Defense One - Business

Fast-flying Shahed drones spur new class of interceptors

Lauren C. Williams — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 07:00:00 -0400

WASHINGTON—A surge in Russia’s use of jet-powered Shahed drones in Ukraine has spurred the need for super fast interceptors to defeat them. And it’s a problem U.S.-based dronemaker Powerus hopes to solve.

“We constantly need to move ahead of the threat. The next threat that we see to get in front of is the jet-powered Shahed drones,” Brett Velicovich, cofounder and president of the dronemaker Powerus, told Defense One. “Jet-powered Shaheds are very difficult to defeat because of how fast they are, and so to defeat those, we need jet-powered interceptors. So that is one of the things that we're looking at…to be able to fly an interceptor at 600 kilometers per hour, 700 kilometers per hour. That's going to require a lot more automation. It's going to require a lot more R&D.”

Newer versions of Shahed drones propelled by jet engines have increasingly been appearing on the Russian-Ukrainian battlefield in recent months, pushing Ukraine to fortify its air defenses. Those fast flying Shaheds require interceptors that can match those speeds—around 370 mph, or 600 kilometers per hour. Other versions of the Shahed fly just over 100 mph. There’s also concern that other security risks could crop up as other nations adopt the newer Shaheds.

Powerus is just about a year old and has former Pentagon and first Trump administration officials on its board.

Velicovich doesn’t have a target date for developing its rocket or jet-powered interceptor, but the goal is to move quickly.

“I spend a lot of time in Ukraine. There's a good chance that by the end of this year, the majority of Russian drones that are sent into downtown Kyiv will be jet-powered,” he said, “so we really need to move at that timeline.”

But churning out rocket- or jet-propelled interceptors at the same rate as the upgraded Shahed drones can be costly and difficult.

“They can build these things for $20,000-$30,000, and they can turn them out in massive, massive quantities. And so, to do that in an interceptor is very difficult,” Velicovich said. “But the technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, so we'll find a solution for that I think pretty soon. The entire industry is racing to figure that out.”

Powerus, which recently went public, has been busy in recent months.

The Rock Hill, S.C.-based company unveiled its fully autonomous interceptor, Guardian 3, during the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference here. The anti-drone tech is the latest addition to a family of interceptors, including the semiautonomous Guardian 2 and remotely piloted Guardian 1.

“Guardian 3 takes that final terminal phase of a manual operator out of the loop, and it is fully automated, similar to how you might fire a Patriot missile. The difference between us and the Patriot missiles is that…you can build these Guardian 3 systems in the thousands very easily,” Velicovich said.

The company aims to produce 5,000 interceptors per month by November, with an ultimate goal of being able to deliver 10 times that.

“We want to get to that point where it's just massive, massive scale because these things are a lot like artillery rounds, and we need to build them like artillery rounds. So we need more companies out there that have the industrial capacity…to turn these things out,” he said.

Also at the conference, Powerus signed a deal with Parsons on the showroom floor to pair its radar systems with Guardian interceptors to detect oncoming drone threats.

Earlier this year, the Air Force tapped Powerus in an $82 million deal for counterdrone systems, which includes the Guardian family of interceptors. The company has also branched out to international buyers, striking an unspecified deal with the Pakistan army for unmanned aerial systems.

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Defense Business Brief: Wrapping up AUSA

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:31:35 -0400

WASHINGTON—Six anti-war protestors disrupted an autonomous warfare discussion featuring Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth and the military service secretaries Wednesday at the Army’s annual conference. By the time the third protester shouted denouncements of the U.S.-Iran war, some members of the audience had begun chanting “USA, USA.”

The politically charged atmosphere isn’t typical at the show. But this year, it served as a contrast for what appeared to be a more prominent international presence than previous years—from the number of international companies represented to the size of the displays.

Ukrainian companies made their debut with a massive tent just two blocks from the convention center. Overall, there were 165 international companies and nine international pavilions on the showroom floor, representing Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Korea, and Norway, the Association of the U.S. Army, or AUSA, told Defense One.

The roughly 2,000-member international delegation was about average, representing 92 countries—including 27 army chiefs, 14 sergeants major of the Army, 17 ambassadors, and two ministers of defense, according to AUSA.

But the ambassador count this year was also higher, AUSA said. That could be an indication that while political tensions rise, there’s still an appetite for diplomacy—and foreign military sales.

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!

1:1 with Mike Wior, CEO + co-founder of Allen Control Systems. ACS was one of 10 companies to land a counterdrone IDIQ contract with the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force-401 last month, and things haven’t slowed down since. The company makes a robotic turret, called Bullfrog, that can turn machine guns into a counterdrone weapon using AI and autonomy.

“We just got our $500 million IDIQ. We are, obviously, working on getting funds into that as quickly as we can…getting to that point where we can prove on the battlefield, yes this works, and we should be replicating this across all the different services that need this type of capability,” Wior told Defense One during a break from the bustling AUSA conference showfloor.
But the lack of a budget could stymie progress the Pentagon is trying to make in cultivating a tech-forward industrial base, he said.
“Is the military going to be able to sustain this new ecosystem of defense tech companies? Can companies survive in this environment? What do they need to survive in this environment…when the military ultimately doesn't have full control over their own budgets?” he said. “It's a challenging environment as a startup.”
But ACS is still pushing forward with a new facility.
“We just opened a 200,000 square foot facility in North Austin” with the goal of increasing production capacity beyond 50 turrets a month once the orders come in, Wior said.
“Whenever the orders come in, we start to fill out that IDIQ, and we can expand pretty quickly…by leveraging commercial off-the-shelf components, we have a lot of flexibility there, and then it's just a matter of expanding the workforce.”
And they’re eyeing international deals.
“We want to see more of an international economy for defense products…and we want to make our technologies available to other countries. Because that's needed, I think, in this environment where if it's just the United States government and they have a two-year appropriations problem, you might lose some really, really great technologies to attrition—just the ability to stay around long enough and participate.”

Up, up, and away. The Army Space and Missile Defense Agency wants “a family of stratospheric systems,” such as high-altitude balloons, in a range of platform sizes that can provide “space-like capabilities” closer to Earth, Col. Joseph Mroszczyk, who leads the agency’s transformation integration directorate for space superiority, told reporters Wednesday.

“From about 60,000 feet to 100,000 feet is what we focus on in the stratosphere. That operational space allows some persistence and broad coverage in an area where you can deliver space-like capabilities in terms of payloads” while also being able to “take advantage of winds that are pushing you where you want to go already…to get either launched effects or other types of payloads for sensing and communications.”
The agency hopes to start multiple experiments in the coming year.

Bonus: The agency is also “working on a virtual space training environment,” Mroszczyk said. “We're building the virtual space layer to be able to visualize and understand how space effects can play in modern operations.”

Biodefense prep. The Army wants biothreats to be a routine feature in major military exercises, as outlined in its updated biodefense strategy released last month.

Turning that doctrine into actual readiness requires incorporating biothreats into “big” military exercises where it's “an operational constraint, and the whole of staff has to come to bear against it,” Alison Tamasi, the Army Nuclear and CWMD Agency’s chief of survivability and effects analysis division, told reporters Monday.
“Our next target on the wall is looking toward some of those routine things like [Army warfighter exercises] where we can start to put bio defense in as one of the injects.”
Context: These can be tabletop exercises, typically at the corps level or lower, where commanders and subject-matter experts map out responses to proposed scenarios, such as a viral outbreak at a port.

Making moves + other news

Anduril will let employees sell shares through a tender offer, bringing the company’s value to about $90 billion.
BAE Systems now has two new counterdrone systems: a multi-domain artillery cannon system and high-power microwave.
Leonardo DRS landed a $500 million IDIQ contract with the Pentagon’s counterdrone task force, JIATF-401, for tactical expeditionary sensing tech.
Merlin Aerospace completed the first flight test of its new autonomous pilot, which is being designed to aid in missions like “maritime search and patrol,” the company announced on social media.
The Pentagon signed an agreement with the Small Business Administration to increase access to strategic capital to help “defense-critical manufacturers, suppliers, and innovators.” In the deal, the Pentagon will identify companies that need financing through its Business Operators for National Defense (BOND) initiative and refer potential candidates to SBA.

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Shield AI expects to fly its unmanned fighter jet within months

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:15:33 -0400

Shield AI expects to start flying its X-BAT prototype unmanned fighter jet by year’s end—and is getting $150 million from the Navy to keep developing it, officials said.

“We've been building two prototype vehicles—they're full scale. The first one will be done in the next couple of weeks here,” said Armor Harris, Shield AI’s senior vice president of aircraft. “And then we'll be getting into flight testing at the end of this year…going straight to the vertical takeoff and landing tests as the final de-risk of the [technology].”

Shield AI also secured $150 million from the Navy to continue developing the X-BAT, a modification to an other transaction agreement. The venture-capital-backed company promised to match the investment with its own funds. That brings total planned development spending on the project, which also received $50 million from the Navy and the Defense Innovation Unit in August and a dollar match from Shield, to $400 million.

“We really developed X-BAT in collaboration with NAVAIR and NAWCAD, which is the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division—the experts for naval aviation,” Harris said. “The Navy has been funding the development through the newly created Rapid Capability Cell. So there was an initial $50 million investment earlier this year. This is basically the next round of investment, which is $150 million to continue the development of the platform.”

The company also recently named two sites for production and flight testing of the autonomous jet.

Under the X-BAT contract, the Navy money will be released to Shield AI as it meets developmental milestones.

“There will be a follow-on phase in the future if Shield AI and X-BAT continue to perform well—all leading up to fielding an early operational capability in about 2029. So basically, the way that the OTA is structured is that there's milestone-based payments for Shield achieving specific objectives along the way,” Harris said.

The company also aims to export the aircraft as well as sell it to the Pentagon.

“There's been a tremendous amount of international interest in X-BAT because of its multi-role capabilities, its ability to be runway independent, and basically what's called the cost-per effect,” he said. Particularly interested countries are “looking to augment F-35 and F-16 capabilities” and those “that don't necessarily have the infrastructure and the size of an air force needed to operate a jet like the F-35.”

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Defense Business Brief: 1:1 with Gabe Camarillo; Tariff ripple effects?, and more

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 04:55:32 -0400

Peraton wants to bring AI-fueled project management to the Pentagon and beyond—while also changing the perception that it’s just an IT company.

It’s true the company has “a rich history of doing IT services and IT modernization across

government customers,” Gabe Camarillo, the company’s new defense sector president, told Defense One.

But Peraton is also big on defense prototyping and engineering: “We do Tomahawk theater mission planning support for the Navy,” he said, plus “modeling and simulation for Aegis. Also, sonar analysis and acoustic analysis for the Navy at Carderock. And then we also provide engineering support to some Army programs, like, for example, those that do aircraft survivability equipment.”

And those are areas ripe for growth, he said.

“We're looking to expand that footprint across the department, particularly at a time where new capabilities allow you to reduce risk in modernization programs, identify technical risks on system designs…achieve test and evaluation much more quickly. And bring that experience to bear to our customers to help them modernize at the pace they want to,” Camarillo said.

The former Army undersecretary stepped into the role this summer and said his overall vision is for Peraton to become the “go-to provider to manage and modernize enterprise IT across the department” which includes using AI to manage networks effectively.

And part of the vision is to bring what Peraton’s been doing with the $1.5 billion contract to overhaul the Federal Aviation Administration’s aging air traffic control system to other government customers.

“One of the key aspects of that work that we're doing for the FAA is introducing AI-enabled program management, where it gives the leadership of the agency much better insight into how the program can be executed,” Camarillo said, adding that AI can spot cyber risks and map out an organization’s modernization plan.

“That kind of applied AI usage…[can] enable not just an end user to ask queries of an AI tool, but to really allow an enterprise to use the tool effectively for its own modernization. That’s where I think there's some secret sauce that Peraton has brought to the table, and we're looking to expand that across all of our customer sets, whether it's defense and non-defense.”

Welcome

On a waterfront near Baltimore during a shipbuilding announcement Tuesday, President Donald Trump brought up tariffs, which he now calls his “fourth” or “fifth favorite word.” The comments weren’t new, but they were a reminder of simmering concerns about how U.S. trade relations, particularly with close allies, could affect national security.

“Our drug industry is coming back. Our car industry is coming back. They're leaving Canada. They're leaving Mexico. They're leaving Japan, Germany, South Korea. We're building car plants,” he said. “It's all because of my favorite word, my fourth favorite…tariff,” the president said. (Context: There are multiple reports that U.S. tariffs on imported goods, such as automobiles from Canada, create uncertainty and the U.S. trade deficit is worsening.)
The president’s comments reminded me of exchanges last week during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Golden Dome, in which lawmakers on both sides of the aisle raised concerns that the escalating U.S. trade war with Canada could spill into defense.
“They're a good ally. They're a good neighbor. They are modernizing NORAD right now…It's my understanding, though, that an agreement hasn't been reached with Canada yet on Golden Dome,” Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, said during the hearing last week. “I think as we progress along there, my hope would be that we can continue to have a good working relationship there to really protect both of our countries.”

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., agreed, saying tensions between the neighboring allies have necessitated multiple “peacekeeping visits to Ottawa” and that it’s “unrealistic to expect that you can treat an ally badly in one domain, on the economy, but expect…to work cooperatively in terms of our defense.”
Some background: The senators’ concerns echo those circulating since last year when the White House issued hefty tariffs on Canada and threatened to make the sovereign nation the 51st state. Those qualms have resurfaced as U.S.-Canada trade talks faltered in August and as a new batch of tariffs—and retaliatory tariffs—took hold this week. On the defense side, Canada has been reviewing its decision to buy 16 F-35As for months. And even if the trade war is resolved, there’s concern about an overall cooling in U.S.-Canada relations.

Making moves + other news

General Dynamics President Danny Deep will take over as the company’s next CEO in 2027. CEO Phebe Novakovic will become executive chairman of the company’s board of directors.
Peraton hired two more former Army officials as vice presidents: Jennifer Swanson and Danielle Moyer.
The Army inked a $9.5 million deal to expand use of Reveal Technology’s intelligence platform Farsight with the service’s Nett Warrior system.
Ursa Major added ex-Pentagon official David Rader as its chief strategy officer.
ACMI, which builds defense production hubs, added Limitless Aeronautics to its Indiana campus.
Kaizen, the company that helped build the Pentagon’s counterdrone marketplace, landed a $49 million IDIQ deal for $43 million of classified work for the Army.
Auterion debuted a universal UAS launcher.
Tiberius Aerospace snagged a $500 million deal to build and distribute its Sceptre precision-guided missile as part of a U.S.-U.K. collaboration.

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Anduril wades into traditional shipbuilding arena with major submarine play

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 04:41:46 -0400

SPARROWS POINT, Md.—Defense tech company Anduril aims to speed up Virginia-class submarine production by building components, such as torpedo tubes, at a future site outside the nation’s capital by 2030.

The new facility, to be called Arsenal-2, will be the company’s second manufacturing plant and is part of a $6.6 billion effort funded by Anduril, at $3.7 billion, and the U.S. Navy through a $2.9 billion contract award. That contract tasks Anduril with building “critical components and large scale assemblies of the Virginia-class” to be delivered to General Dynamics Electric Boat in Connecticut, and HII Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, which are the prime contractors on the Navy’s submarine programs, according to the company’s announcement.

Flanked by two of Anduril’s Dive-XL vessels, President Donald Trump spoke to a mostly Navy audience Tuesday on a range of topics, from Venezuela to tariffs, and even gave a quick endorsement of subsea autonomous vessels before he announced the U.S. government’s stake in the new shipyard.

“The ultimate proof of our commitment to ensuring the shipyard's enduring success: American taxpayers will receive a 40 percent stake in the new shipyard. We get 40 percent,” Trump said, without providing more details.

That stake is in a new Anduril subsidiary created to operate the future shipyard. The government is not taking an equity stake in Anduril, the company said.

Additional specifics on the deal were not immediately available.

Submarines are “our oceans' apex predators” that are needed “now more than ever” for deterrence, Vice Adm. Robert Gaucher, who oversees the Navy’s submarine construction, said during the event at Tradepoint Atlantic near Baltimore. But he also acknowledged the nation’s lack of shipbuilding capacity.

“As other nations challenge the rules-based order that keeps our oceans free and open, we need the deterrence and denial of our submarines now more than ever,” he said. “At the same time, we must reckon with the fact that we have lost industrial capacity. Today, we start to rebuild it.”

The shipyard is being designed with reconfigurable production lines and will be underpinned by Anduril’s ArsenalOS industrial software platform.

“What we're really focused on here is being able to build an entire shipyard with a software and digital foundation. So that covers everything from how the factory is laid out, how work moves through the factory in a logical way, how all of that work is managed,” Chris Brose, Anduril’s president and chief strategy officer, told reporters.

That means “automating things that you can automate, keeping digital records of things like precision welding, so that you have traceability back to all the work that was done and an ability to understand, in very precise detail, for the purposes of certification and other types of kind of safety critical measures, what was done at what point all along the way, and having that traceability throughout the entire yard.”

The idea, he said, is for software to make it easier for new or inexperienced shipbuilders to perform tasks because they “can come in with a modicum of training enabled by technology—with digital designs, technical augmentation—and really understand how they can [be] contributing much, much faster.”

The company plans to break ground by early 2027 on Arsenal-2, which will span approximately 40 football fields on nearly 200 acres just outside of Baltimore. Initial operations are slated to begin by 2030.

The Navy contract also ties payments to “demonstrated production outcomes,” Anduril said in its news release.

Having a non-traditional defense company like Anduril building submarine components is an example of the Navy’s strategy to increase shipbuilding throughput by distributing the workload across multiple suppliers in the industrial base.

“Today, roughly 10 percent of shipbuilding work is performed at distributed sites. Our goal is 50 percent. New hulls will prioritize modular, digital designs that enable distributed shipbuilding across multiple yards and suppliers,” the Navy wrote in its 2026 shipbuilding plan earlier this year.

The move also deepens the Pentagon’s relationship with the company, which has several contracts across the military, and its leaders. Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named Anduril’s founder, Palmer Luckey, as part of an advising committee for Project Meridian, which will analyze future warfare needs.

Once operational, Anduril’s Baltimore plant is expected to increase overall Navy submarine production by 15 percent or about 9 million production hours per year. That should then translate into more ships produced through the Newport News and Electric Boat shipyards, Gaucher said: “Situated geographically between these two prime shipyards and connected to them by a network of sea, rail, and road, Arsenal-2 will take on the heavy component manufacturing.”

The facility will also build “components our prime shipyards need today, like precision torpedo tubes and impulse tanks,” he said, eventually “moving on to complex rafted module assemblies.”

The company also plans to eventually build sections of the ship’s hull.

Tuesday’s audience included about 100 sailors, and 200 midshipmen bused an hour from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao and Hegseth also spoke at the event.

The USS Billings, which was recently deployed in the Caribbean, served as a prominent backdrop to the stage. Sailors aboard the Freedom-class littoral combat ship could be seen standing at attention during the president’s address.

But many high-level Maryland officials, including Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, were absent from the hourslong event. Moore apparently skipped the event after being denied a speaking slot. Four Baltimore Ravens football players attended and did not speak, but were asked to stand as part of a special shoutout during the president’s remarks.

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Defense Business Brief: End-of-fiscal-year advice for founders; Navy drone boats; Powerus to go public

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:21:03 -0400

WASHINGTON—The Pentagon’s comptroller has a bit of advice for tech makers and founders who want to do business with the military: Make tech that troops like, find out who can buy it for them, and hire someone who knows how things work. .

“Having the users like your products is incredibly necessary. That's a given. But it's the program offices and the [portfolio acquisition executives, or] PAEs who really have the power to make you successful,” Jules Hurst, the Defense Department’s chief financial officer, said at Y Combinator’s Startup Industrial Base event Wednesday. “You have to provide the solution to them. Again, they’ve made their budget. They made it a year and a half ago. They've made a plan to execute that budget. So anything you're bringing in is, at times, disruptive to them if they have an established program. So you've got to figure out how you can fit in.”

Fitting in could mean being a subcontractor for an existing program or helping program managers “shape requirements for a future capability,” but it has to be more than just a good idea, he said.

“You've got to fit into the cycle—and I know that's not what a lot of you want to hear. And we're working on changing that by doing acquisition reform, but it's still the case in a lot of programs across the department,” Hurst said.

Hiring someone familiar with doing business with the government “will help you immensely,” he said, as will finding the right Defense Department program offices.

“Shop for the program offices and program managers that are really interested in change, and you align yourself with that person and you start to help try to solve their problems with your team. If you find the right program office or program manager, they can do immense good for you. They can open up lots of opportunities across the department. They can introduce you to people, even if you're not a good fit for their program. So part of it is also personality shopping and finding somebody who really wants to make change and isn’t fixated on just compliance.”

And once in the door, companies must be able to make the tech in large quantities.

“The best thing is to show that you can make stuff. A lot of startups right now, sometimes they're paper deep—and that's kind of a risky bet for the government. Not that we shouldn't take it, right? Because sometimes our alternative is a company that does manufacture things, but doesn't produce in the timetable we want, or the capabilities we need, or the cost schedule we want,” Hurst said.

“So again, my best advice to you is: show that you can manufacture things. And if you are not manufacturing things, hire people who have experience manufacturing things, so you can show the government that you're bringing on the talent necessary to scale your product and capability if they decide to buy it.”

Welcome

USVs wading in. The Navy will buy 30 medium-sized unmanned surface vessels at about $40 million each from three companies: Galliano Marine Services, HII, and Saronic. Each company will build 10, the first of which are expected to be delivered in the last quarter of 2027.

A little more: Six out of seven companies successfully completed sea trials for phase one of the Navy’s MUSV program. The three that didn’t get production contracts but had successful trials—Leidos, PacMar Technologies, and Sea Machines—“will automatically transfer into the marketplace and be eligible as part of phase two,” which will have broader requirements, Christopher Miller, the Navy’s acting direct reporting portfolio manager for robotic and autonomous systems, told reporters. Birdon participated in the trials and did not meet the program requirements but has a “viable path” to joining the drone marketplace in the future, he said.
Pulling up: The MUSV program has been through a lot of changes in the last year (including a lawsuit.) But the more interesting part for me is what could come out of phase two, where other services, like the Army, can share requirements they have. This could have big implications for the Indo-Pacom region, and is something USARPAC commander Gen. Ronald Clark highlighted earlier this year.
- “The Army has a mission, and they actually operate a number of ships. And I think there's a great opportunity here…and we're just trying to make sure everybody sees the state of the market in terms of the capability, what the performance is. And then we'll obviously work closely on the requirements,” Miller told reporters. “But I'm excited about that because I do think there's opportunity for a close collaboration and partnering with the other services as they think about their future programs.”
- Phase 2 is expected to start testing evaluations as early as Nov. 16 and continue over the next five years.
Related tangent: Defense tech darling Saronic broke ground on its much-anticipated Port Alpha facility in Brownsville, Texas, today. Vice President JD Vance attended the event. Also, earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the company’s Austin facility, praising the company’s USVs for aiding in the rescue of downed Apache pilots.

Making moves + other news

Michael Brasseur joined Booz Allen Hamilton as an executive vice president. Brasseur was previously Saab, Inc.’s chief strategy officer and led the Navy’s Task Force 59.
Dronemaker Powerus is expected to go public Oct. 1 as it finalizes its merger with Aureus Greenway Holdings, a publicly traded company on NASDAQ. The new company name will be Powerus Corporation.
The FBI shut down an investigation into defense contractors’ alleged bribes to lawmakers, ProPublica reports.
Time is the real constraint the defense industrial base has to contend with, Seurat Technologies’ CEO James Demuth writes in Defense One.
Boeing snags a multibillion-dollar deal to build the Navy’s next generation fighter, F/A-XX.
The Navy partially accepted the future USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier.
SpaceX launched a really big rocket and ended the flight test early.

One last thing: Happy New Fiscal Year’s Eve to all who celebrate! Out with the old and in with the new—err, continuing resolution.

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Army awards counterdrone contracts worth more than $4B

Lauren C. Williams — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:10:47 -0400

Military drone and counterdrone demand is booming amid a rush to spend funds before the end of the fiscal year—but the Pentagon’s drone marketplace is making it a little easier, defense officials said.

“These contracts are available to everybody. And so what we've seen across the department is a surge of end-of-year requests for procurement,” Brig. Gen. Matthew Ross, who leads the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401, told reporters Tuesday. “End-of-year spending is nothing new inside of the department, but when you have an available contract vehicle, it makes it really easy to execute. And so, we've seen that from across the services.”

The Army issued 10 indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts Tuesday with a total ceiling of $4.15 billion for systems to disable or destroy unmanned aerial drones, including command-and-control systems, sensors, and weapons.

Seven companies received $500 million awards: Allen Control Systems, Digital Force Technologies, DroneShield, L3Harris WESCAM, Napatree Technology, RADA Technologies, and SRC.

Echodyne and PVP Advanced EO Systems received $250 million contracts, and SmartShooter received a $150 million contract. Only about $50 million was obligated at the time of award, the Army said.

But there’s room for more—up to $7 billion.

"As of today we have awarded over $5 billion, which includes previous contracts with [Aerovironment] and CACI, these 10 new IDIQs and others that we expect to sign before the end of next month. The $7 billion ceiling is in full effect today, and additional contracts will be pursued to get us to that point," Col. Tony Lindh, JIATF-401’s lead for rapid acquisitions, told reporters.

The new enterprise contracts reflect a new way of doing business for the Army, providing buyers more flexibility over time.

“These platforms are software-defined, hardware-enabled systems…so we have to be able to partner with industry and then hold them accountable over time,” said Ross, JIATF 401’s director.

The Army’s unmanned aerial systems marketplace has done about $800 million in transactions since it opened earlier this year, and the expectation is for counterdrone demand to follow a similar path—especially with allies and partners, said Brent Ingraham, who leads Army acquisitions.

“About 10 days ago, Australia successfully procured, in this case, it was a UAS off the drones.mil marketplace,” Ingraham told reporters. “We still have to use the [foreign military sales] process as we go through this marketplace. But…we've automated the tools on the back end.”

That means it now takes days from request to purchase instead of months or longer when an ally or partner nation wants to buy a system the U.S. has.

“When they see the U.S. military buying certain products, they're all in,” Ingraham said. “And so this is a way to share those technologies, share what we're doing,” and help smaller businesses “scale.”

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Treat operational feedback as a strategic resource, new paper argues

Jennifer Hlad — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:56:43 -0400

As the Pentagon overhauls its acquisition system, it should take lessons from recent and ongoing wars, a new report argues.

From Israel, the U.S. should learn that “operational feedback should be treated as a strategic resource.” writes Barak Seener, an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, in a report released Monday. And from Ukraine, the U.S. can learn “the strategic value of competition, decentralization, and commercial innovation.”

Additionally, Seener writes, “software-defined warfare requires software-defined acquisition.” In the future, acquisition models should “treat software as a continuously developing capability, rather than a completed product.”

These changes and more are necessary, he writes, because: “Future military advantage will belong to organizations that can learn, adapt, and integrate faster than their adversaries.”

Acknowledging the reforms the Pentagon began in 2025, Seener writes that the main challenge facing the American defense acquisition process “is not simply one of speed. It is the ability to align authority, responsibility, and operational outcomes within a single decision-making structure.”

Introducing portfolio acquisition executives is a good step, he writes, but “the effectiveness of the reform will ultimately depend upon the degree to which portfolio managers are able to exercise genuine authority over requirements, resources, capability trade-offs and program termination.”

In an interview, Seener pointed to the ways militiaries are using adaptation to outflank exquisite weaponry.

“We used to think that you needed very expensive platforms that took a decade to create, like the F-35, to create strategic impact on the battlefield,” he said. “But look what Ukraine is doing in Russia. Look what the Houthis are doing, just by deploying mass.”

“Technology is evolving much faster than traditional defense acquisition timelines,” he said, “so expensive platforms that take years to develop can leave capabilities outdated by a rapidly changing battlefield landscape before they are fielded.”

Instead of developing bespoke technologies from scratch, “the Pentagon can increase its flexibility by tapping into technologies already developed by the commercial sector—particularly AI, software, cloud computing, autonomy, sensors, and data analytics,” he said.

The need for further reform is clear, Seener said, when you look at how existing systems “have failed to make a strategic impact in Iran.

“You know, in the first couple of days, America and Israel together were able to decapitate the regime, eliminate their command and control, with this rapid tempo, this high velocity of strikes against a huge number of targets, which was unprecedented. And yet it made no strategic impact. Everybody was dazzled; they were awe-inspired at the impact it made…but look, the regime remains intact. Their missile capability remains intact. So this operational wowing effect that it has is not the same as having the strategic impact.”

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Defense Business Brief: Here comes the quantum boom; GDIT’s perspective; and Sec. 889

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 06:15:00 -0400

The benefits of quantum technology could hit the mainstream sooner than you think—at least that’s what one company is aiming for.

“We’re actually really hoping in the next year or two [to] release these as products that people can buy and integrate into their cybersecurity protocols,” said Mehdi Namazi, co-founder and chief science officer of the quantum networking company Qunnect. But the products aren’t “that futuristic.”

Quantum is usually discussed as being able to one day break encryption and help discover new drugs. But Qunnect is betting that commercial quantum technologies for telecommunications networks could be ready sooner rather than later, according to newly released research.

Several focus on authentication, including a quantum position verification process that allows you to verify the position and time of a transaction, providing a physical receipt, Namazi told Defense One ahead of the Quantum World Congress event outside of Washington, D.C.

That could unveil the true source of a phishing call that is pretending to be your bank, for example.

Another example is quantum channel protection, where “entanglement networks can supplement post-quantum encryption to perfectly protect and monitor the communication networks to make sure no one is eavesdropping, no one is harvesting the data,” he said. It also protects against redirecting traffic on the network.

Qunnect counts In-Q-Tel, an investment firm focused on intelligence and national security needs, as one of its backers.

Background: DARPA has previously explored entanglement networks through its Quantum Augmented Networks effort, but has recently become more vocal about it. Following a White House executive order, the Pentagon released its quantum strategy, which focuses on network modernization, such as integrating secure commercial products and using quantum-resistant devices. It also named 2030 as the deadline for all Pentagon systems to support post-quantum cryptography.

That method of using entangled photons or particles, known as quantum entanglement, can also aid in precise time synchronization, which could be used for future telecommunications networks, including 6G. Precision would drill down to one trillionth of a second, “which you usually need for financial transactions, defensive systems—places that you really, really care about the security and the accuracy of your network,” Namazi said.

But there are challenges, particularly in making sure the technology is compatible with existing telecommunications infrastructure.

“These are hardware-based technologies. So, as much as we build everything to be compatible with the telecommunications infrastructure—which they are—this still means that you do need to go and add devices to different locations,” Namazi said. “And when it [comes] to devices that you use for your cybersecurity, you usually want them to be manufactured [domestically]…in very large quantities, in form factors that make sense. That's definitely still a challenge.”

Welcome

Bigs v. littles: quantum edition. Last week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Amy Gilliland, president of GDIT, onstage at NDIA’s Women in Defense conference. When I asked her how GDIT was navigating a changing dense industrial base with startups getting more interest, in some cases, than primes, she said: “It is our job to go out and find these companies and to show them how we can bring them to the mission.”

Gilliland, who received a “Service to the Flag” award at the event, named the quantum company IonQ as an example.
“These are companies with great ideas. A lot of times they have no certification or accreditation, but they have really great ideas,” she said. “They have a lab at the University of Maryland…They have a big clock in there that’s ticking down to when they think Q-Day is,” the day quantum technology would be able to crack the encryption protecting some of the world’s most secure systems.
“They’re making great progress. And it is our job to bring the big brains that are in this quantum company to bear on programs.”
That includes an intelligence contract in which GDIT is using quantum computing to look through imagery and “detect the tiniest of changes…so we can see what the enemy is doing in ways that conventional computers can’t today,” she said.

Remember the Huawei ban? The Pentagon and General Services developed processes and tools to comply with Section 889 of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, including a search function for contracting officers to find out how companies “represent their compliance,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in a report released Tuesday. But they don’t routinely share those insights with the rest of the federal government.

“GSA and DOD do not broadly share their insights from implementing Section 889 prohibitions with other government agencies,” the report states. “For example, based on its experience with Section 889 prohibitions, GSA has plans to expand its use of customs data to identify the origin of goods, which GAO previously reported is difficult to do. By sharing information about their experience with current prohibitions, GSA and DOD could help other agencies address additional upcoming statutory prohibitions, such as on semiconductors. Sharing information could also help improve compliance.”
The GAO issued four recommendations, two for DOD: to share “subsidiary and affiliate information it collects with relevant federal agencies,” including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; and coordinate with federal agencies on Sec. 889 implementation.

Making moves + other news

AEVEX has a new jet-powered drone called Scepter.
Holland & Knight added Ike Blanton to its national security team. He previously led global investment and economic security out of the Pentagon’s acquisition and sustainment office.
John Roche, Accenture’s managing director for defense, joined the Professional Services Council’s board.
The Space Force awarded Impulse Space a $28 million contract for space domain awareness.
BAE Systems delivered two prototype combat vehicles to the Army. The “Infantry Fighting Vehicles” are based on the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle chassis and are designed to combat drone threats.
The Special Competitive Studies Project released its tech scorecard on biotechnology and the U.S. competition with China.

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Defense Business Brief: Dispatch from AFA’s Air, Space, & Cyber 2026

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:58:47 -0400

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—The Air Force Test Center is prepared to keep up with the Pentagon’s calls to buy, develop, test, and field technology quickly—but safety remains the top priority, the center’s commander said.

“We always want to proceed safely forward. The work that we do, as I've noted, is, can be dangerous. So we don't want to take risks that are unnecessary and unsafe. So that's always something that we're on the lookout for,” Brig. Gen. Mark Massaro, who leads the Air Force Test Center, told reporters during this week’s Air, Space & Cyber conference hosted by the Air and Space Forces Association.

Some context: Massaro’s comments come just three months after eight airmen died during a test flight of Boeing’s B-52 Stratofortress at Edwards Air Force Base in California. They also come nearly a year after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pushed for sweeping acquisition reform, which includes “being open to buying the 85 percent solution” while achieving the more perfect solution over time. Separately, the Pentagon has slashed staff and reorganized its weapons testing organization, which raised oversight concerns, according to a Government Accountability Office report released earlier this year.

“There's a lot of capabilities out there today that might not be—from a technology perspective—exactly what it looks like in our minds at the end state. But it's at least the same, if not better, than what might be out there today,” Massaro said. “So there's a risk calculus there from an operational and acquisition risk when you do your cost schedule performance and then overlay that on the effectiveness and employability for the combatant and for the operational warfighter.”

The Air Force is currently testing system upgrades for the B-52, one of the service’s oldest aircraft, that could keep it operational through the 2050s.

The center works with program acquisition executives and operators to “understand where those balances are, and design our test programs to accommodate for more rapid” testing and integration, Massaro said.

“A clear example was our rapid integration of Falco, the [Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System], on the F-15E. Our people, processes, and test assets were postured to respond through integrated developmental and operational testing,” he said.

“The Falco was a little bit over a year ago…We had F-15E's. We had the rockets. We just had never connected them together in that way. So we had one technical risk to really get through, and [it] allowed us to go very quickly. So that's balancing the risk of the programmatic side when an operational warfighter needs it really quick, and understanding where you can make those trades. And with safety always as a backdrop.”

Welcome

Here come the MMAs. The Air Force wants Massed Modular Aircraft, or MMAs, to replace General Atomics’ storied MQ-9 Reaper drone, Troy Meink, the service’s secretary announced earlier this week. It’s a call that Swarm Aero has been waiting for—and building toward for the past four years. On Monday, the company unveiled its autonomous Gamera aircraft, a long-range strike aircraft that boasts seven connection points for payloads like missiles and sensors. The UAS is powered by the company’s Legion autonomy software.

“We thought there would be a need that ultimately…to carry a very large payload like the LRASM that we see here, a long distance, and do so as cost effectively as possible,” Peter Kalogiannis, Swarm Aero’s CEO, told Defense One. “The $10 million listed in the solicitation, that really enables those volumes. And again, we've designed from the very beginning for those volumes, and quite frankly, for that price point, we're very very competitive against them.
The company is building “several” prototypes in its Oxnard, California, facility and expects the first flight by the end of 2027.
“This is something that makes the rest of the force—the bombers, the fighters, the B-21s, the F-47s—it makes them more lethal and more survivable. By being able to take some of the mission sets that they would otherwise potentially have to do, and freeing them up where they can be most effective,” Oliver Palmer, the company’s co-founder, told Defense One.
And while it’s early, the company is looking forward to what the Air Force has in store and the innovation it could spark.
“Frankly, we need competition in large aircraft production. There has historically been a monopoly structure of awarding programs that are intended to be around for 20-, 30-plus years,” Palmer said. “There have been a lot of really great reasons to do that, but increasingly we need competition because the cycle of technology competition with adversaries like China and others is changing so fast…and the model has to change. They started that with CCA. It sounds like they're gonna do that again with MMA. We absolutely welcome this.”

AI integration station. The technology has had a big week in national security, so it’s only natural that the topic surfaced in chatter throughout the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center.

The Space Force’s newly appointed top buyer, Erich Hernandez-Baquero, said the military has to “lean in” to the technology.
- “We cannot afford to lose this race for artificial intelligence,” he said. “The answer is not to shy away from the technology, but to lean into it, understand it, and apply the right guardrails in place. And I think those AI experts have approaches for how to ensure those guardrails are in play, and we need to continue to support development of those guardrails in a way that supports our space missions.”
The Air Force Test Center is also keen to collaborate with the tech industry, and now has a dedicated senior leader role for AI.
- “We have an artificial intelligence expert with us on staff now at the Air Force Test Center. So we are stepping into that world. We are looking to build and maintain those partnerships with tech in that space,” AFTC’s Massaro said.
Air Mobility Command wants a more data-link connected fleet, which could allow for some AI use.
- “The ability for air crews to communicate, to coordinate tanker orbits and rendezvous, to pass threat information, to save lives and save aircraft has been everything we expected it to be,” Lt. Gen. Daniel Tulley, who leads the command, told reporters.
- The command is “well down the path” of having a quarter of its fleet data-link connected despite missing its original 2025 goal. But the strategy has “evolved.” The service is pursuing MAF NEXUS and “the goal is to have this on all mobility aircraft, whether they're future builds and it's incorporated, or it's an add-on capability to existing aircraft.”
- The system “brings edge compute, the ability to then deploy AI and much more computing horsepower forward on the aircraft, and it does network with the rest of the joint force and the Air Force's battle management system.”

One last, fun exercise: If you Google “Air Force MMA” you’re definitely going to get UFC-type content.

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Lockheed’s Skunk Works plans to build four more of its multirole combat drones

Thomas Novelly — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin’s secretive research arm, plans to build four more of its experimental, multipurpose drones as the firm attempts to sell its futuristic platform to the U.S. military.

Last year, Skunk Works unveiled Vectis—a concept for a group 5 drone that’s capable of a wide range of missions. Now, on the first day of the Air & Space Force Association’s defense conference near Washington, D.C., company officials announced they’re making significant progress on the prototype and are already planning to expand the fleet for more tests.

“We are moving forward with a plan to build an additional four vehicles, bringing a total of five to include the original prototype,” said Ron Fehlen, Skunk Works’ vice president and general manager. “Development work on those additional aircraft is already underway, and we'll have more specifics to share soon.”

Company officials shared new images of the Skunk Works combat drone with reporters ahead of this week’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference. Vectis will be roughly 34 feet long and have a 38-foot wingspan, and will feature a submerged engine inlet and a tail-less body to reduce drag and mission flexibility,” Fehlen said. While Lockheed was eager to talk about the aircraft’s design, the Skunk Works vice president was tight-lipped about who the specific customer for the new aircraft could be, and didn’t provide details on the weapons loadout, propulsion system, or estimated cost of the platform. The Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy are all aiming to field collaborative combat aircraft.

“From an affordability standpoint, which we're always looking at, and, of course, are targeting to be the CCA competitive price. So we're very cognizant of it and make trades associated with that, Fehlen said. “It's obviously, I think, focused more on the CCA side of the house, and obviously the price points that are highly relevant in that regime.”

Fehlen said the company remains on track to fly Vectis by “the end of 2027.” He said Skunk Works feels confident in that timeline, due in part, to the use of digital designs and “minimal tooling determinant assembly”—which the Skunk Works vice president likened to ready-to-assemble furniture with pre-drilled holes.

“It's a technique that really enables an increased level of affordability and speed through really reducing the amount of touch labor required and increasing the first pass yield,” Fehlen said. “We've seen in many cases an 80 percent reduction in labor hours to build up the aircraft itself.”

While Fehlen wouldn’t specify one specific U.S. program or customer Vectis is geared toward, he did say it could work with any of Lockheed Martin’s fighter jets, which are also flown by other nation’s militaries.

“I'll point to the fact that we have a long history in crewed tactical systems that, you know, Vectus is going to need to integrate with, in addition to other fighter aircraft that are produced around the world,” Fehlen said. “So, from our perspective, this is in line with our heritage and what we're producing today and delivering to the field. It has incredible capability, and now we're going to be able to add this to it.”

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Defense Business Brief: AI manufacturing; Skilled trades; Arms transfer oversight

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 02:31:22 -0400

Could AI- and robot-made missile components and airframes be the future of aerospace manufacturing? That’s the bet, Machina Labs CEO Edward Mehr said.

The Los Angeles-based company plans to break ground on its third manufacturing facility this year, Mehr told Defense One at the Space and Missile Defense Conference last month.

That facility, which hasn’t been named yet, is expected to be up to 250,000 square feet—more than double the size of Machina Labs’ two existing facilities.

The company builds large metal structures like airframes and drone bodies using AI and robotics with less specialized tooling and equipment.

“If you think about traditional metal structure manufacturers in defense, they have to go build a very custom factory for every product they want to deploy. There [are] facilitization costs that go for each product and then there's a lead time associated with that. For us, the same factory that makes, let's say, [Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile] fuel tanks, can switch and make UAV airframes.”

Last year, Machina Labs raised $124 million in a Series C round, much of which will be used for that third facility: “This year—and next—is about focus, about scale,” he said.

The company, which has Toyota, Nvidia, and Lockheed Martin as investors, plans to significantly increase production of its manufacturing system, RoboCraftsman.

“Today, we manufacture five of these manufacturing systems a year. We're ramping that up,” he said.

Several of those systems are slated to outfit Machina Labs’ upcoming facility, which will produce cruise missile products. The company has not yet announced where it will be located.

“As long as you have a ground that can hold the system, they can be shipped to it, they open up, you connect them to power, and within the same day, they self-calibrate and start manufacturing,” Mehr said.

Welcome

Help needed: Natsec’s skilled trade crisis. For more than a generation, the rhetoric and overall advice for young adults mulling their future was to go to college, get a four-year degree, maybe learn to code, and land an office job—or at least one that is secure and not too dangerous. But that societal rhetoric may have helped fuel a dearth of skilled trade and craft workers, lawmakers and government officials argued during a pre-Labor Day hearing.

“We assume that critical manufacturing inputs such as minerals, sub tier suppliers, [and] skilled labor will always be available. This assumption is false,” Rep. Ken Calvert, who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, said during opening remarks for a Sept. 4 field hearing on the industrial base. “According to the American Welding Society, approximately 20 percent of the welding force are approaching retirement and in 2025 they estimated the need for 320,000 new welders by 2029. These estimates are prior to the data center boom, which relies heavily on welders and fabrication.”
The Pentagon’s head of industrial base policy Michael Cadenazzi echoed those sentiments in written testimony:
- “Decades of government policy and societal pressure have driven millions of talented young Americans towards degrees which haven’t delivered the benefits they were promised and have left defense manufacturers with few skilled workers waiting in the wings. There are as many as 400,000 unfilled skilled trades jobs in the DIB today, and that number could grow to 2.5 million by 2030.”
Cadenazzi also highlighted the Pentagon’s award of a $10 million grant to BuildFreedom.us, which aims to bolster the skilled workforce by linking jobseekers with scholarships, apprenticeship programs, and “AI-proof jobs”.
- “We’ve now rolled out Build Freedom in three states, with plans to expand the program nationwide. This national awareness will drive individuals to our new Buildfreedom.US website, a one-stop shop where their interest can be converted into scholarships, training, credentials, and job opportunities,” he said of the effort, which was launched in partnership with the National Labor Exchange, Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” reality TV fame, and his mikeroweWORKS Foundation.
- That $10 million grant will pay for more than 9,000 scholarships, Cadenazzi said.

Improving oversight of mishandled defense articles abroad. When the U.S. provides security assistance, the State Department is in charge of investigating incidents in which U.S. allies and partners fail to properly secure or transfer defense articles—from weapons to components or technical data. But the department's “investigations, documentation and reporting on potential violations were inconsistent,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in a letter that was publicly released on Sept. 8.

The watchdog agency made those concerns, which appeared in a 2025 report, a “high priority” issue for the State Department.
“We recommended [the State Department] document the status and findings of its investigations and develop guidance for determining when to report an incident to Congress. Doing so could inform congressional oversight of future assistance,” the letter states.

Making moves + other news

The Army picked Boeing and Anduril for its Integrated Fires Protection Capability (IFPC) Increment 2 Second Interceptor.
Allen Control Systems is beefing up its manufacturing capacity with a new 191,000 square-foot manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas. The facility will churn out the company’s signature robotic turret.
Kongsberg selected Echodyne to provide radars for its counter-UAS system.
Former NGA Director Frank Whitworth is now president of Satellogic, a geospatial data company. Whitworth will lead the company’s operations and direct strategy for its defense and intelligence products.
The Navy and MARTAC demonstrated refueling of autonomous vessels at sea.
Ex-Pentagon weapons buyer Ellen Lord joined Chariot Defense’s advisory board with two former Army generals, James Rainey, who led Army Futures Command, and Samuel Peterson, the Army’s former buyer for combat support and sustainment portfolio. Defense investor Stephen Rodriguez also joined the board.

A final stray thought: BuildFreedom.us rings very similar to BuildSubmarines.com. Coincidence? Perhaps.

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Back to life: How Shield AI’s future unmanned fighter made decades-old tech new again

Lauren C. Williams — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0400

LYNN, Mass.—Three decades ago, GE Aerospace tested a technology that could’ve made the F-16 more agile. It worked, but was never fielded. Instead, it sat in a box in a warehouse—until defense tech startup Shield AI called.

“They reached out to us and said…‘Do you still have that capability? And the truth is, we hadn't fielded it. After we did the demonstration, it basically went into storage,” said Steve “Doogie” Russell, VP and general manager of GE’s Edison Works. “And the solution that we've offered to Shield on that is an F110 engine with a nozzle in the back that we call the axisymmetric vectoring exhaust nozzle, or AVEN.”

Not having to start from scratch on the technology was critical for saving time and speeding up flight testing for its collaborative combat aircraft, X-BAT, an autonomous fighter jet designed to take off and land vertically, Shiva Vallabhaneni, senior propulsion engineer for Shield AI, told Defense One.

“X-BAT always needed to have a thrust vector controlled capability to do vertical flight,” Vallabhaneni. “So we really went out and said…where can we get one? Is there technology that already exists?”

The aircraft “needs to be able to move quickly…in any direction,” GE’s Russell told reporters during a visit to the company’s factory here in Lynn.

That comes with a special set of propulsion requirements, so GE paired its 30-year-old AVEN nozzle with its F110 engine found in the F-16 fighter jet for the X-BAT.

The aircraft needs a high-thrust propulsion system “because you've got to be able to have that aircraft take off vertically and then, when it comes back, land at high thrust mode. It also needs to have really good gas mileages. So [thrust-specific fuel consumption], once it's up and away, needs to be able to hit the range requirements that they're trying to get,” Russell said.

And, he said, when it lands, it needs a nozzle “on the back that can move around to balance the aircraft as it's coming in to maneuver into position to dock back up. That's a pretty significant propulsion challenge and pretty unique.”

In under a year, the companies dusted off the AVEN nozzle, refurbished the original hardware, completely rewrote the software code, and have been testing it with the engine.

The hardware was in very good condition, and AVEN One, which is being used for the X-BAT prototype, has “close to 100 percent of the same hardware that was flown from the 90s,” Vallabhaneni said. “That was the biggest key unlock for getting us to an X-BAT prototype flight test this year—100 percent. In some ways, building that thrust vector control nozzle, verifying its technology, and doing it at the speed that we needed to is probably harder than getting an engine.”

The companies recently completed testing the engine integrated with the full AVEN nozzle at GE Aerospace’s test facility in Peebles, Ohio.

Now, the goal is to complete a tethered vertical flight test of the aircraft by the end of the year, to demonstrate that it can hover and remain stable.

Through data collected during testing, engineers can create models that will help develop vertical flight control laws, Vallabhaneni said.

During the planned test, the prototype aircraft will hang from a 180-foot crane to minimize risk. The test will be successful if slack in the tether is created during the hover.

“Shield AI—much like SpaceX, Rocket Lab, all of these other new space companies—the mindset is: be hardware rich, take risks because the faster we get to test, the faster we can learn what the real problems are. And so the tether gives peace of mind that we're buying off risk, but we're not buying off risk irresponsibly,” Vallabhaneni said.

But the AVEN nozzle won’t just be in the prototype—Shield AI plans to make more and eventually tweak the technology along the way. Building additional AVEN nozzles that keep the legacy design will help increase testing effort. And any future changes will likely focus on performance, Vallabhaneni said.

“Lighter, faster, more performance, right? Those are the things that we're going to go and chase and achieve on the future version of AVEN. So the journey doesn't stop here. This is the starting point, and it's really great that GE gave us a pretty great starting point back in the '90s,” he said.

“AVEN sat on the shelf for 30 years. I was born in Cincinnati, so I drive by the hospital I was born in every time I'm at GE—and…AVEN was built before I was born. So for me, it's very important to recognize all of the people who went and did that and built that within a year…We are giving those people their flowers and being able to pay that forward.”

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White House pressure for US firms to skip French space summit is ‘unfortunate,’ insiders say

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:08:13 -0400

A White House official warned U.S. space companies last week that if they attend an upcoming international summit in France, it might appear they’re supporting policies that go against their own country’s interests. Space advocates say the move discourages needed cooperation.

An industry insider told Defense One that Charles Powell, the assistant director for space and spectrum in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology policy, said in a call on Aug. 27 that space companies that attend next week’s International Space Summit in France “might be used as a prop to support policies counter to U.S. interests.” Politico, citing industry and Congressional sources, first reported the news on Thursday, and detailed that SpaceX, Stoke Space, K2 Space and Astra, which compete for civil and military space contracts, were among the companies on the call.

“This is all very unfortunate because France is a country we should be doing more space cooperation with, not less,” the industry insider said.

Space policy experts said the White House warning doesn’t make much sense because the U.S. government is attending the summit, France is a longtime NATO ally, and it is also investing in growing its military space capabilities. More than 120 countries are scheduled to attend next week’s summit in France, according to a government website.

White House spokespeople did not confirm whether Powell gave the warning and did not respond when asked for the rationale behind the call with U.S. space companies.

“The Trump administration continues to collaborate with allies and partners in space,” an Office of Science and Technology policy official told Defense One in a statement. “We look forward to productive conversations at the Space Summit on key priorities including science missions, exploration programs, and space security.”

SpaceX and Blue Origin are among the companies no longer attending the summit, French newspaper LeMonde reported.

"It's hard not to link it to the rumours of pressure," a ministry spokesperson told Agence France-Presse, LeMonde reported. "We obviously want to continue working with our US partners and allies, even though strategic about-turns and political pressures sometimes make the task needlessly complex," the spokesperson added.

Last year, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a nearly $5 billion increase in military space spending. Victoria Samson, the Secure World Foundation’s chief director of space security and stability, told Defense One that U.S. companies want to get in on that investment.

“I think it's a head-scratching decision, given that OSTP, State, Commerce, and NASA are all attending. Also given the huge recent investments by France and Germany in their military space capabilities, you would think U.S. companies would be falling over themselves to get in front of European decision makers,” Samson, who is also attending the summit, said. “This just reads like another short-sighted effort by the Trump administration to stir the pot with long-time European allies.”

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Defense Business Brief: Takeaways from America’s first jet engine test site

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:24:20 -0400

LYNN, Mass.—Rosie the robot and her automated compatriot Thomas are the stars of GE Aerospace’s automated manufacturing line at the company’s factory here. Decked in yellow, the towering machines are reminiscent of the Transformer Bumblebee’s dislocated arms. They move in concert seamlessly to collect tools, machine parts, and assemble components for the T700, which are found in Boeing’s Apache and Sikorsky’s Black Hawks, and, in the future,T408 engines for the Marine Corps’ CH-53-K King Stallion.

It’s part of a multiyear $100 million investment in the plant, which is hyperfocused on upgrades—from machines to workflows—to make more engines and deliver them faster.

“This was historically a bottleneck for our businesses,” Dan Martin, who manages manufacturing engineering and leads a team charged with integrating robotics and automation inLynn plant, said of the piece of the business that makes rotating parts, like cooling plates. “We had quality issues here. We had capacity issues here. The robotics piece now comes online, and these lines are no longer constrained for us.”

That need to go fast will be key once the military starts putting in high-volume orders for collaborative combat aircraft, or robot wingmen for fighter jets.

“We're designing from the very beginning to meet the right production,” starting with small engines, Amy Gowder, GE Aerospace's president and CEO for its defense and systems division, told reporters Monday. For example, “we did a seven-way exercise, and we're like, ‘no, we need a tack time of 100 seconds for each [screw], not an hour and a half,” for 70 screws.

In addition to changing techniques and design practices, Gowder said the company is looking for suppliers that are “used to the high volumes we need.”

For the F404/F414 engine, which is found in the F/A-18, “we're trying to move to a different supply base that has different commercial off-the-shelf type standards that have operated at this volume,” she said. “And when we tell them we want to go from one engine a month to 20 engines a month in like six months or a year, that doesn't phase them because they're used to handling the volumes. Only when you get to like 100 engines a month do they start to say, ‘hey, I might need some some investments or capacity to meet that.’”

GE is also conducting “producibility reviews” as it brings on suppliers, she said.

“So we think we designed it correctly. We think we've chosen the right types of suppliers that have the capacity and processes we need, but as they actually get the drawing and figure out how they're going to make it for the first time, we're there with them [to review] other changes before we lock in that final design.”

Welcome

Next up: Hypersonic testing. The Pentagon’s innovation arm tapped GE Aerospace to develop a hypersonic test bed as part of the Hypersonic and High-Cadence Airborne Testing Capabilities, or HyCAT, program. The award follows one for a prototype in 2023. The first flight is targeted for 2028.

“This is a significant milestone for our hypersonics team,” where “we're the prime, but we're also providing a dual-mode ramjet,” which can make the vehicle go faster and further, while “working with a number of other platforms to provide an all-up round to support this high-cadence hypersonic testing capability,” Steve “Doogie” Russell, VP and general manager of GE’s Edison Works, told reporters.
But the company isn’t interested in developing a weapons system, Russell said.
“This is a case where we do have the ability to be the full integrator for this test bed project, but we're really focused on being a propulsion solution provider across this spectrum of activity. Same thing with the low-cost small-engine side of things.”
The engine-maker is working with several other companies, but declined to name them or discuss product ranges.
GE Aerospace also plans to use the solution to test other payloads, including engine upgrades, said Dean Modroukas, general manager of hypersonics.
“The best way to assess hypersonic systems is to make sure that you've got plenty of time in an operating mode that's relevant for things like thermal equilibrium, maneuverability,” Modroukas said. “HyCat is the second step of what we're doing to develop a test bed and test capability that allows us to bring our engines into flight. So we're always looking forward in terms of ways that we can learn quickly and through testing both on the ground, but end of the day, in a relevant environment, is [that] you want to be in the air.”

One more engine-related thing: The Navy certified Rolls-Royce’s mtu series 4000 and 2000 marine engines to power autonomous surface vessels.

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Defense Business Brief: A day at DIBX 2026 in Philadelphia

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 06:36:43 -0400

PHILADELPHIA—The Trump administration is dialed in on increasing domestic production of critical minerals needed for military weapons. But getting private investment in the industry is tough because of how long it can take for companies to start making money.

“We all know the critical minerals issue is front and center. It's the president's maybe No. 1 issue for the defense industrial base and for national security—and it takes a lot,” Kyle Bass, who leads Rochefort Asset Management, said during the Defense Industrial Base Accelerator conference here Wednesday. “The way that we have looked at it—and the reason we haven't done any critical mineral deals yet, and we've looked at a bunch of them—is that duration mismatch,” when the timeline to access liquid capital is constrained.

The firm has put about $450 million in the past 18 months into “companies that have products, customers, and some revenue,” Bass said. “They're right in that acceleration phase where they're still losing money, typically, but their revenues are growing and they're still staffing. That's where we plug in and help catalyze their growth.”

But private investment can follow once the government puts in capital—or sends a strong demand signal. A recent Center for Strategic and International Studies report looked at how publicly traded companies increased their capital expenditures 31 percent in the second quarter year-over-year after signing long-term framework agreements with the government.

And the Pentagon has made several investments in critical minerals companies in recent years.

For example, last year, the Pentagon took a 40 percent stake in Korea Zinc as part of a $7.4 billion move to build a new critical mineral processing plant in Tennessee, part of a broader push to reduce U.S. foreign dependency on rare earth and critical minerals. That deal also included private investments.

“That capital was asked to come in by the offtakers and the U.S. government because of that duration mismatch, it's too long,” Bass said.

The Pentagon has about $5 billion in reconciliation funds to invest in critical mineral supply chains through fiscal year 2029. And there’s no shortage of domestic critical minerals companies, but they’re destabilized by China’s much-cheaper market, Michael Cadenazzi, the Pentagon’s head of industrial base policy, said while onstage with Bass.

“In putting our RFIs out constantly, we find there are lots and lots of companies that are in the space. They're just undercapitalized because people struggle with a market where our No. 1 strategic competitor undercuts us,” he said.

Bass agreed and said “predictability”, such as with orders or pricing, will be key to getting more private capital investment in critical minerals.

“We have plenty of critical minerals in North America. We just need to build big processing facilities. And that Korea Zinc facility in Tennessee is going to be huge—but it won't be operational for another four years, or five years,” he said. “So that, again, that mismatch is the hard part because…it's a race at the moment, and we have to win that race.”

Welcome

Hello from the city of brotherly love—and defense industry reinvigoration! This week, the Pentagon’s industrial policy shop kicked off its first Defense Industrial Base Accelerator event in Philadelphia’s city center. It was an easy Acela ride up for day two of a three-day conference where attendees seemed cheery! Eager to mingle and make new connections. I had great impromptu conversations about manufacturing—specifically forging!—quantum sensors, computing, and the changing dialogue around the field.

Besides the vibes, here were my key takeaways:

Critical minerals was a major theme.
The event drew about 2,500 registered attendees. And the sessions were packed, some with standing room only.
This was not a heavily government attended event—fewer than 400 registrants were from the government.
Attendees hailed from the aerospace and defense industries, consulting, engineering, software, manufacturing, and venture capital.
Cadenazzi told Defense One the aim was to “unify” all of the separate industry policy efforts into a singular “voice.” And they hope to do it again.

An easy button for financial documentation? The Energy Department is spearheading a pilot program that aims to streamline how businesses looking for financing submit their data.

“From the financing perspective, one of the things we struggle with is you have borrowers, U.S. businesses, who are going to multiple agencies and sort of shopping their materials because they don't know a better front door,” Asad Akram, managing director of the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, said during a panel at the DIBX event.
“So one of the things that DOE has started piloting—that's not fully live yet—is essentially the college common app version of financing.” The tool could cut down on red tape for businesses that want to work with the government.
“Roughly all the financing agencies are looking for the same info…So we're trying to make it better for borrowers, where they can upload it once all of us can have access to it, and then work off of that versus them having to repeat their pitch 12 times across DC.”

And one last DIBX thing: The Pentagon awarded six out of nine companies a total of around $25 million during Wednesday’s event. Several tackle critical mineral harvesting and processing—5N+ Semiconductors, $7.3 million, Graystone Resources, $6.75 million, and Kunin Technologies, $1.9 million. Two winners immediately stood out: Senra Systems, $4.4 million, with their wire harness manufacturing in a box technology, and Neya Systems’ autonomous fuel transport offering that aims to use unmanned ground and maritime vehicles from AM General and Textron, respectively. Their award was for $5.9 million.

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Army selects 5 companies to build nuclear microreactors on bases, under new $2 billion deal

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Army officials have selected five firms to build nuclear microreactors at U.S. military bases as a bid to create energy independence, though the nation still relies heavily on imported enriched uranium for such projects.

The service and the Defense Innovation Unit unveiled the initiative, dubbed “Project Janus,” at last year’s Association of the U.S. Army Conference in Washington, D.C. Now, officials are awarding up to $2.2 billion to the pool of five companies through a milestone-based Other Transaction Authority contract with fixed-price milestones to build out their microreactor technology on Army bases. Those firms and bases, announced on Wednesday, are:

Antares Nuclear, Inc. – Fort Bragg, North Carolina
BWXT Advanced Technologies, LLC – Fort Campbell, Kentucky
General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems – Fort Hood, Texas
Radiant Industries, Inc. – Fort Benning, Georgia
Westinghouse Government Services – Fort Drum, New York

“We now know that our domestic electric grid is potentially at risk in a conflict. We also know that we will not necessarily be able to move fossil fuels easily wherever we need them to go,” said Jeff Waksman, the Army’s principal deputy assistant secretary for installations, energy and environment. “Right now, all critical infrastructure that the Army has is backed up by some form of liquid fossil fuel, primarily diesel. So that makes nuclear energy just a natural game changer for the Army.”

Janus project officials said with additional private investment from the firms, they anticipate up to 20 microreactors across the bases. The service competition paves the way for a program of record to deliver a small nuclear powerplant to an Army installation by 2028. Currently, the U.S. doesn’t have operational nuclear microreactors, and the country only enriches a very small percentage of the world’s uranium supply. Energy Department and National Nuclear Security Administration efforts to grow the supply and produce high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, are still underway. However, service officials remain optimistic the supply chain problems will not set back their microreactor plans.

“We expect sufficient prioritization to ensure that we have the uranium that we need for our fastest moving reactors,” Waksman said, acknowledging that the microreactor effort is “probably going to push beyond what our supplies are as a nation.”

“This is really an all-of-government effort. We are tied in very closely with the folks at DOE and NNSA, trying to stand up new enrichment capability, and we will do what we can to deliver what we need through stockpile, and then to hopefully have fresh enrichment capable of delivering some of the HALEU for the later reactors in this program.”

In November, the Army named nine bases as finalists for the microreactors, but excluded Fort Wainwright, Alaska; Holston Army Ammunition Plant, Tennessee; Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington; and Redstone Arsenal, Alabama; from the final five.

Waksman said it was a “matching process” between the firms and the sites, and some contractors prefer to work in certain areas due to their relationships with utility companies near the bases they were paired up with. While one of the goals of the Janus Project is to cut down on energy supply chain issues for U.S. bases overseas, planners said they want to prove the technology can work stateside first.

“The intent here is to choose the lowest hanging fruit, we want to choose sites that we think are going to be the cheapest and fastest to deploy and the easiest,” Waksman said. “This is already very difficult. There's a reason no one has actually built a fully operational commercial nuclear microreactor before, so we don't want to make this harder on ourselves by trying to deliver this to some island or some foreign country. We want to demonstrate that we can do this here in the 50 U.S. states, and then if this is a success, then we can talk about possibly deploying somewhere else in the future.”

Project Janus is not the first military microreactor initiative. The Army is taking lessons from Project Pele, the Defense Department’s mobile reactor project, and based the contracting mechanism off of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program.

The Army’s selection of firms also follows an Air Force initiative to build a nuclear microreactor at Eielson Air Force Base, near Fairbanks, Alaska. Waksman said the Army should have an announcement in the “not too distant future” about how the services are working together on those projects.

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New contract aims to keep Space Force’s multi-billion-dollar projects on budget

Thomas Novelly — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 04:55:16 -0400

As the Space Force takes on new, multi-billion-dollar national security programs, the service has awarded a new contract to keep those projects on track and on budget, Defense One has learned.

The service’s Space Systems Integration Office awarded Integrate, a Seattle-based firm, a multi-million dollar contract for its AI-enabled project management program. Last year, the company netted a $25 million contract with the Space Force’s Mission Manifest Office to manage the service major multi-payload launch operation project. Now, as the service embarks on massive programs such as building the Space Data Network and the Space-Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator, the service is expanding its use of the company’s software to help keep program managers on the right track.

“SSIO serves as the central nervous system for the Space Force and the singular integrator

across the majority of the national security space enterprise,” Integrate told Defense One. “To maintain the U.S. advantage in space, the office is actively pursuing technological advancements to ensure programs are executed within cost and schedule constraints, and to provide leaders with real-time visibility into the entire Space Force portfolio.”

The Space Systems Integration Office, which is within Space Systems Command and oversees its acquisitions programs, has a growing list of national security projects. So far, seven of the nine newly-established Space Force Portfolio Acquisition Executives are using the program, with the others to be onboarded in the near future. The service’s $71.3 billion budget request this year, if passed, would mark the largest percentage increase for any military branch since 1952, according to the Aerospace Corporation. Service leaders say the new program is necessary to keep everything on the right track.

“As the speed of acquisition becomes increasingly critical to the success of our programs, the

Space Force is prioritizing technologies that equip our leaders with more timely, data-driven

decision-making capabilities,” Helen Ying, the Space Force’s system of systems engineering lead, said in a statement. “Integrate’s project management platform strengthens our capacity to visualize the minute details and track broader objectives within the Space Force’s programs.”

The existing—and antiquated—project management system can lead to mismanagement, miscommunication, and missed deadlines, the company said.

“They might get a hand-drawn PowerPoint with triangles on it sent over in an email or a table in an email with Gantt bars colored in, literally to show this is happening in September and this is happening in August. They don't have any granularity. It's like the minimum that meets the contract requirements in some cases,” John Conafay, Integrate’s CEO, said in an interview. “The most advanced is Microsoft Project Server, which, Microsoft Project was released the same year as Tetris.”

Conafay said his program differs from the current workflow dominated by sending emails and downloading files, and instead offers a clear single schedule that is modified in real-time and across multiple organization levels and classification levels to easily manage sprawling national security work.

Integrate’s contract with the Space Systems Integration Office comes as one of the Trump administration’s major programs, the Golden Dome missile defense shield, is facing budgetary headwinds. Gen. Michael Guetlein, the program's direct reporting program manager, warned attendees at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, this month that if Congress doesn’t sort crucial supplementary funding, the program will be in dire straits.

Golden Dome is not a Space Force program, but the service is helping develop key technology for the architecture. Conafay said Integrate’s system helps in budget-controlled environments to ensure "things are done on time and within budget” and holds contractors accountable. He said the service’s adoption of an upgraded project management system shows they’re taking those budget constraints seriously.

“It shows an incredible amount of responsibility to the taxpayer to use a software that can fundamentally modernize something that hasn't been since 1984,” Conafay said.

Correction: An earlier version of this report misstated which organization wrote about the the service’s budget request. It was the Aerospace Corporation.

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There’s no shortcut to replenish US munitions stockpiles

Lauren C. Williams and Thomas Novelly — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:00:00 -0400

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — As the U.S. military’s critical munitions are quickly used in the Iran war and slowly produced at home, companies are eagerly pitching new low-cost solutions, and the Pentagon is keen to make big deals. But defense experts say those new, cheaper missiles—and the push to accelerate production of existing weapons—won't soon overcome problems exacerbated by the Iran war, even though they will eventually provide the military much-needed options.

At the Space and Missile Defense Symposium last week, Boeing unveiled a low-cost seeker missile, with crucial hit-to-kill guidance technology used on the PAC-3 missile, made of commercial, off-the-shelf components. At the same conference, Northrop Grumman released its “cost-effective” 50-millimeter gun-based drone defense system to “address a critical short-range air defense gap.”

And last month at the Farnborough International Air Show, Lockheed Martin announced a more affordable, proximity-detonation version of its Patriot missile. But those solutions will likely only boost the Pentagon’s stockpiles if the Iran war drags on and if officials quickly award contracts.

“The push for low-cost munitions is unlikely to have a material effect on the Iran War—at least not anytime soon,” said Becca Wasser, Bloomberg Economics’s defense lead.

And, she said, making enough new weapons, at the right cost, is only part of the problem.

“Getting to a lower cost for exquisite munitions will take time. It requires developing new weapons or adapting old ones, which means going through new testing and evaluation processes,” she said. “If the Iran war drags on for years, that’s when the drive for lower cost interceptors and munitions could have an impact,” because “wars of attrition require enormous amounts of material—and the lower price tag helps.”

Right now, the Pentagon is blowing through its prized Patriot and Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense missiles, and they won’t get replaced anytime soon, defense analysts say—even with novel framework deals.

In the last year, top officials have been pushing those deals with major defense primes and are continuing the administration’s rallying cry for the firms to build and innovate faster. Some of those are starting to bear fruit.

This week, RTX netted a seven-year, $22.9 billion Tomahawk missile contract with the U.S. Navy under a new deal, showing that the military is making big bets on legacy systems as it pursues newer options.

But those legacy munitions still take time to manufacture. In a recent report, the American Enterprise Institute think tank found that it would take 27 years for defense contractors to produce THAADs at the current maximum annual rate of 96 interceptors a year to reach quantities the Pentagon wants.

There “will be a window of vulnerability for several years until inventories return to their previous levels, and another several years before they get to the levels that war planners desire,” according to a May report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“These newer, lower-cost munitions absolutely should be part of the way we fix this. But we shouldn't be kidding ourselves that they're going to be ready quickly en masse, are operational, and our forces are trained and understand how to use them,” said Todd Harrison, AEI’s defense budget expert. “It will take years, some sooner than others. And I think it remains to be seen if they're going to be available in large quantities sooner than the reorders of the more exquisite existing weapons.”

Framework deals aren’t contracts

The Pentagon has already inked framework agreements for low-cost and traditional munitions. Overall, experts say they are a step in the right direction.

“It's not a contract, but it helps give the companies a demand signal they can take to their boards and their shareholders, and…it reduces their risks, so they can make increased capital expenditures, or capex, investments,” said Jerry McGinn, a CSIS senior fellow and the director of the Center for the Industrial Base.

McGinn teased an upcoming CSIS analysis that found publicly-traded companies with framework agreements increased their capex investment by 31 percent from the second quarter of 2025 to the same quarter this year.

“They're clearly investing more and it's hard not to tie it to those framework agreements. But the challenge is that the framework agreement is an agreement…It's a best faith effort. It's not a contract,” he said.

Congress still has to appropriate the money, the companies have to get on contract, and then they have to deliver, McGinn said. And none of that is guaranteed.

McGinn said he’s keen to watch how many contracts come out of the framework deals.

One of the first major contracts was a seven-year, $35 billion undefinitized contract with Lockheed Martin for THAADs, which leaves some aspects of the agreement open—to be finalized before the contract starts.

Undefinitized contract actions, or UCAs, require special approval and are used for urgent work that all parties “agree needs to begin before final agreement can be reached on price.”

Lockheed Martin executives said they’re up to the task.

“If you look at the framework agreements we've signed, we've leaned into the ask that the country has made of us. Lockheed Martin has never shied away from stepping up to the line and doing what's been asked,” Johnathon Caldwell, Lockheed's vice president of strategic and missile defense systems, told reporters at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “We're in an unprecedented era where speed matters, and we're able to bring capabilities to market in weeks and months, not years and decades. We're putting our money on the table, and our commitment.”

It’s a tall order for companies to surge production capacity of those munitions, especially amid supply chain bottlenecks for major components such as solid rocket motors.

But it helps that the Pentagon’s actually allocating and committing money to those problems, Bloomberg’s Wasser said.

“The framework agreements are just that—-agreements, not contracts. Until these are on contract, you won’t see a lot of companies surging production,” she said. “All these efforts—sending the demand signal to industry, qualifying more [solid rocket motor] suppliers, ramping up missile procurement—help, but they don’t solve the problem.”

Low-cost munitions, long-term solutions

Lockheed’s more affordable version of the PAC-3 missile comes with some tradeoffs, and a timeline.

“We basically modified the front end, modified the back end, took out the [Attitude Control Motors], so it's no longer hit-to-kill,” Jason Reynolds, Lockheed’s vice president and general manager of integrated air and missile defense, told reporters during a briefing at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium, adding that it integrates with existing munitions systems “at reduced range.”

However, PAC-3 ACE isn’t expecting a first flight until early 2028, and won’t go to production until 18 months after that.

“Everybody wants more air defense interceptors as quickly as possible, and anything that is as capable or nearly as capable as a PAC-3 MSC is a very attractive offer,” Reynolds said on the sidelines of the conference.

There’s no doubt that a more affordable version of the highly-sought after PAC-3 is useful, said Tom Karako, CSIS’ director of the Missile Defense Project. But the question remains: Will the Pentagon buy it?

“PAC-3 ACE is not a contract. It's a concept that they've had for a while and they rolled it out,” he said. “I think the time is right for PAC-3 ACE, but it's a concept, and if you're really attacking the root cause problem, you know the root cause here is the customer.”

A few weeks after the PAC-3 ACE contract was announced, Boeing unveiled its Ultra Low-Cost Seeker. It’s a push to make the company’s precision-guided technology, which makes Patriot missiles deadly and expensive, more accessible and affordable.

“The system uses commercial off-the-shelf components that Boeing adapted for military use,” the company said in a news release this month. “ULCS leverages our seeker expertise developed on programs like PAC-3 MSE, but delivers a different seeker capability that can be applied at low cost to numerous defensive and offensive products to address lower-complexity threats.”

The seeker is still under development, and more flight tests are expected in 2027. Officials declined to provide exact figures on how much more affordable the new product was compared to existing technology.

Overall, there seem to be more options for cheaper replacements to hypersonic or cruise missiles than for top-tier air defense missiles like Patriots and THAAD weapons, said Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral and senior fellow for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

New entrants are also getting in the low-cost missiles game—and landing contracts. There’s Anduril's Barracuda, Zone 5 Technologies’ Rusty Dagger, and Coaspire’s cruise missile.

“We’re seeing it in hypersonic missiles with a company called Castelion…But we're not seeing it in air defense weapons,” Montgomery said.

X-Bow Systems revealed its modestly priced $100,000 drone destroyer at the Farnborough International Airshow. The company also landed a $11 million deal this week with the Missile Defense Agency to develop and test low-cost interceptors.

And the fact that these companies are landing contracts, may be indicative of faster production and delivery in a matter of several months, opposed to years, Montgomery said.

But producing low-cost munitions isn’t necessarily a solution to the U.S. military’s current stockpile problem.

“It's about transitioning your arsenal long term to a high-low mix. But some of these things can come soon,” Montgomery said. “So it doesn't impact the next stage of the war. But it could impact a 2027 end game. And it certainly will impact being ready in 2028, 2029 for Russia or China to do something.”

Strategic shifts

While industry is answering the call to build more affordable munitions, defense experts question whether the military is willing to use them.

In March, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine declared that the U.S. military was pivoting from “from stand-off munitions to stand-in munitions” meaning a pivot from long-range weapons outside the battlefield to ones that need to be dropped within conflict zones.

But CSIS’ Karako said there’s been no significant switch to plentiful GPS-guided, freefall weapons like Joint Direct Attack Munitions in the months since that statement.

"We have 140,000 JDAMS, we have low-cost munitions today. The reason that we're not using them, and the reason that we're hemorrhaging our Tomahawks instead, has to do with extreme risk aversion,” Karako said. “That risk aversion calculus is not going to change just because you have some new entrance, low-cost, low-range missile. We have, today, plenty of munitions that we could use, but we're not using.”

A month after Caine made his comments, a F-15E went down over Iran. The complicated rescue of the two U.S. airmen pushed President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to proclaim the military had “achieved overwhelming air dominance and superiority” over the hostile territory.

Airpower experts previously told Defense One that broad terms used by the administration painted an inaccurate reality of the dangerous situation U.S. pilots find themselves in over the region. That lack of total control also limits which munitions the military is willing to use.

“Despite efforts to gain air supremacy over Iran, the U.S. was only able to gain localized air superiority over some parts. That reduced the ability to drop JDAMs instead,” Wasser said. “Switching to a strategy that relies on JDAMs would mean accepting more risk—or taking steps to further degrade Iranian capabilities to allow for greater U.S. use of the skies without threat.”

Experts told Defense One the Iran war has exacerbated long-standing problems with how the military uses and buys munitions. And while it’s possible the Pentagon could weather this conflict, the resulting mission depletion will likely make future wars—particularly with China—a struggle.

“These missiles will also be critical for a potential Western Pacific conflict,” an April CSIS report said. “Even before the Iran war, stockpiles were deemed insufficient for a peer competitor fight. That shortfall is now even more acute, and building stockpiles to levels adequate for a war with China will take additional time.”

Until production on existing munitions and interceptors ramps up and the Pentagon buys a new mix of high- and low-end missiles, Karako said the military should look at the plentiful munitions it already has—and use them.

“The more immediate thing that we could be doing is changing our tactics,” Karako said. “We've hemorrhaged our long-range stuff, and the thing that we could do is we could start using gravity bombs, but we're not willing to do that … Everytime CENTCOM fires a Tomahawk at somebody without air defense, an angel loses its wings in PACOM.”

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Defense Business Brief: Arcfield’s state of play; SMD wrap up; X-Bow Systems’ MDA win

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:28:23 -0400

HUNTSVILLE, Ala.—There are less than four months left in the year, but defense and aerospace company Arcfield’s plans seem to just be getting started, as they prepare for an upcoming satellite launch and explore manufacturing a highly specialized component key for optical sensors and laser communications.

“There's a lot going on at Arcfield. And what we're really focused on is bringing the government a fully-baked solution,” Dan Knight, Arcfield’s vice president for Golden Dome initiatives and strategy, told Defense One at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Ala., last week. “Instead of saying, ‘Hey, I'm the one-trick wonder that just does sensors,’ or ‘I'm the one-trick wonder that just does architecture,’ we leverage all of our expertise across our organization to bring something that can be easily integrated and operationalized.”

Arcfield is planning to test several sensors in the coming months, and its subsidiary, Orion Space Solutions, expects to launch a very low earth orbit, or VLEO, satellite in September.

“You launch it up to the International Space Station. One of the astronauts up there takes it out, puts it in like a little Pez dispenser, and drops it down into very low Earth orbit,” Knight said. “There's a lot of sensing that happens in the ionosphere with this particular satellite—and some communications packages and other things.”

Knight said the company is forging geostationary orbit satellite plans for 2027 on top of supporting Golden Dome with mission engineering.

“We have a long history of [low-Earth orbit] satellites. We're building a GEO refueler so that the Space Force can maneuver without regret…and then we do optical and [high frequency] sensors,” Knight said, speaking about missile warning and tracking.

The company also wants to scale its manufacturing ability for a very special type of glass.

“We want to get into the manufacturing business of something called an etalon. And you're like, I've never heard the word etalon in my life!” Knight said with a laugh. “It's a highly polished piece of glass. And it's needed for a variety of optical applications—so laser communications, very precise telescopes, and very, very sophisticated optical sensors like the ones we build.”

The move comes as the U.S. military increasingly relies on sensors to garner intel, improve navigation, and fuel autonomy, all while the White House pushes for domestic manufacturing of national security technologies.

“There's a backlog based on our foreign suppliers. We really want to get that investment from the government, which is what they've said they want to do, and get that online so that we can provide etalons for the defense industrial base,” Knight said, referring to working with the Pentagon’s Manufacturing Technology, or ManTech, program.

Arcfield already makes etalons for its products but expansion would support internal growth and the industrial base overall, Knight said. The company has conducted demos and submitted a white paper to start the process with hopes of getting government funding to help build out its manufacturing capacity for a larger scale.

“We want to expand our manufacturing line for our optical sensor…and within that, that's going to require a fairly significant expansion of the etalon production. We can't [rely] on a company in Canada that produces it,” he said.

Welcome

A space-age name change. The German air force, Luftwaffe, officially changed its English name translation to the German Air and Space Force, said Maj. Gen. Michael Traut, who leads Germany’s Space Command.

“What we've seen is that the air and the space domains [are] increasingly merging,” Traut said during an international space panel at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium last week.
Germany wants to procure space surveillance radars, he said, adding that, “Of course, we know that capable missile defense radars can look into space as well. As such, I'm completely interested in the data they provide, and I'm completely interested in the integration.”
Last year, Germany committed €35 billion to space-related defense projects. The NATO nation is also interested in hypersonic vehicles, specifically space planes, presenting “an opportunity to operate in different altitudes we were used to,” Traut said.
“We are absolutely committed strategically to develop and operate space planes in high atmospheric hypersonic operations. [That] not only sets us up to defend against enemy threats, but to explore and make use of that altitude as well.”

Increased munitions options means launchers should do more with less. Common Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher, or CAML, represents the kind of thinking we need around launchers, Brig. Gen. Robert J. Mikesh, the Army’s capability program executive for offensive fires, said during the symposium.

“We should not think of every launcher as permanently married to a single missile or munition,” Mikesh said.
“We need to think about adaptable platforms, commonality, autonomy, payloads for both offensive or defensive environments, reduced soldier burden and the ability to integrate new capabilities more rapidly. The launcher can no longer be an afterthought,” Mikesh said.

Bonus round: NORTHCOM keeps eye on security needs for power generation and increasingly electrified military systems and command and control centers, said Lt. Gen. Joseph Jarrard, the command’s deputy commander.

“We are aware of some of the issues with respect to that,” Jarrard said during the Q&A portion of his keynote at the symposium. “Obviously some of our critical infrastructure requires some of those energy sources. And so I will say that's on our radar…But it hasn't necessarily risen to the level we consider it to be a problem that we have to deal with directly, right now.”
One thing that is top of mind: The lack of sensors to spot and protect military bases from drone attacks.

Making moves + other news

The Missile Defense Agency awarded X-Bow Systems an $11 million contract for testing and development of low-cost interceptors.
Rocketmaker United Launch Alliance names Mark Peller as CEO.
Sam Mehta takes over as L3Harris’ CEO, following the ousting of Chris Kubasik.
Auriga Space brings on former MDA Director Trey Obering as an advisor, Defense One has learned.
REGENT’s seaglider drone platform performs in the Silent Swarm defense event.
CACI opens a manufacturing center in Rochester, N.Y.
Havoc AI teams up with Red Cat.
The Pentagon is auditing academic institutions to scrutinize foreign ties. Related: Reuters looks at how U.S. military funding fueled China’s robot dog boo

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DISA awards Peraton $953M communications infrastructure contract

Ross Wilkers — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:19:00 -0400

Peraton has won a potential 10-year, $953 million contract to continue providing communication infrastructure services to the Defense Information Systems Agency for data centers and hybrid cloud computing environments.

DISA received three proposals for this third iteration of its Capacity Services Communications contract, the agency said in an award notice first posted Friday.

CSC III emphasizes on-demand communications capabilities as the agency adjusts its requirements based on mission needs instead of a fixed equipment set, according to solicitation documents from February.

Peraton is tasked with providing hardware, operating software, storage, network management tools and software, automation tools and software and technical services across DISA and non-DISA sites around the world.

Work will take place over an initial five-year base period and up to five individual option years.

Peraton inherited the CSC program in 2021 through its combination with Perspecta, which purchased longtime incumbent Knight Point Systems in 2019.

Knight Point won the first iteration in 2011 and secured the recompete in 2018. DISA has obligated $573 million in task order volume against the current contract ahead of its April 2027 sunset, according to GovTribe data.

Editor's note: DISA updated its award notice post-publication to say the contract ceiling is $953 million.

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Defense firm L3Harris promotes Mehta to CEO in abrupt leadership change

Ross Wilkers — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 09:31:47 -0400

L3Harris Technologies’ board of directors has promoted Sam Mehta to chief executive from his former role as president of space and mission systems in an abrupt leadership change announced Monday.

Chris Kubasik, L3Harris’ CEO since June 2021, stepped down from that position and his other roles as chairman and member of the board of directors effective immediately.

L3Harris said the board determined to enter into a separation agreement with Kubasik after an investigation found conduct by him that was “not consistent with the values of the company as outlined in its code of conduct.” The company added the alleged conduct was not related to its financial reporting, controls, customer relationships or operational performance.

Mehta joined L3Harris in 2023 as president of the communications segment, then added the additional title of president of the space and mission systems segment at the start of this year.

This transition at the very top of L3Harris is taking place in a year where the company announced its intentions to take the missile solutions segment public following a $1 billion investment from the Defense Department.

L3Harris originally eyed the second half of this year for the initial public offering, but Kubasik told investors in July that the IPO is being delayed until at least mid-2027 because of market conditions the company sees as not reflecting the value of Mission Solutions.

Kubasik’s tenure as CEO started with the completion of the integration of L3 Technologies and Harris Corp. following their merger in 2019, and includes the $4.7 billion acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne in 2023.

The pending Missile Solutions IPO is not the only move L3Harris has undertaken with respect to its space business. L3Harris closed the sale of a 60% stake in the space propulsion and power systems business this month to AE Industrial Partners, while retaining a 40% stake.

In addition to Mehta’s promotion, Lauren Barnes has moved up to be president of the space and mission systems segment from her prior role as president of spectrum superiority. Christopher Aebli, formerly president of mission critical communications, was elevated to president of the communications and spectrum dominance.

Lewis Hay III, a member of the L3Harris and a predecessor board since 2002, was elected chairman after previously holding the title of lead independent director.

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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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