hands of operators, and so we see what the challenges are, being at sea for six, eight, nine months now with some of the unmanned surface vessels. And it really has challenged us” to reconsider where and how they employ these vessels, he explained.

Smith said during the same panel that learning by using basic unmanned systems — or the “minimum viable product,” as he put it — is important. But at some point, he added, “we need to get beyond surveillance” and begin using these sea drones for more warfare-focused operations.

To that end, he said, the Navy will conduct an analysis of alternatives this year to determine what payloads can equip the Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel. He added that this would go beyond surveillance and instead incorporate that information-gathering capability into the detect-identify-track-engage kill chain.

Also speaking at the conference, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti said unmanned systems are not only tools for sailors but also “players on the field.”

Asked by Defense News about the move beyond experiments and into routine operations with this hybrid fleet, Franchetti said she doesn’t want to squash the momentum of experimentation just yet, as sailors are collaborating with industry to find new uses for unmanned systems.

“The most important thing,” she explained” “is to cohere [lessons from experimentation] together into a concept of operations that can apply broadly across our Navy, and I’m really focused on getting to that point. But right now, I really like the fleets having this creative spirit unleashed and being able to get all their ideas out there, so then we can think about how would we elevate that into a concept of operations that we can train to, that we can resource to and that we can continue to use.”

“I’m confident that the future of our Navy is going to be a mix of conventionally manned platforms with unmanned and autonomous platforms all teamed together, so these are all the building blocks that we need to take right now to be able to get there,” she added.

Even though 4th Fleet and 5th Fleet are focused on maritime domain awareness in support of counter-trafficking missions — whereas 7th Fleet focuses on using unmanned systems in support of sea denial and sea control missions — the CNO said there would have to be some sort of common concept of operations across the whole service.

“But you always need to have tailored concepts below it because each theater is different. The geostrategic environment is different. The adversaries are different. The partners are different. And so everything will need to be tailored to that,” Franchetti said. “But I think having a common understanding of the who, what, why we employ unmanned — I think that will be very important for our Navy going forward.”

By comparison, the Army had 10 mishaps and 14 fatalities for all fiscal 2023. The current number of mishaps is equal to or higher than the total annual mishaps reported each year since fiscal 2016, according to Army Combat Readiness Center data.

“Over the first six months of this fiscal year we’ve seen a troubling trend with our accident rates,” Maj. Gen. Walter Rugen, director of Army aviation said on a call with reporters Wednesday. “And certainly, any loss of life is 100% unacceptable and obviously when we have [an] accident where we lose the aircraft or severely damage the aircraft, we consider that unacceptable too.”

Army endures third Apache mishap in two months

The Army defines a Class A mishap as any that results in the loss of life or the loss of equipment totaling more than $2.5 million. The service tracks the rate of Class A mishaps per 100,000 flight hours. The current rate is 3.22, more than double the highest rate of any entire fiscal year in more than a decade, according to readiness center data.

During the “safety stand up” as opposed to a stand down, Army aviation will continue its normal operations, Rugen said. Commanders have asked for flexibility in providing the training.

“A stand up is more empowering,” he said. “We have ongoing operations that are critical that we complete. We want to empower the force at the lowest level to solve these problems.”

The training will target three broad areas, Rugen said. Decision makers, such as unit commanders, will focus on risk management and mitigation for aviation training and operations. At the operational level, the focus will target power management and spatial disorientation. Maintainers will review maintenance standards for aircraft repairs and safety checks.

“Spatial disorientation has been a trend,” Rugen said. “We get into aspects of flight where the crew must reinforce knowing where you are and where your aircraft is with respect to the ground.”

With the power management aspects, Rugen said aviators will reinforce measures taken regarding flight altitudes, higher temperatures and wind conditions.

Rugen and Brig. Gen. Jonathan Byrom, the readiness center director, did not share more specific information on causes of recent crashes or any training changes.

Aviation experts from Fort Novosel, Alabama, home to the Aviation Center of Excellence and the Army Combat Readiness Center, will visit aviation units across the service to work with units conducting the training.

A March 25 crash involving an AH-64E Apache helicopter at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington was the third Apache mishap in two months. That incident resulted in two soldiers injured.

In February, there were two separate Army National Guard Apache crashes, one in Mississippi resulting in the death of two pilots, the other in Utah, which was not fatal.

That pair of crashes prompted a Guard safety stand down.

In April 2023, the service grounded its entire helicopter fleet following a double Apache crash in Alaska that killed three, a March collision between two Black Hawk helicopters that killed nine in Kentucky and a February Guard Black Hawk crash that killed two in Alabama.

Five of the 12 incidents this fiscal year remain under investigation. Mishaps in which the investigations have concluded will be used in classified briefings in the training.

“The focus is to learn from those, so we don’t repeat any of the problems we had in the past,” Byrom said.

Officials issued the safety order Wednesday morning. Active duty aviators and aviation maintainers will conduct four to six hours of training by May 10. The Guard and Reserve components have 60 days to complete the training.

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.

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 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 team studied engagements between U.S. ships and aircraft in the Middle East as well as threats posed by the Yemen-based militant group to understand how the fleet could tweak operations to better see and defeat drones and missiles. It also considered new capabilities the fleet might need for self-defense and to protect merchant ships.

The Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center has led this effort. The center’s mission is to develop surface warfare tactics, incorporate those into advanced training events and provide tactical expertise for the fleet.

The center’s commander, Rear Adm. Wilson Marks, told Defense News that after the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer Carney’s Oct. 19 shootdown of three land-attack cruise missiles launched from Yemen, “we did stand up a 24/7 watch to ensure that we could provide support to the ships and staff at a moment’s notice as they needed.”

As engagements lessened, the Navy has moved into a steady-state rhythm, with weekly meetings involving SMWDC, ships’ crew members, strike group leaders, U.S. 5th Fleet leaders and more.

The ships and aircraft provide a “storyboard” of what happened in each engagement from their perspective, Marks said, as well as data collected by the radars, sensors and combat systems.

SMWDC’s technical experts in Dahlgren, Virginia, then work with a team that includes Program Executive Office Integrated Weapons Systems, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center Corona Division, Naval Information Warfighting Development Center, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Lockheed Martin — and they scour the data for a range of purposes.

“The first thing is we provide immediate feedback to the ships,” highlighting any tactics changes SMWDC recommends, anything new they’re seeing in adversary behavior, new ways to configure ship systems to better see and respond to the threat, or other urgent lessons.

“Basically we’re trying to pull away the fog of war that’s going on there,” Marks said.

In parallel, PEO Integrated Weapons Systems and Lockheed Martin are looking for “potential technical fixes” that can go into Aegis Combat System updates.

Additionally, SMWDC not only provides briefings about lessons learned to the next ships preparing to deploy, but it also rolls these updated tactics and real-world scenarios into the Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training events that ships conduct before their final certifications and deployments.

The Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, for example, went through a Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training event that was heavily influenced by the types of engagements destroyers have seen in the Red Sea over the past six months.

The strike group also tested tweaks to the Aegis Combat System software before it was pushed to ships currently operating in the Middle East, Marks said. He would not discuss the nature of the software changes, citing security reasons, but said it has shown “a significant increase in capability.”

Marks said the Navy and Lockheed Martin had developed a so-called Aegis Speed to Capability process that allows for small changes to be rapidly fielded, instead of waiting to incorporate them into the next major baseline upgrade to the combat system software.

The rear admiral said this has proved its value, as some ships deployed to the region now have software updates that help counter drones, “and we’re finding those to be very successful. And so that was an investment that was made several years ago that is really paying off now.”

Broadly, Marks said, Houthi engagements since October show the “tactics, techniques and procedures that we have in place are solid. Any changes that need to be made to those are kind of in the margins, and basically just making sure people fully understand how to utilize them.”

Though he wouldn’t provide specifics, again citing security reasons, Marks said some lessons learned have to do with the basics, including how the crews set up and operate their SPY radar.

“The Red Sea is probably one of the most difficult areas of the world when it comes to atmospherics and issues with radars. So our continued emphasis on how you set up your radar system in that type of environment has really been critical,” he said. “The second is, because of those atmospheric conditions, and also based on the adversary they’re going against, we make sure that we tailor our systems to look for the capabilities that the adversary has.”

Rather than look for a missile or drone akin to what China and Russia might fire, “you would look at the current adversary and say: ‘Hey, maybe we need to focus in a little bit more on ... certain speed characteristics or things like that that they’re seeing over in the Red Sea.’”

He noted SMWDC made a decision within the past couple years to add training on countering unmanned systems in all domains, which has been validated by Houthis operating unmanned systems in the air, on the surface and under the water.

Overall, he said, the Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training events and other drills don’t require major changes or additions; rather, they may be tweaked to add a little more emphasis on certain skills and types of engagements to best prepare deploying ships for what they could encounter in the Middle East.

Though SMWDC and the rest of the technical team have generated a number of lessons and changes since October, Marks said it is important to note “our captains and crews in the Red Sea have been doing an absolutely incredible job.”

“Those sailors are executing at the top of their game — and this is during sustained combat operations at sea — and they’ve been adapting to all the adversary’s tactics like true combat veterans,” he added.

The board game Reisswitz had crafted was an update of a prototype by his father, which itself was indebted to earlier wargames derived from chess, Milan Vego recounted in a 2012 article in the Naval War College Review. Like its predecessors, the junior Reisswitz’s game involved two sides of few players each making decisions about simulated military maneuvers.

Yet the game was revolutionary.

It brought a new level of reality to wargaming: a detailed map as the gameboard, umpires who challenged the players with realistic scenarios and precise calculations of casualties, Vego wrote. Karl von Mueffling, the chief of the general staff of the army, was mightily impressed.

“It’s not a game at all!” Mueffling ­exclaimed, according to Vego. “It’s training for war.”

This Marine vet created a wargame for enlisted leaders

The Prussian army adopted the game as a tool to train for battle. And two ­centuries later, militaries are still using games to simulate aspects of war.

The Marine Corps, which has rethought its approach to fighting in recent years, uses wargames to explore the tough problems it might be forced to confront in war. These mostly classified games have become yet another focus of the conflict over the future of the Marine Corps.

Marine leaders say the results of wargames are one justification for the controversial changes they have made to the force, such as the divestment of tanks and the reduction of cannon artillery.

Critics of the changes have raised concerns about the games themselves, arguing they were unsound and didn’t lend support to the changes.

Did the Corps conduct its wargames properly and draw the right insights from them? Supporters of the changes say yes — and their view has carried the day, since the service already is years into its ambitious overhaul with the support of Congress and the Pentagon. Some critics still say no.

The Corps has said wargame results helped underpin its decisions aimed at making sure Marines are ready to fight, and win, the next war.

For the Marines who may one day carry out new kinds of operations, while armed with new weapons systems, the stakes of these games are high.

What wargaming is — and isn’t

Wargames try to simulate aspects of armed conflict, imperfectly.

In wargames, as in war, human beings on opposing sides make a series of decisions that have consequences for what happens next. Unlike in war, no one gets hurt.

Generally, the competitors in a professional wargame are the “blue cell” — the home team of sorts, representing friendly forces — and the “red cell,” representing enemy forces, according to a 2019 Rand report.

A white cell often adjudicates how the game progresses as the blue and red cells make their moves. Sometimes a green cell represents allied forces or civilians.

These days, computers often play a role in wargames, according to retired Marine Lt. Col. Travis Reese, who as a contractor has helped develop scenarios and wargames pertaining to Marine Corps modernization since 2017. But many wargames still involve people laying a map out on a table and, given a detailed scenario, making the tough decisions a commander might face in war, according to Reese.

There are two broad categories of wargames: educational and analytical, according to retired Marine Maj. Ian T. Brown, who worked with educational wargames while at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare.

In educational wargames, the focus is on the players and their learning, according to Brown. In analytical wargames, the focus is on better understanding the problems that the games simulate.

Wargames can’t predict how a real war would unfold or even how the same wargame would turn out if it were played again. They can’t “validate” real-life decisions, several wargaming experts cautioned.

“In essence wargaming is an exercise in human interaction, and the interplay of human decisions and the outcomes of those decisions makes it impossible for two games to be the same,” the influential wargamer Peter Perla and Navy Lt. Cmdr. Raymond Barrett wrote in the Naval War College Review in 1985.

And no wargame can capture the complexity of real life.

Wargame designers must keep a narrow scope and assume, for the games’ purposes, that some things will work the way they are supposed to, freeing them up to play with other variables, according to Reese.

“You can never do everything in detail that you need to do to simulate a fight perfectly,” Reese said. “It’s just too many things to put together.”

The limitations of wargames are many, but so are their possibilities, these wargaming experts said.

Educational wargames can sharpen service members’ abilities to make good decisions when in a conflict with an adversary, Brown said.

Analytical wargames can “investigate processes” and “explore questions of strategy, human behavior and warfighting trends,” Perla and Barrett wrote.

The Quantico, Virginia–based Warfighting Lab has its own wargaming division to conduct these kinds of wargames.

Its major wargames tend to take place in a Marine Corps University auditorium, with the cells huddled on different sides of the room, division director Col. George Schreffler said. The cells get briefed for about a day and spend about three days making the moves that form the meat of a wargame.

The players, ranging in number from about 30 to 150, work long days that start at around 7:30 a.m., with a break for a ­brown-bag lunch, according to Schreffler. The adjudicators from the Wargaming Division sometimes work overnight sorting out the implications of the players’ decisions.

At the end of the week, the players ­debrief the game, explaining their choices. The Wargaming Division writes a ­preliminary report on the game and then a more fleshed-out analytical ­report, which typically takes two to three months, according to Schreffler.

Well-conducted wargames can usher players into a mental zone called “the magic circle,” in which they accept the virtual world and make decisions that feel real within it, Brown said. In this magic circle, players emotionally engage with what happens in the game.

“That’s actually a very valuable psychological dynamic, because it makes your experience stick with you in a way that you remember,” Brown said. “And if you remember it, you can assess it yourself, and you can learn from it.”

Preparing for war

Analytical wargames have been at the center of the Marine Corps’ bold, and controversial, overhaul plan.

That plan — called Force Design 2030, though leaders recently dropped the “2030″ — was championed by now-retired Gen. David Berger, who served as commandant from 2019–2023 and before that was the deputy commandant for combat development and integration.

From 2016 to 2018, before Berger was in those two modernization-focused roles, he was the leader of Marine Forces ­Pacific. It was at that job that he witnessed a series of worrisome wargames, he said at a ­Brookings Institution event in May 2023.

The games convinced him the Corps had to evolve if it didn’t want to lose a fight with China.

“If we don’t change something, the same result is going to happen every time,” Berger recalled thinking.

A 2018 wargame Berger observed at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, indicated to him that Marine forces needed to be lighter, more mobile and positioned closer to the possible sites of conflict in the Indo-Pacific and China, he told Defense News.

How Marine Commandant Berger became ‘the poster child for change’

In 2019, Berger devoted three of the 23 pages of text in his commandant’s planning guidance to wargames, including what they have “shown” the Corps needed to change.

He already had decided that the Corps needed to become capable of spreading out on and near shore, fending off enemy naval forces, and avoiding getting tracked and hit by long-range fires, he wrote in the guidance. Wargames would “rapidly produce solutions for further development in accordance with my guidance and vision.”

Divestments of tanks, artillery, law ­enforcement personnel and more ­followed. So did controversy.

Critics of the changes, including several retired Marine leaders, have voiced concerns that the Corps was focusing too much on China and losing its ability to assert itself in conflicts elsewhere — and that even a fight with China would go poorly because of these divestments.

One skeptic is Scott Moore, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who holds a doctorate in conflict analysis and resolution and who as a BAE Systems contractor observed and analyzed wargames at the Warfighting Lab between 2016–2021.

He said he took issue with the timing of the divestments relative to wargames. The games he was involved in didn’t lend support to those changes, he said.

“Those decisions, to my mind, were made absent any wargames,” he told ­Marine Corps Times.

Yet Gen. Eric Smith, who became the Marine commandant in September 2023, has said the Marine Corps shouldn’t wait until concepts are totally fleshed out ­before implementing them.

That would take too much time, he said in October 2023 on a War on the Rocks podcast. And with changing administrations and budgets, and adversaries who are modernizing their own militaries, time isn’t something the Corps can afford to lose.

“If you wait until it’s completely validated, you’ll get nowhere,” Smith said.

Current Marine leaders have insisted the force needed to modernize given the threat of the Chinese military. Even in its revamped form, these leaders have said, the Corps remains ready to respond worldwide.

Wargames are just one element in the Corps’ “virtuous cycle” of learning, according to Smith.

First, the Marine Corps develops a concept, Smith said. Next comes a wargame. Then Marines do an experiment in the field with real equipment. Finally, the Corps ­incorporates feedback from these efforts.

“One wargame is one wargame,” Smith said. “It’s a data point.”

“Now, when I see 17 data points aligned and moving in a certain path or a certain trajectory, OK, now I’m interested.”

Logistics, logistics, logistics

But what if, some critics of Force Design have asked, those data points came from wargames that were fundamentally flawed?

Moore said the wargames he observed made too-optimistic assumptions, especially about logistics and mobility: that the ­Marines would be in the theater ready to fight when conflict broke out, that ship-to-shore vessels would come ashore without issues, that civilians would help Marines get food and supplies locally, that roads and bridges would be in good shape. He said the games also assumed uninterrupted command and control, sufficient air defenses and lack of detection by adversaries.

“Those were the assumptions that we never were allowed to test,” Moore said. “And those underpin the entire Force ­Design.”

A source who has firsthand knowledge of Marine Corps wargames and participated in some himself, and spoke on condition of anonymity, said he also had concerns about logistics being assumed away.

“It’s like a play,” he said. “The curtain goes up, and everyone’s on stage, and then we play. But how did everyone get on the stage?”

A now-retired senior Marine officer recalled asking questions about logistics while getting briefed on the results of the Corps’ wargames. How would Marines and their equipment be moved to the fight? How would they be sustained? How would these logistics efforts evade the enemy’s notice?

Top Marine pushes back on critics’ ‘lack of trust’ in Corps’ overhaul

“Every time, it was like, ‘Sir, that’s a great question,’” said the retired Marine, who spoke on condition of anonymity for professional reasons. He said he never got those questions answered.

Proponents of Force Design argue a lack of emphasis on logistics in some wargames does not mean those games were entirely flawed.

The wargames that Moore observed ­occurred early in the Force Design ­process, Reese noted. The games had to constrain “some chatter and some noise” so the Corps could begin to answer the questions it had about the nascent overhaul, he said.

“A lot of the games that, quote-unquote, ‘didn’t address logistics’ weren’t designed to, because it was going for a different problem,” said Lt. Col. Leo Spaeder, a ­logistics officer who worked at the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab from 2018–2021.

Spaeder acknowledged that “there were very, very unlikely and very favorable logistics assumptions made” in some games when he first got to the lab. But that soon changed, in part thanks to the 2018 arrival of now-retired Col. Tim ­Barrick as head of the Wargaming Division, according to Spaeder.

These days, Marine Corps leaders make clear they aren’t ignoring logistics. Far from it, they say: In his final year as commandant, Berger repeatedly declared his focus was “logistics, logistics, logistics.”

In the past three years at the Wargaming Division, 40% or more of the games have been specifically geared toward ­examining logistics, according to Schreffler.

Logistics “are gap areas that the Marine Corps has considered, continues to work on and is very alert to,” Schreffler said.

In interviews with Marine Corps Times, those with knowledge of the wargames spoke about them in general terms. That is because the Corps keeps the results of many of the analytical wargames classified — a fact that has provided more fuel for criticism from those with concerns about Force Design.

“I have not heard or seen anything of any weapons systems or any tactic that would justify the classification of these games, other than the fact that they really didn’t want people to know what they were up to,” said retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, who retired as chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in 2000.

Reese pushed back on the idea that high levels of classification allowed the games to evade scrutiny. Before Berger could make changes, he had to have ­buy-in from civilian Defense Department leaders and legislators, Reese said.

The Corps keeps wargame details classified for good reason, Schreffler maintained.

“There are, in fact, secrets that need to be protected from adversaries, who if they had the information, would immediately use it to develop counters to the capabilities the Marine Corps is developing,” he said.

What comes next

In coming years, the Wargaming Division plans to do more wargaming than ever before — about 20 big games a year, up from eight to 10, Schreffler said on a Corps podcast in August 2023. Enabling that will be the large facility now under construction on the campus of the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia.

Named for retired Gen. Robert Neller, who championed wargaming while serving as commandant from 2015–2019, the $79 million, 100,446-square-foot center is set to reach initial operational capability in 2025.

The Neller Center will allow more games, at a bigger scale, with better technology for analyzing data, according to Schreffler. The center will have remote capabilities, meaning a Marine in California could examine a problem through a wargame without booking a cross-country flight.

A defining characteristic of wargames — whether played on a map or through the cloud — is, according to the 2019 Rand report, that players make decisions and end up “living with the consequences of their actions.”

Yet the wargames that inform the path of change the Marine Corps is pursuing have consequences of their own. When Marines and Marine veterans argue about wargames, they are also arguing about war: how to prepare for it and how to fight it.

The Corps has an obligation to the more than 30,000 Marines now positioned overseas to get its transformation right, Berger told the audience at the Modern Day Marine conference in June 2023.

“They are our sons and daughters, and we owe them an unfair fight,” Berger said.

Reisswitz’s wargame was no game, a Prussian general observed in 1824 — but war is no wargame. People live and die with the consequences.

The test, which also involved Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne, took place in a closed chamber at the Arnold Engineering Development Complex in Tennessee. It followed static fire tests of the first and second stages’ rocket motors in March 2023 and January 2024, respectively.

This third stage that was tested is the smallest of Sentinel’s three-stage propulsion system. The Air Force did not offer further details about the test, nor did it identify whether the event was successful.

“This test is the latest in our ground and flight test program and is designed to help us refine Sentinel’s air vehicle design,” Maj. Gen. John Newberry, commander of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center and the service’s program executive officer for strategic systems. “It demonstrates the progress the Air Force is making on modernizing our nation’s strategic land-based nuclear deterrent.”

The Sentinel program is intended to replace the aging LGM-30G Minuteman III ICBM, which has been a key part of the United States’ nuclear triad since the Cold War. The Air Force now has roughly 400 Minuteman III weapons in silos spread out across Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska.

Northrop Grumman did not issue a news release about the test, but provided a short statement to Defense News: “In partnership with the Air Force, we continue to make significant progress on the Sentinel program, achieving key milestones to mature the design and reduce risk.”

Northrop said in a February release it had successfully tested several other elements of the missile. This included evaluating the forward and aft sections of a Sentinel ICBM at its Strategic Missile Test and Production Complex in Promontory, Utah to collect data about the weapon’s in-flight structural dynamics.

Northrop also tested the Sentinel’s shroud, which encases the payload within the missile’s nose, in a fly-off test at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California. This test, which the company said was successful, verified the shroud would not strike the enclosed payload as it flew off the missile.

The price tag for the Sentinel program has spiked enough to trigger a cost overrun process known as a Nunn-McCurdy breach. Top Air Force leaders have pinned the bulk of the cost growth on its highly complex command and launch segment, which involves securing real estate from hundreds of landowners across the Midwest, building more than 400 launch facilities and 7,500 miles of utility corridors, and laying thousands of miles of fiber-optic networks.

The Air Force said the Sentinel missile itself is not seeing as much of a severe cost growth as other portions of the program.

Sentinel, which was originally due to reach initial operational capability in 2029, is also falling behind schedule by about two years, the Air Force said earlier this year.

But the service is unlikely to cancel the Sentinel program over cost overruns and delays, and top leaders have said replacing the Minuteman III is so important they would find money elsewhere in the budget to pay for the new ICBMs. The Pentagon is now reviewing Sentinel to see how it might restructure the program to get it back on track and bring down costs.

The U.S. Air Force on Sunday carried out what is expected to be the final test of the hypersonic AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon.

The service did not say whether the test was successful.

In a statement to Defense News, an Air Force spokesperson said a B-52H Stratofortress carried out the test of the fully operational ARRW prototype, referred to as an all-up round test, after taking off from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. The test was carried out at the Reagan Test Site, an Army facility in the Marshall Islands.

The Air Force declined to identify the test’s objectives, but said it “gained valuable insights into the capabilities” of the Lockheed Martin-made hypersonic weapon.

“This test acquired valuable, unique data and was intended to further a range of hypersonic programs,” the spokesperson said. “We also validated and improved our test and evaluation capabilities for continued development of advanced hypersonic systems.”

In a follow-up statement, Lockheed Martin said it is ready to deliver ARRW technology or other hypersonic capabilities to the Air Force.

“Following the recent end-to-end flight test, Lockheed Martin has completed the test program with full confidence in ARRW’s revolutionary capabilities, and we stand ready to deliver this fully-qualified, hypersonic solution to the U.S. Air Force,” the company said. “Building on ARRW’s industry-leading technology and testing success, Lockheed Martin can quickly deliver additional hypersonic-strike assets that can be rapidly deployed to the U.S. military.”

ARRW is one of the Air Force’s two main programs to develop an air-launched hypersonic weapon that could fly faster than Mach 5 and be highly maneuverable. China and Russia have invested heavily in their own hypersonic weapons, and the Pentagon is under pressure from Congress to show more progress toward fielding the United States’ own capabilities.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall last year told lawmakers the ARRW program had “struggled” in testing, shortly after a March 2023 test failed.

Air Force officials said earlier this month that ARRW’s upcoming test would be its last, and the service plans to wrap up its rapid prototyping program this year. The service requested no funding to procure ARRW, nor conduct any research and development, in 2025.

Kendall has sounded a more optimistic tone about the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile program, and the fiscal 2025 budget request proposes $517 million to keep developing that program. The HACM weapon, developed by Northrop Grumman and RTX subsidiary Raytheon, is an air-breathing missile that the Air Force said would be smaller than ARRW and able to fly along “vastly different trajectories” than the boost-glide ARRW.

The Air Force assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics told reporters earlier this month that the service will study the results of the final ARRW test to help it decide what hypersonic capabilities it will need.

It’s the third time Kim was reported to have observed military exercises since the start of the 11-day South Korean-U.S. drills, which he views as rehearsals for an invasion. That’s a less provocative option than missile tests. North Korea has intensified launches since 2022 and ramped up belligerent rhetoric this year.

At the tank drills Wednesday, Kim praised the country’s latest tank as “the world’s most powerful” and told his troops to bolster their “fighting spirits” and complete “preparations for war,” according to the official Korean Central News Agency. The other two drills he inspected recently were dedicated to artillery firing and maneuvering exercises.

The tank was first unveiled during a military parade in 2020, and its rolling during Wednesday’s drill indicates that it’s ready for deployment, South Korean experts say.

Photos of the tank released by North Korea show it has a launch tube for missiles — a weapons system the Soviet Union operated in the 1970s.

The new tank could pose a threat to South Korea, said Yang Uk, an analyst at Asan Institute for Policy Studies, but it remains to be seen whether it can be mass produced.

The North’s Defense Ministry last week threatened “responsible military activities” in reaction to the South Korea-U.S. military drills, which involved a computer-simulated command post training and 48 kinds of field exercises — twice the number conducted last spring. The U.S. and South Korea have been expanding their training exercises in a tit-for-tat response to the North’s weapons testing spree.

Concerns about North Korea’s military preparations have deepened since Kim vowed in a speech in January to rewrite the constitution to eliminate the country’s long-standing goal to seek peaceful unification of the Korean Peninsula and cement South Korea as its “invariable principal enemy.” He said the new constitution must specify North Korea would annex and subjugate the South if another war breaks out.

Kim’s moves signal “North Korea’s fundamental change on its South Korea policy, beyond just rhetoric,” as the North’s previous push for inter-Korean unity had allowed it to make a steadfast call for the removal of U.S. troops in South Korea, a senior South Korean presidential official told a small group of reporters Monday. He requested anonymity, citing the delicate nature of the issue.

Observers say Kim likely wants to use his upgraded weapons arsenal to win U.S. concessions like extensive relief of international sanctions on North Korea. They say North Korea is expected to extend its testing activities and ramp up warlike rhetoric this year as South Korea holds parliamentary elections in April and the U.S. a presidential election in November.

“The South Korean-U.S. training is over, but the North’s isn’t over yet,” Yang said. “They won’t just stand still ... they’ve been talking about war,”

Associated Press writer Jiwon Song contributed to this report.

The seminar will include Air Mobility Command, U.S. Transportation Command and Air Force Materiel Command as well as a “host of other senior leaders,” said Gen. Charles Hamilton, who took over AMC a year ago. The event will focus on coordination in “the first 30 to 60 days of going into a conflict,” he said.

While the Army is required to support the joint force’s logistics and sustainment needs in operations globally, planning and managing the vast network of moving equipment from fort to port and into theater, as well as maintaining capability on the battlefield, has been siloed among the services. But in actual operations, it’s a joint effort.

When Hamilton took over AMC, he immediately changed the command’s mission statement to focus on the joint global force.

“I’ve never gone into a major operation without it being joint,” he said at a March 13 Association of the U.S. Army event in Arlington, Virginia. “In fact, I’m held to that standard to support joint, so why not embrace it and articulate that back to the Army, and in particular [the Office of the Secretary of Defense], that potentially could lead to some resources down the road?”

All of the moving parts across these commands result in a “congested space,” Hamilton said. “There’s a lot of moving pieces and what we’ve got to do is detangle it and integrate better in time.”

With the new focus on how to do all of this in a contested environment, “it’s really going to get interesting and sporty,” he added.

The seminar will focus on the Army’s most challenging operational theater – the Indo-Pacific. The Army continues to build its capability in the Pacific and a major aspect of its pivot to the region will be to work through theater sustainment and logistics and setting the theater in order to deter China’s aggression.

In the fiscal 2025 budget request released Monday, the Army’s portion of the Pacific Deterrence Initiative would be $1.5 billion. The service plans to spend $461.4 million on Operation Pathways exercises and another $337 million for other exercises with allies and partners in the Pacific, a 200% increase over FY24. The service also wants to spend $38 million in theater sustainment there.

The Army is requesting funding for contested logistics including new watercraft, command-and-control gear, and point-of-need sustainment capabilities.

While some experimentation exists already with the Joint Staff, the seminar in August will “take it to a larger scale” and bring in experts and industry partners to contribute to the conversation, Hamilton said.

While allies and partners will not be a part of the conversation in this first round, the Army plans to include them down the road because their participation “is a huge part of the equation,” he said, adding that there’s “no way we go into a large-scale fight without relying on allies and partners for supply chain, airfields and ports.”

Taking what comes out of the seminar, Hamilton said the Army will design an exercise that is solely focused on sustaining the force over the first two months of operations in large-scale combat to see how planners and commanders react to the situation.

The geospatial intelligence company on March 12 said it won the latest phase of prototype work on the service’s One World Terrain, which compiles realistic and, in some cases, extremely accurate digital maps of territory across the globe for military purposes.

A Maxar spokesperson said the company was “not disclosing any financial details” of the deal. The announcement did not say how long the effort was expected to take. Three phases of the OWT prototype project were previously said to be worth nearly $95 million.

OWT is considered a critical component of the Army’s Synthetic Training Environment. The STE is meant to provide soldiers convincing, common and automatically generated environments in which they can study tactics and rehearse missions. Virtual worlds afford troops additional means of training while also saving real-world ammunition, fuel and wear and tear.

Maxar’s fourth phase of work will focus on delivering enhanced, believable terrain. The company has been involved with OWT since 2019.

“This latest award reflects the unique value of our 3D geospatial data for military simulation use cases,” Susanne Hake, Maxar’s general manager for U.S. government, said in a statement. “Our data, derived from our Precision3D product, offers an extremely accurate 3D representation of Earth, including real textures and superior accuracy of 3 [meters] in all dimensions.”

Maxar was acquired by private equity firm Advent International in 2022 in an arrangement worth $6.4 billion. Following the buy, the company reorganized into two businesses: Maxar Intelligence and Maxar Space Infrastructure.

The ministry listed 49 ongoing modernization and acquisition projects across the military. Here are some that stood out:

Land Forces

M60 tank: Two separate modernization projects are ongoing. The first will replace the existing fire control system with the new Volkan-M, as well as provide additional armor protection and protected crew seats to M60T tanks. The contract was signed in January 2023. The second bolsters the firepower, survivability and mobility of M60A3 tanks. Prototype development studies are continuing.

Leopard 2 A4 tank: The platform variant is undergoing modernization work through a contract signed in 2022 between the government’s defense program management agency SSB and local defense contractor BMC Otomotiv. Aselsan, another Turkish business, is providing the fire control systems; remote controlled weapon stations; command, control, communication and information systems; laser warning systems; driver vision systems; active protection systems; and close-range surveillance systems. BMC will integrate these systems into the tank and overhaul the chassis.

T-155 Firtina self-propelled howitzer: The next generation of the T-155 is under construction by BMC Otomotiv. The original contract covers the delivery of 130 units. As of the end of 2023, the company had delivered eight. BMC is also developing an engine for the weapon. Inspection and acceptance activities of the prototype engine concluded Feb. 24, 2023.

ACV-15 vehicle: Aselsan is modernizing the combat vehicle by providing the 25mm Nefer turret, among other systems. The Defence Ministry’s 2nd Main Maintenance Factory Directorate is conducting the repair and overhaul of the engine and the transmission of the vehicles.

Naval Forces

Milden submarine project: The Naval Forces’ design office is working on the country’s first indigenous submarine program. Construction is to take place at Gölcük Shipyard Command. A test block is to undergo construction this year, and efforts to build the first submarine are scheduled to start in 2025.

Reis-class submarine program: Hizirreis, the second submarine of the Reis project, which includes the production of six submarines, began May 25, 2023. Gölcük Naval Shipyard is carrying out the work.

Preveze-class submarine: After integration and testing activities ended on the TCG Preveze submarine, which acted as a testbed for the early delivery of the systems, the Gölcük Naval Shipyard started midlife upgrades for the TCG Sakarya in July 2022. That platform is the first submarine to receive the modernization features, and work is ongoing. The plan is to modernize all Preveze-class subs during maintenance and overhaul periods until 2027.

Barbaros-class frigate: Turkey is working on a midlife modernization project focused on the sensors, weapons and combat management systems of Barbaros-class frigates. The first ship to receive upgrades, the TCG Barbaros, is currently performing acceptance tests.

Air Forces

F-16 fighter jet: There are two separate projects for the Turkish Air Forces. The first one is the procurement of new F-16 Block 70 aircraft and the application of Viper modernization to the existing F-16 Block 40/50 airframes in service. The second is meant to extend the structural service life of F-16C/D Block 40/50 aircraft currently in service to 2050, and to strengthen them structurally. This project will take place in facilities run by the 1st Air Maintenance Factory Directorate.

Akinci and Anka-S drones: There are ongoing efforts to buy various types of Akinci and Anka-S drones. For both of these projects, Turkey considers the extension of their range via satellite as critical.

Hürjet aircraft: The primary goal of this project is to design and produce a single-engine, tandem-seat jet trainer with performance features that will play a critical role in training pilots for modern fighter aircraft. The prototype made its maiden flight in April 2023.

Hürkuş-B aircraft: This program for a new-generation basic jet trainer is meant to meet Air Force Command’s need for additional training aircraft. Ultimately, this is to improve the quality of combat readiness training and the effectiveness of flight personnel training. The first aircraft is scheduled for delivery in 2025.

NEW DELHI — India has successfully conducted its first test flight of a domestically developed missile that can carry multiple warheads, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Monday.

The missile is equipped with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, Modi said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

India has been developing medium- and long-range missile systems since the 1990s amid strategic competition with China.

In 2021, India successfully tested Agni-V, a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 5,000 kilometers (3,107 miles) that is believed to be capable of targeting nearly all of China. Agni missiles are long-range surface-to-surface ballistic missiles.

India is also able to strike anywhere in neighboring Pakistan, its archrival with which it has fought three wars since they gained independence from British colonialists in 1947.

The three-word statement was highlighted in bold letters at the opening of NATO’s March 4 briefing, on the occasion of the Polish-leg of the alliance’s largest military exercise since 1988.

But even amid the resolute and calm tone of officials in the room, there was a palpable sense of apprehension among reporters.

A core theme of the speeches presented by NATO representatives revolved around transparency, specifically in showcasing what the Steadfast Defender exercise — and its subsidiary drill Dragon, led by Poland — would involve. Yet many were wary of answering questions related to Russia or lessons learned from the war in Ukraine.

On several occasions, officials were pressed about whether they had concerns over revealing their plans to Russia through events such as these, or even the possibility the Kremlin could intercept operational details.

“Of course we are concerned, everyone is concerned,” Brig. Gen. Gunnar Bruegner, assistant chief of staff at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, told Defense News. “[We need] to make sure we are safeguarding the critical information, but it does not relieve us from the requirement of making these exercises happen.”

“It is quite a balance you need to keep; you cannot showcase everything,” he said.

During a March 4 news conference, Maj. Gen. Randolph Staudenraus, director of strategy and policy at NATO’s Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum, told reporters that while the alliance does protect its communications, “we are also really trying to be transparent.”

The fine line between accountability and information security is one that some NATO members have recently grappled with. A notable example is the leak of a German discussion about potentially providing Ukraine iwth Taurus missiles. Russia intercepted audio from the web conference between German Air Force officials.

Through this, Moscow was able to get its hands on information regarding the potential supply of cruise missiles to Ukraine as well as operational scenarios of how the war could play out.

Russian officials said last month that the country views Steadfast Defender as a threat.

When it comes to that training event, Bruegner said, details provided to the media during briefings are meant to illustrate the bigger picture, but only in broad terms.

“The plans themselves and the details in there will not be made available to everyone. What you’re seeing here are slides NATO has unclassified,” he explained.

He also noted that an objective of the exercises is to showcase the integration of capabilities, and not necessarily what NATO would do in a contested setting.

“We for sure would not fly banners on the amphibious devices in a contested exercise, which would have involved having an opponent on the other side of the eastern benches of the river and would’ve looked different [than what we saw in the Dragon drill],” Bruegner said.

The Space Force is the Pentagon’s hub for organizing, training and equipping the units that provide satellite communications to the joint force, track missile launches, catalog debris that could damage spacecraft, take images of troop movements and wildfires from orbit, and more.

But as the newest service has taken shape — pulling together soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and fresh recruits to form the military’s smallest branch — the growing importance of space in global security has highlighted the need for a flexible, collaborative workforce for the decades to come.

“I’m extremely proud of the Space Force and all the good that it has accomplished,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Feb. 13 at an Air and Space Forces Association conference in Colorado. “But as good as we are, as much as we’ve done, as far as we’ve come — it’s not enough.”

The service hit its congressionally authorized staffing goal — about 13,900 billets overall — for the first time in 2023.

As of Dec. 31, the Space Force employed around 4,400 officers, 4,600 enlisted guardians and 4,900 civilians. The service plans to expand to 14,526 members, including 9,400 in uniform, in fiscal 2024.

Each year, that number creeps closer to the 16,000 personnel the Pentagon estimated the Space Force would reach as it lobbied Congress to create a lean new service in 2019.

Katharine Kelley, the Space Force’s civilian personnel boss, predicts “steady-state growth” that allows the service to keep up with operational needs without stressing the training pipeline or setting unattainable recruiting goals.

“We’re realists about what we can actually produce,” she said in a Feb. 23 interview. “There are plenty of people that say to me, ‘Why don’t you just add 10,000 more people?’ … We’re not trying to grow for the sake of numbers. We’re trying to grow for the sake of the mission capability.”

The Space Force is preparing to welcome reservists to its ranks under a new model that will allow guardians to serve in a full- or part-time capacity without leaving active duty. That approach lets the Space Force avoid the bureaucracy of standing up a separate reserve component while ideally offering troops more flexibility than active military service typically provides.

The window for reservists in the other armed forces to apply to transfer into the Space Force will likely open this summer or fall, Kelley said.

In the meantime, service officials will continue hashing out the details of how that hybrid workforce will function: How would it affect military housing or health care? How would promotions work? What would it mean for unit staffing? And what back-end human resources software does that require?

“It’s not copy-and-pasting the reserve model and dropping it into the Space Force,” Kelley said. “It’s truly, how are you going to manage one composition that has a couple of different ways to serve?”

Further growth may require the Space Force to take a more active role in its own recruiting. The Air Force has so far handled guardian recruitment in an effort to minimize overlapping bureaucracy between the two services, which comprise the Department of the Air Force.

But Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna, the service’s top enlisted leader, said that could change.

“We don’t have Space Force recruiters right now,” he told Air Force Times in a Jan. 11 interview. “That’s probably something we have to do.”

Still, the Space Force’s accession numbers haven’t suffered from a lack of in-house recruiters.

More than 4,000 people sought to fill just 492 enlisted billets in fiscal year 2023, the service told Congress in January. It signed up all but three of the 259 officers it sought last year.

The Space Force plans to recruit nearly 700 new enlisted guardians and 321 new officers in fiscal year 2024.

Bentivegna plans to work on refining the Space Force’s recruiting strategy in 2024, to give potential enlistees a better understanding of the service’s mission and what their place in it could be. That might mean mounting an ad campaign targeted at those who future guardians might ask for advice on joining the military.

“What do they say? What do they know about us?” he said of recruits’ family and friends. “I want to ... start owning that more as a service.”

Rethinking training

As the service continues to expand, leaders are reconsidering whether the foundation they’ve built can carry them into the future. That begins with an overhaul of the training pipeline.

The Space Force has already designed a service-specific curriculum for enlisted recruits inside the Air Force-run boot camp. Now it wants to shake up how guardians train for their first job in uniform, starting with the officer corps.

Rather than sending officers to technical school to learn about a narrow slice of military space, the Space Force will start them out with an introductory Officer Training Course that exposes troops to the basics of its three core operational fields — intelligence; cyber; and running the satellites, radars and other systems that comprise space operations.

Once the foundational course is done, guardians will pick the career field they like best and head to their first operational unit for on-the-job training, rather than spending more time in the classroom, Kelley said.

That means the Space Force will eventually stop sending guardians to some Air Force-run tech schools, like intel training at Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas.

The service eventually plans to expand the same idea to the enlisted corps. It’s unclear how long the vision might take to implement.

Officials hope the idea will lead to a more intuitive workforce that better understands how the military space enterprise functions overall. Graduates will go on to staff units that increasingly look to blur the lines between operations, acquisition and sustainment of military space assets.

“It is very difficult to separate satellite operations, cyber operations and the intelligence that you need to understand to deal with the domain,” Saltzman said.

For example, he said, “a cyber operator will be far better at their job defending the network if they understand the satellite operations, and they understand the intelligence and the threat, and how to ask the right questions.”

The new ops floor

As the pace of operations mounts — fueled by wars in Europe and the Middle East, deterrence in the Pacific, the proliferation of satellites on orbit and burgeoning threats to the U.S. military space ecosystem — the Space Force is unsatisfied with the number of troops it has focused on the daily mission, Kelley said.

The service plans to bolster its shift work, hoping to ease burnout among operational teams, make better use of the troops it has and create more bandwidth in case of a surge.

The Space Force wants to grow the number of crews who staff ops floors around the clock from three to five or so, Kelley said, to give guardians more time to train when they aren’t handling the mission.

To build those rotational crews, the service aims to more cleanly divide guardians who handle administrative work from those who staff daily operations — allowing more operators to focus on the mission rather than distracting them with managerial tasks.

Those crews will form standard packages of combat squadrons the service offers the joint force for daily missions around the world, like the Navy’s carrier strike groups and the Air Force’s future expeditionary wings.

That comes as the Space Force continues to open service component units that work directly with combatant commands like U.S. Central Command and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to ensure precision-guided weapons can land on target, pass communications between troops, protect U.S. satellites from electronic attack and flag incoming rockets, among other tasks.

The tenor on ops floors is changing, too. Space leaders want guardians to see themselves not as button-pushers at desks, but as warriors in a fight that extends around the globe and into orbit.

In the past, “it was not about what happens if somebody actually tries to take out one of your satellites,” Kelley said. “What we’re focused on now is where to put that manpower and those resources to really flesh out the operational warfighter capabilities.”

The service expects to lean more heavily on enlisted guardians to run daily operations, while officers handle more of the joint force planning to which space is key. Bentivegna noted the Space Force plans to open a retraining program this year to more easily balance its noncommissioned officer corps and others across specialties.

Space Operations Command boss Lt. Gen. David Miller told reporters on a Feb. 27 call that the service is “in a good place” in terms of the staff needed to handle daily tasks, though it’s “in no way … overmanned.” He declined to say in which fields the Space Force is spread thinnest.

But he acknowledged that as the mission set grows, so will the need for staff in expanding areas like missile warning and tracking. That’s especially driven by the Pentagon’s plans to put hundreds of disposable satellites on orbit to become more resilient in case of attack.

It’s time for the service to take a hard look at how many people it needs in each of those roles, and figure out how to promote and pay them fairly, Chief Bentivegna said.

“Am I happy with the structure? No,” he said.

Bentivegna said he’d like to see all guardians who are fully qualified be promoted, up to the first noncommissioned officer rank of sergeant (E-5) — when troops start vying for a smaller number of leadership positions.

“I don’t want to have commanders make a decision that, ‘Only 65% can get promoted this cycle,’” he said. “The only thing that the guardians should be … comparing themselves against is the standard, not one another.”

Kelley, the civilian personnel boss, said the service will advocate for guardians to be allowed to pocket salaries that rival those in the commercial space, cyber and other technology-focused sectors that compete with the Space Force for talent. When guardians may qualify for bonuses and how large those might be is also under consideration.

Officials contend there’s no time to lose in nailing down the details.

“There’s [a] real world at stake here. This is not hypothetical,” Kelley said. “As much as I worry about how much we’re trying to attack at once internally, to get stood up and do all these new things and build new laws and new policies, what’s at stake is you’re farther and farther behind where you need to be. And so I’m excited for what we can do.”

While the war between Ukraine and Russia has emphasized the crucial role drones can play — and the threat they can pose to troops — Gen. Piotr Blazeusz remains unconvinced of their value during waterway crossings.

“Traditionally, you would not use drones just for a water crossing. You might use them for reconnaissance purposes to collect intelligence ahead of time, but while you are doing the actual crossing you would not really need them in the air,” the deputy chief of the General Staff told Defense News in an interview on the sidelines of the Polish-led Dragon drill held here. “You’d want them ahead, at the front, making sure there are no roadblocks, or identifying enemy positions or threats for the vehicles disembarking.”

During the March 4-5 drill, organized as part of NATO’s larger-scale Steadfast Defender exercise, drones were nowhere to be seen. A single unmanned aerial system — AeroVironment’s Puma drone — was visible during the static display portion but was reportedly not involved in the training. It had previously flown during the recently concluded NATO Brilliant Jump exercise.

In the last two years, the 2,200-kilometer-long (1,367-mile-long) Dnipro River — which flows through Russia, Belarus and Ukraine — has served as a critical part of the front line between Ukrainian and Russian forces as well as a major target for both sides.

In November, both Ukrainian and Russian officials confirmed that Ukrainian units were able to cross it and had established footholds on the east bank of the river.

Drone and aerial reconnaissance units were reportedly involved in the crossing operation, in part having provided cover for soldiers traversing and detecting Russian movements.

“Combat drones are probably of little use in a river crossing,” said Samuel Bendett, an adviser on Russian military capabilities at the Center for Naval Analyses. “What’s more important is to have ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] ones flying for constant overwatch, as well as a menagerie of counter-drone and electronic warfare systems to protect personnel and equipment.”

“You would, however, need combat drones — especially tactical [first-person view drones] — if you identify an enemy position not far from the crossing trying to disrupt it with mortar, artillery and [anti-tank guided missiles], or if you locate an enemy drone unit that is using either ISR or combat drones against your attempt to cross the river,” Bendett added.

Blazeusz said one reason drones were not used as part of the Dragon demonstration at the Vistula River had to do with the smaller distance forces needed to cross.

“The Vistula crossing is only 320 meters, so it’s not that big. But if it was a longer distance, potentially you may want them, but we do have other means of communicating beyond just drones,” he explained.

In contrast, some parts of the Dnipro River in Ukraine can be nearly 1.6 kilometers long.

Some observers present at the exercise shared concerns that not everyone in the West adapts tactics fast enough to match the requirements of modern warfare, ushered in by the Russia-Ukraine war.

While countries must keep a close eye on happenings there, Blazeusz cautioned that militaries should not try to simply duplicate strategies.

“Never in history was the next war an exact copy of the previous one, so we have to be really careful about identifying lessons learnt in Ukraine and then applying them, because yes, there’s clear indications of what we need to be doing, but we shouldn’t be looking to just replicate what they’re doing over there,” he said. “We have our own set of considerations [as a country] to think about.”

Sophisticated networking and communications capabilities derived from the U.S. Navy’s hush-hush Project Overmatch are deployed on at least three carrier strike groups, according to the commander of the Third Fleet.

Project Overmatch represents the sea service’s contribution to the Department of Defense’s multibillion-dollar connectivity campaign known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control. Military leaders have shared few details about its progress since inception in 2020, citing competition with Russia and China.

During a March 5 discussion with reporters at Camp Pendleton, California, for the Army’s technology crucible dubbed Project Convergence Capstone 4, Vice Adm. Michael Boyle said Project Overmatch is “already fielded on” three carrier strike groups. He did not name them, nor did he say for how long the capabilities had been installed.

Project Overmatch engineers are participating in PCC4, where they are identifying connectivity gaps and fixes, according to Boyle. The capstone event aims to improve information-sharing and coordination of firepower across the military.

“We’re not just experimenting for the sake of experimenting. We’re experimenting to understand what works and what doesn’t work, and what do we want to pursue as a capability that connects us together,” the admiral said. “This is proving that we can connect, that I can connect, to a Patriot battery, that I can connect across the joint force, that I can connect through a tactical operations center-light to Air Force sensors and bring that information in.”

What Project Convergence will look like after bucking its yearly rhythm

A Navy spokesperson corroborated Boyle’s count when asked by C4ISRNET. The spokesperson declined to name the carrier strike groups, but said the rollout is ahead of schedule.

Navy officials have in the past said Project Overmatch’s introduction to the fleet would focus on the Indo-Pacific — a vast region where Washington may clash with Beijing and where digital links will be strained — and then expand globally. Project Overmatch was also expected to play a role in Large Scale Exercise 23, featuring 25,000 sailors and Marines as well as aircraft carriers, submarines, logistics support and simulated units.

Project Overmatch trials kicked off last year with the Carl Vinson carrier strike group off the coast of California.

Rear Adm. Doug Small, the leader of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, later said much was learned from the testing.

“It’s never something we’re done with. It’s a constant learning and a constant improving process,” Small said in February. “Not only have we fielded it, we’ve updated and re-fielded and delivered over-the-air capability based on what it is that sailors need.”

The Navy sought $192 million for Project Overmatch in fiscal 2024, which began Oct. 1. A full defense budget, however, has yet to pass Congress.

The 74-page whitepaper, which the service unveiled during its annual symposium this week and which builds on a similar document published four years ago, details planned procurements out to 2037.

“The Air Force is aware of [the importance of] long-term development planning and spending of the national budget to achieve maximum value,” said the service’s commander, Air Chief Marshal Panpakdee Pattanakul.

Indeed, part of the whitepaper’s raison d’être is to stake claims for long-term funding as its aircraft inventories age. For instance, the 2020 version stated the fighter fleet had an average age of 26 years, a figure that continues to increase.

But the government’s procurement process is disjointed, according to Greg Raymond, an expert in Asia-Pacific affairs at the Australian National University. He cited factors like political instability, inadequate strategic planning, annual rather than multiyear budgeting measures, and weak civil oversight that allows each armed service to makes its own decisions.

In the latest whitepaper, the Air Force gives priority to a medium-range air defense system possessing a minimum 30-nautical-mile range from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2028. Afterward, from FY33 to FY37, the service plans to carry out a second phase for a medium- or long-range air defense system.

From FY28 to FY32, the force plans to buy a short-range air defense system boasting gun-, missile and laser-based weapons. Credence is given to counter-drone systems, too, and a nine-year project to procure these is to commence in 2025.

The service is also eyeing 12-14 new fighters to replace the F-16 jets of 102 Squadron based at Korat. The procurement is scheduled to take place from FY25 to FY34, two years later than originally planned. The squadron’s F-16s from the late 1980s are to retire by 2028.

Two contenders have emerged for the aircraft requirement: Lockheed Martin’s F-16 Block 70/72 and Saab’s Gripen.

“We’re confident the F-16 Block 70/72 will complement the RTAF’s existing F-16 fleet and deliver the advanced 21st century security capabilities and performance needed to address Thailand’s most pressing defense requirements,” a Lockheed spokesperson told Defense News.

Thailand ordered its first Gripen C/D fighters in 2008. Following a January 2021 contract, the aircraft were upgraded to what the manufacturer calls the MS20 configuration.

Robert Björklund, who markets the Gripen to Thailand for Saab, told Defense News the existing fleet is integrated into the Saab-supplied Link T data system and that the aircraft provides its user with “a very wide range of weapon options, including its highly effective RBS15 anti-ship missile.”

A second fighter replacement project for 12-14 aircraft is slated for FY31 to FY35 to replace F-5E/F jets of 211 Squadron at Ubon that are to retire around the end of the decade. An identical number of fighters are needed to replace F-16A/Bs of 403 Squadron at Takhli from FY37 to FY46.

Thailand tries to maintain relations with several competing nations, including the United States, China, Russia and India, the whitepaper noted. Thailand previously purchase materiel from China, such as armored vehicles, air defense systems and a submarine.

Asked whether the Royal Thai Air Force would consider buying a Chinese fighter like the J-10CE, Raymond said the service values its relationship with the U.S. and likeminded allies too much to do so. He noted that Thai-U.S. relations have “largely stabilized,” despite the latter denying the former’s request to buy F-35A jets last year.

“They wouldn’t want to see themselves placed on the outer [circle] in terms of not getting invitations to things like [exercise] Pitch Black in Australia. I tend to think they’d be perhaps more careful about getting Chinese aircraft than the Thai Navy was about getting a submarine,” he said.

The whitepaper also detailed an effort starting this year to refurbish C-130H Hercules transport aircraft. The 2020 version recommended the service buy 12 replacements, but that idea was dropped.

As for pilot training, last year’s delivery of 12 T-6TH trainers allowed the Air Force to retire its Pilatus PC-9 fleet last month. New Zealand-built CT-4E trainers are to retire in 2031, so basic trainers will be needed from FY33. New lead-in fighter trainers are also sought from FY25, with Thailand already operating the South Korean T-50TH in this role.

The new whitepaper also emphasized unmanned technologies. One effort underway is the Thai-developed M Solar X solar-powered drone. Loitering munitions are also schedule for purchase by 2026, as are medium combat drones from FY26 to FY29 and high-altitude pseudo-satellites from FY24 to FY35.

The Air Force also mentioned procurement programs for micro- and nano-drone swarms from FY26, and a research and development effort for weaponized tactical drones from FY29.

And two Saab 340B Erieye airborne early warning aircraft are to receive enhanced command-and-control capabilities, with their dorsal-mounted radars to be replaced. This would take place from FY26 to FY29.

The government’s FY24 defense budget bill calls for a 198 billion baht (U.S. $5.5 billion) fund, of which $1 billion is for the Air Force. The service has already applied for an allocation of approximately $530 million for a first batch of four fighters.

Troops fired the XM7 rifle and XM250 automatic rifle, part of the Next Generation Squad Weapon program, at the Cold Regions Test Center at Fort Greeley, Alaska, according to an Army release.

That testing began in late January and ran through Feb. 9.

The XM7 rifle will replace the M4 carbine while the XM250 automatic rifle will replace the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. Both are chambered in 6.8mm and slated for the close combat forces such as infantry, special operations, scouts, combat engineers, combat medics and forward observers.

The 6.8mm round intermediate caliber round is the first of its kind for U.S. forces and provides users a heavier round that can have lethal effects at greater distances and punch through barriers that stop the standard issue 5.56mm round, which is the caliber of the M4 and SAW.

Both weapons come with an advanced fire control, dubbed the XM157, that houses a ballistics computer to help shooters compensate for bullet drop and distance.

In 2022 the Army chose Sig Sauer to build the two weapons and produce the 6.8mm ammunition until the service upgrades the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant with a production line devoted exclusively to 6.8mm.

The same year the service chose Vortex Optics/Sheltered Wings to provide the XM157 fire control.

The 10-year weapons contract has a ceiling value of $4.5 billion, XM157 fire control cost ceiling is set at $2.7 billion, Army Times previously reported.

The M4 and SAW are expected to remain the primary small arms of non-close combat forces for the coming decades. Once fielded, the XM7 and XM250 will drop the “X” designator.

A platoon with the 101st Airborne Division conducted limited user tests of the rifle, carbine and optic in November. A not-yet-identified platoon with the 101st will officially field the weapon in September, Army Times previously reported.

Staff with the Army’s Cross Functional Team-Soldier Lethality, Program Executive Office-Soldier and the Joint Program Executive Office Armaments and Ammunitions worked with soldiers at the Alaska testing center to evaluate the weapon’s performance in extreme cold weather.

“Extreme cold can affect the weapon’s functionality, of course, but it also hinders a Soldier’s movement and mobility,” said Maj. Brandon Davis, a member of the SL CFT operations team. “So which sling does he prefer in these conditions? Can he or she effectively manipulate the widgets on the weapon wearing gloves? We’re getting after every aspect of how the NGSW impacts lethality and mobility under extreme conditions.”

The service has scheduled testing for the NGSW in extreme heat and humidity later this year, according to the release.

Maj. Gen. Brian Eifler, commander of the Alaska-based 11th Airborne Division, spoke with reporters Monday about the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center training exercise that took place from Feb. 8 through Feb. 22 across the state.

It’s been three years since the Army started its Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center rotations in Alaska, and Eifler said this was the largest and most complex version of the training so far.

A Mongolian Armed Forces infantry company and 600 Canadian troops, 350 from the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, 165 from the Royal Canadian Air Force and 100 from various support forces, participated alongside U.S. forces. Other partner nations such as Sweden, Finland and South Korea sent forces to work with staff sections of U.S. units.

Another 18 nations sent observers to the exercise, Eifler said of the growing exercise.

Army sketches out plan for an Arctic brigade combat team

The Army released its Arctic Strategy in 2021. In June 2022, the service reactivated the 11th Airborne Division in Alaska to oversee and grow Arctic-focused forces and training to counter increasing militarization of the region by Russian and Chinese military forces.

The 1st Brigade, 11th Airborne Division, served as the “blue force” fighting over the two weeks against two battalions of the 2nd Brigade, 11th Airborne Division, which served as the enemy force.

Both units ran their field operations but were joined by simulated brigades. Eifler and his team were able to fight an entire division in the exercise using simulated forces alongside real soldiers, he said.

The 2nd Brigade was given about five times the number of rockets, artillery and ammunition to battle 1st Brigade. The “enemy” brigade also had air defense, communication jamming and electronic warfare tools.

That extra firepower meant that blue force fire units had to pick their targets wisely, shoot quickly and move rapidly to avoid enemy counterfires, Eifler said.

The enemy air defense challenged the blue force to create attack windows and push realistic approaches to a near-peer adversary that controlled the sky.

A standard airborne or air assault mission would easily be detected in that scenario, he said. Which meant division aviators had to strike first.

“We did a 150-mile deep attach with our Apache division while avoiding air defense emitters that we put out,” Eifler said. “They had to duck and weave over those 150 miles close to the terrain to get to the target and destroy it and get back safely.”

Deep strike

That was the first and longest such deep strike of that distance since the rotations began, Eifler said.

Once the strike had its effect, the blue force brigade flew a more than 80-mile air assault using 15 aircraft, including Chinooks and Black Hawks, he said.

On the ground, soldiers used the five new cold-weather, all-terrain vehicles, or CATV, during the exercise, which Eifler said performed well and allowed soldiers to maneuver over various snow, mud and water-logged terrain. Temperatures fluctuated from -40 degrees Fahrenheit to 40 F

BAE Systems won the $278 million contract to produce the cold-weather, all-terrain vehicle for the Army in 2022. At the time the service planned to purchase 163 of them to replace its decades-old small unit support vehicle.

The cold-weather, all-terrain vehicle is a tracked vehicle that can carry nine soldiers and equipment.

At the same time, 1st Brigade dispatched soldier teams on snowmobiles armed with Javelin missile launchers to navigate off-road and knock out enemy tanks and vehicles.

“One of our standing orders is to stay off the road when you’re fighting in harsh weather because the roads and trails are like the enemy’s engagement areas,” Eifler said. “We’re always saying ‘if your traveling is easy, you’re running into danger. And if it’s very hard and difficult to move you’re winning.’”

In the airwaves, the enemy force jammed digital communications that, at times, forced commanders to dispatch those same CATVs and snowmobiles to hand-deliver orders to battalions and other units.

The unforgiving cold

Eifler stressed that soldiers operating in the Arctic need to simultaneously keep their high-tech gear running but be ready to go “manual or mechanical” to get the job done.

The unforgiving cold can paralyze some systems and drain batteries in minutes, not hours.

As part of the exercise, soldiers used a C-130 cargo plane to fly a high mobility artillery rocket system more than 500 miles to Utqiagvik, Alaska ― a city on the northernmost reaches of the state and above the Arctic Circle.

Eifler’s blue force also had to contend with smaller, but still challenging threats.

The enemy force used small drone swarms of a dozen or fewer drones used to detect unit positions. They even “armed” some of the small drones with tennis balls and Nerf footballs to drop onto locations, showing soldiers they could be hit by ordnance they weren’t tracking.

During the two-week exercise, Eifler said soldiers tested 40 different types of equipment, from communications gear and vehicles to tents, skis and boots.

The two-star said that in the future the force likely will need more snowmobiles for the types of missions used in this exercise as well as casualty evacuation and basic mobility.

Early observations include a need for a better tent system that can fit into a rucksack and improved ski bindings to withstand the extreme cold temperatures, he said.

North Korea has conducted six rounds of missile tests so far this year, most of them reportedly involving cruise missiles that typically fly at a low altitude to overcome opponents’ missile defenses. Analysts say that in the event of a conflict, North Korea aims to use cruise missiles to strike U.S. aircraft carriers as well as U.S. military bases in Japan.

South Korea’s air force said in a statement the drill on Friday involved fifth-generation stealth F-35A fighter jets from both countries and other fighter jets from South Korea. It said the U.S. F-35As were deployed in South Korea on Wednesday from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan.

North Korea has ramped up its weapons tests since 2022 in what experts call an attempt to increase its leverage in future diplomacy. South Korea and the U.S. have responded by expanding their military exercises and trilateral training with Japan.

On the sidelines of a G20 meeting in Rio De Janeiro on Thursday, the top diplomats from South Korea, the U.S. and Japan agreed to strengthen their joint response capability against North Korea’s evolving nuclear threats and coordinate to block the North’s financing of its nuclear program, according to South Korea’s Foreign Ministry.

This year, North Korea is expected to step up its testing activities and belligerent rhetoric as both the U.S and South Korea head into elections. North Korea is likely seeking international recognition as a nuclear state, a status that experts say the North thinks would help it receive relief from U.S.-led economic sanctions.

North Korea’s advancing nuclear arsenal has likely emboldened its stance, and there are concerns that the North may launch a limited military provocation against the South. Observers say a full-scale attack is unlikely as the North is outgunned by more superior U.S. and South Korean forces.

U.S. and South Korean officials have repeatedly warned that any nuclear attack by North Korea against them would spell the end of the North’s government, led by Kim Jong Un.

But the U.S. Air Force’s B-52 bomber fleet is showing its age, and the Red Gremlin II is no exception.

On a crisp, clear morning in January, its five-person aircrew from the 11th Bomb Squadron ran through preflight checks for a training mission, tallying up what was broken and how serious the problems were.

Instructor pilot Lt. Col. Michael DeVita’s digital display — a relatively recent system known as the Combat Network Communications Technology, or CONECT — wasn’t working. The radar altimeter was down. And the targeting pod display, needed for a key element of the planned simulated bombing, was on the fritz. At one point, DeVita, the squadron commander, leaned over and gave a stubborn dial three solid taps to unstick it.

For the last six decades, the Red Gremlin II and the other 75 B-52s still in use have been the backbone of the Air Force’s bomber fleet.

They have conducted around-the-clock nuclear alert missions at the edge of Soviet airspace as well as massive bombing campaigns during the Vietnam War. They helped carry out strikes on Iraq that paved the way for the rapid ground assault of Operation Desert Storm. And in recent years, these aircraft conducted precision-guided strikes against the Taliban and the Islamic State group.

Now the Stratofortress needs to last another 36 years.

The Air Force is preparing to bring on its newest stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider, and retire the aging B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit. Sometime in the 2030s, the service plans to have a fleet of two bombers — at least 100 B-21s and the current fleet of 76 B-52s, modernized top to bottom with a slate of upgrades.

It is the most sweeping revamp of the U.S. bomber fleet in more than a generation.

This $48.6 billion overhaul is intended to keep the (eventually redubbed) B-52J operational until about 2060 — meaning the Air Force could be flying nearly century-old bombers. When the last B-52 was delivered in 1962, it was expected to last 20 years, the Defense Department’s inspector general said in a November 2023 report.

‘Weapons hot’: Lessons and mistakes on a B-52 bomber training flight

The service is preparing for the overhaul, rethinking day-to-day maintenance and reevaluating its strategy for how a fleet made up of two bomber types would operate against an advanced enemy.

“The B-21 with the B-52J [will be] a very powerful, integrated force,” Maj. Gen. Jason Armagost, commander of 8th Air Force, said in a January interview here, sporting a B-21 patch on his uniform sleeve. The combined fleet would be capable of conducting a wide range of operations and striking an array of enemy targets, possibly armed with the latest hypersonic weapons.

The centerpiece of the B-52J modernization will be the replacement of the bomber’s original ’60s-era Pratt & Whitney TF33 engines with new Rolls-Royce-made F130 engines; that $2.6 billion effort is known as the Commercial Engine Replacement Program. The Air Force expects the first test B-52J will start ground and flight tests in late 2028, and for more B-52s to receive new engines throughout the 2030s.

But that’s not all: The B-52J will also receive a new modern radar, improved avionics, the Long Range Standoff weapon to carry out nuclear strikes from a distance, communication upgrades, new digital displays replacing dozens of old analog dials, new wheels and brakes, and other improvements.

The Air Force is counting on all these advances to work. If they don’t, the service could find itself with perhaps as much as 40% of its planned bomber fleet unable to keep up with wartime requirements.

The Air Force must make the B-52 modernization succeed, said Heather Penney, a retired F-16 pilot and senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “Long-range strike is absolutely nonnegotiable. Bombers are it.”

Air Force historian Brian Laslie said the fact the B-52 is still in the air, and could continue flying until around its centenary, is remarkable.

“If there was an airplane that was flying today that was 100 years old, we have to go back to 1924,” Laslie said. “We’re talking about the [Boeing P-26] Peashooters, the [Curtiss] JN-3 and JN-4 Jennys [a series of World War I-era biplanes]. We’re talking about canvas and wire and wooden airplanes. A hundred years ago, we don’t even have enclosed cockpits [or] retractable landing gear.”

Experts like Penney argue the United States has underinvested in its bomber fleet since the 1990s, including truncating its B-2 purchase by more than 100 planes, letting the B-1 fleet decay, and waiting too long to start working on the B-21. As a result, she said, the Air Force is asking the B-52 to shoulder a burden no bomber has before.

“We’re asking geriatric B-52s to be that backbone while we’re waiting for B-21 to be able to come on board,” Penney said.

Looking for ‘showstoppers’

Before a B-52 takes off, DeVita said, it’s common for its crew to find at least one thing is broken during the preflight check process. Usually maintainers can fix the problem on the flight line and the crew takes off with a fully operational jet. But sometimes, he added, a broken system can’t be fixed in time, and the crew must decide whether its loss would be bad enough to scrub the mission.

‘More with less’: Lacking parts, airmen scramble to keep B-52s flying

Of the 744 Stratofortresses the Air Force built between 1954 and 1962, 10% remain — and the years have taken a toll. The aircraft’s mission-capable rate has steadily declined over the last decade, from a modern high of 78% in 2012 to 59% in 2022 — the most recent year for which statistics are available.

The bomber’s 185-foot wingspan means it must often remain outdoors, exposed to the elements, including frigid winters at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, searing Middle Eastern heat and sand, and corrosive salt air from the Pacific Ocean. Key parts have become increasingly unavailable, as the companies that made them have moved onto other business or simply closed.

The B-52 may be old, but it’s a hardy plane, said Capt. Jonathan Newark, the instructor weapon systems officer for the training flight. And even though some of its systems may look “antiquated,” he said, they get the job done. He gestured to a panel with thick, black keys he uses to punch in targeting data.

“You look at this keyboard, it looks like something out of the Cold War. Dr. Strangelove, right?” Newark said, referring to the 1964 film about nuclear war that prominently features the B-52. “But we could do every single mission set using this keyboard ... all the way up to our most advanced weapons.”

Back on the runway, the Red Gremlin II idled more than a half hour longer than expected, with the engines emitting a low and steady whine, while maintainers tried to get the targeting pod screen to function. But a fix would have taken too long, so the crew decided to get the flight going.

“We’re balancing what training we can get done,” Newark said. “I don’t have any showstoppers [on this flight]. The students that are here can still get all the training they need. [The targeting pod practice would be] nice to have, not necessarily something we needed today. There’s a lot of things like that — the radar altimeter doesn’t work.”

“We’re able to make an aircrew decision to fly without it,” he added. “We do that a lot with airplanes that are a little bit older.”

Issues with the engines, hydraulics or flight surfaces would be deal-breakers in any situation, Newark said. But in combat, a B-52 crew will be more willing to fly with minor problems on their plane because the mission must get done.

So the crew of the bomber, call sign Scout 93, strapped on their parachutes, buckled into their seats and roared into the sky to meet up with a KC-135 Stratotanker aerial refueling tanker near Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Top-to-bottom upgrades

The scope of this modernization project is unprecedented in the B-52′s history, said Col. David Miller, director of logistics and engineering at Air Force Global Strike Command.

And Armagost noted the service expects the B-52′s engine upgrades will provide improved efficiency and range. But the new Rolls-Royce engines are also expected to be quieter and more reliable than the current engines, plus they wouldn’t have to depend on an outdated supply chain for spare parts.

“If we’re on a [bomber task force] mission in Indonesia, we’ll probably have parts available for those [new] engines that are pretty close, rather than having to schedule a C-17 [cargo aircraft] to fly an engine from” the United States, Armagost said.

Gallery: Take a flight in the US Air Force’s B-52 bomber

The B-52J will receive a modern active electronically scanned array radar to improve its navigation, self-defense and targeting capabilities. The B-52′s current, outdated mechanically scanned radar is at the end of its life and is increasingly difficult to support, Armagost said.

But making the B-52 new again is only one step in the process. The Air Force is also trying to map out how best to use it in a war against advanced forces that could deny airspace to the U.S. and allies.

Such a conflict would represent a dramatic shift away from the relatively open airspaces in which B-52s have operated for the last two decades. And the modernization on the way is vital to keeping the B-52 able to engage the enemy, Armagost said. That will mean figuring out the best way for the B-52J to work alongside the B-21 now in development.

The B-21 Raider, with its next-generation stealth capabilities, was designed to conduct penetrating strike missions against an adversary with advanced air defenses, such as China, while the B-52J — about as stealth-less as can be — would carry out standoff strikes, launching missiles at enemy targets from outside contested airspace.

But Armagost doesn’t expect a “siloed” approach to how the service will use its fleet of two bomber types, with one or the other individually designated to carry out certain types of missions. What’s more likely, he said, is the B-52J and B-21 working in concert, along with other U.S. forces or partners, in integrated multidomain operations that could include working with cyber and maritime assets.

“Their capabilities are inherently different,” Armagost explained. “But a penetrating strike force, [including the B-21], might open up opportunities for a standoff strike force, [like the B-52], that then has follow-on opportunities for reacquiring denied or contested airspace.”

He envisions the B-52J conducting the kind of integrated operations that paved the way for Desert Storm or the opening salvoes of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

During the Gulf War, for example, B-52s flew 1,741 missions and dropped 27,000 tons of munitions, including Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missiles and conventional bombs. They targeted airfields, aircraft, command-and-control sites, power facilities, and Republican Guard positions, while allowing allied ground forces to sweep through and swiftly win the war.

And in a single night mission in the opening phase of the Iraq War, B-52s launched 100 cruise missiles at targets before going on to fly at least 100 additional missions in the conflict’s first few weeks.

Such a campaign would allow “a 100-hour ground war because of what’s been conducted through an air operation,” Armagost said. “Then the resulting joint environment becomes completely different than what it was prior to that.”

The Air Force is drawing up “robust” concepts of operations for how the B-21 will carry out missions, he added, including alongside the B-52, which is also helping Air Force Global Strike Command identify potential future capability gaps and how to address them.

The weapons arming the B-52J will likely run the gamut, Armagost said — everything from gravity bombs that provide “affordable mass,” to cruise missiles for carrying out strikes beyond the range of enemy air defenses, to precision-guided munitions and highly specialized, “exquisite” weapons like hypersonics.

“If it can fly or be dropped off an aircraft, the B-52 has probably done it,” he said.

The Air Force has used B-52s to test prototype hypersonic weapons in recent years, and Armagost “absolutely” sees them as a regular part of the Stratofortress’ future arsenal.

Although hypersonic weapons have the potential to provide tremendous capabilities — including flying faster than Mach 5 and maneuvering in such a way as to avoid countermeasures — they carry price tags so steep that the B-52J would need cheaper and more traditional bombs, too, he added.

“Everything is a choice, particularly when it comes to aviation,” Armagost said. “If it flies fast or is maneuverable, everything’s a trade-off. That’s why gravity weapons probably will always be a thing.”

Broken tech ‘makes combat a lot more difficult’

After a nearly six-hour flight that included flying alongside another B-52, aerial refueling with a KC-135 Stratotanker out of Illinois’ Scott Air Force Base, and simulated bombing practice, the crew of the Red Gremlin II turned back to Barksdale. Its student pilot, 1st Lt. Clay Hultgren, practiced touch-and-go landings over and over, and then brought the bomber to a safe stop.

During the post-flight debrief, instructors took stock of how the flight went — and considered the toll the broken equipment took on their lessons. The radar altimeter started working after the bomber took off, but even if it stayed broken it wouldn’t have been a big deal.

The crew was able to successfully complete most of the planned bombing simulations, except an assignment to find and target mobile equipment.

“We weren’t able to do that because we didn’t have a targeting pod,” DeVita said. “So [we have an] alibi for that.”

And losing the bomber’s CONECT screen — a system rolled out in the mid-2010s that provides detailed, moving color maps and helps with digital targeting — was a major “limiting factor,” DeVita added. The crew of the Red Gremlin II instead had to use the legacy navigation system DeVita learned to fly on years ago.

Losing the CONECT screen also meant the weapon systems officer and electronic warfare stations didn’t have the maps that would have made their jobs easier, DeVita said.

“That’s an issue,” he explained. “It makes combat a lot more difficult to be precise and to do a lot of the things that we walked out the door to do today. So that was unfortunate.”

While the B-52′s massive modernization is vital, Penney fears what the Air Force might find when it takes a closer look under its hood. Six decades of flying may have left it with metal fatigue, corrosion, stress fractures and other hidden structural issues, the retired F-16 pilot said.

She compared the potential dangers facing the B-52 to the unwelcome surprises the service found when it re-engined massive C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft in the 2010s.

“They ended up having to cut the planned number of [C-5] upgrades nearly in half because when they opened up the aircraft, they found a lot of stuff that they didn’t expect,” she said. “They ended up having to do a lot of unplanned [service life extension work], essentially, and that ended up eating into the available money they had for the program.”

Air Force Global Strike Command said in a response to Defense News’ inquiry that the service assessed the B-52s before deciding to modernize them, and found their underlying structures were strong enough to last through the plane’s extended life span.

Penney said she also worries about the risks that come from concurrency as the Air Force attempts multiple major upgrades on a plane in short succession, if not simultaneously. Any one of those upgrades — re-engining, installing a new radar, updating avionics and so on — would be a major effort on its own, she added.

“These are programs that are long overdue and are utterly necessary if the B-52 is going to be able to execute what we need it to do in today’s — and last into the future’s — strategic environment,” she said.

If the B-52 modernization ends up significantly more complicated than expected, and thus delayed, Penney explained, the Air Force may be forced to extend the life of some B-1s or B-2s beyond their planned early retirements in the 2030s just to keep enough operational bombers.

And if the Air Force opens up the B-52 and finds structural problems severe enough to jeopardize the re-engining?

“We can’t even go there,” Penney said. “It is such a must-do. We cannot fail.”

The plane’s weapon systems officer, Capt. Jonathan “Loaner” Newark of the 11th Bomb Squadron at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, furiously taps targeting coordinates into a computer, his face bathed in green light.

Numbers on the screen tick down to zero as the bomber looms over its destination. The bomb bay doors open with a whir and a thump.

”Weapons hot,” Newark says over a crackling intercom. He reaches to his right and flips open a small panel covering a button designed to let loose a 2,000-pound bomb. “Bay three, releasing.”

In one of several passes, and without warning, the bomber jerks sharply upward as its student pilot, 1st Lt. Clay Hultgren, disengages the autopilot at the wrong time. Within seconds, the plane climbs past its assigned altitude limit of 20,000 feet — where it could run afoul of other aircraft.

Instructor pilot Lt. Col. Michael “Fredo” DeVita quickly grabs the yoke and wrestles the 185,000-pound bomber back down to a proper altitude, banking hard to the left. The plane steadies and resumes course as quickly as it veered off track.

No bombs — real or fake — were aboard the B-52 during its Jan. 4 training run. But the five-person aircrew on the flight dubbed “Scout 93″ practiced each step in the process as if they were headed for a airstrike at war.

Stratofortress pilots control six-decade-old hardware with a 185-foot wingspan — and the lives of the four or five airmen onboard. But the moment the Vietnam War-era bomber’s wheels leave the ground, anything can happen — and some of the most important lessons cover more than routine flight procedures.

During training flights, instructors impress upon younger lieutenants the seriousness of life and death when controlling one of the most formidable weapons of war ever built. Its crew must make calculations, down to the smallest decimal point, that ultimately determine whether the bomber strikes its intended target or innocent civilians.

“It’s tough to really glue everybody together,” Newark said. “At the end of the day, we’re all crew and we’re all in charge of those weapons. We all own them.”

Cold War plane, 21st-century training

Hultgren aims to join a long line of pilots that stretches back to the B-52′s debut in 1954. If his training goes as planned, he’ll be among those in the cockpit as the fleet remains in service for decades to come. The Air Force is now working on a series of upgrades, such as new engines, that aim to keep the B-52 flying until about 2060.

As the Stratofortress barrels toward a century in operation, its missions and training for the aircrew aboard must adapt to the digital age, too.

The new B-52: How the Air Force is prepping to fly century-old bombers

Five crew members were aboard the bomber that day, including three instructors: DeVita, 40, a pilot who commands the 11th Bomb Squadron; electronic warfare officer Capt. David “Rumble” Bumgarner, 35; and Newark, 34, the weapon systems officer. Rounding out the crew were pilot trainee Hultgren, 27, and WSO student 1st Lt. Jeremiah Tackett, 27, both too early in their careers to have earned their own call signs.

The mission marked Hultgren’s sixth training flight on the B-52, and Tackett’s 10th.

Their unit, the 11th Bomb Squadron, is the active duty component of the Air Force’s B-52 formal training unit. It takes airmen about nine months to finish the academics and flight training syllabi to learn to operate B-52s and their weaponry. About three dozen students graduated last year, the service said.

For Hultgren occupying the co-pilot’s seat is an exciting opportunity. He dreamed of flying when he joined the Air Force and would have been happy in any aircraft, he said. But being chosen to operate the B-52 — with its deep history and strong community with others who fly the Stratofortress — was thrilling.

“I like that I’m doing something that people have been doing for a while,” Hultgren said.

‘You scared him’

On the morning of the training flight, the crew strapped into their parachutes, donned their oxygen masks and buckled up for takeoff.

Their aircraft — completed in 1960 and dubbed the “Red Gremlin II” — eased onto the runway, following another outbound B-52 that spewed a plume of jet fuel exhaust as it departed.

Hultgren’s left hand rested on the bomber’s eight throttle levers, which allow the pilots to individually adjust the power to any engine that shows signs of trouble. DeVita reached over and guided him as they pushed forward in tandem.

A whine rose from the plane’s engines as it accelerated through the acrid cloud of exhaust. DeVita stuck his hand into Hultgren’s peripheral vision, flashing a thumbs-up. The student let go of the throttle and gently pulled back on the yoke with both hands. The Red Gremlin II was airborne.

A typical B-52 training mission almost always follows the same script: takeoff, a few passes with an aerial refueling tanker, simulated bomb runs, and a few touch-and-go landings. Each sortie lasts five or six hours.

During the nearly 6-hour, counterclockwise loop over Arkansas, Oklahoma and back to Louisiana, the B-52 flew alongside the first bomber, met up with a KC-135 Stratotanker for aerial refueling practice and logged bombing runs at Fort Johnson, Louisiana.

Aerial refueling is one of the hardest things for a pilot to master — especially when flying something as massive as the 159-foot-long B-52, mere feet away from a tanker that is almost as large, tens of thousands of feet in the air at hundreds of miles per hour. It requires a steady hand, Newark said, and is “where pilots make their money.”

“Two big airplanes, with a lot of aerodynamic forces, and you’re trying to make really small corrections,” DeVita said. “We’re talking corrections of … a couple feet left or right, on airplanes that are really close together. That’s the hardest part.”

There’s a lot of aerodynamics to consider. As Hultgren pulled the B-52 closer to the KC-135 for yet another round of refueling, the bomber entered the tanker’s downwash. The B-52 began drafting off the KC-135, causing the bomber to speed up as its air resistance waned.

A buzzer blared and red light flashed. The KC-135 pulled away. DeVita pushed Hultgren’s hand off the throttle and eased the plane back.

“You scared him a bit,” DeVita said. “That’s why I took over.”

‘More with less’: Lacking parts, airmen scramble to keep B-52s flying

But after spooking the tanker, Hultgren showed he could learn from his mistakes. DeVita gave him back the throttle and offered pointers on making incremental changes to the bomber’s power to find the “sweet spot” behind the KC-135.

“Whenever you’re ready,” DeVita said. “If you need a little bit more of a break, that’s fine.”

“Think we can do one more?” Hultgren asked. He slowly maneuvered the B-52 forward for its sixth refueling connection.

“Crank the power just a hair,” DeVita said. “Good.”

“F---ing awesome,” Hultgren murmured, as the refueling boom loomed larger and larger above the cockpit.

“That’s really good, dude,” DeVita said as the boom settled into place with a thunk. “Contact. Perfect.”

Hultgren kept practicing to get aerial refueling right, over and over, before the bomber parted ways with the KC-135 and flew back to Louisiana for bombing practice.

Like most training missions, this run was designed to pit the B-52 against a generic, unnamed adversary, Newark said. The crew of the Red Gremlin II practiced entering a simulated battlespace with enemy fighters and friendly forces — in this scenario, F-22 Raptor and F-16 Fighting Falcon fighters and an E-3 Sentry airborne target-tracking jet — before striking imaginary ground targets.

But instructors can throw students some curveballs. The bombing simulation began by striking soft targets such as aluminum aircraft hangars, before the instructors directed the crew to hit hardened two-story buildings in other locations. The deviation pushed Tackett, the student WSO, to decide what combination of munitions could best destroy the sturdier buildings, and to work with Newark to update the targets.

“It gives them [experience with] live problem-solving,” Newark said. “That’s what drove all those good discussions about, how would we destroy a troop staging area? How would we destroy a hardened building? Because we didn’t tell them ahead of time what it would be.”

For years, Stratofortress flights required five airmen — two pilots, two WSOs and an electronic warfare officer. But advancements in technology are allowing the Air Force to fold the EW officer’s duties into the WSO job, blending the bomber’s offensive and defensive roles and shrinking the crew to four.

Now WSOs can handle electronic warfare and airstrikes from computers that show data for both jobs, rather than making airmen sit at a designated station that can perform only one role.

Combining those tasks isn’t daunting for Tackett, the WSO-in-training. When asked how he juggles the sometimes-conflicting duties of a WSO, whose job is to take a plane close enough to a combat zone to strike targets, and an EW officer, who is responsible for keeping a plane out of danger, Tackett said: “A lot of it comes down to commander’s intent, and our mission for the day, making judgment calls, and assessing the situation from there.”

“Knowing both sides of it, I’m able to provide better recommendations to pilots” about where to go and what to hit, Tackett said.

A cramped ride

Flying on the B-52 can be exhausting, and even more so on operational missions that can last up to 36 hours. Despite being one of the biggest bombers ever built, the Stratofortress doesn’t leave much space or comfort for the crew.

It’s cramped and noisy. The constant roar of its six-decade-old engines creates such a din that airmen wear earplugs under their noise-canceling headsets and flight helmets. Without the communications system, it’s impossible to hear what someone else is saying, even when shouted from inches away.

Airmen must stoop when making their way from the cockpit to the electronic warfare station at the back of the jet’s upper level, and then down a ladder to the WSO station. Their posture in the seats isn’t much better.

“This is why our backs are all so screwed up,” DeVita said. “We’re sitting hunched over like this, with this heavy parachute on.”

Gallery: Take a flight in the US Air Force’s B-52 bomber

Amenities are few. A single bunk behind the pilot’s seat allows airmen to grab some shut-eye on long-haul flights; a small, well-used oven that can heat meals up to 400 degrees sits in the back. Typically, the crew brings light sandwiches or other snacks to ward off hunger, and — since it’s easy to get dehydrated while spending hours at high altitude — large bottles of water.

The B-52 crews find ways to entertain themselves in transit on ultra-long flights. Sometimes that means bringing a book; other times, 11th Bomb Squadron members plug a music player into the intercom, courtesy of a jury-rigged cable one airman soldered together.

In 2022, Air Force Global Strike Command launched a program at Barksdale called “Comprehensive Readiness for Aircrew Flying Training,” or CRAFT, to give airmen the physical, nutritional and mental tools to better weather the grueling missions.

But there’s one thing the Air Force can’t give crews: a real bathroom.

Behind this bomber’s WSO station, next to the bomb bay hatch, sits a single urinal without a curtain for privacy. Passengers are often reminded of the “Big Ugly Fat Fellow’s” cardinal rule: Do not go No. 2 on the B-52. An emergency garbage bag is on hand for those who really must go, but the crew is clear: Using it won’t win you any friends.

Debriefing the mission

After a series of repeated touch-and-go landings, the bomber came to a safe halt at Barksdale. The crew made their way back to Thirsty’s, a heritage room decorated with the insignia of the 93rd Bomb Squadron and other aviation memorabilia, a pair of arcade machines and a bar.

The crew popped jalapeño popcorn and cracked open small beers — only one per person — before the instructors started the debrief to run through the results of the day’s training.

They successfully refueled the bomber, and they hit their targets, which was good, DeVita said.

But then, DeVita said, the mission “started to go downhill.” The crew missed check-ins and roll calls they were supposed to make with other aircraft, and started to fall behind schedule.

“In real life … they might cancel the whole ball, because we didn’t speak up or show up,” DeVita told Hultgren and Tackett. The students listened with neutral expressions.

Then there was the matter of the lurch. After a simulated bomb drop at about 19,000 feet, DeVita said, Hultgren had turned off the autopilot while attempting a ‘break turn,’ in which an aircraft turns away hard from a potential threat. Hultgren didn’t account for the bomber’s nose pitching up, causing the sudden and unexpected climb, DeVita said.

“I’ll take the slap on the wrist for that,” Hultgren said. Some of the crew chuckled — but not DeVita.

“Did anybody tell you to kick off the autopilot and make that aggressive of a turn?” DeVita asked him. “Someone taught you that? Or did you teach yourself that?”

“My first-ever break turn, they said don’t use autopilot,” Hultgren said.

“Who?” DeVita said.

Hultgren demurred: “I don’t want to out him.”

DeVita told Hultgren that, at his current skill level, he should stick with the autopilot in those scenarios. And he warned Hultgren that kind of flying endangers the bomber and its crew.

“[At] the roll rate that you did today, I wasn’t comfortable that you were not going to break the airplane — not to mention the fact that we didn’t have control of the airplane, because we climbed 300 feet out of the airspace,” DeVita said.

But DeVita owned up to making his own mistake, when he relayed the wrong data to the crew during bombing practice.

“It can happen so easily, even to experienced people,” Newark said. “It has to be exact.”

The instructors stressed to the students that — even when they’re the new airman in their squadron, and even if it’s a more experienced commander who made a mistake — they need to speak up if they see even a single decimal point out of place on a bomb’s coordinates. Newark said he’ll sometimes give students the wrong coordinates during training to ensure they double-check the numbers.

“I wasn’t paying attention” won’t hold up as an alibi in court, Newark said.

“Don’t just be a passenger in that situation,” Newark said. “If we drop the bomb on the wrong target …”

“We all go to jail,” DeVita answered.

Though the training on “Scout 93″ didn’t go perfectly, that’s why the Air Force spends so much time training B-52 students, DeVita said. Instructors give their unvarnished feedback; students learn and grow from their mistakes.

Hultgren acknowledged his mistakes and said his aerial refueling skills have greatly improved, thanks to DeVita’s frank feedback. He and Tackett are on track to graduate in March.

“If we fly a sortie, and we don’t debrief anything [that went wrong], then we shouldn’t have wasted the taxpayer’s money by taking the airplane airborne,” DeVita said. “It’s not personal.”

Defense News visited Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to check out the aging B-52 bomber fleet and talk to pilots about what it will take for the aircraft to fly for several more decades. Here’s what we saw: