The agency, for the first time in roughly 20 years, did not provide a public briefing on its budget request at the Pentagon. A budget summary provided by the Defense Department March 11 lacked a breakdown of how much the agency is asking for research and development, procurement, operations and maintenance and military construction.

However, for the next fiscal year, the agency said its most significant investments are focused on homeland defense and protecting the strategically important island of Guam from air and missile defense threats in the Pacific.

Here’s how the proposed spending compares to budgets past:

♦ MDA is requesting $2.7 billion to advance its Next Generation Interceptor development effort as well as upgrade and replace Ground-based Midcourse Defense system components and infrastructure, improve fire control and kill vehicle software and buy long lead items for the Phased Array In-Flight Communication System Data Terminal retrofits. The agency did not lay out specifically how much of the funding would go toward NGI development or GMD system improvements.

Two teams — Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne as well as Northrop Grumman and Raytheon — are competing to develop NGI, which will replace the current ground-based interceptors in the GMD system, which is designed to protect the United States from intercontinental ballistic missiles from North Korea and Iran.

A year ago, the agency asked for a total of $3.2 billion for the effort, which included $2.1 billion for NGI, $903.6 million for GMD upgrades and operations and another $41.8 million in testing and $174.8 million in maintenance.

♦ MDA wants to spend $1.2 billion on the defense of Guam in FY25, more than twice what the agency asked for in FY24. Funding would go toward developing and buying Aegis systems tailored for ground-based sites on the island and Vertical Launch Systems. Some of the money would also support a complete environmental impact study and construction on a Command Center Complex, a Transportable Array Unit Complex and a launcher field complex, the document lists.

♦ The agency is asking for $1.2 billion to buy 12 SM-3 Block IIA missiles and SM-3 Block IB spares but will not buy any additional SM-3 Block 1B missiles. Software capability development will continue to upgrade the ability for Aegis ships to take on the new AN/SPY-6 radar, designed to better track more advanced threats.

♦ The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, an anti-ballistic missile defense system, would get a small boost in MDA’s budget in FY25 compared to a year ago. The agency is asking for $732 million to continue developing interceptor capability and weapon system performance against more advanced threats, to buy 12 THAAD interceptors and to start engineering to integrate THAAD into the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System architecture.

The agency asked for $574 million for THAAD including buying 11 interceptors in FY24.

♦ Funding for development of the Glide Phase Interceptor dropped by $27 million to $182 million in FY25. MDA requested $209 million last year. The interceptor, which would defend against hypersonic missiles farther away from intended targets, is in a competitive preliminary design phase.

♦ MDA continues to request funding for its Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor and the Space-based Kill Assessment. The agency wants $120 million to continue the HBTSS on-orbit demonstration, which is designed to track and target hypersonic threats. The HBTSS launched into space on Feb. 14.

♦ The agency wants to buy an additional AN/TPY-2 radar and sustain its other 12 radar systems to “improve discrimination capabilities.” The radars are positioned around the globe to help track ballistic missile threats. MDA is asking for $587 million in FY25.

As the agency looks to transfer the Long Range Discrimination Radar to the U.S. Space Force, it is asking for $105 million, which would also include software development to improve discrimination capabilities.

♦ The Command and Control, Battle Management and Communications system, which provides the C2 for MDA’s global missile defense architecture, would get $517 million in FY25 to expand its ability to track hypersonic threats and tie into space sensors with views of advanced threats. The system would also support tying into the LRDR, according to the summary.

The agency is also budgeting nearly a billion dollars to fund threat representative targets and major tests including an experimental test of the initial defense of Guam architecture, Aegis Sea-Based Terminal test firing of an SM-6 against a hypersonic glide vehicle and an intercept test of the SM-3 Block IIA missile against a medium-range ballistic missile with exo-atmospheric countermeasures, the summary details.

While briefing reporters on the Pentagon’s new budget request, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said her signature initiative would cost a planned $1 billion, divided evenly between fiscal years 2024 and 2025.

Hicks debuted Replicator in August. The goal is to field thousands of drones while at the same time honing a process to do it all over again for other tech in the future. In her briefing, Hick emphasized that second aim, noting the first round of the program is intended to help the military services innovate faster and in larger numbers.

Whatever programs follow early Replicator work will likely require additional funding, she said.

“It is my fervent view that [the] follow-on to that is a significant investment potential that is not about Replicator,” she said. “That is about what the services are going to be able to do on autonomy once we’re able to lower those barriers through that initial investment.”

Just after Hicks finished speaking, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord detailed how the department might get the $1 billion.

There are two options. First, Congress could include the first $500 million in its long-delayed FY24 Pentagon budget. Working toward this goal, McCord said, Hicks has been speaking with the defense committees on Capitol Hill.

The backup plan, McCord said, is a reprogramming request — in which the Pentagon asks the defense committees for permission to shift money around in its budget.

In FY25, the $500 million for Replicator is already in the budget. McCord, though, did not say where that money is, other than to say it’s classified.

In a briefing Friday, Rear Adm. Ben Reynolds, the Navy’s budget deputy, told reporters multiple times the service’s request includes funding for Replicator projects.

Days after the briefing, a spokesman from the service issued a correction. Reynolds, it said, “conflated” money intended for other projects with money for Replicator.

“We are not currently discussing specific numbers associated with Replicator,” the correction read.

The Army in a separate briefing with reporters wouldn’t comment on its share of the program. And an Air Force spokesperson confirmed the service wouldn’t be spending any money on it in the coming fiscal year.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s overall budget slides say “Replicator does not have a specific funding line,” though “the FY 2025 Budget includes resources to boost the number of Replicator investments.”

This followed a page focused on other Pentagon innovation programs — each listing a specific dollar figure.

The Pentagon’s stated reason for its ambiguity around the program is that it doesn’t want China to know what it’s up to. Some in Congress and the defense industry have criticized that ambiguity, saying it’s not yet clear whether Replicator is more than a good idea with ambitious goals.

McCord said that posture will likely stay the same for now.

“We’re leaning on the side of not disclosing the details until we are confident that that’s what the deputy secretary wants to do,” he said.

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 U.S. Navy’s fiscal 2025 budget request includes money for one Virginia-class attack submarine instead of the planned two, but still represents “a prioritization and very significant investment in undersea warfare capabilities,” the service’s undersecretary said Friday, arguing this is not contradictory.

The Navy has been buying its attack subs at a rate of two per year since FY11, but industry has not kept up in recent years, delivering closer to an average of 1.2 boats annually. The service spent $2.3 billion from FY18 to FY23 to change that, hoping to not only get industry up to an on-time delivery rate of two per year, but then to a rate between 2.3 and 2.5 to support the AUKUS submarine partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom.

The Navy, business leaders and lawmakers have all highlighted stable funding as a key to helping industry bolster its output. And yet, in a fiscal year with a top line capped by law and in which the Navy had to delay several major shipbuilding and modernization efforts, the sea service chose to save some $4 billion in the FY25 spending plan by nixing the second Virginia sub.

“We did reduce the funding to one Virginia-class submarine in FY25. But we maintain the funding for nine out of the planned 10 Virginia class” during the five-year Future Years Defense Program, or FYDP, Under Secretary Erik Raven told reporters.

The one FY25 boat will be the first of a new Block VI design. Navy budget books refer to seeking a nine-sub multiyear procurement contract for Block VI.

“In addition, we make significant investments in the submarine-industrial base. During last year’s budget rollout, I talked about $2.4 billion in submarine-industrial base investments that were planned over the FYDP. In this year’s budget, we plan an additional $8.8 billion on top of what was already programmed across the FYDP,” he added.

Raven said the FY25 budget also maintains its planned advance procurement for future submarines, which is “incredibly important in terms of supporting the supplier base to set themselves up for the needed production rate for Virginia class.”

And in the longer term, he explained, the Navy in last year’s long-range shipbuilding plan showed an intention to buy one boat a year in each of FY30 and FY31.

Now, the Navy believes it can buy two boats in each of those years, which will be reflected when the long-range shipbuilding plan comes out later this spring, he added.

“So taken as a whole, this budget presents a significant investment in the undersea capability area, and we feel like these are absolutely the needed moves to make sure that we’re set up for the long term, for success in both Virginia and the Columbia program,” he said, the latter being the ballistic missile submarine that the Navy still calls its top spending priority.

Rear Adm. Ben Reynolds, the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for the budget, said Friday the total submarine-industrial base funding would be $3.9 billion in FY25 alone. That doesn’t include the cost of buying actual submarines, but rather the funds being poured into the supply chain to help vendors hire and train workers, retool existing facilities and build new ones, invest in additive manufacturing, and more.

That one-year sum is $1.5 billion more than the Navy planned to spend across the entire five-year FYDP last year, showing how thorny a challenge this has been and how important it remains to future American and AUKUS alliance needs.

However, the Navy also asked for $3.3 billion more in the supplemental funding package that stalled in Congress. The package was meant to fund support to Ukraine and Israel, operations at the U.S.-Mexico border, and other emerging defense needs — including submarine-industrial base support, couched as pivotal to deterring China from attacking Taiwan.

Neither the FY24 defense spending bill nor the supplemental spending bill have passed Congress, so it’s unclear when or if any of that money will make it to the supply chain.

Reynolds said this massive spending for a targeted segment of the industrial base “gets us up to that place where we can get to one-plus-two [Columbia and Virginia production rates] towards the end of the FYDP.” That fund would total at least $16.8 billion by FY29 if everything, including the FY24 budget and supplemental, were to pass.

At least one member of Congress is pushing back. Rep. Joe Courtney, a Connecticut Democrat whose district includes the General Dynamics’ Electric Boat submarine construction yard, said Monday the reduced buy in FY25 “demands the highest scrutiny by the Congress” because it “contradicts the Department’s own National Defense [Industrial] Strategy issued January 11, 2024, which identified ‘procurement stability’ as critical to achieve resilient supply chains.”

Still, Raven, in a Monday afternoon briefing, maintained the Navy’s choice is best for industry.

“We removed one Virginia-class out of concern for the industrial base ability to produce yet one more, while in a capped environment making headroom for these historic investments in the submarine-industrial base,” he said.

The top line for national defense is $895.2 billion, and the Pentagon’s share of that will be just under $850 billion. These figures are lower than projected in the request for fiscal 2024, due to a deal struck to avoid a government default.

That deal capped spending for the upcoming fiscal year, amounting to a small drop in defense funding when adjusted for inflation. Hence the inevitable question leading up to this year’s request was what accounts would have to slim down. The answer is mainly those for procurement and research, development, testing and evaluation. The previous year’s ask for those accounts was $315 billion. This year’s is $310.7 billion, and that doesn’t account for inflation.

Divided out, the total includes $167.5 billion for procurement and $143.2 billion for RDT&E for FY25. Among the weapons systems trimmed to reach that lower-than-planned number are a Virginia-Class nuclear-powered submarine and a slew of F-35 fighter jets. The request for munitions also fell slightly — to $29.8 billion from $30.6 billion in FY24.

Every year’s budget request is a planned, but not final, roadmap that adjusts to direction from Congress. This year’s is even less certain, since the FY24 budget cycle has yet to close and could force more detours.

Congress has yet to pass an FY24 defense budget, now almost six months into the government fiscal year, which started Oct. 1. For the Pentagon, this presents two major risks: a full-year continuing resolution and the threat of a sequester. According to last year’s default deal, if lawmakers fail to pass all of their annual spending bills by April 30, there will be an automatic government-wide spending cut of 1%.

At the same time, the Pentagon is also trying to plan around a mammoth national security supplemental that’s also frozen in Congress. The bill contains billions in aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan along with money for the American defense industry. The department is counting on that money in part to continue support its partners in need during wartime and to pay back some of its own bills. Those include a more costly force presence in Europe during the war in Ukraine and some of the cost incurred by U.S. Central Command after war broke out in the Middle East.

The department has about a $10 billion bill outstanding to replenish munitions sent to its partners around the world, said a senior defense official briefing reporters on the budget.

“The big issue before us is: Is Congress going to pass the supplemental or not?” the official said.

Last week, at a conference hosted by the defense analysts McAleese and Associates in Washington, ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee Rob Wittman, R-Va, said that the House wouldn’t act on that supplemental until its other spending bills have passed.

And while the Pentagon hasn’t drafted another supplemental request in this budget, it may well need one this year to pay for its bills being totaled in Europe and the Middle East.

“That would be a later decision,” the official said.

A blip or a trend?

Because of the confusion around this fiscal year’s budget, the department had to make careful assumptions about how Congress will act in the near future.

One example is aid to Taiwan. For the first time, the official said, the FY25 budget includes funding to replace weapons sent to Taiwan, starting at $500 million. The official said the Pentagon would have preferred to make that closer to $1 billion — the yearly amount its allowed to donate — but was more conservative because of this year’s spending caps.

The $500 million will go to Taiwan regardless of whether Congress gives the department extra money to do so — like a vacation that would come out of one’s saving account if they didn’t get a raise. There’s money for such a drawdown in the supplemental, and the department is framing its own commitment as a gesture to Congress.

“We, knowing that the authorization [to donate kit to Taiwan] is there and wanting to show that we agree with it, have made the decision to put some money in whether or not the supplemental passes,” the official said.

Another case is the Pentagon’s account for munitions. The previous budget requested money to issue a set of seven long-term contracts for precision weapons in an effort to give the defense industry a steadier long-term commitment. This budget assumes that Congress will approve those five-year contracts, the official said, and hence doesn’t ask for any more.

“With almost everything [we are] not trying to guess exactly what they’re going to do but have predicated that they’re ... going to largely approve what we asked for,” the official said.

Perhaps the biggest assumption is the department’s expectations for its budget in future years. The slide used to show their estimates is nearly the same as the previous year’s, except instead of a steady rise from FY24 on it has a divot that reflects this year’s spending caps.

But the ceiling only lasts one year, and the Pentagon plans to return to funding projections from before the default deal going forward. In other words, the department considers its FY25 top line a blip not a trend.

“We don’t have any insight into what that next two-year [debt ceiling] deal might look like, so that could get revisited,” the official said. “But our message is that we need to get back on plan.”

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters March 8 that the smaller budget request – which is, like the rest of the Defense Department, constrained by funding limits set in the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act — means the service won’t be able move as fast as he’d like to build more resilient systems that can counter space threats from China and Russia.

“China has fielded a combination of anti-satellite capabilities and space-based targeting capabilities — so they’re threatening our space assets and they’re threatening our joint force,” he said during an embargoed media briefing. “We’ve got to respond to that. . . . I’d like to move faster on that than we currently are.”

The Space Force’s budget has nearly doubled since it was created in December 2019. Its fiscal year 2021 request for $15.4 billion jumped to $30 billion by FY-24. That growth was due largely to the consolidation of space systems and personnel under the service’s purview.

Service officials, including former Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David Thompson, have said the Space Force’s funding must continue to increase as it takes on new responsibilities and missions.

“The budget needs to grow because there are still more missions that are migrating to space,” Thompson told C4ISRNET in December. “The challenge is, in this environment, defense budgets are likely not to grow significantly in the near future the way they have in the recent past. "

Kendall said the service is making progress toward improving the resilience of its systems. He pointed to the shift toward building smaller satellites in large quantities across key mission areas like missile warning and communications.

However, he wants to be able to invest more in other mission areas — like positioning, navigation and timing — and improve the service’s portfolio of offensive space programs, which are largely classified.

“We need to find a way to have PNT be more resilient, and I think there are some additional communications things that we need to do,” he said.

Funding modernization

The largest portion of the Space Force’s spending request, $18.7 billion, would fund the development of satellites, ground systems and other supporting technology and modernization of existing capabilities. That’s about $300 million less than FY24, due in part to the Space Force’s classified portfolio.

According to Kendall, a portion of the service’s FY25 budget is part of a separate account known as “pass-through” funding, which typically goes to outside organizations like the intelligence community. Kendall would not confirm whether or how much Space Force funding had shifted from its base budget to this account, but said that part of the service’s smaller request is owed to some of its funding being tagged as pass-through money.

Elsewhere in its research and developing account, the Space Force requests $4.7 billion to develop satellites in multiple orbits that can spot and warn of traditional and advanced missile threats.

Within that portfolio, the service proposes $2.1 billion for the Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared program. The effort is the successor to today’s Space-Based Infrared System, which detects and tracks ballistic missiles. It includes two satellites built by Lockheed Martin that will reside in geostationary orbit, about 22,000 miles above Earth, and two Northrop Grumman-built polar satellites destined for a highly elliptical orbit.

The Space Force also wants $2.6 billion for its Resilient Missile Warning and Tracking program, which aims to field satellites in low Earth orbit, about 1,200 miles above the planet, and medium Earth orbit, at an altitude of between 1,200 and 22,000 miles.

Funding for the MEO portion of the program would support initial satellite development and ground support. The LEO funding, which sits around $1.7 billion, would go toward the Space Development Agency’s efforts to launch 28 satellites in FY25.

Another $1.7 billion would support other SDA activities, including expansion of the agency’s fleet of communications, or data transport, satellites.

The Space Force’s request includes $1 billion for the Evolved Strategic Satellite Communications program, which is developing secure, survivable communications capabilities for strategic missions. The satellites are designed to withstand nuclear attack, and the service wants to award a contract and begin production in 2025.

The request also calls for $237 million to start a new program, Protected Tactical SATCOM Global. Initial budget documents did not describe the effort in detail.

The Space Force’s $4.3 billion procurement account — which is about $400 million smaller than it was in fiscal 2024 — would fund 11 launches, down from 15 planned missions in FY24. Four of those launches will carry SDA satellites and the remaining 7 will be for Space Force missions.

Another $527 million, if approved, will buy two GPS IIIF satellites, a modernized version of navigation spacecraft designed to provide better accuracy and anti-jam capabilities. The service expects to start launching the satellites in 2027.

The service is asking for $175.4 billion in its base budget and another $10.5 billion to pay for overseas operations.

The FY25 budget levels also presume the passage of supplemental funding by Congress to cover the costs of providing military aid to Ukraine and to support increased operations in the Middle East. The most recent supplemental package passed the Senate but is stuck in limbo waiting for a House vote.

The Army is canceling several modernization programs and truncating some procurement across the future years defense program, but it is not making those cuts in order to stay in line with congressionally mandated budget gaps, Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo said in a March 8 briefing with reporters at the Pentagon. The service made “some very difficult tradeoffs, particularly as we’re trying to maintain pace on modernization,” he said.

“We’re trying to fully fund our military personnel account,” he said, “but at the same time, we wanted to make a significant investment in barracks and housing, so areas, for example, that we had to potentially look at are other areas of [operations & maintenance] spend[ing] that are not tied to readiness.”

And the service will continue to prioritize readiness and modernization geared toward operating in the Indo-Pacific theater as part of a larger strategy to deter China’s aggression in the region. Its share of the Pacific Deterrence Initiative in FY25 would be $1.5 billion. The Army would fund $461 million in FY25 for its Operation Pathways exercises, for example, and is asking for $602 million in research and development and $2.8 billion in procurement to field integrated air and missile defense capability in part to support the defense of Guam.

Additionally, “the Pacific focus leads to more investments in longer range, precision munitions,” Army acquisition chief Doug Bush said in the same briefing.

Protecting people

“Overall, the [FY]25 budget funds the needs of our soldiers, $70.7 billion in military personnel funding to account for all increases in basic pay, housing and subsistence,” Camarillo said. The Army is investing $900 million more in FY25 in its personnel account over FY24.

Continuing to acknowledge its recruiting challenges, the service is planning on an active-duty end-strength of 442,300 soldiers. In FY24, the Army requested funding for an active-duty force of 452,000 troops.

Army National Guard end-strength will remain the same as it was in the service’s FY24 budget request – a total of 325,000 – and the Army Reserves will grow to 175,800, an increase of 1,000 reservists over FY24 budget request levels.

The service is investing in recruiting to include the expansion of the Future Soldier Prep Course, improved recruiter selection and training and other efforts to redesign its recruiting workforce. And the Army plans to spend $1.1 billion for marketing and advertising in FY25.

Military housing improvements were a top priority in the FY25 budget, Camarillo noted, including $935 million for new barracks construction at nine sites, up by 41% from the FY24 request. “Barracks and sustainment is funded to 100% for the first time ever, at least in recent memory,” Camarillo said.

The Army is requesting $71.4 billion for operations and maintenance, down by just under 1% from its FY24 request. The budget accounts for the Army’s force structure changes and supports “projected global requirements.”

Modernization modifications

In addition to the Army’s recent decision to cancel its Future Armed Reconnaissance Aircraft to invest in the current utility and cargo helicopter fleets and new unmanned aircraft systems, the service’s FY25 budget will reflect the cancellation of another major priority program established five years ago when the Army overhauled its modernization enterprise and set out to build over 30 weapons systems and other capabilities.

The Army has decided not to move forward with the Extended Range Cannon Artillery program, which used a service-developed, 58-caliber gun tube mounted on the chassis of a BAE Systems-made Paladin Integrated Management howitzer.

“We concluded the prototyping activity last fall, unfortunately, not successful enough to go straight into production,” Army acquisition chief, Doug Bush, said in the same March 8 media briefing. “So what we’re hoping to do is, after an exhaustive tactical fires study that was done to revalidate elements of the requirements by the Army led by Army Futures Command, we hope to, this summer, go into an evaluation of existing systems from industry to get the sense of the maturity of those systems … that would lead to ..a downselect of one of those systems for potentially follow-on production.”

The Army is asking for $55 million to execute its new plan to fill ERCA requirements in FY25.

Overall, the service’s total research, development, test and evaluation funding is $14.1 billion, dropping by $1.7 billion from the FY24 request, or a 10.8% decrease.

The Army plans to spend $24.4 billion in procurement in FY25, $1 billion more than requested in FY24, or a 4.5% increase.

“The shift in RDT&E from FY24 to 25 shows a progression of many of our key capabilities and systems going from R&D into production to include some of the aviation rebalancing as well as the production of new aviation platforms,” Camarillo said.

The Army plans to shift $4.5 billion taken from the FARA development program canceled in the middle of a competitive prototyping effort, along with money taken from the discontinued UH-60 Victor-model Black Hawk program and the retirement of Shadow and Raven UAS, to current fleet upgrades and procurement and future UAS, launched effects and loitering munitions programs.

The service’s other major Future Vertical Lift program — the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft — is fully funded in the budget according to the current cost estimate, Bush said. “We are going through a Milestone B [research and development phase] this year, where we will finalize our cost estimate for the program’s [Engineering and Manufacturing Development] phase.”

The Army also continues to fund its troubled Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon program, hoping for a successful test planned for this summer. It wants $538 million in FY25 for research and development and another $744 million in procurement. The service was supposed to field the first unit with all-up rounds at the end of last year, but following a series of failed and canceled flight tests, the program is lagging behind.

With the drone war heating up in Ukraine and the Middle East, the Army is requesting roughly $40 million in research and development for various directed energy programs that will help the service tackle countering small UAS and drone swarms to include work to provide both a laser weapon and high powered microwave system for the Indirect Fire Protection Capability Increment 2 program, Camarillo said. And the service is requesting $88.5 million to continue developing its Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense System.

Procurement plus up

The Army is requesting $24.4 billion, a $1 billion dollar boost over FY24, to begin buying some of the new weapons systems the service is planning to field as the result of a major modernization push to ensure the service is ready to fight in a multidomain environment against high-end threats by 2030.

There are no major munitions or missile procurement boosts as a means to replenish stockpiles sent to Ukraine or expended in the Middle East as the service continues to push for the approval of supplemental funding to cover those costs, according to Camarillo.

Yet some quantities will go up in FY25 as new missiles begin to be fielded to first units. For instance, the Army wants to buy 230 Precision Strike Missiles for $492 million in FY25, which were fielded to the first unit in late 2023.

And the service would ramp up the number of Mid-Range Capability missiles, its new ship-killing capability, planned for production. The Army is requesting $183 million in FY25 to continue MRC development as well as $233 million to procure 32 Tomahawk missiles and MK14 cannisters, along with operational support. MRC is one program that was supposed to be fielded to the first unit in FY24 but a continuing resolution is preventing the Army from reaching that milestone.

Continued investment in major munitions like the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement missile, Javelin, Guided Multiple Launch Rocket system, and 155mm artillery are planned in FY25.

The PAC-3 MSE’s first multiyear contract was supposed to start in FY24 but without supplemental funding, cannot be finalized. FY25 would be the second year of the contract the Army needs to replenish and stockpile the missile which is being used both in Ukraine and the Middle East. The Army wants 230 missiles in FY25 for $963 million.

The Army would also like to spend $1.2 billion on GMLRS, procuring 6,408 missiles in a multiyear buy, which is “the highest base budget number for GMLRS probably ever,” Bush said.

A purchase of 10 more High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems for $79.4 million is also on tap, as well as 126 next-generation Stinger missiles for $75.2 million.

The majority of the 155mm munitions production would come from supplemental funding but the Army is requesting to build 50,000 for $171.7 million using base budget dollars in FY25.

The Army is prioritizing air-and-missile defense in its budget in FY25, supporting 15 Patriot battalions for $172 million and the service is requesting $516.6 million to procure four new Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensors to replace older Patriot radars.

The Indirect Fire Protection Capability system would also get a budget boost in FY25. The service is asking for $658 million to procure systems needed for the program’s initial operational test and evaluation. The Army asked for $313 million in FY24.

With the surging need for counter-unmanned aircraft systems, the Army is requesting to spend $82.5 million to buy Mobile Low, slow, small, unmanned aircraft Integrated Defeat System (MLIDS) and $26.4 million for Fixed Site LIDS. The service would also spend $116.3 million on Coyote interceptors in FY25 and another $33.6 million on unspecified C-UAS effectors.

As the result of the FARA advanced helicopter cancellation, the Army plans to use funding freed up by the decision to begin production of the CH-47F Block II Chinook for active force along with what it’s already building for Special Operations units, investing $465.2 million in FY25.

The Army is also planning on buying more UH-60M Black Hawks, asking for $709 million in FY25. And the service wants to rapidly procure new Future Tactical UAS as it retires aging Shadow and Raven UAS from the aviation fleet, asking for $149 million to buy aircraft and another $128 million to continue development. The Army wants to award a contract for FTUAS in the fourth quarter of FY25.

The Navy in its FY25 budget request seeks six ships instead of the previously planned seven in the proposal — including one attack submarine, compared to the planned two — and will trim its research and development budget by 2.7% and military construction spending by 26.1%.

The service said it wants to instead prioritize current operations and personnel, along with small unmanned systems and the Pentagon-led Replicator program, which could yield results for the fleet on a much shorter timeline.

The Department of the Navy is seeking $257.6 billion for FY25 for the Navy and Marine Corps, up 0.7% from the FY24 request Congress has not passed more than five months into the fiscal year. The Defense Department’s overall spending plan is capped at a 1% increase compared to FY24 under the Fiscal Responsibility Act that dictates FY24 and FY25 spending levels.

Under Secretary Erik Raven told reporters Friday the department fully funded the sea-based portions of the nuclear deterrence triad, including the Columbia-class ballistic submarine, the Trident nuclear missile and the TACAMO command and control aircraft system — leaving insufficient money to cover other shipbuilding and modernization needs.

“Our guidance directs us to take risk in future modernization when there are hard choices to be made,” Raven told reporters ahead of the budget’s release.

“So if you look at F/A-XX, or the other X [next-generation] programs, we knowingly took risk in the schedule for development of those programs in order to prioritize those key investments — whether that’s readiness, or investing in our people, or undersea, to make sure that we make those programs whole,” he added.

‘Re-phased’ modernization plans

The Navy today is quickly using up missiles and ship readiness in the Middle East, as Houthi forces ashore in Yemen continue to lob missiles and attack drones at warships, merchant ships and other targets throughout the region.

As a result, the Navy is already facing a bill it hadn’t anticipated when building the FY25 budget. Raven said the Navy, through the Office of the Secretary of Defense, would likely ask Congress for a supplemental spending bill sometime in FY25 because “the ‘25 budget that is being presented does not anticipate the current expenditure of missiles in the Red Sea or those additional operations costs.”

But the Navy is also worried about the next few years. It considers the 2020s to be a decade of concern, due to experts believing 2027 could be a likely time for China to invade Taiwan.

Because of the cost associated with ongoing operations and the push to be ready for a tougher fight within the next few years, the Navy postponed a number of big-ticket items that wouldn’t come to fruition this decade and doubled down on smaller systems that could.

The Navy’s next-generation fighter, the F/A-XX, is one example. Whereas the FY24 budget sought $1.5 billion to develop and design the plane and its enabling technology, the Navy in FY25 only wants a third of that.

Rear Adm. Ben Reynolds, the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for budget, said that was one of the “hard choices” resulting from the limited top line. The delay also gives industry more time to mature technology, he added, saying the Navy is “still committed” to this piece of its Next-Generation Air Dominance family of systems.

The Navy asked for $586.9 million for SSN(X) next-generation attack submarine design and development efforts, up slightly from the $544.7 million it requested in FY24.

The sea service also seeks $102.7 million for its DDG(X) next-generation destroyer, down from FY24′s $187.4 million request.

Budget documents released Monday do not address potential resulting delays.

The Navy previously said it would buy its first Large Unmanned Surface Vessel — a key part of its distributed maritime operations concept, serving as remote missile launchers to supplement manned ships operating elsewhere in theater — in FY25, followed by two in FY26 and three each in FY27 and FY28.

That procurement schedule is now pushed back two years, budget books show.

Reynolds characterized it as “experiencing … technical difficulty,” making the program an easy target for “rephasing,” or delaying to later in the five-year defense spending program when the Pentagon won’t be subject to spending caps.

The Extra Large Unmanned Underwater Vessel, which would lay mines and conduct other covert missions, was meant to begin one-a-year procurement in FY26 and appears to still be on track despite Reynolds also referring to “rephasing” its funding.

But, even as some bigger unmanned programs are delayed, Reynolds said the Navy is moving quickly with some of its smaller unmanned systems. Several are moving from research and development into procurement, and from fabrication into testing, he said. Both the Medium USV and Medium UUV are both funded in the budget and advancing toward fielding, he added.

Reynolds also noted the Navy will fund its contribution to the OSD-led Replicator program, which intends to flood the Indo-Pacific theater with thousands of drones to deter a war or help win it. However, he declined to detail what that money would buy, and the Navy did not disclose how much it will put towards the effort.

Raven noted the budget funds the newly formed Disruptive Capabilities Office, which will rapidly bring innovative technologies, including but not limited to unmanned systems, into the fleet.

“We continue to see unmanned as a feature of so many important naval capabilities, and we are making those investments in this budget,” the undersecretary said.

Deferred buys, early decommissionings

The Navy asks for $32.4 billion to buy six ships in the FY25 budget request, compared to the seven it previously planned for the year.

These include two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, one Constellation-class frigate, one Virginia-class attack submarine, one San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock, and one landing ship medium.

This is one fewer submarine than previously planned, and the budget nixes a T-AGOS ocean surveillance ship the Navy previously planned to buy in FY25.

It does, though, add in the San Antonio-class LPD, a shipbuilding line the Pentagon had tried to truncate two years ago.

The continuation of the LPD line allows the Navy to adhere to a law that requires the Navy to maintain a fleet of 31 amphibious ships to support Marine Corps operations, Raven said.

That the landing ship medium program will begin acquisition in FY25 is welcome news for the Marine Corps, which says it needs those ships to move small groups of Marines within a theater — from shore to shore to conduct missions while evading enemy detection. The program was previously slated for a FY22 start, but was delayed due to lack of funding.

Because these ships are already three years late, the Marine Corps was eyeing a number of other ship types in the fleet that could support Marine Corps maneuver. Many of those, however, are on the chopping block in FY25.

Reynolds said the Navy will request to retire 10 ships before the end of their planned service life, including two Independence-variant LCSs; the four oldest Expeditionary Fast Transports; an Expeditionary Transfer Dock the Marines could leverage; and one Whidbey Island-class amphibious dock landing ship that counts towards the 31-amphib fleet.

Reynolds told reporters these 10 ships would each require “a substantial amount of funding to get to the requirements, to get to the modernization, the lethality, that they need to be part of the fight.”

Due to these and other planned retirements, the fleet will decline to 287 ships in FY25, compared to 293 today.

The budget also postpones the Navy’s plans to buy its next aircraft carriers. It’s still building and paying for the future Enterprise and Doris Miller, hulls 80 and 81, that were put on contract in a two-ship buy in 2019.

Reynolds confirmed the Navy is delaying the next carrier, CVN-82, from a planned FY28 buy to FY30.

Other procurement and readiness

The Navy also intends to spend $16.2 billion to buy 75 manned and unmanned aircraft.

This includes 13 F-35B and 13 F-35C Joint Strike Fighters, 27 Multi-Engine Advanced Training System trainers, 19 CH-53K heavy lift helicopters for the Marine Corps and three MQ-25 Stingray unmanned carrier-based refueling aircraft.

The Marine Corps would spend $4.2 billion for procurement under the budget request, to cover ground vehicles, weapons and more.

The budget requests $6.6 billion for Navy weapons procurement, down slightly from FY24′s historic high of $6.9 billion.

The budget also includes $227 million to support the weapons industrial base, in an effort to increase missile production and strengthen the suppliers of critical components.

The Navy asked for $380 million for these efforts in the FY24 budget.

Raven previously told reporters the Navy intends to sign multiyear procurement contracts for four key weapons programs: the Standard Missile, the Naval Strike Missile, the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile and the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile.

While Congress approved these in the defense authorization bill for FY24, the Navy still doesn’t have the money to sign those contracts. The FY25 plan assumes those contracts are in place and that the hundreds of millions in investment dollars to increase supplier output is taking effect.

One key munition program does face a budget cut and a delay. The Conventional Prompt Strike, the Navy’s portion of the hypersonic missile program alongside the Army, is being pushed back as the test and development program is behind schedule, Reynolds said. The Army, too, is delaying the procurement.

Despite the delay, the Navy is devoting $904 million to the program.

The FY25 budget also includes $2.8 billion for dry dock repairs and upgrades at the four public ship repair yards for nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines, under the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program. And it includes $407 million for a similar modernization and optimization effort at the Fleet Readiness Centers that maintain aircraft.

These initiatives are meant to “increase ready players on the field,” one of Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti’s calls to action since taking over as the Navy’s top officer in November.

“We concluded the prototyping activity last fall,” Doug Bush told reporters at a March 8 briefing on the fiscal 2025 budget request. “Unfortunately, [it was] not successful enough to go straight into production.”

The new plan — following an “exhaustive” tactical fires study meant to revalidate elements of the extended-range cannon requirement led by Army Futures Command — is to evaluate existing options from industry this summer “to get a sense of the maturity of those systems.”

Of the 24 new Army systems slated to make it into the hands of soldiers by the end of 2023, only the Extended Range Cannon Artillery program missed that goal. The ERCA system uses a service-developed, 58-caliber gun tube mounted on the chassis of a BAE Systems-made Paladin Integrated Management howitzer.

The Army was building 20 prototypes of the ERCA system: two for destructive testing and the remaining 18 for a battalion.

The operational evaluation of ERCA revealed “engineering challenges,” Bush said a year ago. Observations in early testing of prototypes showed excessive wear on the gun tube after firing a relatively low number of rounds.

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Army Futures Command leader Gen. James Rainey told Defense News last summer the service was working on a new conventional fires strategy expected by the end of the calendar year. The strategy would determine both capability and capacity of what exists and what the Army may need, Rainey said.

The strategy considered new technology to enhance conventional fires on the battlefield, such as advances in propellant that make it possible for midrange cannons to shoot as far as longer-range systems.

Depending on the artillery strategy’s conclusions, there are a variety of options the service could consider in order to fulfill the Army’s requirement for an extended-range cannon, Bush said.

The Army was able to conduct a variety of successful tests with ERCA prototypes, including hitting a target on the nose 70 kilometers (43 miles) away at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, in December 2020 using an Excalibur extended-range guided artillery shell.

The problems with the cannon were mostly related to the length of the gun tube and its ability to withstand a large number of projectiles without excessive wear to the gun tube.

The Army is racing to extend artillery ranges on the battlefield to take away advantages of high-end adversaries like Russia and China. The ERCA weapon was intended to be able to fire at and destroy targets from a position out of the range of enemy systems.

That requirement remains, Bush stressed last week.

The hope now is to find systems that currently exist and are capable. The Army would then choose one for production if it proves promising, Bush said.

“There [are] things people say, and then we need to actually do testing to make sure it’s true,” he explained.

“It’s a shift from developing something new to working with what is available both domestically and internationally to get the range,” he added, “because the fires study validated the range and volume are still needed, so we want to find a different way to get there.”

The Army is asking for $55 million in its FY25 budget to pursue the new effort to find an extended-range cannon capability.

The service also plans to continue developing new munitions it was already working on as part of the ERCA program, Bush noted.

The fiscal 2025 budget request unveiled March 11 is about $1 billion more than the Biden administration’s previous ask. It is also up from fiscal 2023, when it sought $11.2 billion.

The department is prioritizing all things cyber as competition with Russia and China grows increasingly digital. All three world powers are well known for their virtual arsenals and their desire to poke and prod without triggering armed conflict.

“The FY25 cyber activity budget focuses investments in three portfolios, covering cybersecurity, cyberspace operations and cyber research and development,” a senior defense official told reporters at the Pentagon. “Cyber capabilities will continue to be a critical component of our national defense and, accordingly, a priority in our budget.”

The Defense Department has since 2015 experienced more than 12,000 so-called cyber incidents, with annual totals steadily declining since 2017, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Defense contractors are also victims of infiltrations; their intellectual property is a top target of foreign hackers.

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To further insulate its sensitive information, the department is pursuing zero trust. Unlike older cybersecurity paradigms, zero trust assumes networks are always at risk or are already compromised, requiring constant validation of devices, users and their virtual reach.

The fiscal 2025 blueprint allocates a little more than $977 million for zero-trust transition. It also features nearly $300 million for modernized identity, credential and access management, or ICAM, a means of tailoring what information is available to a person while also keeping tabs on those plugged in.

“The cybersecurity budget request improves our cyber posture by funding the development and modernization in cybersecurity tools and capabilities and also expands investment in zero-trust technology to ensure the department can fully secure and protect” its assets, the senior official said.

A baseline level of zero trust across the department is required by 2027. Additional protections, dubbed advanced zero trust, are required down the line. Cybersecurity leaders have in the past said the looming deadlines will be challenging to meet.

The service plans to buy 42 Lockheed Martin-made F-35As for $5.9 billion and 18 Boeing F-15EXs for $1.8 billion next year. That would be a reduction from the 48 and 24 fighters, respectively, the service originally expected to buy.

The Air Force plans to stop buying F-15EXs all together after 2025 concludes, which will cap the entire line of Eagle IIs at 98 — six fewer than the 104 the service had been planning to buy. The Air Force’s expected total purchase of 1,763 F-35As remains unchanged.

The Air Force also wants to cut 250 aircraft in 2025, including 56 A-10 Warthogs, 65 older F-15 C and D Eagle fighters, 26 F-15E Strike Eagles with less-capable engines, 11 F-16 Fighting Falcons, and 32 Block 20 F-22A Raptors the service said would be prohibitively expensive to ready for combat. The service expects those retirements, if approved, would save more than $2 billion in fiscal 2025.

The Department of the Air Force’s fiscal 2025 proposed budget requests a total of $217.5 billion, an increase of $2.4 billion, or 1.1%, over its request from this year. Kristyn Jones, who is performing the duties of undersecretary of the Air Force, noted to reporters that the increase does not keep up with inflation.

The service asked for $188.1 billion, a $3 billion or 1.6% increase over its 2024 request. The Space Force’s requested $29.4 billion budget would be a 2% drop from the 2024 request.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters in a March 8 briefing the service “had to make some hard choices” to fit within the constraints of the Fiscal Responsibility Act.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act caps the government’s spending increases as part of a deal Congress struck last year to avoid a default on the nation’s debt. For the Defense Department, that limits its 2025 budget to $850 million, less than the $860 million the administration originally anticipated.

Kendall described the resulting budget as “acceptable,” and “essentially consistent” with the fiscal 2024 budget. But although he said it moves the department forward on key programs and strikes a balance between near-, mid- and long-term programs, he said he’d “like to be able to move faster.”

And more “tough choices” are ahead in fiscal 2026′s budget, he warned, including the first real effects of the LGM-35A Sentinel program’s severe cost overruns. The Air Force’s next intercontinental ballistic missile, slated to replace its aging Minuteman III nuclear missiles, has seen its costs ballon at least 37% and triggered a cost overrun process called a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach.

“Life gets a lot harder as you get past [20]25,” Kendall said.

The Air Force tried to strike a balance between mid-term procurement of more air frames and capabilities that have already been developed, and research and development of future advanced capabilities the service hopes will pay off in the long term.

“My priority is to get to a next generation of capabilities as quick as we can, because of what China’s doing in terms of their modernization,” Kendall said. He added later, “China is advancing very quickly, and they’re not stopping. So we really need, as a priority, to get to a next-generational capability. And you can’t even start to buy that until you’ve done the research and development.”

That resulted in a “tradeoff” in favor of R&D over procurement, Kendall said, to give future administrations options of new capabilities it can choose to buy as threats change.

The Air Force’s proposed procurement budget in 2025 is $29 billion, which would be down $1.6 billion from its 2024 proposal. And its proposed research, development, test and evaluation budget would rise from $36.2 billion in the 2024 proposal to $37.7 billion in 2025.

Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., warned at the March 7 McAleese Defense Conference in Washington that Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing to make a move on Taiwan by 2027. Wittman said military strategies that depend on fielding capabilities by about 2030 will come too late, and the U.S. military must field shorter-term capabilities to be able to dissuade China from trying to take Taiwan by force.

“Anybody that uses a metric and says, ‘We’ll get this stuff done by 2030′ — wrong answer,” Wittman said. “2027 needs to be the metric. That’s how we will have the opportunity to deter” China.

In a gaggle with reporters at McAleese, Kendall said the Air Force has to take a longer view, and will need to counter China not just in 2027, but for years to come.

“It’s a risk balance over time,” Kendall said. “If you fixate only on 2027, you’re going to find that in ‘29, you’re in big trouble. And ‘29 is going to come.”

Squeezing costs

A variety of rising costs are squeezing the Air Force’s budget, Jones said, and led to the procurement cuts. The department expects to spend about $1 billion more in 2025 to keep the number of flying hours and weapon system sustainment on par with 2024 levels, and personnel costs such as military pay and benefits are also going up, she said.

R&D funding for Sentinel would remain flat from the 2024 request at $3.7 billion. And the service wants to spend $700 million on six construction projects for Sentinel in 2025, as well as another $70 million for planning and design, a major increase from the $140 million it requested for Sentinel construction in 2024.

Jones said some of the changes included in the “reoptimization for great power competition” reorganization the Air Force unveiled last month will help set the Sentinel program back on track. Those changes would include putting a three-star general in charge of the Nuclear Weapons System Center, and having a two-star general serve as a program executive officer for ICBMs. Jones said the Air Force is still studying the program’s requirements and looking for alternative strategies that could save money.

Overall funding for the B-21 Raider stealth bomber will remain fairly steady, although some funds will shift from R&D to procurement as the bomber continues in its low-rate initial production phase. R&D funding for the bomber’s engineering, manufacturing and development phase would dip from $3 billion in 2024 to $2.7 billion in 2025, while procurement funding would increase from $2.3 billion to $2.7 billion.

The Next-Generation Air Dominance program, the service’s future fighter system, would receive an additional $815 million to develop and test its air vehicle, mission systems and capabilities, bringing spending on that program to more than $2.8 billion.

The Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft, or CCA, program would receive $559 million in R&D funding to continue development, prototyping and integration of its air vehicle, which would be a $166 million boost over 2024 levels.

CCAs are drones outfitted with autonomous software that could fly alongside crewed NGAD and F-35 fighters into battle and carry out missions such as strikes, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare operations. The service now has contracts with five vendors on this program — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Anduril — and plans to winnow the field to two or three in the months to come.

The CCA program would also receive another $116 million to test its autonomous capabilities and for experimentation programs such as Project Venom and the experimental operations unit. And the service said its proposed 2025 funding for CCAs would allow it to lock down the aircraft’s design, build production-representative test aircraft for the program’s first increment, begin testing and refine the concept for its second increment.

The Air Force also plans to buy 15 KC-46A Pegasus tankers for $3.1 billion and seven T-7A Red Hawk trainers for $233 million. And it would retire 16 KC-135 Stratotankers as it brings on new KC-46s.

The service plans to retire 22 T-1A Texan II training aircraft to free up more resources that can be invested in newer pilot training technologies.

And the budget would provide $13.7 million for the Air Force’s tanker recapitalization effort to serve as a bridge between the current wave of KC-46s and the service’s planned Next-Generation Aerial Refueling System, or NGAS. That choice will likely be between more Boeing KC-46s and a tanker from Airbus. The service expects to finish its acquisition strategy for that tanker this summer, and then release a request for proposal in 2025. The Air Force plans to start requesting procurement funding for that tanker in 2027.

The Air Force started conducting an analysis of alternatives study for NGAS in January, Maj. Gen. Michael Greiner, the Air Force’s deputy assistant secretary for budget, told reporters. The service wants to spend about $7 million on preparing for NGAS, including conducting modeling and simulation studies, so it can field an advanced tanker by the mid-2030s.

The service also wants to boost its purchases of AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles, or AMRAAMs, Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles, or LRASMs, and Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile-Extended Range missiles, or AARGM-ERs. The LRASM and AARGM-ER purchases would increase considerably — from 27 in 2024 to 115 in 2025, and from 14 in 2024 to 128 in 2025, respectively.

Kendall said the Air Force is hoping to continue its strategy of multi-year procurement purchases for AMRAAM, LRASM, and the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range missile.

The sale of Russian weapons to other countries fell by 53% between the five-year periods of 2014-18 and 2019-23, according to the latest report by the think tank, dated March 11.

While Moscow exported major arms to 31 countries in 2019, this number plummeted to only 12 last year, with Western sanctions against the Kremlin representing one of the key reasons some governments are interested to buy elsewhere.

The report noted that the three largest receivers of Russian-made weapons between 2019-23 were India, China, and Egypt. However, the amount of equipment that those governments acquired underwent a steep decrease.

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“Between the two periods, Russian arms exports to India decreased by 34%, while exports to China decreased by 39% and to Egypt by 54%. Algeria and Vietnam, which were Russia’s third- and fourth-largest recipients in 2014-28, saw their exports drop by 83% and 91%,” respectively, SIPRI analysts wrote.

The newest figure, combined with the overall low number of pending Russian arms deliveries, suggest that the country’s exports in the defense sector are likely to remain low, as the draw of made-in-Russia military equipment is waning, according to the analysts.

One trend relates to the continents of Asia and Oceania. The regions, which accounted for 68% of overall Russian weapons exports in 2018-2023, are now seeing the rise or the United States as their largest arms supplier.

Several Asian countries have hinted in the last year at their intention to decrease their arms dependency on Russia, rather looking to diversify their supplier channels or build up their domestic industries.

Another important shift in arms transfers between the two time periods analyzed was the move of France ahead of Russia in the ranking of arms-exporting nations. Paris is now the world’s second-largest weapons exporter, recording a 47% increase in sales.

With European nations scrambling for weapons to fill their own stocks or to support Ukraine, the continent logged a significant increase in arms imports, which were 94% higher in the past five-year window than in 2014-18. Purchases from the United States accounted for 55% of the uptick.

Weapons high on countries’ wish lists currently are both combat aircraft and helicopters, with 800 on order globally, as well as air defense systems and a greater interest in long-range missiles.

“In the past two years, we have seen a much greater demand for air defense systems in Europe, spurred on by Russia’s missile campaign against Ukraine,” Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher at SIPRI’s arms transfer program said.

The Feb. 14 presidential election saw Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto garner nearly 60% of the votes, as of March 5. Since assuming the post in 2019, Prabowo has pushed for large-scale military modernization and increases in defense spending, despite the COVID-19 pandemic hitting Indonesia’s economy and partially reversing poverty-reduction measures, according to the World Bank.

Collin Koh, a senior fellow at the Singapore-based S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said Indonesia has consistently built up its defense since the term of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, first elected in 2004. And given Prabowo’s background, he will likely support continued military modernization efforts, Koh added.

“In some ways, one may argue that he might be more enthusiastic about it,” he said.

But given the country’s fiscal state and the scale of modernization the military requires, Prabowo might only be able to complete programs already in the works rather than start new ones, Koh added.

Prabowo was a lieutenant general and commander of the special forces known as Kopassus that were blamed for human rights abuses, including the torture of 22 activists who had opposed Suharto, the authoritarian leader whose 1998 downfall amid massive protests restored democracy in Indonesia.

Human rights groups have claimed that Prabowo was also involved in a series of human rights violations in Timor-Leste in the 1980s and 1990s, when Indonesia occupied the now-independent nation. Prabowo has denied those allegations. The alleged human rights abuses led to Prabowo being forced out of the military, and he was dishonorably discharged in 1998.

Orders and hiccups

Indonesia has pivoted toward naval and air modernization efforts. In 2021, it signed a deal with Airbus realted to A330 Multi Role Tanker Transport aircraft, anti-submarine and transport helicopters, and A400M transport planes. The helicopters are already in service, and the Defense Ministry finalized orders for two A400M aircraft in January. The A330 acquisition remains under discussion, company officials told Defense News.

In 2022, the government ordered 42 Dassault Rafale fighter jets for $8.1 billion, and it most recently completed orders for the last 18 jets in January 2024.

In August 2023, the government signed a memorandum of understanding with Boeing to acquire 24 F-15EX jets, and it also placed orders for Sikorsky S-70M Black Hawk helicopters.

The Defense Ministry also signed a contract to buy a $100 million submarine rescue vessel from the United Kingdom, and it’s reportedly in talks for two more Scorpene submarines from France’s Naval Group.

While President Joko Widodo last year approved approximately 139.3 trillion rupiahs (U.S. $8.9 billion) in defense spending for 2024 — a 20% increase from the prior budget — the government still needs more to meet its military modernization goals.

And the country appears to be falling behind. Under its Minimum Essential Force policy, the government is to complete a list of military upgrades and asset procurements the end of the presidential term, which is October 2024.

As of September 2023, the Air Force had met 51% of its goals, the Army 60% and the Navy 76%, according to Evan Laksmana, Southeast Asia military expert with the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank.

The problem, Koh said, is that while Indonesia did list specific assets and capabilities under its policy, it had not provided enough specifications for planners to further the country’s goals.

Furthermore, Indonesia’s pivot to naval and air modernization might cause an uproar in the Army, which has traditionally received the lion’s share of the budget pie. The Army has been clamoring for artillery and land systems amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, Koh said.

“The Air Force will have a tougher time these days and in the future when it comes to competing with funding with the Army,” he explained.

For example, Indonesia reportedly scrapped a deal to buy 12 used Dassault Mirage 2000-5 jets from Qatar to replace its retiring F-5 fleet. Public backlash pushed the government to abandon the plan days ahead of the Feb. 14 presidential election.

Indonesia is also behind on payments for a joint program with South Korea. The countries agreed to co-fund the KF-21 Boramae fighter jet program.

When asked for an update, Sangshin Park, a regional manager for KF-21 manufacturer Korea Aerospace Industries, told Defense News: “We also don’t know what’s going to happen, and we’re still waiting.”

Edna Tarigan and Achmad Ibrahim with The Associated Press contributed to this story.

NEW DELHI — India has successfully conducted its first test flight of a domestically developed missile that can carry multiple warheads, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Monday.

The missile is equipped with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, Modi said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

India has been developing medium- and long-range missile systems since the 1990s amid strategic competition with China.

In 2021, India successfully tested Agni-V, a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 5,000 kilometers (3,107 miles) that is believed to be capable of targeting nearly all of China. Agni missiles are long-range surface-to-surface ballistic missiles.

India is also able to strike anywhere in neighboring Pakistan, its archrival with which it has fought three wars since they gained independence from British colonialists in 1947.

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.

French Space Command has determined the move is deliberate, and intelligence shows the enemy spacecraft is equipped with a robotic arm that would allow it to de-orbit the friendly asset. The French-led blue team moves a “patroller” satellite into a protective position – a capability France is working on, but now lacks – to block any hostile action by the U.S.-led red team.

While fictional, the scenario played out March 7 during Europe’s largest space wargames is credible and based on real capabilities, said Colonel Mathieu Bernabé, who is leading the exercise. During the event called AsterX 2024, some 190 participants from France and 15 partner countries are training for everything from jammed space communications to hostile satellites maneuvering to take out friendly orbiters.

“This type of exercise is absolutely essential for our operators, but also our processes, training for what we call operational readiness, so we’re ready to fight a real war,” General Philippe Adam, the commander of France’s space command, said during a presentation of the exercise in Toulouse in south-west France. “It’s as realistic as an exercise scenario can be, obviously – inspired by a lot of things you’ve probably recognized.”

Adam said “unfriendly behavior” by Russian satellites, with uncoordinated and unannounced approaches, happens “all the time,” in all orbits.

Space is becoming more dangerous, and militarization is on the rise, Adam said. Earth orbits have become busier, with increased competition between commercial players and states, while satellites are becoming a lot more capable and maneuverable.

Space-based systems have become an integral part of military operations, from communication to ballistic-missile detection, navigation, planning and targeting. Meanwhile, the value of the space economy rose 8% to $546 billion in 2022, according to the non-profit Space Foundation.

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French President Emmanuel Macron created a military space command in 2019, with the goal of boosting the country’s awareness of the security situation in space, and to better protect its satellites. France had 91 satellites in orbit in February 2023, the most of any European Union country, according to data published by Statista.

AsterX is “absolutely essential” for ramping up French Space Command, which doesn’t have operational status yet, though it’s performing operations, Adam said. The command is expected to pass an initial stage of operational qualification when it moves into new headquarters in Toulouse next year, and targets full operational capability by 2030.

France is organizing the AsterX wargames for the fourth year, pitting the French-led blue team against the fictional country of Mercure, an adversary trying to destabilize the nation of Arnland. What’s new this year is that the red team, with “significant” space resources, is played by U.S. Space Force personnel, the first time a foreign nation plays the role of adversary.

The exercise simulates more than 4,000 objects in orbit, spinning around in simulated space already days before the exercise, and with the blue and red teams not fully aware of the spatial capacities of their adversary. The knowledge gaps create an intellectual challenge, and the red team being played by the U.S. results in a non-deterministic scenario, Bernabé said.

“AsterX is a laboratory in which you’re confronted with situations, where you experiment with solutions, and get feedback,” Bernabé said. “The challenge is to train how to manage a space situation, but backed up by an inter-army and multi-domain environment, which also means cyber or informational, so this scenario provides for conditions that enable us to play the full spectrum.”

Americans playing the red team provides an additional element of surprise to the exercise, according to Bernabé.

The exercise runs through to March 15 and will include 14 different types of threats and 23 events, within the scenario of a gradually worsening crisis, headed towards high-intensity warfare. Adam said a crisis situation is a useful exercise, as there’s “a lot of ambiguity” to be resolved, while a high-intensity scenario is in some ways simpler because “anything goes.”

Worst-case scenario

A worst-case scenario for orbital conflict would be generalized war with a completely uninhibited enemy attacking satellites “quite indiscriminately,” according to Adam.

“Then we’re going to be losing satellites all over the place, we’re going to lose resources, we’re going to create debris, and then it’s a bit of a snowball effect,” Adam said. Failure to quickly stop such an adversary would create “a problem that will last for decades. Once you’ve created debris everywhere, some orbits become completely inoperable.

”So yes, a generalized conflict in space would be very, very bad news.”

Through the exercise, France also seek to develop a common culture of space operations with its allies and partners, under realistic threat conditions. In addition to the U.S., countries participating in AsterX include the U.K., Japan and South Korea, as well as a number of EU partners.

“We understand each other better after this exercise, in the nature of the responses we can provide, since we’ve experimented with things together,” Bernabé said.

Interoperability challenges between countries’ space forces are “extremely numerous,” including distinct vocabulary for the same things and different procedures and policies, according to Adam.French Space Command targets about 500 personnel in 2025, from around 350 now, according to Adam. He said partners such as Japan, Germany and Italy are creating commands similar in size, between 300 and 600 personnel, adding that human resources are “a tremendous problem” for everyone.

Those goals compare to around 13,900 staff for the U.S. Space Force at the end of December. France doesn’t have the ambition of creating anything similar, which would require “being rich like an American,” the general said.

In addition to the new Toulouse headquarters, the main priority for France is to get patroller satellites into orbit, according to Adam. He said the country also needs to strengthen the terrestrial part of its space capabilities, and needs more space-surveillance sensors.

He said the country’s Yoda agile satellite demonstrator, which has been held up by a lack of launch slots, may become operational “in the next few months,” with operational space-patrol capacity following within one to two years.

“These are not very big satellites, they’re not very complicated satellites,” Adam said. “What’s most complicated is knowing how to use them.”And that’s what France is preparing for with AsterX.

The difficulty is that Replicator requires disruptive innovation — innovation that rapidly introduces new concepts and/or technologies, and significantly changes the operational level of warfare. This is exceptionally hard and should not be confused with the incremental evolutionary innovation that the DoD historically exploits in peacetime. Critically, emerging technology and creative warfighters can rapidly disrupt traditionally dominant forces, such as in the spectacular example playing out in Ukraine.

The good news is that the DoD has recent successes.

In 2022, the Navy began a two-year experiment known as the Unmanned Task Force. While much of the UTF effort was classified, it operationalized and fielded multiple disruptive capabilities to the naval and joint forces. This success is being institutionalized as the Navy’s new Disruptive Capabilities Office and will directly support Replicator.

Key to the UTF’s success was unblinking adherence to four principles:

1. Solve problems, don’t meet requirements. Starting with requirements constrains thinking and immediately eliminates options because it begins with a solution rather than trying to solve the problem itself. It also takes many years, involves organizational politics and includes individuals far removed from today’s problems.

The UTF focused on problems identified by four-star combatant commanders and further refined their detail with the operational community. While the warfighters are the experts in the operational problems, they rarely have bandwidth to dive deep into every facet of every problem they face or to optimize their problem articulation for the innovation ecosystem. This was a critical functionality performed by the UTF.

2. Protect, incentivize and embed the innovators. An organization’s primary innovation activities (i.e., its evolutionary innovation activities) will destroy all attempts to innovate disruptively. This isn’t because of stodginess or bad behavior — it’s by design.

Because evolutionary innovation seeks to improve the status quo while disruption seeks to overthrow it, the bulk of an organization will see disruption as misaligned, attempt to kill it and assimilate its resources. A common reaction to this tendency is to isolate the innovation group. This is a mistake. Organizational separation will give the innovation group speed and agility, and build barriers ensuring their fruits are impossible to leverage.

To this end, the UTF did two rare, seemingly counterintuitive things. First, it remained physically located inside the Pentagon and vehemently fought all attempts to relocate to more so-called innovation-friendly settings. Second, it remained administratively located in the Navy’s resourcing and requirements organization. While these choices throttled the UTF’s tactical speed and agility, the strategic gains from always having a seat at the table were a cornerstone of its successes.

3. Experiment early, incrementally and only against actual hypotheses. Experimentation is too often confused with testing. Cost-performance-schedule cultures typically conduct tests (often mistakenly called experiments). In a test, failure is an undesired result, and those championing failure lose credibility and resources. In an experiment, an undesired result is a learning experience, and organizations that learn fastest typically prevail (not those that fail fastest).

A gold standard for early, incremental, hypotheses-based experimentation is the NASA lunar landing program that conducted many launches from 1961 to 1972. All launches were against explicit learning objectives, and many produced arrays of unexpected lessons that shaped the next experiments. The UTF emulated this approach by jumping to experimentation with users, existing technologies and explicit hypotheses before any development was initiated. This was contrary to traditional procedures.

4. Optimize for discovery and speed, not for efficiency or scale. Clayton Christensen defined the difference between crux evolutionary innovation and disruption as seeking to improve the current business model versus searching for a new one. Improving a business model is the realm of process improvement such as Lean Six Sigma or the Toyota Production System where finding and scaling efficiencies is paramount.

Searching for a new business model requires nearly the opposite behavior. The key insight is that disruption has an unknown end state. Thus, it involves an iterative search for true customer pain points and rapidly iterating potential solutions. This requires different processes, risk tolerances, organizational configurations and cultures.

To this end, the UTF rejected a one-size-fits-all innovation approach. In one example, the UTF’s primary contributions were shepherding and funding incremental experimentation to eventually hand off to others. In another, it was distilling insight from an operational problem, finding relevant solutions in other operational communities, and shepherding the matchmaking process. In yet another, it was a year of daily, small-scale skirmishes against political and organizational antibodies to allow the disruption sufficient time to prove itself on its own merits.

While these activities were directly driven by the UTF’s standardized innovation process, the tactical execution was adapted to the unique nature of each operational problem and user base.

Disruptive innovation inside any large organization is extremely hard. Few organizations have shown they can sustain disruptive innovation over time. Most militaries excel at disruption during wartime but struggle in absence of an existential threat.

Nevertheless, the DoD has recent successes to leverage for Replicator. The question remains: Which path will the DoD choose?

Jason Stack is the chief technology officer and co-founder of a dual-use maritime logistics startup and a senior adviser at the consultancy BMNT. He co-founded the U.S. Navy’s Unmanned Task Force and previously served as the deputy director.

The three-word statement was highlighted in bold letters at the opening of NATO’s March 4 briefing, on the occasion of the Polish-leg of the alliance’s largest military exercise since 1988.

But even amid the resolute and calm tone of officials in the room, there was a palpable sense of apprehension among reporters.

A core theme of the speeches presented by NATO representatives revolved around transparency, specifically in showcasing what the Steadfast Defender exercise — and its subsidiary drill Dragon, led by Poland — would involve. Yet many were wary of answering questions related to Russia or lessons learned from the war in Ukraine.

On several occasions, officials were pressed about whether they had concerns over revealing their plans to Russia through events such as these, or even the possibility the Kremlin could intercept operational details.

“Of course we are concerned, everyone is concerned,” Brig. Gen. Gunnar Bruegner, assistant chief of staff at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, told Defense News. “[We need] to make sure we are safeguarding the critical information, but it does not relieve us from the requirement of making these exercises happen.”

“It is quite a balance you need to keep; you cannot showcase everything,” he said.

During a March 4 news conference, Maj. Gen. Randolph Staudenraus, director of strategy and policy at NATO’s Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum, told reporters that while the alliance does protect its communications, “we are also really trying to be transparent.”

The fine line between accountability and information security is one that some NATO members have recently grappled with. A notable example is the leak of a German discussion about potentially providing Ukraine iwth Taurus missiles. Russia intercepted audio from the web conference between German Air Force officials.

Through this, Moscow was able to get its hands on information regarding the potential supply of cruise missiles to Ukraine as well as operational scenarios of how the war could play out.

Russian officials said last month that the country views Steadfast Defender as a threat.

When it comes to that training event, Bruegner said, details provided to the media during briefings are meant to illustrate the bigger picture, but only in broad terms.

“The plans themselves and the details in there will not be made available to everyone. What you’re seeing here are slides NATO has unclassified,” he explained.

He also noted that an objective of the exercises is to showcase the integration of capabilities, and not necessarily what NATO would do in a contested setting.

“We for sure would not fly banners on the amphibious devices in a contested exercise, which would have involved having an opponent on the other side of the eastern benches of the river and would’ve looked different [than what we saw in the Dragon drill],” Bruegner said.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Heath Collins, the agency’s director, said March 7 at the McAleese & Associates conference that the agency was told by the Pentagon it would not conduct its usual briefing as part of Monday’s formal rollout. He referred questions to the Defense Department.

Collins noted he’s working with his staff on finding another forum to detail its budget request, adding that the agency would “still make sure” to “get the appropriate information out.”

Several reporters and analysts recalled MDA budget briefings took place as long ago as the early 2000s.

When asked about the decision, Pentagon spokesman Chris Sherwood declined to confirm it.

“We will not preview content or briefers before the president’s budget release,” he said. “The undersecretary of defense (comptroller)/chief financial officer will decide which departments and agencies brief their respective budgets during the DoD budget rollout press conference.”

This year marks the first budget cycle in which Collins is leading MDA. President Joe Biden tapped Collins to be MDA director in May 2023; he succeeded Vice Adm. Jon Hill, who had served as the agency’s leader since 2019.

Collins did not officially take command of the agency until Congress confirmed him in December, after Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., released a lengthy blanket hold on military officer confirmations.

Last year, MDA sought a budget of $10.9 billion, prioritizing regional and homeland missile defense with a major focus on building an air and missile defense architecture in Guam.

The agency is in the midst of major modernization efforts to keep up with the pace of emerging, complex threats. This includes developing a Next Generation Interceptor to replace Ground-Based Interceptors that make up the roughly 20-year-old Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System. That system protects the homeland from potential intercontinental ballistic missile attacks from countries like North Korea and Iran.

The agency is also working on a Glide Phase Interceptor to defeat hypersonic missile threats farther from intended targets.

Noah Robertson contributed to this story.

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.”

Space Systems Command — the service’s acquisition arm — is in the early phases of planning for the capability, according to March 5 notice, and is seeking industry feedback as it studies the prospect of increasing its portfolio of observation satellites.

Domain awareness is a top priority both for the Space Force and U.S. Space Command as they look to better characterize and deter threats from adversaries like Russia and China. As the service prepares to release its budget request for fiscal 2025 next week, Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein on March 7 called for more funding for space domain awareness capabilities, among other areas.

“We must invest more in test and training, space domain awareness, command and control, and in the ability to control the domain,” he said in a March 7 speech at the McAleese & Associates annual defense forum in Washington.

The service already operates a fleet of Geosynchronous Space Situation Awareness Program, or GSSAP, satellites that serve a kind of neighborhood watch function. They also perform rendezvous and proximity operations, drawing close to other satellites to observe and provide data on them.

Details on GSSAP’s full suite of capabilities are slim as the program is largely classified. The service first launched the Northrop Grumman-built spacecraft in 2014 and in 2022 fielded two more to replenish the constellation. Last year, it deactivated one of the six GSSAP satellites in orbit.

It’s not immediately clear how the additional GEO satellites would be distinct from GSSAP. However, one key difference is that the service wants the spacecraft to carry carry a Space Force-supported, in-orbit refueling port that would allow them to extend missions.

In recent years, Space Command leaders have pushed for the service to field more refuelable spacecraft to support more dynamic operations, noting that satellites like GSSAP are somewhat limited due to their fixed fuel supply.

Last year, then-deputy Space Command commander Lt. Gen. John Shaw called on the Space Force to equip all space observation satellites to be equipped for refueling by the end of the decade.

The notice indicates the satellites would be highly maneuverable and would carry an electro-optical payload. The service is also looking for low-cost systems that require minimal development and could be quickly built and launched.

The spacecraft wouldn’t need bespoke ground systems or operational units but would instead rely on existing capabilities.

The Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy will immediately start refreshing troops’ training and changing maintenance procedures as prerequisites for resuming normal operations, leaders from each of the services told reporters Wednesday.

But they acknowledged it will be months before the tiltrotor aircraft are fully back to flying real-world missions.

The Ospreys will receive no equipment modifications before they return to the air.

What is the Osprey, the aircraft at the center of multiple tragedies?

Marine Corps Col. Brian Taylor, the V-22 joint program manager, told reporters his office and the services “have high confidence that we understand what component failed and how it failed.” It’s still unclear why the part in question did not perform as intended.

Taylor and other service officials declined to say which component’s failure caused an Air Force Special Operations Command Osprey to crash into the sea during a training mission Nov. 29, killing all eight airmen aboard. They also declined to answer whether the aircraft would be restricted from flying under certain conditions or in certain areas due to the risk of a repeat problem.

The accident is still under investigation. The Air Force has shared its findings with the joint program office — which manages V-22 acquisition and maintenance for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps — and the other services to better understand the material failure that led to the crash.

Because the wreckage of the Osprey sat under the Pacific Ocean for about a month before being recovered, the drive system is corroded such that engineers may never understand why the unnamed component failed, Taylor said. But investigators created a “fault tree” to map out potential causes, which are addressed in the services’ mitigation plan.

The main change will increase the frequency of an inspection that is already done on the aircraft — like upping the number of oil changes on a car, Taylor said. He said the change gives the component a greater “perimeter of safety” during operations.

Though Taylor repeatedly declined to offer information about the component, he said it is not the input quill assembly that attaches the Osprey’s engine to its proprotor gear box — the component that began wearing out early and caused a series of clutch malfunctions for Marine Corps and Air Force pilots in 2022. A portion of the Air Force and Marine Corps fleets were grounded in 2023 as those services studied how to mitigate the risk of so-called “hard clutch engagements” and when to replace worn-out parts.

NBC reported Feb. 19 the November crash may have involved “chipping,” where tiny pieces of metal wear off during use and can damage the engine. Taylor did not specify whether chipping played a role in the crash, but characterized it as a normal phenomenon for a mechanical system and said the V-22 has a sophisticated monitoring system that looks for small metal bits and alerts the pilot if any are detected.

Taylor made clear the November crash was unrelated to other previous V-22 mishaps.

“This is the first time that we’ve seen this particular component fail in this way, and so this is unprecedented” in the 750,000 flight hours amassed over the life of the V-22 program, he said.

Due to that long track record, Taylor said: “We are confident in the system.”

The ‘Gundam 22′ crash

The Nov. 29 accident was the deadliest Air Force mishap since 2018, and the fourth fatal Osprey crash in a two-year span. Twenty U.S. troops have died in Osprey incidents since March 2022.

The downed crew of “Gundam 22″ included Osprey pilots Maj. Jeff Hoernemann, Maj. Luke Unrath and Capt. Terry Brayman; medical personnel Maj. Eric Spendlove and Tech. Sgt. Zach Lavoy; flight engineers Staff Sgt. Jake Turnage and Senior Airman Kody Johnson; and airborne linguist Staff Sgt. Jake Galliher.

Six were stationed at Japan’s Yokota Air Base; two worked at Kadena Air Base. All were assigned to the Air Force’s 353rd Special Operations Wing.

The weeks-long, multinational search effort successfully recovered the bodies of all but Spendlove.

The U.S. military now flies hundreds of V-22s, largely operated by the Marines. The tiltrotor aircraft is known for its towering nacelles that allow it to launch and land like a helicopter, and speed forward like a fixed-wing plane. Troops use the unique aircraft to slip in and out of areas without established runways, where fixed-wing planes may not be able to land with troops and supplies.

The Marine Corps owns nearly 350 Ospreys; the Air Force and Navy operate smaller fleets at around 50 and 30 aircraft, respectively.

Beyond the safety and accident investigation boards studying the most recent crash, Air Force Special Operations Command is also conducting a deep-dive into its CV-22 Osprey program to determine whether it provides adequate training, resources and other factors to ensure airmen’s safety.

The Government Accountability Office and House Committee on Oversight and Accountability have also launched their own probes into the V-22. On Wednesday, Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who chairs the House oversight committee, said it had not yet received information from the military as it looks into the aircraft’s safety and performance.

“Serious concerns remain, such as accountability measures put in place to prevent crashes, a general lack of transparency, how maintenance and operational upkeep is prioritized, and how DOD assesses risks,” Comer said in a statement. “We will continue to rigorously investigate the DOD’s Osprey program to attain answers to our questions on behalf of American taxpayers and protect U.S. service members defending our nation.”

Marines prepare

As the biggest user of the V-22 platform by far, the Marine Corps has been most affected by the monthslong grounding. It relies on the Osprey to move people, supplies and weapons, and operates from ship decks and from ground bases.

Brig. Gen. Richard Joyce, the assistant deputy commandant for aviation, told reporters the Marine Corps has focused on keeping up troops’ proficiency on the Osprey since the grounding began in early December so the service could resume flights as quickly as possible.

“Our simulator utilization has been maximized to keep proficiency as much as possible in the virtual environment,” he said.

How the Osprey grounding affected a Marine unit in the Indo-Pacific

The service has gone as far as sending MV-22 pilots in Djibouti thousands of miles away to use simulators in Japan, and shipping MV-22 pilots who are deployed to the Middle East with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit back home to North Carolina for simulator training.

Now that the program office has cleared the aircraft to fly, the Corps’ most experienced pilots and aircrew will begin maintenance-check flights to get the Ospreys up in the air, then retrain on “core and basic skills,” Joyce said. Once those top personnel have brushed up on the fundamentals, they’ll pair with junior pilots and crew for additional basic training.

Joyce said it would take about a month for a squadron to get everyone back up to speed basic skills.

However, it will take more time for the personnel to retrain on more advanced skills and mission-specific tasks for combat assaults, transport flights and other missions.

The general said it would take until late spring or early summer to get back to pre-grounding readiness levels.

V-22 squadrons will go through more consumable parts, like filters, as they take on additional inspections and maintenance, he said. Those parts and training support will first go to deployed units, followed by squadrons with upcoming deployments, squadrons participating in key exercises or service-level training events, and eventually to test-and-evaluation units and those farthest from a future deployment.

The amphibious assault ship Boxer and the 15th MEU are set to deploy from California this spring, and Joyce said it’s not clear yet if they’ll be ready to bring the V-22 along. It’s one of the most pressing decisions related to resuming V-22 flight operations, he said.

Air Force’s ongoing studies

Airmen have done the work required to keep the Air Force’s Osprey fleet healthy during the three-month standdown, but “there’s only so much they can do with aircraft that are not flying,” Air Force Special Operations Command boss Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind told reporters Wednesday.

He described a 12-week road map to getting the Ospreys back in the air that adds new maintenance requirements and allows experienced airmen to lead the way. The service will deviate from that plan as needed if work isn’t progressing on schedule.

Returning the aircraft to service begins with ground and simulator training that will include new safety controls and briefings, a review of aircraft maintenance records and refining squadron-level training plans to implement the new safety protocols, Bauernfeind said.

The Air Force did not elaborate on what new safety protocols will be introduced. AFSOC held an all-hands for Osprey crews Feb. 22-23 at Hurlburt Field, Florida, to explain the new safety protocols.

“We received very positive feedback that it was very beneficial to the crews,” Bauernfeind said.

The second phase will focus on returning air crews and maintainers to basic proficiency, initially targeted at senior aviators, instructors, evaluators and weapons officers. Simulator training has helped keep skills sharp during the standdown.

The phased approach gives the service time to absorb findings from the service’s initial safety investigation, an internal report meant to root out the cause of a mishap and prevent future occurrences. Bauernfeind received and accepted the findings of the safety board March 1.

He expects it will take the service more than three months to reach the level of proficiency it had on the Osprey before the Nov. 29 crash.

Bauernfeind said he’s confident in the service’s ability to safely resume Osprey operations before wrapping up two ongoing investigations. The Air Force has kept the families of the downed crew informed about the process, but has not told them the results of the recently completed safety investigation board.

“I have confidence that we know enough now to return to fly,” he said.

Navy’s path to at-sea missions

The Navy will take a similarly cautious approach to resuming its flights, putting only its most experienced personnel in the air first for basic flights in daytime-only conditions, Commander of Naval Air Forces Vice Adm. Daniel Cheever told reporters.

Those top personnel will then pair with junior sailors and eventually resume night operations and other, more complex training. The Navy will lastly resume training new pilots and aircrew at the fleet replacement squadrons.

But Cheever warned that returning to flight wasn’t the same as returning to mission: It may be several more months until the Navy sees its CMV-22Bs flying operational missions to haul cargo and people to aircraft carriers at sea.

Cheever said the Navy would avoid long, over-ocean flights until all personnel had built up sufficient proficiency. But when asked about any restrictions on the aircraft regarding duration of over-water flights, he deferred to NAVAIR. Taylor, from the V-22 program office under NAVAIR, declined to say whether there were or were not any operational limitations for the planes under the new return-to-flight plan.

Cheever highlighted the Navy’s flexibility and said all carriers at sea had fared well during the V-22 grounding. The Navy relied on its C-2A Greyhound, which is set to sundown in 2026 as it’s replaced by the CMV-22B, to resupply carriers at sea, including the Theodore Roosevelt deployed in the Indo-Pacific today.

He said the Navy also relied more heavily on its replenishment ship fleet and looked to load more goods onto carriers when they were in port.

But he noted the importance of getting the CMV-22 back to its mission, saying it can conduct medical evacuations and haul large F-35C engine components — unlike its aging predecessor.

“No U.S. boots will be on the ground,” Biden said. “A temporary pier will enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day. And Israel must also do its part. Israel must allow more aid into Gaza and ensure that humanitarian workers aren’t caught in the cross fire.

“To the leadership of Israel I say this: Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip.”

Senior administration officials told reporters earlier Thursday the mission would route humanitarian aid through Cyprus to the temporary port in Gaza. The White House is also pushing Israel and Egypt to allow more aid through the land crossings at Rafah and Kerem Shalom.

The announcement, which drew bipartisan applause from lawmakers gathered, came amid calls from Biden for Congress to pass his long-stalled foreign aid bill to arm Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan.

The Senate passed the $95 billion foreign aid plan by a 70-29 vote in February. It includes $14 billion in Israel military aid, $48 billion in security assistance for Ukraine and $4 billion to arm Taiwan.

Israel receives an annual $3.8 billion in U.S. military aid, but the White House has said the Defense Department lacks the replenishment funds needed to continue arming Ukraine from U.S. stockpiles.

There’s also $2.4 billion in the bill for U.S. Central Command to respond to the uptick in attacks on American forces since the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023; as well as $542 million for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in response to its fiscal 2024 unfunded priorities list.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has so far refused to put the bill on the floor amid growing resistance to additional Ukraine aid from Republican lawmakers as well as opposition from former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner in the GOP presidential primary race.

“Now assistance to Ukraine is being blocked by those who want to walk away from our world leadership,” said Biden, invoking former Republican President Ronald Reagan. “Now my predecessor tells Putin ‘do whatever the hell you want.”

The reference to Trump’s remarks at a campaign rally last month in which the former president voiced frustration with some NATO allies underspending on defense drew “boos” from Republicans in the crowd.

“Send me the bipartisan National Security Bill. History is watching,” Biden said, staring down Republican members of Congress who have opposed the measure. “If the United States walks away now, it will put Ukraine at risk, Europe at risk, the free world at risk, emboldening others who wish to do us harm.”

Biden also promised a strong response to other national security threats, including strikes to degrade Houthi capabilities in the Red Sea. “As commander in chief, I will not hesitate to direct further measures to protect our people and military personnel.”

Despite limited details about the plan for a humanitarian port, the idea drew immediate praise from Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., and fellow panel member Angus King, I-Maine, who last week urged the administration to deploy a Navy hospital ship to the region.

“The civilian suffering in Gaza must be alleviated, and a maritime aid route will enable large quantities of food, shelter, and medical supplies to be delivered to those who need it most,” the pair said in a statement. “This temporary port, along with the ongoing airdrop campaign, will help ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

The Public Accounts Committee’s review, released March 8, comes two days after the government opted not to allocate extra funding for the military in its 2024 budget.

The deficit for the 10-year equipment plan, which the ministry published late last year and begins in 2023, will amount to £16.9 billion (U.S. $21.5 billion), the committee found. However, that could grow by a further £12 billion if the individual armed services each took the same approach to stating their equipment requirement costs, the committee noted.

The committee reviews the 10-year defense equipment plan annually as part of its role in overseeing how the government spends taxpayers’ money. The committee has consistently cast doubt on the affordability of the ministry’s equipment plans, but the latest report is especially critical.

The 10-year plan, based on financial data from March 31, 2023, saw the ministry allocate an equipment budget of £288.6 billion over the following decade to 2033 — a £46.3 billion rise on the figures presented from 2022.

“However, forecast costs have increased by £65.7 to £305.5 billion, resulting in a £16.9 billion deficit between the MoD’s capability requirements and the available budget,” the committee reported.

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That deficit could grow to £29 billion were the separate armed services to be consistent in the method they use to price their equipment requirements, the committee noted. For example, the inquiry found the Royal Navy includes the costs of all capabilities the government expects the service to deliver, whereas the Army only includes those capabilities it can afford.

Committee figures show this can have a significant impact on forecast costs. For instance, the Royal Navy’s decision to change its previous policy of only including costs it can afford, to predicted costs for capabilities the ministry expects it to deliver, resulted in a deficit of £15.3 billion in the latest plan, compared with a surplus of £700 million in the 2023 equipment plan.

The primary problem

The main cause of the cost increases reported by the committee is the ministry’s decision to fully fund Britain’s defense nuclear enterprise, according to the report.

The ministry has agreed to a minimum 10-year budget with the Treasury at a price tag of £109.8 billion for nuclear activities over the period.

The principal cost for the nuclear program is the construction of four Dreadnought-class nuclear missile submarines made by BAE Systems. They are to enter service in the coming decade. However, a new warhead program and other nuclear-related initiatives together dwarf spending on individual conventional weapons procurement.

Maintaining the nuclear deterrent is one of the ministry’s top defense priorities. If addition funds are needed for the nuclear program, accounts for conventional equipment will be further squeezed, the report noted.

Costs at the Defence Nuclear Organisation, which is responsible for the U.K.’s nuclear deterrent — have increased by £38.2 billion since the government released last year’s plan, the committee said.

‘Unpleasant, short-term decisions’

Inflation and the foreign exchange rate have also taken their toll on Britain’s budget. The ministry estimates inflation will add almost £11 billion to its costs over the 10-year period.

Despite the ailing condition of the Defence Ministry’s finances, the report said, the department has put off making major decisions about canceling programs it cannot afford.

“Instead, it has optimistically assumed that the plan would be affordable if the government fulfilled its long-term aspiration to spend 2.5% of GDP [gross domestic product] on defense each year, despite there being no guarantee on whether this will happen,” the report noted.

Everything that does not fall under the nuclear budget will experience severe pressure, said Malcolm Chalmers, the deputy director general at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London.

“The government is going to have to make some unpleasant, short-term decisions between different conventional equipment capabilities at a time when the Ukraine war is shining the spotlight on neglected capabilities in which our armed forces clearly need to invest more,” he said.

“After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many European countries are increasing their defense budgets rapidly, including Germany, the Scandinavian countries, the exposed eastern countries and quite a number of others as well. The U.K. government seems to have decided, given the wider fiscal squeeze and the priority being given to tax cuts, that there will be no more money for defense in this budget.” he added.

Indeed, the Defence Ministry is becoming “increasingly reliant” on allies to protect British interests, the committee said, “which carries the risk that such support might not always be available.”

Last year, the ministry told the National Audit Office, the government’s financial watchdog, that it was not planning to cancel programs in the short term, as that would limit the choices available to decision-makers at the next governmentwide spending review‚ which is likely this year.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt has been under pressure to increase funds to rebuild Britain’s depleted military amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. He has reiterated the Conservative government’s ambition to increase overall defense spending from the current level of 2.1% of GDP to 2.5% during his March 6 budget speech‚ but has not provided a concrete timeline, only saying it would happen when economic conditions allow it so.

The Labour Party has pledged to reform defense, but not unveiled specific spending commitments.

A general election is expected by the end of the year, with the Labour Party currently ahead in the polls.