South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration said that it will deploy at least one anti-air laser weapons system called “Block-I” by the end of this year and more in coming years.

An agency statement said the “Block-I” system is capable of launching precision attacks on small incoming drones and multi-copters. It said the system, developed by local company Hanwha Aerospace, costs just 2,000 won (about $1.50) per shot.

“We face North Korea on our doorstep and its drones pose present threats to us, so that's why we've been aiming to build and deploy laser weapons soon to cope with them,” an agency official said, requesting anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to media on the issue.

He said that other countries like the United States and Israel are ahead of South Korea in laser weapons technology, but their primary focus has been on higher-powered laser guns that can shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. South Korea also hopes to develop such anti-missile laser weapons, which its defense procurement agency called “a game changer” in future combat environments.

The “Block-I” system is meant to hit circuit boards and other equipment in enemy drones to make them malfunction and crash on the ground. Tests of the weapons system in 2022-2023 were successful and proved its credibility, the official said.

Some experts questioned the technology.

Lee Illwoo, an expert with the Korea Defense Network in South Korea, doubts how effectively South Korea can use its laser weapons since its anti-air radar systems aren't advanced enough to detect North Korean drones well. He said the range of a laser weapon is relatively short, so high-power microwave weapons would be better when enemy drones are flown in large numbers simultaneously.

Jung Chang Wook, head of the Korea Defense Study Forum think tank in Seoul, said South Korea is likely about five years away from acquiring a functioning laser weapon that can shoot down the drones used by North Korea.

North Korea has periodically flown drones across its heavily fortified border with South Korea for several years, in what observers have called tests of South Korean readiness. In December 2022, South Korea accused the North of sending drones across the border for the first time in five years. South Korea fired warning shots and launched fighter jets and helicopters but failed to shoot down any of the drones.

In a key political meeting in December 2023, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to introduce various types of unmanned combat equipment such as attack drones for 2024. Foreign experts say Kim likely regards drones as a cheap yet effective method to trigger security jitters and an internal divide in South Korea.

Animosities between the two Koreas, split along the world’s most heavily fortified border, have deepened in recent months, with North Korea flying trash-carrying balloons toward South Korea in response to South Korean activists floating political leaflets via their own balloons.

The new capabilities will “have significantly longer range than current land-based fires in Europe. Exercising these advanced capabilities will demonstrate the United States’ commitment to NATO and its contributions to European integrated deterrence,” the joint statement reads.

The long-range fires capabilities will include the SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles and “developmental hypersonic weapons,” the statement details.

The capabilities will be resident in the U.S. Army’s Multidomain Task Force already headquartered in Germany.

The announcement lines up with the Army’s plans to fill out its five MDTF units worldwide. Defense News first reported in April that the MDTF in Europe would be fully established in fiscal 2026 with the addition of a Long-Range Fires Battalion, or LRFB, in support of the European theater.

The Army stood up the 2nd MDTF in Europe in 2021. It has two other established MDTF units in the Indo-Pacific theater with plans to build out two more for a total of five MDTFs. Three will be focused on Pacific operations, one in Europe and one will be based in the U.S. at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, and will be capable of rapid deployment where it is needed.

The units are designed to operate across all domains — land, air, sea, space and cyberspace — and are equipped with the Army’s growing capabilities, including long-range precision fires.

The Army’s plan is to complete all MDTF units by FY28, according to a document detailing the Army’s most recent round of force structure analysis obtained by Defense News earlier this year.

Long-Range Hypersonic batteries

The service will consolidate Mid-Range Capability and Long-Range Hypersonic batteries under a LRFB headquarters over the next five years. Long-Range Precision Fires units will also include the service’s Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM, the Army Tactical Missile System replacement, which can be fired from a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launcher.

The 1st MDTF, based out of Joint Base Lewis McChord in Washington State, has already deployed its Mid-Range Capability launcher to the Philippines earlier this year as part of a bilateral military exercise with the country, marking the first time the newly fielded system has been exercised outside of the U.S.

The MRC fits in the Army’s fires portfolio between its PrSM, designed to hit targets over 499 kilometers away, and its ground-launched hypersonic missiles. The Army’s 3rd MDTF recently fired the newly fielded PrSM from the Pacific island of Palau during a recent ship-sinking exercise.

The service chose Lockheed Martin in November 2020 to build the MRC prototype, landing a nearly $340 million contract to take elements from naval missiles - the SM-6 and Tomahawk – to forge the new weapon. The full MRC system has a battery operations center, four vertical launch systems, prime movers and modified trailers.

The Army’s hypersonic weapon capability has been delayed significantly due to testing troubles.

The service completed its delivery of the first hypersonic weapon capability, minus the all-up rounds, to I Corps’ 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 17th Field Artillery Brigade unit at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state two days ahead of its end-of-FY21 fielding deadline.

The original plan was to train on the equipment and receive those rounds in the fall of 2023, but based on a series of failed or aborted tests, that timeline has slid further down the road.

The Army and Navy, which are jointly developing the common glide body for the weapon had to abort flight tests in March, October and November last year to due “challenges at the range,” according to Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office director.

The Army is gearing up for another flight test this summer. If the test is successful, the Army is aiming to field the first rounds to the first battalion at JBLM in FY25.

An FBI investigation revealed that Teixeira, a 22-year-old who ran a server on Discord called “Thug Shaker Central,” spent much of his life online, talking primarily with other young men via message, video calls and voice chats. He chatted about guns and military gear, threatened his school, made racist and antisemitic jokes, traded conspiracy theories, discussed antigovernment sentiments, and in a bid to show off, shared some of the military’s most closely guarded secrets about the Russia-Ukraine war and the Middle East.

By the time the young airman was arrested in 2023, media scholar PS Berge had been studying Discord and its users for three years and had created an online consortium of other academic researchers who were doing the same. That an intelligence leak occurred on the site, creating a national security incident, didn’t come as a shock to her.

“My response was, ‘Of course. Of course this would happen on Discord,’” Berge said. “Because on a platform like this, you share everything with your people. Everything about your life. So, why not share national security secrets?”

Teixeira pleaded guilty in March to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. His sentencing is scheduled for September, and prosecutors are asking that he serve between 11 and 17 years in prison.

The same month Teixeira agreed to a plea deal, the FBI revealed it had investigated another service member in 2022 for leaking information on Discord.

Former Air Force Staff Sgt. Jason Gray, who served as a cyber analyst at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, admitted to running a Facebook group for followers of Boogaloo, a loosely organized, antigovernment movement that advocates for a second Civil War. Gray was disgruntled with his military career, and he discussed his dissatisfaction with the U.S. government in several Discord channels created for the Boogaloo movement, according to a 2022 FBI affidavit that was unsealed in March.

Gray, who used the account name LazyAirmen#7460, was accused of posting a classified image in a private Discord channel that he “likely obtained” from his access to National Security Agency intelligence, the affidavit states.

Investigators said the image could’ve been shared “in furtherance of the Boogaloo ideology,” but didn’t elaborate on the image’s details. It’s uncertain whether the FBI is still investigating the potential leak. But while searching Gray’s electronic devices for evidence of an intelligence breach, authorities discovered hundreds of images of child pornography. Gray is currently serving five years in federal prison on multiple child pornography charges.

Oversharing is a hallmark of Discord, an online world where members of certain channels talk all day, every day, and even fall asleep together on voice calls, said Megan Squire, a computer scientist and deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

People who study the platform agree that it’s not inherently bad — it’s used by millions of gamers, students, teachers, professionals, hobbyists and members of the military community to communicate and socialize. However, extremists have hijacked a part of the platform to radicalize and recruit others to their causes, said Jakob Guhl, senior manager for policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Following the leak of national security secrets and other high-profile, nefarious uses of the platform in recent years, researchers are grappling with what to think of the platform’s small but headline-grabbing dark side, and many disagree on whether Discord as a company is doing enough to root out bad actors.

“It’s always a bit difficult to strike the right tone between not scaring people off the platform, because the majority of users are completely fine, but also highlighting that there is an actual issue of radicalization,” Guhl said. “It’s not the biggest or most offending platform, but it definitely plays a crucial role among this network.”

‘Not inherently evil’

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, known as START, studied decades of violent extremist attacks and found a military background to be the most commonly shared characteristic among those who committed or plotted mass casualty attacks from 1990 through 2022, more so than criminal histories or mental health problems.

Researchers from START said the study revealed why extremist groups tend to focus recruitment efforts toward people with military service records: Even a small number of them can have an outsized impact inside extremist movements.

While such recruitment occurs on Discord, Guhl, Berge and Squire agreed that the mere presence of service members and veterans on the platform isn’t a cause for concern.

“It’s a popular platform and not inherently evil,” Squire said. “I’d be much more concerned about military folks on 4chan, Telegram, places like that. Nothing good is happening on those platforms, but Discord could be useful.”

In fact, Berge said, it can be a valuable forum for marginalized people to foster a sense of community. On its “about” page, Discord describes its mission as one that helps users find a sense of belonging.

“Discord is about giving people the power to create space to find belonging in their lives,” the company’s mission statement reads. “We want to make it easier for you to talk regularly with the people you care about. We want you to build genuine relationships with your friends and communities close to home or around the world.”

That’s what the veterans group Frost Call is doing on the platform. The nonprofit encourages veterans and service members to stay connected through gaming, one of its founders told Military Times last year. As of June, it boasted 390 members.

“When we founded Frost Call, we built an organization around this idea of bringing veterans together, helping to improve camaraderie that’s missing from military service,” Marine Corps veteran Wesley Sanders said last year. “It serves an enormous mental health need, but also ... an existential need for a lot of veterans.”

Moreover, when new users join Discord, extremist elements of the platform are not easily visible.

Discord is made up of millions of servers centered on various topics. Users can join up to 100 servers, and each server has numerous text, voice and video channels. When a new user creates an account and searches servers to join, the platform will suggest “its most popular, most successful, public-facing communities,” rather than any disquieting, invite-only communities, Berge said.

“If you are a standard user, and if you’re signing in to Discord for your general interests — maybe you’re looking for fellow students or fellow veterans — 90% of the time, you’re not going to accidentally stumble upon an extremist group,” she said. “They actually go through a lot of effort to make these spaces insulated, to make them difficult to find.”

When using Disboard, a third-party search platform for Discord servers, prompts such as “Nazi” or “white supremacist” won’t elicit results like they used to, Berge said. In a 2021 study, she found thousands of Discord servers that marketed themselves on Disboard as hateful and Nazi-affiliated spaces.

“You used to be able to search for those terms and find communities. It was horrifying,” Berge said. “Those servers still exist, but they’ve changed the ways they’re identified, and in some cases, we know that high-profile, toxic communities have been shut down.”

Extremists find a foothold

Founders Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy created Discord in 2015 as a way to allow friends around the world to communicate while playing video games online. Its popularity exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic, when lockdowns went into effect and many people became more isolated than ever before.

Just two years after it launched, Discord gained notoriety as the platform of choice for facilitators of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Organizers, including some veterans, used Discord to share propaganda and coordinate the protest, which turned deadly. James Fields was convicted of killing Heather Heyer when he drove his car into a group of counterprotesters. Fields had joined the Army in 2015 but was separated quickly because of a cited lack of motivation and failure to train.

In 2022, Discord made headlines again after a mass shooting at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, where seven people were killed and dozens more injured. The suspected shooter ran his own Discord server called “SS,” where he complained about “commies,” short for “communists,” according to posts archived by the nonprofit website Unicorn Riot.

That same year, an 18-year-old white gunman killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The gunman, Payton Gendron, spent months writing plans for the attack in a diary he kept on a private Discord server, visible only to him. About 30 minutes before the attack, Gendron sent out invitations for others to view the diary, and 15 people accessed it, according to Discord.

The platform again faced scrutiny following Teixeira’s leak of national security secrets.

“It’s periodic. Every couple of years, it seems like there’s something,” Squire said. “There are other platforms that are worse, but Discord keeps coming up over and over again.”

Research institutions such as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that Discord serves as a hub for socializing and community-building across far-right groups, including Catholic extremists, the white supremacist Atomwaffen Division and the antigovernment Boogaloo movement.

Extremist groups value the platform’s layers of privacy and anonymity, as well as its chat and video functions and collaborative nature, Guhl said. Berge described it as a walled garden, or an online environment where user access to content can be controlled. Servers come with the capability to assign hierarchy to different members and allow some members to access information that others can’t, the researchers said.

“In, say, a Twitter direct-messaging thread or Facebook DM, you don’t really have levels and hierarchies,” Squire said. “Discord really allows you to have more fine-grained ranking structures.”

Another reason for the prevalence of extremists on the platform stems from its roots in gaming, Guhl surmised.

Rachel Kowert, a globally recognized researcher on gaming and mental health, has spent five years researching extremism in video game communities. Though gaming itself is a powerful tool for connection and growth, extreme and hateful ideologies are now commonplace in those spaces, Kowert said.

“If you’re spending a lot of time in the social or gaming spaces where misogyny is commonplace, that can in turn start to internalize in the way you see the world and interact in it,” Kowert said.

Fighting a dark legacy

The existence of far-right groups on Discord — and the high-profile instances of extremism on the platform in the past several years — has spawned its “extremist legacy,” one from which it’s now trying hard to distance itself, said Berge.

Discord said it removed more than 2,000 far-right-affiliated servers following the “Unite the Right” rally. After the Buffalo killings, it removed Gendron’s server and worked to prevent the spread of content related to the attack, the company said. At that point, Discord agreed it “must do more to remove hate and violent extremism.”

“We created Discord to be a place for people to find belonging, and hate and violence are in direct opposition to our mission,” the company said in a statement at the time. “We take our commitment to these principles seriously and will continue to invest in and deploy resources.”

Earlier this year, the company reported that 15% of its staff works on its user safety team, which cracks down on harassment, hateful conduct, inappropriate contact, violent and abusive imagery, violent extremism, misinformation, spam, fraud, scams and other illegal behavior.

During the investigations into Teixeira and Jason Gray, Discord officials immediately cooperated with law enforcement, a company spokesperson told Military Times. And in recent months, Discord has leaned on machine-learning technology to moderate content.

“We expressly prohibit using Discord for illegal activity, which includes the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents,” the spokesperson said.

The company publishes reports each quarter showing actions taken against various accounts and servers. The latest report, published in January, says Discord disabled 6,109 accounts and removed 627 servers that espoused violent extremism during the last few months of 2023.

Squire and Guhl agreed that Discord is “pretty good” at responding to extremist content. Guhl credited the company for including extremism and hate speech in its community guidelines, as well as for deleting servers on a regular basis that breach its terms of service. Discord also created a channel where Squire could flag questionable content on the platform, and the company has been receptive to the concerns she’s raised, she said.

“I credit where credit is due, and I have to give them credit for that,” Squire said. “I think it’s taken seriously, and there are other platforms that I could not say that about.”

Extremists are ‘absolutely still there’

Berge applauded Discord for ramping up the technology behind its moderation and for introducing IP bans, which restrict a device from accessing the platform, rather than just an account. Still, she sees room for improvement.

Discord should place more emphasis on educating moderators and users about how to recognize when someone is being radicalized and pulled into an extremist space, Berge said. She also criticized the platform for disbanding a program in 2023 that included hundreds of volunteer moderators.

“It wasn’t Discord’s automated flagging systems that caught national security secrets being leaked by Jack Teixeira. It took other users and community moderators digging into it and someone finally reporting it,” Berge said. “Elevating people and giving them tools to moderate is absolutely central to protecting the platform, and that’s one area where I think they’re taking a step back.”

Berge is still researching communities on Discord, four years after she first uncovered a network of white supremacists using the platform as a recruitment ground. Despite its community guidelines and efforts to remove offending servers and accounts, Discord still serves as a meeting place for pockets of extremism.

“They’re harder to find, but they are absolutely still here. We’re still finding them,” Berge said. “It is still one of the most popular spaces for people to congregate, share and be in community with each other, for better or for worse.”

Discord remains the “platform of choice” for some hate groups, noted Squire, who described the company’s fight against extremists as playing whack-a-mole: As soon as one is removed, another pops up. A lack of institutional knowledge among far-right extremist groups is partly to blame, she said.

“Everybody’s always fresh, and they don’t have any structure for teaching one another and learning from mistakes of the past,” Squire said. “That’s convenient for us, because as we keep amassing knowledge, they make the mistake of reusing the technology that’s most convenient, rather than being strategic.”

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

NASA test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched aboard Boeing’s new Starliner capsule early last month, the first people to ride it. Leaks and thruster failures almost derailed their arrival at the International Space Station, and has kept them there much longer than planned.

In their first news conference from orbit, they said they expect to return once thruster testing is complete here on Earth. They said they’re not complaining about getting extra time in orbit, and are enjoying helping the station crew.

“I have a real good feeling in my heart that the spacecraft will bring us home, no problem," Williams told reporters.

The two rocketed into orbit on June 5 on the test flight, which was originally supposed to last eight days.

NASA ordered up the Starliner and SpaceX Dragon capsules a decade ago for astronaut flights to and from the space station, paying each company billions of dollars. SpaceX's first taxi flight with astronauts was in 2020. Boeing's first crew flight was repeatedly delayed because of software and other issues.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s fiscal 2025 defense policy bill, released July 8, includes a provision that would require DIU to craft a roadmap for how it plans to expand into more regions of the U.S.

“The committee recognizes the importance of DIU’s mission to strengthen national security by accelerating the adoption of commercial technology,” the panel said in a report accompanying the measure, “The committee believes DIU should find ways to expand its geographic footprint to achieve nationwide coverage for DIU activities, particularly to geographic areas that are not major technology and innovation hubs.”

The bill directs DIU to deepen its relationships with Defense Department laboratories, university affiliated research centers and other entities across the country that are tapped into local innovation ecosystem.

The Pentagon established DIU in 2015 to help the department take advantage of technology being developed by Silicon Valley firms. Since then, the organization has grown significantly in influence and resources and has partnered with a range of non-traditional companies — from West Coast startups to smaller defense firms located around the country.

Companies based in California have received the most contracts since DIU’s inception — 159 awards worth $635 million according to its most recent annual report released in May. However, the organization has made a concerted effort to increase its outreach throughout the U.S. As of fiscal 2023, it had awarded contracts to firms in 35 states.

DIU is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and has offices in Boston, Austin, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. This year, through its National Security Innovation Network, the organization opened five new onramp hubs in Kansas, Ohio, Arizona, Hawaii and Washington.

The hubs provide a chance for local universities and businesses to learn how to work with DOD and get access government funding. They also serve as an entry point for the into innovation networks it may not otherwise be aware of.

“American ingenuity is critical to building our nation’s enduring advantage,” DIU Director Doug Beck said of the hubs when they were announced in 2023. “These spaces will serve startups, academia, industry and other local talent and technology in order to leverage the innovation capability across the entire country, connecting them directly to DOD needs and strengthening the defense industrial base.”

The all-new Ariane 6 blasted off from French Guiana for a validation flight loaded with scientific experiments and testing equipment. The next flight planned for December will carry CSO-3, a French military-surveillance satellite that had originally been scheduled for launch in 2021.

“This first successful launch of Ariane 6 finally gives Europe back its capacity to access space,” Philippe Baptiste, the head of French space agency CNES, said in a statement.

The first launch of Ariane 6, originally planned for 2020, had been pushed back by technical issues as well as the Covid-19 pandemic. Russia broke off space cooperation in 2022 after its invasion of Ukraine, meaning Europe could no longer use the Soyuz launchers as a stop-gap measure, and leaving the continent reliant on commercial providers including SpaceX for heavy space lift.

The most urgent upcoming military missions for Ariane 6 are observation satellites including CSO-3, according to Paul Wohrer, a research fellow specialized in space issues at the French Institute of International Relations, or IFRI. France also still has to launch the Yoda agile satellite demonstrator, after the small patroller satellite was held up by a lack of launch slots.

The lack of autonomous access to space was “becoming dangerous,” leaving Europe unable to launch satellites that are “extremely sensitive and extremely useful for our armed forces,” according to Wohrer, and pushing back future programs such as the French IRIS military-observation satellites.

European armies “need this type of space capability, particularly at a time when war is on Europe’s doorstep,” Wohrer said. “The war in Ukraine clearly demonstrated the importance of space. We seem to be entering a period in which the ability to access space will become increasingly strategic.”

While military satellites made up a limited share of Ariane 5 launches, the retired rocket’s final mission in July 2023 lifted the French Syracuse 4B military communications satellite into orbit, as well as Germany’s Heinrich-Hertz-Satellit with a dual civilian-military communications payload.

Over a 27-year career, Ariane 5 placed the military communications systems for the major western European states in orbit: Skynet 5 for the U.K., Syracuse 3 and 4 for France, Sicral-2 for Italy, Secomsat and SpainSat for Spain and Satcom BW for Germany’s Bundeswehr.

The new rocket has an order book for 30 launches, Caroline Arnoux, head of the Ariane 6 program at Arianespace, said in a press briefing on June 25. After two launches planned for this year, the pace will increase to six in 2025, eight the following year and ten in 2027. About a third of the missions are for government customers, including the military.

The primary goal of Ariane 6 is to serve European institutional missions and ensure they can reach space, which is the core reason for public funding of the launcher, according to Lucia Linares, head of space transportation strategy and institutional launches at the European Space Agency. The new rocket will the “Europe’s workhorse for guaranteed access to space,” Linares said at the June 25 briefing.

An Ariane 6 launch may initially be in the order of tens of millions of dollars more expensive than a launch by SpaceX of the reusable Falcon 9, according to Wohrer. That probably won’t hold back European armed forces from favoring the domestically-produced rocket, he said.

“It’s unlikely that the difference in costs will be enough for the military not to buy European launchers,” Wohrer said. “At what point does it become an unbearable factor? It’s a bit like the cost of security, the cost of ensuring strategic autonomy in terms of access to space.”

ESA is working on a reusable rocket engine called Prometheus, with ArianeGroup the lead contractor, with the goal of making a “very low-cost” engine that can be built at one-tenth of the cost of the Vulcain 2 that powered the Ariane 5.

Launching military or dual-use satellites on a foreign rocket risks revealing secrets, and it puts Europe at the mercy of foreign competitors’ prices, as was the case with the EU paying SpaceX a premium for security measures around the launch of Galileo navigation satellites, according to Wohrer. The lack of autonomous launch capacity “is something quite dangerous, quite risky,” he said.

European countries will have to think about bolstering their capabilities to gather intelligence from space if they want to be less reliant on the United States, according to Wohrer. The European parliament has raised concerns about depending on the U.S. in terms of space security, saying this could contradict the EU’s desire to achieve strategic autonomy.

“If this is the kind of development we’re heading for, access to space will be absolutely essential,” Wohrer said. “I don’t think you can be a major military power today without access to space. Frankly, space has become extremely useful for waging war and conducting operations.”

Japan’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency – ATLA for short – published the video on its official YouTube page on July 4. In an accompanying explanation, it said it had “conducted a pre-launch test of a Hyper-Velocity Gliding Projectile for island defense” in California on March 23.

Examining the video footage, Timothy Wright, research associate in the Defence and Military Analysis Programme of the U.K.-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), offered this explanation to Defense News:

“Japan conducted two preliminary tests of its so-called HVGP in March and April, 2024 respectively. The missile’s manufacturer said the purpose of the test was to validate ‘measurement’ units, possibly meaning the missile’s inertial navigation system. ATLA did not say whether the warhead separated from the booster during either test.”

Once fielded, the HVGP, made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, will be launched from a truck using a booster, after which the warhead separates and glides towards its target.

Wright noted, “Japan is developing the HVGP for both anti-ship and land attack missions to intercept and eliminate invading forces against Japan at a distance and at an early stage.”

ATLA has previously released computer animations of an HVGP attacking an enemy aircraft carrier.

When development commenced in fiscal 2015, the HVGP was slated to enter service in 2029. However, Japan’s perceived deterioration of its security environment – prompted primarily by China and North Korea – caused defense leaders to accelerate the missile’s development by three years.

The high-supersonic Block I version of the HVGP, with an estimated maximum range of 310 miles (500km), is now expected to be fielded by the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF) in 2026.

As part of its incremental development, a hypersonic Block 2 version, with perhaps an 1,864-mile (3,000km) range, will be fielded in around FY2030.

“Japan’s current missile capabilities reflect the restrictions of its post-1945 defense posture, but those limitations will soon change substantially following Tokyo’s groundbreaking decision in 2023 for it to procure so-called ‘counterstrike’ capabilities,” Wright said.

The IISS researcher said Tokyo is developing “at least seven new types of air-, sea- and ground-launched missiles for land and maritime roles, and buying three different missile designs from its U.S. ally”.

One of those American missiles is the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM). Also on July 4, ATLA confirmed it had signed an agreement to acquire the Lockheed Martin-made weapon. The U.S. had approved a $104 million Foreign Military Sale of 50 AGM-158B/B-2 JASSMs with extended range last August.

These, plus the HVGP, will strengthen Japan’s “stand-off defense capabilities in order to quickly and remotely intercept and eliminate invading forces against our country,” ATLA said.

Japanese ground forces are expected to eventually field two HVGP battalions.

“Once these systems enter service in large numbers, Japan will possess one of the most significant long-range strike capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region,” said Wright.

The journalists reported seeing nothing wrong on the flight deck, which was precisely the point of Hill’s invitation. Ike and its crew remained on station, with no hole in the deck.

Two weeks earlier, a spokesman for Yemen’s Houthi rebel movement announced that the rebels had struck the Eisenhower with a barrage of missiles to punish the United States for its support of Israel in its war against Hamas.

On X (formerly Twitter), Houthi supporters shared a video allegedly showing a large crater at the forward end of the Eisenhower’s flight deck. Other accounts posted a different image of a fiery blast aboard the ship.

The purported evidence of a strike spread quickly across Chinese and Russian social media platforms, thanks in part to the efforts of Russian sites with a reputation in the West for spreading disinformation.

Despite false Houthi claims, the Ike aircraft carrier fights on

The Houthis’ online conjuring of a successful attack on Ike that never happened complements their months-long campaign to disrupt commercial shipping in the Red Sea that has sunk commercial vessels and injured civilian mariners.

And while the U.S. military and allies regularly hit back with airstrikes against Houthi missile launchers and other assets in Yemen, the Pentagon is less prepared to defend against the online lies and disinformation that the Houthis are spreading.

In the instance of the false Ike attack, Capt. Hill took matters into his own hands, leveraging his 86,000 followers on X. The day after the false claims emerged, Hill began to post videos and still images showing normal operations aboard his ship, including a plane landing on the flight deck and trays of muffins and cinnamon buns fresh from the oven in the ship’s bakery.

I infiltrated the bake shop because I smelled something interesting from way down the p-way. pic.twitter.com/8BkWFdI5LU

— Chowdah Hill (@ChowdahHill) May 31, 2024

Meanwhile, independent analysts exposed how the Houthis generated their false evidence of a missile strike on the Eisenhower.

An Israeli analyst demonstrated that the supposed photograph of a crater on the carrier’s flight deck consisted of a stock image of a hole superimposed on an overhead shot of the Eisenhower taken from satellite imagery dated almost a year before the alleged strike.

This is a photoshopped satellite image of the USS Eisenhower docked at Pier 12 at the Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, taken on April 10th, 2023.
Additionally, here is the Shutterstock image used for the "impact". https://t.co/CWagV062Xl pic.twitter.com/eqYsb04WVM

— Tal Hagin (@talhagin) June 4, 2024

The fictional attack on Ike did not come as a surprise to anyone tracking Houthi disinformation efforts. In an ironic example from March, a Telegram channel and a pro-Houthi website shared an AI-generated image of a burning vessel they identified as the Pinocchio, an actual commercial ship the Houthis had targeted but missed.

The Houthis’ supporters had pulled their supposed evidence from a website that shared free stock images. However, no one from the Pentagon officially debunked this image as the Israeli analyst did for the fake photos of Ike.

In addition to these forgeries, pro-Houthi accounts have posted actual images of commercial vessels in flames, claiming the destruction resulted from Houthi attacks.

Yet in those cases, one image showed a burning ship on the Black Sea while another showed events that took place off the coast of Sri Lanka. Pro-Houthi posters even attempted to portray a blurry photo of a distant volcano as a successful strike on an Israeli ship.

This deluge of deceptively labeled images spread was also met with crickets from the Pentagon.

The U.S. military appears to grasp the need to counter disinformation spread by the Houthis and other regional adversaries. In February, the Joint Maritime Information Center, or JMIC, launched its efforts to provide accurate information to shipping companies about Houthi strikes, both real and imagined.

The JMIC operates under the umbrella of the Combined Maritime Forces – a naval partnership of 44 nations under the command of the top U.S. admiral in the region, who also serves as commander of U.S. 5th Fleet.

This is a start, but the Navy has yet to show that it can debunk false information as quickly as the Houthis post it online.

It is fortunate that an Israeli civilian had the skill and commitment necessary to expose the alleged crater aboard the Eisenhower as a work of photoshopping. He posted his conclusions on X four days after the Houthis publicized the supposed attack. Ideally, the Navy itself should be prepared to debunk such propaganda as soon as it appears.

Standing up this kind of capability should be a priority for the JMIC, which could include such efforts in its existing weekly updates.

It is important to act now before the Houthis’ disinformation apparatus becomes more sophisticated. Already, one of its supporters’ fake images of a burning ship garnered 850,000 views on X.

Moreover, the challenge is not limited to the Red Sea or the Middle East. Military forces in every command should have public affairs and open-source intelligence personnel working together to debunk false and exaggerated claims of enemy success on the battlefield.

Max Lesser is senior analyst on emerging threats at The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a non-profit, non-partisan think tank.

Outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced the contract Tuesday at a Chamber of Commerce industry day focused on increasing NATO member countries' defense manufacturing capabilities to deter future attacks.

“There is no way to provide strong defense without a strong defense industry," Stoltenberg said.

The Stinger is a portable surface-to-air defense system that can be carried and fired by troops or mounted onto a vehicle and used as short-range defense against aircraft.

The Raytheon-produced system was one of the first weapons the U.S. shipped to Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 invasion. It is now among hundreds of types of systems, and tens of millions of rounds of ammunition, artillery and missiles, that countries have pulled from their stockpiles to help Ukraine. But the rapid push over the past two years exposed that defense firms both in the U.S. and in Europe were not set to produce at the levels needed in a major conventional war.

The NATO summit is also occurring against a backdrop of uncertainty: U.S. political divisions delayed weapons for Ukraine for months and the upcoming presidential election is raising concern that U.S. backing — with weapons and troops — in case of threats against member countries may not always be guaranteed.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has boasted during campaign speeches that he'd encourage Russia to do as it wished with NATO members that do not meet their commitment to spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.

In some cases, defense production lines were stagnant at the time of the 2022 invasion and are only now getting production numbers up. The buildup has been dependent on getting new, longer-term contracts signed to support more capital investment in the needed infrastructure.

“This is not about shifts or a bottleneck. It’s building new factories,” said Morten Brandtzaeg, the chief executive officer of Nammo, a Norway-based ammunition firm.

The war also spurred those NATO members to increase the amount they spend on defense.

Out of 32 NATO members, 23 are expected to meet the 2% commitment this year, up from just six before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That's seen as still not enough, as Russia has leveraged the sheer size of its workforce to rapidly replace weapons lost in the war.

“If you want to fight a war for a long time, you need to have an industry behind you, that has the capacity for a long time,” Brandtzaeg said.

Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur told the Chamber of Commerce that Russia is now spending an estimated 7% to 9% of its GDP on defense. Estonia is spending more than 3% of its GDP on defense, but needs to do more to refill its stockpiles, Pevkur said.

Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, who also serves as a deputy prime minister, said his country will commit at least 4% of its GDP to defense this year.

The war in Ukraine “exposed major weaknesses of Poland, of region and of the world at large,” Kosiniak-Kamysz said.

Since the invasion, the U.S. has provided more than $53.6 billion in weapons and security assistance to Ukraine. This support, at a time when the U.S. also is sending weapons to Israel and Taiwan, has strained the U.S. stockpile. The rest of the NATO members and other international partners have provided about $50 billion altogether in weapons and security assistance, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, an independent research organization based in Germany.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan told Tuesday's gathering that for the first time ever, the NATO countries will each pledge to make plans to strengthen their own industrial defense capacity. He said this would help the alliance “prioritize production of the most vital defense equipment we would need in the event of a conflict."

The 32 members have widely varying defense industry sizes and capabilities, so each country's plan could vary widely, from partnering with industry to partnering with other countries.

___

Cook reported from Brussels.

Speaking in Alaska at the onset of NATO’s large-scale Arctic Defender drills, Boris Pistorius announced that Germany would propose a joint procurement scheme at the alliance’s summit this week in Washington, D.C.

The summit, marking the alliance’s 75-year anniversary, is expected be dominated by talk about countering the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine.

The German defense minister said he expected the summit to result in the formal announcement of a command in the German city of Wiesbaden to coordinate the provision of military material and training to the Ukrainian armed forces. Germany will be “represented at a high level in the leadership,” he said Monday.

The new command, the name of which is still being debated, will have a staff of 700 people, the U.S. State Department has announced. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stressed that “these efforts do not make NATO party to the conflict.”

Russian state media and government officials have repeatedly said they consider the war in Ukraine a conflict between their country and NATO as a whole and the U.S. specifically due to their crucial support of Kyiv.

Pistorius also announced that Germany will buy “tens of thousands of rounds” of armaments this year through the Czech munitions initiative. He pledged to continue the military support of Ukraine more broadly, noting that the third German-donated patriot system had recently arrived in the eastern European country and was already operationally deployed.

In Washington, Germany will present a plan for NATO to buy drones “from German industry” on behalf of the Ukrainian armed forces, Pistorius said. This proposal would serve as “a foundation for our partners for the joint procurement of drones of all kinds,” he said while speaking to the press in Fairbanks.

According to the German government, the country has already provided 537 surveillance drones to Ukraine, mostly VECTOR and RQ-35 HEIDRUN models. The proposed initiative would encourage NATO to jointly procure these and other German-made drones on Kyiv’s behalf.

As of the end of April, Germany had provided a total of €10.2 billion ($11.03 billion) in military goods to Ukraine since the onset of the invasion, putting it second only to the U.S. on the list of Kyiv’s most dedicated supporters. In 2024 alone, the government in Berlin has already authorized the export of €4.88 billion in armaments to Ukraine, contributing to record military export volumes.

Airmen and guardians will soon be able to take advantage of the Hypori Halo Workspace Anywhere program that grants access to government apps, email, NIPRNet, sensitive data, and CAC-enabled websites via personal devices, including a phone or tablet, whether they’re in the office or not.

A spokesperson for Hypori did not give an exact date for enrollment, but told C4ISRNET it’s still on track to begin this summer.

“The Air Force and Space Force are actually already using our platform,” said Jared Shepard, CEO and president of Hypori, at the TechNet Cyber conference presented by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International late last month in Baltimore. “Now, they’re going to scale.”

Capitalizing on the need for integrated communications and the pandemic-fueled remote work environment, the Army, including its Reserve and Guard components, already began transitioning service members toward Halo, which as of June 11 became the only way Army.mil users can access Army 365 services from a personal device. Shepard said at the conference that 50,000 Army enrollees are using the service since that BYOD effort began as a pilot in 2022. Hypori was also awarded a contract by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on June 6 to give a third of its workforce remote access to secure networks.

“[BYOD] is a top priority for us, and it is a game changer because when our soldiers and airmen are not at the armory, they have to be connected in a secure way,” said Ken McNeill, chief information officer of the National Guard Bureau, in a statement February.

Reservists and part-time members of the services especially have limited access to base networks, so giving them the flexibility to complete work from wherever they are will be a boon to the organization, leaders have said.

“In our dynamic environment, the Department of the Air Force is committed to providing user-friendly enterprise solutions which empower the force to work securely in a wide range of operational contexts,” said said Air Force Chief Information Officer Venice Goodwine in a statement in March.

The technology also eliminates the need to carry two devices while ensuring their government and personal data are kept separate to minimize liability. The idea of “no data at rest” means there is no risk of compromise if the enrolled devices are stolen or lost, and it ensures that personal information stored on that device is not accessible by the government.

The technology, which also vets users, is also compliant with White House orders that ban TikTok on government devices due to concerns that the social media platform’s Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance, would get access to sensitive data.

“Industry has a responsibility that if it’s doing work for the Department of Defense, that it protects that data,” Shepard said.

Aircraft are traditionally painted using a masking technique, requiring painters to use tape, film and paper to outline certain markings for a particular aircraft.

The new system being tested projects insignia and markings directly on the aircraft, providing the exact placement of objects that need painting without all the masking.

So far, the laser projection system is dramatically easier to use than the old stenciling method, according to Steven Lofy, senior materials engineer for the center’s corrosion and wear team.

“It takes an extensive amount of time and labor to mask aircraft for the application of major markings and insignia during the final finish process,” Lofy said in a statement. “It’s a demanding process based on old, paper drawings that can be difficult to read, making it challenging for our artisans to mask the exact areas on each aircraft consistently.”

Navy assembles F-35B clutch for first time

It’s also saving time, he said.

“With the laser projection system, we can simply come in, turn on the projectors and actually project where each marking should be on the aircraft,” Lofy said. “All we have to do from there is line each stencil up, mask and paint.”

The readiness center first utilized the system in January on a Marine Corps MV-22B Osprey for the aircraft’s signature white, horizontal stripes — resulting in an 85 percent decrease in labor hours. While the process previously took roughly 16 hours, the projector brought that number down to two.

The center has used the laser projection system to paint four aircraft so far and plans are underway to use the system more broadly by uploading 2D stencils to the projection system’s software, according to the Navy.

Based out of Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina, the center provides maintenance and repairs for Marine Corps aircraft — including the F-35B Lightning II. It is one of the Navy’s eight fleet readiness centers.

Notably the country aims to put Sfera communications satellites into orbit — an analogue of the American-made Starlink and the British OneWeb constellations. Roscosmos previously sought to launch more than 600 systems into space as part of this project, but budget cuts prevented this. Now the agency is eyeing 360 satellites, although Borisov said the goal ought to be at least 1,200.

The government has agreed to approve 180 billion rubles (U.S. $2 billion) for 162 satellites. However, thus far the state has allocated 95 billion rubles, and a strategy meant to further develop the domestic communications sector up to 2035 calls for the launch of six geostationary satellites.

Sergei Prokhorov, who leads the Sfera project, recently said there is money set aside for four of them.

Is this practical?

While Borisov, who spoke July 3, is aiming for the production of at least 250 satellites per year for various purposes, the country currently makes about 15 annually — despite an existing capacity to manufacture about 40 each year.

Roscosmos’ goal is unrealistic, according to Pavel Luzin, a space policy expert at the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank. He noted the satellites will likely serve several functions, including optical observation, communications, meteorology, radar and television service.

“All the serious satellites that Russia has launched into space since 2022 were produced using imported Western electronics purchased no later than the mid-2010s, before the first sanctions,” Luzin told Defense News, referring to economic restrictions placed on Russia following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“It turns out to be a fundamental contradiction: Russia has a big problem with satellite production, but at the same time Russia declares that in just a couple of years it will be able to produce [250] high-quality satellites for various purposes per year and is already mastering the technologies of their conveyor production,” Luzin said. “This simply does not happen.”

Russia can find components on the world market for the production of several satellites, but not enough to produce hundreds, Luzin added. “The heads of companies report that despite the sanctions, the industry is alive, although in fact they may not know where to get components for hundreds of satellites.”

Indeed, Borisov had said “industry is functioning relatively stably” amid the sanctions.

Amid the war, the state has adjusted its satellite production priorities, focusing heavily on dual-use satellites — that is, ones that provide military and civilian services.

Among its priorities are the optical reconnaissance satellite Razdan; a radar satellite for marine reconnaissance for the Pion-NKS constellation; two radar satellites, dubbed Obzor-R and Kondor; and several Glonass communications satellites.

Denis Banchenko, a former employee of Roscosmos, told Defense News that “a significant part of the planned satellites, and most likely all of them, will be used in the interests of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation for intelligence, surveillance, navigation and communications purposes.”

DIU, whose mission is to help the U.S. Department of Defense better leverage commercial technology, worked with two computing firms on the 18-month effort: Rescale, headquartered in San Francisco, and Parallel Works, based out of Chicago.

The companies partnered with DoD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program, which is working to make decision-making tools enabled by supercomputers more accessible across the department — from researchers and acquisition officials to operators in the field.

The military uses supercomputers to quickly process large amounts of data that can be used to inform decisions or simulate complex scenarios. For example, a unit could use high-performance computing to understand how the weather forecast might impact a planned ISR operation. Or an engineer designing lighter body armor for soldiers could use it to research materials.

The Pentagon relies largely on physical computers — which are expensive to buy and maintain — to perform this work. Through the DIU effort, Rescale and Parallel Works demonstrated that they could provide these computing tools on the cloud, which means users don’t have to have access to a physical computer to take advantage of the capability.

“Researchers are [now] able to access cloud resources when appropriate to augment their work at on-premises centers,” Benjamin Parsons, chief technology officer for the High Performance Computing Modernization Program, said in a June 27 statement. “This has given them access to a wider variety of hardware, and the ability to scale resources beyond what is currently possible, all within one secure, easy to use, environment.”

Both firms are poised to receive production contracts later this year to scale their high-computing platforms to more users.

Matt McKee, Rescale’s chief operating officer, told C4ISRNET in a July 3 interview that cloud-based computing platforms have played a key role in the private sectors, which have used these tools to significantly reduce engineering cycle times for new product releases.

Those capabilities, he said, could change the way DoD develops, tests and fields new systems over the next three to five years.

“You’re seeing that type of thing reverberating through the private sector industry — so, how do we make sure that the U.S. government also has that agility,” he said. “We need to be able to incorporate everything new that is available to us and put all those resources to bear.”

Defense electronics manufacturer Hensoldt will provide the additional technology, worth more than €100 million (U.S. $108 million). The company will also integrate the TRML-4D radars into the IRIS-T SLM air defense systems destined for the two customers on behalf of Diehl Defence.

Estonia and Latvia agreed to purchase the German-made weapons in September in a deal worth more than €1 billion. For Latvia, the purchase of €600 million worth of air defense systems was the largest military purchase in the country’s 30 years of independence.

The TRML-4D radar enables the detection and tracking of aerial targets within a 250-kilometer (155-mile) radius and are able to simultaneously follow about 1,500 targets, Hensoldt said in a news release.

The European Sky Shield Initiative, launched by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2022, seeks to strengthen the continent’s air defenses, with a particular aim of countering Russian and Iranian ballistic and cruise missiles.

The initiative now counts 21 participating countries, including neutral non-NATO members Austria and Switzerland. The aim is to maintain systems that can form a continuous barrier across the continent, from the Nordic region to Turkey.

The latest announcement brings the total number of radars Hensoldt is producing as part of the initiative alone to more than 80, the company said.

The German-made IRIS-T is the primary short- and medium-range system used under the scheme. Some participating countries have procured American-made long-range Patriot missiles and the Israeli-made Arrow 3 exo-atmospheric interceptor for longer ranges.

France, which is not part of the initiative, has criticized the approach for relying too heavily on non-European components. Italy and Spain are also not participants. However, the initiative has consistently expanded, notably when Poland dropped its ambiguous stance and announced in April it would join.

The initiative, largely a consequence of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has contributed to dramatically accelerating the pace at which European governments are spending funds on air defense. The Baltic states were among the first European nations to kick off the initiative, signing a joint declaration with 12 others in October 2022.

Kongsberg and MBDA informed Swiss defense-procurement agency armasuisse they won’t submit offers due to time constraints, armasuisse spokeswoman Samanta Leiser told Defense News in an emailed response to questions. The evaluation process will continue as planned, with Diehl remaining as a potential manufacturer, the government office said in a statement on Friday.

Switzerland in April decided to join the Germany-led European Sky Shield Initiative, for which Diehl is a partner for the medium-range component with the Iris-T SLM system. Armasuisse said participation in ESSI doesn’t preempt any decision on what air defense the country is buying, though other partners in the initiative have picked Diehl’s system.

“Armasuisse is awaiting the receipt of the offer from the remaining manufacturing company by mid-July,” the office said. “Apart from the costs, a decision in favor of the remaining candidate in the third quarter of 2024 is dependent on this candidate submitting an offer which meets the requirements of armasuisse.”

Leiser declined to comment on the budget, how many systems Switzerland is seeking or what the delivery timeline will be. The Swiss parliament is currently discussing buying the system within the 2024 defense plan, rather than in 2025 as previously envisioned.

The alpine country in 2016 suspended a previous project to modernize its air-defense system, terminating a contract with Thales for purchasing preparations. Switzerland in 2022 agreed to buy the Patriot system for longer-range, ground-based air defense.

Kongsberg had been asked to provide a quote for the NASAMS system, according to company spokesman Ivar Simensen, who said the company has no further comment. MBDA didn’t respond to requests for comment, while Diehl also didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

Slovenia in January agreed to buy one Iris-T SLM fire unit, consisting of a radar component, a tactical operations center and four missile launchers, through the German federal office for defense procurement. Estonia and Latvia signed framework agreements with Diehl in September to buy the system within the framework of ESSI.

One of Switzerland’s criteria is that the system must already be successfully in use. The country also says inclusion of Swiss industry in the contract is “of particular importance,” with a demand that the entire purchase price is compensated with offsetting transactions in Switzerland. “There is no flexibility” with respect to the offset requirement, according to Leiser.

Iris-T SLM is designed to defend against aircraft, cruise missiles and drones to a range of up to 40 kilometers. Diehl says the performance of Iris-T SLM in Ukraine has been “excellent,” achieving “close to 100% hit rate” even during attack waves with more than 12 targets.

Separately, Kongsberg said it signed a contract with the Norwegian Defence Material Agency to the initial development phase of the German-Norwegian supersonic strike missile, or 3SM, set to be deployed on naval vessels from 2035. The contract value for the first development phase is up to 1.5 billion kroner (U.S. $131 million), the company said in a statement on Friday.

Kongsberg, Diehl Defence and MBDA Deutschland agreed in May to set up a partnership for joint development of the new missile.

MDA announced the successful flight of its first Hypersonic Testbed, HTB-1, June 14, which took off from Wallops Island in Virginia. Not only did it provide a high-speed test platform for the agency, but it allowed its two missile tracking satellites — launched in February and designed to detect advanced threats — to catch their first tracks of a hypersonic vehicle.

While MDA did not provide details about which company built the system, Kratos confirmed last week that its Erinyes vehicle — named after the Greek goddess of vengeance — flew the mission.

The company developed Erinyes in three years for under $15 million with a mix of internal investment and congressional funding. According to Josh Peterson, senior vice president for space and missile defense systems at Kratos, the company built the system largely in response to concerns within the Defense Department that its existing hypersonic test infrastructure was overtaxed and not well positioned to meet demand.

Now, Erinyes is drawing significant attention from other potential customers within the Defense Department, Peterson and Dave Carter, president of Kratos’ defense and rocket support systems division, told C4ISRNET in a July 2 interview.

“There’s been a lot of interest from numerous parties,” Carter said.

Those possible customers include the Pentagon Test Resource Management Center’s Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed, or MACH-TB. The program relies on vehicles like Rocket Lab’s HASTE and Stratolaunch’s Talon-A to test components and subsystems in a realistic flight environment that mimics the conditions these systems might face as they fly and maneuver at Mach 5 and higher speeds.

Kratos is already involved with MACH-TB as a subcontractor, providing sounding rockets to the program’s prime contractor Leidos. Carter highlighted the vehicle’s affordability — a single Erinyes costs around $5 million, not including the rocket motor that powers it or any other customer-specific requirements — and said he expects it to play a key role in the program moving forward, potentially flying MACH-TB experiments in 2025 or 2026.

In the meantime, the company is eyeing its second flight for MDA, which is slated for later this year.

Beyond Erinyes, Kratos’ hypersonic development work includes a range of services for commercial, DOD and classified national security customers. The company started out using its sounding rocket technology to provide targeting capabilities to MDA and the Naval Surface Warfare Center in support of its Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System.

It has since supported various hypersonic experiments and is now on contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory for its Mayhem program, which is developing a hypersonic ISR and strike platform.

Kratos is also developing a line of rocket motors called Zeus, designed to provide greater thrust and range at a lower cost. The company sees the system as a response to a need within the defense and commercial markets for affordable launch vehicle propulsion.

Zeus will fly this year on an undisclosed mission, Carter said, and will eventually be a propulsion option for Erinyes.

“We think it will provide some additional capabilities for both our target missions and probably even more capability for our Erinyes vehicle,” he said. “It’ll give it the additional horsepower to do more sophisticated things.”

The aircraft, a modified Bombardier business jet outfitted with Northrop Grumman’s Battlefield Airborne Communications Node payload, or BACN, is lesser known than the Air Force’s stalwart fleet of bombers, fighters and cargo jets. Now, with U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, the E-11 has taken on a new behind-the-scenes role supporting the multinational mission to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Georgia base welcomes first ‘BACN’ communications relay plane

Since March, the 430th Expeditionary Electronic Combat Squadron, the only unit in the Air Force to fly the aircraft, has supported more than 30 of the service’s airdrops in Gaza while operating out of an undisclosed location in U.S. Central Command. Pilots with the squadron who spoke with Air Force Times in an interview declined to discuss specific missions, but offered brief insights into their work in the region.

The Air Force has participated in 40 airdrops alongside coalition partners since March. Those missions were paused for more than a month as Israel’s invasion of the city of Rafah began in early May. The U.S. flew its most recent airdrop June 9.

“The BACN mission provides the Air Force, as well as joint and international partners, line-of-sight and beyond-line-of-sight interoperability, and that’s between dissimilar platforms with varying electronic capabilities,” 430th EECS Commander Lt. Col. R. Clayton “Vector” McCart said. “We capture, translate, combine and, ultimately, relay and extend legacy and modern comms and data links.”

That means flagging potential threats to the cargo aircraft ferrying shipments of food, any course corrections or other important details from mission planners and other troops around the area.

In a region as large as CENTCOM, airdrops can be derailed by a number of variables, from weather to other flight safety issues. The BACN aircraft, which carries two pilots, can quickly relay real-time changes coming from the Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar to mission partners on the front lines.

“We can monitor progress in a way that other platforms may not be able to see … as far as locations of the assets, the weather calls, etc. Weather plays a big factor in the airdrops off the coast of Gaza,” Capt. Britton “Rad” Ellington, an E-11A pilot who previously flew the service’s now-retired E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, or JSTARS, aircraft, said.

With a range of more than 6,900 miles and a typical sortie time of around 10 hours, the aircraft can take over where satellite phones fail, and interpret transmissions between the military’s myriad communications systems that can’t otherwise connect. While AFCENT declined to say how many of the service’s seven E-11As are operating in theater, the 430th acts as a data lilypad for more than 1,000 hours every two weeks.

“We’re just not relegated to an airdrop. For instance, we could do that as a part of a larger expectation from CENTCOM leadership, and just move around the battlespace. … We’re not really tethered to any one location,” McCart said.

The E-11A is in the process of establishing its new home at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, within the 18th Airborne Command and Control Squadron. It’s one of four missions replacing JSTARS planes at Robins over the next several years; the squadron is expected to become fully operational by 2027.

The 430th EECS, which deploys out of the Middle East, and doubles as a training unit, will shift its training mission to Robins.

“Every sortie is a training sortie, in the sense that we learn every day that we fly,” McCart said.

Published recently, the “Vision for the IC Information Environment: An Information Technology Roadmap” articulates the pressing need for transformation within the IC, emphasizing how the current strategic environment is vastly different from that of September 2001.

Today, we face adversaries ranging from peer nations to non-state actors, each seeking to challenge our national interests and security. This dynamic environment demands that our information technology infrastructure not only keep pace but also provide a strategic advantage.

The roadmap aims high and purposefully so. It outlines five key focus areas, each designed to fortify, assure, enable, enhance, and accelerate the mission through a comprehensive IT strategy. These areas include:

— Fortify the Mission with a Reliable and Resilient Digital Foundation.

— Assure the Mission with Robust Cybersecurity.

— Enable the Mission with Modern Practices and Partnerships.

— Enhance the Mission with Data-Centricity.

— Accelerate the Mission with Advanced Technologies and Workforce Readiness.

One of the most exciting aspects of this roadmap is Focus Area 4: Enhance the Mission with Data-Centricity. This section highlights the importance of managing and securely using data effectively to expedite mission outcomes and maximize intelligence value. Of particular note, it stresses three main objectives:

Realizing End-to-End Data Management: To achieve data-centricity at scale, the IC must govern and manage data cohesively, at every point of the data lifecycle. This involves comprehensive data management planning, which aligns complex data lifecycle management activities with critical mission architectures. Whether you’re gathering sensor data or video footage in a remote location or extracting insights from that data in an air-gapped facility, such plans will increase the adoption of IC Data Services and applied advanced analytics and AI.

Implementing a Data-Centric Architecture: Valuing data as a strategic tool requires establishing common data standards, models, services, and enterprise digital policies so that everyone is handling mission-critical information in a cohesive way, aligned with the appropriate protection and sharing of each data object. This will facilitate a decentralized data ecosystem, enabling seamless data exchanges and fostering advanced AI/Machine Learning capabilities. Ultimately, this architecture will streamline data sharing and collaboration within the IC and with external partners.

Transitioning Sensitive Data Silos to Data-Centric Enclaves: Sensitive data within the IC is often siloed, making it difficult for analysts to access and utilize information across different enclaves. By transitioning to data-centric enclaves, the IC can break down these barriers, allowing authorized users to discover and access relevant data more efficiently and effectively.

As a whole, this focus area encapsulates the IC’s shift from traditional processes to a data-centric approach. The report details, “Timely, accurate, well-informed insight is key to delivering enhanced mission outcomes. The IC must shift from an organization- and system-centric paradigm to one that is data-centric; preserves organizational equities, authorities, and rights; implements legal/compliance frameworks; and enforces security.”

Centering the data changes everything

Let’s give credit where it’s due; this vision for data-centricity is transformative. Aiming to shift the IC from a paradigm of isolated data silos to an integrated, agile, and efficient data environment, this transition is crucial for enabling analysts to derive actionable insights swiftly and accurately, thereby enhancing the overall intelligence process. By implementing a data-centric architecture, the IC can ensure that data is not just a byproduct of operations, but a core asset that drives decision-making and operational effectiveness.

One of the most critical aspects of this transformation is bringing data-centric security down to the data object level using technologies like the ODNI’s Trusted Data Format and the recently approved Zero Trust Data Format by the CCEB. By doing so, the IC can ensure that data remains secure and can be effectively shared and utilized across various platforms and with international partners and allies. This granular level of security is essential for maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive information while promoting interoperability and collaboration.

The “Vision for the IC Information Environment: An Information Technology Roadmap” provides a robust framework for modernizing the IC’s IT infrastructure. By prioritizing data-centricity specifically, the IC can unlock the full potential of its data assets, enabling more informed decision-making and more effective operations, which will ultimately prove to be critical for maintaining a strategic edge in a data-driven world and ensuring the United States remains protected.

The roadmap’s vision is ambitious, but with commitment and collaboration, it is well within reach. Together, we have the opportunity, talent, and determination to close IT gaps and open new mission horizons, securing our nation’s future.

Shannon Vaughn is general manager of federal at Virtru, a data security company.

The Russian Defense Ministry noted a recent “increased intensity” of U.S. drones over the Black Sea, saying they “conduct intelligence and targeting for precision weapons supplied to the Ukrainian military by Western countries for strikes on Russian facilities.”

“It shows an increased involvement of the U.S. and other NATO countries in the conflict in Ukraine on the side of the Kyiv regime,” the ministry said in a statement.

It noted that “such flights significantly increase the probability of incidents involving Russian military aircraft, which increases the risk of direct confrontation between the alliance and the Russian Federation.”

“NATO members will bear responsibility for that,” it added.

The ministry said that Defense Minister Andrei Belousov has directed the General Staff to “make proposals on measures of operative response to provocations.”

Washington and Moscow have clashed before over U.S. drones in the Black Sea. In a 2023 incident, a Russian fighter jet damaged an American drone there, causing it to crash. A repeat of such a confrontation could further fuel tensions over the war in Ukraine.

On March 14, 2023, a Su-27 fighter jet of the Russian air force intercepted and damaged a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone, causing it to crash into the Black Sea. The incident marked the first direct clash between the Russian and U.S. forces since the Cold War.

The Pentagon and U.S. European Command said after the incident that two Russian Su-27 aircraft dumped fuel on the MQ-9, which was conducting a routine surveillance mission over the Black Sea in international airspace.

The Russian Defense Ministry said then that the U.S. drone was flying near the Russian border and intruded into an area that was declared off-limits by Russian authorities.

Russia has declared broad areas near Crimea off-limits to flights. Ever since Russia's 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea and long before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow has accused U.S. surveillance planes of flying too close to its borders while ignoring the notices issued by Russia.

Friday's Russian statement follows a Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol over the weekend with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles, which killed four and injured about 150, according to Russian authorities.

Russian officials have claimed that the U.S. was directly involved in the attack by providing intelligence and targeting and warned to take retaliatory measures.

Amid a sharp increase in one-way drone attacks on U.S. and allied forces by Iraq, Syria and Houthi rebels, CENTCOM is working with the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI office to identify sensors that can detect adversary systems and be integrated into a command and control framework. Earlier this month, the command’s innovation team solicited proposals from industry for the effort, dubbed Desert Guardian.

Army Maj. Bryan Cercy, an innovation officer at CENTCOM, told C4ISRNET the innovation team will choose sensors this summer to participate in a U.S.-based exercise in October focused on spotting UAS threats. Early next year, it will stage a second exercise — this one at a base in the Middle East — focused on integrating those sensors into a single interface used by operators in the field.

“Our proof of concept is that there’s a world in which all of these different sensors are integrated together, and they provide the user, the operator one common picture of the threats to the base,” Cercy said June 25 during an interview at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Fla. “Maybe we don’t accomplish everything, but we’re inching one step closer to make the operators, on a day-to-day basis, more effective.”

The command’s innovation office regularly runs technology sprints to identify operator challenges and try to find solutions. The upcoming demonstrations are part of a series of sprints the team has been running this year focused on countering UAS threats.

The effort began in March with several fact-finding missions. CENTCOM’s innovation team traveled to the Middle East to observe operators and hear first hand about the challenges they face in conducting their missions.

CENTCOM also leveraged its technology residency program, which temporarily embeds private sector experts within the command to help solve technical challenges. It sent its resident at the time to observe operators tracking UAS threats and better understand their capability needs.

As Rinderer compiled his findings, CENTCOM conducted its own market research to find out what other organizations were doing to meet counter UAS needs and whether there was a gap for the innovation team to focus on.

“Counter UAS is a very broad problem that a lot of organizations across the department are trying to solve right now,” Cercy said. “We owe the due diligence to the warfighter to really see, is there already something out there that might close that gap, even just a little bit.”

It became clear through this work, he said, that while base defense operators have access to many sensors, they lack an integrated picture of the threat.

“You’ve got operators that are operating on different systems that are trying to protect against threats to the base, and sometimes those systems don’t necessarily talk to each other,” he said. “They’re not integrated, and so it’s a lot of swivel chair action that’s happening . . . between the different operators to make sure that they’re all detecting a threat.”

Following the two exercises, if the team identifies a capability it thinks could benefit operators, it will work to find an acquisition pathway within the Defense Department to get that to the field. That could mean drafting a joint urgent operational needs request or feeding findings to the Pentagon’s Joint Counter UAS Office or a program office that might be looking for a similar capability.

Air Force Col. Nate Huston, CENTCOM’s director of innovation and capability integration, said in the same interview that part of the intent behind technology sprints like this is to demonstrate a process for identifying innovative solutions to problems in the field and validating whether there’s a capability that can address it.

“What we want to say is like, ‘Hey, we started at this point, we got these disparate folks together, we showed that this could be integrated,’” he said. “The other part of this is . . . we fully understand some integration will not work exactly right, and we’ll learn from that.”

At the TechNet Cyber conference presented by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International in Baltimore, leaders from the Pentagon discussed capabilities for public, private and hybrid networks. Officials acknowledged there’s a natural appetite for the most exclusive, secure networks in the national security space. And sometimes there is no wireless network infrastructure available in remote warfighting locations far from population centers.

So as the services determine appetite for private networks that offer more control over information sharing, the DoD is guiding them to use open radio access networks, or ORAN, said Juan Ramírez, the director of the 5G Cross-Functional Team at DoD.

“I think what industry wants to hear is there’s actually going to be requirements that come out that ... necessitate an open RAN architecture,” he said at the conference. “So you’ll start to see those come out in the next couple of years, pending budgets.”

New 5G challenge to incentivize open architecture solutions

Certainly, private networks aren’t the only way to go. In fact, sometimes that’s not the best solution, said Lt. Col. Benjamin Pimentel, who leads the Camp Pendleton 5G experiment for Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.

“Think about when we deploy in a theater,” he said. “A lot of countries that we go to or locations that we go to already have roads and bridges, and it’d be silly to then go and build my own private roads and my own private bridges separate and apart from that to get where I need to go. If those roads and bridges meet my transportation requirement, and they’re not going to fall under the weight of a ‘seven ton,’ we’re going to drive over it.”

But, somewhere like the first island chain, for example, may not have adequate coverage to put up sensors for long-range precision fires. In cases like those, he said, it would make more sense for units to bring private capabilities.

Given China’s rising aggression and U.S. efforts to deter it in the Taiwan Strait, what Pimentel described is the type of environment where current threats seem to colocate.

Winning the 5G arms race requires full funding from Congress

Regardless, to ensure there is connectivity wherever the need is, Ramirez said the department is looking at ORANs, which allow multiple vendors to operate as one network and provide more flexibility to scale.

ORAN is something the DoD has been pushing aggressively to explore as it simultaneously journeys toward more standard 5G adoption on military installations and “smart bases.”

Ramirez said the department is hopeful it will get additional support from Congress via future defense spending bills that will backup forthcoming requirements with dollars.

The Pentagon’s 2024 budget requested $143 billion in research, developing and testing of emerging technologies including 5G, but also artificial intelligence. Much of the spending in recent years has been for prototyping, and though the Office of the Secretary of Defense has the lion’s share, Ramirez said his office is offering direction to the services for them to budget for 5G.

“We think that pursuing ideas like [ORAN] advanced by the ORAN Alliance all the way to fully open-source code ... provides the feature velocity the DoD needs and the ability to innovate quickly,” said Pimentel.

Currently, Ukraine has few counters to glide bomb strikes.

As Ukraine gains new Western arms and technologies, it can better address the threat. But the West will also need to show more flexibility in the conditions it sets for Ukraine’s use of advanced weaponry.

Glide bombs are cheap. Russia is firing hundreds a week at Ukrainian targets at and behind the front lines. These bombs are small and difficult to spot on radar. They do not use propulsion or emit a detectable heat signature. Russian aircraft launch glide bombs dozens of miles behind the front lines, in relative sanctuary.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that 3,000 glide bombs hit targets in March. More Patriot air defenses were needed, he said, to stop the bombs from wreaking destruction on infrastructure. The U.S. is sending more Patriots, but interceptors are expensive. The cost-exchange ratio is unfavorable.

The most practical counter to glide bombs is to destroy the launching aircraft — on the ground or in the air. This can be done by employing a mix of tactical missiles, air-to-air capabilities and electronic warfare.

Ukraine is skillfully using tactical missiles and drones against ground targets. In May, long-range (as in 186 miles) U.S.-produced Army Tactical Missile Systems destroyed three advanced combat aircraft in Crimea.

In June, Ukraine fired at least 70 of its own drones against a faraway Russian airfield, possibly destroying three aircraft configured to launch glide bombs.

Under recently relaxed U.S. policy, Ukraine can fire Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, at forces in Russia that are attacking or about to attack Ukraine. But Ukrainians say this applies only to targets 60 or so miles inside Russia. The U.S. may be wise to permit ATACMS to strike distant airfields.

If even longer ranges are needed, the U.S. might provide air-launched, ground-attack Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles. The Finnish and Polish air forces rely on these low-observable arms.

Incoming Western equipment could offer a second way to neutralize glide bombs. Ukraine may soon acquire European F-16 fighters and two Swedish airborne early warning and control, or AEW&C, aircraft.

Pairing them would create a new capability, especially if the U.S. provided long-range (or 20-plus-mile) Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles. They could strike many aircraft before bombs were launched. Radar-guided AMRAAMs have a range longer than glide bombs.

Saab AEW&C aircraft will be a force multiplier. They can identify targets out to some 250 nautical miles and detect airborne and ground-based radars. This is essential to track and destroy distant aircraft and air defenses.

Although Ukraine’s F-16s will be older, they will have many modern electronics. This may include Link 16, a NATO-standard system to exchange tactical data. Flying over Ukraine at a safe distance, the AEW&C aircraft could vector F-16s to targets. Some proficient Swedish air battle managers may be needed until Ukrainians are fully trained.

Over time, the U.S. might also assist Ukraine to build a more substantial air force. Some retired F-16s and U.S. Navy E-2 Hawkeye AEW&C aircraft stored in Arizona could be refurbished for Ukraine.

Electronic warfare offers a third way to defeat glide bombs, by confusing their GLONASS or GPS satellite navigation systems. Electronic warfare works better against some systems than others. To protect critical infrastructure, Ukraine would need powerful jammers to block satellite signals over a wide expanse.

A glide bomb may rely on a backup inertial guidance system should satellite navigation fail, but this is less accurate for precision targeting. Errors increase the farther the bomb flies without satellite guidance.

In warfare, silver bullets are rare. Fighting often requires multiple capabilities and innovative or flexible use. More of both will be needed to enable Ukraine to defeat the glide bomb threat. Long-range tactical missiles, F-16s and AEW&C aircraft, plus advanced electronic warfare tools — and more flexible U.S. policies for their use — could give Ukraine a potent force.

John Hoehn is an associate policy researcher at the think tank Rand. He was previously a military analyst with the Congressional Research Service. William Courtney is an adjunct senior fellow at Rand. He previously served as the U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, Georgia and the U.S.-Soviet Commission.

CEO Adam Bry described the work in an interview with Defense News Wednesday, hours before he testified before Congress.

“I’ve never met drone users as sophisticated as the folks in Ukraine,” Bry said. “We want a team there.”

For now, the hires are in the single digits, with employees focused on engineering and customer support. Bry said he could see Skydio manufacturing drones in the country later on, but thinks building smaller components — like the equipment that helps prevent jamming — is more realistic at first.

The war in Ukraine is the first to feature widespread use of small, commercial style drones. In the last two years, it’s become a sandbox for companies around the world trying to test their equipment. U.S. firms including AeroVironment to Shield AI have sent their products to help defend Ukraine and see how they perform in intense electronic warfare environments.

That said, most of the drones used in Ukraine so far have been made in China, the world’s dominant manufacturer in the sector.

Bry went as far to say that Ukraine’s needs are driving Skydio’s product development, even when that doesn’t overlap with the U.S. government.

His company’s main defense contract is with the Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance program, which Skydio won in 2021. Defense firms are now competing for that contract’s second iteration, to be selected in 2025, and Skydio is putting forward its new X10D drone to do so.

Ukraine is also interested in that drone. Its Ministry of Interior has formally requested “thousands” of them — though Bry wouldn’t specify how many — atop the thousand or so drones Skydio has already sent Kyiv since the full-scale invasion began in 2022.

The requirements laid out by the Army are similar to what Ukraine needs, Bry said, but they’re not one for one.

“This has been a shift in strategy for us,” he said. “Where there’s discrepancy, we’re prioritizing what we’re seeing in Ukraine.”

The main difference between the two sets of requirements is in resiliency. Ukraine’s biggest need is for drones that can counter intense Russian jamming. That is not what the short-range reconnaissance program has focused on to this point, Bry said.

Still his argument is that Ukraine is the “proving ground” for small drones. If they can survive there, that should be a good sales pitch for the U.S. military as well. But that’s not guaranteed, Bry acknowledged.

“It’s a risk from a business standpoint,” he said. “But I think it’s a risk worth taking.”

Vulcan flew its first mission in January, but a second is required to confirm that the rocket can perform consistently across multiple flights. CEO Tory Bruno told reporters June 26 he’s confident the company will complete the certification process in time to meet the Space Force’s timelines.

“At the moment, we’re quite confident that the payloads will be there,” he said in a media briefing. “I’ll have the rockets. All I need are satellites, and I should be able to fly them.”

ULA, along with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is one of two companies with rockets cleared to fly national security space missions for DOD and the intelligence community. The company is in the process of replacing its legacy Atlas V and Delta IV vehicles — longtime workhorse rockets for the U.S. government — with the more powerful Vulcan.

The company previously expected Vulcan to begin flying national security missions in 2022, following certification by the Space Force that the rocket is cleared to fly high-value missions. Repeated delays — many involving the rocket’s BE-4 engine built by Blue Origin — have slowed that process.

Blue Origin has largely overcome those engine setbacks, but ULA faced a new challenge in recent months when it learned that the payload for its second Space Force certification mission — Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane — was behind schedule.

Bruno told reporters that because of those delays and the need to certify Vulcan, the rocket will now carry an inert payload built by ULA as a backup. He described the payload as a mass simulator that will feature proprietary experiments and demonstrations that will inform future technology development for the company.

Once that mission launches, the company will work closely with the Space Force to support the necessary analysis to validate Vulcan’s performance. Bruno noted that because the service has had several months to review data from the rocket’s first mission, it shouldn’t take long to finalize the certification after the second flight.

“It’s sort of pre-staged and ready to go,” he said. “All they really have to do is receive the data from us with the analysis we also provide to them and kind of go down the list and say, ‘Yep, that’s what we expected.’”

Independent review team

ULA’s payload swap and its push toward its second certification flight follow criticism from the Space Force about Vulcan’s delayed debut and concerns that the company may struggle to ramp up the rocket’s launch cadence.

The Washington Post reported in May that Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, sent the company a letter relaying those concerns and calling for Lockheed and Boeing to convene an independent review team to consider whether ULA is capable of meeting the service’s launch demands.

“I recommend that you work together over the next 90 days to complete an independent review of ULA’s ability to scale its launch cadence,” Calvelli said in the letter.

Bruno said that team has since formed and is in the process of reviewing ULA’s manufacturing facilities before moving on to its launch site.

He said he welcomes input from the group. In fact, once that work is completed, Bruno plans to stand up a longer-term review team that will continue to monitor Vulcan’s progress until the company has achieved full-rate production.

“I’m a big believer in that,” he said. “When your team is working really hard in the trenches, sometimes it’s good to have some senior folks who have done it before that are stepping back from it and not driving every day, feeling schedule pressures and all that, to be taking an objective look and give you advice.”

Production ramp-up

Bruno said that amid the reviews and the company’s focus on national security space launch certification, ULA is working to ensure its factories, launch facilities and supply chain are positioned to support an increased launch cadence in the coming years.

In 2025, ULA plans to launch 20 missions, some of which will fly on Vulcan and some on its Atlas V rocket.

“It’s absolutely appropriate for everyone, including my customer, to focus on ramping up the rocket. For us, that is the primary thing we’re working on right now,” he said. “It requires two things . . . a much higher production rate in the factory and in our supply chain, and then infrastructure that supports the higher launch rate at the launch site.”

At its factory, the company has converted space once dedicated to its Delta line of rockets to produce Vulcan and is doing the same with its Atlas line, which will fly another 16 missions before it retires.

The company is nearly finished with the Vulcan rockets that will fly the two national security missions it’s lined up to launch this year, Bruno said, noting that the first will arrive at Cape Canaveral in August and the second soon after.

On the supply chain side, ULA has worked with suppliers to shore up its inventory early, in advance of the increased launch rate. And at the launch site, it’s converting an existing facility to one that can support payload and rocket integration. The company had initially planned to activate the facility next June, but Bruno said he’s accelerating that schedule to early 2025.

“The key to the higher launch rate at the launch site is having a whole other [vertical integration facility], a who other lane, if you will, so you can be building rockets simultaneously,” he said.