The aircraft will support the service to oversee offshore waters, conduct search and rescue operations, and help counter drug trafficking operations, among other things, the Coast Guard said in a news release today. They are not expected to carry weapons, a service spokesperson told Breaking Defense.

“The MQ-9B long-range unmanned aircraft systems will expand our reach and strengthen our ability to protect the nation,” Anthony Antognoli, the assistant commandant and program executive officer for robotics and autonomous systems for the Coast Guard, said in a statement. “This investment will give Coast Guard crews a longer-range view of our maritime domain, helping them detect threats earlier, make better-informed decisions and act faster across our missions.”

The Coast Guard first revealed its plans to purchase the drones last year, thanks to funding the service received from President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” that passed in July 2025, Military Times previously reported. 

The Coast Guard said today that funding for the MQ-9B acquisition stemmed from the FY25 reconciliation package that included nearly $25 billion for the service, along with FY26 appropriations. The MQ-9B purchase totaled $247.8 million for the four aircraft, along with ground control stations and other supporting equipment, the Coast Guard said. 

The Coast Guard has previously teamed up with the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and flown CBP’s MQ-9A drones for operations out of Texas, according to a Coast Guard factsheet. The Coast Guard noted in today’s release that the aircraft supported CBP to seize 60,700 pounds of illegal drugs and the apprehension of roughly 20 “smugglers” in FY26. 

The MQ-9B SeaGuardian is designed to conduct maritime intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations for more than 30 hours at a time with a mission radius of roughly 1,200 nautical miles, according to General Atomics, which builds the aircraft.

“A lot of what we’ll see in FY27 is leveraging mechanisms within the Army FUZE portfolio to address bigger Army acquisition problems, and I think again this demonstrates that the Army recognizes we need to diversify the defense industrial base,” FUZE Director Matt Willis told Breaking Defense in an interview last month. 

Established in September 2025 by then-Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, FUZE is the service’s flagship venture-capital innovation engine designed to accelerate deployment of new technologies using pre-existing acquisition mechanisms. The office falls under the Army’s Pathway for Innovation and Technology (PIT) portfolio, which is facilitated by the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology office. 

According to Willis, the organization’s overall goal is to find new tech and deliver it to the warfighter faster. But FUZE’s first year also showed the challenge of making sure promising technologies don’t stop at the prototype stage where they can fall into the ever-dreadful tech valley of death.

That prompted the organization to focus on getting Army acquisition officials involved earlier to create a clearer path toward procurement in FY27, he said.  

“We need to incentivize innovation, and we need to invest in emerging or bleeding-edge capabilities to stay ahead of the rapidly evolving threat landscape … or how fast war is changing. We can see that in Ukraine and elsewhere,” Willis said.

Igniting the FUZE 

Broadly, the PIT acts as a “plus one” structure in tandem with the Army’s six Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs), bringing together multiple offices focused on fielding emerging capabilities. All organizations within the PIT are geared toward harnessing innovation and getting tech to the warfighter sooner, but FUZE specifically uses a venture-capital style model to do so. 

FUZE is allocated $750 million in annual, “non-dilutive” research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) funds. The money is pulled together from four existing innovation efforts — xTech, Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) Programs, the Technology Maturation Initiative and the Army Manufacturing Technology Program.

Before FUZE, the four funding streams were dispersed throughout the Army, making it difficult for companies to understand how to acquire funding for a promising capability, Willis said.  

“The big piece and the power of the Army FUZE program is this sort of continuity, or seamlessness — or as seamless as we can make it in the government,” Willis said. 

First, companies demonstrate their capabilities during Army xTech competitions and if they are placed among the top contenders they win a cash prize. Then, the SBIR program gives those vendors additional money to develop initial prototypes, while the TMI funding helps with “scaling that prototype,” Willis said. The final step is securing the ManTech investment, which vendors use to reduce manufacturing costs. 

Once this process is complete, the Army’s network of venture and private capital partners “inject” funding into the companies so they can eventually scale their products and get on contract with the service through the PAEs, Willis explained. 

“This has really been foundational in terms of bridging the gap between [the Army’s] mission needs and private sector venture capital,” he said. “Rather than expecting startups to just rely solely on government R&D funding, we’re actively signaling defense priorities to private markets.”

But FUZE is still refining the process to ensure vendors come out with a contract instead of a box full of prototypes, he said. To achieve this, the office wants to engage with PAEs from the outset to ensure there’s a clear pathway for tech to advance. 

“I’d say we’re doubling down or tripling down on this sort of mandate that, for all of our FUZE investments — for all the project investments that we’re making — we’re building in this piece where we have buy-in from the warfighting unit,” Willis said. 

Drones Dominate, EW Less So 

FUZE held about 16 xTech competitions in fiscal 2026 focused primarily on drones, counter-drone systems, electronic warfare and energy resiliency. Willis said the office “exceeded” its goal of getting capabilities into the field within 60 to 75 days of posting a solicitation — a process that can traditionally take several months or even years. 

In some cases, the organization was able to go from a solicitation to contracts in less than five days. All four technology areas have made it into the field in some capacity, meaning the tech was either delivered to a unit for permanent use or as part of a “soldier experimentation event,” Willis said.

Vendors were more receptive to some capabilities than others, with drone and counter-drone tech being the most popular among industry, Willis said. 

“The commercial sector is already mass producing these platforms at high volume, and what we’re looking for in the Army is not starting with basic research and matriculating all the way up through a prototype,” he said. “Then a big piece for us from an adaptation perspective is — how can we make them military grade?” 

By contrast, electronic warfare drew less industry interest because “it has the least overlap with commercial applications,” Willis said. As for energy resiliency capabilities, FUZE has provided some solutions to the field, but it’s still “definitely the latest push,” he added. 

FUZE now wants to tackle more challenging acquisition problems, including low-cost interceptors. While these systems are not considered widely commercially available or affordable, they can be built using off-the-shelf, inexpensive components, Willis explained. 

To kickstart the effort, FUZE launched the xTech Disrupt Fires competition to search for a second low-cost interceptor for the Army’s Indirect Fire Protection Capability (IFPC) Increment 2 program specifically designed to hit low-flying and supersonic targets. 

During the annual AUSA conference this year, FUZE will award up to four companies a $1 million cash prize each for the program, “which is intended to jumpstart capability development for the second interceptor,” Willis said. 

The prize pool is far smaller than the funding required to build the IFPC Increment 2 interceptors currently being developed. Lockheed Martin and a Boeing-Anduril team were recently selected to move onto the second phase of the initial competition, but Willis clarified that while FUZE tech could feed into the larger Army IFPC Inc 2 program, the two are separate for now. 

“We’re executing this [FUZE] competition to see if we can incentivize or identify novel technology approaches to meet this mission. So this is in parallel,” he said. “If successful at the end, there will be an opportunity to integrate within the broader program of record, but the vendors that were selected for IFPC Inc 2 second interceptor are moving along their way.”

Apart from the low-cost interceptor competition, Willis said there are other larger acquisition issues FUZE plans to tackle in FY27, but declined to share them as he said they are “not fully baked.” 

“I’d say we’ve moved away from the prior acquisition methodology of spending years, if not decades, developing some bespoke, eloquent solution that really didn’t work in the field to recognizing that we need to move quickly and take risks to make sure that our soldiers have access to the best technology,” Willis said. 

Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed’s missiles and fire control unit, said the new interceptor is meant for what Lockheed called the Army’s Future Interceptor program, which he indicated seeks to develop a next-gen version of the Patriot’s current PAC-3 missile segment enhancement (MSE).

Cahill said Lockheed was one of two companies selected to advance in the program. He did not identify the other company, and the Army did not respond to a request for more information today.

Lockheed is set to unveil a full-scale model of the new missile on Monday at the Association for the US Army conference, Cahill said.

“PAC-3 Edge is designed to go after the most stressing targets that we — and, more importantly, that the Department of War — believes are the next-generation [threats] that they’re going to be seeing in the fight from our adversaries,” Cahill said in an interview with Breaking Defense ahead of AUSA, using the secondary name for the Department of Defense.

“PAC-3 Edge will be longer ranged. It’ll be higher altitude. It’ll be more capable to take on targets that are trying to hide,” he added. “It’ll have greater sensitivity in its seeker. It’ll have greater capability to maneuver and to respond to threats.”

Lockheed intends to invest hundreds of millions of dollars of its own cash in the missile alone, alongside additional investments in its seeker and solid rocket motor, Cahill said.

“We’ve already probably somewhere between $50 [million] and $100 million or better put into this,” he said.

Lockheed is developing the seeker in-house, with the intent of being able to use the new technology across other offensive and defensive systems, Cahill said. The company plans to invest about $800 million into the seeker, having invested “several $100 million dollars” into it so far.  

For the solid rocket motor, Lockheed is working with Northrop Grumman on a three-pulse motor intended to provide greater range and altitude compared with the legacy PAC-3 missile, he said.

Lockheed intends to begin testing PAC-3 Edge in 2027, ahead of its first deployment in 2031, the company said in a news release.

The PAC-3 Edge will be made on Lockheed’s existing PAC-3 line in Camden, Ark. The company currently is ramping up production of the PAC-3 MSE under an agreement with the Pentagon to triple interceptor production over the next seven years.

To support that effort, Lockheed is building a new MSE production facility outfitted with robotics, automation and AI meant to improve manufacturing efficiency, Cahill said. PAC-3 production will move to the new facility once it’s complete, and the legacy facility will receive the same upgrades.

“That’ll be available then to build Edge in the future,” he said. “Before we ever get to the point where we’re producing Edge, we will have already outfitted the entire factory from end to end with the most modern manufacturing capability available, frankly, in the world.”

The Army has weathered fits and starts in its efforts to develop a next-generation interceptor for the Patriot missile defense system. In 2024, the service announced plans to cancel the Lower-Tier Future Interceptor (LTFI) program, which saw both Raytheon and Lockheed competing to build the new missile.

But a year later, an Army official suggested the program could move forward after all.

“There are some aspects of the LTFI program that are still somewhat pre-decisional, but I believe that we will get support for the program, and I may be in a position this time next year to begin program-of-record execution,” Maj. Gen. Frank Lozano, then the program executive officer for missiles and space, said in October 2025.

“I think right now the glass is probably half full that we’ll get to run that program, and so we’re really in the planning process in figuring out what that’s going to look like moving forward,” he added.

Earlier this year, Lockheed announced the development of the PAC-3 ACE, a less capable, lower-cost version of the MSE that would be available to international customers.

Moving Forward on the Weapons Boom

Since the start of the year, the Pentagon has raced to increase munitions production, inking multiyear framework agreements with weapons makers and suppliers meant to entice companies into modernizing facilities and making major capital investments. Some of those agreements have been turned into undefinitized contract actions, allowing money to start flowing to companies for production.

The department recently awarded Lockheed undefinitized contract actions (UCAs) to ramp up PAC-3 and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) production.

“We were moving forward anyway on our own investment, so we didn’t lose time on that. But clearly the UCAs get us all the contractual authority we need to move forward,” Cahill said. “Definitization of the final contracts — they’ll happen when they happen. Those won’t hold us up.”

Eventually, Congress will need to appropriate the money linked with production increases, but foreign military sales contracts and current domestic orders could help pad out any short-term delays as lawmakers work out the budget, Cahill added.

Lockheed’s partnership with General Dynamics to expand solid rocket motor production is also progressing well, Cahill said. The companies announced the partnership in 2024 with the plan for General Dynamics to produce solid rocket motors for Lockheed’s Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS).

“We just had a motor firing here in the last few days,” he said. “There was a Lockheed Martin-designed GMLRS motor that was partnered with General Dynamics to put propellant in it and to actually fire the motor.”

Breaking Defense spoke with Craig Anders, SVP of Growth at AEVEX, about the need for autonomy, how the company is building multi-domain solutions and lessons learned from the use of uncrewed systems in Ukraine and Iran.

What’s the threat scenario right now that is driving the need for air and maritime autonomy?

Anders: We’re operating under this environment with persistent surveillance, ships, comms, everything’s exposed to attack. Everybody can see everything everywhere. Adversaries are out there deploying inexpensive systems at volume, at scale, and it disrupts the navigation and communications that we depend on to fight. GPS is a mess, comms are a mess, everything’s being jammed.

By creating the distributed capability to help grow reach and reduce the exposure of the manned side of things, both air and maritime autonomy can help maintain awareness, mission effects and keep the forces operating across way larger areas and swaths of the area of responsibility (AOR). These systems need to remain useful when navigation and communications are degraded and operating conditions change.

It’s such a dynamic battlefield these days that having autonomy that doesn’t rely on traditional methods of fighting is now this situation that is critical to mission success.

How have the lessons learned from Ukraine and Iran shaped the thinking around air and maritime autonomy?

We’ve learned both what to do and what not to do over the past four to five years. I was in the military and we started off the Phoenix Ghost program on the government side, and I was able to come here and continue that mission. One of the things we learned there is if you can’t cycle fast, if you don’t have people on the ground near the fight, you’re going to get left behind because being able to dynamically flex, have short engineering cycles, short stroke changes to systems outside the normal build process, you’re just going to lose.

Iran reinforces that pressure. They mass inexpensive threats on the battlefield. They levy pressure on our defenses, our inventories and our maritime access at a level we’ve never seen before. Affordability is key. Resilience of the system is key. Being able to adapt to keep it all working together is the only way to succeed in this environment.

We need functional systems in a degraded environment. We need to be able to have close connections between the operators and the engineers, and our production approach needs to be flexible enough to incorporate those changes fast. Otherwise, we’re not going to have what we need to fight. Even if we do deliver it, it’s not going to be very effective. We strive to shorten those engineering cycles, shorten those production cycles and continue to get users the things they need in a short timeline.

That’s because the Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation, RDT&E, cycle has to move at the pace of combat.

Right, and here’s the deal. Over time, airplanes aren’t going to grow extra wings or weird new kinds of propellers. This becomes largely an autonomy and a software fight. You have to have a good solid vehicle by which to implement these capabilities, whether it’s air, sea or subsea.

We’re taking the background we have in airborne intelligence, ISR, one-way attack and what we’ve learned on the battlefield, and producing that in a method that ties up with the way the US wants to fight.

What is evolving rapidly is how the US employs affordable unmanned systems at scale, across domains and as part of a broader force. That requires more than platforms. It requires concepts of operations, force structure, storage, forward support, and sustainment that keep those systems effective as conditions change.

What multi-domain capabilities are needed, and how has AEVEX evolved into a company that can offer them?

A key to this coming fight is understanding what layered defense and offense looks like. You don’t want to just send a couple long-range, one-way assets out there. They’ll probably just get shot down and you won’t know what happened. You don’t want to have a USV just floating out there in the water by itself. You want these things working together autonomously, but also passing information back to be used for the rest of the fight. Ultimately, this whole multi-domain concept is important to ensuring mission success in these AORs because of the uncertainty.

We believe that bringing in this BlackSea piece – there’s one-way attack boats, ISR boats, security, there’s mine sweeping. You have high-flying ISR assets that work with the boats. You have one-way attack that gets tied together by the boats on the water and the planes in the sky.

When you bring systems together to accomplish different parts of a mission, a common autonomy architecture and compatible interfaces can help them share information and coordinate more effectively. That is the opportunity we are pursuing across air, surface, and subsea capabilities. Our CompassX family of navigation and autonomy capabilities supports that approach, with modular hardware and software tailored to the platform and mission.

There are so many different capabilities you can bring to bear using these types of systems, whether it’s ISR, non-kinetic effects, EW/EA, mine sweeping, mine neutralization, critical infrastructure protection, long-range logistics. There’s so much you can bring to bear that helps take people out of harm’s way, but still accomplish the mission set. When you start to tie all these together across our divisions, it tells a story and sets a new standard on the battlefield.

How does having all of these systems working in conjunction give a more comprehensive picture of the battlefield to decision makers?

You’re going to see things you couldn’t see before. You’re going to see patterns develop. Every platform the military owns, operates or uses generates data, and that data, a lot of times, largely goes unused. As you start to pull together these systems of systems and these whole concepts of operations, you start to see different points where you can pull and utilize data to help make better decisions, target better, communicate better, share data across multiple common operating pictures, and enable the fighting man to make better decisions across the board.

You mentioned BlackSea Technologies, which you recently acquired and is now AEVEX Maritime Systems. What capabilities do they bring?

AEVEX already had surface capabilities through Mako. Our Maritime Systems division adds substantially greater maritime engineering, vessel manufacturing, and operational depth. That broadens both our portfolio and the expertise we can bring to customers.

When you look at their main system, it used to be called the GARC, now it’s LYNX. That’s a US Navy Program of Record. We’ve delivered 350 vessels, and now we’re revamping them to increase the comm/nav solution on it to make it even more adaptable in the current environment.

Those systems are fantastic. They’re all aluminum. We have more than 25,000 operational hours in them. They’re doing mine sweeping in the straits right now. They’re doing countermeasures. They have some unique reconfigurable capabilities that a lot of other people do not. Affordability is also central to our approach.

When you look at that, coupled with some of the other things we’re doing such as the NightTrain, low visibility container transport and delivery; that’s a semi-submersible, large ship, has a couple storage containers on the back. It has a wet bay and it does 2,700 nautical miles.

We have the sea-based petroleum distribution, which is a tanker that holds 185,000 gallons of gas that you can sink down to the sea floor and cache petroleum in place for contingency operations. It creates just a whole other level of how you would operate and fight in that environment.

What else should people know about AEVEX and what you’re doing in the field?

The biggest thing is multi-domain matters, because every mission out there crosses multiple domains. Bringing air, surface, and subsea capabilities together is going to give the warfighter what they need and create opportunities for more coordinated operations. It’s hard to fight in a vacuum. If you’re just focused on air, you’re just focused on sea, you’re missing out. You’re missing out on the CONOPS that help you win effectively and spend less doing it.

Autonomy is changing the way forces see and operate and deliver effects, sustain themselves. Autonomy is bringing capability to bear. Autonomy is also the back side, where you’re using data to analyze and grow your models in an effort to continue to iterate these systems to success. Its value is in real-world performance and real-world operating conditions, but you take that back and you grow your systems based on data and not conjecture. That’s exciting for me.

We bring substantial operational experience delivering and supporting these capabilities. That experience gives us a strong foundation for incorporating lessons from the field and continually improving our systems as requirements evolve. The production process has to keep pace as well, so we can move those improvements into repeatable builds and deliver them at the volume customers need.

That’s what we’re building at AEVEX: the ability to turn evolving mission requirements into capability customers can field and use. We help customers develop concepts of operations, integrate capabilities, and sustain them in the field. That is how we deliver solutions that remain useful as the mission changes.

Founded in 1938, North Dakota-based Ideal Aerosmith — not to be confused with the name of your favorite playlist — has undergone a few “instantiations” throughout its decades-long history, David Markert, the company’s senior vice president and general manager of government systems, told Breaking Defense in an Oct. 2 interview. The firm has been “defense adjacent” in more recent years, Markert said, manufacturing test equipment for navigation systems.

But about three years ago amid rising demand for defense tech, Ideal Aerosmith decided to pursue military customers directly, according to Markert. The company chose a low-cost, one-way attack drone, now dubbed “Troublemaker,” and publicly unveiled the system Thursday as a chief platform to market to prospective customers.

Ideal is now entering low-rate production for the Troublemaker, according to Markert, who said the company has a “Department of the Navy sponsor” for the system when asked about current contracts. He said the company has built 26 of Troublemakers so far, and is manufacturing the drones at a rate of two per week. With sufficient demand, he added the company could build up to 20 Troublemakers weekly within existing infrastructure.

“We felt that was a sweet spot in the market,” Markert said of a one-way attack drone. “And as the market turned away from exquisite systems to low-cost, affordable mass, it seemed like the ideal time to go after that. Given our engineering pedigree [and] our precision manufacturing, it gave us a pretty solid base to transfer some of those skills over to building drones.”

With a 15-foot wingspan, the Troublemaker is classified as a Group 3 system and can be launched from a catapult or truck. The company says the drone can fly in swarms, boasts a range of over 750 nautical miles (863 miles), has an endurance time exceeding 10 hours and can carry a payload of 30 pounds for missions spanning attack to reconnaissance. 

Markert said the company views the Troublemaker as filling a different niche compared to other strike options, particularly amid surging interest in low-cost cruise missiles. He argued key differences, like the ability to reuse the drone — which can be recovered via a skid landing — and the system’s ability to launch without the need for more specialized infrastructure or platforms, such as aircraft.

“We looked at the air launch or the palletized launch,” he said. “There’s a ton of guys in that low-cost cruise missile space. We’re differentiated from that because we’re in the drone space, and in our definition of that, drones give you post-flight options that missiles don’t give you.”

Troublemaker is not the company’s only planned defense product. Markert said Ideal is also working on other systems with greater range and payload capacity. But for the time being, there are more immediate concerns, like the effects of a continuing resolution (CR) that began Oct. 1 and freezes new-start programs while holding funding at prior-year levels.

Ideal has thrown its hat into the ring for relevant solicitations, Markert said, but added that “clearly, the CR has impact.” 

“How much of an impact it has, we don’t know at this point. We’re kind of keeping our fingers crossed and holding our breath that this stuff was funded under the [fiscal 2026] budget,” he said.     

“We do believe that there is an operational need and a solution based on our open standard, being able to address the sovereignty for the countries. We do believe that this solution is already fit for purpose regarding the Gulf,” Thales Vice President for Multi-Domain Operations Patrick Moreau said in an interview Tuesday.

Moreau declined to comment on any discussions the company may be having with individual Middle East customers.

Unveiled Sept. 17, HexaForce is designed to “accelerate decision-making and secure operational advantage at every level of command” for “NATO and allied nations,” the company’s release explains.

“This solution is a data, AI-powered solution. We leverage on the AI to develop quite fast, and there is agentic and LLM [large language model] inside this solution [that] could really allow the end users, for instance, to propose targeting solution to the operator, meaning that it allows the operator to process a huge amount of data,” Moreau said.

He added that HexaForce is based on open-source data, allowing users to reinforce sovereign capability within the state. This means, Moreau explained, if “you understand how it has been built and you could adapt the solution for the local needs. The [operational] data remains the property of the nation, meaning that it will remain within the country, guaranteeing the sovereignty of the solution.”

Thales says the platform also covers both strategic- and tactical-level decision making. While the C2 platform has yet to be deployed in any conflict, it has been tested in military exercises like the CWIX NATO exercise that took place in June in Poland.

The live-trial phases of HexaForce will forge a path for “for full-scale deployment, targeting an increase in capacity from 100 to 1,000 targets processed per day,” Thales’ release states.

Regarding the possibility of coproduction of this system with Gulf states in compliance with localization efforts in the region, Moreau answered, “whenever we deploy it locally, we could rely on domestic capabilities of Thales and/or partners to develop AI-powered capability, which are much more sovereign, considered as sovereign eyes only by the country.”

Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar have stressed local production in recent years according to national mandates.

The platforms are the second iteration of the company’s Precision Effects & Reconnaissance-Canister-Housed, or PERCH system. The kit integrates on Abrams tanks and Stryker vehicles to provide beyond line-of-sight surveillance and is outfitted with AeroVironment’s (AV) Switchblade loitering munitions.

Four PERCH 2.0 prototypes will be delivered to Fort Hood’s 1st Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division by the end of October, where soldiers will integrate them into Abrams tanks for experimentation, Scott Taylor, GDLS’ director of US growth, said.

The company developed the first PERCH iteration with internal research and development (IRAD) funding in response to reporting about the war in Ukraine, feedback from field commanders in Europe and discussions with senior leaders in III Armored Corps, Taylor said.

“So it’s sort of a rapid development, trying to meet the Army’s needs where they are,” he added. 

After GDLS demonstrated its first PERCH iteration, which it debuted at last year’s AUSA, the Army provided feedback to GDLS. The company applied the Army’s comments to create the first prototype of PERCH 2.0, once again using IRAD funds. 

Part of that initial feedback, Taylor explained, was to incorporate enhanced beyond line-of-sight technology, make reloads easier, increase storage space — which the company did by switching out AV’s SB600 for the SB300 — and create a system that can fire without soldiers having to open hatches

After evaluating the second version, Taylor said the Army found the design “compelling” and wanted a total of four prototypes.

“We said, ‘Well, can you get some skin in the game?”’ Taylor recounted. The Army subsequently purchased three prototypes under the Abrams System Technical Support (STS) contract, which is updated periodically, with the PERCH 2.0 purchases added to the contract in August.

A spokesperson from GDLS later told Breaking Defense that “doing it that way allows us to move quickly to meet emerging needs.” 

The Army has shown increased interest in mounting loitering munitions onto its armored vehicles. Apart from the Abrams tank, the service is looking to implement loitering munitions onto its replacement for the Bradley Infantry Vehicle, dubbed the XM30.

As Breaking Defense previously reported, the two models the Army is currently choosing from — American Rheinmetall’s Lynx and GDLS’ Wolf — are both outfitted with options to attach loitering munitions. However, Taylor did not comment on what kinds of loitering munitions could be attached to the Wolf.

The Army is heading into AUSA 2026 with new leadership and a major question hanging over the service: How much of its modernization agenda will remain intact? Breaking Defense Editor-in-Chief Aaron Mehta and Army reporter Carley Welch preview what they expect to hear from acting Army Secretary Adam Telle and acting service chief Gen. Christopher LaNeve. Then they discuss what the Army’s new autonomy command could mean for its growing focus on drones and robots.

Make sure to check back each day next week for wrap-up videos, photos from the show floor and comprehensive reporting from the Army’s biggest annual conference.

Breaking Defense spoke with Sion Power CTO Job Rijssenbeek about advances in high-capacity battery chemistry, where lithium-metal technology may be applicable, and why batteries and unmanned platforms increasingly need to be co-designed as a single system.

Breaking Defense: As unmanned systems take on more demanding missions, is energy becoming a limiting factor in what they can do?

Rijssenbeek: Absolutely. Brig. Gen. Troy Denomy, program acquisition executive for maneuver, summed up energy challenges at GVSETS (Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering & Technology Symposium) this past summer when he said, ‘Every formation we have today is underpowered.’ The insatiable demand for energy will only increase.

For airborne platforms, every pound matters. More weight requires more energy to lift, which requires more batteries, which add more weight. This quickly becomes a vicious circle. If you can put more energy into the same battery weight, you meaningfully change that math. Greater energy density batteries become enablers of greater range, endurance, and mission capability. They put more missions within reach.

What has changed in battery technology to make improvements in power, weight, and performance possible?

Lithium-ion technology has been extraordinarily successful, and will remain the right choice for many applications, but it is reaching its entitlement performance. There are several advanced battery chemistries coming onto the market, but there isn’t one chemistry that’s best for every mission. The different chemistries and ways of putting those together deliver different combinations of energy, power, cycle life, safety, and cost.

For applications where weight and endurance are especially important, lithium-metal anode batteries are compelling because replacing the graphite anode with lithium metal reduces weight and volume, and increases energy density. Those gains significantly enhance mission capability.

Sion Power has been at the forefront of lithium-metal battery innovation for more than 25 years. Over the last 15 years, we’ve developed robust IP around high-energy density batteries for electric vehicles. In the process, we developed lithium anode production technology, electrolyte formulations, cell designs, and packaging that makes this promising chemistry practical and applicable for aerospace and defense applications. 

Today we’re producing large-format lithium-metal cells in Tucson, Arizona that offer double the energy density of conventional lithium-ion batteries, at the cell and pack level, which is transformational for drones and the missions they can fulfill.

What does higher energy density mean in practical terms for defense customers?

More energy at the same or lower weight translates into extended mission duration or additional payload. You can fly longer, reach farther, and do more.

Our maximum energy, one-way attack Licerion Strike cell is designed to deliver up to 500 Wh/kg at the cell level, compared with roughly 250 Wh/kg for today’s standard lithium-ion drone batteries. This means roughly twice the flight time, which translates to greater reach, significantly greater time on station, and enhanced effectiveness. For example, drones are being asked to carry increasingly greater electronic payloads (like communications, jamming, autonomous guidance, etc.), which consume hundreds of watts of continuous power. Higher-energy batteries allow operators to incorporate more of these capabilities without sacrificing endurance.

Defense systems must operate safely and reliably in harsh environments. How do lithium-metal cells perform under abuse conditions and temperature extremes?

Higher energy density is a benefit only if the cell can operate reliably under the conditions the mission requires. Any time more energy goes into a smaller package, safety always has to be front of mind. I’m proud to say that safety has always been our top priority at Sion Power. We design for safety rigorously, from the materials to the battery pack.

At our Tucson facility, we have approximately 2,000 test channels and a 5,300-square-foot safety and abuse lab dedicated to rigorous performance and safety testing – from exposure to extreme temperatures and vibration, to nail penetration, and forced discharge.

We understand that our batteries need to perform reliably in diverse environments and conditions, and we are constantly expanding the capabilities on that front.

What happens when you take lithium-metal batteries out of the lab and put them onto an actual drone?

We asked ourselves the same question earlier this year, as we shifted our application focus to drones. To find out, we fitted one of our Licerion Strike demonstration packs onto a commercially available Freefly Astro Max drone, replacing the drone’s two conventional lithium-ion batteries. Our pack increased onboard energy by over 50 percent and reduced the pack weight by nearly 30 percent, all while using the same mechanical footprint.

More importantly, the drone flew nearly twice as long when equipped with our battery, increasing from 33 minutes to 60 minutes.

Twice the flight time means reaching targets twice as far away and putting the pilot further out of harm’s way. Twice the flight time also means more time to be productive at the target. For example, if the target area is 15 minutes away, a 33-minute aircraft has only about three minutes on station before it must return. That’s not a lot of time to be effective. However, at 60 minutes of endurance, that enables 30 minutes on station. Imagine what more you can do in 30 minutes that you cannot do in 3 minutes. That’s the kind of difference operators care about.

Can lithium-metal technology be manufactured at defense-relevant scale and cost?

Absolutely. We’re shipping cells today from Tucson and are ramping 10–20 MWh of pilot-line capacity. We have plans for expanding to 100–200 MWh and more as demand increases. While we replace graphite with a lithium metal anode, all the other battery components are the same as those used in commercialized lithium-ion batteries. We already tap those supply chains to minimize our cell costs. As our manufacturing scale increases, our cost position will improve further.

Which drones would benefit most from lithium-metal, and where else could higher energy density change the performance equation?

Our lithium-metal solutions are ideal for heavier Group 1 and Group 2 drones where the range and payload benefits are significant. Group 3 drones tend to be powered by internal combustion engines today but will benefit from greater electrification and noise reduction that high-energy batteries will enable. Beyond drones, we anticipate our cells will be able to support robotics, automotive, and space applications in the future. If weight and energy are constraints, our batteries will help.

Is lithium-metal technology primarily suited to one-way applications, or can the technology also support rechargeable systems?

Lithium-metal batteries are absolutely rechargeable. Our work for automotive was foundational to demonstrating this. 

We developed large-format 400 Wh/kg Licerion pouch cells that achieve 800 charge-discharge cycles, are fast-charge capable, and were validated by leading global OEMs. While our Licerion Strike product is aimed at maximum energy density, we’ve applied those learnings to Licerion Echo, our rechargeable solution, which is designed to deliver high energy density with over 150 cycles. Rechargeability increases flexibility, supports reuse, and reduces replacement demand.

China dominates the global supply chain for battery-grade materials. How can battery technologies reduce that dependency?

China’s supply chain dominance was established over decades and that will not be undone overnight. There isn’t a single chemistry that eliminates every supply-chain vulnerability. 

One advantage of lithium-metal batteries is that the anode doesn’t require graphite, which removes one key dependence from the bill of materials.

I’m proud to say that Sion Power’s batteries are 100 percent manufactured in the United States. We already have a low dependence on China-made materials, and we are systematically qualifying alternative material sources to strengthen our supply chain resilience and comply with US defense sourcing requirements. 

What needs to change in how batteries and unmanned systems are designed to unlock the next leap in capability?

I don’t think drone dominance will be based on one particular chemistry; rather,  it’s about using the right chemistry for the mission. 

For drones where endurance and weight are critical, lithium-metal represents a significant step forward in energy density. But the bigger change will come when batteries and unmanned systems are increasingly co-designed. That will enable greater optimization of range, payload, power, cycle life, and cost at the system level. The real acceleration comes when we stop optimizing the drone and the battery separately and start optimizing the entire system as one. That kind of approach turns improvements into capabilities that deliver decisive advantages today and create new opportunities for the future.

About 100 personnel from the Swedish Air Defense Regiment (Lv 6) in Halmstad will protect NATO’s logistics hub in southeastern Poland, outgoing Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said at a press briefing at the government headquarters on Tuesday. Saab Gripen fighters from the Blekinge Air Wing (F 17) are already flying over Poland this month to protect the same hub.

“All of this strengthens NATO, it strengthens Europe, and it strengthens Sweden,” said Kristersson.

The hub near the Ukrainian border is the main transit point for military and civilian aid to Ukraine under NATO’s Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (NSATU). The Swedish unit will operate under NATO Air Command and contribute to NATO’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD). 

Sweden is taking over the rotational role from the Netherlands, which has Patriot batteries there. The mandate runs from December with plans to continue into the first half of 2027, Defense Minister Pål Jonson said.

“We will also gain important operational and strategic experience with a very close ally, as Poland is. These are rotational deployments to which we are now contributing in solidarity,” Jonson said.

Jonson stressed that the security situation in Sweden’s immediate neighborhood “is very serious,” citing intensified hybrid operations against Europe. “Moscow’s purpose is clear,” he said. “It is about trying to undermine support for Ukraine. It is about trying to intimidate our societies and create division and fear. Russia will not succeed in that.”

He concluded that Sweden “must prepare for a deteriorated security situation in the neighborhood for a prolonged period,” and pointed to several recent cases. Alongside the incident at Germany’s Leipzig Airport in August, the Estonian recently security service claimed that Russian intelligence services were behind the August attack on the defense company Milrem in Tallinn.

In Sweden, the current cabinet is a caretaker government after September’s parliamentary election, in which the red-green-center bloc won by a narrow margin. However, no government has been formed, and it is unclear when the parties will cohere around a new leader.

As a result, Kristersson, who has been prime minister since October 2022 with the conservative Moderate Party, is acting as a caretaker at a time when the security situation is shaky. 

“Almost every day something happens that affects security in Sweden and Europe. We are monitoring it constantly. We are on our toes. Our authorities are on their toes,” he said.

The caretaker government is, as he noted, quite limited when it comes to new domestic-policy initiatives. However, Kristersson said, it “is not limited when it comes to protecting Sweden — that is, Swedish interests, Sweden’s security, and the security of Swedes in Sweden or abroad. That is also important to say.”

Foreign Minister Questions PM Candidate Andersson

Underlining Kristersson’s point that the security situation does not pause while Sweden works out its politics, an internal row broke out this week between the rival parties.

Social Democratic leader and prime-ministerial candidate Magdalena Andersson told Politico on election day that the outgoing government had focused too narrowly on the Baltic region and ignored “the global south,” seemingly an indication that should Andersson manage to form a government, Sweden’s focus on NATO’s eastern flank could change.

Andersson is in a second round of talks after the Speaker of the Riksdag again tasked her with forming a government that parliament can tolerate. She first received the mandate, returned it, and has now been given it again.

Politico’s story was later updated to say that Andersson’s office clarified she was not criticizing efforts to strengthen work in the Baltic region, but opponents, including the caretaker government, have tried to jump on her comments as a sign that a Social Democrat-led coalition will be less committed to defending NATO’s eastern flank.

Speaking to Breaking Defense on the sideline of Tuesday’s briefing, outgoing Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard painted Andersson’s comments in a negative light, saying “I actually think it gives the impression that one does not really have a grasp of the situation, and that is very concerning because she [Andersson] aspires to become prime minister in a historically difficult period for security policy.”

Malmer Stenergard added that “I want a prime minister who is comfortable with the security issues,” and ” who does not make sweeping statements about nuclear weapons without actually having grounds for them, and “who truly prioritizes security in the immediate neighborhood, because that is how we build security for Sweden.”

The day after Malmer’s Stenergard’s comments, Andersson posted on X, saying, “A government I lead will be a strong, reliable and active ally in NATO. In turbulent times, we are stronger together.”

“I think it’s a must. I mean, when we had early conversations with the Army, we actually thought the Army might be procuring tracked [variants] first,” Mike Smith, Hanwha USA’s COO and president of Land Systems, told reporters Tuesday. 

Hanwha USA is looking at a “menu of options” for the competition — namely either its K9A1 or K9A2 tracked vehicles, Smith said. While he noted that the K9A1 is widely available and the “most cost-effective” option, the newer K9A2 variant features more modern capabilities.

According to Hanwha’s website, the K9A1 variant has a 155mm and 52-caliber cannon with a range of over 40 kilometers. At full capacity, it can fire six to eight rounds per minute for three minutes.

The K9A2 is the company’s newer tracked variant. The howitzer has the same drive power as the K9A1, but features a fully automated turret capable of firing nine to 10 rounds per minute. The K9A2 also has two “independent” loading arms for projectiles and propellants, as well as a new autoloader system to increase the rate of fire and reduce the number of crew members needed.

The service recently awarded Hanwha $233 million for the accelerated delivery of six wheeled prototype howitzers, with an option for an additional 12. Both new wheeled and tracked variants are intended to replace the Army’s towed M777 and self-propelled M109A7s howitzers, the latter of which was originally fielded in the 1960s.

Smith’s comments come after the Army’s Program Acquisition Executive for Fires posted a request for information (RFI) on Sept. 30 seeking tracked howitzers and a coinciding resupply vehicle. The solicitation asked vendors for potential production lead times, maximum production capability, strategies to onshore US production if the vendor’s facilities are abroad and more. 

Smith said the company currently has several variants of both vehicles being sold to other land forces, which could make the production lead time for the Army shorter if the service selects one of Hanwha’s tracked variants. However, he didn’t reveal what that lead time would look like. 

The howitzers are “completely tailorable,” he added, meaning the company can make small tweaks to its vehicles if needed in order to meet the Army’s formal requirements.

A spokesperson from PAE Fires told Breaking Defense earlier this month that the Army is pursuing separate tracked and wheeled howitzers because the two variants “address different operational requirements and formations.”

The spokesperson said the wheeled variant is intended to provide more mobility, survivability and “responsiveness” for formations with towed artillery, while the tracked variant is better suited “for employment” with armored formations.

Traditionally, wheeled vehicles are also lighter and best suited to driving on roads. Tracked vehicles often feature heavier chassis that can more easily maneuver in muddy or rougher environmental conditions.

That makes Zero Trust less an endpoint than a continuously changing security model.

“We can’t just buy Zero Trust from a vendor; it isn’t just compliance,” said David Thompson, product lead for E-ICAM at Army CPE Command and Control Information Network (C2IN), participating in a Breaking Defense webinar on Zero Trust. “Our adversaries are not static and the Army must continually work within the ZT framework to adapt to an ever-evolving cybersecurity threat-policy process or technology.”

At the center of that effort is identity. Zero Trust, Thompson said, means that anything attempting to access a resource must first be identified, tied to a credential, and authorized. That requirement goes beyond people to encompass machines and other non-human entities.

“Everything, everything that connects to another thing to access a resource has to be positively identified, strongly bound to credential and securely granted access,” he said. “Everything means literally everything from human users to non-human interfaces and every physical or virtual component in between.”

The phrase often heard today to represent that desired end state is often called “fine grain authentication” and it’s at the heart of Zero Trust, where users, devices, data, and AI agents undergo regular steps of authentication to remain logged in. 

Pulling In 5,000 Systems 

The immediate challenge is applying that principle across Army systems that vary widely in age and technical capability, with many in existence for decades without keeping pace with modernization. Rather than impose one technical solution across all of them, Thompson said the Army is developing different onboarding pathways and trying to impose the fine-grain access controls that each system can currently support.

He compared the problem to securing a government building. Security can be imposed at the gate, the front entrance, the elevator, interior doors, or even individual desk drawers. But an older building may not contain all of those barriers.

“If the building doesn’t have interior doors or desks, we have to secure what we can today with the expectation that we will support the customer’s future security improvements tomorrow,” Thompson said.

Legacy systems are likely to remain one of the biggest obstacles to full compliance with Zero Trust. 

“There is absolutely going to be a significant amount of technical debt that they’re going to have to solve for that,” said Curtis Dukes, executive vice president and general manager of Security Best Practices at the Center for Internet Security, who also participated on the webinar panel. “It may be that you have to look at some of these older systems and they may have to be updated as part of that movement to this new concept around Zero Trust.”

That flexibility is important as the Army drives toward its end-of-2027 deadline for meeting all Zero Trust target milestones. Thompson called getting thousands of systems into a Zero Trust posture by then “a huge goal.”

Among the approaches being pursued is onboarding systems by operational domain rather than necessarily handling every system individually. The Army is also trying to give system owners the ability to perform more of the work themselves.

“We’re trying to pioneer a way to onboard operational domains that may have hundreds or maybe a thousand IT systems within them,” Thompson said. “The Army is also developing a ‘do-it-yourself kit’ so system owners can take actions on their own without having to work with Army CPE C2IN one-on-one. We’re trying to democratize this as much as we possibly can,” he said.

Doing that requires system owners to understand not only what systems and assets they have, but how those systems operate. Thompson said Army teams working directly with system owners have sometimes discovered that the owners themselves lack complete visibility into their environments.

“It’s not one-size-fits-all; every IT system is unique,” he said. “It’s hard, but it’s not because it’s complicated. It’s because it’s very detail-oriented.”

From Identity To Data

The expansion of Zero Trust across enterprises raises a second issue: authenticating and authorizing a user or device does not by itself protect the information that user or device can reach. That means the security controls should extend to the data itself. 

Mario Puras, senior vice president of Global Solutions Engineering and Architecture at Netskope, said Zero Trust therefore has to extend security controls to the data itself.

“Zero Trust must go beyond identity and access control,” said Puras, speaking in a separate Breaking Defense interview. “It must encompass continuous verification, rapid threat containment, and full-spectrum data protection. The mission fails if user access is secured but the data is compromised.”

Puras described an approach in which identity, device posture, behavior, content, and other context are evaluated to make dynamic access decisions. That’s done through policy controls at the data level while drawing context from users, devices, network connections, applications, and the data itself, he said. Those policies can then change as the underlying risk changes.

That becomes particularly important as cloud services, APIs, collaboration platforms, and encrypted traffic become part of military environments. Puras pointed specifically to attempts to move sensitive information through API calls, cloud uploads, or chat messages as examples of data movement that Zero Trust architectures may need to inspect and control.

AI And The Tactical Edge Expand The Identity Problem

The definition of identity is also becoming more complicated as AI agents begin operating across networks.

For Thompson, the underlying Zero Trust rule does not change simply because the identity is no longer human. AI agents still need identities, limited entitlements, and least-privilege access.

“It’s not a different way of doing it or different paradigms – same paradigm, but we’ve got to get faster,” Thompson said. He warned that automation could increase the speed at which malicious activity occurs from “a few attacks per minute” to potentially “hundreds of attacks per second, even thousands per second.”

Dukes said agentic AI further muddles the problem because agents may delegate tasks to other agents, requiring organizations to establish and manage trust across chains of non-human identities. He also raised the prospect of unauthorized “shadow agents” and the need to contain agents that behave unexpectedly or are hijacked.

Moving to Zero Trust at the tactical level, the Army faces a different constraint as it’s pushed from enterprise networks toward deployed formations.

At brigade and higher, Thompson said, units can reasonably expect connectivity to Army cloud resources. Below brigade, forces are more likely to operate with denied, degraded, intermittent, or limited connectivity. Those formations therefore need enough E-ICAM capability locally to continue their mission when disconnected and to update information when connectivity returns.

The same Zero Trust principles being discussed for users and devices are expected to also soon apply to operational technology such as industrial control systems and Internet of Things devices, and the individual components that make up complete weapon systems. 

Thompson offered the example of a helicopter, where identity attributes could determine whether an individual is authorized to start the aircraft.

“If Dave Thompson is going to go jump in a helicopter, does Dave Thompson have the authority to turn the helicopter on?” he asked. “Again, tying it back to the identity and the attributes of that identity and what that identity is allowed to do and not do.”

That illustrates how far the Zero Trust challenge has moved beyond logging onto a network. For the Army, it increasingly means determining which human, machine, application, or AI identity can touch a particular resource, what that identity can do once it gets there, and how those permissions have to change as the technology, mission, and threat change.

As Thompson put it when discussing operational technology, “it’s not an end state, it’s a continual action.”

Regardless of the role drones are filling on the battlefield today – everything from information gathering to facilitating logistics and combat operations – how effectively they carry out that role in the future will come down to how much cognitive load these machines place on our warfighters in the field. Palladyne AI describes the technology that enables machines to sense, reason, and act in the physical world as decentralized embodied collaborative AI, or DECA. In DECA-equipped drones, the intelligence resides on each aircraft, with each drone able to dynamically react in real time to changing circumstances without human direction.

The first thing to understand is that the words “unmanned” and “autonomous” are not synonymous, according to Ben Wolff, president and CEO of Palladyne AI.

“A lot of folks in the industry refer to waypoint following or coordinated pre-programmed flight as autonomy,” Wolff said. “I take issue with that because autonomy means the machine is making real-time decisions, not merely following a pre-programmed script where human operators have made all of the decisions in advance. That’s a critical distinction when we are talking about the unpredictable nature of the battlefield.”

Real autonomy goes well beyond predetermined routes or checklists of tasks for drones to carry out. The ability to reduce the cognitive load on operators and to deliver a true force-multiplier capability requires real autonomy, not simply unmanned capabilities.  But just like with autonomous or self-driving cars, there are different levels of autonomy and it is critical that the industry gets on the same page about what level is being required and offered by various solutions. 

The five levels of autonomy

Wolff points out that the five levels of UAV autonomy closely track the commonly adopted levels of autonomy for self-driving vehicles. 

At the most basic level, most modern automobiles will at least have cruise control. The next step beyond that would be adaptive cruise control, where a vehicle slows down or speeds up based on traffic flow and proximity of other vehicles. At the other end of the spectrum would be full self-driving, where the driver hits a button and the car makes every decision along the way, though the driver still has the ability to intervene.

“We see the same thing in drones,” said Wolff. “Level 0 drone autonomy is where the drone is being directed with its every movement by the human operator by remote control. But let’s say there’s a big wind gust and the drone self-rights in the wind gust. It has an automatic stabilization capability. That’s the equivalent of that adaptive speed control in a car. It can right itself automatically. It’s all preprogrammed.”

“At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got a drone where the soldier launches the drone and gives it a high-level mission. Let’s say the mission is canvass this 20-square-mile area for a vehicle that is emitting a certain type of signature, meaning an RF signature or an energy signature, acoustic signature, whatever it might be. You hit the button after giving it that high-level mission profile and it just goes and does its job entirely.”

Between Level 0 and Level 5 are levels that reflect less and less input required by the human in order for the drone to complete its mission.

Regardless of the level of autonomy – both now and in the future – Wolff believes autonomous drones should always enable human intervention. In his view, critical decisions such as authorization to impact a target with a kinetic device should always require a human in the loop, although he acknowledges that our adversaries might not always agree. 

“The ability to abort or to proceed with an attack should, in my view, always reside with a human,” said Wolff. “I fear that someday, we may have an adversary that doesn’t share my perspective.”

Building collective intelligence for swarms

The latest advantage of drones on the battlefield is deploying them in swarms to develop better situational awareness. With most low cost drones having limited computer and sensors on board, and considering that a single drone can only be in one place at one time, Wolff suggests that each drone possesses a unique perspective and that by sharing information among all drones, each drone in the swarm can leverage the intelligence of the whole.  “This concept is no different than the concept of a human team,” says Wolff.  “The value and capabilities of the collaborative team is much greater than the sum of its parts.”

Palladyne AI developed its SwarmOS software to make collaborative intelligence in a heterogenous drone swarm a reality by enabling disparate drones to share high-value curated information. Similar to a squad of soldiers in the field, drones can carry out their individual mission while sharing information with other drones, enabling better situational awareness and mission effectiveness. The company’s algorithms reside on the individual drone, so it can act autonomously with no centralized control.

“What’s cool about that is it doesn’t have to be seven, eight, 10 or 20 drones all from the same manufacturer,” said Wolff. “In the most recent Army PC-C6 (Project Convergence Capstone 6) exercise, we had drones from multiple manufacturers, all with our SwarmOS software on them, and the drones were collaborating together to complete the mission using limited amounts of information from the sensors on each of those drones.”

The software stack on each drone enables it to make decisions and react quickly in real time without having to wait for instructions. Wolff uses the example of playing catch: if someone throws a baseball to you, you aren’t going to consciously think about your arm and hand movement. Rather, you will simply react by lining up your glove to catch the ball.

“You just do it in a split second,” he said. “That’s what we’re embedding in these drones. They can act in real time responding to what’s going on in the battlefield. The fact that it’s on the edge, not centralized, the fact that it is a closed-loop sense, reason and act system; and then the fact that it can collaborate with other drones using that same sense, reason, and act system, that’s what makes it unique.”

Palladyne AI is developing what Wolff describes as “Oracle-Class Wolf Pack Swarming.” “Our algorithms are predictive in nature,” he said. “We can actually leverage the sum of knowledge across all of the drones to be able to use our algorithms to predict what the target might be doing next or what our friendly colleagues on the team might be doing next.” He gave an example of a swarm tracking a convoy: “The convoy went under a canopy of trees. Where is it likely to come out based on all the information we have about it was going when it went under the canopy?” “Oracle class to us is a fancy way of saying predictive,” Wolff said. “I think that is the holy grail. When we can start predicting what the enemy is going to do… that adds a whole other element of capability.”

Pilots needed

While building better intelligence in drones means pilots will have less of a role, they will still be needed for decisions such as defining the mission parameter and whether to attack a target. As drone swarms grow, it is not practical – from either a personnel or an economic standpoint – to have one pilot for each drone. With demand signals from the Department of War focused on increasing the volume of drones in the arsenal, that creates a need for both pilots and solutions that will lessen the load on those pilots and enable them to manage large numbers of drones at once. 

“Who’s going to fly all of them and how are they going to be flown as part of a collaborative tactical effort?” asked Wolff. “If you think about wanting to launch a thousand drones on the battlefield all at once, do we have a thousand pilots that are trained on that particular type of drone to be able to fly them? The answer is probably not.”

Palladyne AI’s software aims to solve that challenge by making large fleets of drones manageable by a much smaller number of pilots, operating from a controller rather than juggling separate controls for each drone. Because drones can share information and make decisions by themselves, pilots are not needed to approve every deviation or decision by a drone to meet its mission objectives. Operators can then focus on higher-level decisions – like confirming a target or redirecting a mission – while the fleet’s shared information gives them the clearest possible picture to make those decisions.

The key is leveraging collective sensor information from all drones in a particular region of interest to give pilots the best situational awareness possible. To do that, drones must work together effectively. “That doesn’t mean they have to be from the same vendor or model. Through SwarmOS, Palladyne AI lets different kinds of drones, sensor payloads and assets share what they see with each other and with the pilot, building a fuller picture together,” said Wolff.

“Using the drones in the sky much as the way we use teams of soldiers on the field, each of them is able to observe what’s going on in the battlefield,” he said. “The drones share information through the mesh network created by the drones and the team as a whole is able to be more effective.”

Autonomous vehicles in all domains

Airborne drones are currently the most common application for uncrewed vehicles, in large part because operating on the ground or in the water is mechanically more difficult, given challenges such as terrain avoidance. Airborne drones can operate along all three axes – X, Y, and Z – allowing them to change altitude to avoid obstacles.

But according to Wolff, the next big thing is extending that kind of autonomy to every domain – whether it’s land, sea, space or air. He sees the real challenge ahead as integrating and bringing systems across those domains together into one coordinated, unified battlefield picture that gives commanders and warfighters a far clearer sense of what’s happening and how to respond.

“There will be a day in the not-too-distant future where we’re not only incorporating data from all domains, but we’re actually causing embodied AI to manage all of these machines in a collaborative function, frankly, in a way that even we humans today are challenged by.”

Officials have weighed an F-35 multi-year procurement contract for years, and the latest push comes as the Trump administration seeks to expand the use of long-term agreements to buy key weapons like munitions. A successful deal covering both production and sustainment of the tri-variant fighter could be worth tens of billions of dollars. 

“There’s been talk about a 10-year, multi-year buy that would include the production as well as sustainment,” Matt Milas, president of Honeywell Aerospace’s defense division, told Breaking Defense in a September interview. Honeywell is a key supplier for the F-35 program. 

A source familiar with the negotiations, who requested anonymity since they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, confirmed ongoing talks around a multi-year production and sustainment deal. But they expressed skepticism of its efficacy. 

A multi-year procurement “makes sense where the department has seen success with munitions contracts. It makes less sense for aircraft lot buys” — particularly because some aspects of F-35 modernization are still in development, the person said. They added that “the complexities of sustainment present multiple unique challenges.” 

Milas said the potential agreement would potentially include “bulk buys” of spare parts, with the increased flow of components beginning around the jet’s 21st production lot, expected in roughly three years. Increasing the supply of spare parts is viewed as a key way to help raise the fighter’s dismal readiness rates. 

Proponents of multi-year agreements argue that they give industry more predictability, allowing companies to make long-term investments and leverage economies of scale to reduce costs. Milas said the “big benefit” of an F-35 multi-year agreement would largely be on the sustainment side, since the jet’s production rate is expected to remain at 156 annually. 

“It’s more about the sustainment and how do you get more spares and get that bulk buy up front so that you’re not going year-to-year or small lots,” he said. 

It’s unclear if the production and sustainment agreements would be linked or structured as separate arrangements, or whether they would stretch the same length of time.

In a statement to Breaking Defense, a Lockheed spokesperson said the company “continues to advocate for a multi-year contracting approach which would provide additional stability for the F-35 industrial base. As demonstrated with other successful programs, this would enable predictable production rates, cost efficiency, and continuous modernization essential to maintaining air superiority and warfighter readiness.”

The company referred all further inquiries to the US government. Spokespeople for the F-35 Joint Program Office and Pentagon declined to comment on negotiations. 

A New Version Of A PBL?

Lockheed has previously pushed for a larger sustainment deal in the form of a performance-based logistics (PBL) contract spanning five years. Such agreements essentially pay contractors based on outcomes like equipment availability or readiness rates, and at one point company officials were confident a PBL deal would be reached for the F-35 by the end of 2023.

But lawmakers have required the Pentagon to certify that any PBL agreement would either reduce maintenance costs or increase readiness, a hurdle officials were unable to clear. 

The world’s largest defense contractor is once again backing a long-term sustainment contract, according to a company official — but it may not formally be a PBL. 

“A multi-year performance-based contract is still in discussion. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a PBL,” Dina Halvorsen, vice president of F-35 global sustainment at Lockheed, said in a Sept. 14 briefing with reporters. “We are looking at advocating for a multi-year agreement for sustainment on the F-35 program.”  

But the source familiar with the negotiations characterized the proposal as “PBL by another name.” The person expressed doubt that Lockheed “can successfully propose something that demonstrates long-term cost savings” and noted that congressional approval for a multi-year deal has still not been granted.

The fiscal 2027 defense authorization bill helmed by the Senate Armed Services Committee includes language that would permit the Pentagon to enter into multi-year procurement contracts for the F-35. The House version of the bill includes a similar provision, with some additional guardrails. 

For one, it would not authorize multi-year F-35 procurement until the defense secretary certifies that the contract also includes “the full complement of initial spare parts and alternate mission equipment for each aircraft to be procured under the contract.” The Pentagon must also demonstrate that the multi-year contract achieves cost savings of at least 5 percent. 

Neither version of the bill explicitly mentions or authorizes a multi-year sustainment agreement, potentially leaving a key piece of the broader proposal unresolved. Both the House and Senate will need to hammer out agreed upon language before Congress passes the finalized bill. 

The F-35 program is projected to last until the 2080s, and sustainment accounts for a vast portion of its nearly $2 trillion lifecycle cost estimate. Improving the jet’s mission capable rates is a leading focus for the program, as previous government watchdog reports have found that readiness hampered by a lack of depot capacity, shortages of spare parts and insufficient access for military maintainers to the jet’s technical data. 

More than 1,000 F-35s have been delivered to date. But over the last two years, many newly delivered jets have been held for training as officials struggle to clear a new upgrade for combat.

Aaron Mehta contributed to this report.

The base value of the five-year contract is $4.4 billion, but options include an additional nearly $2 billion for more of the air defense munitions over another two years. The announcement did not say how many of the missiles were under order.

“This contract provides production certainty to our defense industrial base, breaks sub-tier manufacturing bottlenecks, and ensures that our fleets and combatant commands have the interceptors required to dominate the battle space — air, sea or land,” Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Michael Duffey said in a DoD release.

The Pentagon has listed the SB-3 IB as one of the critical munitions it is looking to scale as quickly as possible. Raytheon says the weapon can be fired from both ships and land to intercept short‑ to intermediate‑range ballistic missiles during the midcourse flight phase.

“SM-3 Block IB has proven its relevance in combat and this contract helps ensure we can replenish inventories and keep pace with the evolving threats the U.S. Navy, MDA [Missile Defense Agency] and their partners face around the world,” Raytheon President Phil Jasper said in a company release. (The MDA was the contracting agency for today’s deal.)

Back in February the DoD and Raytheon inked a framework agreement designed to pave the way for the multi-year deal.

Today’s announcement comes among a string of similar deals between the government and the RTX subsidiary. In recent weeks, the duo inked a $24.4 billion deal designed to “accelerate” production of the Standard Missile-6, a $22.9 billion contract to ramp up production of the Tomahawk cruise missile to 1,000 rounds a year, and a deal worth up to nearly $20.7 billion for production of the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM).

“This marks Israel’s first official participation in the defense exhibition held in Morocco since the signing of the Abraham Accords,” Israel’s Ministry of Defense said. Yair Kulas, the head of the ministry’s SIBAT office, praised this first participation in the Moroccan exhibition, calling it a “milestone” for Israel’s defense industry.

The ministry continued that the “opening of the Israeli national pavilion at the Marrakech Airshow is part of the IMOD’s strategy to increase defense exports and defense cooperation with countries worldwide.” The ministry added that this strategy will also strengthen the Israel Defense Forces and influence foreign policy, noting, “During the exhibition, meetings were held with delegations and government officials from various countries.”

Morocco joined the Abraham Accords in December 2020, three months after the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain agreed to the historic Accords to normalize ties with Israel.

Despite almost six full years of official relations, Moroccan-Israeli defense ties are often not mentioned in either country’s media for security and sensitive reasons. Some of the rare instances of the countries’ media presence include in 2023 when a dozen Israeli soldiers joined the US-led African Lion exercise. And reports over the last year have indicated that Morocco acquired IAI’s Barak MX air defense system, may have acquired Israeli drones and partnered with an Israeli drone maker and may have other partnerships with Israel’s defense industry.

Hence, Israel highlighting its presence at the Marrakech Airshow stands out. Israel’s defense industry has seen historically high exports over the last several years, even though Israel has also faced some controversy at arms shows abroad. France, for instance, banned Israel from Eurosatory in February.

Eight Israeli companies exhibited at the Marrakech Air Show, which has taken place biennially since 2008 and attracts more than 200 exhibitors from two dozen countries. Morocco is the second largest spender on defense in Africa, spending over $6 billion on defense last year, according to SIPRI figures.

Israel’s Ministry of Defense noted in a statement that the Israeli companies showcased combat-proven technologies “including loitering munitions, AI-powered robotic systems, autonomous navigation capabilities for UAVs, laser guidance for FPV drones, satellite communications, and more.”

The Israeli pavilion included ASIO Technologies, Orbit Communication Systems, Shilat Optronics, Uvision Air and Xtend Systems. Speaking broadly, all five companies provide the kind of small drone or loitering munition systems that have come to define battlefields in Ukraine and Gaza.

Additionally, the three largest Israeli defense firms — Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Elbit Systems and IAI — have their own booths set up at the show.

Rafael showcased its air defense systems in Morocco, including its Spyder system which has been sold to Greece and Romania recently. The company noted that the system “integrates radar, command and control and launcher on a single vehicle, together with the interceptors for its common launcher.” In addition to other systems, such as targeting pods and missiles, Rafael also mentioned an interceptor drone called Hunter Eagle as part of its solution for smaller drone threats.

“Rafael builds for the battlefield as it is now and as it will be in the future. Every system we brought to Marrakech, from laser interception to long-range precision strike, was shaped by operational battlefield experience,” Yoav Tourgeman, Rafael’s CEO, said in a statement, adding that the company views its participation as laying the groundwork for future collaboration.

Elbit brought its large Hermes drone, as well as its entire line of smaller drones under what it calls its FUSE line of “military-grade autonomous systems designed for scalable deployment.” In addition, Elbit highlighted its Mini-MUSIC airborne self-protection system, which uses directed-energy countermeasures.

“At Marrakech Air Show 2026, Elbit Systems will showcase capabilities spanning unmanned and autonomous systems, precision fires, airborne protection and electronic warfare, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), electro-optics, communications and digitalization, as well as advanced training and simulation,” the company said in a statement.

IAI did not put out a statement detailing the wares it’s showing off.

Improved power generation and efficiency will be critical to ensuring troops can rely on the capabilities they need from their vehicles. Breaking Defense spoke with SAPA Transmission President Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Darren Werner, former commanding general of US Army Tank Automotive and Armament Command (TACOM), and John Tasdemir, vice president of engineering and operations, about the company’s transmission technology and how SAPA is helping to revitalize the US defense industrial base.

Breaking Defense: What is driving the need for new transmission technologies in military vehicles?

Werner: Current military vehicle transmission technology was designed and developed in the early 1980s to support heavy combat systems. Those designs were built around the drivetrains, engines, and mission requirements of their time. Legacy transmissions performed well for the requirements they were designed to meet, but today’s combat vehicles face very different demands. Manufacturing, design, and engineering are now digitally enabled, creating opportunities to increase efficiency, adaptability, and growth potential in systems designed and built for the future.

If you look at the history of ground combat systems, and specifically where John used to work at GVSC (US Army Ground Vehicle Systems Center), Army technical assessments in the early 2000s identified emerging propulsion gaps in transmissions and engines. In practical terms, there had been limited incentive to invest capital in redesigning systems that were still functioning. As a result, engine and transmission technology remained largely unchanged for decades while vehicle weight, power demand, and mission complexity continued to grow.

The Army recognized that lack of development and started to incentivize companies to look at better alternatives. SAPA took advantage of the Army’s desire to find a better solution and started working on developing a solution that was more in line with what the future requirements. The introduction of the XM30 advanced infantry combat vehicle is an important example of where this technology is going. XM30 is being developed around the Army’s need for greater growth capacity, improved mobility, advanced electronic systems, and future autonomy. Those same drivers also apply to legacy platforms. The advantage of a more efficient, software-centric, drive-by-wire capable powerpack is that it creates a path to upgrade existing combat vehicles without redesigning the entire platform. In many cases, replacing the powerpack with an advanced engine and transmission solution can restore mobility, increase usable power at the sprocket, reduce thermal burden, and provide the digital control foundation needed for future capabilities. That gives the Army a practical way to modernize legacy fleets while also introducing next-generation performance into new platforms like XM30.

Tasdemir: As vehicles are growing, vehicle capability is growing. We always talk about ‘what does the future next generation of combat vehicles look like?’ There are more protection systems, more electronic sensors, more weapon systems, more autonomous drive requirements. But now you need to improve the vehicle’s overall propulsion system, better efficiency, better thermal management, power distribution as we develop hybridization. Those are the challenges the Army felt back in the early 2000s timeframe. What can we do on the mobility side now that we’re adding all the capabilities on the operation of the vehicle? How do I get that vehicle to be faster and to enable it to grow as the vehicle gets heavier for current platforms and for future systems?

The Army always uses SWaPC, size, weight, power and cooling. What can you replace while also maintaining and supporting those future and current vehicles applications? The architecture that SAPA has, our 32-speed transmission architecture, allows for that scalability and modularity across multiple vehicle classes from ranges of 35- to 75-ton applications and to adapt with newer emerging propulsion systems in the future.

Hybridization and electrification are being enabled on current and new platforms today. SAPA can adapt to those systems, as well, without having to do a major redesign of the vehicle. What can you do on the current platforms to minimize the integration impact and the design aspect of it with the aim to increase mobility? And for new vehicles, what can you do above and beyond? SAPA’s architecture is focused on a compact, power dense design with high efficiency to minimize space on the vehicle and maximize vehicle power and performance.

How does your transmission accomplish those goals? What makes it unique?

Tasdemir: We don’t have a torque converter. The 32-speed transmission architecture allows us to not include a torque converter. Typically on vehicles, ground or track vehicles – and in automotive, as well – the torque converter is the most inefficient point, but it allows vehicles to do better at climbing hills or launch assist.

The 32-speed allows us to remove that torque converter and provide purely mechanical gear shifting. That is where it’s the highest efficiency as compared to a torque converter. Torque converters range from down to 65 percent, 70 percent up to 80 percent, whereas the mechanical systems are 90 percent or greater. SAPA’s transmissions operate at greater than 90% efficiency.

That allows us to reduce power usage and create a lower thermal burden for the vehicle, as well. We also have a fully drive-by-wire integrated system as our inherent design. Our steering and braking functionality are all compact with that architecture that offers a fully teleoperational function for vehicle OEMs.

Werner: SAPA transmissions are software centric. What that means is that it enables the customer, the US Army or the US government, to have the flexibility to adapt and change the characteristics of the combat platform just by making a software change.

The best example I can use is in combat in 2003, I was a part of an organization that had Bradleys. When the Bradleys deployed into Iraq, they didn’t have reactive armor tiles, but soon after we arrived, we started to receive kits of reactive armor tiles to install in the Bradleys. It was great because reactive armor is a great way to defend against different threats, especially rocket-propelled grenades. We wholeheartedly got those tiles loaded up and installed on those Bradleys.

The impact of adding significant weight to the Bradley was that the vehicle lost mobility. It no longer accelerated the way it needed to. It experienced degraded power delivery and other performance issues because the transmission was not designed to move a Bradley with that additional weight.

With our transmission, software changes can adjust shift schedules and control logic within the mechanical design envelope, allowing the vehicle to respond better to changes in weight, configuration, or mission profile. The drive-by-wire capability strengthens that advantage because steering, braking, and transmission control are integrated through the same digital architecture. That means the vehicle can translate operator commands into more precise, software-managed mobility responses, giving the platform greater maneuverability, smoother control, and a more adaptable path for future autonomy, teleoperation, and advanced vehicle functions. That adds an important operational advantage because the customer does not have to replace the entire hardware system to make targeted performance adjustments. It is an element of our transmission that leaders in the Army and across industry recognize as a benchmark for mobility.

In your example, with the reactive armor and adding weight to the vehicle, what can you change via software that allows it to carry another ton that it was never designed for in the first place?

Werner: It’s in the design of the transmission. John talked about 32 gears. Now what you have is a broader scope of gearing that you can transfer the load into. Instead of shifting at X RPMs, you can shift at Y RPMs and it can get the vehicle accelerating quicker.

It’s just like in your car. If you have ever driven a manual transmission and you shift consistently, you can get the vehicle going pretty quickly. But if you put it in first gear and let it stay in first gear and try to get it up to 50 miles an hour, you’re never going to get there. This enables you to shift at a rate that’s consistent with what the different physical nature is of the platform after it’s been changed.

How did you remove the torque converter? How does that work in practice?

Tasdemir: All transmissions have a mechanical element to them. You have your shifting gears, you have either an eight-speed, or five-speed transmission, while SAPA offers a 32-speed design. The torque converter is on the front end of it. We remove that torque converter. The 32-speed design, using the software and the digital controls, enables use to function the entire range of vehicle operations.

Our architecture offers a greater ratio coverage of 20:1. We don’t start at gear one and work all the way up to 32. Depending on the vehicle application, you start at, say, 13 speed and you allow shifting upward to accelerate. If you need to climb a hill, you go downward depending on which ratio you need to be at. Our transmission systems enables almost continuous gear shifting without power interruption using lower average engine speeds, thereby extending the life of the powertrain.

You describe your transmission as power- and engine-agnostic. What does that mean for efficiency and capability in the field?

Werner: You can see the energy losses associated with heat generated by a transmission that uses a torque converter. That heat represents energy that is not being delivered as usable power to the sprocket.

When we say engine-agnostic, we mean the transmission is designed to maximize usable engine output by transferring more available power efficiently to the sprocket, rather than losing energy through a torque converter. Over the last several years, we have worked with engine manufacturers that support the US defense industry and integrated our transmission with multiple engine families. That work has produced an array of transmission configurations with different exterior profiles to support the engines and vehicle platforms in use today.

For example, our ACT850 has multiple designs that support different engines. The ACT1075 follows the same approach. Using digital design and engineering, we can rapidly develop transmission profiles that support the outputs and configurations of different engines. That gives customers flexibility to pair the transmission with a broad range of engine and vehicle configurations. A further advantage is the ability to move toward common transmission architectures across the Army’s tracked combat vehicle fleet. Common transmissions can reduce the number of unique parts in the supply system, simplify maintenance procedures, streamline soldier and maintainer training, and improve readiness by giving units a more consistent sustainment model across multiple platforms. Over time, that commonality can lower lifecycle risk, improve parts availability, and make it easier for the Army to modernize vehicles at scale.

Most Americans associate maneuver and maneuverability with an engine. In tracked combat vehicles the reality is maneuverability, speed, takeoff, braking, all of that is done inside the transmission. The transmission is responsible for taking that power off the engine and making that track maneuverable. When you toss in the drive-by-wire capability along with the software capability, the software management capability, you’ve created a very maneuverable platform.

I did not focus on the engine because its primary role is to generate power. Once the engine produces enough power to move the vehicle, the transmission makes the vehicle maneuverable and turns the power into speed, braking, and maneuverability, making the overall powerpack perform effectively and consequently makes the engine look good. 

What do you see going forward and the capabilities needed?

Tasdemir: Where SAPA is looking is how you gain that improvement in efficiency. How much more efficient can I get from my engine to the sprocket, and how much more power can I provide on board electrical power?

Efficiency is a key driver. You can minimize the size of the transmission, minimize the cooling burden of it, and then also provide more power available at the sprocket. Now you have more power available without having to increase the horsepower of an engine, without having to increase the size of the propulsion system. More power at the sprocket allows the vehicle to provide more of a maneuverable architecture in operational mobility and the transmission can modernize current vehicles.

The future battlefield will demand combat vehicles that are more agile, more efficient, more digitally connected, and capable of adapting to technologies that have not yet been fielded. The next generation of mobility systems must do far more than simply transmit engine power. They must intelligently manage energy, support advanced electronics, enable autonomy, integrate new propulsion technologies, and provide growth capacity for evolving mission requirements. At SAPA, we’re engineering those capabilities today so that U.S. and allied forces maintain their mobility advantage for decades to come.

What are the challenges facing the defense industrial base, and how are you helping to solve those challenges?

Werner: The biggest issue with the defense industrial base is age across the board. As the commander of TACOM, I commanded the arsenals, depots and supported ground systems. The arsenals and depots were struggling to maintain their viability and contribute to the defense industry because of the age of the depots and arsenals and the fact that there hasn’t been a very consistent effort to keep them up to current technology.

Even in the private sector, if you look at our foundries, you look at our casting and forging operations across the country, there was a period of time where our government made decisions to encourage offshoring of some operations to other countries where it was economically a better choice to take on offshore-manufactured materials than to manufacture those products onshore. Those decisions that were made stagnated and, in some cases, caused a deterioration of some of the manufacturing skill sets inside of our country.

That offshoring has added a strategic weakness into our defense industrial capabilities. Our strength dating all the way back to World War I and World War II is the ability for us to quickly mobilize and manufacture. We won World War II as a result of our great men and women fighting. But second to that great asset was the fact that we could outproduce any other nation in the world.

Today, the United States does not have the same industrial-base dynamic it once had. Much of the defense industrial base is aged or deteriorated, and there is now a concerted effort to reshore critical technologies, manufacturing, and capabilities that moved offshore in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This is expensive and often requires long lead times, but reshoring can reduce long-term cost, shorten supply lead times and strengthen supply-chain security.

SAPA’s endeavor here in the US supports the administration’s effort to expand domestic defense manufacturing capability. We are building an advanced manufacturing center of more than 200,000 square feet, with eight manufacturing cells equipped with advanced manufacturing tools, multi-axis milling machines, gear manufacturing systems, and automation so we can manufacture using current technology. This expansion not only helps develop the United Stated Defense Industrial Base’s capabilities on shore, but also brings over 200 jobs to the U.S.

If you look out across the US, there’s a lot of new manufacturing that’s standing up to bring in advanced manufacturing technology, whether it’s 3D printed materials, advanced milling materials, and even companies are standing up new casting capability. All that is going to help us revitalize the defense industrial base.

“Operating capabilities day after day in extreme desert conditions provides invaluable data on system durability and operator usability that directly translates to contested environments like the CENTCOM AOR [area of responsibility],” Marine Col. Scott Humr, deputy director of science and technology for the Army-led Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) 401, told Breaking Defense last month shortly after the military concluded its most recent Falcon Peak exercise in Arizona desert.

He said the “realities of the desert” like intense heat, wind, dust and glare closely replicate the physical challenges faced by forces in CENTCOM in the Middle East. Handling such realities here in Yuma for Falcon Peak 26.2, put on by US Northern Command, allowed the team to “identify critical, highly practical sustainment needs that cannot be replicated in a laboratory.”

Related: Battling sand and wind, Pentagon evaluates counter-drone tech at southern border exercise

For instance, Humr said the task force had to pay close attention to how often solar panels powering the tech needed to be cleaned, as they would quickly become covered in dust. Soldiers had to make other “simple physical modifications” too, like getting new display shields so operators could read their screens in the unrelenting sunlight. 

That information, in turn, can enable industry to better outfit troops in commands like CENTCOM.

“Passing this direct feedback from our operators back to developers ensures that counter-UAS [unmanned aerial systems] are fully ruggedized and optimized before they are deployed to forward combat environments,” he said. 

Mike Wior, CEO of Allen Control Systems, the company that makes the counter-drone Bullfrog system, echoed Humr’s concerns over the wind. He told Breaking Defense on the sidelines of Falcon Peak that during the exercise his team had to adapt to the “gusts of wind that kind of come out of nowhere” and the crosswinds that affect the direction of the interceptors. 

“That has been kind of an eye opener,” he said. “We’ve already been out there shooting for quite a while, and so we’ve been getting used to it. But it’s really, really good, comparable stuff to CENTCOM.”

The sentiment was echoed by Joe Cornelius, who’s firm Perseus makes drone interceptors that the company says cost under $5,000 a hit.

“Some of the big takeaways we took from [the exercise] were like, we need to do more robust testing on different wind environments and things like that.” Cornelius told Breaking Defense. “The winds out here at Yuma are about twice what we’ve ever tested with down in Texas. So that was a pretty big thing that we learned.”

Regarding the lessons learned related to tech, Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, JIATF-401’s commanding general, told reporters on Sept. 24 that the task force plans to inform leaders from CENTCOM of its success with constructing a “layered defense” during the exercise — using different, overlapping defensive tech in a way that offers more than one chance to neutralize a threat. CENTCOM already uses layered defenses, but Ross said that beefing it up will be vital considering the ongoing risks Iranian Shaheed drones pose to US and allied bases in the region.

“We work in support of all the COCOMs, and so we and the services receive the requirements from them, and so we have provided support to [CENTCOM commander] Adm. [Brad] Cooper and CENTCOM,” Ross said. “I would say more than anything, [Falcon Peak] reinforced what we knew about the requirements for a counter-UAS ecosystem, meaning that we need a layered defense that consists of both active and passive sensing.”

He added that he’s seen how leaders in CENTCOM are “effectively” using the tools that are available, explaining that his task force’s role is to “try to give them some additional tools” so they can “layer them together in an effective manner to protect their critical assets.”

Though Ross didn’t specify what kind of tools could be offered to CENTCOM, during the exercise, the task force and NORTHCOM demoed three “lanes” of capabilities: sensing, kinetic interceptors (also known as drone-on-drone take downs) and ballistic take downs, which primarily consisted of small ammunition taking down the aircraft.

The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) also played a role in finding relevant capabilities for CENTCOM during Falcon Peak. Angela Aspito, a director with DIU’s onramp hub in Arizona — which manages the continental US-based experimentation events for CENTCOM — told reporters DIU was successful in finding such capabilities, but she also did not specify on the types. But she said there are “gaps that we’re aware of that the warfighter needs to fill with technology.” 

“It’s pretty relevant right now to be out in Arizona, getting everything that’s happening with the war in Iran and Epic Fury. There’s a lot of relevant capability that needs to be transitioned into the Middle East, and so the opportunity to see that on the battlefield today is really real,” Aspito said.

BELFAST — The UK and Germany are working “to progress” the potential for Germany to join the UK-Italian-Japanese Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), Prime Minister Andy Burnham said today, in what would be a major shake-up for the next-generation fighter effort.

Speaking at a joint press conference in Berlin with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to ratify a bilateral security and defense treaty, Burnham said he and Merz talked about the UK’s “openness” to Berlin joining GCAP.

“That is something that we seek to progress in in the coming period, working with our other partners, Italy and Japan, in relation to that as well,” he said.

Germany had joined with France and Spain on the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), a rival next-gen fighter program, but the effort collapsed this summer amid industrial disputes. At the time, German officials said they were weighing different paths forward, including a brand new project led by FCAS developer Airbus or joining GCAP.

At a political level, the latest interest in adding Germany to GCAP comes after Canada joined the program as an observer nation in July, allowing it to gain a working understanding of the high-profile effort. Observer status could also lead to Ottawa becoming a fully-fledged partner and contributing at an industrial level in the future.

Germany’s potential participation as a new partner has previously been welcomed, with some hesitation, by at least one GCAP industry partner.

Leonardo CEO Lorenzo Mariani said in July that he could see the benefit of Berlin joining but warned any major change risks “disruption.”

As Breaking Defense previously reported, he noted that Germany would make a “strong industrial partner,” but “another nation joining, another group of industries joining the program would risk [producing] some delays, while at the moment, on the contrary, we are fully committed to the 2035 [service entry] date.” 

The future fighter is slated to replace British and Italian Eurofighter Typhoons, as well as Japanese F-2 combat aircraft. It is also envisioned to fly alongside loyal wingmen drones, with support from a combat cloud communications network. 

The Navy has signed off on a $150 million modification to an existing Other Transaction agreement for the X-BAT program under the Pentagon’s Defense Exportability Features program, and Shield AI has agreed to match that funding with $150 million of its own capital, according to the firm.  

The investment builds upon another $100 million in government and private funding announced. In August, the Navy’s Portfolio Acquisition Executive (Aviation) Rapid Capability Cell and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) awarded $50 million in funding for the X-BAT program as part of the Runway Independent Maritime Expeditionary Strike (RIMES) effort, which seeks a drone capable of conducting long-range strikes with minimal infrastructure. Shield AI also coupled $50 million in private capital to match government funding for that initiative. 

Altogether, Shield AI and the US Navy are investing a combined $400 million in the X-BAT drone, which is slated for flight testing later this year. 

“We are testing early and often while working on the aircraft, mission systems, ship suitability and production in parallel,” Armor Harris, senior vice president of aircraft at Shield AI, said in a statement. “That approach helps us identify and resolve issues earlier, reduce development risk and move more quickly toward flight testing.” 

After unveiling X-BAT last year, Shield AI announced last month that the Seattle area would serve as the production site for the aircraft while testing would occur at the Newton City-County Airport in Kansas. 

The firm said that it has employed 500 engineers at Shield AI and other “key suppliers” to construct a test aircraft and has already completed engine light-off and thrust-vectoring nozzle integration. The aircraft — which Shield AI markets as the “world’s first AI-piloted VTOL fighter jet” — measures in at 26 feet long with a 39 foot wingspan and a range of more than 2,000 nautical miles, according to the company. 

The effort comes as the Navy has sought an unmanned aerial system (UAS) capable of launching from ships without large flight decks — like Arleigh Burke-class destroyers — to conduct long-range strikes.

The DIU published a solicitation in February for the RIMES program, which claimed that naval surface combatants are “constrained in their ability to support long-range strikes over extended combat operations due to reliance on single-use missile systems, with limited magazine depth and limited at-sea munition replenishment capability.”

As a result, the notice said the Navy wants a drone that can launch from “expeditionary locations with minimal infrastructure, or from ships without large flight decks,” and have a one-way range of at least 1,400 nautical miles with 1,000-pound munitions. 

JJ Cummings, Shield AI’s head of mission solutions for the US Navy, touted the aircraft’s design for the Navy operations.

“Its runway-independent design and small deck footprint can increase sortie generation and extend long-range air combat power from CVNs, LHAs, LHDs and ESBs,” Cummings said in a statement. “Just as important, we are designing it for safe, high-tempo manned-unmanned flight deck operations and integration with the missions and capabilities of the carrier air wing, so X-BAT can add combat power without compromising existing operations.” 

“Our partners simply need to make a political decision regarding the permanent deployment of troops, and Lithuania is ready to cover the associated financial costs,” the Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius said on Facebook on Tuesday, as quoted by LRT, the country’s public broadcaster. 

Sinkevičius discussed the possibility of a Lithuanian-funded US base in an appearance on Bloomberg on Sept. 29, saying Vilnius would “go for” an American base there, akin to the Fort Trump proposed in Poland. He said he told a US official recently, “We would like to have American troops with a permanent stationing, and we are ready to pay the bill if that’s the case.”

The discussion comes amid wariness from America’s NATO allies related to efforts by the Trump administration to reduce troop presence in Europe, which has played out in fits and starts.

Sinkevičius expressed his thanks during the Bloomberg interview that a new, temporary rotation of American troops would soon be arriving in the Baltic country. Since 2019, the US has continuously deployed forces on a rotational basis to Pabradė Training Area in southwestern Lithuania near the border with Belarus. According to a statement from the US Army, as of 2025, over 1,000 US forces were operating and training in the country.

“We are grateful to Donald Trump and the US administration for this decision, which is important not only for Lithuania, but also for the security of the entire region. The US military presence in Lithuania is an indispensable part of our deterrence,” Sinkevičius wrote in a post on X on Sept. 22.

In February, the Germany announced that Berlin planned to set up a 5,000-person brigade that will be permanently stationed in Lithuania, composed of soldiers and civilian personnel. The troops are expected to be based primarily in the areas of Rūdninkai and Rukla, with training and firing ranges as well as accommodation. 

The Lithuanian Ministry of Defense did not respond to a request for comment at the time of writing on whether the German brigade arrangement could serve as a potential template for any future enduring American presence in the country.

Between Sept. 20-26, the Lithuanian Minister of National Defense Robertas Kaunas was also on an official visit to Washington, where he met with executives from Lockheed Martin, Palantir, Northrop Grumman, and Mach Industries.

A statement from Lithuanian authorities said that in the last three years, the Baltic nation has bought nearly €2 billion ($2.24 billion) worth of military equipment from the US, becoming its largest customer in the Baltic region.

Gecko Robotics will utilize its inspection technology and its AI-powered software to conduct non-destructive testing (NDT) on these submarine components and will establish a “digital thread” of data to assist with maintenance planning, per Gecko’s announcement.

“It allows us to go in and assess and create that digital baseline of the actual, as-built condition of this critical component, and so it takes things like our robotic capability and actually gathers and sort of inspects what’s going on subsurface within the weld, etc.,” Troy Demmer, co-founder and president of Gecko Robotics, told Breaking Defense. 

On Tuesday, Anduril and the White House announced that the company is establishing a new facility to manufacture parts like torpedo turbines for Virginia-class submarines as part of a $6.6 billion investment, with $3.7 billion from private capital and up to $2.9 billion from the Navy. Permitting for the new shipyard is expected to commence immediately, and construction will launch after it has received appropriate approval, Breaking Defense previously reported. 

Currently, Anduril is preparing for the facility to launch initial operations in 2030, and plans to expand production from basic submarine parts into more complex sections of the vessel, like the bow. 

Anduril also announced Tuesday that it will start to manufacture submarine parts at a new, 160,000-square-foot facility in Orange County, Calif., in conjunction with building the new Arsenal-2 facility. Gecko’s technology will be used at the Orange County facility as well, according to the firm. 

“We are already embedding Gecko’s NDT technology into real production workflows at our Orange County protofactory and integrating it deeply with ArsenalOS,” Bill Noderer, Anduril’s vice president and general manager for shipbuilding, said in a statement today. “This will reduce inspection wait times, give our inspectors better tools to do their jobs, and establish quality processes that we can bring to the Arsenal-2 shipyard in Maryland from day one.”

Anduril’s shipyard announcement comes as industry has struggled to meet the Navy’s production goal of two Virginia-class submarine deliveries annually. The Navy’s shipbuilding plan released in May said investing in the submarine industrial base is critical to hitting that production target.

Gecko Robotics has previously worked with the US Navy, and in March, the service awarded the company a contract of up to $71 million over five years to use Gecko’s hull-scaling robots and artificial intelligence to identify possible repairs on ships, including destroyers in the US Pacific Fleet. 

Breaking Defense spoke with Tiberius Aerospace Co-Founder and CEO Chad Steelberg about the company’s efforts to “weaponize the supply chain,” speed up delivery of munitions and develop the systems needed to support the US and its allies.

Breaking Defense: What have recent conflicts revealed about the way the US and its allies develop and replenish weapons?

Steelberg: The human tragedy in Ukraine is central to our ethos as a company, and we used it as a catalyst to understand the challenges that were unfolding in modern warfare. How do you supply weapon systems at scale? What does that network look like?

That ranges from sourcing raw materials, to relying on allies to deliver weapon systems that work, to building up your own military industrial base from scratch. And the RDT&E cycle against your enemy has changed completely. Historically it was measured in years, if not decades, and you fought wars with stockpiled weapons. Now you’re in a tit-for-tat innovation cycle of less than one quarter, right? Every two months you’re watching the weapon systems evolve.

If you can’t iterate it, improve it and get it back in the field, it’s DOA. That is probably the clearest example of how warfare has changed: the RDT&E life cycle now connects directly to the warfighter, and continuous innovation and continuous deployment have become essential to our national security and that of all our allies.

Tiberius calls its approach Defense-as-a-Service. What does that mean in practice?

Look, we’re not just building a better round. We’re defining a new operating model for defense. Defense-as-a-Service means rapid iteration, sovereign scalability and continuous innovation on a global scale. It was one thing to say we’re going to go build amazing products like SCEPTRE and Invictus. But what really mattered was the process behind them: the open architecture.

How do we deliver that on a global basis, and how do we weaponize the supply chain? I use that term very deliberately, because I look at how the commercial world has weaponized supply chains to its advantage. Take Apple: it rolls out hundreds of millions of 700-part iPhones every single year on a brand new design – it weaponizes its supply chain. It doesn’t design its own cameras or LiDAR chips. It weaponizes an ecosystem of suppliers that are constantly innovating.

That’s how we arrived at Defense-as-a-Service, and GRAIL is the software that makes it real. Over the past two and a half to three years, we’ve gone from a concept to saying that we’re not only going to build an exquisite weapon system, we’re going to use GRAIL to actually facilitate its manufacturing, delivery and financing.

Tell us about Tiberius’ $500 million agreement with the UK that puts that model into practice.

This is no longer theory; it’s in practice. We have signed a $500 million manufacturing contract in the UK with a private group that’s building a consortium of manufacturing and RDT&E partners. Most importantly, it means SCEPTRE won’t just be built there – it will be co-developed through GRAIL.

This activity was authorized via a TAA, a Technical Assistance Agreement and AUKUS License Exemption under the ITAR,  allowing us to share the co-development of SCEPTRE as the ballistic round moves from TRL 6 to 7 and 8 . That’s federated manufacturing: you qualify the weapon once, then produce it across sovereign, in-country nodes. The UK is the first of those nodes, and the intent is to supply those weapon systems across Europe for European defense.

In my opinion, this is the most important announcement in our company’s history since we first set out our vision of how we’re going to attack defense differently, with Defense-as-a-Service as the business and GRAIL as the operating system that supports it. That was the vision; now it’s reality. It’s been written into a contract, and it’s deployed in the UK.

Why did Tiberius decide to build a 155mm long-range ramjet powered precision weapon as its first effort?

We started with the problem. Today you can see further than you can shoot. A drone finds a target deep behind the line, the imagery is on a screen in minutes, and nothing in range can reach it. Your options are all bad: move the guns forward into counter-battery fire, spend a scarce missile, or let the target go.

Then we went to the data. I’m a big AI guy, and we laid the foundation of GRAIL by ingesting every piece of open-source information we could find about every weapon system on Earth. In the process, we started to define a new language for measuring a weapon’s effectiveness. Not just range and accuracy, but target efficiency and the environment you’re shooting in – I’m talking about GPS denial, GNSS denial.

When we ran that problem through the data, the answer that came back was a long-range precision munition designed to strike at 150 kilometers or further, at a specific price point – fired from a howitzer. We looked at that and shook our heads: ‘We’re going to go do what?’ A cannon designed in the 1930s is going to be the best weapon we can build? But it became clear there really was method in the madness. Howitzers are already in service right across NATO. If you can turn the gun the warfighter already has into a long-range precision weapon, you close that gap without waiting for a new platform.

Why power SCEPTRE with a liquid-fueled ramjet engine, and what does that change operationally, such as its ability to throttle?

The reason is fundamental. As soon as you sit down with your engineering team and say, ‘We want to build a long-range precision fires weapon that comes out of a howitzer,’ you have to look at the characteristics of the gun. The gun generates 16,500 Gs. That means anything with moving parts, like a fuel pump, turns into a bag of parts on launch.

Our team took a different approach. We developed a mechanism that allows the liquid fuel and the injection system in the combustor to survive 16,500 Gs, which immediately opened up the opportunity for liquid fuel.

There are three things we like about liquid fuel in our munitions. The first is cost-effectiveness and availability. If you can build a system that runs on anything from diesel and Jet A-1 all the way to JP-10, the weapon’s availability and cost-effectiveness immediately go in your favor.

The second is that we can build munitions that are stored defueled. You can ship what is basically an inert device and stockpile it. Take the payload out and you have just a hunk of metal. From a maintenance standpoint, every 10 years you replace a battery and an O-ring for a couple hundred dollars, and that weapon system is ready to go.

The third is similar to the one you mentioned: not throttling but thrusting. Unlike solid-fueled weapon systems, you have the ability to adjust the thrust curve, giving you all sorts of advantages, not just in survivability, but in weapon effectiveness and terminal performance.

Where does SCEPTRE stand today?

In April we achieved a world first: liquid-fueled ramjet ignition from a NATO-standard 155mm howitzer, with stable flight. We’re now at the TRL 7 tipping point, going through final live-fire tests. To date we’ve been firing at short ranges, making sure we have ignition and proper gun survivability. Starting in October, we move on to longer ranges: full, live, long-distance shots of 150 km-plus, which we’ll be certifying both in the US and overseas. And we film every test, including the ones that don’t go to plan. That’s how you iterate.

Our goal is to complete that certification as early as the end of this year and be ready to deliver final manufactured product in Q1 next year.

Invictus takes a modular approach to missiles. What problem is that intended to solve?

The conventional wisdom on missiles is that you can’t build one that serves multiple missions, because then it won’t serve any mission well. So missiles became so specialized and optimized that they lost the ability to be cost-effective.

The opportunity with Invictus was a strike missile designed for 200 km, with full modularity – components you can mix and match, so it isn’t a do-everything missile, but a modular one. That means you can scale production and reduce operating and manufacturing costs. Suddenly you have a weapon system that can be optimized for different targets and different missions.

GRAIL underpins much of this. Tell us about it.

GRAIL started with GRAIL Effects, our modeling tool. It takes in all the characteristics of both offensive and defensive weapon systems, plus the environmental conditions they’re operating in, and lets you run massive simulations to understand not only their effectiveness, but the cost of that weapon against those targets in those environments.

As we moved into the next phase of our business, we asked ourselves: who’s actually going to help us manufacture our weapon systems? So we built GRAIL Agility, which uses AI to search for and identify vendors and match them against our designs.

The third piece is compliance – import/export rules, ITAR, DSP-5s, MLAs, TAAs. We now have AI systems that draft our manufacturing license agreements fully programmatically, based on the bill of materials and the manufacturing partners.

The final piece was financing – equipment financing and other types – not just for ourselves but for the supply chain we’re now facilitating. That’s where GRAIL Finance was born.

We believe GRAIL is to us what AWS (Amazon Web Services) is to Amazon. We’re building our tools the way Amazon built AWS. Amazon built its cloud because it had problems that no one else had seen, and it started tackling them with software in the cloud. Once that reached a certain scale, they realized what they had built was valuable to the entire ecosystem – which is why AWS is today the most profitable part of Amazon.

We believe GRAIL will hold an equally strong position in the market down range. We’re not trying to force it today; we’re using it internally. But we have now signed hundreds of partners for external systems that aren’t even related to our own products.

We believe that, in 2027, GRAIL will probably become one of the most valuable assets not only to our company, but to national defense.

The two companies announced at the ongoing Land Forces defense exhibition in Australia that they will team together to “support the introduction into service, sustainment and future growth of advanced loitering munitions capabilities across Australia and New Zealand.”

A new release from NIOA said, “The partnership establishes a framework for cooperation across the AeroVironment portfolio, including the combat-proven Switchblade family of precision loitering munitions, and positions NIOA as AeroVironment’s local partner for distribution, customer engagement, support and long-term capability development.”

It added that both companies “will also explore opportunities to expand support and industrial capability in Australia” and “reflects a shared commitment to supporting Australian Defence Force requirements and exploring opportunities for local support, sustainment and future industrial capability development.”

Ben James, NOIA’s executive vice president of Australia and New Zealand, noted that Australia’s 2024 Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) plan, released by the Australian military, called for the introduction of the Switchblade 300 loitering munition into the Australian Army “by 2025,” following an earlier acquisition announcement.

“Combining NIOA’s deep expertise in strategic munitions supply, manufacturing and support with AeroVironment’s global leadership in loitering munitions and autonomous systems technology represents a significant win for both the ADF and in the integration of Australian and US industrial bases,” James said in the release.

AeroVironment vice president of international business development Justin McFarlin said that the partnership with NIOA combines “AeroVironment’s combat-proven technologies with a trusted Australian defence industry partner to support customers, strengthen sovereign capability outcomes and establish the foundations for long-term growth across the region.”

On Sunday, the US abruptly pulled out a dozen B-1 Lancer long-range bombers from RAF Fairford in southern England due to fears of a threat from Iran, according to President Donald Trump. The New York Times reported Monday that the swift exit was prompted by the possibility of a localized drone attack, potentially mirroring a Ukrainian operation last year dubbed “Spider Web” that used cheap drones to destroy Russian strategic aircraft on the ground. 

Fairford, located in southwest England, has been a key launch pad for US bombers like the B-1 and B-52 Stratofortress after the outbreak of Operation Epic Fury in February. The base offers a shorter flight path to the Middle East — about 3,000 miles to Iran — relative to installations in the US, reducing strain on aircrews and airframes and offering a relatively quicker turnaround for sustained operations.

The immediate operational impact of the bomber evacuation from Fairford is likely to be limited since the US is not currently flying many missions against Iran, according to Stacie Pettyjohn, senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security.

Still, other experts said future operational planning — especially for any significant resurgence in offensive strikes, as Trump is reportedly considering — will have to be reevaluated.

“Withdrawing these bombers to home airfields in the contiguous United States will provide an opportunity for more significant maintenance on the aircraft, but it does reduce the potential sustained strike capacity US forces could bring to bear against Iran,” Timothy Walton, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told Breaking Defense.

Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, similarly said that having to move aircraft farther from the Middle East “means greater transit times and greater use of tanker aircraft,” increasing strain. 

Pointing to potential impacts like lower sortie generation, the loss of convenience offered by access to Fairford could influence “the efficiency and flexibility” that bombers could be employed, said Joshua VerGow, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Walton said he believed the bombers would return to Fairford in the future, but in the meantime US war planners are likely looking at other options.

Where To Go From Here

Beyond Fairford, VerGow said the US still maintains an “ecosystem of bases, allies, logistics, and intelligence sharing agreements” that can “ensure movements like these can be made while keeping them [the bombers] operationally relevant.”

But options for potential locations to move the B-1s are more limited than they may have looked just a year ago. Analysts pointed to the resistance of local governments to aid the US strikes against Iran — a stance that has drawn Trump’s ire.

Walton observed that Fairford is specially equipped with infrastructure to host US bombers, and that continental host governments have not granted permission for the aircraft to launch from other suitable locations closer to the region like Incirlik Air Base in Turkey or Morón Air Base in Spain. (Bomber operations from Fairford itself were already a source of political controversy in the United Kingdom, where the government has restricted their missions to “defensive” operations.) 

In the Middle East, B-1s operated from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar prior to the current conflict, “but that is not an option now given the extreme vulnerability of Gulf bases to Iranian drones and missiles,” Pettyjohn said.

Walton noted that American commanders have also run bomber operations from the British territory of Diego Garcia, which lies about 3,000 miles southeast of Iran in the Indian Ocean. The pacific atoll hosts a joint US-UK military base that can support B-1s.

Should the Pentagon have to stick to launching from the US, Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, said it would “more of a challenge,” but the US has other options to strike Iran if need be. For instance, the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group and other American forces are on their way to the region and expected to arrive by next month. 

“That will give the president more options when it comes to escalation,” he told Breaking Defense.

Highlighting The Drone Threat To Bases

Experts largely agreed that the bomber withdrawal underscored a need for a greater mix of defenses for US installations. Similar to events in the American homeland, British installations like RAF Lakenheath have reportedly been the subject of mysterious drone incursions that officials have been largely powerless to stop, raising fears of vulnerability to an attack.  

The Air Force and broader US military community “really need to internalize that nowhere offers sanctuary,” Pettyjohn said. “Typically, the US has moved its most valuable and scarce assets farther away to ensure that they are invulnerable. That is no longer an option, which means that the USAF needs more active and passive defenses.”

Walton emphasized that the US needs to “accelerate” base defense initiatives, and warned that some ongoing efforts suggest poor planning. He pointed to the construction of environmental protection shelters at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota — a home base for the B-1 and first beddown destination for the service’s forthcoming B-21 Raider stealth bomber.

“Although these shelters protect aircraft from weather and environmental exposure, they provide little protection against attack, leaving parked B-21s vulnerable to future Operation Spiderweb-style drone attacks and other threats,” Walton said. “This is a penny-wise, pound-foolish choice.” 

The Pentagon and the military services appear very aware of the threat, as they are seeking to boost bureaucratic authorities when it comes to employing defenses, coordinate better with federal partners and introduce new counter-drone tech to military facilities.

VerGow, for his part, noted that the possibility of adversaries being able to project forces from inside of a supposed sanctuary is itself “nothing new,” adding that it would be “easy to simply conclude that better base-protection measures are needed.” Instead, he said that the B-1 withdrawal highlights the efficacy of “operational resilience” in the military system.

“This type of rapid relocation doesn’t happen without tripwires and deliberate risk-analysis done at multiple levels of command. For me, moving the aircraft is evidence that the system worked,” VerGow said. “Intelligence identified a threat and commanders preserved combat power.”

Tim Martin in Belfast and Ashley Roque in Washington contributed to this report.

Novakovic, who has held the top spot at GD since 2013, will transition to the role of executive chairman on Jan. 1, 2027, when Deep becomes CEO.

“Danny is a highly skilled executive with rich operating experience. It has been a pleasure working closely with him and I am certain he will be an outstanding CEO,” Novakovic said in the company announcement. “I very much look forward to our continuing collaboration.”

Deep has worked for GD for 25 years, becoming its president in 2025 — a move seen by industry watchers as a signal that he was next in line for the CEO job. His experience spans several business units, having previously held positions such as the executive vice president of global operations, executive vice president of combat systems, and president of land systems.

“Phebe has been an extraordinary leader for General Dynamics, and I am grateful for the close partnership we’ve shared and the opportunity to continue working together in the future,” said Deep. “I am profoundly honored to be selected as the next CEO of General Dynamics and humbled and deeply thankful for the board’s confidence.”

General Dynamics develops and manufactures technologies ranging from ground vehicles to cyber tools to nuclear submarines. The company generated $52.6 billion in revenue in 2025.

Novakovic’s announced departure comes five days after the surprise exit of Amy Gilliland, who was head of GD subsidiary General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) since 2017.

The companies include General Dynamics Mission Systems, Air Space Intelligence Federal, Immersive Wisdom, LMI, Mente Systems, Stilman Advanced Strategies, Onebrief, Rune Technologies, and AIR (formerly Govini) with contracts for an initial one-year period.

The applications will enable critical software capabilities that will be delivered to I Corps in the Pacific, which is the first fielding organization for NGC2, and will perform functions across six warfighting areas: C2, Fires, Intelligence, Movement/Maneuver, Sustainment, and Protection.

An Army spokesperson declined to provide details about the specific tasks the applications will perform, due to security concerns, but told Breaking Defense that generally, the apps will allow soldiers and commanders conduct faster and more integrated planning, synchronization, operational modeling and course of action analysis; airspace management and deconfliction, as well as sustainment management and decision support.

Joseph Welch, portfolio acquisition executive Command and Control (C2)/Counter C2, said in the release, “Providing core software applications is a critical next step. It provides a foundation that can be rapidly scaled and trained with continuity across the force.”

Today’s announcement comes after Anduril revealed a new pricetag for early NGC2 work. In June, the Army announced Anduril would lead the common data layer baseline with support from Palantir and Raft. At the time, a value for the award was not given, as it was awarded under an enterprise licensing agreement that the Army entered into with Anduril with a 10-year, $20 billion ceiling. But Monday, the company announced an “initial base period valued at $162.8 million, with options that could bring its total value to $1.8 billion over five years.”

Then in August, Striveworks was selected to lead the artificial intelligence layer. Similar to the data layer award, contract values were not disclosed at the time it was awarded. Today, however, a spokesperson from Striveworks told Breaking Defense the company will soon announce a new $200 million award on top of $70 million it received previously. Striveworks will also provide its Chariot suite of software platforms which, in part, ensure AI models continue working in changing environments, allowing soldiers to turn vast amounts of information into actionable decisions in minutes.

The Army has maintained that through its commercial solutions opening, it will continue to onboard relevant technologies as needed for the NGC2 architecture.

UPDATED 10/9/2026 at 1:00pm ET to correct a reference to LMI.

The counter-UAS fight increasingly requires having enough different ways to detect, track, and defeat drones to match the threat, terrain, mission, and cost of an engagement. That is pushing the Pentagon toward a layered approach that includes lower-cost sensing, kinetic and non-kinetic effectors, directed energy, artificial intelligence, and physical protection.

In this editorial eBRIEF, Breaking Defense examines how JIATF-401, led by Brig. Gen. Matthew Ross, is widening those options: testing lasers and high-power microwaves in operational settings, using AI to speed decision-making and testing, opening new paths for industry, and applying lessons from Ukraine showing that sometimes hardening, dispersion, or other infrastructure changes can be as valuable as another counter-drone system.

Breaking Defense thanks CACI for supporting this editorial E-Brief.
Sponsorship does not influence the editorial content of the E-Brief.

“Homeland defense is not about protecting from outside; it’s also protecting inside. We could do one without taking care of the other, and that’s not the right answer,” Brig. Gen. Jason Rueschhoff, operations director of US Northern Command, told reporters on Sept. 24 in Yuma during Falcon Peak 26.2 — the fourth iteration of the exercise. 

“The big things for us to be focused on will be collateral damage issues,” he said.

Falcon Peak is run by NORTHCOM, and the most recent exercise in September at Yuma marked the first time officials from the command, the Defense Innovation Unit, the Army-led Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) 401 and the Department of Homeland Security all came together for the exercise. Together, they tested ways to neutralize drone threats in the open desert — whether through electronic means or by blasting them out of the air — and learned how the heat, wind and sand can wreak havoc on different systems, as Breaking Defense previously reported. 

But like Rueschhoff, Marine Col. Scott Humr said he expects the next edition, scheduled for about a year from now, to be more complicated, considering the physical, operational and legal challenges that come with operating in and around populated civilian areas.

In regards to physical barriers, dense buildings, electronic “congestion” and other physical obstacles create signal interference and “block the line-of-sight required for conventional radars and cameras,” Humr, the deputy director of science and technology for JIATF 401, said. 

“Legally and operationally, defending urban areas in the homeland requires navigating strict domestic policies, complex jurisdictional boundaries and heightened collateral-damage concerns that are not present on an open test range,” he said.

Humr noted that JIATF 401’s “primary takeaway” going from the recent Falcon Peak to the next one will be taking a “highly coordinated” interagency approach, especially working closely with DHS and the Federal Aviation Administration.

In the past, coordinating with such agencies hasn’t been so seamless. For example, in February the FAA suddenly and mysteriously shut down the airspace around the busy El Paso, Texas airport. It was later discovered that the emergency was related to a miscommunication between federal agencies about the use of a counter-drone laser by Customs and Border Patrol, on loan from the Army. 

Since then though, military officials have emphasized close coordination with the FAA, culminating in a joint agreement for a laser system to protect the southern border. Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, JIATF 401’s commanding general, also told reporters during Falcon Peak that the task force and the military writ large continues to coordinate testing with the FAA. 

But Rueschhoff and Humr said perhaps the highest priority, and a key challenge, will be learning how to protect any civilian population from any collateral damage. In the desert, there are relatively few issues with using a shotgun to simply blast a quadcopter out of the sky, but Humr said that for an urban environment, the Pentagon and task force will focus on using low-collateral and non-kinetic options to make congested environments as safe as possible.

The exercise, Rueschhoff said, will be “really telling for capabilities, and this will get at more than just our borders.”

Coming just days ahead of the massive annual AUSA trade shadow in DC, this odd couple combines a classic heavy-metal military manufacturer, which has built the M1 for over 40 years, with a young AI startup best known for demonstrations with small drones.

But Primordial built its Anura voice-control system to be platform-agnostic — it’s also working on AI assistance for Army helicopter crews — and adaptable to any kind of vehicle, co-founder Lee Ritholz told Breaking Defense. “We’re [used to] doing everything on a really tiny processor,” he said. “As we get to these larger platforms, it becomes almost a luxury” by comparison.

GDLS, for its part, sees tremendous potential for voice control to help increasingly overburdened human soldiers manage an ever-growing array of complex systems, from tactical data networks to AI target recognition, company officials said in interviews.

“There’s a bunch of technology being thrown at soldiers,” explained Salem Auclair, a 20-year Army veteran who helped write the official requirements for the XM30 before joining Primordial. The XM30 program, for which GDLS is competing with American Rheinmetall, actually calls for shrinking the crew from three soldiers on today’s M2 Bradley to two on XM30, while adding more technology.

“These are the same 18- to 22-year-old soldiers that that are driving these vehicles now, and we’re giving them more complex system,” Auclair said. “Well, how can we help them use those systems? Give them a mechanism that they’re used to, their voice.”

Geoff Norman, GDLS’s director of strategy and a retired Army general who worked on the next-gen vehicle program, said, “having to flip switches and push buttons and type on keyboards and do the manual tasks in a combat vehicle, on the move, in the dark, in bad weather … will be a challenge in the future, especially given that those tasks are going to be done by a smaller crew.”

With AI voice control, by contrast, a soldier just needs to give a verbal order, and the software should be smart enough to take care of the rest, the two companies’ experts explained. In many ways, Anura is designed to act as an additional, virtual crew member, to which the human soldiers can delegate a wide range of tasks — especially time-consuming or technically complex ones — so they can stay focused on the fight. Company officials said it can even help manage other automated systems, for example by telling an AI threat-detection system to scan for flank attacks while the humans focus a target up ahead.

However, Anura won’t be able to fire a vehicle’s weapons, the companies emphasized.

“We’re not talking to the fire control system and doing … lethality tasks,” Norman said. “What we’ve chosen are things like doing communications, adjusting which radio net you’re on, sending reports that otherwise you would have to type in, adjusting the camera view that you’re looking out of the vehicle on. Those things are easy to verify and validate for a safety case.”

Anura isn’t using generative AI, the kind of superpowered but unpredictable chatbot that has roiled the world since the launch of ChatGPT.

“We can’t hallucinate because we don’t generate things,” Ritholtz said. “We’re not using generative AI.”

Instead, he explained, Anura uses more narrowly focused and predictable forms of machine learning, which in turn serve as translators between the human soldier’s voice commands and the complex, often user-unfriendly interfaces of military systems.

Anura isn’t installed on the current XM30 prototypes now in testing by the Army, Norman said, but GDLS aims to offer it on future upgrades, both to XM30 and to legacy vehicles like the M1 tank and Stryker troop carrier.