The ministry listed 49 ongoing modernization and acquisition projects across the military. Here are some that stood out:

Land Forces

M60 tank: Two separate modernization projects are ongoing. The first will replace the existing fire control system with the new Volkan-M, as well as provide additional armor protection and protected crew seats to M60T tanks. The contract was signed in January 2023. The second bolsters the firepower, survivability and mobility of M60A3 tanks. Prototype development studies are continuing.

Leopard 2 A4 tank: The platform variant is undergoing modernization work through a contract signed in 2022 between the government’s defense program management agency SSB and local defense contractor BMC Otomotiv. Aselsan, another Turkish business, is providing the fire control systems; remote controlled weapon stations; command, control, communication and information systems; laser warning systems; driver vision systems; active protection systems; and close-range surveillance systems. BMC will integrate these systems into the tank and overhaul the chassis.

T-155 Firtina self-propelled howitzer: The next generation of the T-155 is under construction by BMC Otomotiv. The original contract covers the delivery of 130 units. As of the end of 2023, the company had delivered eight. BMC is also developing an engine for the weapon. Inspection and acceptance activities of the prototype engine concluded Feb. 24, 2023.

ACV-15 vehicle: Aselsan is modernizing the combat vehicle by providing the 25mm Nefer turret, among other systems. The Defence Ministry’s 2nd Main Maintenance Factory Directorate is conducting the repair and overhaul of the engine and the transmission of the vehicles.

Naval Forces

Milden submarine project: The Naval Forces’ design office is working on the country’s first indigenous submarine program. Construction is to take place at Gölcük Shipyard Command. A test block is to undergo construction this year, and efforts to build the first submarine are scheduled to start in 2025.

Reis-class submarine program: Hizirreis, the second submarine of the Reis project, which includes the production of six submarines, began May 25, 2023. Gölcük Naval Shipyard is carrying out the work.

Preveze-class submarine: After integration and testing activities ended on the TCG Preveze submarine, which acted as a testbed for the early delivery of the systems, the Gölcük Naval Shipyard started midlife upgrades for the TCG Sakarya in July 2022. That platform is the first submarine to receive the modernization features, and work is ongoing. The plan is to modernize all Preveze-class subs during maintenance and overhaul periods until 2027.

Barbaros-class frigate: Turkey is working on a midlife modernization project focused on the sensors, weapons and combat management systems of Barbaros-class frigates. The first ship to receive upgrades, the TCG Barbaros, is currently performing acceptance tests.

Air Forces

F-16 fighter jet: There are two separate projects for the Turkish Air Forces. The first one is the procurement of new F-16 Block 70 aircraft and the application of Viper modernization to the existing F-16 Block 40/50 airframes in service. The second is meant to extend the structural service life of F-16C/D Block 40/50 aircraft currently in service to 2050, and to strengthen them structurally. This project will take place in facilities run by the 1st Air Maintenance Factory Directorate.

Akinci and Anka-S drones: There are ongoing efforts to buy various types of Akinci and Anka-S drones. For both of these projects, Turkey considers the extension of their range via satellite as critical.

Hürjet aircraft: The primary goal of this project is to design and produce a single-engine, tandem-seat jet trainer with performance features that will play a critical role in training pilots for modern fighter aircraft. The prototype made its maiden flight in April 2023.

Hürkuş-B aircraft: This program for a new-generation basic jet trainer is meant to meet Air Force Command’s need for additional training aircraft. Ultimately, this is to improve the quality of combat readiness training and the effectiveness of flight personnel training. The first aircraft is scheduled for delivery in 2025.

Militaries the world over are increasingly developing and deploying drones and robotics, with the systems posing a threat on land, at sea and in the air. The growing importance of uncrewed systems has been on display for two years in Ukraine and is at the heart of the Defense Department’s clandestine Replicator initiative.

In discussions about the Army’s fiscal 2025 spending plans, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Doug Bush said a multiyear procurement for something that changes as fast as unmanned aerial systems “may not be appropriate.”

“There’s also a lot of new entrants in that space,” Bush said in a briefing at the Pentagon. “Committing to one, as good as that company might be, would perhaps foreclose other options because there’s so much innovation with new companies in that space.”

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Multiyear procurements are typically used to secure mass amounts of munitions. They are thought to motivate defense suppliers, who can count on longer-term demands and ramp up production as a result, and save money by buying in bulk over the long run.

But locking in on the same drone year after year is a different circumstance, according to Bush. Demands for technology can change month to month, let alone year to year.

“What you buy in one year, I’m not sure you’d want to buy that exact same [unmanned aerial system] for five years,” Bush said. “We might be heavy one year in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and heavy the next year in strike.”

The Army’s fiscal 2025 budget blueprint totals nearly $186 billion, an uptick of $400 million compared to the year prior. The service is asking for $175.4 billion in its base budget and another $10.5 billion to pay for overseas operations.

The budget levels also presume the congressional passage of supplemental funding to cover the costs of funneling military aid to Ukraine and to support increased operations in the Middle East, Defense News reported.

The service on March 9 rolled out a policy, dubbed Enabling Modern Software Development and Acquisition Practices, enshrining the revisions. Officials said the measure brings them closer to private-sector expectations, making business simpler and more inclusive.

“We thought this was important to do this now, and issue this policy now, because of how critical software is to the fight right now,” Margaret Boatner, the deputy assistant secretary of the Army for strategy and acquisition reform, told reporters at the Pentagon. “More than ever before, software is actually a national-security imperative.”

Consequences of the policy include: changing the way requirements are written, favoring high-level needs statements and concision over hyper-specific directions; employing alternative acquisition and contracting strategies; reducing duplicative tests and streamlining cybersecurity processes; embracing a sustainment model that recognizes programs can and should be updated; and establishing expert cohorts, such as the prospective Digital Capabilities Contracting Center of Excellence at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

While the policy is effective immediately, the different reforms will take different amounts of time to be realized. The contacting center, for example, has several months to get up and running. No additional appropriations are needed to make the transitions, according to Boatner.

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“All of our weapons systems, our missiles, our radars, our helicopters, our tanks? They run on software,” she said. “The ability to rapidly develop and upgrade and enhance these capabilities is critical to ensure that we can maintain that competitive overmatch over our adversaries.”

U.S. competition with Russia and China — world powers considered top-tier national security threats — is increasingly digital. A ballooning demand for seamless connectivity, lightning-quick decision making and advanced robotics has propelled software into the spotlight.

Chief Information Officer Leonel Garciga said the new directive puts the Army in a more-dynamic posture.

“As our partners were coming in to compete on work inside the Army, we were almost holding ourselves back by not having some of this stuff in place and missing out on some opportunities,” he told reporters. “This is kind of edging into the second phase of our digital transformation as a service.”

The Army considers digital transformation, or the phasing in of new technologies and virtual practices, vital to its larger modernization goals. Previous budget blueprints featured billions of dollars for cyber and information technology.

Army Gen. Michael Kurilla told lawmakers on March 7 that he would “love” to have the Navy deploy more directed-energy arms capable of downing drones. Having supplemental directed energy on hand, he added, would also mean expending fewer U.S. missiles, which can cost millions of dollars a pop. Iranian drones being funneled to extremist groups can cost thousands of dollars each.

“The bigger concern is if you start talking about swarms. We need to continue to invest in things like high-power microwave to be able to counter a drone swarm that is coming at you,” Kurilla said during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in Washington. “Nothing is 100%. At some point the law of statistics will come up. You have to have a layered defense.”

High-energy lasers and microwave weapons are capable of zapping overhead threats in ways dissimilar to traditional munitions and at a fraction of the cost. Lasers can fire at the speed of light and punch holes through material, while microwaves can fry electronics at a distance, rendering tech obsolete. Both are considered a critical element of layered defense, or having multiple countermeasures ready to thwart different threats in different situations.

The Defense Department has for decades pitched money into directed-energy weapons, an average $1 billion annually in the past three years, according to the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog.

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At least 31 directed-energy initiatives are underway across the department, with some more mature than others. Among them are Lockheed Martin’s High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance, or HELIOS, installed aboard the Navy destroyer Preble in 2022, and Epirus’ Leonidas, delivered to the Army in 2023 in furtherance of its Indirect Fire Protection Capability.

Bringing such systems to fruition — let alone mass production — has proven tricky. Aside from their technological complexity, laser- and microwave-based weaponry demand precious components and materials such as germanium and gallium.

Kurilla on Wednesday said the Army “sent us some directed-energy mobile short-range air defense” that are being experimented with. He provided no details about initial results. The service dispatched four Stryker-mounted 50-kilowatt laser prototypes in February, Breaking Defense reported.

Militants across the Greater Middle East have in recent months conducted more than 175 attacks on U.S. and allied forces. A drone strike in Jordan, at the Tower 22 installation near al-Tanf garrison, killed three troops in January. A Houthi missile attack on a commercial ship in the Gulf of Aden this month killed three crew members, as well, and forced an evacuation of the vessel.

“This is not the same central region as last year,” Kurilla said. “Iran’s expansive network of proxies is equipped with advanced, sophisticated weaponry, and threatens some of the most vital terrain in the world with global and U.S. implications.”

The move by Fincantieri reflects the state-controlled yard’s push to beef up its defense business, which currently accounts for 40% of overall revenue; the remainder comes from offshore and cruise ship work.

For more than a decade Leonardo has searched on and off for a buyer or partner for its torpedo unit known as WASS. The company’s primary focus is aircraft, helicopters and high-tech electronics.

A spokesperson for Fincantieri declined to comment for this story.

WASS, which stands for Whitehead Alenia Sistemi Subacquei, traces its origins to Englishman John Whitehead, who developed the world’s first effective self-propelled torpedo in 1875 in Fiume — then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and now in Croatia.

In 1995, WASS became part of the Italian group Finmeccanica, which has since been renamed Leonardo.

Fincantieri CEO Pierroberto Folgiero told Defense News in December he was keen on ramping up his firm’s undersea defense business, a sector the company predicts will be worth €94 billion between 2024 and 2030.

“We will be an integrator, deciding whether to make or buy systems,” Folgiero said at the time, adding that Fincantieri would also harness oil and gas technology for subsea defense needs.

As part of its ambitions, Fincantieri is a partner at a new subsea center in La Spezia, Italy, bringing together industry, the Italian Navy and academia to work on programs.

Fincantieri also signed a deal with Leonardo last year to work on drones to protect undersea cables and pipelines. And in December, Fincantieri purchased Italian firm Remazel, which manages subsea operations for the oil and gas sector.

The firm also signed a memorandum of understanding to work with W-Sense, an Italian startup using Norwegian technology to develop underwater communications based on acoustic and optical signals.

It also struck a deal to work with C.A.B.I. Cattaneo, an Italian supplier of underwater vehicles to Italy’s naval special forces. Last year, the Navy ordered a third U212 NFS submarine from Fincantieri.

On Thursday, Fincantieri released its results for 2023, which showed orders last year reached €6.6 billion, up from €5.3 billion the year before, while revenues rose 2.8% to €7.65 billion and are expected to reach €8 billion this year.

The firm reported a €53 million loss, against a €324 million loss in 2022.

According to Defense News’ Top 100 list, Fincantieri is the 48th largest company in the world based on defense-related revenue.

Program Executive Office-Land Systems announced Wednesday that General Dynamics Land Systems and Textron Systems Corporation would design, develop and manufacture an advanced reconnaissance vehicle 30-mm autocannon prototype vehicle.

The contract award is $11.8 million for Textron and $10.9 million for General Dynamics. Each company will produce one prototype to be delivered by fiscal 2025, land systems spokesman David Jordan told Marine Corps Times.

If prototyping is successful for the family of vehicles, which includes other variants, production could cost between $1.8 billion and $6.8 billion throughout five years, according to a 2022 Congressional Research Service report.

Both Textron and General Dynamics announced in January that each company had completed testing of a command and control advanced reconnaissance vehicle variant prototype, according to company websites.

Marine Corps pushes 'dramatic change' for its reconnaissance forces

This 30-mm cannon variant will use the same turret and weapon system that is on the amphibious combat vehicle-30, said Steve Myers, Marine Corps program manager for light armored vehicles.

“Ensuring commonality is crucial, especially for the Marine Corps’ capacity to maintain weapon systems with limited fleets,” Myers said in a land systems release. “The prototyping of the ARV-30 allows the government to test and confirm the requirements before entering the engineering and manufacturing development phase.”

The Marine Corps established the Light Armored Vehicle Way-Ahead plan to replace the light armored vehicle, which has been in service since the early 1980s. The light armored vehicle is a trooper carrier vehicle with radio systems and a 25 mm Bushmaster cannon that has been used extensively in Marine deployments since its fielding.

But light armored vehicle’s life cycle is expected to end in the mid-2030s, Myers said at the time.

In 2019 the service announced the advanced reconnaissance vehicle concept as the official replacement for the light armored vehicle.

But the Corps wanted more than just a newer up-armored gun truck. In the following year, Marine Corps Systems Command staff and Office of Naval Research personnel developed the advanced reconnaissance vehicle concept that would use the vehicle to conduct command and control, sensing, cyber and drone missions.

The Marines later laid out concepts for a command, control, communications and computers/unmanned aerial systems version. Textron and General Dynamics delivered those prototypes in late 2022. Marines tested and evaluated those in from January 2023 to November 2023.

What the Marines want in the advanced reconnaissance vehicle:

• An automatic medium-caliber cannon.
• Anti-armor capability to defeat close-in heavy armor threats.
• Precision-guided munitions to defeat threats beyond the engagement range of threat systems.
• Unmanned systems swarm capability to provide persistent, multifunction munitions.
• Advanced, networked, multifunctional electronic warfare capabilities.
• A modern command-and-control suite and a full range of sensors.
• Organic unmanned aerial and ground systems that can be deployed from the advanced reconnaissance vehicle.
• Active and passive vehicle protection.
• Robust cross-country/on-road mobility performance with shore-to-shore water mobility.

Source: Congressional Research Service

Early planning for the advanced reconnaissance vehicle began in 2016, prior to the Force Design 2030 launch under former Commandant Gen. David Berger in 2019.

Before force design changes, the advanced reconnaissance vehicle was slated to serve much as the light armored vehicle had in light armored reconnaissance battalions.

But the Corps continues to restructure its force, aiming for leaner, smaller formations that can operate distributed, conduct reconnaissance, and counter reconnaissance for the joint force. Platforms such as the ARV must be able to help with deep sensing and pass data for targeting and protect themselves from electromagnetic attack and detection.

In 2023, Berger spelled out in his final update to the force design how reconnaissance would change.

The service needed “littoral, multi-domain reconnaissance capabilities that our light armored reconnaissance battalions do not currently provide.” The document notes that the Corps will shift instead to “mobile reconnaissance battalions” that will include maritime, light mobile and light armored companies.”

The service has hundreds of thousands of radios, too many to quickly and cost-effectively modernize given looming security deadlines and cat-and-mouse competition with Russia and China, world powers with sophisticated signals intelligence capabilities. An as-a-service model may provide the military with the latest radios and support networks while driving down costs and promoting hardware and software flexibility.

At least one related request for information was published last year. It garnered more than a dozen responses, ranging from enthusiasm to rejection, officials said at the time.

The input was helpful to the Army, and that sort of dialogue with defense suppliers will continue, Undersecretary Gabe Camarillo told reporters March 7, 2024, on the sidelines of the McAleese defense conference in Washington.

“We were going to send an RFI out, we were going to enter into a very formal and elaborate conversation with industry about the economics of that buying model and get feedback,” Camarillo said. “I think we’ll continue to partner with industry on multiple RFIs, multiple discussions in different fora.”

Exploratory pilots could help iron out kinks, Camarillo said. Radio as a service could resemble a subscription offered by some makers of consumer products; it could also mirror other deals in which companies furnish goods and expertise on a rolling basis, keep them up to date and handle quality control.

Updated connectivity has for years been a priority for the Army, alongside demands for improved long-range precision fires, air and missile defense and aviation. Secure, reliable networking is a tenet of the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept, which envisions insights seamlessly relayed across land, air, sea, space and cyber.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George at the same conference Thursday said the service must recognize the demands of today without losing sight of the potential leaps ahead of tomorrow.

“We have to get our soldiers the right technology, when it is relevant, with the ability to upgrade and adapt to the threat. If we don’t, then we are putting our men and women in the dirt unprepared to fight and win,” George said. “This isn’t just about product innovation, it’s about process innovation.”

The chief of staff previously said soldiers “need to shoot, move and communicate,” and that “technology should facilitate those fundamentals, not encumber them.”

Technology developed through the terminated program will also be applied to a wider variety of platforms, he said.

The service is “planning to set up additional research and development resources for the UH-60M Black Hawks to continue to improve that vital platform,” Doug Bush, the Army’s acquisition chief, told lawmakers during a House Armed Services Committee’s Tactical Air and Land Subcommittee hearing on March 6.

The end of the FARA program last month marked an abrupt change of direction in aviation modernization and became one of the service’s most significant program cancellations of the last decade. The Army had already spent at least $2 billion on the program and had requested another $5 billion for the next five years.

At the same time, the service scrapped its Shadow and Raven unmanned aircraft systems developed for the counterinsurgency fight nearly two decades ago and a program – the UH-60V – that upgraded Lima-model Black Hawks with a digital cockpit for the National Guard. The Guard will now get Mike-model UH-60s.

The Army also plans to invest in a new multiyear procurement buy of its UH-60M Black Hawks and purchase CH-47F Block II Chinook cargo helicopters it did not plan to procure for the active component. And it will invest roughly $2.5 billion across the next five years beginning in fiscal 2025 in new unmanned capabilities, according to Bush.

While FARA has come to an end, the Army said it needs the funding budgeted in FY24 to close out the program and wrap up some critical technology development efforts that can be transferred to other programs.

The FY25 budget request will show that the Army has requested funding for UH-60 research and development across its future years development program “that was not there before,” Bush said.

“When we go to that next multiyear, we hope that’s a better Black Hawk aircraft,” he said. “The one we have is great, but we hope that that R&D, cutting across the whole FYDP, that will allow us to have a better aircraft.”

Making Black Hawk better

One of the largest areas of technology development in the FARA program was focused on a modular open systems architecture.

That development will cascade to other aviation platforms from its Future Long Range Assault Aircraft to the current fleet of helicopters and even to other future platforms like the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle in the design phase now, Gen. James Rainey, Army Futures Command commander, said during the same hearing.

The number one priority for Black Hawk upgrades will be incorporating the open system architecture, Maj. Gen. Mac McCurry, the Army’s Aviation Center of Excellence commander, testified at the hearing. “The ability for us to turn and be more nimble as we react to changes on the battlefield and put a new piece of kit on a Black Hawk, that open architecture helps us do that very well.”

The Army also “learned numerous things … modeling and simulation that we developed as part of this, the whole Launched Effects ecosystem was one of the main things we’ve benefited over the course of this study,” Rainey added.

Launched Effects will be deployed from both aircraft and ground platforms and will not only be able to perform armed scout-type missions for Army aviation but will be host to a wide variety of sensors and payloads to perform reconnaissance, take out enemy weapons, provide targeting or even extend network connectivity.

More technology that will be transferable includes work on Degraded Visual Environment capabilities, which the Army has been working on for many years, as well as sensor processing and heads-up mounted display advancements, according to McCurry.

Additionally, the service did a lot of work on sensor miniaturization and lightening payloads and sensors that can now be easily transferred to unmanned systems, he added.

And work on additive manufacturing to get away from forgings and castings will increase the Army’s maintenance-free operating periods, McCurry said.

A path for improved engine

The Army plans to spend some of its time closing out the FARA program testing out its Improved Turbine Engine Program engines in the FARA prototypes built in a competition between Lockheed Martin and Bell Textron. Both aircraft had been built and recently received ITEP engines to begin the process toward initial flights by the end of the year, prior to the program’s cancellation.

“We’ve got engines in test stands today. We’ve got engines in the aircraft today that we’re going to run in the FARA aircraft and we will learn from that,” Brig. Gen. David Phillips, the Army’s program executive officer for aviation, said during the hearing.

The ITEP engine program experienced technology development and supply chain hurdles, drastically delaying its introduction to the aircraft it will power including the FARA program. ITEP was originally designed to replace the engines in UH-60M and AH-64E Apache attack helicopters, giving the aircraft 3,000 shaft horsepower and increased fuel efficiency.

The Army is delaying procurement of the ITEP engine, a move it announced along with the FARA cancellation, but it is sustaining its research and development efforts, Bush reassured at the hearing.

“We’re going to revisit that in [the program objective memorandum FY]26, to understand based on how things are going with integration on Apache and Black Hawk, when those procurement dollars need to come back into the program,” he said. “The Army remains committed to that program and getting that capability to the fleet.”

The framework agreements with the five companies – Alice & Bob, C12, Pasqal, Quandela and Quobly – are worth up to €500 million (US$545 million), the Armed Forces Ministry said in an emailed statement on March 6.

President Emmanuel Macron announced a national quantum strategy three years ago to equip the country with the computing resources required to guarantee France’s sovereignty in the field. Quantum computing exploits the laws of quantum physics with the goal of solving complex problems faster than with classical computers, a target known as quantum advantage.

“Quantum technology is of major importance to the Armed Forces, with potential applications in cryptography or in communications,” the ministry said in the statement. “The revolution underway will allow us to perceive our environment with unprecedented precession, discover new materials, explore new ways of transmitting information, navigate there where the GPS network is inaccessible.”

The program to develop quantum-computer prototypes will be coordinated by the Defense Digital Agency, known by its French acronym AND, and part of the procurement agency.

Google, IBM and others have built the first wave of quantum computers, but challenges around stability and scalability means commercial applications still face hurdles. In quantum computing, information is stored in quantum bits, or qubits, which can exist in multiple states simultaneously, potentially enabling the technology to outperform a traditional system based on binary bits.

France two years ago announced a hybrid quantum computing network to connect traditional systems and quantum computers, making them available to research institutions, startups and industry partners.

The five French startups “all have what it takes to meet this challenge, but tit’s too early to say which of them will succeed in overcoming the various engineering, manufacturing and industrialization hurdles,” the ministry said. “That why this partnership takes the form of a three-stage competition: proof of concept, maturation and then industrialization.”

Four years in to the program, the three most successful projects will be retained to develop the best logic qubits capable of going to scale, according to the ministry. At the eight-year mark, the competition will be limited to two technologies, which will continue to be developed from prototype computers, with a goal of 128 logic qubits, to commercial systems, with a goal of 2,048 qubits, and usable by their first customers.

Paris-based Alice & Bob was founded in 2020 and has raised more than €30 million, working on a universal quantum computer with error correction. C12, founded in the same year and also based in the French capital, is using carbon nanotubes to build its quantum processor, after securing €10 million in seed funding in 2021.

Pasqal, founded in 2019, has raised more than €140 million to date and is developing a quantum computer using neutral atoms ordered in arrays. Quandela raised more than €50 million in November, and is using photonics as its technology of choice, which the company says is relatively easy to scale and operates largely at room temperature. Quobly is developing error-tolerant quantum-computing processors which it says can be built using existing semiconductor fabs, and the Grenoble-based company in July closed its first funding round of €19 million.

Indra plans to lead consolidation of the Spanish defense industry, Chairman Marc Murtra told analysts during a March 6 presentation in Madrid. He cited the U.K.’s BAE Systems, France’s Thales and Italy’s Leonardo as examples of national defense champions that consolidated their home markets.

European countries have boosted defense spending since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to strengthen their militaries after decades of cost cutting. Purchases of defense equipment by NATO’s European members will rise 7% to 8% a year through 2030, with total procurement of as much as €950 billion (US$1 trillion) over the period, Indra forecasts.

“Europe is entering a new major defense investment cycle after more than 30 years, characterized by a significant shift in focus towards technology, a greater share of defense systems and the expansion of multi-domain capabilities,” Murtra said.

Indra seeks to transform its businesses from national to international, and become “the Spanish multinational of reference” in defense and aerospace, the chairman said. The company wants to become the Spanish coordinator in European land, air and cyberspace programs, and the main defense-system integrator in its home market.

The company has announced a number of cross-border deals in its defense business this year, including a radar joint venture with the Emirati defense-technology company Edge Group, and agreements with Thales and Lockheed Martin to jointly work on defense systems.

The EU has been pushing for consolidation and joint projects in the defense industry, with fragmentation and duplication between national markets estimated to waste billions of euros. The EU’s executive branch on Tuesday proposed a €1.5 billion plan to boost defense production and promote joint military projects among member states.

Indra is already involved in multinational European projects including the Future Combat Air System, the Eurofighter Typhoon and the A400M freighter.

“Some of our NATO allies within Europe, such as the U.K., Italy and France, have already made significant strides in consolidating defense and aerospace sectors,” Murtra said. “This process is crucial to achieve strategic autonomy in Spain, and to guarantee its influence at the global scale. With our strong positioning and capabilities, we aspire to lead the Spanish national ecosystem in less than 10 years.”

Spain’s defense budget is expected to outpace Europe, rising 11% to 12% a year to reach a target of 2% of GDP by 2030, Indra projects.

The company expects its defense sales to grow 42% organically over the next three years to €1.1 billion, excluding the contribution from acquisitions. Defense currently accounts for about a fifth of the company’s revenue.

Indra projects overall sales of €6 billion in 2026, including €700 million added through mergers and acquisitions. The company plans tol allocate more than 75% of its acquisition spending to defense and aerospace, with a focus on Spain, Western Europe, the Middle East and North America.

The company said it will concentrate M&A activity in its defense business on bolstering capabilities in the land domain, developing home markets in Western Europe and strengthening its business in sensors, avionics and counter unmanned aerial systems, or C-UAS.

Indra is simplifying its defense-product portfolio, moving more than 100 customized products into six technology categories, including radar, electronic defense, as well as command, control, computing and intelligence, or C3I.

Space division

The company is also setting up a new space division that will serve the defense and air-traffic management segments, with a goal of €1 billion in revenue by 2030. Indra wants to become a tier-one European player participating in the continent’s main space programs, Murtra said.

“Space is a segment that is becoming more and more relevant in Europe to guarantee its strategic autonomy and sovereignty over communications,” Murtra said “Satellite communications are becoming mission critical for governments in both both defense and non-defense applications.”

Indra will seek one or more shareholders for its information-technology business Minsait, though Murat said he plans to keep a “significant stake” in the unit, because of synergies with the defense and aerospace businesses.

Sophisticated networking and communications capabilities derived from the U.S. Navy’s hush-hush Project Overmatch are deployed on at least three carrier strike groups, according to the commander of the Third Fleet.

Project Overmatch represents the sea service’s contribution to the Department of Defense’s multibillion-dollar connectivity campaign known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control. Military leaders have shared few details about its progress since inception in 2020, citing competition with Russia and China.

During a March 5 discussion with reporters at Camp Pendleton, California, for the Army’s technology crucible dubbed Project Convergence Capstone 4, Vice Adm. Michael Boyle said Project Overmatch is “already fielded on” three carrier strike groups. He did not name them, nor did he say for how long the capabilities had been installed.

Project Overmatch engineers are participating in PCC4, where they are identifying connectivity gaps and fixes, according to Boyle. The capstone event aims to improve information-sharing and coordination of firepower across the military.

“We’re not just experimenting for the sake of experimenting. We’re experimenting to understand what works and what doesn’t work, and what do we want to pursue as a capability that connects us together,” the admiral said. “This is proving that we can connect, that I can connect, to a Patriot battery, that I can connect across the joint force, that I can connect through a tactical operations center-light to Air Force sensors and bring that information in.”

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A Navy spokesperson corroborated Boyle’s count when asked by C4ISRNET. The spokesperson declined to name the carrier strike groups, but said the rollout is ahead of schedule.

Navy officials have in the past said Project Overmatch’s introduction to the fleet would focus on the Indo-Pacific — a vast region where Washington may clash with Beijing and where digital links will be strained — and then expand globally. Project Overmatch was also expected to play a role in Large Scale Exercise 23, featuring 25,000 sailors and Marines as well as aircraft carriers, submarines, logistics support and simulated units.

Project Overmatch trials kicked off last year with the Carl Vinson carrier strike group off the coast of California.

Rear Adm. Doug Small, the leader of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, later said much was learned from the testing.

“It’s never something we’re done with. It’s a constant learning and a constant improving process,” Small said in February. “Not only have we fielded it, we’ve updated and re-fielded and delivered over-the-air capability based on what it is that sailors need.”

The Navy sought $192 million for Project Overmatch in fiscal 2024, which began Oct. 1. A full defense budget, however, has yet to pass Congress.

Logos Technologies announced a $19.4 million deal for its Serenity hostile fire detectors late last month. The five-year arrangement also accounts for maintenance and operation costs across U.S. Africa Command.

Serenity combines electro-optical and acoustic sensors to pinpoint the origin of weapons fire and explosions as far as 6 miles away. It can be paired with a wide-area motion imagery, or WAMI, device to document swaths of land over extended periods of time.

“Serenity can cue the WAMI system to a particular area of interest — say, the location of an enemy mortar team — and then the WAMI system can track their movement across the battlefield, as well as ‘go back in time’ and discover their initial staging area,” Doug Rombough, vice president of business development at Logos, said in a statement.

Serenity systems are already used by U.S. troops, Rombough added, and a quickly deployable version for international forces is under consideration. The Army Research Laboratory is also looking into a smaller version of Serenity that can be mounted on a gyrocopter, according to the company.

Counterterrorism missions across the African continent involve multiple countries and their forces. The region has been plagued by violent organizations affiliated with al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. In addition, coups in Mali in 2020, Burkina Faso in 2022 and Niger in 2023 have complicated U.S. Defense Department operations and assistance programs there.

Elbit Systems of America is itself a part of Israeli business Elbit Systems, the 21st largest defense contractor in the world when ranked by defense-related revenue. Elbit Systems earned nearly $5 billion in defense revenue in 2022 and about $4.8 billion in 2021, according to Defense News Top 100 analysis.

The European Commission on Tuesday presented its European Defence Industry Program aimed at bolstering a sector that has struggled to ramp up production in the face Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022.

“The war is at our borders,” Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, said during a news conference in Brussels on Tuesday. “Russia’s war of aggression has brought a great sense of urgency to step up our industrial defense capacities.”

With each of the EU’s 27 member states in charge of its defense budget, economic nationalism has often pushed countries such as France and Germany to buy local rather than European. The resulting fragmentation has a price: A European Parliament report in 2019 found the costs of duplication in security and defense policy among the bloc are at least €22 billion a year.

“In the last two years, we have faced the situation of a defense industry without sufficient production capacity to meet the sharp increase of demand,” the European Commission’s executive vice president, Margrethe Vestager, said at the news conference. “We have been vividly confronted with a well-known structural fragmentation along national borders that limits economies of scale, and creates mistrust, while preventing genuine competition between industrial players. This entails major inefficiencies, and insufficient value for taxpayer’s money.”

Funding for the European Defence Industry Program, or EDIP, runs from 2025 to 2027 and serves a bridge until the bloc negotiates a new long-term budget, said Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner for the internal market.

The commission suggested profits generated by frozen Russian assets could be used to fund support for Ukraine within the framework of EDIP, subject to a decision by the European Council. EU leaders meet in the council, which, together with the European Parliament, adopts European legislation.

The program would extend a regulation to incentivize joint procurement by member states in the EU’s defense industry, offering aid from the common budget to partially reimburse joint purchases. The commission also proposed continued financial support to boost Europe’s defense-industrial capacity.

The plan called for a new legal framework for joint European armament programs that includes favorable access to funding, simplified rules and potential waivers of value-added tax. Under the proposed plan, Ukraine would be able to participate in common procurement efforts.

The commission is inviting member states to spend at least 50% of their defense procurement budgets in the EU by 2030, and 60% by 2035. The union’s executive arm is also asking countries to collaboratively buy at least 40% of defense equipment by 2030.

From February 2022 to June 2023, EU states spent more than €100 billion on defense acquisitions, according to Vestager, who said almost 80% was spent outside the EU, with the U.S. alone accounting for more than 60%. She said spending that sort of money outside the bloc is no longer sustainable.

She added that while the EDIP budget “is not a lot of money” when it comes to defense, the funds can work as an incentive to bring together member states.

“The real funding for a stronger defense comes from member states, and that funding will increase over the years to come,” Vestager said. “What we can do here is to enable that funding to be spent in a better way, that we get more value for money, and that more, relatively speaking, is being spent in Europe.”

Another proposal is for a fund to fix supply chain bottlenecks in the EU’s defense industry, focused particularly on helping small and medium-sized companies with debt and equity financing. The commission plans to ask the governance bodies of the European Investment Bank to this year review lending policies, which currently limit defense investments to dual-purpose activities.

The commission proposed the creation of a defense-industrial readiness board that would be a forum for EU member states, and for the commission itself to define EU-level priorities to coordinate and smooth out countries’ procurement plans.

EDIP also includes measures to allow priority purchasing of civilian and military equipment in case the European Council declares a supply or security crisis, according to Breton. The council shot down a similar measure included in last year’s commission plan to boost EU ammunition production, and Breton said he hopes “this time it will pass.”

Breton added that the commission has developed plans to finance industrial sites that are ready to ramp up arms production if necessary, with EU funding to share the risk with industry.

The European ammunition industry increased production capacity by 50% since the start of the war in Ukraine, according to Borrell.

Breton said the EU is currently providing a little more than 80,000 artillery shells a month to Ukraine.

Borrell added that in addition to EU donations, Ukraine has purchased more than 350,000 shells from the European defense industry through direct contracts.

What matters now is that the EU defense-industrial base grows rapidly so Russian President Vladimir Putin understands “we are extremely serious,” Breton said.

He added that European defense production will not only match that of Russia — “we will do it much better.”

The joint venture will be able to access a pipeline of orders for almost 300 sophisticated radar systems in non-NATO and non-European Union countries, the companies said in a statement on Monday. They didn’t disclose financial details.

Indra this year already concluded separate agreements with Thales and Lockheed Martin to jointly work on defense systems, as the Spanish company seeks to bolster its Defence & Security division, one of its fastest-growing businesses.

“This agreement between the two companies can create one of the world’s leading players in the field of radar technology and is a step forward in Indra’s international expansion strategy,” Indra Chairman Marc Mutra said in the statement.

The joint venture will get “prime rights” for current and future non-NATO and non-EU orders awarded to Indra, the companies said. Indra and Edge didn’t immediately reply to emailed queries regarding the deal’s financials and agreements around technology sharing.

Indra last week agreed a defense collaboration with France’s Thales, with the companies seeing joint opportunities in radar systems, cybersecurity, communication systems and simulation. Both are already partners in the Future Combat Air System project, a German-French-Spanish collaboration aimed at fielding a next-generation fighter aircraft accompanied by drones. In January, Indra and Lockheed Martin agreed to explore cooperation in areas including radars and electronic-defense systems.

For the United Arab Emirates’ Edge Group, the venture with Indra follows on the heels of last month’s joint venture with Italy’s Fincantiere to supply naval vessels to non-NATO customers, with a potential pipeline of €30 billion.

Edge in February also signed a memorandum of understanding with Turkish Aerospace to provide its payloads and sensors for integration with the latter’s products, and announced the purchase of a majority stake in Estonia-based military-robot maker Milrem Robotics, a deal that had faced an EU security review.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the UAE in December, meeting with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to discuss expanding economic ties between the countries, in one of his rare foreign trips since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The UAE is Russia’s biggest trade partner in the Middle East, according to the Emirati leader.

The commander of the Turkish Naval Forces, Adm. Ercüment Tatlıoğlu, visited the Istanbul Shipyard Command and the Naval Forces Design Project Office on Feb. 28, the service announced, where he received a briefing on the design process and plans for the TF-2000 program. The design office, which is based on the same premises as the shipyard, began design efforts in July 2017.

The TF-2000′s principal mission is to detect and destroy guided missiles. According to the navy, the ship will be able to detect ballistic missiles, too. It’s unclear how many vessels the service plans to buy, how much money is set aside for the program and how long construction will take.

This vessel’s latest iteration shows changes from previous ones. For example, the original displacement was 7,000 tons. And in previous versions, the calculated speed was 28-plus knots (32+ mph). The second iteration shared in 2021 had the ship at 166 meters (545 feet) long and 21.5 meters (70.5 feet) wide, with a displacement of 8,500 tons.

In the latest design, the ship is 149 meters long and 21.3 meters wide. It has a draft of 5.75 meters. The displacement is 8,300 tons.

Its main machinery is in the so-called CODOG — or combined diesel or gas —configuration, which is expected to help the vessel reach 26 knots (30 mph) or more.

The ship will feature one 127mm main gun, two 25mm remote controlled weapon station and one 35mm Gökdeniz close-in weapon system.

It’s also to receive two Midlas vertical launch systems. The first one, with 32 cells, is located between the bridge and the main gun. The other, armed with 64 missiles, is located at midships between the funnels and the main mast. The principal weapons for the VLS will be the Siper and Hisar air defense missiles. The navy had previously said the TF-2000 would be fitted with Gezgin cruise missiles launched from vertical launch systems.

The ship also features a Levent point defense missile system.

The newest version of the TF-2000 comes with structural changes, too. According to the new design, Turkey has abandoned the approach for two, separate funnels; there is now one large funnel structure.

Turkey shortened the length of the ship when it eliminated the flexible mission space. This leftover area between the funnels and the hangar were supposed to be a reconfigurable space to carry up to 10 standard ISO containers at 20 feet each; or four 12-meter-long rigid inflatable boats; or various unmanned underwater and surface vessels. There was also space for 16 Atmaca anti-ship missiles, but the newest design does not show dedicated launchers onboard.

The ship is to feature 130-150 crew members, and with accommodations for 200. The vessel’s range is estimated to be 5,000 nautical miles at 18 knots. The ship is also to have a minimum 45-day operational capability without replenishments, and perform missions for 180 days without the support from its base.

Boeing and Spirit confirmed Friday they were in talks about a possible acquisition, following a Wall Street Journal report. The move, were it to happen, would reunite the two companies after nearly 20 years apart — and would come after a series of troubles with Boeing’s 737 MAX commercial aircraft, of which Spirit is a supplier.

“It’s kind of ‘back to the future,’ right?” defense industry analyst Byron Callan told Defense News on Monday. “You’re bringing back a part of Boeing that has really been” separate since 2005.

That was the year Boeing spun off what would become Spirit, when it sold its airframe manufacturing operations in Wichita, Kansas, and Oklahoma to a private equity firm.

Spirit AeroSystems is now a manufacturer and supplier for structural components that go into military aircraft such as the Boeing-made E-7 Wedgetail and P-8 Poseidon, the B-21 Raider stealth bomber built by Northrop Grumman, Bell’s V-280 Valor, as well as struts and nacelles for the B-52H Stratofortress. Its role in the defense industry is growing, with defense revenues reaching nearly $650 million in 2022 and a goal of hitting $1 billion by 2025.

Boeing on March 1 confirmed the potential acquisition and said the reintegration “would further strengthen aviation safety, improve quality and serve the interests of our customers, employees, and shareholders.”

The troubles with the line of MAX aircraft — most recently, the January blowout of a door on an Alaska Airlines flight — have generated new concern over Boeing and Spirit’s quality control.

But Callan believes there’s likely more motivating this possible acquisition, such as Boeing’s desire to keep a closer eye on its supply chain and manage rates of aircraft production, as well as address quality issues that have cascading effects.

“You don’t go buy a company because of one specific incident,” Callan said. “This is probably a broader set of instances. … They’ve recognized what happens when there are quality issues, delays, all the other things that were tripping up Spirit, that fundamentally impacts their ability to do business.”

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said Boeing could use its desire to increase quality oversight and exercise more control over its supply chain to support its case that federal regulators should approve a potential deal.

“That’s been somewhat problematic, especially now in light of these quality control issues, which arguably go back to Spirit in a lot of ways,” Clark said — though he also noted that “we’ve seen plenty of examples where Boeing’s quality controls” have fallen short.

Clark said a Boeing-Spirit acquisition would be an overall — albeit muted — benefit for the defense industry, by making it easier to improve their production facilities and methods.

Spirit has “started to use some new production techniques like additive manufacturing; they have a lot of experience with composites from the 787 Dreamliner,” Clark said. “Spirit’s got a lot of potential to be able to turn into this pretty high-tech supplier to a variety of programs. It’s just hard to do that as a standalone company, because you’re not dealing with a high-volume or high margin business.”

Acquiring Spirit would also “help stabilize Boeing in the defense space,” by allowing the company to contribute to more defense programs without being a prime contractor.

“As the DOD starts to shrink down the number of mainline manned aircraft programs … that means fewer and fewer opportunities for Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop to become the prime,” Clark said. “This way Boeing could be … through Spirit, a contributor to programs that they otherwise could have been locked out of.”

In the near term, Callan said, acquiring Spirit would give Boeing a piece of programs that company works on, such as the B-21 Raider stealth bomber — which Boeing lost to Northrop Grumman in 2015 — and the Bell V-280 Valor, the Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft.

Even if Boeing moves forward on its potential acquisition of Spirit, Callan said, it likely won’t boost Boeing on programs already in the works or nearing contract awards, such as the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance future fighter platform.

But when the military moves forward on subsequent aircraft programs — such as a future Air Force mobility aircraft to succeed the C-17 Globemaster or C-130 Hercules, or the replacement for the Army’s CH-47 Chinook — having Spirit in-house could bolster Boeing’s position, he added.

Callan and Clark said they doubt the Pentagon or government would object to a potential Boeing acquisition of Spirit, even though federal regulators objected to Lockheed Martin’s attempted acquisition of solid rocket motor manufacturer Aerojet Rocketdyne. Unlike the exceptionally narrow solid rocket motor market, they said, there are multiple air frame manufacturers to sustain competition if Boeing took over Spirit.

Spirit has somewhat branched out, Clark said, such as by becoming a supplier to Northrop Grumman for the B-21 and working with Airbus. But most of its business is still with Boeing, he said, and in many ways, “they stayed in Boeing’s shadow.”

Callan said the acquisition may be a boon to Spirit’s president and chief executive, Pat Shanahan, who also formerly served as acting secretary of defense and was an executive at Boeing before that. While Boeing’s chief operating officer, Stephanie Pope, is seen by many as a potential successor to current Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun, Callan said Shanahan’s experience could make him another contender.

“He would put a very different flavor to what we’ve seen in recent years,” Callan said.

But the big question, Callan said, is whether these hoped-for improvements in supply management and quality control will materialize, if an acquisition happens. It all will depend on how Boeing chooses to manage Spirit’s culture, standards and workforce, he said.

“If it’s really the beginning of a rejuvenation of their safety focus on engineering and manufacturing — that clearly somewhere along the way they lost, so if this helps that would be good,” Callan said. “But I wouldn’t say, ‘Boeing buys Spirit, all the problems go away.’ It’s too soon to tell.”

The $78 billion tax bill, sponsored by House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., includes a provision to fully restore a research and development credit Congress first enacted in 2017 as part of former President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax cuts. The House passed the bipartisan bill in January in an overwhelming 357-70 vote.

The 2017 R&D tax cuts allowed companies to immediately deduct their research and development expenses. But in 2022, the provision partially expired, meaning companies now must spread that deduction out for a minimum of five years or longer in an amortization period.

Smith’s bill would fully restore the immediate R&D tax deductions without the amortization period while allowing defense contractors and other businesses to retroactively claim the credit for 2022 as well.

Aerospace Industries Association chief executive Eric Fanning said in a statement the “critical bill provides a short-term fix to a harmful policy that has forced American businesses to cut back on R&D spending.”

The defense industry is pushing the Senate to pass it before the 2023 tax filing season ends.

“Congressional members deserve enormous credit for addressing a significant issue negatively impacting companies of all sizes and across all sectors of the U.S. defense-industrial base,” the National Defense Industrial Association said in a statement. The statement said the five-year amortization period “substantially reduced the cash flow many small businesses had available to maintain a highly qualified and specialized workforce and to accelerate their research and development investments.”

The top five biggest defense contractors — all of whom are National Defense Industrial Association members — have also lobbied Congress heavily to restore the tax credit, according to lobbying disclosure forms reviewed by Defense News.

Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman brought up the R&D tax credit every quarter while lobbying Congress last year, according to the disclosure forms. Boeing and RTX, formerly known as Raytheon Technologies, also raised tax issues every quarter.

Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman both spent at least $10 million total last year lobbying Congress. General Dynamics spent at least $12 million lobbying in total last year, while RTX spent at least $11 million and Boeing at least $14 million.

All of those companies, except Lockheed Martin, are also members of the Aerospace Industries Association.

Last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Chris DeLuzio, D-Pa., pressed defense contractors on their lobbying to restore the R&D tax credit, deriding it as “nothing but corporate handouts.” But the R&D tax credit nonetheless enjoys widespread bipartisan support.

Even so, the bill remains stalled in the Senate over unrelated issues, and the Financial Services Committee has yet to advance it amid opposition from ranking member Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho.

Crapo lambasted efforts from the House “to pressure Senate Republicans to rubber stamp” the compromise legislation “as counterproductive” in a statement last week.

“This was the risk of announcing a deal without my support and with no near-term path forward in the Senate,” said Crapo. He said he disagrees with the bill’s child tax credit policy even as he supports its measures to maintain “pro-growth” policies from the Trump tax cuts.

“That is precisely why I am still working with my Senate colleagues to reach consensus on a path forward,” Crapo added.

In the meantime, Senate Democrats are looking at possibilities to advance the bill outside the Financial Services Committee. Those options range from holding a stand-alone vote on the Senate floor to attaching it to must-pass legislation due this month. Possible legislative vehicles include the long-overdue spending bills or the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act.

Militaries and extremist groups around the world are deploying drones and other robotic technology to collect intelligence, aid targeting and even attack from relative safety. Learning how to intercept and neutralize them has quickly become a priority for Defense Department officials, who are monitoring skirmishes across Ukraine and the Greater Middle East.

The proliferation of sophisticated uncrewed systems “poses a challenge to the department and our nation’s nuclear enterprise,” Air Force Gen. Anthony Cotton said in his 2024 Strategic Posture Statement, which was sent to Congress on Feb. 29. The matter is further complicated by an “accelerating technological race with our adversaries,” namely Russia and China, he said.

Cotton’s command, headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, oversees the U.S. nuclear arsenal and supports electromagnetic operations and missile threat assessment.

STRATCOM in 2022 and 2023 tested counter-drone weaponry to better understand its effectiveness and inform future investments, Cotton said in his statement. He did not disclose results.

So-called “no drone zones” were established years ago at military bases and nuclear weapons sites, including where parts are made and maintained. A provision in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act empowered the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration to protect its facilities from drones considered hazardous to safety or security.

Houthi rebels present little threat to undersea cables, US admiral says

The zones cover sensitive compounds such as Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where nuclear-weapon cores known as pits are expected to be manufactured; the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, where uranium-processing facilities are being built; and the Nevada National Security Site, where subcritical experiments and nonproliferation research are conducted.

NNSA leadership in December visited the Nevada site, where they were shown counter-unmanned aerial system technologies.

“These capabilities are applicable across all of NNSA’s sites,” Frank Rose, the administration’s deputy, said in a statement at the time. “We are developing the tools we need not only to counter the UAS of today but also to defend against evolving threats.”

Among the equipment showcased was the Anduril Industries-made Anvil. Anvil drones zip toward a target on a collision path with the goal of knocking threats out of the sky. An explosive variant dubbed Anvil-M offers the same sort of countermeasure, but instead relies on a fire-control module and munitions payload.

Rose was also pictured in front of a screen displaying Anduril’s command-and-control Lattice software.

Five months into the fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, lawmakers have yet to pass a full FY24 budget. The uncertainty has raised concerns in the Pentagon that Congress may put the department on a one-year continuing resolution with a 1% sequester.

Without an FY24 defense budget, the Pentagon remains unable to implement new modernization programs and cannot take new steps to expand the defense-industrial base amid wars in Europe and the Middle East.

“The lack of full-year funding has put key government programs in purgatory, wasted taxpayer money on outdated budgets and hindered forward progress that will make the country more secure, push us to the next levels of technological advancement and support American competitiveness in key industries like aerospace,” Aerospace Industries Association chief executive Eric Fanning said in a statement.

The House voted 320-99 to pass its fourth temporary spending measure, and the Senate followed suit shortly thereafter in a 77-13 vote. Under the latest stopgap spending bill, funds appropriated for Veterans Affairs and military construction will expire on March 8, two weeks before Defense Department funding runs out.

Congress is expected to vote on the FY24 Veterans Affairs and military construction spending bill next week. But lawmakers have yet to finalize the FY24 Pentagon spending bill.

The right-wing House Freedom Caucus has insisted on several policy riders in the appropriations bill that Democrats have ruled out as poison pills, including bans on the Pentagon’s abortion travel leave policy and medical care for transgender troops.

Last year’s debt ceiling deal caps FY24 defense spending at $886 billion. If Congress does not pass a full FY24 federal budget by April 30, the debt ceiling agreement puts government funding on a one-year continuing resolution that would cut spending at the Pentagon and all other federal agencies by 1%.

Pentagon sounds the alarm

The undersecretaries of the Navy, Army and Air Force told reporters Wednesday a one-year stopgap funding measure at FY23 levels would result in billions of dollars in “misaligned” funds at the Defense Department.

To cope with a one-year stopgap measure, they said the Defense Department would first have to prioritize current operations in places like Europe and the Middle East, followed by personnel, then acquisition and modernization.

Navy Under Secretary Erik Raven noted this would result in the military submitting “unprecedented” reprogramming requests to Congress. The Navy, for instance, would need Congress to approve a $13 billion reprogramming request to address $26 billion in misaligned funds.

It would also result in a $2 billion shortfall for the Virginia-class attack submarine program and another $800 million shortfall for amphibious ship spending. Congress has provided a $2.2 billion carveout for the Navy to continue work on the Columbia-class ballistic submarine program, most at risk of falling behind schedule.

Other services would not be able to begin new initiatives either, including a highly prioritized munitions ramp-up following the influx of arms the U.S. has sent to Ukraine and Israel with more due for Taiwan.

“These are production rate increases, new starts — both in programs for acquisition as well as military construction projects — that we cannot start,” said Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo.

Congress has still not funded the multiyear munitions procurement plans it authorized for FY23 and FY24, and Camarillo noted those funds are needed “to give industry the incentive to be able to facilitize, invest in a workforce and be able to do those extra shifts that we know that we need in order to restore our munitions.”

The $95 billion foreign aid bill for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan also includes considerable funding to ramp up the munitions-industrial base. But House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has so far refused to put it on the floor for a vote after the Senate passed it 70-29 earlier this month.

For its part, the Air Force warned earlier this month a 1% sequester would reduce its buying power by $13 billion and put $2.8 billion in space modernization projects on hold.

The U.K. arms of Belgian-based company Rhea and American firm Lockheed Martin won separate contracts, cumulatively worth £4 million (U.S. $5 million).

The deals were announced Feb. 14, although both contractors have worked on their potential offerings since mid-2023, when they were selected from six firms initially tasked to undertake work on what is known as Project Beroe.

The amount of money involved may be small, but the outcome of the research and development work by the two companies could be key, according to Commodore David Moody, the head of capability at UK Space Command.

“This is a pivotal moment for UK Defence and the UK Space Sector as we develop software and partnerships that will determine the future of how we manage our activities in space,” Moody said in a statement released at the time of the announcement. “This project will enable us to define and understand how we will control and optimise the use of our satellites in a safe and sustainable way and is an important part of UK MOD’s future satellite aspirations.”

The 20-month-long contracts are scheduled to conclude in March 2025. There is no public timeline regarding the possible acquisition or future development phases of the software.

Existing British satellite control is focused around the Skynet 5 communications spacecraft network but Project Beroe is expected to enable satellite taskings from a much wider group of government entities and satellite types, individually or in concert.

Project Beroe is not directly related to Skynet and will support future non-Skynet satellite constellations like the low-Earth orbit ISTARI and Minerva programs.

Together, ISTARI and Minerva are to form the building blocks of a low-Earth orbit ISR capability for the British military.

ISTARI is a 10-year, £968 million program planned to deliver a multi-satellite system supporting surveillance and intelligence gathering for military operations.

Minerva is a £127 million project to develop four concept demonstrator satellites: Titania, Tyche, Oberon and Juno.

Tyche, which is the first of the four to launch, is scheduled to enter orbit this year. The Minerva group is meant to demonstrate the ability to autonomously collect, process and disseminate data from British and allied space assets, and this will inform how the ISTARI project moves forward.

Both programs are part of a planned £6.4 billion fund spread out over 10 years, as announced by the MoD when it rolled out its space defense strategy in 2022.

At a cost of about £5 billion, the lion’s share of that spending will go toward the procurement of a new generation of satellites and ground facilities under the Skynet 6 program.

Airbus is already building the first of those satellites, known as Skynet 6A, and a further competition is underway to provide a new generation of narrowband and wideband satellites under the Skynet 6 banner.

Defense News reported earlier this month that Banco do Brasil declared its intention to stop financing defense companies, citing governance and sustainability policies.

The U-turn follows a meeting held Feb. 26 involving the bank’s president, Tarciana Medeiros; Brazil’s vice president and the minister of development, industry, commerce and services, Geraldo Alckmin; the minister of the civil house, Rui Costa; and the defense minister, José Múcio Monteiro.

“The decision will prevent losses to companies in the sector that were at risk of losing contracts and will contribute to the sustainability and autonomy of the Defense Industrial Base,” the Ministry of Development, Industry, Commerce and Services said in a statement this week.

The ministry noted the latest decision reinforces the importance of structured financial policies that ensure “not only the economic viability of companies but also national security and sovereignty.”

If the bank had gone through with its initial plan, the move would have impacted many Brazilian defense players and the Proex program — a government mechanism, managed by the bank, that provides resources for domestic companies exporting goods and services.

The Brazilian defense contractor Mac Jee has celebrated the decision.

“The Mac Jee Group believes that this measure is a crucial step towards the sustainability and autonomy of our Defense Industrial Base,” the company said in a statement. “The initiative also ensures the preservation of vital contracts for companies in the sector, contributing to the generation of foreign exchange and jobs in the country, in addition to strengthening national security and sovereignty.”

Banco do Brasil declined to comment for this story.

Anduril, serving as the prime contractor, plans to deliver “a modified, autonomy-ready Uncrewed Ground Vehicle (UGV) based on Hanwha’s proven Arion-SMET platform, which has already demonstrated its performance in highly-relevant and varied environments in the Indo-Pacific, including the latest Foreign Comparative Testing with the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in Hawaii,” the companies said in a Feb. 29 statement.

The Army chose General Dynamics Land Systems’ Multi-Utility Tactical Transport, or MUTT, for its SMET unmanned ground system in a first increment of the program. The $162.4 million contract, awarded in October 2019, would wrap up at the end of October 2024. GDLS won another follow-on contract in 2020.

Now the service has opened bids for the second increment of the program intended to carry gear and light payloads to decrease the burden to soldiers in the field. The Army is pursuing two major robotic combat vehicle platforms simultaneously: the Robotic Combat Vehicle meant to fight alongside Stryker and Bradley vehicles, and the SMET, which is likely to accompany lighter formations.

Anduril and the U.S. arm of South Korean defense firm Hanwha will also be working with Forterra, formerly RRAI, to incorporate its AutoDrive vehicle autonomy solution “to enable complex on and off-road maneuvers,” the statement reads.

“By combining Anduril’s electronics and software, Hanwha Defense USA’s proven hardware, and Forterra’s proven off-road vehicle autonomy stack, the partnership will bring speed, flexibility, and advanced capabilities to dismounted infantry,” Zach Mears, head of strategy at Anduril, said in the statement. “With a simplified user interface powered by Lattice, users will be able to quickly and easily command and control the S-MET to support lethal effects at the tactical edge.”

Lattice is Anduril’s software originally designed to counter drones and other threats, but has wider applicability for sharing battlefield information and data at a tactical level. Anduril is also teamed with American Rheinmetall Vehicles in the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle competition underway to eventually replace the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, bringing its Lattice capability to that effort as well.

The capability, Anduril states, will allow soldiers to operate the vehicle, manage payloads and communicate simultaneously in “complex environments.”

The team is focused on load-carrying, power generation capacity, reduced sustainment, survivability and a modular architecture for a wide array of payloads, the release details.

The robotic vehicle will have a low acoustic signature, “ensuring that it serves as an asset, not liability on the modern battlefield,” the statement adds.

Other expected competitors are Teledyne FLIR, GDLS, Rheinmetall, with teammate ST Engineering, and HDT.

Teledyne FLIR announced its bid in October at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

The Army has tightly held details on the competition such as the timeline for evaluating and choosing winners and what comes after and has not posted any solicitations on the public domain for federal contract opportunities, Sam.gov.

The service is focused on rigorous experimentation with robots and emerging technology to develop integrated fighting formations of both humans and robots. The Army calls it “human-machine integration” and is evaluating exactly how robotic technologies can be coupled with the best of what humans can bring to the table on the battlefield.

The U.S. military may run out of personnel funds before the end of the year, be forced to scale back operations and see ongoing modernization efforts harmed if Congress fails to pass a defense spending bill by the end of next week, service leaders warned Tuesday.

The undersecretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force said they’d have billions of dollars in “misaligned” funds — money that exists but not in the right budget lines to support their current spending needs — if they’re stuck with a full-year continuing resolution that keeps fiscal 2023 spending levels through the rest of 2024.

They agree that they’d have to prioritize current operations first, then people and then acquisition and modernization in a CR.

“You see sailors and Marines across the globe today, performing important missions: the Red Sea is an excellent example of how current operations take precedence,” Navy Under Secretary Erik Raven told reporters at the Pentagon.

Without sufficient funds, he said, “we have to make tough choices. But between the ability to fight tonight and be ready for all the threats, versus preparing for the future and modernizing our forces — it is a tough decision, but we have to lay our chips somewhere, and that’s on the ability to perform our missions today.”

Raven said the Navy’s ability to make that prioritization, though, would require Congress to grant the services some “unprecedented flexibilities” in the form of massive reprogrammings, or moving money from one line item into another.

The Navy, for example, would have $26 billion in the wrong places, and would need Congress to approve $13 billion in formal reprogrammings — more than twice the money Congress approves for the entire Defense Department in a typical year, he said.

But the reprogramming frenzy would be vital to mitigate the risk the services would take in their modernization efforts and industry would face if contracts are delayed or nixed altogether.

The Army is facing a similar misalignment in funds, to the tune of $6 billion.

“These are production rate increases, new starts — both in programs for acquisition as well as military construction projects that we cannot start,” Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo said.

The Air Force’s misalignment in funds equates to over $13 billion and “impacts are particularly challenging in the Space Force, who has seen their budgets rising over the last couple of years,” Air Force Under Secretary Jones said.

‘Burning hotter’

Further complicating funding this fiscal year is the fact that Congress has yet to pass a sweeping supplemental request, which the Pentagon hoped would supply weapons to Ukraine and Israel in support of ongoing wars for both countries and would also fund the Southwest border mission. The lack of supplemental funding compounds the impact of a long-term CR, Camarillo said.

The Army is spending $500 million out of its base budget for operations costs in the European theater, another $100 million in the U.S. Central Command area of operations and another $500 million for the operations along the U.S. Southwest border.

“At one point in time, there was a thought that all of this could be funded through a supplemental, and it is now currently, today, in FY24, being funded 100% out of the Army’s base budget,” Camarillo said.

“We are just burning hotter than we normally would across all of our appropriations accounts,” he said. “[U.S. Army Europe and Africa] in Germany has explained that … they will run out of money this summer in the absence of extraordinary relief, aka a reprogramming.”

This will be a problem across the board, he added, to include running out of funds in the Army’s military personnel account.

Industry impacts

The services planned to ramp up munitions spending in FY24, to bolster their own stockpiles as a hedge against a future fight and to replenish allies’ and partners’ stocks.

A year-long CR puts that industry ramp-up in peril.

Camarillo said he was “particularly concerned” the CR would not allow the services to “send that strong signal to give industry the incentive to be able to facilitize, invest in a workforce and be able to do those extra shifts that we know that we need in order to restore our munitions.”

Camarillo said the Army intended to kick off a multiyear procurement effort for the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (PAC-3 MSE) interceptors in FY24. Under a full-year CR, it would be $1.2 billion short to reach the production rates needed to achieve the economic order quantities and savings associated with the multiyear procurement deal.

Lockheed Martin has invested significantly in the PAC-3 MSE line to grow production from 550 missiles per year to 650. The Army requested in its FY24 budget $775 million to ramp up that production. The company intends to grow production beyond 650 in the following year, as demand increases due to the war in Ukraine and conflict in the Middle East.

Camarillo added the Army could not begin to field its Mid Range Capability missile to the first unit, which is important to its Pacific deterrence, due to new programs not being allowed to start under continuing resolutions. Nor could it increase production levels for the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, Javelin missile, and 155mm munitions.

“I will just say that we have always said our goal was to get on 155 artillery 100,000 per month rounds by the end of calendar year ‘25. We cannot get there unless we get both the appropriation and we get the supplemental,” Camarillo said.

“It’s very challenging, because we’re asking industry to lean as far forward as they possibly can and to make investments both in additional personnel, unique tooling and machining that’s required to ramp up production capacity,” Camarillo said.

And the Army planned to buy 225 Coyote counter-unmanned aerial system interceptors – a spending need that hits home, he said, due to the recent deaths of three soldiers in Jordan who were killed by a drone strike from Iran-backed militants — but those, too, could not be purchased in a year-long CR.

For the Navy, Raven said the sea service wanted to double its Standard Missile 6 spending — something particularly timely, as Navy ships are expending the older SM-2 missiles almost daily in the Red Sea, shooting down Houthi missiles and drones — but that cannot happen under the full-year CR.

After the Navy just last week awarded a maintenance contract to HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding to overhaul the attack submarine Boise – which has languished at the pier since 2015 and has been unable to undergo repairs at either a public or private repair yard – Raven said a full-year CR would render the Navy unable to actually fund and execute that contract this year due to a $600 million shortfall in the submarine maintenance funds.

It would also see a $800 million shortfall in amphibious ship spending that could put at risk America-class amphibious assault ship construction, a $2 billion shortfall in submarine construction spending that would threaten the Virginia-class attack sub program, and more.

For the Air Force, Kristyn Jones, who is performing the duties of the under secretary of the Air Force, said the service has five contractors onboard for its collaborative combat aircraft effort, but that wouldn’t be able to move forward.

The full-year CR would also hamper production increases on the Joint Strike Missile and the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter, both of which the Air Force says it needs for a high-end fight, as well as spending on the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile for facilitization to support future production increases.

“We hear over and over: the industry wants that solid demand signal so they know how to invest, they can support the facilitization — and by having this uncertainty, it really has negative impacts across the defense industrial base,” Jones said.

ST Engineering signed the deals for MRO work during last week’s Singapore Airshow. They cover Airbus’ C-295 medium transport aircraft and Embraer’s C-390 Millennium airlifter.

ST Engineering has experience providing MRO services to the Republic of Singapore Air Force’s legacy aircraft, including A-4SU Super Skyhawk jets, a company representative told Defense News.

The firm has also performed MRO services for Airbus’ commercial line and conducted freighter conversions, but the recent agreement looks to expand work to the C-295, which will include depot-level maintenance.

Airbus executives said they have been looking for MRO partners in Asia, where 28 C-295 are currently in service with armed forces in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei and Bangladesh. The agreement with ST Engineering would only cover C-295 aircraft in the Asia-Pacific region, Airbus told with Defense News, and will not include aircraft from Bangladesh.

The C-295 can be used for surveillance and maritime patrol missions. The French firm Airbus anticipates an increase in C-295 orders following a rising demand for surveillance aircraft in the region.

A spokesperson from ST Engineering told Defense News the firm has not yet finalized the specific C-295 variants involved in the MRO collaboration.

Brazilian company Embraer signed a memorandum of understanding on MRO collaboration with ST Engineering for the C-390. An ST Engineering spokesperson told Defense News via email that the agreement covers engineering, support services and maintenance for the aircraft.

Embraer has not yet announced sales in Southeast Asia but anticipates demand for the C-390 airlifter. The two firms will also cooperate on radars and land systems; border security; simulation; advanced production technologies; command-and-control, communications and computer technologies; and intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance, according to a news release.

Meanwhile, ST Engineering’s defense aviation services division announced a first-time collaboration with American company Honeywell amid ongoing overhaul work for two C-130s in service with the Tunisian Air Force.

The long-time agreement between the two companies will see Honeywell provide hardware and engineering support to ST Engineering for the Tunisian aircraft. This includes the integration of Honeywell’s Cockpit Display System Retrofit, a system composed of up to five large-format LCD color displays that provide flight controls, air data and altitude sensors.

SINGAPORE — American company Honeywell has signed an agreement with PT Dirgantara Indonesia to provide avionics and mechanical products to a planned Black Hawk helicopter program.

The memorandum of agreement, inked during the Singapore Airshow last week, includes the integration of Honeywell’s weather radar system into the Sikorsky S-70M Black Hawk GFA-type transport helicopters. PTDI will assemble the helicopters at Bandung under a manufacturing license for the Indonesian Defense Ministry.

In August, PTDI and Sikorsky, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, entered into an industrial arrangement for the ministry to procure the Black Hawks. PTDI did not disclose the number of helicopters under the deal with Sikorsky in August, but the ministry revealed during the air show that the contract covers 24 helicopters.

The agreement between PTDI and Honeywell also includes the localization of maintenance, repair and overhaul services for Honeywell’s avionics and mechanical systems as well as the manufacturing of a harness assembly.

While the helicopters have yet to be completed, Honeywell is working with PTDI to provide technologies to elevate and sustain the aircraft, according to Sathesh Ramiah, vice president for Honeywell’s defense and space business in the Asia-Pacific region.

PTDI wanted to minimize maintenance periods for the helicopters and ensure they meet the needs of the armed forces, Ramiah told Defense News. “That’s something we signed and continue to work with PTDI in terms of expanding other technologies from the sustainment side.”

The two companies have previously collaborated on the Indonesian Air Force’s CN-235 twin-engine transport aircraft and CN-212 medium cargo aircraft manufactured under license by PTDI.