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Stop managing NATO. Start rebalancing it.

Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The Atlantic alliance can no longer be managed through reassurance, communiqués, or the fiction that its internal tensions are political noise. They are structural. Mark Rutte's recent visit to Washington made that clear. NATO requires rebalancing: a more credible distribution of responsibility, capability, and strategic weight across the alliance.

Beneath this lies a growing crisis of trust. Europeans no longer simply ask whether the United States will stay engaged; they worry that ambiguity or sudden shifts in Washington could hollow out deterrence and tempt adversaries to test what was once an ironclad commitment. Unequal burden‑sharing has shifted from a long‑running grievance to a hard instrument of leverage. The American message to Europe is blunt: step up or live with more conditional U.S. guarantees. Europeans, for their part, argue they are already carrying heavier financial and political costs. They also demand a seat at the table: they expect to be consulted, not simply informed, when decisions with direct consequences for European security are made.

The alliance cannot afford to remain trapped in this cycle of mutual recrimination—it must move decisively to embrace rebalancing as a strategic imperative that serves the long-term interests of both sides of the Atlantic.

The simultaneous wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have revealed just how critical transatlantic rebalancing is. Russia's war against Ukraine has been the alliance's most clarifying test in decades. Without Washington's intelligence, industrial capacity, and political resolve, Ukraine's resistance would have looked very different. That European dependency is a structural condition, built over thirty years of unbalanced burden-sharing, that now constitutes a strategic liability for the Alliance as a whole. In the Strait of Hormuz, the calculus ran in the other way: the United States recognized that it needed European military bases, naval presence, and diplomatic cover to manage escalation in a region where allies are deeply exposed. Taken together, these two theaters make the case that neither side can afford to act alone.

This is an inflection point—one that requires the terms of the transatlantic relationship to be reset and clarified. Against this backdrop, GMF’s new Europe Defense Roadmap lays out three structural reforms that allies urgently need to operationalize.

First, Europe must transform defense spending into integrated strategic capability. The structural shift from a U.S.-led security order in Europe to a European-led framework—supported but no longer directed by the United States—is no longer hypothetical. It is accelerating. Spending announcements are not capabilities. The historic shifts in German defense investment, Poland's military buildup, and Nordic-Baltic rearmament are real and significant—but fragmented national procurement will not produce the interoperable architecture a rebalanced Alliance requires. The issue is no longer whether Europe spends more. It is whether Europe can pool procurement, expand industrial depth, and generate interoperable force at the scale required on NATO’s eastern flank. Without that, burden-shifting will remain a slogan.

Second, NATO must replace its outdated burden-sharing metrics with a framework that actually measures strategic value. The 2 percent, and now 5 percent, benchmark is a political signal, but it is not, by itself, a serious measure of alliance contribution. Both NATO and the EU already use more granular mechanisms to track defense efforts, covering force readiness, deployable units, intelligence sharing, logistical capacity and resilience to hybrid threats. Taken seriously, these tools offer a more accurate picture of who delivers what to collective defense than headline spending alone. They would also recast the transatlantic argument: from an annual quarrel over percentages to a more rigorous and measurable assessment of strategic partnership.

Third, the Alliance must settle the European strategic autonomy debate—permanently—and embrace strategic complementarity instead. The decade-long argument that European defense capacity somehow threatens Alliance unity has served no one. The choice is not between a Europe that duplicates American power and a Europe that remains permanently dependent on it. The choice is between a Europe that can act and fill operational gaps when the U.S. is stretched across theatres and one that cannot. Ukraine and Iran, taken together, make the case. Rutte effectively hinted at this shift in Washington when he argued that Europe must move from “unhealthy co-dependence” to “true partnership”. That is the right formula. A stronger European pillar does not weaken deterrence and defense. It makes it more credible.

The transatlantic relationship will be preserved and strengthened only by being transformed. The task is to build a version of the alliance suited for the strategic conditions of the next decade: one in which American commitment is sustained by European capability, and European ambition is anchored in a strategic contribution framework that reframes the conversation in terms Washington can act on and Brussels can deliver: not just how much Europe spends, but what Europe can do—reliably and at scale, within EU, NATO and/or coalition frameworks. Europe will need clear planning, coordinated investments, and a shared pathway for collective defense and crisis management. That is the real message: Stop managing NATO. Start rebalancing it.

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Army’s HADES spy plane on track for first delivery later this year

Meghann Myers — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:28:51 -0400

NASHVILLE—The Army’s next-generation spy plane will begin flight tests this summer, then be delivered to the first units later this year—two years after the Army awarded Sierra Nevada Corporation $1 billion to turn its Bombarder 6500 business jet into an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platform that will replace the Army’s legacy turboprop fleet.

The service wants to combine the inherent range of the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System—HADES for short—with launched effects, Andrew Evans, the director of strategy and transformation in the Army’s headquarters intelligence office, told reporters Friday at the Army Aviation Warfighting Summit.

A year ago, he said he wanted 1,000 kilometers of coverage, but after discussing with industry, “we aimed short,” he said, without disclosing precisely how far he thinks HADES will be able to see.

“We are on a campaign now to begin to do some service contracts where companies come in and they show us what they can do,” Evans said, with a demonstration planned for later this year.

HADES’ eventual capabilities will stay open-ended, in line with the Army’s Continuous Transformation acquisition model, which favors getting basic prototypes into soldiers’ hands for feedback on all of the systems and capabilities a platform needs to be most useful.

“What we're seeking in this portfolio is progress, not perfection. We understand that HADES is going to be an iterative program that over the next number of years will continue to change and evolve, because the threats that it's addressing are continuing to change and evolve,” Evans said. “So we're not looking to build a system that gets locked into time. We're looking to build a system to give us options to scale to the threat as a threat changes.”

HADES will be delivered in three prototypes, Col. Joe Minor, the Army’s fixed-wing project manager, told reporters.

The first will have legacy sensors that have been built into previous ISR planes, and that iteration will be part of the initial testing to start this year. The next prototype will add advanced radar, and then third will be “combat credible,” Evans said, declining to offer details.

“What I think is most important to understand about the HADES sensor strategy is it's going to be an ever-evolving sensor strategy, right?” Evans said. “So if you come back in three years from now, what does HADES have on it? And I tell you that it has the same thing that I told you right now, then shame on us, because we're not being resilient enough. So we will be dynamic in the way that we sensor this aircraft out.”

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How the MV-75 Cheyenne II is pushing the service to re-think its aviation lineup

Meghann Myers — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:21:17 -0400

NASHVILLE—When Army leaders talk about their new tiltrotor platform, the first thing they tout are its speed, range and load capacity, all eclipsing the UH-60 Black Hawk whose missions it’s destined to take over.

But bringing the MV-75 Cheyenne II online will also force changes upon the service’s aviation community—including, perhaps, an entirely new aircraft just to refuel it.

“Certainly, you're not going to be able to take a conventional rotorcraft with an MV-75, but a fixed-wing can go with an MV-75,” Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, who leads the Army Aviation Center of Excellence, told reporters Thursday at the Army Aviation Warfighter Summit. “We're also thinking creatively about, if we put aerial refueling…on a conventional variant, then how do we refuel it? So we're thinking through, you know, do we need to develop a requirement for aerial refueling for ourselves now that we have really enhanced our capability?”

The Army is the last service to add a tiltrotor to its aviation fleet, and it’s the only service that doesn’t have air tankers to refuel its aircraft. While Army units within U.S. Special Operations Command can rely on Air Force C-130s to refuel in the sky, the conventional units that are to start testing the MV-75 will have to rely on ground refueling like the rest of the helicopter fleet.

But even in the short term, Gill said, MV-75 still reduces the logistical burden, because units don’t need to set up as many forward area refueling points for it as they would for a Black Hawk.

A Bell-Textron promotional video that accompanied the Cheyenne’s unveiling on Wednesday includes a vignette of an aerial refueling by drone. The unmanned system looks a lot like the Navy’s MQ-25 Stingray, a carrier-based tanker.

“So I think we need to solve our own problems and think about, how do we do our own—let's call it logistical resupply—in the air, something that can keep up with an MV-75. So that's where that concept was pointing,” Gill said.

But the Army doesn’t have a written requirement for a refueling drone, he added, so the idea is just an aspiration at this point.

What’s next for helicopters?

Beyond refueling, there are some other considerations for how a tiltrotor will operate with existing Army aviation assets, and one of the biggest is how to protect it.

Traditionally, the Army uses AH-64 Apaches to escort its helicopters on missions, and that will continue with MV-75. But the Apache, which tops out around 185 mph, is far slower than the MV-75, which is built to cruise faster than 300 mph. To protect a Cheyenne, the Army may have to launch multiple Apaches from different locations; it is also looking into ways to give Apaches a longer reach.

“We haven't updated the requirement document since 2017, so we're very focused on updating that requirement,” Maj. Gen. Cain Baker, who leads the Future Vertical Lift cross-functional team.

Launched effects from an Apache will help it extend its range, Baker said, with drones that can extend the Apache’s ability to see threats and also fire on them.

Then there’s the matter of the Army’s trusty workhorse, the Black Hawk, which the service selected to replace the UH-1 Iroquois in 1976. At least theoretically, the Cheyenne II was developed as an eventual replacement for the Black Hawk.

In practice, that will be a slow transition, if a complete replacement even happens at all.

“We're going to be modernizing every formation with the latest generation of Black Hawks, as we can and our budget allows,” Gill said. “We're going to be flying the Black Hawk for decades, I can assure you.”

At least into the 2050s, Col. Ryan Nesrsta, the Army’s program manager for utility helicopters told reporters Thursday. At least in the near term, the Cheyenne will probably free up the Black Hawk to do some more complex missions than just ferrying troops.

“So I think, before, there was a focus on troop movement, battlefield circulation, associated with the aircraft. I think what it's actually doing is, it's opening up the aperture for the aircraft to appreciate its multi-role capability,” Nesrsta said. That has led to “substantive conversations and activity on employing launched effects on the aircraft,” including equipping it with autonomous systems.

Not only that, but Sikorsky, who makes the Black Hawk, is working on a completely unmanned variant to pick up the helicopter’s supply mission.

“I think the Black Hawk will continue to do what it does so well, which is, you know, the same air-assault capability, the same medevac capability, the same logistical support capability, but probably closer in, to what we call the ‘close fight,’ ” Gill said.

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Pro-Iran hackers appear to increase critical infrastructure cyberattacks

Chris Teale — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

Cyberattacks against critical infrastructure from groups sympathetic to Iran appear to be ticking up, as the federal government warns that hackers may exploit vulnerabilities.

Last week, pro-Iranian hacking group Ababil of Minab claimed responsibility for a March hack on the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, publishing claims on Telegram that they said showed them accessing LA Metro’s internal systems. The transit agency shut down access to some of its network after its security team found unauthorized activity, although officials said bus and rail service was unaffected.

The group's claims may be false. It is an “emerging” group “with a limited public profile and little verifiable prior activity in threat intelligence reporting — making any definitive capability or intent assessment premature at this stage,” said a blog post by Tim Miller, field chief technology officer for public sector at Dataminr, an artificial intelligence-backed platform that helps leaders track events, threats and risks in real time.

Still, Miller wrote, “What can be cautiously observed from available evidence is that their explicit pro-Iran messaging and targeting of a major US public transit authority is broadly consistent with Iranian-aligned actors’ known pattern of targeting US critical infrastructure."

Other experts that track such events are similarly cautious. “There is no clear evidence that the claim is legitimate,” said a spokesperson for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which has warned of attacks on critical infrastructure by pro-Iran hackers.

Still, it is a worrying time for state and local governments and critical infrastructure operators, who have been waiting to see whether the ongoing U.S. war on Iran would draw retaliation by Iran-linked hacker groups.

"The threat of cyber-attack from Iran is real,” Andrew Chipman, governance, risk and compliance manager at cybersecurity company ProCircular, said in an email. “At this time, we expect to see that threat realized through proxies, hacktivists, and other allies to the Iranian regime. If Iran is able to build back their regime, we may see direct retaliation from Iran in the form of cyber-attacks against highly visible targets. History teaches us that hospitals and medical service providers are prime targets for the regime and its supporters. However, any critical infrastructure is a potential target.”

The alleged Iran-backed hack in Los Angeles preceded a April 7 warning from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and a slew of other federal agencies that various operational technology devices used in critical infrastructure, including programmable logic controllers, have been exploited by bad actors linked to Iran.

The agencies said those efforts, which have at times “resulted in operational disruption and financial loss,” have been designed to “cause disruptive effects within the United States.” CISA and its fellow agencies said the targets have included government services and facilities, water and wastewater systems and energy.

“Iran using cyberattacks to probe and impact American utilities should come as no surprise,” Lt. Gen. Ross Coffman (Ret.), president of artificial intelligence company Forward Edge-AI, said in an email. “Iran is using its long-range targeting tools to fight in every domain possible. We must continue to harden our cyber defenses and remind employees that they are the first line of defense. Our government's cyber professionals are the best in the world, so Iran is probing daily to find an exposed flank.”

Ababil of Minab warned that their “forthcoming actions will exact sterner pain,” although Miller said in the blog post that those pronouncements should be “treated as unverified rhetoric until corroborated by additional intelligence.” Chipman said some form of escalation could happen.

“Iran is not currently in a position to wage large scale cyber warfare against the United States or its allies, but hacktivists and proxy attackers are plentiful — expect attacks to come and prepare appropriately," he said.

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New test range opens for the startup-war era

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 06:00:00 -0400

A new, 400,000-acre testing and training facility aims to bring troops and defense firms together so they can innovate at the speed of modern warfare.

On Friday, Georgia-based Second Bend Labs announced the public opening of the facility near Moody Air Force Base. It’s designed to appeal to two usually separate groups whose challenges can only be solved together. Soldiers need to test drones and counter-drone equipment against a competent adversary, and drone startups need to see if their stuff works.

That requires a new approach to the military test range: a site that civilians can easily access, unlike a military base, and that allows military drone testing, unlike a regular expanse of private acreage.

Simply creating a place where a young company can fly medium-sized drones at the altitude of an A-10 Warthog and have soldiers shoot at it might seem obvious. It isn’t. It’s a problem that Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg discussed in his confirmation hearing as a major obstacle to modernization, and that Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon’s acquisition undersecretary have called burdensome to innovators. It’s also a problem that Ukraine has solved out of necessity, making the wartorn country a central testing site for drone and counter-drone warfare.

“You need to train the way you fight in realistic mission environments,” said Stu Booker, a former Air Force combat controller who is now Second Bend’s president of unmanned and autonomous systems. “Our clients, whether they are testing new technology, developing new tactics, or sharpening existing skills, are doing it in conditions that reflect the complexity of the environments they will actually fight in.”

The site offers diverse terrain and five miles of riverfront water for testing land and sea drones. It sits within Moody’s Corsair South Military Operations Area, which enables testing of low-altitude air support craft like the A-10 Warthog but also, increasingly, small and medium drones.

The facility has a range complex designed to Defense Department specifications, a 3,000-square-foot hangar, and an adjacent 20-foot launch pad. It also has “personnel in private guest home lodging, chef-supported meals, a 2,000-square-foot gym, and 3,000 square feet of team bonding spaces,” according to a press release for the lab. The idea is to create something akin to a modern co-working space or even a tech accelerator, allowing startups to collaborate and share gear. Think back to the Silicon Valley campuses of Google, Facebook (before Meta), and Twitter (before X) in the 2000s.

One thing the company is still working on is getting changes or waivers to local and federal regulations that limit its ability to replicate jamming and other electromagnetic warfare effects—the biggest factor driving evolution on the Ukrainian battlefield.

Second Bend Labs CEO Sam Kellett said he had reached operating agreements with the nearby Air Force base and the state of Florida. He also touted the willingness of federal officials to visit the site and discuss easing regulations—something the Defense Department has been pushing to increase the realism of testing and training.

“Our first government group will come out at the end of this month to start planning that. So there's nothing set in stone that we can or can't do. Okay, if somebody says they want to do something, we go find a way to make it happen for them,” said Kellett.

Why the need

One senior enlisted military official said other testing and training sites don’t make it easy for soldiers and engineers to do realistic drone-on-drone warfare, which changes far faster than Cold War-era testing sites or weapon designs under the constraints of programs of record.

The senior enlisted official said, “The rise of drones and counter-drone systems has forced us to dramatically expand the scope and frequency of training and testing. It’s no longer enough to strictly focus on shooting, moving, communicating.” Modern warfare has created a need for other skills such as analyzing electronic warfare conditions, identifying difficult-to-detect drone threats, and modifying equipment. “That means more repetitions, more scenario-based training, and more live or realistic test environments where drones are actually flying,” they said.

Practicing those skills requires more frequent contact with the people actually creating those technologies, people who aren’t easily found on military bases.

“My operators aren’t just users anymore, but they are also testers and evaluators. Every new piece of gear means building a mini test plan, running iterations, capturing data, and feeding that back to developers and higher headquarters,” they said.

The facility quietly hosted the 123rd Air Force Special Tactics Squadron in March and other military elements in previous months.

It has also hosted a handful of defense startups, younger companies that don’t have their own ranges and who aren’t accustomed to navigating the Defense Department’s complex procedures. These include Red Cat, a startup drone company; and a drone and counter-drone company called T3i.

Shaun Sorensen, T3i’s director of small unmanned aerial systems, said conventional test ranges are too “static.”

Today’s ranges lack “the ability to rapidly integrate and evaluate new systems—especially prototype solutions from startups,” Sorensen said in an email. “We need more interactive training and testing locations because drone and counter-drone threats evolve faster than traditional ranges and curricula can keep up.”

CEO Kellett also leads a biometric wearables company called Aware Custom Biometric Wearables. He said 2BL is blending the two to offer “next-gen human performance technology in development that will measure brain activity and vitals in realtime,” as well as other new tech that startups might want to test against gear from other startups.

Kellett said some of the early visitors to the site have also expressed interest in setting up production facilities nearby, in line with the growing Defense Department preference for a closer design, testing, and supply chain.

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‘Best drone’ innovation winner developing enemy drone recovery system with the Army Research Lab

Meghann Myers — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:01:24 -0400

NASHVILLE—A group of soldiers from the Pennsylvania Army National Guard is teaming up with the Army Research Laboratory to develop a prototype enemy drone recovery system that won the innovation award at the Army’s first Best Drone Warfighter competition in February.

The idea came together over a “couple beverages” after Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Reed and his 28th Infantry Division Innovation Team got the invitation to enter the competition late last year, he told an audience Thursday at the Army Aviation Warfighter Summit.

“So we wanted to come up with something that wasn't just the run-of-the-mill, Army-type system, something that industry would be excited about and potentially be able to take and make it scale from there,” he said.

They came up with Project RED—Recovery Exploitation Drone—an unmanned system that uses AI to find downed enemy drones, and an attached robot arm to pick up those drones and fly them back to the unit to download their data.

“We're currently working with Army Research Laboratory at this time to kind of refine our product, create more autonomy, more stability in the flight controls,” Reed said. It’s part of a one-year research-and-development agreement with ARL.

Other units are already starting to work on their pitches for next year, Reed said as part of a panel discussing lessons learned from the first Best Drone Warfighter competition.

He suggested creating sub-categories for the “best innovation” award with different budget thresholds, to give units of varying size and resources more room to develop their ideas.

He was joined by Sgt. Javon Purchner and Staff Sgt. Angel Caliz, who won the best drone operator and best team portions of the competition.

Purchner, a fire support specialist, brought several years as a first-person view drone hobbyist to the competition, he said. He suggested units give soldiers more designated time to train on drones.

“At installations, have actual courses for soldiers that want to compete,” he said. “They can have time to actually go out and practice their flying skills and have that time set aside for them, because flying FPV drones isn't just as easy as picking up the controller and flying. It's something that takes a lot of time and practice to become proficient at.”

Purchner’s leaders were so impressed with his skills that they plucked him from his unit in 1st Cavalry Division to serve at III Corps headquarters and develop a training center with multiple levels of courses to train new drone pilots at Fort Hood, Texas.

Caliz said he’d been practicing the hunter-killer drone mission with his fellow 2nd Cavalry Regiment soldiers, giving him an edge.

He suggested that next year’s competition include electronic warfare interference to make the scenario more realistic. He also had some suggestions for industry to make the drone mission more viable.

One would be some sort of transport system for drones, he said, because when you’re a team carrying five to 10 of them, they no longer just fit in a backpack. Another idea was a new kind of ground control station.

“I'd like to see more mobility. Something smaller, more compact,” he said. “Something that doesn’t tie you down to a certain case or certain bag, something that’s not too many wires.”

Assuming the second annual Best Drone Warfighter competition becomes a reality, leadership would like to expand the challenges with a nighttime portion, said Col. James Brant, the lessons learned and training manager for the Army Aviation Center of Excellence.

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Space-based missile defense may cost too much for Golden Dome’s 12-figure spending plan

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:55:04 -0400

Space-based interceptors may be too costly even for the massively budgeted Golden Dome missile defense system, the program’s leader said Wednesday.

Acknowledging what many analysts have said ever since President Trump ordered up orbiting interceptors in one of the first executive orders of his second term, Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein told the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee on Wednesday that building and deploying satellites armed to down enemy missiles early in flight may never be affordable.

“What we do not know today is ‘can I do it at scale and can I do it affordably?’ That’s going to be the huge challenge for boost-phase intercept,” he said. “I will tell you because we are so focused on affordability. If we cannot do it affordabl[ly] we will not go into production.”

Trump’s 2025 executive order that established the missile defense system explicitly calls for the “development and deployment” of boost-phase space interceptors, even though defense budget analysts and physicists have continuously pointed out that the technology would be too expensive and even ineffective for the project’s desired cost and ambitions. The recently increased $185 billion price tag for Golden Dome would be supported by $17.5 billion in the Defense Department’s 2027 budget request. Most of that is coming from reconciliation spending, a special budget process that requires a simple majority to pass mandatory legislation.

Even though reconciliation isn’t a guarantee for future years, defense spending analysis shows that Golden Dome funds will likely be included in the baseline budget for several years.

Baseline Golden Dome spending is estimated to be $14.7 billion in 2028 and rise to $16 billion by 2031, according to data from the American Enterprise Institute’s budget data navigator. Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at AEI, said that’s a big deal and shows there’s support for the project outside of abnormal spending bills.

“They actually roll it into the base budget in future years; they don’t stay dependent on reconciliation,” Harrison said. “That’s been one of the big lingering questions.”

Trump said last year that the system would intercept “very close to 100 percent” of a wide-range of missile threats, although his most recent defense budget request acknowledged that “the goal is to not create a 'perfect' defense.”

During Wednesday’s hearing, Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., said Trump “probably thinks himself a greater theorist of strategic deterrence than everyone else” and that a limited missile defense system would be more feasible.

“It is clear to me now that the reality does not match what President Trump has promised to the American people, an impenetrable shield, as he says, against all threats,” Moulton said. “Experts from both sides of the aisle have admitted this both from a technical and fiscal perspective.”

Guetlein told Congress that the boost-phase interceptors aren’t the only missile-defense solution for the project. In November, the Space Force put out a notice for prototype ideas for a “kinetic midcourse interceptor,” technology that would destroy a missile mid-flight with a direct collision.

“So, if boost-phase intercept from space is not affordable and scalable, we will not produce it because we have other options to get after it,” Guetlein said.

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Hegseth orders termination of DOD union contracts

Erich Wagner — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:32:20 -0400

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week instructed department leaders to terminate most of the department’s collective-bargaining agreements, more than a year after President Trump signed an executive order banning federal employee unions from many agencies on national-security grounds.

In an April 9 memo obtained by Government Executive, Hegseth gave his deputies 24 hours to take action to cancel most union contracts.

“I hereby direct the termination of all collective bargaining agreements to which the department is a party, not subject to a court order enjoining implementation to which the department is a party, not subject to a court order enjoining implementation of Executive Order 14251, ‘Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs,’ within 24 hours of the date of this memorandum, except as applied to the population covered by the [April 2025] secretary of defense certification . . . and the local employing offices of any agency police officers, security guards or firefighters, pursuant to EO 14251,” the secretary wrote last week. “This action is required to align agency operations with national security requirements as outlined in EO 14251.”

A year ago, Hegseth exempted bargaining units of Federal Wage System workers at four installations: the Letterkenny Munition Center in Pennsylvania, the Air Force Test Center in California, the Air Force Sustainment Center in Oklahoma, and the Fleet Readiness Center Southeast in Florida.

Spared from the new memo are the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the Federal Education Association, which last fall secured preliminary injunctions blocking implementation of the executive order. The order cites a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act as authority to strip two-thirds of the federal workforce of their collective-bargaining rights on national-security grounds,.

Not so for AFGE, the nation’s largest federal-employee union. In a statement Wednesday, National President Everett Kelley decried Hegseth’s decision as “cowardly.”

“For 50 years, these employees have exercised their union rights; under several administrations, during a global pandemic and throughout peacetime and wartime, including our most recent conflict with Iran,” he said. “To rip up the union contracts of civilian employees after touting a successful ceasefire in the Middle East is not only a slap in the face to the employees who supported those efforts, but again proves that this action has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with silencing workers’ voices.”

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US has turned back 13 ships in blockade of Iran, Joint Chiefs chairman says

Meghann Myers — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:21:27 -0400

Since the United States began to blockade Iran’s ports on Tuesday, 13 ships have heeded warnings from U.S. warships to turn back, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Thursday.

The Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group is leading the blockade, Gen. Dan Caine said at a Pentagon press briefing with sailors prepared to board any commercial vessels that attempt to cross the blockade line.

In addition to ships, there is a “massive, massive force of fighters, intelligence aircraft, helicopters, and other embarked forces, to include aerial refueling tankers that are up overhead this blockade area,” Caine said, indicating a chart of U.S. presence in the region.

Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, joined the briefing to talk about two recent trips to the Middle East, where he said he “had the privilege of personally recognizing more than 100 servicemen and women for their extraordinary valor, their courage and their initiative under fire.”

Cooper also said he met with teams who had recovered downed Iranian one-way attack drones and rebuilt them.

“We brought them back to America, took the guts out, put a ‘made in America’ stamp on them, and fired them right back to Iran,” he said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addressed Iran’s government directly in his remarks, asserting that Tehran can attempt to “dig out” of its destroyed military and defense industrial base facilities, “but you can’t reconstitute.”

Hegseth also challenged Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, saying they “don’t have a real navy or real domain awareness,” though Iran’s mines have effectively kept the waterway closed.

Hegseth then turned his ire upon the press.

“I just can't help but notice the endless stream of garbage, the relentlessly negative coverage you cannot resist peddling, despite the historic and important success of this effort and the success of our troops,” he said. “Sometimes it's hard to figure out what side some of you are actually on. It's incredibly unpatriotic.”

He compared coverage of the Iran war to that of the Afghanistan withdrawal, accusing the media of bending “over backwards to explain away” the chaos of the American airlift out of Kabul’s airport as Taliban forces took over the country.

In reality, news organizations at the time asked the Pentagon in its daily briefings how and why the withdrawal effort had been left to the last minute and allowed to get so out of control. Pentagon officials deferred questions about planning and decision-making to the State Department.

Hegseth then turned his attention to recruiting efforts by the Air Force and Space Force, which announced Tuesday they had met their fiscal year 2026 goals five months ahead of deadline.

“Where are the reports on that? Where's the coverage of the new spirit in the country? The new spirit in the ranks, the surge of Americans wanting to join the greatest military in the world,” he said. “Nothing from the fake news.”

In fact, ABC News reported on the story on Wednesday, becoming the latest of several news organizations to do so.

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Russians will surrender to robots. Russian robots won’t.

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 22:19:14 -0400

NATO is studying how to use ground and air robots to replace human soldiers in assaults, something Ukraine has been doing for more than a year. But that hasn’t stopped Russia’s continuous assault with its own, increasingly autonomous one-way attack drones.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a social-media splash with a video describing a historic first from last July: a skirmish in which Russian troops surrendered to Ukrainian robots.

“The future is already on the front line—and Ukraine is building it,” Zelenskyy said in the video, adding that Ukrainian robotics companies “have already carried out more than 22,000 missions on the front in just three months.”

Still, the Ukrainian president offered far fewer details than did Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade in its own July 2025 post.

“Enemy fortifications were attacked” by first-person-view aerial drones and ground robots armed with explosives and made by Nazemnyi Robotychnyi Kompleks, the post said. “The next robot was already approaching the destroyed dugout when the enemy, in order to avoid being blown up, announced surrender. The occupiers who survived were taken to our lines by ‘birds’ [aerial drones] and, according to the regulations, taken prisoner.”

“The operation was carried out without infantry and without losses on our side,” it said. “The occupiers surrendered to the ground robots of the Third Assault!”

Ukraine’s ground-robot game advanced quickly in the following months, said Olena Kryzshanivska, a senior editor at the NATO Association of Canada who first relayed the news to English-language audiences.

“Already…[by the] beginning of this year, we saw several documented cases when UGVs [unmanned ground vehicles] were used for strike missions. They were either delivering grenades [or] they were sometimes … attacking trenches, attacking Russian troops,” Kryzshanivska said in February during a podcast with CNAS adjunct senior fellow Sam Bendett.

That sort of combined robotic fast maneuver is one of the ways Ukraine is forcing a reconsideration of decades of military doctrine, and NATO is taking notice. In February, its Allied Command Transformation announced the extension of a study on Force Lethality Enhancement to build out “a few practical force options and test them against realistic scenarios to see what works, and what it would take to use them on operations.”

Another alliance effort to integrate ground robots, part of the multidomain Task Force X, is being led by Brig. Gen. Chris Gent, NATO deputy chief of staff transformation and integration.

Venture capitalists are taking note as well. Eric Brock of Ondas Capital told Defense One in January that his firm is investing in “ground robots that are tailored towards defense and homeland security but also critical infrastructure protection in certain places.”

Challenges

The biggest constraint in using first-person-view drones is that an operator can generally fly just one at a time. But the drone can fly itself to waypoints, loiter in the air, and reconnect after brief communications interruptions.

Ground robots, by contrast, need constant attention because navigation remains a technical challenge, John Hardie, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told reporters in February. And UGV operators must also stay in frequent contact with the operators of the aerial drones above.

“My understanding is that they've experimented with autonomous navigation, but it’s especially difficult with [unmanned ground vehicles] for that to be reliable. So I don't think they're there yet,” Hardie said.

Ukraine has also been hunting for alternatives to GPS, which is jammable. Since 2023, it has been experimenting with visual- and terrain-matching systems and other AI-powered ideas for long-range navigation, Hardie said.

Russia, too, has carried out robotic operations in large volumes. But they’re limited to strikes with one-way attack drones like Shaheds and, occasionally evacuation of the wounded, not taking positions.

The Lancet drones produced by Russia’s ZALA company are guided on final approach to their targets by matching camera imagery to preloaded maps. It works well enough—because Russian forces place less of a premium on collateral damage or striking the right target.

For Ukrainians, the goal is greater autonomy, allowing one operator to preside over fleets of ground and air robots but with confidence that they will perform the mission assigned, hit the target that they’re supposed to hit and not simply whatever happens to be there when the drone finally arrives. It’s the same sort of complex multi-drone swarm capability that the Pentagon is seeking to develop.

Ukrainian Air Force Capt. Max Maslii, deputy chief of staff for the 96th Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, described that goal as a departure from the way Russia operates “autonomous” drones like the Lancet, as isolated flying bombs.

Under the “new paradigm,” Maslii told Defense One, the drones would be able to “find the … more efficient way to accomplish this mission, together with such machines.” At that point, he said, operators wouldn’t be stuck piloting one drone at a time. They would work more like technicians managing a larger, more complex system.

“Our job will be … to produce a lot of drones, to put them in the proper place, to take care [of] the systems that manage those drones, and just to, you know, turn them on.”

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Air Force presses for space-based radar despite AWACS loss in Iran

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:35:31 -0400

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado—Air Force officials are pursuing a space-based system to detect airborne threats and pushing off additional funding for battlespace awareness aircraft in the 2027 budget, even as the service’s fleet of radar planes is in Iran’s sights.

A base contract has been awarded for a new space-based airborne moving target communication capability, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said Wednesday during his keynote address to the Space Symposium here. During a follow-up roundtable with reporters, the service leader said they’ve selected a pool of vendors and are progressing towards the first award. While he didn’t provide a specific timeline, Meink said it could be sooner than anticipated.

“We expect that system to field very rapidly,” Meink said. “These are programs that are ready to execute and ready to execute rapidly, to be honest, as soon as the money is fed down to the system.”

Meink’s support is backed by roughly $7 billion in funding for space-based Air Moving Target Indicator, or AMTI, satellites in the latest 2027 budget request. By comparison, the service’s E-7 Wedgetail radar plane was, once again, not funded.

Military and defense experts told Defense One that the capability is seen as crucial to battlespace awareness in chaotic combat zones and there is an immediate need for it in conflict.

The Air Force’s E-3 Sentry fleet, is down to only a handful of serviceable aircraft after one was hit in a recent Iranian missile attack last month.

The damage to the Airborne Early Warning and Control System aircraft, or AWACS, alarmed former military officials.

“They're going after the tankers. They went after the E-3,” a former military official told Defense One. “The bad guys understand that if we blind the eyes and handicap the ability to project power, then we don't have to deal with the fighters.”

The former official added they hope the lack of E-7 funding, and next-generation tanker capabilities is not permanent and the budget is “not a final version.”

When asked if the losses in Iran underscored the need to fund the E-7 or other similar air capabilities, Meink backed the space-based system once again—while keeping Wedgetail funding open for discussion.

“Some of those losses highlight the importance of a survivable platform right now,” Meink said. “The capability that the E-7 will provide is an important capability, and so we need to look at what we're going to do going forward. We're finalizing those decisions within the Pentagon about how we want to do that, and we'll roll that out to the Hill when it's appropriate.”

Last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth criticized the E-7’s survivability and made a push for space-based systems; the Air Force’s 2026 budget request cut funding for the program. Congress added back a little more than $1 billion into that year’s defense spending bill. Last month, the service awarded $2.3 billion in contracts to Boeing for Wedgetail development.

Meink expressed confidence in the space-based AMTI system and said the capability has already been demonstrated, but did not elaborate further.

“Space-based AMTI, I think, will probably be far and away the most capable AMTI system ever built,” Meink said. “That doesn't mean it's going to do the entire job. There are many other systems that come into play, as you do data fusion to get the bigger picture.”

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Space Force’s 2040 vision: a larger force to contend with larger Chinese, Russian threats

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:20:15 -0400

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The next 15 years will likely see potential adversaries crank up their space and counter-space capabilities, so the Space Force needs more people and money, the service’s chief said as he rolled out two long-awaited policy documents on Wednesday.

Together, “Objective Force 2040” and “Future Operating Environment 2040” offer “a conceptual view of a future where our space superiority efforts must contend with new technologies, new threats, new missions and new ways of war,” Gen. Chance Saltzman said during his keynote address to the Space Symposium conference here. “It will serve as a point of departure and a catalyst for the growth and change that the future of space war fighting will demand.”

Plans for the Objective Force document were announced in early 2025 and for the Operating Environment document in September; both were expected by year’s end. Saltzman said the delays were “my fault” and that he was particular about the wide-ranging ambitions and vision the documents painted for the service. Some of the findings have already privately been briefed to various government and military organizations.

The public release coincides with a record-breaking 2027 budget request for the service and recent calls to double the number of guardians over the next decade. The public rollout also marked one of Salzman’s last major appearances before his retirement later this year.

Threats through 2040

The operating-environment document identifies China, and to a lesser extent Russia, as the service’s main threats.

The service predicts China will develop the “means and desire to use integrated, AI-enabled space-ground operations on a global scale,” according to the document.

The service predicts China may make large investments in sophisticated intelligence systems, proliferated low-Earth-orbit constellations for communication, sophisticated counterspace weapons, maneuverable space assets, and human-machine teaming for future operations.

Russia will likely look to “asymmetric counterspace capabilities” rather than “pursue space power parity” with NATO and the United States by 2040, the document says.

Space Force planners predict Russia will aggressively pursue technologies to level the playing field, such as a nuclear anti-satellite weapon that they won’t be afraid to use.

“Russia has the lowest threshold for nuclear weapons use in the world, according to its public doctrine,” the document says. “Though the use of space-based nuclear weapons is not explicitly mentioned, there is increasing concern that Russia is developing a nuclear ASAT.”

By 2040, Space Force officials speculate, U.S. government and commercial entities will operate upwards of 30,000 satellites. There are about 12,000 operational U.S. satellites in orbit now, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s space data navigator tool.

The document estimates that China will have roughly 21,000 satellites by then, up from 1,602, by AEI’s count, while Russia will have about 1,500, up from 356.

The Space Force documents diverge somewhat from the new National Defense Strategy, including by stating that China and Russia are likely to be the main threats, and that U.S. allies and partners will be key to staving them off.

“Commitments among established allies and partners will endure. NATO, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (AUKUS), as well as the U.S.–Japan alliance and the U.S.–South Korea alliance, along with enduring U.S. partnerships, will remain the backbone of Western deterrence,” the document reads. “Adversarial alignment among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea will continue informally, but without the creation of a formal ‘anti-U.S.’ bloc or new league of treaty based alliances.”

The operating-environment document also speculates that there will be “no major wars fundamentally altering the state system” such as a U.S.-China clash over Taiwan or a NATO-Russia escalation in Ukraine before 2040.

“Conflicts and crises may arise and intensify, but the existing major frontiers and the global balance of power will be preserved,” it says. “The world remains fraught with rivalry and limited conflict, but it avoids systemic breakdown or large-scale territorial revisionism.”

Saltzman told reporters the document was not intended to align with the National Defense Strategy, but prompt thought among the service about what it faces in the future.

“There is no intent to square this with a strategy, because it is not a strategy,” Saltzman said. “It is simply one vision, one conceptualization of what the future could be.”

Tomorrow’s force

To counter those threats, the Space Force hopes to expand and reorganize its number of guardians and missions.

“The Space Force will require significant additional manpower and specialized expertise to generate space control forces able to conduct sustained operations at a global scale,” the Operational Force document reads. “In practice, this will result in new deltas and squadrons as well as new types of Squadrons focused on targeting, command and control, and battle damage assessment.

The service also believes its orbital, electromagnetic and cyberspace warfare missions “will only become more vital,” the document reads, and would like to see them grow.

In addition to taking on additional mission sets, the service also expects that “existing units must realign to organize around platforms rather than around effects” as a way to provide more rapidly deployable and mobile forces.

While those ambitious plans will require more manpower and money, there are some mission areas that could see a decrease in some roles. Satellite control units, for example, could see a “net decrease in dedicated personnel” as it turns to more automated services to reduce crew responsibilities.

To meet the demand for a growing list of missions, the service points out it will likely need to rely on allies and artificial intelligence to meet those emerging threats.

“The Space Force of 2040 will be fundamentally different from the service of today,” the document reads. “It will center on proliferated, resilient architectures that integrate military, commercial, and allied capabilities into a hybrid warfighting system. It will operate at machine speed, leveraging artificial intelligence and autonomous systems while maintaining the primacy of human judgment for critical decisions.”

The Objective Force document will have classified and unclassified versions, and the service plans to publicize new changes and ideas as the service’s vision evolves from one administration to the next.

“To the maximum extent possible, the Space Force will publicly release an unclassified Objective Force every five years, providing a high-level summary of a much deeper body of conceptual and analytical work,” the document reads.

Saltzman’s swan song

Saltzman’s keynote address and roundtable with reporters on Wednesday marks one of his last major public engagements as the service’s top uniformed leader.

His tenure has been defined by a push for the service to embrace a warfighting mindset and to adopt new missions. It’s also grown from a budget of $26 billion to nearly $72 billion over the past three years and expanded to nearly 11,000 service members today.

The Space Force has also seen more public recognition for its role in joint operations.

Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, and Navy Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, have both highlighted the role that space and guardians played in Iran and Venezuela, describing the service’s space effects as critical first wave in operations which quickly established “space superiority.”

Saltzman was confirmed to the four-year chief of space operations position in the fall of 2022. On Wednesday, the general said he was retiring but declined to provide a date for when he’ll leave his role.

“I'm not sad,” Saltzman said. “This is so exciting…We're starting to marry up resourcing and processes and guardian talent; the joint force is recognizing how important this is. I think our messaging is getting through.”

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Defense Business Brief: Robotic arms + satellite refueling | Iran war costs | Unmasking shadow fleets…from space

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:59:10 -0400

It seems everyone wants to rule the cosmos—or get a spaceplane. But the more satellites militaries launch and rely on, the more they need a good watchdog to protect them. And what’s better than one with a robotic arm that can also refuel?

That’s where the MDA Midnight platform, unveiled at Space Symposium in Colorado this week, comes in. The satellite—which boasts a robotic arm—can get in close to inspect other spacecraft, monitor surroundings, investigate approaching objects, and defend against incoming threats if needed, Holly Johnson, vice president of Canadian-based MDA Space’s robotics and space operations told Defense One.

Plus, it can refuel other satellites using its arm to keep a safe distance from a satellite that needs refueling while keeping it operational, she said.

The arm connects with a satellite’s refueling interface and “the robotics will compensate for the relative drift rates of those two platforms and refuel the satellite in a seamless manner,” Johnson said.

The company has worked with the Space Development Agency and is selected to join the Missile Defense Agency’s SHIELD program.

“More countries and more companies are going to space,” Johnson said, “and defense organizations around the world are increasingly relying on the imagery, the data, the information and the communications that satellites provide for their operation.”

There’s been a push for more information on what objects—including upwards of 10,000 satellites—are in space, what they’re doing, who they belong to, and any potential threats, “but the missing part of space domain awareness was being able to do anything about it,” Johnson said.

The product release comes after the head of U.S. Space Command expressed concerns about China’s recent satellite refueling experiments; more recently, he stressed the need to be able to move satellites around.

“My concern is if they develop that, they will have the ability to maneuver for advantage the way the United States has for decades—on the land, at sea, and in the air—used maneuver for our advantage,” Gen. Stephen Whiting told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month. “We need to deliver our own maneuver-warfare capability to make sure that we can leverage the advantages that the joint force has developed over the decades in space, as we have in other domains.”

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!

Costs of war. A protracted conflict with Iran could cost up to $20 billion per month, with surge capacity pushing it closer to $30 billion, Wayne Sanders, a senior aerospace and defense analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, told Defense One.

Some costs are built into annual budgets, such as operation and maintenance of platforms, regardless of whether they’re in sustained operations.
For example, as the U.S. Navy blockades the Strait of Hormuz, “that continued operation and maintenance budget—there's a certain amount that already exists, whether [ships] are floating right outside in the Persian Gulf, or whether or not they're sitting near Norfolk. They're still going to have a $10 million-a-day carrier fee, if you will,” Sanders said.
“But the air wing…the amount of missiles that are being expended, the amount of jet fuel—obviously—begins to start playing a part in this, especially as you expand that time frame. So I think that's more into that $20-25 billion range per month for this period of time.”
Plus: There will likely be “very high” intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance costs “because you're looking at 24/7 overflights” and air support.

Demystifying shadow fleets. The U.S.-Israel war on Iran has resurfaced concerns about GPS jamming and spoofing, which can make accurately tracking ships difficult. So spatial imagery company Vantor is melding its tech with Windward’s maritime analytics platform to put crisp, space-based visuals with an aggregate of vessel tracking data to better identify specific ships and their movements.

“It's not enough to use [low or medium resolution] satellites to look at ships, because it doesn't tell you anything. It just tells you, ‘hey, here's something that looks like a tanker,’” Windward CEO Ami Daniel told Defense One.
“You need to know who it is, what it has been doing, and what's going to do…And you have probably 10 minutes to make that decision because you might have five ships trying to go down the blockade, and you need to decide now. I think that's the core of a partnership with Vantor” and their visual library.
Peter Wilczynski, Vantor’s chief product officer, said the company’s imagery can track vessels over time, while Windward can add context.
“We have no idea what the actual order of battle, from a military context or perspective is, or the ownership structure, especially in the gray and dark fleet environment,” including vessels that deliberately turn off their AIS data to hide their location.
Vantor will integrate its persistent monitoring technology with Windward’s analytics to answer the question: “how do you take a picture of a ship and give it a fingerprint? And then that fits really naturally with the biographical history of the ship, who commands it, what its patterns are, what it tends to do—that gives you more of that predictive layer.”

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Army names its first tiltrotor aircraft: Cheyenne II

Meghann Myers — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:30:34 -0400

NASHVILLE—The Army is continuing to name its airframes after Indigenous tribes with its first tiltrotor aircraft. The MV-75 is officially the Cheyenne II, the service’s undersecretary announced Wednesday at the Army Aviation Warfighting Summit.

Members of the tribe have served in every U.S. armed service and during every major conflict, said Undersecretary Mike Obadal, a relationship that “evolved from warfare to mutual respect and finally into an unbroken legacy of patriotic service.”

“In the Army, system names carry both history and expectations,” Obadal said. “With the MV-75, we honor a legacy forged in conflict, proven in battle, originally known to the U.S. Army as some of the most formidable and disciplined adversaries on the battlefield.”

The II is a nod to the Army’s original Cheyenne, a Vietnam War-era attack helicopter program that was canceled before entering production in 1972.

The new Cheyenne has been more than a decade in the making, originally the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, part of the Army’s Future Vertical Lift program. The service’s then-chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, announced earlier this year that the latest prototypes, which have evolved from Bell-Textron’s V-280 Valor, will be fielded to units for testing by the end of the year.

Envisioned as an eventual replacement for the UH-60 Black Hawk, the Cheyenne is the Army’s first foray into tiltrotor aviation, decades after the Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy all integrated the V-22 Osprey into their aviation communities.

It “carries the lessons of the past and the present into the future,” Obadal said.

Bell-Textron and the Army are integrating some of the lessons learned at deadly cost from the Osprey, including a fixed engine rather than one that tilts with the rotors.

“Now that may seem like a minor difference, but when it comes to maintenance, reliability, cost, impact from vibration or utilization, we found that fixed engine is likely to result in less maintenance requirements, less complexity,” Col. Tyler Partridge, who commands the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade at Fort Campbelly, Ky., told Defense One in March.

The Army and Bell-Textron will officially unveil the aircraft Wednesday at the Army Aviation Warfighting Summit.

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Airbus’ autonomous supply-helicopter effort may pave the way for an armed model

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:19:19 -0400

An unmanned helicopter concept being developed by Airbus for Marine Corps logistics missions may pave the way for an armed variant, company officials say.

Airbus is working on an unmanned version of the MQ-72C Lakota for the Marines’ Aerial Logistics Connector competition; on Wednesday, the company said it had completed another autonomous flight test using its H145 helicopter and technology from Shield AI, L3Harris Technologies, and Parry Labs.

Company officials said it’s possible that the Lakota could be armed.

“Based on our discussions with other potential customers and partners, we believe there is an opportunity for mission expansion to include launched effects,” an Airbus official said. “Our primary focus remains providing the best aerial logistics platform for the Marine Corps. We believe the MQ-72C Lakota Connector can support a range of future missions thanks to its versatile design, [modular open system] architecture, and autonomous mission capabilities.”

Airbus is among several defense companies working on autonomous aircraft intended to replace military aviators on logistics missions. Last year, Sikorsky unveiled a pilotless UH-60L Black Hawk to carry cargo into combat zones. Similarly, Boeing announced a concept for a tiltrotor drone-wingman concept to support the Army’s helicopter fleet.

Airbus’ latest test flights, conducted in recent weeks at its Grand Prairie, Texas, facility, refined the helicopter's perception, officials said. The H145, the commercial variant of the Lakota, scanned a landing zone in flight, detected obstacles, and found an alternative spot to land if necessary. The technology detected objects “ranging from the size of a SUV down to a pelican case,” an Airbus official said.

“This test was vital for us to show the Lakota Connector’s development in performing aerial logistics missions for the U.S. Marine Corps,” said Rob Geckle, CEO of Airbus U.S. Space and Defense. “Perception systems can make or break the success of an unmanned mission in the field, and I am excited to see our aircraft perform so well under uncertain conditions.”

Part of the effort’s fourth series of tests, the flights were conducted in recent weeks at the Airbus facility in Grand Prairie, Texas. Shield AI contributed its Hivemind autonomy software, L3 Harris supplied modular and digital backbone, and Parry Lab provided edge-computing and ground-control stations for the tests, an official said.

“This H145 flight test proves Hivemind delivers scalable autonomy across rotary and fixed-wing aircraft without custom redesign,” said Christian Gutierrez, vice president of Hivemind Solutions at Shield AI. “That speed and flexibility are critical in contested logistics.”

An Airbus official said “the next step is progressively improving perception to detect smaller, more operationally representative objects” and additional internal autonomy and integration flight tests are expected throughout the year.

The Aerial Connector program is one of several Defense Department initiatives “aimed at delivering logistical support in distributed environments during peer or near- peer conflicts,” Airbus said in the news release. Other competitors in the program include

Those developments have made some aviators fearing for their careers, Defense One previously reported, especially as the push for autonomous choppers comes as some services shed helicopter units.

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Unheeded lessons from the US warship nearly sunk by an Iranian mine

Bradley Peniston — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:48:16 -0400

Thirty-eight years ago today, an Iranian mine tore a hole in the hull of the USS Samuel B. Roberts, a guided missile frigate that had been helping to escort reflagged Kuwaiti tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. The blast broke the frigate's keel, flooded its engineroom, and lit fires on several decks. Only its well-trained crew saved the Roberts from sinking.

The story has become a touchstone of Navy schoolhouses, where instructors exhort officers and enlisted sailors alike to take seriously the grueling business of damage control. But a strangely amnesiac effect seems to surround the threat of mines.

The attack on the Roberts came nearly a year after Iranian minelayers had first taken U.S. planners by surprise. In early 1987, Washington agreed to shepherd Kuwaiti tankers through the Persian Gulf, where Iran and Iraq were striking at each other's economic jugulars. The very first convoy of Operation Earnest Will began with three U.S. Navy warships surrounding the supertanker Bridgeton—until the giant ship hit a mine. The Bridgeton’s double hull enabled her to sail onward. But the thin-skinned Navy vessels followed in her wake, huddling behind the damaged tanker for safety.

"The assumption that the Iranians 'wouldn’t dare' was shattered,” an official Navy history recounts. “The incident also revealed that despite all the preparation for the convoy, the United States had virtually no mine-warfare assets in the Arabian Gulf. Further convoys were postponed during the scramble to deploy eight MH-53 Sea Stallion mine-warfare helicopters and eventually eight ocean-going minesweepers (MSOs) and six coastal minesweepers (MSCs)."

This was a puzzling oversight. No weapon had sunk more ships since World War II. But once shocked into action, the Pentagon responded forcefully. Besides the overt dispatch of the minesweeping vessels and aircraft, the Pentagon also launched a covert operation: Prime Chance, the first big mission of the new U.S. Special Operations Command.

Navy SEALs ran patrol boats from a pair of leased oil barges in the Gulf, while elite Army aviators flew Little Bird helicopters from U.S. warships. Together, they sank and captured enough Iranian boats to bring mine attacks to a halt as the year drew to a close.

But even the newly joint special operators couldn’t stop Iranian boats from sneaking into the Gulf. On April 14, 1988, the Roberts ran into a string of newly laid mines. They were traced to Iran, which led to Operation Praying Mantis, a one-day war of retribution. On April 18, U.S. naval forces shelled Iranian operating bases in the Gulf, sank two Iranian warships, and did yet more damage before President Reagan called the shooting to a halt.

Repairing the damage to the Roberts required 18 months and $90 million—nearly a quarter-billion in today's money. The mine that did the damage cost far less. Based on a 1908 design for the Russian empire, it likely cost around a thousand bucks.

Did the Navy emerge from the incident determined to bulk up its perennially underfunded minehunting forces into capabilities somewhat equal to their tasks? It did not, and has not, despite innumerable Pentagon wargames that have since underscored a continuing and urgent need.

Now once again, Iran is disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Despite its advancements in missiles and drones, the humble naval mine remains a potent part of Tehran’s arsenal. Within weeks of the U.S. attack, Iranian boats began slipping mines into the strait.

The move caught the Trump administration by surprise. Just weeks earlier, the Navy had loaded its four Avenger-class minehunting vessels onto an even larger ship, and sent them thousands of miles away. “The Pentagon and National Security Council significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to U.S. military strikes while planning the ongoing operation,” CNN reported.

Painfully, history is repeating itself.

I wrote a book about the Roberts, its mining, and the enduring lessons we can learn from the incident. One of them was also taught by IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan: a determined adversary finds cheap ways to hurt technologically advanced forces.

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US must adjust to Iran’s use of commercial satellite photos, Space Command says

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:45:50 -0400

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado—Iran’s use of commercial space imagery to strike U.S. and allied targets will force the Pentagon to adjust, the head of U.S. Space Command said.

“We have to recognize that the rest of the world can now see the entire planet transparently and almost 24/7 and so we have to be able to operate in that environment successfully,” Gen. Stephen Whiting, the head of U.S. Space Command told reporters Tuesday during the Space Symposium conference here.

U.S. Central Command, which leveled Iran’s nascent space command in the opening days of the war, more recently announced that the U.S. military had achieved “space superiority” over its enemy. Despite those quick victories, Whiting acknowledged that the conflict has still taught him that even less-equipped adversaries can still inflict damage using commercial satellite imagery and that the U.S. military’s space assets remain key targets during major operations.

“Every country, just about today, can somehow access space imagery, which then gives them an insight on what's going on in the battlefield,” Whiting said. “I think we need to be cognizant of that.”

A day before Whiting spoke, the chairman of the House Select Committee on China wrote to the Pentagon, asking how Iran came by the imagery it used to attack U.S. troops. In the letter, which was obtained by Defense One, Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Michigan, alleged there was a “high likelihood" that satellite photos taken by Airbus were provided to China's MizarVision ahead of Iran’s March 27 attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

The Europe-based company says it’s not true.

"Airbus denies these allegations, and this letter contains many inaccuracies regarding our operations and commercial relationships,” an Airbus spokesperson told Defense One. “We strictly comply with all applicable sanctions, export controls and international regulatory frameworks."

Moolenaar wrote that Airbus should “follow suit” with other commercial satellite imagery companies that have stopped releasing photos of the region. Planet Labs and Vantor, two of the U.S.’s leading satellite image providers, have limited customers’ access

“This decision reflects our responsibility to ensure that our services do not inadvertently increase risks to civilians or to U.S., allied, or partner forces given the highly dynamic and rapidly evolving conditions in the region,” Vantor said in an emailed statement to Defense One.

In harm’s way

Space Force guardians, as well as other troops supporting SPACECOM and CENTCOM, are working within reach of Iran’s missiles and drones.

During the press conference, Whiting took a moment to remember Army Staff Sgt. Benjamin Pennington. The soldier was assigned to Fort Carson’s 1st Space Battalion, 1st Space Brigade, and was killed in the March 1 attack on Prince Sultan Air Base.

Gen. Chase Saltzman, the Space Force’s top uniformed officer, has previously said guardians deployed for Operation Epic Fury had continued to launch space effects “despite being under attack from an adversary.”

Whiting said the U.S. military’s space capabilities will remain key targets for enemies who will seek to “balance their inferiority in conventional arms” in future conflicts. That includes Iran.

“Even a medium power like Iran will seek to target our space capabilities,” Whiting said. “We do not live in an era of sanctuary anymore, and so our systems need to be resilient to those kinds of attacks, be able to operate through those attacks.”

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Orbán’s loss won’t stop Russian influence campaigns, but it shows they’re beatable

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:20:31 -0400

The electoral defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán dealt a blow to Russia’s foreign-influence operations—and illustrated how the Kremlin’s approach is changing. In the victory of the opposition-party candidate, other Western nations can draw lessons for confronting Russia’s continuing efforts.

Orbán was a key player in Vladimir Putin’s effort to weaken the European Union and its support for Ukraine. In February, the prime minister blocked a 90-million-euro loan that would have funded Ukrainian defense and civil infrastructure. His government also tried to block EU sanctions against Russian oil interests. In March, news broke of Orbán’s foreign minister collaborating with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov to influence EU voting. Orbán himself accused Ukraine, without evidence, of planning to attack pipelines that carry fuel to Europe and even of plotting to send troops to his home. With Orbán’s loss, Putin loses a critical aide in his drive to establish a “sphere of influence” over a fragmented Europe.

Extraordinary efforts

Russian efforts to keep its Hungarian friend in power included a coordinated disinformation campaign launched in January, when false narratives began to spout from TikTok accounts and other social media accounts affiliated with a Russian group called Storm-1516. The first claimed that Tisza Party candidate Péter Magyar—Orbán’s main rival and ultimately the election’s winner—“used a humanitarian trip to Ukraine as cover to divert $16.7 million in European aid.” A second claimed that Magyar and others conspired with Ukraine to embezzle $30 million in international aid.

Researchers at Clemson University tracked the false narratives. Others included rumors of “reinstating military drafts, offending world leaders, and drug addiction,” the researchers write in a new research paper. “Storm-1516 targeted Hungary with 11 narratives identified for this report, several of which received thousands of reposts.”

Storm-1516 collaborates with Matryoshka, another Kremlin-backed group. Discovered in 2023 by French researchers monitoring Russian attacks on France’s national elections, Matryoshka “impersonates North American and European public figures and media outlets, including French ones” to spread disinformation about Ukraine and, sometimes, French politicians.

Storm-1516 and Matryoshka increased their Hungarian efforts in February and March. They baselessly accused Orbán detractors of child sex abuse. They accused Ukraine of attempting to foment a coup. In April, the Kremlin dispatched Putin’s First Deputy Chief of Staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, to coordinate online campaign strategy with the Orbán regime.

This drew calls for an investigation from the EU Commission, which said that the approach “is modeled on previous interference campaigns that Russia has rolled out in other countries, most recently Moldova. The interference team is reportedly deployed on behalf of Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, and operating out of the Russian embassy in Budapest.”

But Russia’s measures were muted compared to Orbán’s own party, Fidesz, which funded proxy groups such as the National Resistance Movement. Fidesz and its allies were the election cycle’s biggest creators of AI-generated content, according to the independent Hungarian monitor Lakmusz and the European Digital Media Observatory.

“Researchers attributed some targeted disinformation attacks in the Hungarian campaign to known Russian groups. However, their reach and impact so far have remained limited, at least compared to the disinformation” produced by the Orbán regime, EDMO wrote.

What this shows

All this illustrates changes in how Russia is waging digital influence warfare.

First, Russia is creating vastly more fake social-media accounts. The Clemson researchers found 36 TikTok accounts that purported to be legitimate marketing efforts, building up followings of 10,000 to 80,000 followers.

“Before January 2026, these accounts did not engage with or post Storm-1516 content. Since then, the accounts have shifted from commercial marketing and promotional content to posting political content aligned with Russian narratives,” the Clemson researchers write.

Such influence campaigns often work alongside physical hybrid-warfare tactics such as sabotage and political violence, Soufan Center observers wrote in March.

Russia is also working to put a local face on its influence efforts. The Kremlin engages a friendly politician in a target country to take the lead, then boosts his or her message with fake accounts and a growing network of Kremlin-paid influencers.

“By leveraging influencers and the trust they have from existing communities, Russia can engage in focused messaging targeting specific communities with narratives that those communities may already be inclined to believe,” the Clemson researchers write.

When such politicians win, they erect institutional obstacles to prevent opposing candidates from displacing them. The Orbán government “had worked on every district, just crafting it to make it perfect for its own strengths and weaknesses. They had almost total control of radio, television and media. They were using massive, massive state resources for their own political purposes,” Thomas Carothers, director of Carnegie's Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment, said on a podcast this week. So Magyar “was going against, you know, it looked like every possible obstacle.”

U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance have been open boosters of Orbán and his tactics. Vance campaigned for Orbán—even repeating a Matryoshka false claim: that Ukraine, not Russia, was interfering in Hungary’s election.

Russian efforts in Hungary will continue.

“Even without Viktor Orbán, Fidesz controls roughly 80 percent of Hungary's state media landscape and remains a willing partner. If anything, Russian operations will be even more network-driven, leveraging political allies and entrenched media infrastructure to sustain anti-Ukraine narratives and erode trust in the EU,” said former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Ellen McCarthy who now leads the Trust in Media Cooperative.

They will also find new targets outside of Hungary.

“Increasingly, they are targeting regional elections, trying to influence countries within their sphere of influence. We already know who their next target is: Armenia,” which has elections coming up in June, said Darren Linvill, one of the authors of the Clemson paper and co-director of the Watt Family Innovation Center Media Forensics Hub. Linvill pointed to several examples of new false social media accounts that he says were set up he says to target those elections. “From Russia's perspective, this is self-evidently worth it, largely because these efforts are cheap to produce and have very little downside. In the current political environment one could even say there has been no downside.”

In their March report, the Soufan Center says Russia’s ultimate hybrid-warfare goal isn’t actually to help one candidate over another, but to undermine democratic societies

“This strategy drains the financial resources, military capabilities, and political bandwidth of countries supporting Ukraine, or withdrawing from its traditional sphere of influence, while providing a testing ground to refine tactics for potential future conflict with NATO. Erode the guardrails that make democracies resistant to interference by exploiting pre-existing societal schisms, undermining trust in institutions and keeping populations polarized and confused.”

Magyar’s win, however, also offers a blueprint for beating Russian and Russian-aligned election interference. Magyar was particularly gifted at social-media campaigning, visiting more than 700 cities and towns across Hungary and continuously putting out social-media content that was watchable and nimble, said Carothers, a part-time resident of Hungary.

“He'd walk into a public building where the elevators were broken, and stand in a broken elevator and go, 'Why does this elevator not work? Why does nothing work in this country?' People loved them. Very clever social media campaign.”

The opposition candidate was also willing to face Russian disinformation head-on and call out specific attacks even before they hit the internet. On March 10, Magyar took to Facebook to warn of a new AI-enabled disinformation campaign targeting him.

“In the coming days, the Fidesz party, together with Russian services, will launch a smear and disinformation campaign that has already been tested in Moldova, primarily on social media, particularly on TikTok,” he said.

Perhaps the biggest factor that drove an election turnout above 80 percent was the simple fact that Hungarians are increasingly sensitive to Russia’s growing attacks on democracy, wrote Matt Steinglass, the Europe editor for The Economist. “People were much more concerned than we had thought about the country's shift towards Russia. They were concerned about leaving the European Union. More and more news started coming out about how Russia had sent social media operatives to Budapest to try to help Fidesz retain power.”

That is, perhaps, a warning for other politicians who saw Orbán as a model.

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Put nuclear reactors in space within a few years, White House tells Pentagon

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:12:22 -0400

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.— Launch nuclear reactors to orbit as soon as 2028 and to the Moon as soon as 2030—that’s the White House’s new order to the Pentagon and NASA.

The six-page policy memo released on Tuesday calls for a dual design competition between the agencies that is to produce a “nearterm demonstration and use of low- to mid-power space reactors in orbit and on the lunar surface.”

“The United States will lead the world in developing and deploying space nuclear power for exploration, commerce, and defense,” the policy reads. “Agencies will establish cost-effective partnerships with private-sector innovators to meet near-term objectives that include safely deploying nuclear reactors in orbit as early as 2028 and on the Moon as early as 2030. Achieving these near-term objectives will establish technological viability essential to unlocking space exploration, commerce, and defense applications.”

Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House’s science and technology policy office, unveiled the policy at the Space Symposium here. He tied it to President Donald Trump’s December executive order that aimed to “ensure space superiority” for the United States.

“Nuclear power in space will give us the sustained electricity, heating and propulsion essential to a permanent robotic and eventually human presence on the moon, on Mars, and beyond,” Kratsios said.

The defense applications for a nuclear reactor are wide-ranging, said Todd Harrison, a space policy and budget expert for the American Enterprise Institute. With a reliable energy source, the military could use it to power some of its most crucial future missions.

“You could run data centers in space, you could use it to power mission-critical systems that can never really go without power, like missile warning, strategic communications, Harrision said. “Directed energy, jamming, data centers, all of those things could use a lot of power.”

Within 90 days, the Pentagon must brief the White House’s science and technology policy office, management and budget office, and National Security Council on “relevant use-cases and payloads” for the systems and “best use of the 2031 mission,” according to the policy.

Those offices, along with the Defense Department, will decide on the final mission for that technology.

On Earth, the Defense Department has worked for decades to field nuclear microreactors to power its military bases. Last year, the Army announced last year that it aimed to break ground on a microreactor on a U.S. base by 2027. As well, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit declared eight companies eligible to build those microreactors.

Last week, the Air Force and Defense Innovation Unit selected Buckley Space Force Base, Colorado, and Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, as possible locations for two microreactors. There is also a standalone pilot program that will test the operational benefits of a reactor at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska.

Top U.S. officials have dismissed the fears of groups such as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, who have pointed out that microreactors on U.S. bases “could become attractive targets for an adversary.”

Currently, there are no nuclear reactors in space and no operational microreactors on Earth within the United States. Harrison said the White House’s timeline for moon-based reactors is ambitious.

“The timeline and feasibility strikes me as rather aggressive,” Harrison said. “Demonstrating a microreactor on Earth would be challenging by 2028, doing it in space is even more challenging.”

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A Russian space nuke was focus of US wargame, Space Command says

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:58:45 -0400

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado—Russia’s hypothetical use of its alleged nuclear anti-satellite capability was the focus of U.S. Space Command’s latest tabletop wargame, which pushed the U.S. government, allies, and dozens of defense companies to speculate on the fallout from the weapon’s launch.

Gen. Stephen Whiting, the head of U.S. Space Command, told Space Symposium attendees Tuesday that the reported development of the Russian weapon was the subject of the first “Apollo Insight” wargame, which concluded last month. The classified exercise involved Space Command officials and more than 60 companies that discussed the “worst-case scenario” and looked at industry solutions “to help prevent such a situation,” according to a recent news release.

“We just concluded our first [exercise] last month, and it was an event focused on weapons of mass destruction on orbit—a development we do not want to see come to fruition, but reporting about Russia’s plans to launch such a weapon, and that has forced us to prepare.”

In 2024, President Joe Biden’s administration said a suspected Russian testbed satellite for the weapon had been in orbit for two years. Moscow denied the claims. Countless defense experts have noted Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon in space would be a violation of the long-standing Outer Space Treaty.

The wargame involved a broad collection of defense companies, allied nations, and several U.S. government organizations that would be the most affected and that, ultimately, may be tasked with developing and fielding a counter-nuclear weapon capability.

“I feel as though the participants came away from the wargame with a better understanding and awareness of the seriousness of potential threats, and they were eager to share their thoughts on how they could be a part of the solution,” Jay Santee, Aerospace Corp. general manager, said in Space Command’s news release.

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom participated, as well as U.S. government organizations including the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Energy Department, and NASA.

While Whiting and U.S. Space Command did not disclose the wargame’s findings, open-source reports have described the devastation such a weapon would cause to orbiting satellites.

“In a purely destructive sense, such a weapon could destroy large numbers of satellites. This would be done in two waves: the first would be those satellites in the line of sight of the nuclear explosion; the second would be satellites affected by the increased amount of trapped in the Van Allen belts,” according to the Secure World Foundation’s latest Global Counterspace Capabilities report. “Some of the effects would not be felt for days, weeks, or even months, as the higher radiation levels slowly degraded unhardened satellites and could persist for years afterwards, endangering the use of space by all countries.”

The wargame’s conclusion preceded U.S. Senate criticisms that the National Defense Strategy inadequately addressed emerging nuclear and space threats. The policy does not mention Russia’s potential anti-satellite weapon, but does allude to the country’s efforts to “modernize and diversify” its nuclear arsenal.

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How the Army is preparing to bring its first tiltrotor aircraft online

Meghann Myers — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:00:38 -0400

The Army—the last of the U.S. services to introduce a tiltrotor aircraft—is gathering lessons and working through challenges as it prepares to send the first Bell MV-75s to units for testing and feedback later this year.

It’s a different kind of effort than bringing a new helicopter or tank online, because the Army is making the move 30 years after the Marine Corps began testing the V-22 Osprey, 20 years after Air Force special operations started training on its version, and 10 years after the Navy selected it to take over the carrier on-board delivery mission.

Part of that delay has been the Army’s insistence on developing its own platform, an ongoing effort since Bell-Textron unveiled its V-280 offering for the Army’s Future Vertical Lift Program at the AUSA annual meeting in 2013. In January, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George announced that the aircraft, now called MV-75, would head to units this year for evaluation.

With the MV-75, the Army is hoping to take the best of the Osprey—a much faster aircraft than the UH-60 Black Hawk, with a longer range and the ability to carry a lot more soldiers—and leave behind the Osprey’s safety concerns. A total of 65 military personnel and civilians have died in V-22s since 1991, when the fourth prototype crashed. Twenty of the deaths occurred in four crashes in 2022 and 2023.

“I can't comment on the readiness or reliability of the Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force’s programs, and I won't,” Mike Obadal, the Army undersecretary, told reporters March 24 at the AUSA Global Force Symposium.

Still, Obadal added, the Osprey’s reputation may be overwrought, even if it has made so many headlines over the course of its operation.

“I do know they've flown about 900,000 hours, and in the Marine Corps, I think their accident rate is probably less than their large helicopters,” he said.

And it is: less than half of the CH-53 King Stallion’s rate of class-A mishaps—incidents that cause a death or total loss of the aircraft—as of 2024. Whether that’s good news for the Osprey or just extremely bad news for the CH-53 is a matter of perspective.

“So I think we have to be very careful about making sweeping statements about tiltrotor technology—and especially when you look at what Bell-Textron and the Army are doing, because it is the most advanced manufacturing and digital backbone that exists,” Obadal said.

For its part, the Army is hoping to eliminate one recurring problem—engine fires—by building its airframe with fixed engines, rather than ones that tilt with the rotors like the Osprey.

Patridge’s brigade is leading the Army’s tiltrotor integration as a Transformation-in-Contact unit. His soldiers got to see what an air assault from a tiltrotor looks like earlier this year during their annual Operation Lethal Eagle exercise.

A career CH-47 Chinook pilot, with experience in both conventional units and special operations, Partridge said his first impression is that the tiltrotor’s speed is impressive, but that comes with its own considerations.

“I think that's probably the biggest sales pitch—the Army has been looking at this, how do we go farther faster? Really, that's the challenge, or the question of the day that we've been trying to solve,” he said. “So from my perspective, looking at the tiltrotor platforms, integrating them into the plan, it's always been the challenge.”

‘A smoother process’

The MV-75 outperforms a UH-60 in that it flies twice as fast, reaching 300 mph, and its thousand-mile range is longer than the Black Hawk’s 600.

But an air assault mission isn’t just moving troops, so integrating a tiltrotor involves some timing issues. The CH-47 Chinooks carrying heavy equipment and the AH-64 Apache providing security are not as fast as a tiltrotor, so they have to take off on a different schedule than they would traditionally.

“How do we integrate them and utilize them across all the warfighting functions smoothly is probably the biggest challenge. And the speed is a challenge there, specifically sequence and timing,” Partridge said. “What time do they take off? They may take off after helicopters that are landing after they are, in the air-assault plan.”

Last year, 101st CAB used tabletop exercises to model how they would integrate a tiltrotor into an operation.

“To kind of compare icons moving over a map at different speeds, and kind of thinking through how that changes the speed of decision-making, or perhaps the complexity of planning or logistical resupply,” Partridge said.

During Lethal Eagle, they got to test those AI models in the real world, including the ways their equipment and battle rhythm will need to change.

“A forward area refueling point seems simple enough, but when it comes to ensuring we have the right nozzles, the right fuel pressures, the flow rate—all those things matter when it comes to synchronizing and integrating an air assault mission with as many platforms as we normally have, especially at the scale and speed that this division wants to operate at,” Partridge said.

The soldiers also have to get used to the sound and the intensity of the rotor, which is much different than a helicopter.

“I would say, as you compare a tiltrotor versus a fixed rotor on a Black Hawk, it's smaller. And so definitely sounds different and it’s a little more intense if you're directly underneath the tiltrotor portion,” Partridge said.

Just learning where to stand and what sounds normal when working with a tiltrotor is part of the familiarization process, he said.

As a TiC unit, the 10st Airborne’s feedback will go into initial design of the MV-75, and that relationship will continue as the first prototypes are fielded and then updated.

“And I think that the seeking experience from the fixed-wing and the rotary-wing side of the house is probably the exactly the right thing to do here, particularly with the platform that is so dynamic,” Partridge said. “I think there's the focus on more maneuverability in the helicopter mode that the Army has specified for the MV-75. I do believe that those requirements will be met by industry partners.”

Army leaders have also been convening with Marine Corps counterparts to get their lessons learned and best practices, he said.

“I know that we've got some of our maintainers integrated with the Marine Corps on the academic side of the house, with regards to their maintenance programs, so that we can learn the differences between tiltrotor maintenance and rotary-wing maintenance,” he said.

At the same time, the aviation Captain’s Career Course has added MV-75 instruction, Gen. David Hodne, then the head of Transformation and Training Command, told reporters in March. There’s also a training simulator at Fort Rucker, Ala., where the Army aviation schools are housed, to give prospective MV-75 pilots an idea of what it’s like.

Said Partridge, “And so I do anticipate that these efforts will ensure that it's a smoother process, you know, than perhaps other platforms have experienced in the past.”

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HASC chair: Trillion-dollar defense budgets are the ‘new normal.’ Reconciliation is less certain.

Thomas Novelly — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:20:05 -0400

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—A $1 trillion baseline defense budget is the standard for future funding, but additional multi-billion spending measures to cushion 2027’s request are less certain, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee chairman said Sunday.

The $1.5 trillion defense budget request unveiled this month would mark the highest level of military funding in a single year since World War II, if passed. That figure includes $350 billion in reconciliation funding and $1.15 trillion from the annual discretionary defense bill. And the trillion-dollar baseline figure is here to stay, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said Sunday evening during a roundtable at the Space Symposium Conference here.

“We don’t cut the baseline budget in defense,” Rogers said, briefly noting a few past exceptions. “This is going to be the new normal.”

Last year’s defense budget relied heavily on reconciliation, a budgetary process in which a simple majority can quickly pass mandatory spending legislation. The proposed 2027 budget’s reconciliation funding would include some of the administration’s top space-related priorities, including an additional $17 billion for the Golden Dome missile defense project and $12 billion for the Space Force which, if passed, would bring the service’s budget to $71 billion, the largest boost in its history.

The administration is also reportedly seeking anywhere from $98 billion to more than $200 billion in supplemental funding for the ongoing war in Iran. Rogers sounded less certain about whether those measures would be included in the 2027 budget.

“We're going to try to do a reconciliation bill, there might be a supplemental, which would get us to the $1.5 [trillion] the president talked about,” he said. “But, even if you don't do those, that $1.15 trillion would be the new baseline.”

The White House has estimated that baseline defense spending will increase from $1.15 trillion to $1.36 trillion through 2036, with no projected reconciliation funding past fiscal year 2027, according to budget documents released earlier this month.

The Trump administration has argued defense-related reconciliation measures are necessary for “decoupling funding for Republican priorities from Democrat waste,” a White House budget fact sheet said.

Seamus Daniels, a Center for Strategic and International Studies fellow, wrote in an analysis on Friday that last year’s reconciliation led to Republican infighting and disagreements before it was passed. Reconciliation would most likely face similar arguments, he added.

“Such a partisan political approach to pursuing budgetary priorities presents significant challenges to actually securing the requested $1.5 trillion in resources for defense from Congress,” Daniels wrote. “Republicans would likely face similar dynamics and obstacles this year with only a slim majority in the House of Representatives.”

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., told Defense One on the sidelines of Space Symposium that no reconciliation bill exists yet. As the chairman of the Senate Appropriation's Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee, Moran said he prefers to see crucial spending, including reconciliation, to go through a standard appropriations process to get top priorities funded.

“That debate has not occurred. I mean, we don't have a reconciliation bill that is close to being put together,” Moran said. “I think it's better to bring us together and get this accomplished in a normal process. and bring the entire Congress into the process. I think it's better to bring us together and get this accomplished in a normal process and bring the entire Congress into the process.”

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4 ways the war in Iran has weakened the US in the great power game

Jeffrey Taliaferro, The Conversation — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”—Napoleon Bonaparte’s maxim—may well have been in the minds of policymakers in Moscow and Beijing these past weeks, as the U.S. war in Iran dragged on. And now that a 14-day ceasefire between Tehran and Washington is in effect, with both sides claiming “victory,” Russian and Chinese leaders still have an opportunity to profit from what many see as America’s latest folly in the Middle East.

Throughout the weeks-long conflict, China and Russia struck a delicate balance. Both declined to give Iran – seen to a varying degree as an ally of both nations – their full-throated support or sink any real costs into the conflict.

Instead, they opted for limited assistance in the form of small-scale intelligenceand diplomatic support.

As a scholar of international security and great power politics, I believe that is for good reason. Beijing and Moscow were fully aware that Iran could not “win” against the combined military might of the United States and Israel. Rather, Iran just needed to survive to serve the interests of Washington’s main geopolitical rivals.

Below are four ways in which the U.S. war in Iran has damaged Washington’s position in the great power rivalries of the 21st century.

1. Losing the influence war in the Middle East

As I explore in my book “Defending Frenemies,” the U.S. has long struggled to balance competing objectives in the Middle East. During the Cold War, this meant limiting the Soviet Union’s influence in the region, while contending with the development of nuclear weapons by two troublesome allies, Israel and Pakistan.

By the 2020s, the priorities in Washington were aimed at restricting the influence of the U.S.’s great power rivals– China and to a lesser degree Russia – in the Middle East.

Yet under Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, China and Russia have sought to increase their footprint in the region through a variety of formal alliances and informal measures.

For Russia, this took the form of aligning with Iran, while also partnering with Tehran to prop up the now-ousted regime of President Bashar Assad during the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, China increased its diplomatic profile in the Middle East, notably by acting as a mediator as Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic ties in 2023.

The irony of the latest Iran war is that it follows a period in which circumstances were unfavorable to Russian and Chinese aims of increasing their influence in the Middle East.

The fall of Assad in December 2024 deprived Russia of its one reliable ally in the region. And Trump’s May 2025 tour of the Gulf states, in which he secured major technology and economic deals with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain, was aimed at countering China’s growing economic and diplomatic influence in those countries.

With Washington perceived as an increasingly unreliable protector, the Gulf states may seek greater security and economic cooperation elsewhere.

2. Taking US eyes off other strategic goals

In expanding military, diplomatic and economic ties in the Middle East, Russia and China over the past two decades were exploiting a desire by Washington to move its assets and attention away from the region following two costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Trump’s decision to wage war against Iran directly contradicts the national security strategy his administration released in November 2025. According to the strategy, the administration would prioritize the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific, while the Middle East’s importance “will recede.”

In co-launching a war in Tehran with Israel, without any prior consultation with Washington’s other allies, Trump has shown a complete disregard for their strategic and economic concerns. NATO, already riven by Trump’s repeated threats to the alliance and designs on Greenland, has now shown further signs of internal divisions.

That offers benefits for China and Russia, which have long sought to capitalize on cracks between America and its allies.

The irony, again, is that the war in Iran came as Trump’s vision of the U.S. as the hegemonic power in the Western Hemisphere was making advances. International law and legitimacy concerns aside, Washington had ousted a thorn in its side with Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and replaced him with a more compliant leader.

3. Disproportionate economic fallout

Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where some 20% of the world’s oil passes, was as predictable as it was destructive for U.S. interests.

But for Russia, this meant higher oil prices that boosted its war economy. It also led to the temporary but ongoing easing of U.S. sanctions, which has provided Moscow an indispensable lifeline after years of economic pressure over the war in Ukraine.

While a prolonged closure and extensive damage to oil and natural gas infrastructure in Iran and the Gulf states no doubt hurts China’s energy security and economy, these were risks Xi appears willing to accept, at least for a time.

And by building up a domestic oil reserve and diversifying energy sources to include solar, electric batteries and coal, China is far better positioned to weather a prolonged global energy crisis than the U.S. Indeed, Beijing has made strides in recent year to encourage domestic consumption as a source of economic growth, rather than be so reliant on global trade. That may have given China some protection during the global economic shock caused by the Iran war, as well as push the economy further down its own track.

The more the U.S. loses control over events in the strait, the more it loses influence in the region – especially as Iran appears to be placing restrictions on ships from unfriendly nations.

4. Loss of global leadership

Trump’s willingness, to abandon talks to go to war, and the contradictory rhetoric he has employed throughout the Iran conflict, has weakened the perception of the U.S. as an honest broker.

That provides a massive soft-power boost for Beijing. It was China that pressed Iran to accept the 14-day ceasefire proposal brokered by Pakistan. Indeed, China has slowly chipped away at America’s longtime status as global mediator of first resort.

Beijing has successfully mediated in the past between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and it attempted to do the same with Russia and Ukraine and Israel and the Palestinians.

In general, the Iran war adds weight to Beijing’s worldview that the U.S.-led liberal international order is over. Even if China benefited at some level from the war continuing, its decision to help broker the ceasefire shows that China is increasingly taking on the mantle of global leadership that the U.S. used to own.

And for Russia, the Iran war and the rupture between Trump and America’s NATO allies over their lack of support for it, shift world attention and U.S. involvement from the war in Ukraine.

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DHS intelligence revamp would keep it answerable to nation's top spy

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400

A White House plan to fold the Department of Homeland Security’s primary intelligence unit into DHS headquarters for the coming fiscal year would not affect its oversight by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an administration official told Nextgov/FCW.

The new reporting structure, unveiled last week in the president’s FY27 budget request, would combine the Office of Intelligence and Analysis and the department’s Office of the Secretary and Executive Management, Management Directorate and Office of Situational Awareness into a single unit reporting to the DHS secretary.

But I&A would still be considered a member of the intelligence community, said the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the changes.

“The planned, internal DHS structural changes noted in the president’s budget submission will not impact I&A’s membership in the [intelligence community] and will not impact ODNI’s oversight over I&A as a member of the IC,” the administration official said.

I&A’s status as an official U.S. intelligence component under the budget proposal has not been previously reported. ODNI, led by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, manages the nation’s 18 spy agencies.

The intent to keep I&A under ODNI management could be a reprieve for lawmakers and stakeholders concerned about future oversight of the office. The reorganization of the intelligence shop, which would require congressional approval in upcoming appropriations talks, would mark the most significant change to the office to date, following efforts made last year to sharply scale it back.

I&A was slated for major workforce reductions in President Donald Trump’s second term, as Nextgov/FCW first reported last July. Those plans, which would have only kept some 275 people working at the office, drew major pushback from law enforcement organizations and Jewish groups that long relied on the agency to disseminate timely intelligence about threats that concern state, local, tribal and territorial communities. One international organization privately warned Congress that the proposed cuts would create “dangerous intelligence gaps.”

The downsizing was put on hold just days later, but I&A reignited efforts soon after to more gradually shed its workforce. As of late last year, the office had around 500 full-time employees, a figure that preserved more staff than the initial plans to cap the workforce at 275, though that still halved the 1,000-person operation in place earlier last year. It’s possible that more people have since departed.

The office falls within the purview of the Senate and House Intelligence committees, but its status as a DHS component also subjects it to oversight from the Homeland Security panels in both chambers.

In November, Nextgov/FCW reported that the House Intelligence Committee privately weighed a measure in the annual intelligence community authorization bill to significantly curtail the size and scope of I&A. The provision would have barred the office from gathering and analyzing intelligence, effectively turning I&A into a clearinghouse for intelligence findings produced elsewhere and stripping it of standard spy agency collection authorities.

As part of its mission, I&A helps manage a series of fusion centers around the country that facilitate intelligence sharing between federal agencies and state and local law enforcement, raising questions about stakeholder engagement under the proposed restructuring.

I&A was born as part of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to coordinate intelligence on homeland threats and expand information sharing with state and local authorities. For years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have sought to reform the unit amid concerns about domestic overreach and partisanship.

Its placement in DHS has put it at the center of recurring jurisdictional tensions with the FBI, which drives much of the nation’s domestic intelligence, counterterrorism and counterintelligence work under the Justice Department.

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