Defense One - Business

The Army gave General Dynamics $533M to build an artillery plant that produced nothing

Jesse Coburn, ProPublica — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 20:27:52 -0400

A robot was on fire. Again.

It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week.

Only weeks earlier, defense officials and executives had touted the factory’s innovative new machinery, imported from Turkey, at a gala opening ceremony. But employees were already used to spectacular mishaps, fiery and otherwise. “After the second, third, fourth time, it just became almost normal,” one former worker said. “It got to the point where I was not surprised by anything that happened there.”

Instead of producing shells in an efficient and streamlined fashion, the pricey machines kept failing in bizarre ways. The robot arms would swing out of control, smashing into carefully calibrated equipment, and sometimes they would unexpectedly drop hunks of steel 5 feet down to the floor. The factory’s signature device, meant to precisely stretch the steel for the artillery shells, instead often cracked it beyond repair. Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell. “We really didn’t have any standardized practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.” To workers, even the factory buildings themselves came to feel doomed, with acrid smoke hanging in 100-degree heat over foundations seemingly sinking into the earth.

The situation never improved. The U.S. Army, which funded the factory, ordered work halted on two of its three production lines in August 2025. By then, General Dynamics had blown eight deadlines. Work on the third production line continued, but the facility never produced a single usable shell, according to a report from the Department of Defense’s inspector general in July.

The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor — which provided the factory’s much-hyped but little-proven equipment — publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back.

Just the opposite: General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest defense companies, has been showered with new contracts, continuing its track record as one of the greatest beneficiaries of Pentagon spending. The company is still in charge of the factory. It recently announced that it will fix things there by bringing in another much-hyped but little-proven technology.

“It’s an absolute disaster,” said one former official in an Army office supervising the project. “The Army should’ve gone after recovering money from General Dynamics,” added the official, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Publicly, the Army has been tight-lipped about what, exactly, went wrong at the factory, located in a sprawling suburb called Mesquite. The inspector general report described the failure but offered few specifics. It didn’t name the companies involved, much less any of the individuals responsible. The report’s recommendations were tepid: The Army should determine whether the contract was “appropriately issued,” how “the money was spent” and whether it can recoup any of it. It should also “identify and implement a solution” for producing more artillery. Army officials deflected blame, telling the inspector general that they didn’t do anything wrong.

In a detailed statement to ProPublica, the Army said it will recover funding for the project by getting unspecified discounts from General Dynamics on production orders. “The Army is exercising rigorous oversight to ensure every dollar invested delivers capability to the warfighter,” the statement read. “Where vendors fail to meet contract specifications, as seen at the Mesquite facility, we are evaluating contract performance, seeking recoupment of funds, and pivoting resources.”

As for General Dynamics, it has given no public explanation whatsoever. The company has said that it “met or exceeded requirements,” according to the inspector general report. General Dynamics declined an interview request from ProPublica. Company spokesperson Jeff Davis said ProPublica’s reporting “fundamentally mischaracterizes the circumstances and falsely impugns our record of employee safety and truthfulness with our customer.” He continued: “An article based on this foundation would be a materially false and misleading hit piece.” Davis did not respond to ProPublica’s request that he specify the alleged errors.

ProPublica reconstructed how the project went awry through interviews with 36 current and former employees of General Dynamics, the Army, the Pentagon and the White House. ProPublica also reviewed internal company documents as well as photographs and videos taken inside the factory.

Those involved described a project that was rushed and ill considered from the start. Congress paved the way, removing government contracting guardrails — meant to ensure taxpayer money isn’t wasted — so that Ukraine-related defense projects could be funded quickly. The Army took advantage, handing General Dynamics lucrative no-bid awards without knowing whether the machines it planned to use could perform the desired work. The Army’s due diligence was inadequate, four former Army and General Dynamics officials told ProPublica.

Compared to the multibillion-dollar budgets of other DOD projects, the financial cost of the Texas debacle is small. But the lack of consequences for the companies involved, in the view of defense-spending critics, is symptomatic of a larger problem: a deep-rooted culture at the Pentagon and in Congress in which expensive failures lead only to more spending. Such critics fear that extreme cases like this one could become more common if the Trump administration succeeds in boosting the defense budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. The administration is also seeking tens of billions of dollars for its war against Iran and pressuring defense companies to quickly ramp up weapons production.

“Too often the contractors have no accountability for their mistakes,” defense budget researcher William Hartung said. The Texas failure, he said, “is a foreshadow of what’s to come if the Trump administration gets the budget it asked for.”

The Pitch

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 felt like an emergency to the Biden administration. For General Dynamics, it was an opportunity. And Firat Gezen was ready with a pitch.

In six years running General Dynamics’ Ordnance and Tactical Systems business, Gezen had earned a reputation as a deft strategist and salesman. At 50, he wasn’t an engineer, and he had no experience running factories. He had spent decades working on the financial side of the weapons business. With a ready smile and a delivery as smooth as his perfectly bald head, he knew how to woo corporate leaders and Pentagon arms buyers alike.

Gezen was also shrewd. In 2020, after the Army sought to diversify its artillery supplier base by contracting with a small Pennsylvania company, Gezen swooped in and bought that company. That allowed General Dynamics to maintain its stranglehold over the production of metal bodies for the standard American artillery shell, referred to by its caliber: 155 mm. “Firat throws his arm around you and talks to you nicely,” one former Army official said. “But he’s got, like, five things that he’s the sole provider of, and it’s exclusive. He’s got you locked up forever.”

Firat Gezen, former president of General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems U.S. Army photo by PFC Brandon L. Perry

That put General Dynamics in an ideal position. Russia and Ukraine were firing thousands of shells back and forth each day. The United States was a key supplier to Ukraine, but decades of disinvestment had left the U.S. artillery industry emaciated. In March 2022, Congress passed the first in a series of bills allocating billions of dollars for Ukraine-related causes, including boosting artillery production. The next month, President Joe Biden pledged to send shells to Ukraine, and he wanted to move fast. But first someone had to make them.

The 155 mm shell has been a military workhorse for a century, owing to its simple, lethal power. Packed with TNT, the 33-inch cylinder can travel 10 miles when shot out of the barrel of a howitzer and send fragments flying hundreds of feet upon impact. But decades of asymmetric warfare in the Middle East, in which the United States relied largely on drones and bombs, had led some to believe the days of artillery battles were waning. By 2022, General Dynamics was the only producer of 155 mm metal shell bodies in the country, mainly in a century-old facility in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Given that, the company was an obvious candidate to meet the sudden new demand. General Dynamics could simply replicate Scranton’s traditional manufacturing method, which dated back to the time of the Korean War. But in meetings with Pentagon officials in the fall of 2022, Gezen proposed an alternative: What if the Army funded a state-of-the-art production line that used a promising new technique?

A soldier attends to 155 mm shells in Ukraine in March 2025. Dmytro Smolienko/Urinform/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Central to this proposal was a virtual unknown in the world of American defense: Repkon. The company had been operating in its home country of Turkey for decades, providing “turnkey production facilities in the metal forming industry.” (Coincidentally, Gezen himself was born to Turkish parents in the United States.)

But Repkon had never received a Pentagon contract, and certainly not for its signature metalworking process called “flow-forming.” Whereas the Scranton method mainly involves molding ultrahot steel in giant forging presses, Repkon added a step in which a fast-spinning machine squeezes and rolls out the metal like clay on a potter’s wheel. The advantage, Gezen told defense officials, is that the same equipment could produce shells of various calibers. Most important, Repkon had a production line already available, meaning General Dynamics could start making shells faster than if it had to procure traditional equipment piece by piece.

Warning signs abounded. Army officials learned that the production line that Repkon wanted to sell had been designed to produce an older, simpler model of 155 mm shells, which was made with different steel. It wasn’t clear that the Turkish equipment could even work with the steel used to make the newer 155 mm model, as the equipment had never actually produced it, according to four former General Dynamics and Army officials. Repkon said other countries were using the machines to produce the older model. But the Army and General Dynamics could not inspect those active production lines, Repkon told them, citing customer privacy.

The Army could have balked at all of this and insisted on learning more about the capacity of the Repkon machines to perform the desired work. But learning more would’ve taken time, and time seemed in short supply. “There was incredible pressure to go fast,” a former Army official said. Everybody moved forward.

In November 2022, the Army raced to give General Dynamics the first in a series of contract awards for the project that would ultimately be worth nearly $600 million if carried to completion. The next month, Congress granted the DOD extraordinary powers to award money for Ukraine-related causes without the usual contracting safeguards, dropping competitive bidding requirements and restrictions on so-called undefinitized contracting actions. UCAs allow a company to begin work even before finalizing the terms of its contract with the government. One defense executive compared them to “building the airplane as you’re flying it.”

The Army made the most of its expanded powers, awarding General Dynamics a number of UCAs without considering alternate proposals in a competitive bidding process. (The Army told ProPublica it selected the company because of its unique artillery production experience.)

In fact, the Army was so enamored with the proposal that it decided to order even more than Gezen had pitched. Instead of contracting for one Repkon production line, the Army signed up to buy three. Without knowing whether any of them would work.

Gezen had never overseen a project this ambitious. Until then, he had mainly presided over smaller expansions of existing factories that used traditional methods. But he was optimistic it would work. “He’s extremely aggressive, willing to take risks,” one former colleague said.

Some of the Army’s scrutiny of the proposal occurred only after it began awarding contracts for it. The service and General Dynamics sent staffers to Turkey to inspect Repkon’s machinery, but they never inspected a full production line in action and there weren’t enough experts who could spot potential defects in the equipment, four former General Dynamics and Army officials said. Crucially, before greenlighting the deal, the Army did not require General Dynamics to demonstrate that it could use the Repkon equipment to complete the entire production process and make shells that met the Army’s specifications. (The Army told ProPublica that “formal testing could not occur prior to full machinery installation.”)

If the typical contracting safeguards had been in place, perhaps everything that followed could have been prevented. If the Pentagon had been forced to open the project to competitive bidding, it would have had to consider other proposals in a painstaking review process. If restrictions on UCAs had been in effect, the Pentagon would have had to slow down and finalize the terms of the deal before allowing it to proceed, which might have surfaced its fatal flaws.

But one man’s due diligence is another man’s red tape. Soon, Repkon’s flow-forming machines were sailing across the Atlantic, heading eventually for Mesquite.

“This Is Actually Hell”

On May 29, 2024, the mood in Mesquite was triumphant. After two short years of planning, the factory was opening, and defense officials and executives gathered there to celebrate.

Former Army Secretary Christine Wormuth at the opening of General Dynamics’ artillery factory Sgt.1st Class Nicole Mejia/U.S. Army

“Our nation’s defense relies not only on our soldiers and other servicemembers in uniform but on production facilities like this one,” then-Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told seated dignitaries. She stood at a podium branded with the General Dynamics logo, with two howitzers posed behind her. She thanked the company’s CEO, Phebe Novakovic, and Gezen by name. “It’s a pleasure to highlight the fantastic work you all have done,” she said.

But everything was not as fantastic as it appeared. Artillery shells displayed around the plant that day had been shipped in from elsewhere, three former workers told ProPublica. A worker picked one up and was startled to discover it was fake — seemingly made of plastic. General Dynamics had already failed to perform a scheduled first article test, meant to demonstrate the facility could produce shells that met the Army’s specifications. The facility was supposed to start cranking out shells soon, but machines were barely functioning.

Soon problems seemed to explode out of every corner, according to interviews with 12 former factory workers. For one thing, the flaming robot arms also kept smashing into things. They slammed into computer numerical control machines, breaking their windows and bending their doors. They knocked over shells. They bashed into safety fences. Workers talked about the arms going “rogue” and began calling one of them “Johnny 5” after a sentient military robot from a 1980s movie.

Even simple equipment failed with slapstick regularity, six workers said. Conveyor belts broke down. Automated carts got lost. Safety gates meant to shut down machines when workers approached did not shut down machines when workers approached. A pipe exploded, spraying water up to the ceiling. Parts on Repkon machines deformed, leading a worker to discover that they were made with Chinese steel, possibly in violation of federal regulations. (The Army said it has no evidence of such violations.)

Smoke hung in the air; it rolled off the press machines when robots sprayed them with lubricant. Workers could feel the smoke in their lungs. When they blew their noses after shifts, their mucus was black. A worker complained to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about a “respirable hazard” at the factory, according to an OSHA record and spokesperson. The agency opened an investigation in October 2024, and an inspector visited the facility. The smoke-spewing press machines were scheduled to be operating on the day of the visit, but for some reason they weren’t running during the inspection, according to four former workers. OSHA issued no penalties, the agency told ProPublica. Staffers started to think it wasn’t just Repkon’s faulty equipment to blame for problems at the factory — it was General Dynamics’ management, too.

The plant could reach Sahara Desert temperatures when the furnaces or presses were on. “This is actually hell,” one worker thought to himself. It was hotter still inside cabinets containing drives that controlled critical machines, where it was regularly 140 degrees, two former workers told ProPublica. An outside inspector warned in an email reviewed by ProPublica that, at that temperature, “you would not only have drives failing but also human lives failing.”

Every day seemed to bring more of the same: another machine broken, another frantic effort to repair it, another batch of misshapen shells tossed into the discard pile. As 2024 became 2025, little seemed to get better.

With so few shells passing inspection stations along the production line, many workers had nothing to do. A cat-and-mouse game ensued. Bored staffers spent endless hours gazing at their phones, leading supervisors to restrict phone use. So workers began bringing crossword books. Managers nixed those. Some workers were seen sleeping, so supervisors took away chairs.

“We sat around twiddling our thumbs, trying to find work, trying to figure out what was going on,” said Natashia Passmore, a former production technician in the plant. “It was a waste of government money, and it was a waste of our time.”

The Dumpster Fire

Tension rose between the Americans hired by General Dynamics and Turkish workers sent over by Repkon. The Repkon team was there to install the equipment, but it seemed equally flummoxed by the problems. General Dynamics workers found them evasive. They would give curt responses to questions in English but then be seen holding long, animated conversations in Turkish outside during frequent smoking breaks. A carelessly discarded cigarette butt sparked a real-life dumpster fire, three former workers said.

Repkon was especially secretive about the flow-forming machines, refusing to answer most questions about their operations. General Dynamics workers could tell when Repkon was testing one of them, because they would find metal shards scattered on the floor around it later. The shards looked like alligator teeth. “Oh, the tooth fairy was here,” one worker would think to himself.

Paranoia set in. Repkon refused to share passwords needed to control important equipment, according to five former General Dynamics employees. Sometimes workers would be startled by the sight of a machine moving by itself and realize it was being controlled by someone in Turkey. Spooked, General Dynamics workers tore out hardware to cut off remote access to the machines, two former workers said.

Rumors swirled among the Americans that the Turks were purposefully sabotaging machinery — or perhaps even engaged in some convoluted form of espionage. “It was astonishing how little progress we would make, month after month, year after year,” one former General Dynamics worker said. “People started speculating, ‘I wonder if they’re spying on us.’” General Dynamics assigned someone to shadow the Repkon workers in the factory, two former staffers said. (The Army said it has no evidence of sabotage or spying.)

Even the buildings themselves — a trio of vast, anonymous boxes tucked into the crook of two freeways — were plagued with problems. Walls cracked, and daylight became visible around window frames. Doors began dragging on concrete floors. When it rained, water would flood in — “like a tsunami,” one former worker said. The foundations appeared to be shifting or sinking, six former employees said. It was as if the whole dysfunctional factory — its fires and smoke, its idle workers and haywire machines — was being slowly sucked down into the earth.

Faced with the kaleidoscopic array of problems, the response from General Dynamics managers always seemed to be to plow forward. “Every single time they opened their mouths, it was: ‘We need to get into production,’” one former worker said. “Production is the only thing that mattered.”

“Nobody Wins”

As the situation at the factory deteriorated, General Dynamics and the Army told a very different story to the public.

In April 2024, General Dynamics CEO Novakovic told investors: “In the U.S., we are rapidly increasing ammunition production with the opening of our Texas facility.” General Dynamics failed to conduct a scheduled first article test in Mesquite that same month.

That July, two months after the opening ceremony, Novakovic told investors that “the first line is running and producing as we anticipated.” In fact, the first line was not producing any usable shells, six former plant workers told ProPublica.

In September Doug Bush, then the Army’s acquisition czar and a key figure overseeing the project, said “there have been no major delays” to the Army’s goal of producing 100,000 artillery shells each month — a goal for which the Mesquite factory was critical. “Any delays you’ve had have been measured in, I would call them weeks, not months, certainly not years,” Bush told reporters. He downplayed the problems, describing them as merely a matter of adjusting a machine “so that it puts out shells just so, versus a little bit off.”

The next day, a laborer in Mesquite photographed the work of a machine meant to begin giving the shells perfectly smooth noses; it had instead mangled the metal into something that resembled the swirl of soft-serve ice cream.

A machine at the factory sometimes mangled artillery shells, meant to be perfectly smooth, into swirls that looked like soft serve. Obtained by ProPublica

Also in September, Secretary Wormuth touted the Army’s artillery ramp-up at a conference, saying, “part of what’s enabling that are things like the brand-new plant that we opened up in Mesquite.” One month later, an Army contracting officer sent General Dynamics a letter of concern about its performance at the facility. The company missed the Army’s deadline for completing the first production line one month after that. (Wormuth declined to comment.)

Despite it all, Gezen remained optimistic through the fall of 2024. The issues in Mesquite were mere delays, he thought, and there were plans in place to fix them, according to a person familiar with his thinking. “If Firat’s guilty of something, it’s not wanting to see the truth in the matter,” a former colleague said. He “has a tendency to not want to listen to bad news.” General Dynamics announcedGezen’s retirement in January 2025. Some industry insiders believe he was pushed out in part over Mesquite. (Gezen denied that but declined to sit for an on-the-record interview.)

The split screen of blown deadlines and rosy public comments continued into the second administration of President Donald Trump. In April 2025, General Dynamics missed the completion date for the second production line. That same month, Novakovic told investors, once again: “We are rapidly increasing munitions capacity and production with the opening of our projectile facility in Texas.” The company missed another first article test two months later.

As the failures mounted, a sinking feeling took hold in Army offices. The service assembled a team to assess the situation in the factory, which produced a report that gave little confidence the problems could be fixed. Finally, in June 2025, the Army told General Dynamics it was considering terminating the contract awards for the plant, a defense trade publication reported at the time. Two months later, the service ordered work halted on two of the factory’s three production lines.

But the Army did not unilaterally terminate the contract awards. “A termination for default would’ve taken years through the legal system, because General Dynamics wasn’t going to accept that,” a former Army official told ProPublica. “Nobody wins except the lawyers.”

This would not be the last act of generosity from the Trump administration to General Dynamics. In December 2025, according to the inspector general’s report, the government paid the company $26.3 million in “progress payments” for the second and third production lines in Mesquite, although neither line had ever produced a usable shell.

General Dynamics’ factory in Mesquite, photographed in August Desiree Rios for ProPublica

A Novel Solution

Two months ago, General Dynamics made an announcement that conjured a sense of déjà vu. To fix the problems at the factory, the company would team up with yet another unheard-of partner promising technological innovation. The solution this time? Artificial intelligence.

A news release from General Dynamics and the new company, Deterrence, was filled with techno-business jargon. “AI-enabled capabilities” and “intelligence and connectivity” would be added at Mesquite and other General Dynamics factories, the companies wrote. “AI transforms production facilities into strategic assets,” Deterrence’s CEO said in the release. “We’re building autonomous manufacturing systems that learn, adapt, and scale in real time.”

These pronouncements have baffled former Mesquite workers. “What are they talking about? There’s nothing to learn or adapt or scale,” one said. “It’s all broken.”

General Dynamics is doing this even as it replaces most of the Repkon equipment with traditional machines like those used in Scranton. How AI will wrest miracles from decades-old technology is unclear. But General Dynamics told investors it expects to be in production next year, and the Army told the inspector general that’ll amount to 20,000 shells a month.

Compared with Repkon, Deterrence is perhaps an even less conventional choice. Deterrence was established just three years ago and has never received a DOD contract. Its website gives no indication it has ever helped to manufacture anything. Its three founders have no prior defense experience. One of them worked at Tesla; the other two created a startup that enabled people to lock and unlock buildings with smartphones. Deterrence did not respond to a request for comment.

General Dynamics also pledged to put $200 million into the project. That’s a small sum for a company that generated more than $50 billion in revenue last year and gave CEO Novakovic a compensation package worth more than $25 million. (Meanwhile, the company furloughed or laid off most of the Mesquite workers.)

The Army says it won’t spend any more money on the project, but it has hardly blackballed General Dynamics. Since the Army shut down work on two production lines in Mesquite one year ago, General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems has received contract awards totaling $2.5 billion, the Army told ProPublica. (The service said this was for “distinct production lines and critical national defense requirements” unrelated to Mesquite.)

Repkon’s American offshoot is now at work setting up a TNT factory after receiving a no-bid contract from the Army worth $435 million. TNT is the primary explosive fill in 155 mm shells. Repkon Turkey’s CEO co-founded the American company, which was originally named Repkon USA. In March, it changed its name to Paligen Technologies. Some interpreted this as an effort to create distance from the Mesquite disaster. Paligen told ProPublica that it and Repkon are “different and wholly separate companies.” Repkon Turkey did not respond to requests for comment.

The one thing that key decision-makers appear to agree on is that they are absolutely not to blame. Gezen, the former General Dynamics executive, told ProPublica that the company and the Army did nothing wrong. In a brief conversation at his apartment door in a ritzy section of Washington, D.C., in May, Gezen maintained his sunny optimism. The Repkon equipment was a good option, and it may still be a good option, he said, holding an iced coffee in one hand and restraining a large dog with his other. In any case, he added, “it was the fastest option available.”

Bush, the Army’s former acquisition chief who had assured reporters there were “no major delays” to increasing artillery production, also declined to be interviewed. In a terse conversation in May, peering out from his half-closed front door in Northern Virginia, he told ProPublica: “All of this was done through appropriate procedures.”

Others who were involved, speaking on the condition of anonymity, engaged in mutual finger-pointing: The White House demanded too much too fast, Repkon and General Dynamics overpromised, the Army didn’t perform due diligence and Congress underwrote the whole thing.

The United States still is not close to producing the promised 100,000 shells per month, a former Army official told ProPublica in June, although other investments to increase 155 mm production have turned out better. Ukraine still needs those shells, the official said, but attention has once again shifted. In the Middle East, it’s other munitions that the Trump administration has rapidly burned through during its war with Iran. Trump officials are now calling for ramping up production in those areas — and fast.

“Conventional ammo is back on the back burner,” the official said. “Everything now is about interceptors, missiles.”

General Dynamics makes components for those too.

Alex Mierjeski and Jeff Ernsthausen contributed research.

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

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Army picks M1 to lead $10B helicopter-school transformation

Thomas Novelly — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:10:13 -0400

A Texas-based aviation company beat out Bell and Lockheed Martin to lead the transformation of Army helicopter training, the service announced on Thursday.

The Army awarded M1 Support Services its Flight School Next contract, a firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity worth up to $10 billion for up to 26 years. It’s the culmination of a months-long competition aimed at converting the service’s Initial Entry Rotary Wing school at Fort Rucker, Alabama, to a contractor-owned and -operated model. Officials expect the change to reduce costs by taking helicopters, instructors, and maintenance out of the service’s hands and pushing pilots to focus on aviation fundamentals.

"This is a major step forward in modernizing how we train our aviation force," Brent G. Ingraham, the Army’s assistant secretary of acquisition, logistics and technology, said in a news release. "Flight School Next delivers the next generation of training capabilities our aviators need to succeed in increasingly complex operational environments."

M1 bid as leader of a team that includes Robinson Helicopter Company, Quantum Helicopters, General Dynamics Information Technology, and the University of North Dakota Aerospace Foundation. It was one of three major finalists, including Lockheed and Bell, that emerged after the December call for solutions.

Last year, Congress raised concerns and blocked funding for the flight school effort in theNational Defense Authorization Act, pending the results of a trial program. It’s not immediately clear when the Army met the congressional requirements before it awarded the contract.

“We are honored to be entrusted with this vital mission,” said George Krivo, M1 chairman and CEO, in a press release. “M1 will deliver a fully integrated, innovation rich training solution designed to develop more proficient Army Aviators on time and on budget.”

Defense One reported in April that Lockheed had been dropped from the competition. Bell said in an emailed statement on Friday that they were disappointed in the Army’s selection.

“Bell was notified by the U.S. Army that our turnkey solution was not selected for the Flight School Next program,” a company spokesperson wrote. “While Bell is disappointed by this outcome, we are thankful for the opportunity to participate and our commitment to supporting warfighters has not changed.”

Under M1’s offering, new Army pilots will learn to fly on Robinson Helicopter’s R66 helicopter, which was offered to meet the service’s requirement for an aircraft with a single turbine engine and a rotor that spins counterclockwise.

The Army’s current aircraft, Airbus’ twin-engine UH-72 Lakota, has been criticized by military leaders as being too expensive and restrictive for teaching aviation basics.

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Pentagon hands Palantir up to $244M in no-bid work

Nick Wakeman — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Palantir has secured another lucrative commitment from the Defense Department: a pledge to pay the company up to $243.9 million to use its software through March 31, 2027.

In a memo viewed by Washington Technology, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg has directed DOD departments to identify options for more spending on Palantir products from April 1, 2027, and Dec. 28, 2028.

In the memo, Feinberg says Palantir's software is "providing valuable support to improve efficiencies with the defense industrial base"—for example, by flagging delays in munitions and delivery-vehicle production and maintenance.

Feinberg made no mention of specific contracts or vehicles.

The action follows a July award of a 10-year, $10 billion Army agreement that consolidated many of Palantir’s existing contracts into a single pact.

The Feinberg memo appears to be part of a trend in federal contracting, where no-compete contracts are growing as a percentage of all awards. No-compete contracts accounted for 14.8% of all awards in the first half of 2026, up from 12.6% for the period in 2025.

Federal News Radio reported that DOD said it has issued similar memos involving other companies.

No-compete contracts are allowed by the Federal Acquisition Regulation if agencies properly document why a sole-source contract is the best use of federal funds. Reasons for a no-compete contract can include urgency, only one responsible source, critical follow-on work, and national security.

Feinberg's memo mentions none of those reasons for directing the spending to Palantir.

Palantir's portfolio of no-compete contracts includes an Agriculture Department award for the One Farmer, One File program. The department also used Palantir's software for its return-to-the-office initiative.

According to GovTribe data, the company has received $3.2 billion in contract obligations since 2024, roughly half through no-compete contracts.

Last week, Palantir reported second-quarter revenues of $1.9 billion, up 93 percent year-over-year. Federal contracts accounted for $809 million of that, up 90 percent from last year.

Palantir is ranked No. 40 on the 2026 Washington Technology Top 100, rising 22 spots in a year.

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Defense Business Brief: VR welding; News from SMD; L3Harris opens maritime factory

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:41:34 -0400

PASCAGOULA, Miss.—Thick puffs of clouds didn’t stop the sun from beating down on the shipyard. And only a strong morning breeze could cut that Gulf Coast heat. But prospective welders for HII’s Ingalls Shipbuilding need not immediately contend with the elements to get a taste of the trade—thanks to the yard’s air-conditioned virtual-reality welding lab.

“If you’ve never worked with your hands before, or used a welding torch, it can feel intimidating,” Brian Blanchette, president of Ingalls Shipbuilding, told Defense One. “Starting in a virtual-reality setting provides a controlled, low‑pressure environment. It not only helps reduce that initial fear, but it also gives instructors much better control and feedback.”

And while learning in a classroom may seem unrealistically pleasant, the VR lab speeds up training by giving entry-level students about 10 times more hands-on practice at melting metal than if using standard welding booths in the same amount of class time.

Ingalls and Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College opened the lab, which has 48 training stations, in January 2025. About 1,000 students, including apprentices and new employees, have completed the VR welding training before advancing to traditional instruction.

The workstations are lined neatly against the walls of a long classroom.

There are blue plastic panels with lime-green QR codes in neat rows that mimic welding materials plates. The welder’s helmet, equipped with small cameras and screens, virtually transforms that plastic into steel. There were also different contact tips and attachments that could be swapped out for different tasks.

Students are gradually introduced to the realities of their tradecraft: virtually welding barehanded and then with gloves, learning angles, precision, and pace—which oddly meant going much slower than you’d think.

I wrapped the hose around my arm, steadied my two-handed grip, and virtually welded about four inches. Holding the right angle was the hardest part.

Trainees can see visual aids that measure torch position, speed, angle, the tip’s distance from the plate—all adding up on a scorecard to show progress and areas for improvement.

The software is really responsive and felt lifelike—even for someone who had never welded anything before.

But there’s one thing VR welding can’t teach: That tactile feeling of gas and fire coming from the nozzle pressing against the steel.

“I can’t teach ‘feel’ in here,” my instructor said, “all I can teach is ‘place’.”

That doesn’t stop students from practicing until they can get the highest score possible: a 99. Students need a 90 or above before they can progress to the next activity. I got a 92 on my first try on a very basic step.

Welcome

You’ve reached the Defense Business Brief, where we dig into what the Pentagon buys, who they’re buying from, and why. Send along your tips, feedback, and song recommendations to lwilliams@defenseone.com. Check out the Defense Business Brief archive here, and tell your friends to subscribe!

Space Command’s new HQ: The command’s new facility in Huntsville, Ala., will have about 200 personnel by year’s end, up from the 113 at Redstone Arsenal right now, Gen. Stephen Whiting, who leads the command, said at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium Wednesday. There were, and just 20 in March.

“We plan to have over half our headquarters staff on the Arsenal by the end of 2028, and the entire command fully moved by 2032,” Whiting added.
Some background: The command’s move to Huntsville has been hotly debated in recent years. Space Command is also updating its facilities and opened its first operational facility at Redstone in April.

Making moves + other news

L3Harris opened a maritime production facility in Providence, R.I. The 50,000-sq.-ft. facility at ProvPort will be used to “integrate and test advanced undersea training systems for the U.S. Navy” and allies, the company said in a news release.
Vatn Systems inked a research deal with Taiwan’s national science and technology institute to explore defense uses of autonomous undersea vessels. Last year, the company signed a deal with South Korean shipbuilder Hanwha Defense.
U.S. Southern Command tapped HII’s tech division for a $2.2 billion task order for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance kit.
DARPA dropped an RFI on next-generation hypersonic cruise missiles—h/t to Defense One’s Thomas Novelly. Check out his latest here.
Boeing is selling its eVTOL business to Archer Aviation in exchange for a stake in the company, piloted air taxis and UAS.
Joby Aviation is expanding its defense business by acquiring defense tech company Resonant Sciences for around $500 million. Resonant Sciences has “classified infrastructure…established production operations and longstanding customer relationships, as well as a deeply experienced technical team,” according to the release. Related: Cerberus Capital Management, the firm Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg co-founded, has been investing in Resonant Sciences since 2023.

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Defense Business Brief: The enduring case for small USVs | Battleship costs balloon | Rainey joins Bain Capital

Lauren C. Williams — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 02:33:00 -0400

Seasats CEO Mike Flanigan isn’t really interested in building ship-sized drone boats.

“We don't plan to build bigger systems,” Flanigan told Defense One.

Instead, Seasats is all in on small unmanned surface vessels with three variants: Lightfish, which is about 12 feet long; the 20-foot Quickfish; and Heavyfish, the company’s largest offering at 35 feet long. The latter will make its water debut later this year.

“All of our substantial business is on Lightfish, so that's really where 95 percent of our focus is. That's what's supporting Marine Corps, Navy, Special Forces…what we're doing internationally,” he said.

Quickfish, which is in production, serves as a “reactionary tool” that can be used to reposition an asset or intercept a target. And Heavyfish is “essentially a Lightfish, but stretched out, where you don't need an expeditionary force to carry it off a beach with no equipment,” Flanigan said. “You can fit significant amounts of payloads, both subsea and aerial.”

The San Diego-based company has long been working with the Navy and other militaries; one of its Lightfish vessels used for surveillance recently spotted a Chinese warship near the Philippines. Last year, a Lightfish traversed the Pacific from San Diego to mainland Japan autonomously.

There’s admittedly a lot of excitement, churn and chatter around larger USVs, but for Flanigan, smaller can be strategically important and avoid some of the pitfalls of building bigger.

“All of these platforms have this long endurance characteristic to them,” he said. “Small USVs have a strategic advantage against large platforms. [Vessels] under 40 feet are much harder to spot. They're much faster to build. You can use them with much less regret. So you actually end up with strategic value over something larger, like over 100 feet.”

And now that Navy doctrine and planning is starting to include maritime drones in more detail, there’s a rush to adopt.

“There's some understanding now that's like, oh, you can put vessels that are 12 feet long anywhere in the world,” Flanigan said.

And that’s good for business.

“Right now we're seeing huge adoption…definitely, we're in the thick of scaling and hiring” as “people are trying to move faster than each other.”

Welcome

Sticker shock: President Donald Trump’s battleship costs keep growing. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the nuclear-powered ship program would cost about $275 billion, with the first battleship costing about $23.4 billion—up significantly from the administration’s original $15.1 billion estimate. That cost would drop to about $18 billion per ship as the fleet of 15 are built through 2056, according to the CBO report released this week. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, ordered the CBO analysis.

For comparison: “A new DDG-51 destroyer costs more than $3 billion. Thus, if the average BBGN cost about $18 billion, the Navy could buy five destroyers for the price of one battleship.”
But those five destroyers would have higher maintenance and operational costs due to the need for more sailors and running on fossil fuel, the report states.
And any cost savings with respect to nuclear-powered versus fuel are undeterminable at the moment: “Switching to nuclear power would reduce the battleship’s operating costs over time by eliminating the need to purchase fuel. CBO does not have enough information to estimate those potential savings, which would depend on the final design of the ship and the specifications of the conventional propulsion plant it otherwise would have used.”
Related: In last week’s earnings call, HII CEO Chris Kastner said the company started initial “design work for the battleship” with the Navy “on a limited basis.”
The CBO report comes as the Pentagon pushes for a $1.5 trillion budget, ramped up weapons production, ambitious new programs like Golden Dome, and existing programs with cost overruns—even amid underlying concerns around transparency.
In the back of my mind: The White House push towards manufacturing is exposing a dearth of workers who can build the nation’s weapons systems—especially at an accelerated pace.

Making moves + other news

James Rainey, former commanding general of Army Futures Command, is now at Bain Capital.
Hadrian secured a $1.37 billion Series D funding round, pushing its valuation to just under $8 billion. The AI-factory builder plans to expand, adding new factories and production lines for things like munitions and autonomous systems.
Lockheed Martin is looking for domestic critical minerals suppliers. The defense giant signed a memorandum of understanding with NioCorp for the rare-earth metal scandium. Lockheed is also in talks with two companies, Teck Resources and 5N Plus, to supply germanium, Reuters reported.
Ondas landed a $50 million contract for the Army’s Lethal Unmanned Systems (LUS) program. The company’s prime defense contractor, Mistral, received the award as part of a $982 million contract for the program. Ondas also hired David Barnea, former director of Mossad, to be the company’s global president and chairman.
The Navy used a Saildrone USV to aid in a drug bust last year. The Voyager drone has been operating with Fourth Fleet for the past three years to support intelligence gathering and surveillance operations and was recently linked with an $81 million cocaine bust from a ship interdiction in October 2025.
Blue Water Autonomy will join a $40 million IDIQ contract to map the ocean floor with uncrewed surface vessels. The multiyear contract with the Naval Oceanographic Office involves multiple vendors that will compete for task orders.
The energy company Fuse inked a research deal with the Nevada National Security Site. “Fuse has built commercial capabilities at the frontier of pulsed power technologies, creating a unique opportunity to advance the field through collaborative research,” Daniel Lowe, NNSS’s chief scientist, said in a news release. “By combining Fuse’s demonstrated hardware with NNSS's technical expertise, we'll be able to evaluate emerging technologies, explore new approaches to dense plasma focus systems and generate insights that benefit both national security missions and the broader fusion community.”
Tiberius Aerospace is working with the Army to further develop the company’s “next-generation precision-guided, ramjet-powered 155mm artillery munition,” called Sceptre. The company signed a CRADA, or cooperative research and development agreement, with Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Armaments Center.

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Attackers are targeting open-source AI just as Big Tech is embracing it

Patrick Tucker — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The future of AI will be driven in significant part by startups and small players using open-source software to make their own, cheaper, more efficient versions of Claude or ChatGPT, tech leaders finally admitted this week. For companies like AWS, the challenge now is protecting those public tools from increasingly sophisticated attacks from China, Russia, North Korea, or other players.

“Open-weight models—AI models that anyone can download, inspect, modify, and run on their own infrastructure—are an important part of that foundation because they make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable, and widely available,” reads a July 24 statement by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and co-signed by Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and a host of other companies.

How open won

The statement shows a dramatic reversal by companies that made fortunes off of proprietary software and have invested billions in OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier AI labs whose primary business is closed AI models. Dramatic, yes. But years in the making.

Satya Nadella illustrates how quickly sentiment among leading tech firms has changed. In 2024, the Microsoft CEO described proprietary models as critical to safety. Closed-source AI, he said, “allow[s] us to do deep end-to-end red-teaming, alignment, and safety evaluations before exposing them to the world.” Microsoft had invested $13 billion in OpenAI by that point.

AWS, another signatory of Huang’s statement, this week completed a $50 billion investment in OpenAI; the Amazon spinoff has also put money into rival lab Anthropic. Both of those investments were bets that the intellectual property of a small number of labs was going to be better and easier to safeguard than code made, often, by volunteers.

What has changed since 2024? Several things: A growing body of research showed that relatively cheap open-weight models were steadily catching up to the performance of closed ones. The American public is increasingly pessimistic about AI. The Pentagon wants AI that it can control and can operate without large, targetable data centers.

But for tech giants like Microsoft and AWS, the biggest change since 2024 is their evolution from provider of AI to provider of tools, space, and security for open-source and open-weight AI developers.

During Amazon’s earnings call on Thursday, CEO Andy Jassy, CEO Andy Jassy boasted of more than 10 models in Amazon’s Bedrock platform, which allows users to build their own generative models.

Nadella did the same on behalf of Microsoft this week. “We offer the broadest model catalog in the cloud, with over 11,000 models, including the latest from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI,” and Microsoft itself.

Venture capitalist Chris Dixon in his 2025 book Read, Write, Own describes this phenomenon as “commoditizing the complement.” Big Tech’s recent open-source enthusiasm is not unlike Oracle’s support for the development of the open-source Linux operating system in 2006. Oracle’s strategy, as Dixon describes it, was to get volunteers to make and maintain an operating system that was cheaper than Microsoft Windows. And they did.

Today, Microsoft and AWS see themselves more and more not as the future’s most powerful builders of AI but sellers of tools, services, computing resources, etc., to a wide ecosystem of AI builders—including their own.

Among those services are AI tools like Microsoft Copilot and Amazon Inspector, which help find malware and vulnerabilities in builder code, including code from open-source libraries.

Poisoning the future

AWS said adversaries are increasingly turning to AI not just to find vulnerabilities in open-source code, but to poison those code libraries in ways even other AI security programs don’t detect; for instance, malware that only executes when a user issues a prompt that has a typo or that only works when other code is entered into the library later.

This dangerous code is often cloaked in helpful suggestions.

“How does that malicious package or software get into that open source?” asked Rick Anthony, Sr., who manages Amazon Inspector. “Attackers are gaining trust… They're going out and they're acting like real developers. You know, they're creating packages, and these packages are doing real useful benefits.”

These techniques are easier to execute with AI coding agents, Anthony said. “They can sit there and have very reasonable-looking contribution histories. They can have very useful release cycles, and before you know it, these attackers look like good citizens within the open-source community.”

Attackers are also exploiting the fact that more and more security reviews now happen via AI agents, which have weaknesses and blind spots. “What we're going to see is attackers not only try to fool the humans, but try to fool the AI by giving it enough evidence to convince it that what you're running is ‘OK.’”

China and Russia are in a great position to carry out such attacks because they don’t face penalties for running experiments on real-world targets, Amazon Chief Security Officer Stephen Schmidt said. he was He said he is “really concerned” about them.

AWS is employing red teams running with their own AI agents to find vulnerabilities in code before adversaries can exploit them, but also to attack emerging open-weight models, hoping to discover potential adversaries' tactics before adversaries do.

But finding a hole or vulnerability is only the first part of the challenge, Schmidt said. Developing an actually useful patch takes longer. So AWS is also looking to speed up sending its fixes to the problems it encounters, and then test them again against threats they haven’t yet thought of.

“We test the [patches] for not only performance but also the way that they respond to certain kinds of adverse behavior, because we know that the adversaries are going to go after them as soon as we release them to the public,” Schmidt said.

That, too, will become increasingly difficult for more and more organizations precisely because defenders are now using AI to find more vulnerabilities. Following Anthropic’s release of its powerful Mythos model to a handful of companies, the number of vulnerabilities researchers found and disclosed quickly doubled, as did the number of patches. Each new bug found is a victory, but it also increases the work to develop a good patch.

“We are running this as a security industry as a sprint—oh my gosh! You know this big thing called Mythos came out, and we’ve got to do all this vulnerability identification. This is going to be the long haul. We're going to be doing this forever” Schmidt said.

The ramifications of that for future software development, and AI model building in particular, are significant. New AI builders will have to invest in protective AI at the same rate they invest in building new tools, he said.

That’s one reason why not everyone is excited about the future of open-source models.

Anthropic is notably absent from Huang’s statement. The company’s CEO issued his own statement this week, stating that he isn’t for banning open-weight models outright, but he supports mandatory safety testing for all models, as well as other measures to curb China’s ability to copy powerful models like Mythos.

Anthropic researcher Julie Merz was more direct about the threat in a Sunday post on X: “This time next year there will be the internet hitting every rural hospital/city council/etc at once with crypto locker attacks,” she said. “I think there’s a shocking lack of imagination in a lot of the CEOs/influencers pushing open models.”

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HII’s sea drone business is growing, but revenue is ‘modest,’ CEO says

Lauren C. Williams — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:58:25 -0400

The nation’s largest military shipbuilder sees maritime drones producing “modest” revenue now, but expects that to grow as the Navy builds its unmanned fleet, HII’s chief executive said during Thursday’s earnings call.

“We know it’s going to become more of the Navy fleet because [unmanned systems] can do excess missions and expand the fleet size such that they can do things that large capital ships can’t do and take the place of large capital ships in some of the missions,” said Chris Kastner, HII’s CEO and president. “From a revenue standpoint right now, it’s pretty modest.”

Kastner went on to say that HII’s unmanned business, which is part of the Mission Technologies division, is growing quickly. Earlier this month, the Navy extended its Lionfish unmanned undersea contract that was originally awarded in 2023 for nearly $350 million. The contract is for five years with options, and the first units were delivered in 2025.

“I don’t really want to comment on how large it’s going to be, but I’ll tell you one thing—it’s the fastest-growing business unit we have,” Kastner said, adding that the company is competing for the Navy’s medium unmanned surface vehicle program.

“The international and domestic pipeline is strong, we’re going to pursue those…It’s a good business unit. It’s a growing business unit. The profitability should be solid because it’s firm fixed-price contracts. We think we’re very competitive, and we’re going to continue to invest in it and watch it grow. Now, is it going to be a billion-dollar battleship? No. We think it’s going to grow. We think there’s significant opportunity, and we think it’s going to be a greater part of the fleet.”

Sea drones have become increasingly visible on the battlefield as navies use them for surveillance, rescues, and kinetic strikes. And more companies have entered the sector as the Navy boosts its unmanned systems budget and homes in on how it wants to integrate them into its fleet—while pushing companies to grow the capacity to build them quickly.

HII has emphasized its tech business more in recent years, often stressing the segment’s poised growth. Mission Technologies had $760 million in second-quarter revenue this year, an approximate $31 million and nearly 4 percent drop compared to last year.

That’s “primarily due to lower volumes in all domain operations in global security, partially offset by higher volumes in warfare systems and unmanned systems,” Tom Stiehle, HII’s chief financial officer and executive vice president, said during Thursday’s call.

The Mission Technologies business is expected to grow about 5 percent in the next five years and generate up to $3.2 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2026, according to the company’s earnings update.

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Anthropic confirms its AI breached 3 organizations during testing

Alexandra Kelley — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:40:00 -0400

Anthropic’s flagship artificial intelligence model Claude gained unauthorized access to the networks of three different organizations, the company announced following internal cybersecurity audits of its routine model evaluations.

In a press release posted Thursday, Anthropic said that, following the containment breach of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5.6 and subsequent attack on Hugging Face’s systems, Anthropic conducted an audit of its own model evaluations. The findings revealed that, out of 141,006 examined evaluations of Claude models dating back to April, there were three incidents where a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the third-party evaluators.

Each attack occurred during a “capture-the-flag” scenario where the models are asked to find hidden information housed within a different node.

In the blog post, Anthropic blamed a “misunderstanding” between them and their third-party evaluators that granted the models internet access. The models were told in prompts that they would not have real internet access and therefore operated under the premise that all accessible systems were part of the test environment.

“Operating under the false belief that all accessible entities were intended to be in-scope for the exercise, Claude compromised the impacted organizations’ infrastructure using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints,” the post reads. “It did not find or exploit any complex vulnerabilities, and in each case, Claude continued working to complete only the specific capture-the-flag task its evaluation had assigned.”

The models involved in the incidents were Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an unnamed internal research test model that isn’t planned for release. Anthropic stated that, despite accessing the internet as part of its cybersecurity testing, the models did not deliberately attempt to leave their training environments; accessing the internet only occurred as they looked to complete their tasks.

In one incident, Opus 4.7 executed the task on the real-world networks of a company once it realized it could via internet access.

A second incident was more extensive. Mythos 5 sought to find information by referencing software development instructions inside a fictional environment. It used these instructions to install a Python package from a public registry that didn’t actually exist in the hopes that the fictional company would automatically download it, thus granting the model access to its networks. In order to do this, it created login credentials a human user would need.

That Python package was inadvertently uploaded to the internet, where 15 systems downloaded it and compromised their systems.

The third incident saw the prototype model scan real targets after being unable to find the fictional target included in the test.

Anthropic noted that, when the models were able to discern that the attacks affected real systems, they halted their testing processes—something that, in part, the company said, gives it “cautious optimism.”

“Several defense-in-depth measures, on both our side and our partner’s, could have prevented these incidents or at least reduced their likelihood of occurring,” the post read. “Both we and our partner also could have reviewed evaluation transcripts or network logs more thoroughly. It’s also possible that a prompt which told Claude it did have internet access would have changed how Claude behaved when it came into contact with real systems.”

In the aftermath of the breaches, Anthropic is working with its evaluation partner, Irregular, and METR, an independent AI evaluation organization, to continue conducting reviews. It is also working alongside affected companies whose systems were compromised.

Anthropic concluded by saying it encourages other AI developers to conduct similar audits and that evaluation exercises in general need stronger oversight and safeguards.

“Ultimately, many factors contributed to these incidents, but, consistent with a blameless postmortem culture, we’re approaching the fixes as if the responsibility were ours alone,” the post reads.

Industry peers characterized Anthropic’s revelations on the heels of OpenAI’s incident as a burgeoning pattern cyberdefenders should heed.

Tom Kellermann, the vice president of AI Security and Threat Research at TrendAI, said that these incidents underscore the continued need for safeguards even in secure sandbox environments.

“Anthropic and OpenAI just proved that when you strip guardrails for testing, you’re not creating a sandbox, you’re inviting systemic risk,” Kellermann said in a statement to Nextgov/FCW. “Every organization deploying agentic AI needs to ask itself if their evaluation environment is actually contained. Containment and monitoring are no longer optional.”

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Defense Business Brief: Handshake deals > plane orders?; Inside the aerospace supply chain, plus thoughts on that critical minerals EO

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 19:50:05 -0400

Maybe it was just me, but there seemed to be more handshake deals between companies than airplane buys—military and commercial—at last week’s Farnborough International Airshow.

As a Farnborough first-timer, I had very few expectations. I guessed there likely wouldn’t be as many aircraft flying because of surging fuel prices and the Iran war. And the NATO Summit already had several major announcements.

But given the fanfare, should there have been more big buys trumpeted? Or are industry deals—showcasing how willing companies are to collaborate—the new normal?

“There are always partnerships being announced, but I think it was more of a lack of the large order announcements that we typically see that made them more visible,” said Grant Holve, a commercial aerospace analyst for Forecast International, a sibling brand of Defense One that provides market analysis and intelligence. “It was a 50-50 split between commercial and defense this year…usually it's like 80-20 or 70-30 tilted toward commercial.”

The lack of big purchase announcements coupled with the strong European defense spending backdrop seemed curious to me. But a theme emerged: dual-use commercial aircraft venturing into the defense arena.

“Commercial crossovers into defense aerospace seemed to be an identifiable theme. That was a takeaway I noticed specifically with the ‘contested logistics’ space for air taxi companies,” said Jon Hemler, director of Forecast International's military aerospace and weapons division.

Those eVTOL makers definitely made a splash, from Archer Aviation’s snazzy black and gold chalet (and partnership with Anduril) to Sikorsky teaming with Beta Technologies’ MV250 on autonomous cargo aircraft.

“It's increasingly an area where civil firms can partner with defense companies as an entry point to the market,” Hemler said.

Welcome

A boom for the aerospace supply chain. The more electrified and digitally-infused aircraft get, the more parts they need. That’s good business for distributors like FDH Aero, which team up with multiple suppliers to bulk buy, store and sell parts to customers.

“There's a lot more digital components, connectors, wires than there were two decades ago,” thanks to the electrification of aircraft and increasingly complex digital environments, CEO Ian Walsh told Defense One at the Farnborough airshow. “And because defense and commercial are growing very sharply, there's a huge pull on the supply chain to keep up with that.”
That demand can put a lot of strain on suppliers as commercial companies cross over to sell more to militaries.
“Imagine an [original equipment manufacturer] that's building helicopters for commercial [customers], and now this military customer wants 250 helicopters…they basically have to double their production, so it's putting a lot of strain on the supply chain to keep up,” he said. “We are seeing and benefiting from the fact that we're really good at what we do. We source long-lead time parts. We know our customers’ build rates in production, so we're really able to plan.”
Plus, drones need parts too: “If you'd been here a decade ago, if somebody mentioned the word ‘drone’ or ‘unmanned,’ they would look at you kind of funny. And I think every single booth [here] has some connection or product that's now tied to unmanned drones, eVTOLs. So that's a whole new frontier.”
But at the end of the day, while the “brains” of the newer, possibly autonomous, aircraft may differ, “an airframe is an airframe, whether it's going into space or it's landing vertically or landing on a runway. They all have connectors, rivets, bolts, connectors, fasteners—a bunch of little components all over it. I mean, there's just hundreds of thousands of those pieces all over that aircraft.”

Quick turnaround. Last week’s executive order on critical minerals will push defense contractors to get clear visibility into their supply chains by next year—a timeframe that caused much consternation. But could it be the push that prime contractors need? Can the industrial base risk waiting longer?

“It’s a critical element of sovereignty for us to be able to make sure that we can create deterrence through our industrial base,” said Chris Morton, who leads aerospace and defense business for IFS, which provides AI-fueled enterprise software and asset management for industrial businesses.
But “directing prime contractors, essentially, to rationalize their entire supply chain all the way to the bottom…it’s a Herculean undertaking.”
Morton said that type of visibility isn’t common among prime defense contractors, but getting that insight could lead the industry to uncomfortable, but necessary discoveries.
“I think there’s gonna be a whole lot of surprises. In the Army, we used to say that one of the first parts of operational planning is knowing yourself. And this effort is really that first step. We may discover some things that we are not happy about. But it’s a critical part of this effort because how can you know what materials you need to source and components you need to manufacture if you don’t really know what goes into your supply chain? We’ll see how the defense primes respond to this, because this is not an easy undertaking, not one bit.”
Related reading: In a July 22 report, the Government Accountability Office evaluated ways to reduce imported critical mineral reliance and recommended four policy changes to help that: creating domestic manufacturing capacity; building more infrastructure for battery and semiconductor recycling; making it secure; and investing in research and testing.
And another thing: The Trump administration plans to ban robots and inverters made in China and certain other nations, to bolster U.S. efforts in the sector.

Making moves + other news

A revolving door in reverse? The Pentagon wants to bring in more people from the private sector into defense acquisition and procurement roles through a new hiring program. But that could cause “significant conflict of interest” that’s layered with “corruption concerns” and “national security implications,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in a letter to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, CNBC reported.
- Related: Feinberg has been scrutinized for at least appearing to benefit financially from his post alongside other members of the Trump administration. Earlier this week, Sen. Warren sent a separate letter to Feinberg re-upping concerns from April about his financial ties to the firm he co-founded, Cerberus Capital Management, and oversight of the Golden Dome for America project.

Defense technology company Tagup wins a Marine Corps contract to help streamline equipment maintenance and repairs for 1st Maintenance Battalion in California. No dollar amount was listed, but Tagup’s Manifest AI platform uses a trove of data to see where all the parts for a given piece of gear come from, anticipate demand in an uncertain environment, and help troops plan for deployments.
- “Every maintenance decision requires balancing readiness, cost, and time,” Paul Plemmons, president of Tagup, said in a news release.
- “Manifest gives maintainers the decision advantage to weigh those tradeoffs and commit to the course of action that best keeps mission-essential equipment ready and available.”
Leonardo DRS to buy tech company Raft for $450 million.
Leidos wins $717 million Air Force contract for ISR support for Air Combat Command. The contract extends work the company has done since 2019.
The think tank Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments added Phil Davidson and Anita Antenucci as the board chair and vice chair, respectively.
- Davidson is the former commander of Indo-Pacific Command and has been on CSBA’s board for four years.
- Antenucci has served on the board for nearly eight years and founded the investment banking firm 3Wire Partners.

One more thing: A Seasats drone boat caught footage of a Chinese warship near the Philippines, Reuters reported.

Jennifer Hlad contributed to this report.

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The Army didn’t want this striking rotorcraft, but could it be what NATO needs?

Lauren C. Williams — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:44:30 -0400

FARNBOROUGH, England—Two years ago, the Army changed its mind about buying a new attack helicopter. Now, one of the finalists in that canceled effort is pitching its tech to NATO.

“We called that Raider-X for the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program for the U.S. Army. I ran that aircraft chained to the ground, getting ready to go do a flight test in that aircraft. Our competitor, Bell Helicopter, built the Invictus helicopter. And the Army canceled the program. So we never got to fly that aircraft,” said Bill Fell, test pilot for Sikorsky, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin.

The S-97 Raider helicopter was center stage in front of Lockheed Martin’s megachalet at the international airshow here last week. The display comes as Europe grows its industrial base and NATO increases its defense spending, presenting U.S. companies with the challenge of making their bids more attractive to allies.

Sikorsky is weighing a bid on NATO’s Next Generation Rotorcraft Capability program alongside European-based Airbus and Leonardo with U.S.-based Bell, which were chosen to develop prototype designs for the aircraft. Leonardo and Bell have expressed willingness to collaborate on the program.

Boeing is also considering a bid for NGRC, assessing “the competition as customer requirements and specifications are refined,” a company spokesperson told Defense One.

“We're looking for the right customer now,” Sikorsky’s Fell said. “We're looking at the requirements and evaluating that now. We're also considering a prospective program in South Korea.”

Sikorsky has said it would produce the NGRC aircraft in Europe, similar to other aerospace companies looking to expand business on the continent.

The company flew a bigger version of the aircraft, created with Boeing, called the Defiant in 2019. That helicopter lost its bid for the Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program.

The stacked, or coaxial, rotors makes the Raider, which can reach up to 240 knots, visually striking. Russia’s Kamov debuted a coaxial helicopter at Farnborough in the 1990s, versions of which still fly today.

The dual-rotors promote fast, low-altitude flight and prevent retreating blade stall.

“There's a natural speed limit to helicopters,” Fell said. “The airflows end up being such that the outboard few feet of the retreating disc has to produce the same amount of lift as the advancing disc entire blade does—with much higher velocities over it as well. And so, in normal helicopters, you get in high-speed flight, and eventually you get to the point where you've gone so fast that that retreating half of the disc just can't keep up anymore. It can't produce the right amount of lift, and we call that retreating blade stall.”

Fell said Sikorsky’s X-2 technology addresses that by having an “advancing half on each side” where the high-velocity airflow that comes over the disc can be counterbalanced or somewhat discounted on the retreating side.

So, going fast isn’t a problem, but the system isn’t as efficient as a tiltrotor.

“This technology is never going to be as efficient as a tiltrotor, and I think the Army wanted the additional speed that they could get out of that, and it also goes fast a little more efficiently,” Fell said.

Raider is for the military customer that wants to go fast and decelerate just as quickly, he argued.

“Any time you're coming in somewhere where they're shooting at you, or you are afraid they're going to shoot at you, you can decelerate more quickly in this aircraft and minimize the amount of time that somebody's shooting at you. I think that's a good thing,” Fell said.

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More than 30 companies form open-source AI alliance

Alexandra Kelley — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:22:00 -0400

A slew of major technology companies announced Monday that they have joined together to advocate for the continued development and availability of open-source artificial intelligence models.

The Open Secure AI Alliance, spearheaded by NVIDIA, consists of 37 hardware and software companies supporting the continued need for and access to open source AI models. The alliance’s primary argument is that open source AI benefits cybersecurity, enables users to customize model controls and comes with no vulnerable single point of failure.

“Just as open source created a shared foundation for software, the United States and its partners now face a choice in AI security: whether the defenses that protect our infrastructure will sit inside a few opaque systems or be built on open models, harnesses and tools that any defender can study, adapt and deploy,” according to a blog post announcing the alliance's creation.

Members of the Open Secure AI Alliance say open source is needed now more than ever. The post references last week’s incident—in which OpenAI’s advanced GPT-5.6 broke from its container environment during internal testing and hacked into Hugging Face’s data infrastructure—as evidence of a clear need for continued access to open source models for security support.

The blog post noted that Hugging Face ran a popular open source model, GLM 5.2, on its networks to contain the breach.

“That incident showed a practical truth: when defenders cannot inspect, adapt and run advanced AI on their own infrastructure, their ability to respond is constrained at exactly the moment speed matters most,” the post said. “Companies and countries need open frontier defensive tools and techniques so critical industries can build security systems across a multi-vendor ecosystem and avoid single points of failure.”

Two major closed-source AI developers, OpenAI and Anthropic, were not among those listed as part of the alliance. While OpenAI does offer some open-source products, Anthropic does not.

Goals for alliance members include creating and maintaining an open defense stack for AI agents, with different companies offering their distinct open-source products. Coinciding with the blog post, NVIDIA unveiled its Labs Object-Oriented Agents, a repository of agents built on Python code.

The future of the open-source model ecosystem in the U.S. has recently become a political lightning rod. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios on Wednesday accused Chinese AI model developer Moonshot AI of illicitly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model, a process in which an AI learns and copies the inner workings of a more mature and complex model.

Other Trump administration leaders, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, clarified that the administration supports an open-source model ecosystem, but that “open source is not open season on American IP.”

The announcement of the alliance also included a call for policymakers to support a robust open-source environment.

“As policymakers and regulators grapple with AI safety, it will be crucial to recognize open models, harnesses and security tooling as defensive assets, not liabilities, in AI and cybersecurity policy,” the post said. “Blanket restrictions on open frontier AI systems would weaken defensive capacity and risk concentrating power, dependence and vulnerability in a few closed providers.”

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The German navy can’t get enough P-8 patrol aircraft

Lauren C. Williams — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 03:19:34 -0400

FARNBOROUGH, England—The German navy is buying eight submarine-hunting P-8A aircraft, but it would welcome more, said the nation’s head of naval air warfare.

“No, eight is not enough. Give me 10, and I will say I need more. And give me 12, I will say give me more,” Capt. Broder Nielsen, the commanding officer of Germany’s naval air command told reporters Wednesday at the Farnborough International Airshow.

NATO countries are working to bolster their anti-submarine capabilities to protect against Russian activity in the region, including attacks on undersea cables. Earlier this month, Denmark agreed to buy two Boeing P-8A Poseidon aircraft and the UK inked a sustainment deal for their aircraft.

“The demand for this aircraft is so huge. And to cover these huge areas there, you have to build up a real significant fleet,” which is possible when all the P-8As that are operated across Europe and the North Atlantic are combined, Nielsen said.

It’s becoming increasingly important to “get a clear picture of what is going up in the High North…the threat is there.”

Germany is drastically boosting its defense spending—which could soon make up a third of federal spending—to hit NATO’s 5 percent of gross domestic product target. The country recently canceled its much delayed, multibillion-dollar F126 frigate program, a platform designed for anti-submarine warfare, in favor of a smaller more commercially ready design.

The German navy is already planning to pair the P-8s with General Atomic’s MQ-9B SeaGuardian drones. But additional unmanned tech—like air-launched effects, which can launch drones from a missile-like tube—isn’t a primary consideration yet as it’s receiving the first few aircraft.

Nielsen said the need for kinetic effects take priority.

“We are in the very early stage of introducing our aircraft. So step by step, I would say. But what is even more important is our capability to launch kinetic effects,” he said. “It is of high importance that we will receive the torpedoes and also deep precision strike” capabilities.

Anti-ship weapons for the German P-8As are still being considered.

“The German navy lost the ability to fight against surface warships. That was 25 years ago when we lost our [Panavia] Tornadoes and gave it to the [German air force], unfortunately. And ever since, we do not have any missiles in stock anymore against surface ships. So we need long-range surface missiles, and the [Kongsberg] joint strike missile is a valid option.”

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Defense Business Brief: Dispatch from Farnborough

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:44:15 -0400

LONDON—Private capital is becoming a key part of the defense industrial bases on both sides of the Atlantic, but distinct “cultural differences” in the UK may stymie progress, finance experts say.

Asked what the UK could learn from how private capital has rallied behind defense tech in the U.S. in recent years, Fiona Walters, CEO of Serco’s UK and Europe business, cited a sense of enthusiasm to move quickly—and to persist even when things get hard.

“There's optimism on the part of the government, there's optimism on the part of business, and there is this, kind of, leaning in to [say] ‘OK, we're going to solve this problem together,’” Walters said Tuesday during a panel discussion on the future of defense investment as part of a finance summit at the Farnborough International Airshow. “The sense of still being able to achieve anything is really profoundly different.”

But that doesn’t mean UK investors and entrepreneurs need to emulate their American counterparts.

“We're not going to become the U.S., and nor should we necessarily want to be. I think the issue is about how do you harness that optimism around actually being able to create and do something, to evidence it, and do it quickly,” said Walters, whose company is a major government contractor managing services and facilities across multiple sectors, including health, IT, transport, justice and defense.

Walters’ comments come as NATO leaders are calling for expansion in Europe’s industrial base, in part over concerns that U.S. companies will be unable to produce enough weapons to restock Pentagon arsenals depleted by the Iran war to build up European militaries looking to deter Russia.

An enthusiasm gap isn’t the only hurdle facing the UK defense industry. Another panelist, Joe Cassidy, KPMG UK’s head of technology, media, and telecoms, said the UK has been working on reforms to overcome some regulatory challenges, but many companies and investors are still risk-averse, and may not understand where defense fits into the broader industrial strategy.

“There is no shortage of capital in the UK, first of all. So let's not kind of convince ourselves that's the case. The problems that we've had with the Valley of Death, so call it Series C capital, broadly speaking—those are true in every sector. There isn't a risk appetite for that investment. We've been trying to unlock some of the—through the Mansion House reforms and the Edinburgh reforms—some of the pension fund capital to be allocated into scale up sector, and that's true for defense as well. But that's been a slow, very slow-moving beam,” Cassidy said.

“So, some of the culture is, again, around that regulatory constraint historically, our risk appetite in and around Series C, but…I think we haven't told the story, the investor story, as well as we might about the industrial strategy, how important defense is in regard to that, how resilience links to it, and what the spillover effects are for the broader economy and growth.”

And a third panelist suggested that the UK had the enthusiasm it would take. Across multiple sectors, such as AI, cyber, and advanced manufacturing, “there's a real willingness to pivot their business models to defense,” said Stuart Foster, Barclays’ head of Coverage, UK Corporate Bank. “So if we have the universities, we have the talent, we have the people, we have the will…it just feels that there's an enthusiasm backed by capability and talent should we create the right framework and environment to unleash that.”

Welcome

A bit of Farnborough chat

Spotted! In addition to a Congressional delegation that included Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Defense One spotted William Kimmitt, the Commerce Department’s undersecretary for international trade, ahead of a meeting with Boeing executives on Monday.

State and local governments traversed the Atlantic to woo new business into their districts. There were booths for California, West Virginia, Missouri, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and Ohio, to name a few.

Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb told Defense One about his aims to bring more defense companies into the city: “The biggest choke point right now, and the big reason why I'm here, is telling the Cleveland story and putting Cleveland in the conversation,” Bibb said.
“When folks are thinking about aerospace events, more than likely Cleveland's not at the top of that list,” Bibb said. The city built the 350-acre Midline business district “to attract aerospace, defense, advanced manufacturing, health care companies” and bring in 2,500 jobs over the next 10 years. The business park doesn’t have any defense or aerospace companies committed to it yet, but the goal is for that to change next year.

The “first in flight” state wants to grow its defense and aerospace sector. North Carolina is courting foreign direct investments, which make up nearly half of its pipeline projects, said Lee Lilley, the state’s commerce secretary.

It's a fact that may surprise “some people because it feels like the international environment is a little chaotic and unsettled at times,” Lilley said. “But…companies want to be located in the United States. It's still a tremendous market for them” and it’s a benefit for foreign companies to have supply chains in the U.S. and North America.
Mixing legacy and new defense tech: North Carolina is home to aerospace upstarts Boom Supersonic and JetZero, the latter of which recently broke ground (and secured $3 billion in financing) on a new sprawling campus on 600 acres in Greensboro, N.C.
It’s that space appeal Lilley wants companies—even if they were hatched somewhere else—to latch on to.
“Our list of projects here is a mix of large legacy producers like Boeing, like Airbus, like Lockheed Martin, and then several of these startup organizations…that are doing innovative work that are really responding to the needs on the battlefield” with “dual-use capabilities. And they need to get to market fast. We pitch North Carolina as a place where you can do that.”

One non-Farnborough thing: The Marine Corps is picking up an autonomous turret from Allen Control Systems for its ground-based air defense program. I wonder if they’ll get it in rose gold.

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An Australian CCA flew in a Pacific exercise. Boeing exec says it’s an important ‘first step’

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:27:55 -0400

FARNBOROUGH, UK—The first robot wingman to fly with U.S. aircraft in a major multi-national exercise wasn’t among the ones that the Air Force picked for initial-production contracts last month. Instead, it was the MQ-28 Ghost Bat, which is being developed by Boeing for the Australian Royal Air Force—and a company exec hinted that its CCA could have more exercises in its future.

The Ghost Bat, which made its airshow debut this week here in England, flew last month alongside U.S. and allied forces in Valiant Shield, a large training exercise in the Pacific’s Northern Mariana Islands. On Tuesday, Glen Ferguson, Boeing Defense Australia’s MQ-28 global programs director, told reporters on Tuesday that was the “first step” in integrating CCAs into the force. More opportunities are likely on the horizon, he said.

“As far as next steps, there’s not too many exercises these days that are single-country exercises, and Valiant Shield wasn’t,” Ferguson said. “Things like Talisman Saber next year— 40,000 people turning up to Australia across the Pacific and Indo region, they’re the opportunities to go and do that. I think you’ll see us, in the Australian Air Force in particular, applying these assets into those exercises as operational capabilities to test and develop their tactics.”

Two years ago, the Air Force dropped Boeing from the running for the first increment of its CCA program, which in June issued contracts to Anduril and General Atomics instead. (Boeing didn’t offer its MQ-28 Ghost Bat for that first competition.) Late last year, the service started giving money to companies to develop a second iteration of CCAs. It’s not publicly known whether Boeing is among them, and Ferguson declined to comment on increment two.

This month, Boeing said in a news release that the Ghost Bat had become “the first and only collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) deployed to a multinational, joint operational exercise.” “Having MQ-28 participate in such a significant military training exercise is a first, and this is just the start of demonstrating how advanced human-machine teaming extends the reach and awareness of crewed platforms and enhances joint force operations,” Steve Parker, Boeing Defense, Space and Security’s president and CEO, said in a news release this month.

Ferguson told reporters that Navy Adm. Sam Paparo, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, was happy to have a CCA flying in the region.

“The feedback from the U.S. government was they were very happy to have a CCA in the Pacific theater,” he said.

In its own press release, the Air Force said the U.S. used Boeing’s CCA appearance to project new capabilities in the Pacific.

"By advancing human-machine teaming, we are increasing our power projection while building a more resilient, capable, and lethal joint force,” U.S. Air Force Maj. Daniel Pesich, the Experimental Operations Unit’s collaborative combat aircraft detachment officer in charge, said in a news release.

Boeing said in a news release that the drone wingman flew alongside F-35s, F-15EX, HC-130, E-3, E-2D, EA-18G, and RC-135 aircraft. U.S. officials have said they plan to field its first 100 operational CCAs by 2029.

Other countries are eager to field their first CCAs, too. In addition to the Royal Australian Air Force’s current Ghost Bat orders, Germany is also eyeing Boeing’s drone wingman.

Germany’s Bundeswehr plans to field its first operational drone wingmen by 2029. Earlier this year, Rheinmetall and Boeing Australia joined together to offer the Ghost Bat as the country’s drone wingman offering. That team expanded last month to include German firms Diehl Defence and Rohde & Schwarz. On Tuesday, HENSOLDT, a German electronics company, announced that it joined Boeing’s Ghost Bat industry team.

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Boeing adjusts approach to court more European business

Lauren C. Williams — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:53:25 -0400

LONDON—Keeping some things local will be key for U.S. weapons makers that want to expand their business in Europe, a top Boeing executive said.

That can mean not being a prime on certain contracts, teaming with European defense companies, employing locals, and designing future platforms—like the MQ-28 Ghost Bat—with open architecture that can be tailored to fit international militaries’ needs.

“I would say that we've been listening a little bit [differently] for the past couple of years, as there has been some kind of shift in Europe,” Steve Parker, Boeing’s president and CEO for its defense business, told reporters Sunday ahead of the Farnborough International Airshow.

For example, as part of an upcoming bid competition, Boeing is pitching its T-7A fighter jet training platform—built with Saab for the U.S. Air Force—to be the Royal Air Force’s next trainer.

“We're going to bring what I believe is the world's most advanced training system to the UK, and we'll compete there very differently with a UK focus and a final assembly checkout line here,” Parker said, “We are teamed with BAE Systems, and…they will prime an opportunity for us, and this is all about British jobs.”

BAE Systems announced the solidification of the multivendor bid for T-7 on Tuesday.

Having BAE, Saab, and Boeing bid together “aligns with the ambition of the Defence Investment Plan, while strengthening the UK’s sovereign industrial capability,” Charles Woodburn, BAE Systems’ CEO, said in a news release announcing the decision.

And for Boeing, it’s a way to emphasize their commitment to keeping European business.

“Boeing Defense UK, we started with five employees. We're up to over 2,100—those are 2,100 jobs here in the UK. I don't care whose name is on the door,” Chris Raymond, Boeing’s president and CEO of global services told reporters. “And you’ve got to create those partnerships between a piece of kit they want and an industrial participation plan that works and gets the local capability starting to grow.”

Raymond said the company has employed that strategy in the UK, Australia, India, Japan, and Canada.

The comments come as the UK and other European countries boost their defense spending and increasingly look internally at domestic defense companies.

From a tech perspective, collaborative design using modular open systems architecture can give foreign governments more flexibility and “provides the country sovereignty,” Parker said of Boeing’s MQ-28 Ghost Bat, a collaborative combat aircraft that will be on display for the first time this week at Farnborough.

The St. Louis-based company is working with Rheinmettall and others to put their technology on the German version of the Ghost Bat aircraft.

“We've teamed with Rheinmetall and a number of other German companies to offer that up to the [German armed forces] and the [German air force], and they will have similar control of what systems they want to put on,” he said. “We're changing the way we bring these capabilities to bear, and sort of the value proposition of the offering. And I think there's more to come there as well. So, it's playing out. We've been looking at it for a couple of years, and I think there's a lot of opportunity for us if we think differently, which is what we're doing.”

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Sweden’s trio of radar planes will complement NATO’s 10, says air force chief

Thomas Novelly — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:19:08 -0400

LONDON—The trio of Saab GlobalEye radar planes ordered by the Swedish Air Force are separate from—but a vital complement to—NATO’s own order of 10, the service’s top officer said Monday.

Maj. Gen. Jonas Wikman, the head of the Swedish Air Force, told reporters in London that his country’s order of the Swedish-built airborne early warning and control aircraft is “on top” of the alliance deal announced at the NATO summit in Turkey earlier this month.

“My view is that NATO will have the fleet, like AWACS today,” Wikman said. “We will have our fleet, a national fleet, in cooperation with other nations, hopefully.”

He added that he had started a “dialogue” with the alliance to develop operational concepts for the aircraft.

Earlier this month, NATO announced plans to buy 10 GlobalEyes to replace its Boeing E-3 AWACS, snubbing the U.S. company’s pitch of its E-7 Wedgetail. In 2024, Sweden placed an order for its third GlobalEye. The country has donated two of its older fleet of Saab 340 radar planes to Ukraine as it awaits delivery of the new aircraft in 2027 or sooner.

“We are supporting Ukraine with our previous fleet of airborne early warning and control aircraft, and we are now waiting to introduce our next generation of aircraft,” Wikman said. “The intention of introducing the GlobalEye, or the S106, is not to introduce another early warning and control aircraft for control of the air. It is to introduce airborne early warning and control aircraft for all domains.”

Boeing executives, in a roundtable with reporters in London on Sunday, defended their E-7 Wedgetail after NATO’s announcement.

“We've got a number of platforms, airborne early warning and control platforms, in the Middle East. What capability was asked to come and help? It was the E-7 Wedgetail,” said Steve Parker, Boeing Defense, Space and Security president and CEO. “It's that way for a reason, because it is unmatched and it has a technology roadmap that's going to take it out 30,40 years and stay relevant. It's the world's leading capability right now.”

Parker added that Boeing is “super proud” to support the NATO mission with the E-3.

In May, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reversed course and decided to support funding for the E-7, after it was initially zeroed out in the initial budget request. Last month, House appropriators, mostly, supported the White House’s $1.5-billion budget amendment to fund Wedgetail development.

Debates over fielding the E-7 intensified after a U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry was heavily damaged during the war in Iran. Last year, Hegseth rallied the Wedgetail and defended space-based capabilities for the mission instead. Now, Air Force officials are backing space programs, like the Airborne Moving-Target Indicator, and the next-generation radar plane.

Wikman said the Swedish’s air and space force hasn’t discussed a similar arrangement. The military’s first space-based ISR asset, a Planet Labs satellite, was launched into orbit in May. He said the hope is to share that data with the new fleet of GlobalEyes.

“So, in that sense, we are already there,” Wikman said. “I’m telling Saab ‘hey, you need to be able to import the space data.”

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Allies and industry will gather at Farnborough Air Show amid Iran war, spending debates

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 17:15:16 -0400

LONDON— Disagreement among allies, uncertainty around the Iran war, and defense spending fluctuations in Europe and the United States will swirl around the Farnborough Air Show in England next week.

Other things will also set this year’s edition of the biennial show apart from its predecessors, industry representatives and aviation analysts told Defense One. Typically, the commercial-heavy air expo is preceded by the Royal International Air Tattoo at the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force station, one of the world’s largest military airshows. But in late May, RIAT organizers announced this year’s show was canceled to the public. The reason: the war in Iran.

“This has not been an easy decision,” RIAT’s statement read. “It follows extensive discussions with the Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force regarding uncertainty over access to RAF Fairford, given the ongoing situation in the Middle East.”

As a result, the Farnborough International Air Show, which runs July 21 to July 24, will likely absorb much of the focus and presence, said Eric Fanning, the Aerospace Industries Association’s CEO and president. Additionally, the show follows a bumpy NATO summit earlier this month and President Donald Trump’s continued push to have U.S. allies take on more defense spending.In Washington, D.C., the administration’s $1.5 trillion military budget pitched at revitalizing the defense industrial base is in dire straits, in part, due to political disagreements over the Iran war.

Fanning said government participation is not in flux due to the war in Iran, but it has caused some logistics and planning considerations for military aircraft to be displayed. U.S. Air Force platforms shown at Farnborough this year will include the F-35 Lightning II, the C-130J, the UH-60 Blackhawk, and the CH-47 Chinook helicopter, according to the air show’s website. British, Czech, Italian and Turkish planes will also be displayed.

With RIAT’s cancellation, Fanning said more U.S. defense firms are making an appearance at Farnborough.

"With the cancellation of RIAT, and with everything that's going on, this is actually, for the U.S., a record attendance,” Fanning said. “There are more U.S. companies that are involved in the air show, displaying at the air show, than have ever before, and it comes on the heels of a pretty big surge in exports from the United States in aerospace — a 25% increase from last year, with the UK as one of the top five export destinations.”

Last year, ahead of the Paris Air Show, Fanning said. “There's more underlying to this air show than any one I’ve been to before.” Now, he said the environment surrounding Farnborough tops that.

“It's only intensified," Fanning said. "There's so much focus on, pressure on, and questions about the transatlantic alliance and the future of the alliance.”

Over the last year, the Trump administration has pushed for European nations to spend more on their defense while also advocating for other nations to buy U.S. arms, a move which some experts have described as a “contradictory policy.” J.J. Gertler, a senior aviation analyst at the Teal Group, said that’s one of the major trends he’s watching at Farnborough this year.

“Europe has now had a year from when it became clear that the US was not going to be as actively involved in their defense, they've had a year plus to get going on their own programs,” Gertler said. “What programs are on display that weren't there, say, two years ago, and what are their big plans for the future?”

Some allies, like the United Kingdom, have taken note. Last month, the country’s defense secretary resigned and said in a public letter the country is “unwilling” to support a necessary increase in military spending. Shortly after, the country unveiled its $298 billion Defense Investment Plan which pushed investments in space, autonomous systems, and cyber warfare.

“The Government has committed to increasing defence spending to 3 percent of GDP

in the next Parliament, with funding and plans to be set out at the next spending review where defence will be the number one priority,” a summary of the DIP reads. “Alongside NATO allies, the UK has committed to reach 3.5 percent of GDP on defence spending by 2035.”

Other nation’s ambitious defense efforts have fallen short ahead of Farnborough.

Last month, Germany and France dropped their plans to collaborate on a next-generation fighter jet: the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System, or FCAS. Gertler said he’ll be paying attention to any announcements or moves to push a replacement forward.

“Do we see announced at Farnborough either of their replacement programs, their independent programs to move forward on a next-generation aircraft?” Gertler said. “It's awfully soon, but then again, they've had a lot of time to get ready.”

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Defense Business Brief: Farnborough preview, thoughts + trends; Trade groups balk at NDAA buyback provision; Pennsylvania’s DIB

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0400

England did not make it to the World Cup final, but London Town will likely still be buzzing next week as the Farnborough International Airshow kicks off Monday. And while last week’s NATO Summit got a bit prickly, there’s an appetite for unity amid increasing global tensions.

Dozens of countries, major weapons makers, defense tech companies, and suppliers are expected at the weeklong show. And states’ representatives will be there as well, trying to draw international business.

Trends to watch are how the U.K. and other European countries are spending their newly padded defense budgets. Are they buying more U.S. weapons? Or are they buying more homegrown tech? And for U.S. companies, what are they pitching?

BAE Systems is teasing a futuristic fighter pilot helmet. Northrop Grumman plans to talk up its F-16 modernization efforts, including electronic warfare system upgrades, and Raytheon will showcase its Coyote counterdrone system:

“It's the first major show since multiple theaters of operation have been using the Coyote system,” Joseph DeAntona, a Raytheon executive who focuses on land and air defense, told reporters Monday. “I think the customers that are attending Farnborough will be…wanting to know more about it and what it would take for them to potentially consider Coyote as a counter-UAS solution for them.”

And while it’s not flashy, aircraft maintenance and repair could be big—especially as private capital moves in.

“There's also a ton of interest in the [maintenance, repair, and overhaul] business, for example. We're seeing a lot of private equity and, you know, financial sponsors interested in that space,” Doug Peck, managing director at the consulting firm BCG, told Defense One. “There's going to be no shortage of demand for these aircraft, these systems, over time—whether that's from just the commercial passenger travel market or from the military side. But…the capacity to actually keep up with that growth is much stickier. So you're just seeing backlogs for these basic sustainment facilities and MRO facilities just really, really grow. And therefore the margins that they're going to be able to demand should only look better over time as well.”

It’ll be my first time at the airshow. If you’re there, you’ll likely catch me in Converse singing Fergie’s “London Bridge” in celebration after I file a story.

Welcome

You’ve reached the Defense Business Brief, where we dig into what the Pentagon buys, who they’re buying from, and why. Send along your tips, feedback, and pub recommendations to lwilliams@defenseone.com. Check out the Defense Business Brief archive here, and tell your friends to subscribe!

Pushback on buybacks ban. The Chamber of Commerce joined dozens of trade organizations in a bid to get Congress to remove a provision in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act that would prohibit defense contractors from paying dividends or repurchasing publicly traded stock without a waiver from the Pentagon.

“The restriction applies broadly to contractors providing any goods or services … regardless of the dollar value of the contract,” with the Defense Department, trade groups wrote in a July 14 letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senators Roger Wicker and Jack Reed, who lead the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The letter states the ban would bar large swaths of companies from contracting with the Pentagon and, more broadly, affect Americans’ retirement accounts.
“If adopted, Section 815 would harm millions of American retirees and other investors by restricting lawful returns of capital to shareholders, establish a troubling precedent for federal interference in corporate governance and capital allocation decisions, and discourage the private sector from participating in the defense industrial base at a time when Congress should be encouraging greater private-sector participation.”
Background: Senate Democrats blocked advancement of the typically bipartisan annual defense policy bill, setting up a showdown for funding the Iran war. Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement he couldn’t “vote to proceed to a bill that enables an ongoing war against Iran that Congress never authorized and the American people overwhelmingly oppose.” Then he said: “We also cannot ignore a nearly 45 percent increase in defense spending at a moment when the Pentagon has refused to provide an account for the true cost of this war or submit basic information to Congress.”
State of play: Following the failed Senate vote, House Republicans unveiled a $90 million reconciliation bill on Wednesday, most of which would fund the Iran war. House Democrats voted to end aid to Israel for the Iran war.

Spotlight on the Pennsylvania defense industrial base. Wednesday’s Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit hosted by Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa., at the Army War College had quite a turnout, with a spate of defense tech company announcements—including $10 billion in defense investments—and a keynote speech from President Donald Trump.

JPMorgan Chase pledged $24 million to help finance a new submarine manufacturing facility at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The investment would be a part of the more than-trillion-dollar commitment to national and economic security efforts made last year.
Gecko Robotics announced plans to open a 10,000 square-foot advanced manufacturing plant in Pittsburgh. The plan is for the facility to be a “manufacturing and integration hub where Gecko will work alongside partners from across the Defense Industrial Base to integrate robotics into advanced manufacturing processes with its AI-powered non-destructive testing technologies,” the company said in a news release.
Trump’s take: “Since I took office, defense investments in Pennsylvania are up by nearly 25 percent,” the president claimed. “And today, we're adding [$]10 billion, and I think the number is going to end up being about $19 or $20 billion dollars. And we'll be building two massive national security, multi-mission vessels at the beautiful and historic Philadelphia shipyard.”

Making moves + other news

Bryan Fenton, the former head of Special Operations Command, has joined counter-UAS tech maker RADD as a senior advisor, Defense One has learned. Fenton also has advisor roles with a16z’s American Dynamism firm, and HawkEye 360, a geospatial intelligence company. The retired general is also a board member at Mantech and an executive for the Carlyle Group.
The Army broke ground on a $635.2 million ammunition plant in Middletown, Iowa, the service announced Wednesday. The Future Artillery Complex at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant is expected to produce 432,000 M795 artillery rounds a year once fully built, according to a news release.
The Navy awarded Florida State University $88 million to research and develop testing systems, modeling, and simulation for shipboard power and energy systems.
The U.S. war on Iran has spurred $12.3 billion in venture capital investment in defense technology, the Financial Times reports. Last year, companies in that sector raised nearly $10 billion.
Venture capital firm Red Cell Partners added Glenn Youngkin, the former Virginia governor, to its board as chairman. The company invests in defense tech companies Epirus, Red 6, Reveal Technology, and Valinor. (Fun fact: Veronica Daigle, who leads the firm’s national security team, was on stage at Defense One’s Tech Summit. Catch the recap here.)
Vatn Systems announced its “all-in-one autonomous mine countermeasures system” called SIGURD, which can detect, track, and neutralize sea-based mines.
BigBear AI is expanding its generative AI platform for national security use.

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Pentagon halts Phase 2 of cybersecurity certification program, launches 60-day ‘reform’ review

Nick Wakeman — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:51:53 -0400

The Defense Department has essentially ended the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program by suspending its second phase requirements.

The Pentagon will keep in place Phase 1, which requires self-assessments for how companies protect controlled unclassified information in their systems. But the department said Monday it is suspending Phase 2, which was to begin on Nov. 10 and requires third-party certifications.

DOD is also launching a review of CMMC to make sure it aligns with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s acquisition initiatives, which prioritize speed, and lowering barriers for new entrants. The Acquisition Transformation System directives also aim to replace bureaucratic compliance with what DOD calls “scalable, resilient cybersecurity measures.”

The CMMC program got its start during the first Trump administration and was revised and streamlined during the Biden administration. CMMC has been envisioned as a cyber and supply chain security standard for the defense industrial base.

According to DOD's Monday statement, the department is responding to complaints that CMMC was increasing compliance costs and adding bureaucratic burdens.

The Small Business Administration also reported that CMMC compliance had caused some companies to leave the defense industrial base, which DOD said is delaying the deliveries of critical capabilities to operators.

"In support of Secretary Pete Hegseth's directive to reduce compliance barriers for small and medium sized businesses, we are today suspending the CMMC Phase II requirements and initiating a 60-day study of the future of this program," said DOD Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies.

Davies said cybersecurity and operational resilience are critical priorities.

“We believe the DIB can achieve both, while we reduce unnecessary government red tape,” she said.

Phase 3 of CMMC, which was to begin in November 2027, and Phase 4 for full implementation are also all suspended.

In the meantime, the department said it would rely on “self-assessments and select government-led assessments.”

DOD's announcement said Davies made the decision.

“The CIO's decision ensures we maintain a strict security baseline while removing paralyzing costs and keeping innovators and competition growing in the defense supply chain," said Michael Duffey, defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment.

DOD has also formed a CMMC Reform Task Force to conduct a review of the certification program. Part of their role will be to review comments in responses to a request for information, which DOD posted Monday.

The department wants feedback from companies on cost drivers, administrative burdens tied to CMMC compliance, and which NIST 800-171 security controls deliver meaningful risk reduction.

DOD also wants to know know how companies are already using commercial cybersecurity tools and managed services, and how the department might recognize those in a compliance framework instead of requiring separate assessments.

Responses to the RFI are due Aug. 14.

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Two more rocket-makers join Pentagon's list of launch options

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:18:08 -0400

Space Force officials have tapped two startup companies to compete for future national security launch missions, expanding the service’s growing list of providers as the military’s demand for orbital capabilities skyrockets.

California-based firms Impulse Space and Relativity Federal have been added to the Space Force’s National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 contract, reserved for its more accessible and lower-risk missions. Both companies will receive a $5 million firm-fixed-price task order, indefinite-delivery indefinite-quantity contract “to conduct an initial capabilities assessment and develop their approach to tailored mission assurance,” Space Systems Command officials said Wednesday in a news release. The two firms will be able to compete against Blue Origin, SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab, and Stoke Space for future launch contracts.

“These new awardees, together with the other providers already on the Lane 1 contract, are building the next generation of launch vehicles. This is critical at a time when our launch cadence is rapidly increasing and our customers are relying on us to deliver everything they need to provide for the security of our nation and allies,” Space Force Col. Eric Zarybnisky, the acting space access portfolio acquisition executive, said in the news release.

The additions of Relativity Federal and Impulse Space come amid a growing demand for national security launch capabilities. Space Force officials expect upwards of 100 such missions over the next five years, according to the latest budget request. Over the next decade, service leaders speculate that demand could swell to upwards of 3,000 launches from its two launch sites by 2036, according to an April service document. The Lane 1 contract method, aimed at expanding the number of qualified providers, “focuses on rapid contract award, streamlined integration phases and reduced timelines from award to launch,” according to the news release.

“The increase to seven providers in the third year of our NSSL Lane 1 contract is exactly the kind of result we envisioned when we developed our dual-lane strategy to address the changing needs of our customers,” Zarybnisky said in the news release. “We have numerous upcoming missions that the Lane 1 launch providers will be able to compete for as soon as they’ve successfully launched at least once.”

Relativity Federal’s Terran R reusable, two-stage rocket is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral later this year, according to the company’s website.

Impulse Space’s approach differs from the other providers. The company’s Helios vehicle would be used aboard another provider’s medium lift rocket, transporting payloads from low earth orbit to “high-energy orbits like Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO) in less than one day,” according to the company’s news release. The vehicle is scheduled to take its first flight in 2027, according to Impulse’s website.

“Pairing Helios with a standard medium-lift launch vehicle offers a more operationally flexible and cost-effective path to high-energy orbits than other solutions,” Eric Romo, president and COO of Impulse Space, said in a news release. “We look forward to providing a new option for assured access to space for the Space Force.”

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Defense Business Brief: Rocket engine startup eyes production; NATO Summit Day 1; Anduril’s first NATO contract

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 22:44:45 -0400

Rocket engine startup Venus Aerospace only has one major test flight under its belt, but the company just raised $91 million from investors ready to bet on future production demands.

The Series B funding round was led by the venture capital firm Mercury Fund and with participation from other investors, including Lockheed Martin Ventures, which noted the company’s rapid development of its rotating detonation rocket engine—which uses continuous supersonic detonation waves to generate thrust—calling it a welcomed addition to the defense ecosystem.

“Since our initial investment, Venus has progressed very quickly in its technology development. Our reinvestment in Venus recognizes Venus’ accomplishments to date and focus on speed to manufacture, cost management and reduction of supply chain constraints. Venus is working effectively to position its propulsion system for the production scale required by defense programs,” Chris Moran, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures, said in a statement.

And setting up the building blocks for growth is the six-year-old startup’s chief focus.

“We are really focused on growing the foundation that we have to be able to scale to meet the commercial and government demand that we're going to have for this system,” including hiring more talent and increasing manufacturing capacity, Tom Barron, chief operating officer for Venus Aerospace, told Defense One. That also means growing “the mundane but super important sort of business process and architecture required to meet high-consequence government contracts.”

Barron wouldn’t specify when its rotating detonation rocket engines might enter production, what the company’s manufacturing targets were, or how many people they plan to hire. Hinting at forthcoming announcements, he said the plan is to hire “technical and business talent” while “growing our in-house manufacturing capacity” and testing.

Last year, the Houston-based startup finished a flight test of its engine, which uses a continuous supersonic combustion process to burn fuel and is made up of 3D-printed components: “it's literally a rotating detonation wave inside the engine. The engine body itself is only three pieces,” Barron said.

The engine promises to be more efficient and travel further, faster, than traditional rocket motors by 15 percent, the company said of the test flight results. It takes about two weeks to produce through machining and 3D printing. And key to future production, and development, is being able to test and integrate changes quickly.

“We co-located our rocket-engine testing, our manufacturing, and our design engineering all in one place,” Barron said in an interview. “We test rocket engines 500 feet behind me, whereas if you go to basically any other major rocket engine designer, builder, they're doing it in the desert somewhere. And so you have this enormous lag driving eight hours into Mojave or into another remote area. So being able to test is a critical component of what we do.”

The funding announcement comes as the White House pressures weapons makers to speed up production amid supply chain delays and skyrocketing demands for solid rocket motors needed to propel munitions and space architecture.

And as geopolitical tensions highlight near-term shortfalls, there’s a longer play Venus is hoping to make.

“Solid rocket motors are a 70-year-old technology,” Barron said. “We still need that technology to rebuild our capacity to produce those propulsion solutions. But we're at the margins of their performance.”

“We deliver performance that doubles the range relative to solid rocket motors for several classes of munitions. And then in space, which is a massively growing market…that can either quadruple your payload or massively reduce the cost to launch. And so being able to deliver what our future capabilities, not just supply shortfalls of current capabilities, is what makes our engine different. It's a fundamentally new, novel, transformative technology.”

Welcome

U.S.-NATO tensions remain, but there are still deals to be made. NATO leaders announced a flurry of new weapons deals Tuesday, estimated to be in the “tens of billions”—a demonstration of the increased defense spending President Donald Trump demanded last year. But while European countries have made strides to meet the 5 percent of GDP spending targets, there’s still work to be done, especially with the domestic industrial base, said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

“By next year, the alliance will have the capacity to produce around four million artillery shells annually. Almost twice as many as last year. That’s scale. So yes, we have made real progress. We are moving in the right direction,” Rutte said Tuesday in his keynote address at the NATO Summit Defense Industry Forum in Ankara, Türkiye.
“The money is there and much more is coming. But this cash must be put to work,” he said, noting that Russia puts about half of its national budget into defense.
Rutte ticked off figures: European allies and Canada increased defense spending by nearly 20 percent, or $139 billion more, from 2024 to 2025. That number is set to increase again for 2026 to more than $250 billion in additional spending year-over-year.
A new ‘front door’: NATO also released a consolidated demand signal, detailing the organization’s defense needs and opportunities for companies in a single portal.
“To meet the challenge, we need a transatlantic defence industrial revolution. The hum of machinery must become a roar,” Rutte said. “At the same time, industry across all of the nations represented here must be ready to take more risk.”

Making moves + other news

Anduril landed its first NATO contract—and it’s for the company’s AI platform, Lattice.
Fairbanks Morse Defense bought the Rolls-Royce Naval Handling facility in Ontario, which will become the company’s new Canadian headquarters.
Ships that were part of America’s birthday celebration in New York, called the International Naval Review 250, will depart Wednesday: USS Arlington (LPD 24); USS Nitze (DDG 94); USS Kearsarge (LHD 3); and USS Farragut (DDG 99), the Navy announced.

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NATO snubs Boeing, picks Saab to build alliance’s next radar plane

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 21:21:42 -0400

NATO allies plan to buy 10 of Saab’s GlobalEye aircraft as the alliance’s next-generation radar plane, snubbing Boeing and its E-7 Wedgetail offering, officials announced on Tuesday.

The alliance would replace its Boeing E-3 Airborne Warning and Control aircraft with the Swedish company’s offering, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said during the alliance’s Defence Industry Forum in Ankara, Turkey.

“For decades, NATO has relied on a fleet of E3 Airborne Warning and Control Systems, that have been our ‘eyes in the skies’. They have been deployed from Northern Norway to Southern Türkiye. They have served us well and continue to do so, but they are reaching the end of their lives,” Rutte said. “Today, several Allies are announcing the joint procurement of up to 10 SAAB GlobalEye aircraft to replace them.”

Saab CEO Micael Johansson told reporters at the summit that he estimated the deal would be valued around $4.5 billion and that deliveries could begin in 2030, depending on when the deal is signed.

Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, and Sweden are joining together to procure Saab’s aircraft, NATO said in a press release.

Their choice was influenced by the Pentagon’s decision—later reversed—to request no money for E-7s in the 2027 budget, one analyst said.

“When the U.S. ‘27 budget came out, and there was no money for E-7, and NATO looked at that and said, ‘Well, if the U.S. isn't buying it, why should we?,’ and they made an announcement right then that because the administration was not behind E-7 they did not expect to be favoring it.” said J.J. Gertler, an aerospace analyst for the Teal Group. “That was both a matter of timing when the administration decided actually to buy E-7 later, but also something of an own goal.”

That “leaning toward Saab” announcement was reported in April, just days after the Pentagon’s budget rollout showed no plans to fund the E-7 Wedgetail, by La Lettre, a French publication.

Boeing defended the E-7 aircraft in the wake of NATO’s formal announcement.

“Boeing remains fully committed to supporting the mission needs of NATO allies and partners. With an active production line, the E-7A is the most capable and mature airborne battle management, command and control system fielded today,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “The E-7 is a combat-proven platform already in the hands of NATO allies, delivering a family of systems approach, driven by unmatched interoperability with allied capabilities, and an industrial and sustainment framework ready to meet operational timelines.”

Saab said in a press release that the company has “not signed a contract or received an order related to the announcement.”

The GlobalEye uses a collection of sensors mounted on a Bombardier Global 6500 aircraft to detect a wide-range of threats in contested combat zones, including drones, ballistic and hypersonic missiles, according to the company’s website.

“We are confident that GlobalEye is the right choice for the Alliance, delivering proven capability, adaptability and long-term operational advantage. Today’s announcement clearly positions GlobalEye as the world-leading solution for advanced airborne early warning and control. We look forward to the next steps in the negotiations,” Johansson said in a statement.

In May, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reversed course and said the initial decision to omit E-7 funding reflected an outdated “austerity” and “divest-to-invest mindset.”

Last month, House appropriators backed the White House’s $1.5-billion budget amendment to fund E-7 Wedgetail development and pushed back on an attempt to raid the Navy’s airborne early warning account in the process.

NATO delivered its own Wedgetail whiplash last fall. In 2023, the alliance announced plans to buy six E-7s. Then, in July 2025, the Trump administration withdrew from the deal. Four months later, the Netherlands and other countries declared they would no longer seek to buy the aircraft, citing “strategic and financial” woes.

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Defense Business Brief: A radar-maker’s answer to the drone boom; the Army’s private capital appetite; One lawmaker’s caution for contractors

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:55:23 -0400

WASHINGTON—The counterdrone industry is booming. So to keep up with—and anticipate—demands, radar-maker Echodyne wants to make 30,000 units a year by early 2028.

The company, which is headquartered in Washington state, began building out a new facility near Seattle earlier this year and plans to have it up and running in July. The $40 million plant is expected to ultimately produce at least 30,000 radars a year—an approximate five-fold increase.

“Our orders are far exceeding our production capacity, which is why we've launched into this new manufacturing facility,” said Eben Frankenberg, the company’s CEO. “The whole counterdrone problem today is that you have this massive number of cheap lethal drones, and you need a massive number of cheap lethal counterdrone systems to defend against those. And so, people want high-performance radars that are cost effective and can be deployed at a big scale, so that's what we're doing.”

Echodyne’s radars can be found on all kinds of counter-UAS systems that can be affixed to combat vehicles, ships, and other devices across the defense industry.

Construction timelines, which slated the facility to be fully built by 2028, have been sped up by about a year to meet and keep pace with future demand, Frankenberg said. There’s a ribbon cutting ceremony for the new plant next week.

“We had a multi-year plan for the build up of the facility, and we're moving all that forward. So we originally had a build out in ‘26, ‘27, ‘28—and now we're doing all of [planned] ‘26 and ‘27 build out this year,” he said.

The facility will support about 200 employees and Echodyne’s operations business, including supply chain manufacturing.

By 2028, the facility should be producing tens of thousands of radars annually. And could be the “blueprint” for future plants.

“We're shipping lots of radars to Europe. We're also shipping radars to Southeast Asia, India,” Frankenberg said. “And we're seeing just demand increase globally. So, this factory, this new facility represents what we think we need from a capacity perspective in the coming few years. But the other nice thing is it gives us a blueprint to potentially open in future locations,” including internationally.

Welcome

The Army’s appetite for private capital. When asked (by me) if the service is considering public-private arrangements to build innovation centers or next-gen manufacturing facilities, Lynda Armer, the executive director of Army Contracting Command at Rock Island Arsenal said:

“Yes, that certainly would be an opportunity that the Army is interested in: companies coming in and building new capability within our [Organic Industrial Base] footprint, and then utilizing our workforce training, our workforce upskilling,” she told reporters following the Association of the U.S. Army’s acquisition and contracting event June 25.
“What we don't want is to be stuck in the 1940s. That's when most of our facilities were stood up, and they've been modernized to a small extent over time. In some cases, we might have new lines and new buildings, but we still have 1940s infrastructure that we're trying to modernize.”
Some context for the question: The Navy has inked similar arrangements near its Naval Surface Warfare Centers in Crane, Ind., and Indian Head, Md. The Pentagon’s industrial base policy chief has also suggested more private investment in the OIB.
“They don't have to go find green space and start from scratch. We have infrastructure there, but if they can add to that, modernize it, give us new capabilities and new training, that's a benefit for both sides,” Armer said. “It continues to grow our organic industrial base, and so we don't become stagnant, and we keep up with the speed at which our requirements and technology are changing.”

BONUS: The Army’s venture-capital style office FUZE is planning to release an annual report later this year, said FUZE’s private capital integrator, Lt. Col. Sam Spencer-Pittman.

The FUZE office gets about $750 million a year—merging existing Army funding lines, including about $420 million from SBIR/STTR and about $270 million for its Tech Maturation Program.
The goal: “Connect companies to capital,” Spencer-Pittman told reporters at the AUSA event. “We don't tell these private industry or the venture capital guys…[that] we want this office to work with this company. It's more, ‘hey, these companies are seeking capital. If this works for your investment portfolio or thesis, call Bill’…and see what works out.”
FUZE has only been around for about a year but is “on a glide path and moving fast,” Spencer-Pittman said.
An upcoming report is expected to detail what the office has achieved in its first year.

New Congress, new contract scrutiny? Midterms are around the corner, which means Congress could look very different in January. That could also mean more questions or probes around the Pentagon’s use of rapid acquisition tools, said Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va, who sits on the House Committee for Government Oversight.

“I'm asked a lot [about] what will next year look like if Democrats are in control of at least the House. And I say this to the contractors in my district every day: There will be very heavy scrutiny of the contracting practices in this administration—both in DOD [and] DHS, especially, and other agencies. And those companies that continue to do things by the book the way that they did before this administration, maybe they lost some business in the last couple years, but they're going to be happy that they continue to do things by the book,” Walkinshaw said, answering my question in an interview with the GovExec news team on Monday.
“Those companies that didn't…and the contracts they receive are going to face a lot of scrutiny.”
A related aside: Pentagon testing and evaluation officials raised concerns that military departments could use the middle-tier acquisition pathway to circumvent certain live-fire testing requirements, according to a Government Accountability Office study released Tuesday. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth slashed staff last year in the office of the director, operational test and evaluation, which oversees weapons testing. The GAO is studying the effects of the reorganization.

Making moves + other news

The Atlantic is diving into the second Trump administration’s use of private Signal chats— after Hegseth’s ‘war plans’ scandal.
Anduril is meshing its mobile command post with a portable Amazon data center, the companies announced Tuesday. If bought and used, that could mean more AI use and more ISR in environments where connectivity is sparse.
Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andressen joins the Pentagon’s policy advisory board. His firm a16z backs several contract-winning startups, including Anduril, Castelion, Hadrian, Saronic, Shield AI, Skydio, and SpaceX. Andressen joins Michael Pillsbury, who previously chaired the board in 2020.
The Pentagon surreptitiously hosted several up-and-coming munitions makers to talk about production, Breaking Defense reported.
Firefly Aerospace won a $144 million NASA contract and is nearing the final stages of launchpad construction at the SSC Space Esrange Space Center in Sweden. The first launch is expected in 2028.

Correction: Echodyne wants to complete its facility build out for increased production by early 2028.

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Anduril and Amazon’s mobile data center venture aims to bring edge computing to the frontlines

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 19:48:49 -0400

Amazon Web Services and Anduril are combining the tech giant’s on-site cloud computers and the defense contractor’s mobile data center to bring edge computing to the frontlines. Both have already been used during the Iran war.

Anduril’s containerized command and data center, Menace-I, can now be outfitted with Amazon Web Services’s Outpost, the two companies announced Tuesday. With two people, the mobile data center “can stand up in under 10 minutes and moves by truck, rail, airlift, or helicopter sling load,” the company said in a press release.

“Whether it's an intelligence analyst in the field or whether it's a flightline operator, someone who's literally trying to get information off of the system, the sensor, and making a meaningful decision about it. What's really different, and what we're seeing is this ruggedized edge,” said Liz Martin, AWS’ global defense managing director and general manager. “It takes very many shapes.”

During a panel at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, an Anduril company executive told reporters that Menace-I had been used during Operation Epic Fury and the containerized command center has been deployed with the Army, Air Force, Marines, and Navy. AWS Outpost has also been deployed in the region, but in protected structures, Martin said. Combining the two together would allow the U.S. military and other defense buyers to put cloud computing as close to the battlefield action as possible and cut down on the time it takes to transfer data in combat.

On Tuesday, AWS named the California-based contractor its “preferred edge provider” for defense customers.

“We're bringing that cloud capability, we're bringing it down to the edge, and then we're enabling you to run applications that may exist in the cloud down at the edge to provide data down at the edge, or to send things from the edge up to the cloud, where they can be analyzed,” said Tom Keane, Anduril’s senior vice president of engineering. “What we're doing is we're providing capabilities for commanders that today they either don't have or are simply too expensive and too difficult for them to practically field and use in real world.”

Anduril’s containerized command center was first launched in 2022. Last year, U.S. Marines strapped a Menace-I onto a CH-53K King Stallion helicopter for transport.

It’s not clear how survivable the shipping container data center would be on the battlefield. During Operation Epic Fury, six U.S. Army reservists were killed when a makeshift operations center fortified by concrete walls was hit in an Iranian attack.

“I think part of what we're seeing in the world right now is a desire to be distributing many systems, as opposed to a singular, highly resilient system,” Keane said. “The idea of distribution as a mechanism for fault tolerance, having many, is becoming increasingly important, is what we're hearing from our customers, as opposed to having a singular thing that is immensely and infinitely robust.”

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Lawmaker warns of administration’s ‘fetishization’ of Silicon Valley startups

Alexandra Kelley, Ross Wilkers, Edward Graham, and David DiMolfetta — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 10:15:00 -0400

Rep. James Walkinshaw has big plans for the federal government’s sprawling tech stack, including scrutinizing the contracting practices of the current administration.

In an extensive sit-down interview with Nextgov/FCW and other GovExec reporters, the Democratic congressman from Virginia said that he wants to help rebuild the federal government’s capacity after sweeping disruption carried out by the Department of Government Efficiency—from strengthening civil service protections and tech talent pipelines to tightening cybersecurity guardrails on AI and reviving oversight tools like the FITARA scorecard and FedRAMP.

“I’m starting to talk to my colleagues about a comprehensive and robust agenda to rebuild the capacity of the federal government, an American capacity agenda, for lack of a better term,” he said in the Monday interview.

“We’re obviously in this post-DOGE era, where, in my view, a lot of damage has been done, 300,000 federal workers lost,” he said, adding that many of the staff lost at offices across the federal enterprise were those experienced with technology and understood how their agencies worked.

His plan, he added, is focused around three pillars—talent, technology and delivery—that center on rebuilding a battered federal workforce, speeding secure AI and tech modernization, and pushing agencies to measure success by whether people actually receive services and mission tools on time, not just whether they satisfy oversight checklists.

Contractor oversight

Walkinshaw said that if Democrats take the House majority in this year’s midterms, there will be “heavy scrutiny of the contracting practices” of the current Trump administration. Contracts with the Defense and Homeland Security departments would fall under that purview, he said.

So too would any contractors who donated to the White House ballroom renovation and other ancillary projects pushed by the Trump administration, he added.

“Those companies that continued to do things by the book, the way that they did before this administration, maybe they lost some business in the last couple years, but they're going to be happy that they continued to do things by the book,” Walkinshaw said. “Those that played by the Trump rules … those companies and the contracts they received are going to face a lot of scrutiny.”

Watchdog groups and Democrats have raised questions of late about whether companies with federal business interests are helping bankroll Trump-backed projects while also receiving or seeking government work. The White House ballroom project has become a particular flashpoint, after several reports and analyses tied some donors to major federal contractors and raised concerns about donor anonymity, conflict-of-interest safeguards and the use of public funds.

On defense contracting, Walkinshaw also took aim at what he called the Trump administration’s “fetishization” of Silicon Valley firms, saying he fears the current White House has leaned too much into startup culture to solve defense tech problems that also require sustained oversight, procurement standards and basic IT management.

“I do worry that with this administration, especially, there might be too much of a fetishization of a certain kind of company, the Silicon Valley-based startup,” he said.

The comments reflect a broader debate amid the Trump 2.0 push to swiftly bring more commercial technology firms into national security work, particularly as both defense and civilian agencies look to buy software, AI tools and other evolving technologies more quickly.

Supporters have seen that shift as a necessary challenge to slow-moving acquisition systems and legacy prime contractors. Critics, however, warn that speed and startup culture are not substitutes for procurement safeguards, cybersecurity requirements, long-term maintenance and oversight of how those tools are actually used.

Cybersecurity

Walkinshaw noted that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency stands as a prime example of the Trump administration making sweeping cuts and then later having to reverse course. The agency’s workforce has been significantly cut over the past year under efficiency-driven efforts and other prevailing GOP misgivings about the cyberdefense shop.

CISA acting director Nick Andersen recently said the agency intends to hire around 330 people in the coming months. Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the cyber unit likely needs around 600 hires and that it might take a year to bring them on.

But the congressman argued restaffing will be more difficult than many anticipate.

“I don’t think that there’s a lot of high-level introspection at the highest levels of these agencies about the negative impacts,” he said. Staffing up at CISA again is a “very difficult thing to do after you’ve just attacked people, abused them, denigrated their service, and then said ‘we want you to want to come back.’”

Cybersecurity has long drawn bipartisan support in Washington, but CISA has become a recurring target of Republican scrutiny over its past work countering election-related disinformation. Since last year, Trump officials have sought to “refocus” the agency’s mission, arguing that CISA had strayed too far from its core mission set.

On other government cyber matters, Walkinshaw said he’s especially concerned about shadow IT — tech and AI tools used without management approval — inside federal agencies, and he plans to introduce amendments in upcoming appropriations measures that would address basic “blocking and tackling” cyberdefense, which he says is “even more important now in an advanced AI world.”

He is also planning amendments focused on event logging—digital records that show what happened on a system and when—to “try to get agencies to actually follow the law and log those cyber incidents when they occur.”

Walkinshaw, along with Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., introduced legislation on June 25 that would require the Department of Homeland Security to provide lawmakers with a report on identified gaps that prevent the agency from fully meeting event logging requirements.

FITARA scorecard

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., who died last year, was one of the original sponsors of the 2014 Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, or FITARA, meant to help the federal government better onboard and use new technologies. Walkinshaw previously spent over a decade working as the chief of staff for Connolly, and he was elected last September to finish the rest of Connolly’s term.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in collaboration with the Government Accountability Office, released its first FITARA scorecard in November 2015 to grade agencies’ tech modernization and oversight efforts on an A to F scale. Since then, the biannual scorecard has served as an oversight mechanism for many agencies, although the most recent iteration of the scorecard was released back in September 2024.

Walkinshaw said the committee’s current Republican leadership “has kind of walked away” from releasing the scorecard, citing the lack of hearings held by the Cybersecurity, Information Technology and Government Innovation Subcommittee panel, in particular. He attributed this to the GOP majority’s desire to avoid subpoena fights over multiple Trump-era controversies.

But that public grading system is important, Walkinshaw stressed, because “it’s necessary and valuable to have an outside forcing mechanism to push for change and innovation.”

The rapid pace of technological change, he said, means “there’s an opportunity to incorporate technologies that were not available three years ago or five years ago that could make many of our functions more effective and more efficient, but if it’s not done thoughtfully and intentionally, it could also go horribly, horribly wrong, and Congress has a huge stake in ensuring that we get it right.”

In addition to resuming the scorecard—something the congressman posited would likely happen if Democrats retake the House in the upcoming midterm elections—Walkinshaw said the current grading scale should be modernized to account for advances in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity threats.

“The question is obviously, ‘how do you develop those metrics in a way that’s objective?’ But I think that scorecard proved to be over time a good forcing mechanism to nudge agencies to modernize,” Walkinshaw said.

When it comes to further AI use across the federal government, Walkinshaw said a grade related to the adoption of the capabilities could also be helpful for better understanding if agencies are effectively leveraging the technologies and not locking themselves into potentially expensive programs, noting that it is “very hard to unwind after you’ve committed to it.”

FedRAMP modernization

Walkinshaw noted that the government’s cloud security assessment and authorization initiative—the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP—will need to be reauthorized next year. GSA is in the process of rolling out a FedRAMP 20x initiative to modernize the authorization process for cloud providers.

He said continuing the program is “100% necessary”—a process he expects to be bipartisan—and added that “if it’s not reauthorized, any administration could basically shut down the program, and then we go back to every cloud provider for every service for every agency starting their [authorization to operate] process from scratch.”

He similarly expressed concerns about the program’s long-term financial backing, pointing out that it is supported through the General Services Administration’s Federal Citizen Services Fund, which means “it’s basically what GSA decides, so it doesn’t really have stable funding.”

He also said he believes “there should be in statute stronger requirements for the FedRAMP office to engage with industry and with the public,” noting that “they do it right now but it’s been sporadic over the years.” And streamlining agency adoption of cloud services, he added, is another area where he believes the program can be tweaked for the better.

Walkinshaw noted that providers still need to receive an ATO from agencies after receiving FedRAMP authorization and said “those agencies need to retain some responsibility for what’s operating on their networks,” but added that “I’d like to explore ways to close that gap, because I still hear from businesses that feel like they’re redoing some of the work that they did during their FedRAMP certification when they’re going to get their ATO at their at their agency.”

AI legislation forecast

Despite Reps. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Lori Trahan, D-N.Y., releasing a discussion draft of AI legislation earlier this month that would, among other things, preempt state AI laws, Walkinshaw said that finalization of a national AI regulatory framework is unlikely until early next year.

“I don’t think you’ll see traction on any kind of large AI package before the election,” he said. “I think both sides are in a kind of ‘wait-and-see’ mode.”

Walkinshaw added that House Republicans are broadly happy to let the White House take the lead on developing and disseminating an AI regulatory framework, and that Democrats are not confident they can get a satisfactory bill passed at this time.

“In terms of big picture packages, it’s going to be next year,” he said. “Then the question will be, ‘If Democrats are in control of Congress, is there a compromise between what we develop––which will come out of our commission––and what the president will be willing to sign?’”

Among potential provisions that could make it into national AI regulation, he added, standards export controls placed on AI products could become a notable feature, given the federal government’s recent decision to restrict the release of certain Anthropic products, following conflict over the company’s decision to limit how its products could be used.

“Companies like Anthropic deserve to have some certainty as to what the process is going to be, so they can make investments, and the American people deserve some sense that there’s a process to ensure safety with respect to advanced models, so hopefully we’ll get there early next year,” Walkinshaw said.

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