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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Air Force will resume B-52 radar testing with second bomber after deadly crash

Thomas Novelly — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:29:13 -0400

DAYTON, Ohio—Air Force officials plan to resume B-52 radar development with another Stratofortress after a crash killed an eight-person crew during a June test flight.

On June 15, a B-52 Stratofortress crashed in California during a test flight as part of the Air Force’s radar modernization program, which is aimed at keeping the service’s 75 Cold War-era bombers in the skies until at least the 2050s. The service had already planned to modify another aircraft with the updated Raytheon-built Active Electronically Scanned Array radar later this year, program officials told reporters on Monday during the Life Cycle Industry Days conference here. It’s not clear when officials will resume flight testing.

“The original acquisition plan and execution strategy was always to have two test aircraft,” Col. Spencer Turner, the B-52 system program manager said, adding that the “modification effort on that second aircraft is ongoing” and that he expects the service to complete the installation of the full radar suite onto the aircraft “this year.”

The deadly crash may add to persistent program delays. The Air Force planned to have two test aircraft for the radar modernization program, but only one had been completed. The June 15 crash paused test flights, and as the service waits for the next upgraded bomber, it’s not clear if another B-52 will be added to development efforts. Despite the incident, program officials claim they are still “on track” with the realigned budget and schedule, but they may need to be adjusted.

“Obviously, the crash was not in our original schedule,” Turner said. “So we need to look at our schedule and adjust as necessary.”

Boeing delivered the first test B-52 aircraft to Edwards Air Force Base in late 2025, according to a company press release.

“The new radar will significantly increase B-52 mission effectiveness by improving situational awareness, speeding target prosecution and enhancing aircrew survivability in contested environments,” Troy Dawson, Boeing Bombers vice president, said in the December news release. “This phase of the program is dedicated to getting it right at the start so that we can execute the full radar modernization program.”

Spokespeople for the Air Force and Boeing did not immediately respond when asked if there are still plans to have two dedicated test aircraft following the crash.

The radar modernization plan has faced heavy criticism.

Last year, the radar modernization program’s cost overruns triggered a Nunn-McCurdy Act breach. The Government Accountability Office warned that the production design for the radar modernization was “planned with very little development flight testing completed” and “beginning production with limited testing of a fully integrated system often results in costly and time-intensive rework if the program discovers issues later,” according to the watchdog’s annual weapons systems assessment released last month.

The B-52 has led major bombing campaigns during the Iran war. With the modernized bombers, which will be designated the B-52J, the service plans to have the Air Force long-range fleet consist of the Stratofortresses and the next-generation B-21 Raiders.

Col. Timothy Spaulding, the portfolio acquisition executive for bombers, said it’s possible that the service could pull B-52s out of the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base for future fights.

“We can and have looked at bringing B-52 out of Arizona,” he said. “That's not necessarily an easy thing to do, and there's some limitation to how far you might go on that number.”

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NIST unveils new AI evaluation platform

Alexandra Kelley — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:56:00 -0400

The National Institute of Standards and Technology launched a new program on Monday granting researchers access to an isolated testbed environment to safely evaluate artificial intelligence models against various commands.

The AI Technology Evaluation, or AITE, is a voluntary testing vehicle focused on AI model safety analysis. It provides blind data for models to process when completing tasks to gain objective insights and conduct evaluations of model capabilities. Notably, the evaluation data is not intended to serve as training data for the models.

Initially, AITE will focus on conducting image analysis tasks using large vision language models across three domains: quantum science, genomics and public safety. More tasks will be available in the future.

AITE’s fundamental goal is to offer a universal rubric to effectively evaluate AI models' capabilities and determine the state of the art for model performance.

“The infrastructure provided by NIST will provide common data, metrics and scoring to help developers understand the performance of their models,” the press release said.

Both data providers and model providers working with AITE will need to submit materials related to the testing. Data providers are asked to submit original datasets that are inaccessible publicly, along with a “meaningful” task suited for the data.

Model developers, likewise, will submit their AI models to be tested using the datasets. The first set of evaluations will start in August 2026.

The formation of AITE is the latest step in the Trump administration’s strategy to work with major AI developers in advancing model safety through voluntary model submissions.

The Commerce Department announced a renegotiated deal in May between the agency and three companies—Google Deepmind, Microsoft and xAI—to evaluate their models through the Center for AI Standards and Innovation.

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More than 30 companies form open-source AI alliance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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‘Game of Thrones’ as Ukraine’s president, defense minister split

Patrick Tucker — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:34:44 -0400

Street protests continued across Ukraine for a tenth day on Saturday in support of former defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, whom President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired and then attempted to placate with offers of different jobs. Fedorov is having none of it, saying on Thursday, “I will not accept any position other than Minister of Defense. No other role carries the actual authority to combat procurement corruption.” The rift has exposed rival factions at the center of Ukrainian leadership, pulling the country in opposite directions as it fights for its existence. “Game of Thrones” is how one former senior Ukrainian military official described it, and its outcome will shape the futures of Ukraine’s war effort and the country itself.

On July 15, Zelensky fired Fedorov, his third defense minister, for feuding with his military commander-in-chief, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi. He first offered the job to Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko but less than a day later appointed Maj. Gen. Yevhenii Khmara. Zelensky spent the weekend in meetings with frontline commanders. On Tuesday, he replaced Syrskyi with Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi. Khmara and Drapatyi are highly respected, non-controversial selections. But the decision-making process that brought them to their new positions continues to stir controversy.

Street protests, ignited just hours after news of Fedorov’s firing broke, grew throughout the week. At least one senior military official has resigned in solidarity. A Tuesday poll shows that 72 percent of the country disapproves of the former minister’s forced removal, and perceptions of Fedorov as trustworthy have surged from 35 percent to 65 percent in a matter of days. (Zelensky’s trust rating moved from 54 to 59 percent.)

“People aren’t marching to save Fedorov,” Olena Tregub, a former Ukrainian government official turned anti-corruption activist, wrote on July 17. “They’re marching because they fear losing the hope that Ukraine can do better.”

The Ballad of Misha

To many Ukrainians, Fedorov symbolizes aspirations for their post-Soviet country: innovation, meritocracy, entrepreneurialism, technological disruption, and especially the fight against corruption.

At 35, Fedorov was Ukraine’s youngest-ever defense minister. In his public appearances, the former software and media entrepreneur wears the Silicon Valley startup uniform: a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. But “Misha,” as he is widely known, has been a key player in government since 2019. Serving as the head of Ministry of Digital Transformation, he led its transition to digital record-keeping, driving the expansion of broadband infrastructure across the country, and developing deep relationships with Western tech companies such as Microsoft.

Following the Estonian e-residency model, Fedorov built out online government services and deepened the resiliency of the nation's institutions and citizen records. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, these digitization efforts helped ensure the continuity of government services essential to the country's survival and economic stability.

By making government records easily accessible to the public, Federov’s digitization push also helped Ukraine battle corruption with transparent and traceable record-keeping in military acquisition. That helped keep Western aid, including military assistance, flowing into the country, and is central to Ukraine’s bid to join the European Union.

As war suffused the country in 2022, he stood up new government entities like the Army of Drones procurement program and the Brave1 platform for coordination between industry and government. He pushed for reforms on government profit caps so that Ukrainian drone manufacturers could earn a 25-percent margin, creating a Ukrainian defense ecosystem that many in Europe and even the Pentagon are now copying.

He used his personal relationship with SpaceX founder Elon Musk to secure the use of the Starlink satellite-communications service, which quickly became vital to battlefield command and control and has since enabled drone strikes across Ukraine. He also pushed to develop AI tools, such as Delta, to improve coordination and control of battlefield drones.

In January, Fedorov was appointed defense minister and quickly proposed reforms: financial incentives for military enlistment, a more institutionalized approach to recruiting foreign volunteers, and support for remote-warfare ideas that reduce the risks faced by Ukrainian soldiers. His vision included a far more roboticized front line. When this drew resistance from Syrskyi, the military commander-in-chief, Fedorov began directing funds away from conventional munitions and personnel and toward companies and projects that better reflected his preferred approach.

Serious challenges for Ukraine, including Russia’s unauthorized use of Starlink, were also addressed quickly and effectively during Fedorov’s tenure.

Very quickly, the trajectory of the war shifted. Ukraine halted and in some cases reversed Russia’s battlefield gains while risking fewer human lives.

One Ukrainian military analyst described Fedorov’s reforms as delivering “a comprehensive vision of how the war should be fought.”

But at least some thought Fedorov was overstepping his legal purview. One former senior Ukrainian military official said that the defense minister was seeking to assert control over areas of responsibility that belong strictly to the office of the commander-in-chief.

“Under Ukrainian law and NATO standards, the Minister of Defense exercises civilian democratic oversight of the Armed Forces—but has no authority to conduct operations or plan military action. His job is ensuring the Armed Forces get what they need,” the former official said.

Not everyone agrees that Ukrainian law defines the roles of defense minister and military chief so rigidly.

“Ukraine’s minister of defense is expected to ask difficult questions and evaluate whether the military system is functioning effectively. This means analyzing the broader strategic picture rather than commanding troops on the battlefield or directing military strategy. The goal is to ensure that Ukraine’s defense system is constantly learning, adapting, and improving,” Tregub, the official-turned-activist, wrote on July 21.

Fedorov also believed that his job included exposing defense ministry business practices and staff that operated to the benefit of a small handful of insiders.

In a press briefing the day after he was fired as defense minister, Fedorov defended his actions.

“We also discovered department heads within the MoD who were effectively appointed by private companies. They wouldn't even attend MoD meetings without being accompanied by specific law-enforcement officers. We systematically fired them,” he said. “We once investigated a direct contract with a massive 200% to 300% profit margin linked to a well-known individual living outside Ukraine.”

The Butcher

If “Misha” represents many Ukrainians’ hopes for their future, Syrskyi resembles its past. As a young Soviet Army cadet, Syrskyi studied at Moscow’s Higher Military Command School; many see in him the face of Soviet bureaucracy and obsolete military thinking.

As a Ukrainian colonel-general in 2022, Syrskyi led the ultimately futile effort to hold the city of Bakhmut by sending waves of soldiers against advancing Russian forces, earning him the nickname “The Butcher.” Still, two former senior military officers said they credit him with keeping Russian gains in check—and they added that he is as tough on himself as he is on his subordinates.

In 2024, Syrskyi—a close Zelenskyy loyalist—was appointed commander-in-chief after the president fell out with Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, (who holds a higher approval rating among Ukrainians.)

But Zelensky also remained close to Andrii Yermak, his political "muscle" and longtime chief of staff. Last November, Yermak was forced to step down by corruption charges, but has remained influential among high-ranking officials.

As one former senior Ukrainian defense official put it, “Syrskyi is a Yermak man.”

A malevolent force

For many Ukrainians, particularly younger ones, corruption is almost a phantom, malevolent force. Moscow has long used bribes, officials, secret deals, and off-the-books transactions to weaken Ukraine’s public institutions and bend them to its will. That was especially true during the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, a staunch ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

The 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” that ousted Yanukovych was as much an exorcism of corruption as it was an ejection of Russian imperial control. The two concepts are intimately bound for many Ukrainians.

Yanukovych lives in a Moscow suburb today. But the self-dealing decadence of his era continues to constrain Ukraine’s integration with the West since foreign assistance in the form of loans and military aid remains heavily conditioned on anti-corruption efforts. Many of the nation’s young feel punished for Russia’s corruption of their society even after staging a revolution rejecting it. The use of modern information technology to create transparency, Fedorov’s work over the years, is essential if Ukraine is going to reach its full potential as a European nation.

After Yermak was ousted, Fedorov used his reformer’s aura to expand his influence across government and build popularity internationally. The former senior Ukrainian defense official said, “When Yermak was in that powerful position, Fedorov was very careful. He didn't rock the boat. But now that Yermak is weakened and Zelensky is weakened, Fedorov is moving forward and stepping out. And so he's pushing the boundaries.”

In his July 16 press conference, Fedorov stopped just short of accusing Syrskyi of criminality, describing him as a man who “prefers to attend backroom meetings, weave intrigues.” But the hidden meaning in the summary was hard to mistake by anyone familiar with Yermak’s reputation.

Ukrainians who speak to Western journalists are cautious when addressing corruption, lest they reinforce negative stereotypes. This caution makes the recent widespread protests across Ukraine all the more remarkable, signaling a public willingness to confront internal problems directly, even when doing so carries political risk.

One Ukrainian military analyst, who declined to name Syrskyi specifically, said, “There are forces within the Ukrainian state that continue to operate according to the rules of the past and seek to resolve issues through old methods. Although Minister Fedorov has attempted to counter such practices through his reform agenda, the influence of these forces within the defense sector remains strong.” The former official pushed back on notions of Fedorov as a knight among villains, suggesting instead that he was a court noble vying for influence, backed by his own faction.

“You have to assume that every single leader and commander in Ukraine has a commercial interest. Every seat has a certain value attached to it. You protect it, but you also have vested interests that must be protected because those people helped put you in that position. So Fedorov obviously has a lot of different vested interests,” the former official said.

The former official pointed to government-funded media platforms he launched and a generation of drone and defense-tech startups that are now attracting lucrative Western investment after starting with government funds and grants secured by Fedorov. Fedorov has no public financial interest in any of them, but “hidden ownership” is something of an Eastern European tradition, they explained. It’s also at the center of the charges against Yermak. Even without a specific or secret financial interest, Fedorov’s future success is intimately tied to the companies he championed.

“His interests are clashing with Syrskyi’s interests,” the former official said.

Like Game of Thrones? “Exactly,” they answered.

Winter is coming

Difficult decisions await Khmara or whoever settles into the defense minister’s office. Even as Putin contemplates a broader mobilization, filling the ranks of the Ukrainian military is growing harder as recruitment slows and draft-dodging increases.

The protests supporting Fedorov and the challenge of filling military ranks are deeply linked, “Ukraine’s mobilization crisis is not fundamentally a manpower problem. It is a trust problem,” Tregub wrote on Tuesday.

Still, sources we spoke to and voices of prominent Ukraine supporters online called the protests a sign of resilience.

The country remains under martial law and in a state of existential war. But when protesters fill the streets to voice their grievances outside the president's office, they are not met with truncheons, tear gas, or fears for their livelihoods as they might in Russia, or even Washington, D.C. That, more than anything, shows a democracy capable of enduring.

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As drones take over, ejection-seat makers prepare for a pilotless battlefield

Thomas Novelly — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:07:46 -0400

FARNBOROUGH, England—In the eight decades since Martin-Baker conducted its first in-flight test, its ejection seats have saved the lives of more than 7,800 aviators. But more recently, advancements in robotic and autonomous aircraft have Martin-Baker and fellow ejection-seat makers looking for ways to keep themselves alive and well.

“Recognizing where drones are going, we have offered our services to support the drone manufacturers, both the small and the larger ones of the future,” Steve Roberts, Martin-Baker’s head of business development, told Defense One on the sidelines of the Farnborough International Airshow here. “It could be anything. How do they get launched? We have an electronics capability in our company. There are some small drone manufacturers that don’t have that… We might be able to help them with payload destruction.”

“We have reached out to say, ‘How can we help?’” Roberts said. “There has been lots of interest, but I can’t report exactly the direction we’re going just yet.”

The end of the manned fighter jet is not yet nigh. For all the airshow announcements about unmanned systems—from autonomous tiltrotorcraft to unmanned multi-role platforms—exquisite next-generation fighter jet projects like GCAP, the F-47, and F/A-XX are still garnering investment and attention. Companies like Martin-Baker and RTX’s Collins Aerospace know that the pilots will need ejection seats to fight this generation’s wars.

For the U.S. military, Martin-Baker supplies ejection seats for the F-5, some F-16 blocks, F/A-18, and F-35 as well as the T-6, T-38, and T-45 training jets. The United-Kingdom-based company has created a community around its product by giving ties to pilots rescued by their seats, hosting regular gatherings of ejectees, and offering an exclusive watch available to aviators who’ve survived crashes.

Martin-Baker won’t be abandoning that culture anytime soon, Roberts said. Major militaries aren’t giving up on exquisite fighter jets, and those pilots will be relying on the life-saving technology.

“At the end of the day, we’re a life-saving company, that’s the ethos. So how can we provide our life-saving technology into the unmanned aircraft,” Roberts said. “We feel that in our lifetimes, unmanned may not take over, but the partially-manned aircraft will be there … and the training aircraft need to deliver the pilots of the future.”

Collins Aerospace’s ACES II and ACES 5 ejection seats are on the F-15, F-16, and F-22 fighters as well as the B-1 and B-2 bombers, per their website. Since 1978, those ejection seats have saved more than 730 lives, a company spokesman told Defense One in an emailed statement. Similar to Martin-Baker, Collins has the “Grasshopper Club” where ejectees can tour the factory and are given a pin, patch, and coin.

“We remain committed to working with our customer to ensure pilots receive the highest level of protection when their need is greatest,” the spokesperson wrote.

But Collins Aerospace—along with RTX’s other subsidiaries of Pratt & Whitney and Raytheon—are all heavily investing in developing unmanned aircraft.

In June, Collins Aerospace’s Sidekick autonomy software was down-selected for the production phase of the Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft, or CCA, competition. At Farnborough, Pratt & Whitney announced it reached a key design milestone for its Pratt & Whitney Valox 1500, an engine designed to power CCAs. And Raytheon has been working with the Air Force to integrate its Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles onto CCAs.

“Together, these efforts, among others, underscore RTX’s commitment to delivering affordable technologies that can be produced at scale, rapidly fielded and critical to maximizing manned and unmanned teaming,” the company spokesperson wrote.

Martin-Baker, which began as an aircraft manufacturer, aims to share their knowledge with newer and smaller companies entering the unmanned warfare business.

“We’ve got a healthy, healthy order book going for many, many years because of these new programs that are coming on top,” Roberts said. “But certainly the new market that’s come up, both the, shall we say, the expensive unmanned and also the inexpensive unmanned, there are companies that don’t have the expertise we have in manufacture.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nielsen said the need for kinetic effects take priority.

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

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

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

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Selective Service System seeks software to aid the military draft

Ross Wilkers — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:00:00 -0400

The agency that keeps lists of draft-eligible men is looking for software to help simulate the personnel needs it would work to fill if a draft were reinstated.

While the U.S. military is all-volunteer, the independent Selective Service System still maintains a registration list of men aged 18 to 25 and a second special-skills database based on professional licensing lists of workers in certain health-care occupations.

By launching this request for quotes on Wednesday, SSS is looking to prepare for emergencies that require it to quickly evaluate staffing and resource requirements through the use of readiness simulation software.

SSS also is tasked with comparing different mobilization and policy scenarios, assessing the operational impacts of surge conditions, identifying potential risks and bottlenecks, and support executive planning and reporting obligations.

The RFQ lists these requirements for the software:

Model the full end-to-end mobilization pipeline
Support configurable scenarios
Provide decision-support analytics for leaders, planners and operators
Operates within an SSS-designated cloud environment
Use anonymized aggregate data
Support complete government ownership and sustainment

SSS is embarking on this search for software ahead of Dec. 18, when the requirement for male U.S. residents aged 18 to 25 years old to register themselves in the system will be replaced with a requirement for SSS to automatically register them by relying on other federal databases.

Quotes are due by 2 p.m. Eastern time on Aug. 14. The window for questions to SS closes at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, July 28.

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Unions ask for injunction restoring collective bargaining at Defense

Erich Wagner — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0400

A pair of federal employee unions on Monday urged a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction restoring their collective bargaining agreements with the Defense Department, arguing that Secretary Pete Hegseth failed to follow the Trump administration’s own process for implementing two executive orders banning organized labor at most federal agencies.

Earlier this month, the American Federation of Government Employees and National Federation of Federal Employees sued the Pentagon over the April termination of their collective bargaining agreements, a move that the Defense Department said was aimed at complying with President Trump’s March 2025 executive order barring collective bargaining for two-thirds of the federal workforce on national security grounds.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for Maryland, focuses not on the legality of Trump’s edict, but rather whether Hegseth fulfilled his obligation to conduct “reasoned decision-making” under the Administrative Procedure Act when he ordered CBAs be terminated with just 24 hours’ notice.

“The Hegseth memorandum did not point to any facts showing that any of plaintiffs’ CBAs, much less all of them, were inconsistent with national security,” the unions wrote. “DOD agencies had voluntarily agreed to these CBAs. Nor did the Hegseth memorandum consider the obvious alternatives to immediate mass termination of all CBAs, such as refraining from terminating CBAs until litigation about [the executive order] runs its course, allowing CBAs to expire pursuant to their own terms, or identifying only those specific parts of CBAs that the secretary determined to be inconsistent with national security . . . The Hegseth memorandum was the opposite of the reasoned decision-making that the APA requires before final agency action.”

The unions said that the Defense Department did not even follow a template for terminating union contracts issued by the Office of Personnel Management in February, seemingly designed to address the APA’s requirements for agencies to explain policy changes and consider the reliance interests of stakeholders. Instead, Hegseth wrote simply that the actions were “required” in order to comply with Trump’s order.

“The OPM termination template reinforces that CBA terminations are discretionary and must comply with the APA’s requirements for reasoned decision-making,” the unions wrote. “The OPM template indicates that agencies should specify that, after the issuance of the EO, the agency ‘considered whether to terminate any CBA, in whole or part, as it pertains to those bargaining unit employees who fall within the EO’s scope.’”

Since the contracts’ termination in April, management officials have told union members that their union “does not exist any longer,” and some employees have been required to sign documents attesting that they lack union representation. Employees in disciplinary proceedings are denied access to union representation, managers are unilaterally changing employees’ work schedules with little notice, and the labor groups’ membership is on the decline.

“Plaintiffs face an existential threat because workers are afraid to engage in any union activity or are confused about their right to do so,” they wrote. “DOD is telling plaintiffs’ members and prospective members that they are ineligible to join unions and that their unions ‘do not exist.’ Plaintiffs cannot successfully retain or recruit members under such circumstances, and union membership is declining. These harms are irreparable.”

Since its initial filing earlier this month, AFGE and NFFE’s case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a jurist who was nominated to the federal bench by both presidents Obama and Trump.

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Hegseth’s conflicting statements, evasions drain lawmakers’ patience, support

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:50:25 -0400

Given a rare chance to press top Pentagon leaders, senators from both parties on Tuesday pleaded with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to outline a strategy for the U.S. war on Iran or simply to defend his previous statements about it. Hegseth responded at times combatively or evasively.

The meeting highlighted growing frustration over the costly war and the Trump administration’s multiple and shifting rationales for it—all of which appear to be reducing lawmakers’ appetite for the White House’s unprecedented $1.5 trillion defense-spending request.

Lawmakers are not the only ones frustrated with Operation Epic Fury. Last week, 68 percent of the public said the war was “not worth fighting,” according to an Ipsos poll. Wednesday brought fresh numbers from Politico showing that just one-third of self-identified MAGA voters approve of the war—a 13-point drop in two months.

At the hearing, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said that the drops don’t reflect differences in concern about a potential Iranian nuclear arsenal, but rather disapproval of how the White House has gone about trying to prevent it.

“This radical Iranian regime should never possess a nuclear weapon. I think we agree on all of these core basic points,” Coons said. “I think your first strategic mistake was to not consult the American people and Congress and make a clear case for the reasons behind this war. There have been many, lots offered.”

Perhaps the most telling portion of the hearing came toward the end, when Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., read Hegseth’s previous public statements back to him verbatim and then asked Hegseth to recommit to the statement.

Ossoff: “You said, quote, ‘Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory.’ You said Iran's military had been rendered, quote, ‘combat-ineffective for years to come,’ and you stated we had, quote, ‘achieved every single objective.’ Were those accurate statements?”

Hegseth answered that U.S. strikes had decimated Iran’s Air Force, Navy, and industrial base, but acknowledged that the country was still developing and launching drones and missiles. “So we never expected they would stop having capabilities to shoot. The question is at scale against opponents like the United States of America.”

Ossoff repeated the question, seeking a declarative yes or no that did not come. He continued, “On March 8, day nine of the war, on 60 Minutes, you assured the American people of Iranian surrender. Does that remain your prediction?”

Hegseth replied, “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon to threaten the United States of America. That has been the objective, and it remains so.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., put the consistency and credibility issue to Hegseth more bluntly.

“The reason why [voters] are so upset with you and this administration is because the words you have used in the past don't add up,” she said. “About Iran, specifically, you said that we had obliterated, quote unquote, Iran's ability to create nuclear weapons. The president made the same claim. Yet eight months later, in 2026, the president launched an act of war, claiming Iran was within two weeks of having a weapon. So when you say two very different things, the American people don't know who to believe or what to believe.”

She went on to reframe the issue in terms of growing economic uncertainty among voters, merely seeking consistent answers as they are asked to make sacrifices. “They just know they can't afford their health care; they can't afford their food; they can't afford housing, and our farmers are continuing to suffer. So, which is true? Was it obliterated or wasn't it?”

Even some staunch supporters of President Trump and his agenda lost patience with Hegseth’s inability to articulate a clear goal for ending the war and the consequences of the United States leaving it before a favorable outcome could be reached.

One such Trump ally, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., asked Hegseth whether Iran would be able to restart its nuclear program if the United States concludes operations too soon.

Without providing a clear yes or no, Hegseth answered that Iran had not given up its nuclear ambitions even though their nuclear sites had been obliterated.

Kennedy interrupted the response with a shout: “We need straight answers!”

That lack of straight answers is hurting not only the White House but also senators' ability to meet the administration’s historic budget request.

Budgeting is very much a part of the discussion among the most loyal members of the President’s voting base. Some 37 percent of self-identified MAGA voters now say they would support the war only if it does not increase costs, according to Wednesday’s Politico poll, a number up from 29 percent in May.

Coons observed broad bipartisan support for the budget’s main pillars: $21 billion to sustain forward-deployed forces, pay increases, and other readiness items; $46 billion to replace munitions stockpiles, develop new supply lines for solid rocket motors, and new counter-drone defenses, and others. There is enthusiasm for the Defense Department’s acquisition reform and bringing in new technology players. But lawmakers had little insight into how the White House was spending funds that Congress had already given it to meet those goals.

“Mr. Secretary, your question says: Without these supplemental funds, we will face critical shortfalls that threaten our ability to pay our service members and sustain global operations without disruption. You've been asked repeatedly—there's $75 billion appropriated but unobligated—can we really not avoid critical short-term shortfalls? What does that mean about the budget management within the department in terms of unexpected and unbudgeted wars, first, Operation Southern Spear and then Operation Epic Fury?”

Hegseth answered that the funds previously allocated under the Big Beautiful Bill would be spent by September. That the U.S. military was receiving everything it required “in spades.” The $1.5 trillion budget request “and any additional funding that comes,” was related to efforts to modernize the force.

Coons observed that those were “Two quite different things. A $1.5 trillion base budget request and a now $67 billion supplemental.” The September date was “news to him.”

At various points, lawmakers turned their attention to Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to make the Pentagon’s case where Hegseth could not. They lavished credit and praise on Caine for carrying out U.S. policy, however confusing they found that policy to be, and then called on him to affirm that China, Russia, and Iran were working together.

“There is no doubt that they are aligning,” Caine responded.He also compared the giant 2027 budget request to the work done by George C. Marshall to mobilize the U.S. military for World War II, then to transform the War Department into what would become the postwar Defense Department.

“I view this as a future investment to buy down risk, similar to what I said Marshall fought through in those heady days in 1940, where the need to invest capital early to deliver scale is an opportunity that I hope we don't miss.”

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Defense Business Brief: Dispatch from Farnborough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome

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!

A bit of Farnborough chat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The antifa terrorism threat the Trump administration describes does not exist

Jason M. Blazakis, The Conversation — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:35:29 -0400

The State Department on July 16, 2026, hosted what officials billed as a ministerial on the resurgence of left-wing political terrorism.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio invited representatives from more than 60 countries to Washington to hear an argument that many of them appear not to believe: that a transnational far-left terrorist movement called antifa threatens the democratic world. At the event, allies were asked to mobilize against that enemy despite nations like the Netherlands and Germany politely noting to their host that they cannot find evidence of any such group.

Some intelligence analysts have declined to brief on antifa at interagency meetings because they do not regard it as a serious counterterrorism threat.

As a terrorism scholar who spent a decade running the State Department office that designates terrorist organizations, I understand their confusion. The threat the administration describes does not exist in the form the administration describes it.

Antifa is not a group

As I and others have written before, antifa is not a group. It is a movement and an ideology, a loose commitment to opposing fascism. In its most organized form, it amounts to scattered local collectives like Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon.

There is no membership roll, no command hierarchy, and no funding structure. There is no leader of antifa – the Trump administration has not named one – and there is no record of deadly attacks attributed to a U.S.-based organization called antifa.

Groups like the Islamic State group and al-Qaida have killed tens of thousands of people and have a documented chain of command. Antifa does not. You cannot decapitate a movement with no head, and you cannot sanction an organization that does not exist.

As such, the Trump administration created one.

The construction project began on Sept. 22, 2025, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. The order describes antifa as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government.” It directs every relevant agency to investigate and dismantle its operations.

Two problems are immediately apparent. First, no legal authority exists to designate domestic organizations as terrorist groups. It’s a gap that Congress has deliberately preserved for First Amendment reasons.

Second, the order designates as an organization something the FBI’s past leadership has described as an ideology. Trump’s executive order asserts an antifa enterprise into existence and then declares war on it.

Three days after the executive order, the White House implemented the order through National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which converts the fiction into machinery. The memorandum directs the Treasury Department to identify and disrupt financial networks that fund what it deems domestic terrorism. The memorandum instructs banks to file suspicious-activity reports with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the U.S. government’s financial intelligence unit.

That means the government’s financial surveillance apparatus, built to trace al-Qaida’s money in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is being pointed at Americans that the administration considers left-wing.

The memorandum likewise directs the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute and disrupt entities and individuals. That harnesses a network of roughly 200 task forces comprising over 4,000 personnel from federal, state and local agencies.

The wording of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 gives away the administration’s true intent. It identifies the markers of this supposed terrorist movement as anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity. It criticizes the movement for its hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.

Those are not indicators of terrorism. They are political positions.

State Department targets groups overseas

The foreign component of the campaign arrived in November 2025. That’s when the State Department designated four European groups – one each from Germany and Italy and two from Greece – as Specially Designated Global Terrorists and Foreign Terrorist Organizations pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The State Department-designated groups are real. And some of their members have committed genuine crimes, including assaults and small-scale bombings.

But as I have noted, the designations are very peculiar. These groups have committed vandalism and harmed people, but not one of the four has carried out an attack that led to any fatalities.

German leaders have said the threat from one of the designated groups, Antifa Ost, or Antifa East, had recently decreased significantly.

As the former head of the State Department’s office that recommended to the secretary of state which groups to designate, I’ve been involved in the designations of hundreds of individuals and organizations. The bar was never this low. That’s because the Foreign Terrorist Organization list loses its meaning, and its deterrent power, when it includes groups whose body count is zero while genuinely lethal movements go unlisted.

That brings us back to the State Department’s ministerial. The sequence of events leading up to it matter:

Invent the organization by executive order; build the enforcement machinery by presidential memorandum; manufacture the foreign nexus through the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designations; and then convene the world to ratify the story. Each step launders the previous one.

Behind it all, Trump administration officials have discussed using the foreign terrorism labels to justify going after Americans with links to the movement. That is the point of the exercise, and U.S allies such as the Netherlands have explained how antifa could not be designated as a terrorist group under their laws.

Counterterrorism tools are among the most powerful instruments the U.S. government possesses. I don’t believe that using them against an ideology, one defined by opposition to fascism, makes America safer. I believe it tells every ally the U.S. asks for help that the world’s leading counterterrorism power can no longer tell the difference between a threat and an opponent.

Implications of the ministerial meeting

This is not just an issue of semantics and rhetoric – each action by the Trump administration against a strawman enemy creates risks. And the push to internationalize the antifa threat could have dire consequences at home.

First, if the State Department leaves the July 16 meeting with pliable allies willing to brand antifa a terrorist organization, it will embolden the administration to point to a supposed global conspiracy of the far left.

That path leads to a State Department foreign terrorist designation. Such a designation means Americans could have their bank accounts frozen and quite possibly find themselves rounded up for providing material support to a movement rather than an organization. This would be more dangerous than Trump’s earlier executive order.

Second, it could chill freedom of speech and assembly. Once other governments treat antifa as a terrorist entity, the U.S. government gains cover to shut down protests under the guise of exposing global left-wing plotting.

Third, it could justify the revival of projects like the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, resurrecting the surveillance, infiltration and disruption of lawful political activity that the bureau was supposed to have abandoned after the abuses of the 1970s.

Fourth, as one European counterterrorism scholar recently warned, the summit lays bare a widening split between American and European counterterrorism priorities and the Trump administration’s willingness to bend counterterrorism policy to partisan ends.

That divergence is the real hazard, far more than any phantom left-wing terrorism group, because European counterterrorism leans so heavily on U.S. intelligence. As such, transatlantic counterterrorism cooperation could be in for turbulent times.

Whatever the outcome of the ministerial meeting, there is no version that will make Americans safer.

I believe one result is certain: Genuine threats – from groups with leaders, actual funding and malicious intent – will get less attention from the U.S. and any ally co-opted to take action against antifa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lawmakers get taste of AI-enabled cyberattacks in China-Taiwan war game

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:00:00 -0400

Members and staffers from the House Homeland Security Committee and the House China Select Committee were put through a simulated Taiwan crisis Tuesday that tested how U.S. officials might respond to AI-backed cyberattacks targeting transportation and logistics networks needed to deploy American forces.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies hosted the event to give lawmakers a window into the trade-offs and uncertainty that would shape the U.S. response to a fast-moving conflict involving China and its implications in American cyberspace.

Among those participating were Republican Reps. Eli Crane of Arizona, Michael Guest of Mississippi and Michael McCaul of Texas, along with Democratic Rep. Shri Thanedar of Michigan and Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner Pablo José Hernández, also a Democrat.

The scenario begins with China launching a massive military exercise around Taiwan in the summer of 2027, leaving U.S. officials unsure whether Beijing was being coercive, imposing a de facto blockade or preparing for a full invasion of the island, per a readout provided to reporters just before the simulation began. Beijing avoids using the term “blockade” but the moves effectively quarantine Taiwan, the summary says.

Lawmakers are then told that U.S. intelligence analysts suspect Chinese hackers had begun targeting ports, freight rail systems, airports and other transportation networks that could be used to move U.S. forces and supplies. Some of the attacks cause immediate disruptions, while others appear designed to preserve access that could be leveraged later.

Participants also have to decide which networks to defend first, how closely to coordinate with private sector critical infrastructure operators and whether moving U.S. forces would deter China or further escalate the crisis.

Cyber “is always going to be a leader in any kinetic war,” McCaul told participants before reporters were asked to leave the war game room so lawmakers and staff could participate more candidly.

The exercise notably included a smattering of AI-related attacks involving stolen credentials and interference with logistics and routing systems. AI is also used in one attack scenario for a misinformation campaign, per the readout. The final scenario involved a prompt injection, in which attackers try to trick an AI system into following malicious instructions instead of its intended safeguards.

“This committee has been briefed extensively on our latest AI capabilities, Anthropic in particular, the Mythos model, and the amount of destruction that Mythos can do if it’s in the wrong hands,” McCaul said, referring to the powerful cyber-focused AI model unveiled in early April. “And we know China is three to five months behind us. That’s not very long, in my judgment.”

Current and former officials have long warned that China could disrupt U.S. military deployments by digitally sabotaging the largely private-sector ports, railways, airports and other infrastructure used to move troops and equipment overseas. Advanced AI tools, broadly, can help hackers work faster, carry out more parts of an attack automatically and target more systems at once.

The war game scenario mirrors longstanding concerns surrounding Volt Typhoon, a Chinese government-backed hacking group that U.S. officials say has spent years quietly burrowing into American critical infrastructure. The hackers are believed to be positioning themselves inside sectors such as communications, energy, transportation and water systems to disrupt them during a future conflict, including one over Taiwan.

China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and seeks to bring the self-governing island under Beijing’s control. Its major role in producing advanced computer chips makes it strategically important to both China and the United States.

U.S. spy agencies assessed earlier this year that China is not planning to invade Taiwan in 2027. While Beijing has repeatedly refused to rule out using force, the intelligence community said it believes China still prefers to achieve unification without military action.

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Canada’s GCAP decision is about relationships, not the F-35

Shaun McDougall, Forecast International — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:25:32 -0400

Canada's decision to become the first observer nation in the Global Combat Air Program, or GCAP, a multinational effort to build a sixth-generation fighter, is less about finding an alternative to its ongoing F-35 purchases and more about building non-U.S. defense relationships.

First, a look at Canada’s current fighter requirements. The Royal Canadian Air Force flies Boeing CF-18 Hornets that were originally expected to retire by 2020. Ottawa had planned since 2010 to replace them with 65 F-35s, but scuttled the plan as the cost of the Joint Strike Fighter continued to rise.

The government examined other options, including the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the Saab Gripen, in a follow-on competition marked by a chaotic process and a trade dispute with Boeing about government commercial aircraft subsidies and negotiations over industrial benefits. Justin Trudeau’s government ultimately decided to buy 88 F-35s.

That changed when Donald Trump returned to the White House. Within a year, the American president's new tariffs and comments about annexing Canada deeply strained the once-ironclad relationship. The fallout reshaped Canada’s political future. Trudeau’s Liberal Party was facing abysmal approval ratings, leading to his ouster as prime minister prior to the 2025 federal election. His replacement, Mark Carney, promised to stand up to Trump in the trade war, which ultimately secured his Liberal party an election victory.

Carney has continued to push back against Trump, including outlining plans to distance Canada from its reliance on U.S. defense equipment. He put the F-35 procurement plans on hold to review the program and determine if a different aircraft would better serve Canada’s broader interests. Ottawa is already contractually committed to the first 16 F-35s, so at this point the government is deciding whether to continue with a pure fleet of F-35s or adopt a mixed fleet that would likely integrate the Saab Gripen. The Royal Canadian Air Force has long preferred the F-35, but the program remains a political negotiating tool.

Enter GCAP

Ottawa’s involvement in GCAP—a joint effort of Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom—isn’t about replacing the CF-18, which will be retired sooner rather than later. Before putting the F-35 on hold, Ottawa anticipated receiving its final new aircraft in 2032. However, GCAP isn’t expected to enter service until 2035, and any theoretical Canadian aircraft wouldn’t arrive until well after that date, meaning it isn’t a viable platform to replace the CF-18. Canadian Defense Minister David McGuinty confirmed as much on Monday when he said any GCAP involvement is a separate issue from the ongoing F-35 review.

Rather, Canada’s move is about building relationships and realigning strategic partnerships at a time of deteriorating relations with the U.S. Canada is increasingly looking abroad to bolster defense and industrial ties with other nations. Joining GCAP, even if only as an observer, serves as way to learn more about sixth-generation fighter capabilities, increase industrial collaboration with allies overseas, and strengthen ongoing security arrangements. “Today is about more than a program, it’s about an enduring strength of partnership,” McGuinty said at a press conference announcing the GCAP news.

McGuinty also spoke of a world that is becoming more contested, with technology and conflict transforming at an unparalleled pace. “The nations that can innovate together, build together, and stand together will be best positioned to meet the challenges of tomorrow,” he said. These sentiments echo a speech Prime Minister Carney gave at the January 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. There, he called for increased cooperation among middle powers to hedge against uncertainty and the rise of “hard power.” While Carney didn’t mention the U.S. or Trump by name, the speech clearly served to highlight Canada’s displeasure with the new status quo in Washington.

Walking a fine line

Canada finds itself in a difficult position. It faces diminished trust in its closest ally and has outlined plans to reduce its reliance on American military equipment in the future. At the same time, U.S. and Canadian defense interests remain closely linked through shared security under the North American Aerospace Defense Command. U.S. and Canadian defense industrial bases are also deeply integrated, and Canada already operates many U.S. platforms. The tense relationship also hasn’t derailed other recent efforts to procure U.S. equipment, such as Boeing P-8A maritime patrol aircraft, General Atomics MQ-9B drones, and Lockheed Martin High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).

As with other European nations that have expressed a desire to rely more heavily on domestic hardware, shifting away from reliance on U.S. equipment is something that would take years to achieve and is a goal that will be significantly impacted by future administrations. For now, GCAP observer status doesn’t change Canada’s fighter fleet or its F-35 review. What it does is give Ottawa a new seat at the table as it works to diversify its defense relationships beyond Washington.

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Spies are targeting US AI labs, experts warn Congress

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:00:00 -0400

The U.S. intelligence community needs to devote more resources to protecting American artificial intelligence companies from foreign espionage, former officials told the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, arguing that China will use a range of intelligence-gathering techniques to steal proprietary AI technology and advance its own military and economic goals.

The hearing, focused on emerging threats to the U.S. in the 25 years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, also highlighted AI’s growing role across a range of national security concerns, including cyberattacks, autonomous drones and foreign influence operations.

“Of course, our intelligence services and agencies are going to have secrets that are always going to be of top desire for foreign intelligence adversaries, but if you’re [China’s Ministry of State Security] today, you’re looking at frontier model companies,” said Frank Cilluffo, a former George W. Bush homeland security official who leads Auburn University’s McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure.

“I think we’ve got to actually rethink counterintelligence. It’s not just the traditional spy-versus-spy, information-versus-information,” he added. “It’s who holds the keys right now, it’s not going to be in government alone.”

Access to proprietary U.S. AI research is valuable to foreign adversaries because it can help them close technological gaps without bearing the cost and time of developing those capabilities themselves.

U.S. officials have several times assessed that China has stolen proprietary national security information, notably data on military aircraft. More recently, the White House and major U.S. AI companies have accused Chinese firms of conducting distillation operations, in which developers covertly use advanced American-made AI models to improve their own.

“The counterintelligence threat has lagged way behind,” said retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who served as national security advisor during President Donald Trump’s first term. “I think we have a lot of work to do,” he said, describing how, over the years, U.S. devotion to counterterrorism efforts after Sept. 11 drew away resources that track China’s efforts to embed spies and other researchers into American firms.

The range of counterintelligence targets is broader now, and especially includes private companies, said Ben Buchanan, who served as the Biden administration’s White House special advisor for AI.

Counterintelligence operations will also evolve with AI, he said.

“Of course cyber operations have already changed, but even if you look at things like human intelligence and detecting human intelligence operations, it is a different technical paradigm that yields different kinds of analysis that AI alone can do,” Buchanan said.

He also criticized the Trump administration’s recent moves to ease restrictions on advanced chip exports to China.

“America has a large structural advantage in AI due to the democratic ecosystem of producing chips, and we should exploit that structural advantage to the fullest,” Buchanan said. “We should be much more aggressive on enforcement and smuggling to stop China from trying to catch up.”

Many individual states are also not well equipped to track and respond to Chinese spying efforts, said Seth Jones, a former U.S. Special Operations Command official who now leads the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Recent quantum computing executive orders have focused, in part, on tasking the FBI and the intelligence community with better protecting the nation’s quantum research from foreign spying.

The White House has directed national security agencies to help safeguard advanced U.S.-made AI from foreign threats, but it has not established a dedicated counterintelligence framework equivalent to the quantum technology directives.

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Boeing adjusts approach to court more European business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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At Europe’s largest airshow, US lawmakers sound alarm over Pentagon-budget gridlock

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:33:55 -0400

FARNBOROUGH, UK—U.S. lawmakers sounded alarms about the fate of this year’s Pentagon budget while attending Europe’s largest airshow and said the Trump administration’s top defense priorities, including the Golden Dome missile defense program, are in peril.

A bipartisian congressional delegation at the Farnborough International Airshow told reporters on Monday that the gridlock surrounding this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, an Iran war supplemental, and additional funding measures likely portends acontinuing resolution: a stopgap funding measure to keep the government open at the current year’s spending levels.

“We're not going to get an NDAA bill done anytime soon,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said. “Anybody, no offense to anybody, anybody who thinks we're going to do an NDAA in the midterm needs to back off the crank. It's not going to happen.”

Kennedy later said, “We'll get the NDAA done” and “I hope we’ll have a CR to continue the budget, but after that, I really don't know.”

Political infighting about the defense budget comes as President Donald Trump has pushed European countries to provide for their own defense and to buy American weapons. Given the gridlock in Washington, the administration has proposed to make heavy, partisan use of an unusual budget maneuver called reconciliation.

“There's a concern that if you start doing defense and reconciliation, it can create a bad habit, and I get all of that,” Kennedy said on the sidelines of Farnborough. “But the military needs money, and the only way to get it to them in this environment is through reconciliation.”

Some $350 billion of the administration’s initial $1.5 trillion defense budget request relies on reconciliation, which allows funding legislation to be passed by a simple majority. The sum includes major defense priorities such as munitions, shipbuilding, and autonomous warfare efforts. Congress has since whittled the reconciliation amount to $60 billion, mostly to support the war in Iran.

“I'd go a little bit heavier on the defense money, but that's just me. I'll take it if that's the best we can do,” Kennedy said.

Democrats disagree.

“I think it does set a dangerous precedent, and I think the Appropriations Committee, both Democrats and Republicans, have been pretty clear with the department about that, about concern that if this is a priority, it should go in the base budget,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said in a sideline gaggle with reporters. “There isn’t going to be a third reconciliation package, so anything that's in there is not going anywhere.”

Golden Dome

Republican lawmakers are also casting doubt on using reconciliation to pass one of the Trump administration’s biggest defense priorities: the sprawling Golden Dome missile defense program.

A mere $400 million of the $17.5 billion the Pentagon is seeking for Golden Dome comes from the baseline budget, and the remainder from reconciliation funds. Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., told reporters at Farnborough the secretive missile defense investment “is needed” but is concerned with the administration’s partisan funding maneuvers.

“I'm worried it's in reconciliation, because I don't know if that's going to happen or not,” Fischer said.

Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said there’s other avenues outside of reconciliation to get the Golden Dome funding the admin wants.

“I think this is one of the priority items in reconciliation [that] they will find a way to work into a funding bill,” Harrison said. “If not this one, then the base budget or something else.”

Kennedy, like Fischer, said the missile defense system is needed but added that there’s other more pressing priorities.

“It's going to be expensive,” Kennedy said of Golden Dome. “Will we get it done in this Congress? I wouldn't bet my house on it. And if I were betting your house on it, it'd be a maybe.”

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Lockheed Martin unveils baby Patriot missile to address urgent gap

Patrick Tucker — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:29:40 -0400

With demand for Patriot PAC-3 interceptors sharpened by Russian and Iranian ballistic missile attacks, Lockheed Martin unveiled plans to build a smaller and cheaper, if less capable, version of the exquisite interceptor.

The Adapted Capability Effector, or ACE, missile would use the PAC-3's launcher and command and control software, but a less expensive rocket motor, radar, and electronic brain, according to a company announcement and remarks by Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control president Tim Cahil at the Farnborough International Airshow.

The ACE lacks some of the features to counter the most advanced missiles, said Cahil, but is intended to be useful against the type of lower-tech short-range ballistic missiles that Iran and Russia have used in recent destructive attacks.

Said one missile defense analyst, “It is conceivable that if you affect the cost drivers, that you—that's probably how you get down to a lower cost. The cost drivers and the bottlenecks of the current PAC-3 missiles are things like the seeker.”

Tom Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project at CSIS, said, “The United States and its allies, the entire PAC-3 community needs as many PAC-3s as industry collectively can produce. But we're also going to need alternatives, and not everything needs the most exquisite capability. And so this is why the low-cost interceptor competition is important and urgent.”

Cahill cautioned that the missile is not “designed to go after drones.” It is, however, designed to address a defensive gap that today’s wave of defense tech startups have been unable to fix: a less expensive way to shoot down, say, an Iskander-M traveling at 5,600 miles per hour.

While Ukrainian and U.S. companies have developed counter-drone solutions, short-range missile defense is one of the few areas where Ukraine can’t replace a U.S. capability.

That’s a deadly problem for Kyiv. Last July, the White House claimed that its aid to Ukraine had drawn the Pentagon’s stocks of Patriots. That turned out not to be true at the time, but became so after President Trump launched his war on Iran in February. An By April, CSIS wrote, the United States had used up about half of its supply.

When Ukraine ran out of PAC-3 interceptors this month, Russia responded with increased short-range attacks.

That supply-and-demand gap is prompting more defense companies to try to produce ballistic-missile interceptors. But so far, none has succeeded. The closest European alternative to the Patriot, the French-Italian SAMP/T, is not as effective, Ukrainian officials have said.

Lockheed, meanwhile, is pitching the idea of ACE missiles to at least some of the 18 countries that already have compatible PAC-3 launchers.The company envisions “joint development and production with European partners,” according to their statement.

Cahill said the new interceptor might enter production in 2028—or possibly even sooner, depending on how ready governments are to open their pocketbooks and work together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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US rocket-launch bottleneck worries Sweden, which just launched its first military satellite

Thomas Novelly — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:36:06 -0400

LONDON—Sweden’s military just launched its first satellite in May, but its top space officer is already worried that bottlenecks at U.S. and European launch facilities could slow the development of urgently needed orbital capabilities.

The satellite, built by Planet Labs and launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg AFB, California, went up four years ahead of schedule because of the “severe security situation,” Swedish Armed Forces Rear Adm. Anders Sundeman, the country’s space chief, told reporters during a media event here. “Time is of essence.”

As Sweden looks to grow its space assets, it will need to rely on U.S. launch providers which are being overbooked and strained by skyrocketing military and commercial demands for new satellites.

“We, of course, are worrying about the limited launching capability, also, in a global scale,” Swedish Armed Forces Rear Adm. Anders Sundeman, the country’s space chief, told Defense One on the sidelines of a media event here. “It is a problem for sure.”

Later this year, the country plans to launch a Finnish-made ICEYE satellite, a synthetic aperture radar. In total, the military aims to have 10 operational satellites on orbit in the coming years.

As orbital demands increase, it will be harder to get rides from U.S. providers into space, which is why Sweden has been working for five years to turn its main space-research center into a launch pad for orbital missions.

“That’s the reason why we are keen on the launch facility in Esrange in Sweden, for example, [to] succeed,” Sundeman said. “There are some other initiatives in Europe. So, we need to improve their launching capability also in a global perspective.”

SSC Space, formerly known as the Swedish Space Corporation, is owned by the country’s government. It’s the European Union’s first mainland spaceport. The facility will host its first orbital satellite launch, aboard Texas-based Firefly’s Alpha rocket, in 2028, according to a news release.

“Adding an orbital launch capability to mainland Europe will strengthen the continent’s capabilities and competitiveness in the commercial space arena, while contributing to greater resilience and strategic autonomy within the defense domain,” Charlotta Sund, CEO and SSC Space group president, said in last month’s release.

As Sweden looks to expand its footprint in space, Russia has been reportedly degrading GPS in the region.

In September, the Swedish Transport Agency accused Russia of increased interference and jamming over the Baltic Sea. In 2023, there were 55 total incidents. That skyrocketed to more than 700 interferences in 2025, the BBC reported.

China previously had access to the Swedish Space Corporation’s ground stations in Kiruna, Chile and Australia, according to the Secure World Foundation’s Global Counterspace Capabilities report. In 2020, SSC officials said they would not renew China’s contracts citing a change in the “geopolitical situation.”

When asked about the pursuit of counterspace weapons, Sundeman said the main focus has been on its initial space assets which don’t have offensive capabilities but are as “robust” as possible. When asked about defending its country’s growing fleet, the space officer added that large constellations are one part of protecting it from adversaries in the future.

“One things is, of course, large quantity,” Sundeman said. “And also, it’s the necessity to cooperate with others, that’s a kind of protection by itself.”

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Anduril pitches a robot wingman for US Army helicopters

Thomas Novelly — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 07:30:00 -0400

LONDON—One month after winning the U.S. Air Force’s drone wingman contract, Anduril announced plans to make an autonomous attack tiltrotor that the company hopes the U.S. Army will pair with its helicopters for future missions.

Nicknamed Thunder, the vertical-takeoff-and-landing rotorcraft is to be autonomous, heavily armed, hybrid-electric powered, and roughly group five-sized. It’s being designed to “be packed into a standard shipping container” for easy transport, Anduril said in a press release. It is being developed with Archer Aviation, another California-based firm, with first flight envisioned for next year.

Company officials say multiple uncrewed tiltrotors could accompany each crewed helicopter on a mission.

“By teaming three Thunder aircraft with each Apache, for example, a Combat Aviation Brigade will achieve a three times increase in available munitions without placing additional pilots in harm’s way, all at a fraction of the cost of a similarly-sized formation of exclusively crewed aircraft,” Anduril said in a statement.

In June, the Air Force announced that it would take the California-based firm's drone wingman prototype into production. The new tiltrotor concept is following some of those same principles, such as having a commercial product that can be affordably and efficiently produced, company officials told reporters.

“It's going to be an absolute, you know, a fraction of the cost of something like a Cheyenne or something like an Apache,” said Chris Brose, Anduril’s president and chief strategy officer. “It is going to be a system that you obviously want to get back when you launch it, but you can afford to lose it if you have to.”

“I think the Pentagon, and the Army in particular, have never been more open to these kinds of new ideas and sort of collaborations than ever before,” Brose said.

Chris Arnott, the company’s senior vice president of maneuver dominance, told reporters Thunder is being designed to hold a wide range of armament: up to ten air-to-ground missiles, such as Hellfires; 16 launched effects;’ or 76 70mm rockets, plus 12 counter-UAS effectors in the nose of the rotorcraft, Anduril’s press release said.

Arnott said they’ve been working on Thunder for around two to three years. He said that if it sells, Anduril could start building it by the end of the decade.

“Depending on kind of how quick the demand kind of goes from there, is then when we hit production, etc., but we're talking about being at rate production in the 2030-29 timeframe,” he said.

While the company officials repeatedly mentioned the Army during a roundtable with reporters, the decision to announce and debut a model at Farnborough means they want the attention of international customers.

“It's a global air show. You know, we'll have the eyes of pretty much everybody that we're interested in discussing this system with,” Brose said. “I think we look forward to discussing it, obviously in the U.K. with the U,K., but then obviously also with the many European partners that are going to show up to Farmborough and, obviously, the US Army as well.”

Other companies have similar ideas.

Last year, at the Association of the U.S. Army’s conference in Washington, D.C., Boeing officials unveiled their own tiltrotor drone wingman concept to support the service’s helicopter fleet. The company used lessons from its MQ-28 Ghost Bat aircraft to design the concept.

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