The agreement, expected to be signed at the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, has not been made public, though President Donald Trump says it grants the U.S. “permanent control.” Denmark and Greenland have not commented on Trump’s claim but said the deal will benefit the Arctic island and respect its sovereignty.

The deal follows months of pressure from Trump, who has said the United States should control Greenland and at times refused to rule out using military or economic force to acquire the semi-autonomous Danish territory. His threats, which peaked in January, triggered a diplomatic crisis within NATO and pushed Denmark and Greenland into negotiations with Washington aimed at defusing the pressure.

“It (the agreement) will be in a form where responsibility for security in the Arctic is not only Danish or American,” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told national broadcaster TV2 on Sunday. He added that to a large extent “it would be NATO that looks after the Arctic”.

‘Security, stability and cooperation’

A NATO spokesperson said on Saturday that the alliance welcomed the agreement, which would “help advance security, stability and cooperation in this vital region.”

Rasmussen, who travelled to New York overnight, declined to discuss the contents of the agreement.

“But we have said from the start that we are open to accommodating the United States’ legitimate security interests,” Rasmussen told Danish news agency Ritzau on Monday.

Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Friday the agreement gives the United States “permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland,” and that no U.S. adversary could have a base or military presence there without Washington’s written approval.

Denmark has not responded to Trump’s claim, though Copenhagen has earlier acknowledged it underinvested in Greenland’s defense for decades and has pledged to expand its military presence on the island, including more NATO troops.

Key details have not been made public, including whether the deal amends the 1951 defense agreement that is the legal basis for the U.S. presence in Greenland.

Greenland’s government has sought to reassure the public about the deal.

Erik Jensen, an opposition lawmaker in Greenland, wrote on Facebook that he had read the draft agreement: “I feel reassured and am not worried,” he said, adding that the island’s foreign minister was handling the work well.

A sale would mark a significant policy shift from the U.S., potentially altering the balance of military power in the Middle East and testing Washington’s definition of maintaining its ally Israel’s “qualitative military edge.”

Saudi Arabia made a direct appeal for the jets in early 2025 to U.S. President Donald Trump and has long been interested in Lockheed Martin’s fighter.

The estimated $24.3 billion sale, which still needs congressional approval, would include 48 of the military aircraft and 49 Pratt & Whitney engines along with communications equipment, spare parts and other support items, the State Department said.

Washington weighs weapons sales to the Middle East in a way that ensures Israel maintains a “qualitative military edge”, effectively guaranteeing that Israel gets more advanced U.S. weapons than regional Arab states.

The Saudi embassy in Washington welcomed the proposed sale, describing it as a further step in defense cooperation between the two countries.

“The proposed F-35 sale reflects the strength and enduring nature of the Saudi-U.S. strategic partnership and the continued advancement of our defense cooperation,” the embassy said on X.

The F-35, built with stealth technology that allows it to evade enemy detection, is considered the world’s most advanced fighter jet. Israel has operated the aircraft for a decade, building multiple squadrons, and remains the only Middle Eastern country to possess the system.

Saudi Arabia, the largest customer for U.S. arms, has sought the fighter for years as it looks to modernize its air force and counter regional threats, particularly from Iran. The kingdom’s renewed push for what would constitute two squadrons comes as the Trump administration has signaled openness to deepening defense cooperation with Riyadh. The Saudi Air Force flies a mix of fighter aircraft including Boeing F-15s, European Tornados and Typhoons.

The F-35 issue has also been intertwined with broader diplomatic efforts. The administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden previously explored providing F-35s to Saudi Arabia as part of a comprehensive deal that would have included Riyadh normalizing relations with Israel, though those efforts ultimately stalled.

Trump has made arms sales to Saudi Arabia a priority since returning to office. In 2025, the United States agreed to sell the kingdom an arms package worth nearly $142 billion, which the White House called “the largest defense cooperation agreement” Washington has ever done.

Congressional scrutiny could pose challenges to any F-35 sale. Lawmakers previously questioned arms deals with Riyadh following the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and some members of Congress remain wary of deepening military cooperation with the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia is pursuing ambitious economic and military modernization plans under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 agenda. It has sought to diversify its defense partnerships while maintaining its decades-long security relationship with Washington.

As the force grapples with supply chain and maintenance issues as well as long aircraft service lives, sustainment funding is becoming increasingly necessary to bridge the gap, service officials said in a panel at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

“If I can throw a number out there right now, we have a $14 billion hole in supply,” Commander of Air Force Materiel Command Lt. Gen. Linda Hurry said during a panel titled “Flying and Fixing to Fight and Win.”

“Let that sink in for a minute,” she continued. “I know we’re not going to get it all at once, but when we get it, we’re going to have to execute. We’re going to have to execute smartly so we can move the needle.”

Hurry said that the service is managing the fleet more globally through partnerships, looking at parts with the Defense Logistics Agency and individual pieces that the force can get from the depot back in the field.

“From a supply perspective, our increase in the supply rate, or the number of aircraft that are down from a supply perspective, has increased 87% over the last seven years,” Hurry said.

On average, around 53% of the force’s fleet is over 30 years old, with 55% of the fleet over its “useful” service life, she said.

Hurry added that the force is working to receive additional funding for spare parts through advocating for the budget request to pass. In the fiscal year 2027 budget, the Department of the Air Force requested a record $338.8 billion, with $4.2 billion allotted for the Consolidated Sustainment Activity Group, or CSAG, that manages spare parts and maintenance backlogs, according to budget documents.

“But once we get even a penny, we have to be ready to execute it,” Hurry said.

Hurry also said that the service is striving to improve its “forecasting accuracy” to better understand where the needs are and where to position those assets globally by using artificial intelligence models and additive manufacturing.

On top of those measures, the service is putting long-term contracts in place that build stability in the collective supply chain and multiple sources of supply.

“Gone are the days of monopolies; we can’t just have one person producing the one critical part,” she said. “I need five [industry partners] producing them because if we get down to the crunch, we’re going to have to have a healthy shelf so that we can fight globally.”

The officials touted the North Star Readiness Campaign, which is meant to increase the number of mission-capable B-52 Stratofortress and B-1 Lancer aircraft by accelerating the delivery of parts, engineering support and depot maintenance.

The campaign has been the “number one driver” of improving readiness in the bomber fleet because of the supply increase the force has received, Gen. Stephen L. Davis, commander of the Air Force Global Strike Command, said during the panel.

Specifically, Davis said that the campaign has increased B-52 readiness by 40%.

“As a commander, you don’t want everything to be a money problem to solve it, but this I think is a money problem,” he said. “We need more money for parts. It’s absolutely the case.”

“The decision was made following an assessment of the costs of the offers, delivery times, operational capabilities and the involvement of the local defense industry in the procurement,” the Latvian Ministry of Defence said in a statement.

In June 2025, Latvia and Sweden signed a letter of intent that was to pave the way for an acquisition of 18 Archer systems. However, Riga’s decision to continue its negotiations with Excalibur Army resulted in an offer that includes more favorable prices and delivery terms, according to the ministry.

“Another significant advantage is that the involvement of the local defense industry is envisaged as part of the contract,” the statement said.

Bolstering Latvian indirect fire support capabilities has been identified as one of the “key capability development projects” to be financed by the nation’s record-high 2026 defense budget. This year, Latvia foresees spending 4.91% of its gross domestic product (GDP), or €2.16 billion ($2.48 billion), on the military.

The value of the howitzer procurement was not disclosed.

Excalibur Army is a subsidiary of Czechoslovak Group (CSG), the Prague-based private defense holding that is one of Europe’s largest ammunition producers.

The Morana has a firing range of 41.5 km (26 miles). Operated by a crew of three, the howitzer can reach a top road speed of 90 km/h (56 mph), according to data from Excalibur Army.

“The crew has 45 carried rounds available for their task completion. Fully automated gun loading allows the crew to fire up to 6 rounds within the first minute from establishing position,” CSG said in a statement.

Battlefield transparency and powerful, precise modern weapons have jointly created a “zone of death” along the frontline where approaching the enemy is “very, very dangerous,” Baratz said at an innovation day held by the French 7th Armored Brigade in eastern France last week. In terms of new technology, what the Army needs most is a way to break the resulting tactical stalemate, he said.

Maneuver along the Ukrainian frontline has largely stalled as near-continuous drone observation means neither Ukraine nor Russia can mass forces without exposing them to destruction. Baratz compared the situation to World War I, when artillery and machine guns meant maneuver and offensive operations could be futile or only possible at the cost of enormous casualties.

“We’re in a system of tactical stalemate, where defensive systems are more powerful than offensive ones,” Baratz said on the sidelines of an innovation day in Besançon on Sept. 9. “We need to be able to break out of this system. So today, we have to be able to recreate what we call a bit of opacity in this world of transparency.”

Baratz said there are “a great number of ways” to think about deception, including physical decoys and electromagnetic deception using simulated command posts. The innovation day featured inflatable copies of equipment used by the 7th Armored Brigade, including a Caesar howitzer and the VBL light armored vehicle.

The commander also noted the importance of electromagnetic jamming, and of electronic warfare and cyber warfare as forces become increasingly connected.

“How can we blind the adversary? How do we mislead him about our intentions? How can we create a temporary vulnerability with the adversary to restore momentum and offensive action,” Baratz said.

“Above all, how do we deceive his sensors or ensure that his sensors don’t see the right things, allowing the concentration of force? Because today, we can’t concentrate if we’re destroyed, and so there isn’t the mass necessary to be able to throw the adversary off balance.”

Other technologies that could reshape the battlefield include quantum technology, both for secure communications as well as for sensing, according to Baratz.

“There’s also multi-spectral image analysis that is starting to allow us to see what’s under trees, what’s under cover,” the general said. “There are new technologies, often driven by artificial intelligence, that provide capabilities we couldn’t have imagined until now.”

With the pace of technological change in some areas now measured in weeks rather than years or months, that creates difficulties for the military, according to Baratz. He cited telecommunications, where the military is “lagging far behind” the civilian sector in terms of bandwidth and data transmission capacity, even as the modern battlefield is organized around data.

The general said the military may be on the brink of a revolution in warfare similar to that of 1920, when mechanization and radio communications accelerated the pace of maneuver. The growing use of data on the battlefield may ultimately speed up both decision-making and destruction of the adversary, Baratz said.

Baratz said the modern battlefield has “radically changed” from the past, when military tactics were ultimately organized around geography, “that is to say the ridge line that defined the field of fire or field of view.”

“So how do we reinvent ourselves tactically?” Baratz said. “At the time, we French didn’t really reinvent ourselves, and we paid the price in 1940.”

Baratz said innovation has become an element of operational superiority for armies, and the ability to continuously adapt systems and incorporate new technology is fundamental.

The Future Combat Command has therefore adopted “a logic that is entirely different” from the Army’s traditional top-down approach, and is encouraging “testing, tinkering, experimenting” at the regimental level, Baratz said, with the aim of making the force more efficient, more flexible, more adaptable and more creative.

While large-scale programs will remain necessary, the Army also needs to be able to repurpose civilian technologies for military purposes and increasingly move toward open-architecture systems, Baratz said.

The Army currently provides each regiment with €150,000 ($172,000) a year to spend on their own projects or to buy off-the-shelf kit in a bid to stimulate grassroots innovation. The Army’s €20 million account for these “subsidiarity credits” is being increased with an additional €35 million in the 2027 defense budget, according to Baratz.

The commander said the Army has “real needs” in areas including robotics, autonomous vehicles, discreet mobility and battlefield-energy generation. New companies are entering the market in those areas and reaching out to the French forces, including increasingly European firms, which is helping stimulate thinking and the wider ecosystem, Baratz said.

He said all French brigades have initiatives around light mobility, working with companies on electric scooters, motorcycles and quads to be “faster and stealthier on this changing battlefield.”

Electric power allows forces to be more discreet but is also an area of vulnerability, due to the need for intelligence-gathering systems and frontline data hubs that are all power hungry, the general said. The Future Combat Command is therefore also looking at what Baratz called “frugal artificial intelligence,” designed to consume as little energy as possible.

“All of this is the combat of the future,” Baratz said. “It’s the future combat that remains hard to imagine, because technology is moving so quickly that I’m incapable of telling you what things will look like in one or two years.”

The decision to extend the B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit comes amid moves by the force to further develop the B-21 Raider, the service’s next-generation stealth bomber with accelerated production.

Both the bombers will be extended, Gen. Stephen L. Davis, commander of the Air Force Global Strike Command, said during a panel titled “Flying and Fixing to Fight and Win” at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

The commander said that the experienced pilots from the bombers will be some of the first B-21 pilots.

The Raiders are on track for a 2027 delivery to Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota. The service aims to replace the aging B-1 and B-2 fleets in the coming decades with at least 100 B-21s.

Davis highlighted the Air Force’s Bomber Supplemental Trainer for Aircrew Readiness, or BSTAR, program, which is meant to address gaps and flight-hour readiness for B-1 pilots. In the program, XSTAR Aviation provides the force with HondaJet Elite light business jets.

“We’re bringing in a HondaJet to actually help experience some pilots, and also as some of these airframes have issues with readiness, it gives those pilots a chance to fly and get them time in the seat, which we know is very important,” Davis said during the panel.

The commander didn’t say how long the bombers’ service lives would be extended for, but the service intends to modernize and invest in the B-1 and B-2s in the coming years despite both aircraft being slated for retirement in the next decade.

Recently, the service launched an operation readiness campaign, dubbed the North Star Readiness Campaign, to increase the number of mission-capable B-52 Stratofortress and B-1s by accelerating the delivery of parts, engineering support and depot maintenance.

During the campaign’s announcement, the force said that while the B-22 and B-1 are being upgraded to continue service, the B-2 will be maintained for combat effectiveness until the B-21 is fully operational.

The Army aims to select a contractor that can deliver two prototype UAVs for what it is calling the Army Blood Link project, the notice states. Each drone must be capable of transporting 20 units of blood products.

The deadline to respond to the notice is Sept. 21, and the drones will need to be delivered within three months of the contract award.

“Due to the compressed timeline, we recommend focusing on further development and adaptation of existing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) UAS solutions,” the notice emphasized.

The request for proposals, issued on behalf of the XVIII Airborne Corps Joint Operations Innovation Outpost, calls for a UAV that can haul a minimum of 35 pounds and up to 50 pounds. The drone should have a one-way transport radius of 30 kilometers and a maximum range of 100 kilometers, the notice states.

Maximum speed was not specified in the request, but the Army wants a UAV capable of flying at an altitude of up to 18,000 feet. The request notes that the UAV should also be capable of a “maximum 30-minute response time from mission request to launch under standard operating conditions.”

Given the perishability of blood supplies, the drone must carefully regulate its operating temperature, the Army requested. The cargo container should “maintain required temperature for up to [three] hours of transport time, within an ambient environment of 15°F to 120°F with high humidity,” the notice states.

The Army estimates a total mission duration of three to six hours, with blood carried within temperature limits for no more than three hours.

The request also details that the container must accommodate blood bags roughly 8 inches long and 5 inches wide. The cargo bay should also be resistant to vibration, rain, sand, chemical contamination and other environmental hazards.

Upon delivery, the drone will need to precisely land a cargo within 10 meters of the desired location, according to the request.

Potentially dropping of the blood supplies from the air is also possible, the notice states. This would mean a “drop capability from 10 to 15 meters above ground level with landing accuracy sufficient to remain within the 10-meter delivery-location requirement and not damage the blood products or compromise container integrity,” the request notes.

The Army envisions a semi-autonomous drone with “autonomous waypoint navigation and return-to-base functions, under operator supervision.” The service wants the UAV and its ground equipment to also have an operational lifespan of 500 to 1,500 flight hours.

The Army has been devoting more attention to the challenge of delivering blood supplies to the front lines. In May 2025, the 173rd Airborne Brigade used drones to transport blood during the Swift Response exercise in Lithuania.

The ⁠Patriot missile defense system remains one of the world’s most sought-after weapons for the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and Russia’s prolonged war with Ukraine.

Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv credits Patriot batteries with helping defend cities against Russian ballistic missile attacks, while Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly appealed for ⁠more ​launchers and interceptors as Moscow intensifies air strikes.

GM Defense delivered the initial batch of housing components for the Patriot interceptors called the PAC-3 MSE — on Aug. 28, just 22 days after the Aug. 6 contract signing, Lockheed said, for parts that traditionally take months or years to produce.

The deal builds on a broader collaboration the two companies announced in June, when they said they were partnering to strengthen the U.S. defense industrial base amid surging demand for munitions, tapping GM Defense’s manufacturing plants and laboratories to boost production capacity and supply chain resilience.

“This extraordinary 22-day turnaround underscores Lockheed Martin’s relentless focus on execution — delivering for our troops faster, with greater capacity,” said Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control.

GM Defense President and CEO Stephen duMont said the automaker’s precision-fabrication expertise would support “production of this country’s critical defense capabilities.”

Lockheed is investing $8 billion to $9 billion to scale munitions output, including PAC-3 MSE, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), adding new buildings and jobs at more than 20 U.S. sites. The company said production and warehousing space would grow nearly 50% following planned expansions.

The strategy prompted a U.S. think tank to ask why America couldn’t do the same and sink China’s growing fleet of carriers.

The think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, devised a plan to target Chinese carriers by using many of the same tactics that China would use against American flattops.

“China’s expanding carrier force presents a strategic vulnerability that the United States and its allies can exploit, rather than merely a challenge to U.S. dominance,” argues a CSIS report, titled “Flip the Script.”

“Instead of treating U.S. carriers as hunted platforms, focusing on how to defend U.S. assets, this report argues that the United States and allied Pacific powers can — and should — go on the offense, becoming the hunters instead of the hunted in this near-peer competition,” it continues.

For years, China has painted a bullseye on American carriers, including building a full-sized mockup of a U.S. carrier in the Taklamakan Desert. Beyond the poetic justice of replying in kind, targeting Chinese carriers exploits the same sensitivities that Americans have about their vessels.

Just as losing a Ford-class carrier would deeply humiliate Washington, sinking a Fujian-class carrier would be devastating for Beijing. Just as U.S. planners must be cautious about committing carriers in waters exposed to submarine attack, so, too, might Chinese admirals.

“These platforms are both prestige projects and critical enablers of future Chinese sea control and expeditionary operations,” CSIS said. “Moreover, just like their U.S. counterparts, the Chinese carriers are high‑value, hard‑to‑replace assets vulnerable to long‑range strike.”

China currently has three operational aircraft carriers, and a 2025 Pentagon study estimated that the People’s Liberation Army Navy will build six more by 2035. Yet, Beijing’s quest to build a carrier fleet may be driven less by military considerations than by prestige, just as Britain and Germany raced to build dreadnoughts before the First World War.

“China’s desire to be taken seriously as a first‑rate power may drive its construction of these capital ships more than pure military thinking,” the CSIS report said. Thus, “the PLAN’s new carriers become concentrated nodes of military, political, and symbolic risk.”

The tactics advocated by CSIS may seem eerily familiar to U.S. Navy strategists contemplating American carriers sailing within harm’s way to save Taiwan from invasion. For example, CSIS envisions deploying manned and unmanned submarines that could ambush Chinese flattops. This would include U.S. nuclear subs and quiet diesel-electric boats from allies such as Australia, Japan and South Korea.

“The key is to turn the undersea domain into a continuous threat envelope that forces Beijing to invest heavily in escorts, ASW aviation, and fixed sensors simply to move carriers out of its home waters,” the report said.

Just like China and its “carrier-killer” ballistic missiles, the U.S. and its allies would deploy land-based missiles against Chinese ships, the CSIS plan says.

Launched from bases in Japan down to the Philippines, these weapons would interdict chokepoints that a Chinese carrier would be forced to pass through. The idea is that “the mere expectation that upon entering the Philippine Sea, carriers such as the Fujian or Sichuan will face dense, land‑based anti‑ship fires backed by allied ISR [reconnaissance and targeting] raises the perceived risk of using them as front‑line tools of coercion.”

In addition, the U.S. would target Chinese carriers with air-launched, anti-ship missiles backed by satellite surveillance. Meanwhile, electronic and cyber warfare would disrupt Chinese command networks in the same way that China would disrupt America’s.

Taking a leaf from Ukraine’s successful campaign to drive the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea, swarms of unmanned surface vessels would hit Chinese ports and ships in those ports.

“The central idea is to make a carrier’s routine employment around Taiwan, the South China Sea, or beyond the first island chain appear prohibitively risky, day in and day out,” said the report.

Historically, powerful and prestigious warships have been a double-edged sword. For example, in World War I and World War II, the German navy’s battleships and battlecruisers spent much of their time in port. Losing a capital ship — such as the battleship Bismarck in May 1941 — could be seen as a national humiliation.

“The potential domestic political fallout from losing the carriers might make the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] more risk-averse,” one U.S. expert on China told Defense News.

“The CCP spent a lot of political capital making its case to the public about building a carrier fleet,” said the expert, who spoke about the situation on the condition of anonymity. “The sustained public campaign to drum up support was part of a larger effort to shape China’s ‘maritime consciousness.’ The CCP tapped into naval nationalism to mobilize enormous resources for the buildup.”

The question then becomes what resources the U.S. Navy would need to threaten China’s carriers.

CSIS’s plan would require changes to U.S. defense strategy, especially building more submarines.

However, the study questioned whether U.S. shipyards have the capacity to build enough nuclear attack submarines to “sustain a dense ‘ambush belt’ against PLAN carrier groups.”

CSIS sees the solution as threefold: buying more unmanned underwater vehicles, investing in allied bases to host naval drones and procuring more torpedoes to bolster an inadequate stockpile.

Significantly, the plan calls for a change in the composition of the U.S. Navy. Rather than current plans for a force of 350 manned vessels and 150 surface and underwater drones, the force would be evenly split between 300 manned and 300 unmanned vessels under the CSIS plan.

The U.S. Army and Marine Corps would contribute units equipped with anti-ship missiles. The U.S. would also arrange for its Pacific allies to co-produce guided munitions.

“The United States cannot afford to fight a long war in the Western Pacific if every LRASM, SM‑6, or Naval Strike Missile must be produced in and shipped from North America,” CSIS said.

Beyond finding a means to discomfit China, the study seems to aim at critics who believe the U.S. Navy’s carriers have become a liability in the age of missiles and drones. CSIS argues that while U.S. carriers are not invulnerable, they “may not be as vulnerable as analysts assume.”

The “current discussion in Washington often frames carriers as unique to the United States and uniquely vulnerable, while underplaying the fact that China is now building its own large‑deck, network‑enabled capital ships that are at least as targetable as the U.S. ships China aims to threaten.”

The agreement is neither a contract nor an order for missiles. Officials described it as a demand signal to Lockheed and its suppliers to justify investing in capacity, workforce and production efficiencies. Should Congress authorize and fund a multiyear buy, the aim is for production lines to be ready when orders arrive.

“Speed, scale, and stability drive acquisition excellence, and these gears must turn in unison,” Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Michael Duffey said in the release. “Today’s announcement reflects our commitment to sending clear, long-term demand signals across the defense industrial base.”

Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, said the company will invest its own money to expand capacity in advance of any orders.

“JATM is one of our nation’s most important air dominance capabilities, but because of the classified nature of the program, it’s also a story we haven’t been able to tell,” Cahill said in a statement reported by Reuters. “We’re proud to finally talk about the extraordinary work behind this missile and how we’re working with the U.S. government to rapidly scale production.”

Lockheed has been developing JATM for the U.S. Air Force and Navy to outrange and eventually replace the AIM-120 AMRAAM.

The company said the AIM-260 offers greater range and effectiveness than current U.S. air-to-air weapons. Public estimates put its range at more than 120 miles, a response to longer-range Chinese weapons such as the PL-15.

Sized to fit the internal bays of fifth-generation fighters like the F-22 and F-35, the missile must deliver that added range with a footprint no larger than the AMRAAM it replaces.

The first public images of the missile were taken May 13, when aviation photographer Jonathan Tweedy photographed an AIM-260 loaded on a Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. The Aviationist published the photo two days later.

Lockheed also tied the framework to foreign military sales. Australia announced Aug. 6 it would invest about $520 million USD, or $736 million AU, to buy JATM for the Royal Australian Air Force, becoming the missile’s first export customer. The service plans to integrate it first on F/A-18F Super Hornets, then on F-35A Lightning IIs and EA-18G Growlers.

That order represents a fraction of what the U.S. has authorized. In March, it approved a potential sale to Australia of up to 450 missiles and associated test articles valued at $3.16 billion.

While some earlier 2026 framework deals with Lockheed came with public production targets, Thursday’s releases gave no JATM production rate or dollar value.

The failure of troops to provide phone numbers for spouses in the Air Force Personnel Accountability and Assessment System, however, can carry dire consequences. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Douglas Scheiss recalled an incident in which he and his wife, Debbie, needed to reach a spouse whose husband had died in Syria.

But when they called the number on file, the phone simply rang and rang. It was the number for the airman’s cell phone.

“The number we were calling [was wrong] because he didn’t want his wife’s number to be on something,” Scheiss said during a forum on military families at the Air & Space Forces Association annual conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on Wednesday. “We are the most connected people in the world … but when the time is needed to contact people … don’t take away that ability for a spouse to be connected.”

The Air Force is launching an effort to improve the service’s ability to collect accurate contact information for spouses and provide it to units’ Key Support Program, the Air Force’s volunteer portion of a command’s family readiness efforts similar to Navy ombudsmen or Marine Corps family readiness volunteers.

Key Support Liaisons facilitate communications between commands and families — and often serve as the social foundation for military families when units are deployed.

Volunteers are required to keep phone numbers and other personal information confidential under the Privacy Act, but the unit phone trees they are provided are only as good as the information in AFPAAS, explained Cindy Wilsbach, wife of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach.

“We’ve asked them to do this and [Key Support Liaisons] have stood up and said they will, yet we haven’t equipped them by giving them the contact information for our families,” Cindy Wilsbach said.

“When this thing kicked off in February,” she said, referring to the Iran war, “I heard from people around the globe … ‘Cindy, their spouse is gone, and this spouse has heard from no one. No one has contacted her, no one has reached out to her.’ It wasn’t just one or two people. I heard it from a lot of people.”

The service has started distributing cards to unit leaders that explain how leaders — most likely unit first sergeants — can pull unit personnel lists from AFPAAS and provide a comprehensive recall roster to their Key Support Liaison.

The four-step effort involves identifying the need, collecting the contact information, maintaining a roster and providing it to the liaison on a regular basis.

The cards were created by Doniel Wolfe, a military family life counselor who holds a doctorate in counseling and is married to Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force David Wolfe.

Collecting and distributing accurate information on family contacts may sound simple, but it’s been a problem “for a very long time,” Cindy Wilsbach said.

“We’ve heard it at every single base we’ve visited … so we’re hoping, with Legal’s blessing, that this is the way forward, that we will arm KSLs with the power to actually do what we’ve asked them to do,” she said.

Connection with the command, as well as one another, is a cornerstone of readiness, Cindy Wilsbach added. She said the liaisons are a vital resource for making initial contact with new families, sustaining families when units are deployed and providing support in emergencies.

The senior leaders and their spouses urged personnel attending the conference to keep their spouses’ contact information updated in AFPAAS, with Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna saying it’s the responsibility of leadership to make sure that spouses feel included.

“How many spouses … are maybe just waiting for someone to reach out to them. The worst that could happen is you send a note or make a phone call, send a text or an email, and you don’t get an answer back … but this is where leadership comes in — you got in there, and you got to take care,” Bentivegna said.

The Navy championed the contract as one of the first successful examples of the Department of the Navy Rapid Capabilities Office and how it “has adapted its acquisition structure to more rapidly meet the needs of the warfighter. … By leveraging advanced commercial manufacturing methods and a vertically integrated production line, this landmark program introduces immediate ‘affordable mass’ to the fleet.”

Blackbeard is “an air-launched, hypersonic strike weapon that provides carrier-based strike fighters with a responsive, long-range, high-speed strike option against maritime and land targets, enhancing survivability against advanced air defenses while significantly increasing magazine depth,” the release notes.

The missile, according to Inside Defense, is intended to serve as a standoff weapon with a 200-nautical-mile range, arming aircraft including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the F/A-18/E/F Super Hornet.

The Navy has long sought an air-launched hypersonic anti-surface missile and, since 2021, has pursued an air-breathing hypersonic cruise missile through the program dubbed Hypersonic Air-Launched Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare, or HALO, according to earlier reporting from The War Zone.

In subsequent years, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin competed for the contract, with the Navy hoping to field HALO before 2030. However, the service scrapped the program in 2024, citing budgetary constraints.

Castelion is now offering the Navy a low-cost solution to its current gap in its weapons systems.

In February, the Navy awarded the defense startup nearly $50 million after it selected Blackbeard for its Multimission Affordable Capacity Effector (MACE) program. The Navy earmarked $156 million in its fiscal 2027 budget request to procure 353 MACE missiles. And in June, the Navy awarded the company $23.4 million for pre-production prototypes and 50 associated storage and shipping containers, according to Castelion.

The latest contract awarded to Castelion leverages the Small Business Innovation Development Act from the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act “to rapidly transition successful technology developed through private capital investment directly into production. This approach reduces millions of dollars in redundant, non-recurring engineering costs while introducing aggressive commercial competition into the munitions production ecosystem,” according to the release.

And with Castelion’s emphasis on low cost and producibility for Blackbeard, the Navy is seemingly positioning itself well in the post-HALO hypersonic missile world.

Britain faces threats not seen since the Cold War, with Russia increasingly probing the North Atlantic and around critical underwater infrastructure, First Sea Lord Gen. Gwyn Jenkins said in a speech at the historical Admiralty House in central London on Wednesday, with repeated references to the Battle for the Atlantic during World War II.

Jenkins cited the memoirs of Winston Churchill on the significance of the Atlantic, saying the wartime leader understood the sea is not peripheral to Britain but existential. The Atlantic remains central to U.K. security and to NATO’s ability to reinforce Europe, according to the First Sea Lord, who said a “whole-nation effort” is required to defend the sea.

NATO allies foil Russian subsea cable sabotage plot

“We must know what is happening in the Atlantic, protect what matters, keep open the sea lanes, and convince any adversary that the cost of coercion or aggression would outweigh any possible gain,” Jenkins said, according to a transcript of the speech. “If we are to prevail in the Atlantic again, we must strengthen our warfighting readiness and rediscover what it means to be a maritime nation.”

The First Sea Lord said British dependence on the Atlantic has grown in the past 80 years, with almost all of the U.K.’s trade moving by sea, and almost all its energy, food, raw materials and exports flowing via maritime routes. He noted a “dangerous paradox,” saying that while the Atlantic has arguably never mattered more to the country, the sea is increasingly invisible in the public’s mind.

Control of the Atlantic has always been closely linked to control of its northern approaches, the Navy chief said, citing the defeat of Norway during World War II that allowed the Nazis to threaten allied shipping lanes, and the importance of the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap during the Cold War.

The Norwegian Sea, the Arctic and the northern approaches are not distant theaters but “form our open sea border with Russia,” according to Jenkins, who said the Joint Expeditionary Force is increasingly important there. The U.K.-led military alliance includes the five Nordic countries, the three Baltic states as well as the Netherlands.

Jenkins said the ten JEF countries will finalize a “Northern Navies” agreement this year to move beyond what he called episodic activity and to create a persistent, integrated maritime force, in response to the security threat presented by Russia.

Russia has advanced submarines that are increasingly difficult to track, long-range precision weapons and specialist deep-water systems, and is “probing, testing and mapping,” Jenkins said. The Royal Navy is spending a growing amount of time and resources to monitor Russian vessels, on average deploying two British warships every week for that purpose, according to the navy chief.

The First Sea Lord defended plans to create a “hybrid Navy,” saying future advantage will come from integrated networks linking crewed vessels, drones, sensors and data. He said that while there are skeptics, the concept is not optional.

“It is no longer possible to defend a vast, contested ocean with crewed warships alone,” Jenkins said. “A ship operating alone is now vulnerable. But a ship commanding a network of large uncrewed escorts, drones and autonomous sensors, that is a different proposition. That’s why we must blend old and new, crewed and uncrewed.”

Berlin plans to dispatch four Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets, alongside a contingent of several dozen soldiers and technicians, to the Lielvārde air base in central Latvia. They will be there for a week in late September and early October, the German ministry of defense said in a statement.

Latvian authorities had requested support from allies to secure the skies over the country during the general election, Germany said. The Latvian parliamentary election is scheduled to take place Oct. 3.

The mission is billed as part of NATO’s enhanced air policing north, or eAPN, in the Baltic States, though the short, one-week timeline and narrower election focus set it apart from the alliance’s routine four-month rotations.

None of the three small Baltic States possess their own fighter aircraft. Unlike northern Estonia and southern Lithuania, Latvia is not usually home to permanently stationed NATO jets; instead, the allied aircraft stationed in the neighboring states also cover Latvian skies.

The Baltic states in particular have been calling for strong NATO commitments to secure the alliance’s eastern flank, as governments in the three small countries feel particularly threatened by Russia. This year, repeated unauthorized drone incursions have additionally put the countries on edge. Some of these have been identified as Ukrainian drones that strayed off course from their targets in Russia, while other instances remain unidentified.

Significantly, Italian NATO jets in neighboring Lithuania shot down a suspected Russian-made drone this week after it crossed the border from Belarus. It was the first time a drone was shot down in Lithuanian airspace.

Lielvārde air base, where the German Eurofighters will be stationed during their mission, has also seen rotating contingents of other NATO countries’ fighter jets. Just a few weeks ago, in late August, two Turkish F-16 fighter jets visited the base. In April, French Rafale jets based out of Šiauliai, Lithuania, visited the airfield. NATO has also used the base for its AWACS aircraft during missions along the Russian border.

Latvia and its two Baltic neighbors have been members of NATO since 2004, joining alongside fellow eastern flank countries Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, and Slovenia.

Both countries had amassed tens of thousands of troops along their poorly demarcated Himalayan border following a deadly clash in 2020.

“The year 2025 witnessed significant reduction in deployment of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Force opposite Northern Borders, with 10 Combined Arms Brigade size forces each deployed in areas along the LAC and in traditional training areas,” the Defense Ministry stated in its annual report for 2025-26 released Monday.

The LAC or Line of Actual Control refers to the roughly 3,500 kilometers long Indo-Chinese frontier in the Himalayas. Much of the boundary remains disputed.

The report said that bilateral interactions at political, diplomatic and military levels had facilitated “positive developments along the northern border, leading to stability.”

However the Defense Ministry did not provide figures for Indian troop deployments along the Indo-Chinese border but said that the Indian Army’s deployment “in all sectors” along the LAC remained “robust, well poised, and prepared to deal with any emerging contingency.”

The report also highlighted India’s accelerated construction of tunnels, roads and other all-weather infrastructure in the Himalayas, which it said is critical for the rapid movement of troops, equipment and supplies.

Analysts point out that China has similarly expanded infrastructure on its side of the border in recent years, suggesting that even as troop deployment eases, long-term military readiness remains a priority for both sides along their border.

“Maintaining a strong dissuasive posture and preparedness along the borders is an imperative. We cannot scale down our defenses irrespective of troop numbers,” said retired Brigadier Arun Sahgal, who directs the Forum for Strategic Initiatives in New Delhi.

The report comes amid a broader thaw in India-China relations. Chinese President Xi Jinping visited New Delhi for the annual BRICS summit last week, his first trip to India in seven years. The visit marked another step in efforts by the two countries to stabilize relations after years of tensions triggered by the 2020 border clash.

After a meeting between the two leaders on the sidelines of the summit, Xi said China viewed India-China relations from a “strategic and long-term perspective” and called on the two countries to support one another and pursue common development. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said peace and tranquility along the disputed border were essential to the continued development of bilateral ties.

India’s foreign ministry said that “the two leaders expressed commitment to a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable resolution of the boundary question.”

Tensions between India and China began to ease after Xi and Modi met in Russia in October 2024 leading to an agreement that helped end the military standoff in eastern Ladakh.

Japan paid roughly $163 million for Northrop Grumman to manufacture each of its three RQ-4B Block 30i Global Hawks nearly a decade ago.

The Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) on Sept. 16 revealed that it lost contact with the high-altitude drone at 12:55 p.m., before losing its radar signature three minutes later over international waters.

The JASDF’s 502nd Squadron operates its Global Hawks from Misawa Air Base in northern Japan. Before crashing, the drone had taken off at 10.20 a.m. on an unspecified mission, with JASDF Chief of Staff Gen. Takehiro Morita only divulging, “This particular flight was not a training exercise.”

One mission for Japanese Global Hawks, which can stay aloft for 32 hours at altitudes of up to 60,000 ft, is monitoring North Korean missile launch preparations. They are also useful for keeping an eye on Chinese military activities.

Morita said a Japan Coast Guard helicopter spotted debris in the water just 50 minutes after it had lost contact. Other assets spotted further wreckage and took photos, enabling precise identification of the aircraft.

No cause of the accident was revealed.

Japan received its first Global Hawk in March 2022, with the other two arriving later that year. Their integrated payload contains an electro-optic/infrared sensor, synthetic aperture radar and ground moving target indicator.

The Global Hawk purchase was controversial in Japan given their enormous cost and the fact that the U.S. retained tight control over the aircraft’s technology and the processing of gathered data.

Global Hawks possess the longest reach of any Japanese drone, so the loss of one among such a small fleet will be sorely missed.

However, as Japan increasingly prioritizes unmanned technologies, the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force is planning to induct the first of 23 MQ-9B SeaGuardians in 2027. Although these drones have a shorter endurance and range than the Global Hawk, Tokyo will use them for maritime domain awareness.

Japan’s draft 2027 defense budget requested US$1.88 billion for the first 17 SeaGuardians. These will take over some of the missions currently performed by P-1 and older P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft.

Incidentally, the U.S. Air Force currently has three RQ-4B Global Hawks stationed at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, after relocating them from Guam in May to avoid the typhoon season.

The United States planned to quickly retire all its Global Hawks, but it will now keep operating them until 2033. After that, there will be only three in South Korea and two in Japan still flying.

The concern, critics say, is not limited to weapons that can select and engage targets on their own.

At the hearing, titled “Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain: Implications for Human Rights,” witnesses told members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission that AI can influence human decisions leading to a strike while leaving the individual formally responsible for the final call.

“The approval button alone does not demonstrate the control,” Anna Mysyshyn, a Ukrainian AI-governance researcher, told lawmakers.

The issue comes as the Pentagon pushes to use AI to accelerate military decision-making. The Pentagon’s 2023 AI adoption strategy identified “fast, precise and resilient kill chains” as a desired outcome, while its 2026 AI strategy calls for becoming an “AI-first” warfighting force by redesigning military workflows and operational concepts around current AI capabilities.

Mysyshyn questioned whether a person supervising multiple AI-enabled systems can recognize an incorrect recommendation and intervene fast enough before harm occurs. She cited Ukraine as an example of AI compressing decisions from hours to minutes.

In many scenarios, a human making the final decision does not necessarily have enough information, time or the ability to challenge the system’s recommendation, she said.

The Defense Department’s 2023 directive on autonomy in weapon systems requires autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.

Wednesday’s testimony focused on a broader question: whether that judgment remains meaningful if AI is influencing targeting faster than a human can authenticate.

Amanda Klasing, national director of government relations and advocacy at Amnesty International USA, warned that AI can compress the military “kill chain” in ways that make it difficult to determine whether meaningful human discernment actually occurred before a strike.

Joseph Chapa, a former military officer and scholar of military ethics, argued that the debate should not focus solely on how autonomous a system is. He urged policymakers to consider whether an AI system relies on statistical inference, what happens when it fails in a particular operational environment and whether its decisions can be audited afterward.

Statistical AI systems can fail differently from traditional software, Chapa said, including producing substantially different outputs from relatively small changes in inputs. More complex systems can also make it difficult to reconstruct how a particular recommendation was produced after the fact.

He called for greater AI education across the military, including specialized training for personnel working with targeting and intelligence systems.

Witnesses on Wednesday also pointed to a larger accountability problem: determining what happens when an AI-assisted decision results in civilian harm.

The Defense Department established its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan in 2022, including a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence intended to serve as a hub for analysis and training. Federal law requires the Pentagon to operate the center.

But a Defense Department inspector general review released in May assessed the department’s implementation of the civilian-harm framework and found problems including the loss or reassignment of personnel, the end of funding for a civilian-harm data-management platform and the failure of a senior steering committee to continue meeting.

That matters in the case of AI because, as Klasing noted, the military currently has limited ability to determine whether AI may contribute to improper targeting of civilians.

On the first day of the U.S.-Iran war, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed — more than 100 of them under the age of 12, according to UN and Iranian officials.

The school building sat fewer than 100 yards from a long-time Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval installation and was previously located within the IRGC compound perimeter until a wall appeared between 2013 and 2016, according to an analysis of satellite imagery by Amnesty International.

By the time the U.S. and Israel launched their first strikes on Feb. 28, the school had been established several years prior. It was active on social media and had its own website, a Reuters investigation found.

More than 120 House Democrats sent a letter to the Pentagon on March 12, demanding clarity on whether artificial intelligence, “including the use of the Maven Smart System, [was] used to identify the Shajareh Tayyebeh school as a target.”

U.S. military investigators in the wake of the incident stated that the strike was likely carried out by U.S. forces. The Pentagon, however, has still not released its investigative findings.

Klasing proposed adding information about AI involvement to the Pentagon’s annual civilian-casualty reports required under Section 1057 of the National Defense Authorization Act. The existing reporting requirement calls for information about civilian casualty mitigation efforts and investigations, but does not specifically require the department to identify whether AI contributed to an incident.

Steve Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Pentagon should collect data from military operations and conduct after-action reviews to determine whether AI-assisted systems accurately identified intended targets and whether errors contributed to civilian casualties.

“A bigger question is to what extent is the Pentagon collecting data and verifying the target accuracy of all these 1000s of strikes?” Feldstein said.

Feldstein also cautioned against treating AI itself as the source of every potential problem. AI can be used to help verify intelligence, detect changes in imagery and prioritize defensive responses to threats such as drones and ballistic missiles.

But if a human-influenced system is built around assumptions that certain demographic traits make someone a lawful target, Mysyshyn said, AI would not correct that underlying premise.

Feldstein similarly pointed to the rules humans establish before an AI system is used. If commanders determine that a particular level of civilian harm is acceptable in pursuit of a military objective, he said, the machine is operating within a human-defined framework.

The challenge is particularly acute when systems operate faster than people can meaningfully assess recommendations.

The commission opened Wednesday’s hearing with an example from Iraq. In 2004, Army squad leader Nick Ellison encountered two young men firing a machine gun from a car during a census patrol in Kirkuk.

Ellison made eye contact with one of the men, saw panic and ordered his soldiers to hold fire. The men turned out to be brothers of a newly married groom, and the gunfire was celebratory.

Mysyshyn said testing should examine bias, reliability, civilian protection, realistic time pressure, whether operators can interrupt systems and whether decisions can be traced throughout an AI system’s lifecycle.

Chapa said some AI systems may be difficult to audit after the fact, while Deborah Brown of Human Rights Watch said information about military AI use has often emerged through investigative reporting and whistleblowers rather than government disclosures.

The growing challenge, according to witnesses, is no longer making a machine pull a trigger, but whether the human who approves the trigger pull has enough time, information and authority to make a meaningful choice before disaster.

Military Times reporter Katie Livingstone contributed to this report.

The possibility of nuclear war in space mostly sat in think-tank territory until recently, when the Pentagon confirmed it keeps weapons above the sky. Moscow demanded the demilitarization of space and Ukrainian intelligence published stolen documents on Russia’s next-generation military space platform all within the span of a few weeks.

But U.S. decision-makers still lack clear guidance, legal clarity and operational plans for a space-based nuclear crisis, according to an April 2026 report published by the American Foreign Policy Council that analyzed the outcome of a pair of 2025 war games that tested possible responses to such a crisis. The report found the U.S. unprepared in each case.

The war games were conducted during two workshops in May 2025 with former officials from the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, the Space Force, U.S. Space Command and the commercial satellite industry, using three draft contingency plans: one for a suspected nuclear device in orbit; a confirmed weapon used for coercion; and a detonation.

The plans were applied to four scenarios using a fictional Russian satellite modeled on a real Russian platform along with a Chinese adversary as stand-ins.

The first found U.S. detection and attribution tools too weak to confirm a suspected payload, with a high risk of premature escalation.

In the second scenario, Russia announced it had a nuclear weapon in orbit and warned the U.S. that it must comply with its demands or lose its military and commercial satellites — a threat the workshop judged credible and one against which the U.S. “appears to lack response options.”

The third and fourth detonated a weapon outright, first in low orbit and then in geostationary orbit as a Chinese demonstration during a Taiwan crisis, with strategists finding no capability in existence to recover from either.

Across all four scenarios, the report concluded that the U.S. can defend its own satellites against an adversary’s direct action, but it has no tested plan for detecting, managing or recovering from an adversary’s nuclear weapon in orbit.

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink confirmed on Monday that the United States “now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” the first public acknowledgment by any American official that the U.S. military has put weapons in orbit.

Although U.S. officials have said there was a “serious national security threat” tied to Russian space activity, including a nuclear-capable anti-satellite weapon since mid-2024, Meink’s confirmation this week prompted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to declare on Tuesday that “We believe that space must be free of any weapon,” according to AFP.

And last week, Ukrainian military intelligence said it breached the network of Russia’s Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology, the corporation behind the Yars and Bulava nuclear missiles, and came away with documents on a Russian orbital program — including “a scalable, unified space platform called ‘Tiporyad,’ aimed at enhancing the reconnaissance, communication, and command capabilities of the Russian army,” the directorate said.

U.S. Space Command said in April it was aware of Russia’s recent orbital upgrades and the dangers they pose to American interests.

“Russia remains a very historic and sophisticated space power... they continue to invest in counter-space weapons, with the most concerning reports being that they are potentially thinking about placing on orbit a nuclear ASAT weapon,” Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, told Fox News on April 16.

Such a weapon “would hold at risk everyone’s satellites in low Earth orbit, and that would be an outcome that we just couldn’t tolerate,” he said.

The Israeli company states that the integration work is being executed as a joint initiative between Rafael and Lockheed Martin, the aircraft’s manufacturer, at Lockheed’s facilities in the United States. Development and testing are expected to conclude within a few months, according to the firm.

Following completion, the munition will be formally cleared for operational employment by the Israeli Air Force’s F-35 fleet. At a later stage, the capability is set to become available to F-35 operators worldwide.

The SPICE 1000 technology converts general-purpose and penetration warheads of 1,000 lbs into precision-capable munitions that pilots can drop from 75 miles away thanks to gliding wings on the bomb’s body. It is part of the company’s SPICE family that includes additional weight classes: the SPICE 2000 and the SPICE 250.

Rafael notes that SPICE 1000 bombs have served as a primary munition of the Israeli Air Force on F-15s and F-16s for several years, including in the recent war against Iran.

Rafael said it has sold the SPICE 1000 to several countries, but didn’t specify which. One customer emerged in December 2025 when India’s Defense Acquisition Council (DAC) approved the procurement of SPICE 1000 systems.

The Israeli Air Force maintains an active fleet of approximately fifty F-35I (“Adir”) aircrafts, and upon completion of all approved procurement processes, including the purchase of 25 aircraft this past May, Israel is projected to hold a fleet of 100 stealth fighters in total.

The force needs to be “clear-eyed” about the environment ahead as future conflicts will be progressively contested and defy simpler solutions, Caine said in a Wednesday keynote at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

“We have to assume from now on that our formations will be hunted by autonomous systems, jammed across the spectrum and tracked in real time,” Caine said in his speech.

“We have to transition the joint force to be prepared to fight and win our future wars by generating and delivering lethality at scale with an agile, optimized, high-low mix of combat capabilities to give the young members of the 2.8 million-member all-volunteer joint force the tools that they need before they need them,” he continued.

While calling the American military and their families the country’s “ultimate insurance policy,” Caine asserted that the joint force needs to be ready for a fight before it begins.

Even as the country’s adversaries are geographically dispersed, they are connected through sharing technology, intelligence, weapons and economic support, he said. As the military branches study past and present American battlefields, they are looking for new ways to challenge the advantage, demonstrating the necessity for readiness and investment in a range of military capabilities before a crisis begins.

Recently, Russia and Iran have deepened their military partnership with a technological feedback loop amid the Ukraine war and the conflict in the Middle East. Moscow is sending Iran upgraded munitions, satellite imagery and targeting data that have been used against American forces in the Middle East.

Tehran first supplied Russia with Shahed attack drones for use in Ukraine in 2022 and has since arranged a license to build the Iranian-designed drones on Russian territory.

“The character of war is changing, and time is of the essence,” Caine said, emphasizing how the way and speed in which countries fight is altering on the modern battlefield as artificial intelligence, cyber capabilities and autonomous systems develop.

The chairman noted that the modern battlefield today operates from the seabed to the cislunar space, highlighting that the advantage will go to whoever can see, understand, decide and act first as a learning organization.

Caine highlighted the June rescue of two Army soldiers by way of a remotely piloted Navy unmanned surface as an example of how the military is adapting and utilizing AI and autonomous tools.

He also referenced how these tools are being used to change the threat in contested electromagnetic interference environments, such as in Ukraine, with first-person view drones.

“Take it together, these examples from the Strait of Hormuz to the front lines in Ukraine show how quickly technology is changing the character of war,” he said.

Caine spotlighted that it will be young service leaders who will be the ones in charge of the subsequent conflicts in these environments and will have to be adaptive and understanding of their environment with a plethora of information.

As technology, networks and software continue to change, the need for capable and lethal leaders will not, he said. The nation can bring autonomy and better networks to the force but none of it will matter without trusted leaders that can work under pressure.

“We must move together because the window to build the force that we need is closing,” Caine said. “We can buy almost anything in life, but we cannot buy time.”

COLOGNE, Germany — The defense leaders of Germany and the United States have signed an agreement positioning Germany as an additional production hub where workers can make scarce munitions for American weapons if stateside U.S. firms are overwhelmed by demand.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the pact on Tuesday during a visit by Pistorius to the Pentagon. It comes as German officials, in particular, are looking to secure practical touchpoints in the trans-Atlantic defense relationship, dinged by U.S. President Trump’s on-again, off-again disdain for NATO and Europe.

Hegseth portrayed the agreement as combining defense-acquisition reform initiatives in both nations.

“When we align the two, you expand opportunities for joint development, production, licensed manufacturing and expanded maintenance and sustainment capacities — exactly what allied countries should be doing,” he said.

Germany’s arm of pan-European missile maker MBDA is already making Patriot air-defense interceptors of the older PAC-2 generation. Production of an upgraded version, PAC-2 GEM-T, is set to begin at the company’s plant in Schrobenhausen later this year, Pistorius told reporters.

In addition, officials from both countries will consider which components of the Tomahawk cruise missile Germany could supply, he told reporters.

Berlin wants to buy the missiles, along with Typhon launchers, as part of Germany’s emerging “deep precision strike” complex. While there is agreement on a political level on selling the weapons, manufacturing them will take longer than defense leaders in Berlin want to wait.

Patriot interceptors and Tomahawk cruise missiles have become prime examples of scarce weaponry in recent years.

European nations have funneled much of their Patriot inventories to Ukraine to help Kyiv defend against barrages of Russian missiles and attack drones, and they are now scrambling to rebuild their own arsenals.

Meanwhile, U.S. forces have reportedly drawn down the Pentagon’s Tomahawk stock considerably during the war against Iran. That has made the cruise missiles, prized for their precision at a range of 1,000 miles, hard to obtain for European countries, like Germany, looking to build a long-range strike capability from scratch.

Berlin is keeping its options open for more readily available medium- and long-range weapons while developing an upgraded version of its own German-Swedish Taurus missile. For example, Germany is part of a European group of nations looking for a homegrown alternative, known as ELSA.

In addition, officials are eyeing the Anthem cruise missile by U.S.-based firm Covenant, as well as a cooperation with Ukraine, Pistorius said in Washington.

Germany’s new defense-industry overture with the U.S. may ruffle some feathers among European autonomy purists, especially in France.

Paris has already seen Berlin walk away from joint weapons development programs in recent years in favor of quicker purchases from the U.S. Those include P-8 maritime surveillance aircraft made by Boeing and F-35 fighter jets by Lockheed Martin.

The acquisitions were perceived by some French officials as sucking the air out of bilateral efforts to develop next-generation aircraft for each of the two mission types.

France has repeatedly criticized the use of European money to produce U.S. weapons under license, with then-Armed Forces Minister Sebastien Lecornu, the current prime minister, saying in February 2025 that doing so would be a “historic mistake.”

The French government has argued that EU funds should build up European defense-industrial capacity, rather than subsidizing systems whose design authority remains outside of Europe, citing German production of interceptors for the Patriot air-defense system rather than investing in the French-Italian SAMP/T.

During their public remarks at the Pentagon on Tuesday, Hegseth focused on the mechanics of the new defense-cooperation agreement, as Pistorius painted a geopolitical context for the pact.

“We need to realize once more … that we are currently experiencing what might be the greatest threat to the alliance, the West, and our way of life since the height of the Cold War,” Pistorius said. “Russia has been waging a brutal war against Ukraine for almost five years now. Russia is modernizing its nuclear arsenal, increasing its presence in the Arctic and militarizing space.”

“Russia will remain the biggest threat to Euro-Atlantic security in the foreseeable future,” he added.

The German defense minister was scheduled to meet with U.S. lawmakers and local defense company executives after meeting Hegseth in Washington, per the German Ministry of Defense.

His trip will be capped on Friday by a handover ceremony of the first German F-35 coming off the production line at Lockheed Martin’s plant in Fort Worth, Texas. Germany has ordered 35 of the planes so far, but defense officials in Berlin are eyeing more.

Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris and Linus Höller in Vienna contributed to this report.

Correction: An initial version of this story incorrectly quoted Pistorius as saying PAC-3 MSE interceptor production would begin in Germany. Pistorius instead said PAC-2 GEM-T production was set to begin there.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said Beijing opposed the weaponization of outer space and turning it into a war zone.

“We urge the U.S. to stop expanding military build-up in outer space, and uphold global strategic stability with concrete actions,” Guo told a regular press briefing on Tuesday.

U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said on Monday the United States had “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action”, the strongest acknowledgement yet by a Pentagon official of U.S. weapons in orbit. Meink did not identify the weapons.

China’s state-backed Global Times said in a report on Tuesday that the disclosure exposed what it called Washington’s pursuit of “space hegemony” and risked fuelling a global space arms race.

Chinese military analyst Song Zhongping told the newspaper the acknowledgement marked a shift from protecting space assets and relying on ground-based counter-space systems toward directly deploying weapons in orbit.

“If the U.S. continues down this path, other countries may be forced to respond,” Song said.

Last week, state news agency Xinhua said in an analysis of a U.S. orbital military exercise that Washington’s push to weaponize this domain risked creating a “security dilemma”, forcing other countries to strengthen counter-space capabilities that the United States would then regard as new threats.

The Squall missile will carry a 50-60 kg warhead and fly over 300 km at low altitude after being launched from naval or land platforms including ramps, containers or tactical vehicles.

Weighing in at 150 kg and measuring 3.4 meters in length, it will reach 0.8 Mach, an Indra official told Defense News.

“What we have seen in recent conflicts is armed forces using very expensive weapons to take out low cost targets,” said Juan Mahon, Business Development Director for Indra’s Weapons and Ammunition Division.

“If you want to saturate the defenses of an enemy you cannot use too many missiles if they each cost 2-3 million euros,” he said.

“And you may not need the capability that missile offers. What you do need however is to launch 10-20 missiles to saturate the target, followed by one more-costly missile,” he said.

Mahon said Indra was hoping to price the Squall to allow operators to purchase ten for the price of one top-price missile.

Typical targets would include command-and-control centers, air defense systems and high-value military infrastructure, Indra said in a statement.

The firm added the missile will be equipped with “different guidance and navigation systems designed to withstand attempts at jamming or spoofing and reach the intended target.”

The missile will also be supported by an all-Spanish supply chain, “based on components over which sovereignty and control are maintained, to ensure the ability to scale production in times of crisis, when international supply chains may be disrupted and access to certain materials may become more difficult,” the statement said.

Mahon added, “It’s ITAR-free.”

“Another development is undergoing testing. It’s a Ukrainian development and it scored a hit, the ‘shahed’ was destroyed,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, referring to the Iranian-designed drones that Ukraine’s military has faced.

“But some technical things still need to be refined. We need a bit more time. The work of other developers is continuing.”

Ukraine’s military said on Facebook that its forces had downed 187 airborne targets overnight.

In his remarks, Zelenskyy said 93% of all Russian drones had been intercepted overnight.

“That is significant. But, of course, more is needed,” he said.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has rapidly developed anti-drone technology and now offers its expertise to other countries, including some in the Middle East that have faced Iranian strikes.

It has focused on developing interceptors as an efficient and cheaper means of intercepting drones.

Ukrainian forces have had more difficulty downing Russian ballistic missiles and have asked Western allies to step up supplies of interceptors. Kyiv is also pressing for the rapid development of a European-designed air defence system, known as Freyja.

To support the tanker aircraft and the anticipated mission capability rates, the Air Force should continue prioritizing available spare parts and modernization efforts for the aircraft, officials and industry experts said during a panel at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

“The last KC-135 pilot has not been born,” Air Mobility Command Deputy Commander Maj. Gen. Gerald Donohue said during the panel, titled “Long-Range Airpower: Lessons from Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury.”

“That is just a statement of fact when you consider the time it takes to modernize, and so we will have to sustain our legacy platform as well as our newest platforms, and ensure that the joint force is supported by being able to execute the mission,” he continued.

The force primarily uses two tanker aircraft: the legacy KC-135 Stratotanker and the next-generation KC-46A Pegasus, which is in the first phase of recapitalization.

As the force continues to modernize its strategic bomber fleet, the service must increase optionality by modernizing the tanker fleet to better offer alternatives when needed.

Moving forward, recapitalization will be the command’s priority alongside modernization of existing aircraft, Donohue asserted, by emphasizing connectivity, survivability and technical viability.

“Epic Fury, Midnight Hammer underscore the importance that connectivity plays, not only to our own survivability, but more importantly, to the success of the joint force and the mission at hand, whether it’s passing information to the bomber force as they’re executing their refueling or to the combat air forces forward, we’ve got to have the connectivity to add that value,” Donohue said.

Donohue said that the service is currently going through recapitalization as it brings on the KC-46s and modernizes the KC-135s, highlighting that once the acquisition of the KC-46 is completed, the service will still have hundreds of KC-135s.

As future conflicts and operating areas get more and more contested, getting the bomber or fighter force to their last Air Refueling Control Time, or ARTC, puts the force at risk, he said, furthering the need for survival platforms with additional tanker systems that propel the viability of legacy and future aircraft.

“We can never walk away from the idea that our young airmen out there on the line today and for decades still will have to sustain 70-year-old-plus airframes,” Donohue said.

The panelists argued that partnership with industry matters most as the “biggest enabler” for getting capability into the hands of the warfighter faster and at a lower cost to the service, saying that more opportunities to rethink the work upfront boosts efficiency for the operator.

Jamie Burgess, Boeing’s vice president and general manager of Mobility, Surveillance and Bombers, said that the work the company did on the KC-46 aircraft, such as upgrades to the vision system for refueling, altered the way they think about the development work.

“Getting teams together — operators, subject matter experts, engineers — come to agreement on design up front so we can get after the detailed design work and get it built and tested and out to the operators,” he said in the panel.