U.S. Air Force Gen. Dagvin Anderson, head of U.S. Africa Command, seemed concerned that the answer might be “no” when he testified to Congress last week.

Anderson said that Africa is the epicenter of global terrorism, but warned that a 75% U.S. force reduction over the past decade – coupled with a parallel drawdown of allied troops – has created “an intelligence black hole” on the continent.

“AFRICOM’s lack of expeditionary capabilities and diminished force posture compromise our crisis response,” Anderson testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, noting the command is operating with “minimum necessary resources.”

“Our reduced presence on the continent also allows disruptive actors to drive the agenda, undercutting American interests,” he said. “ISIS leadership is [in] Africa. Al-Qaeda’s economic engine is in Africa. Both of these groups share the will and intent to strike our homeland.”

Asked whether his command is capable of disrupting such threats, Anderson gave a circumspect response.

“That is very difficult for us to ascertain in the Sahel right now given our limited posture,” he cautioned.

The implicitly critical remarks came just before President Donald Trump ordered a strike that killed the Islamic State’s second-in-command in Lake Chad Basin. Additional armed actions in northeastern Nigeria followed soon after.

“At my direction, brave American forces and the Armed Forces of Nigeria flawlessly executed a meticulously planned and very complex mission to eliminate the most active terrorist in the world from the battlefield,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Friday night. “He will no longer terrorize the people of Africa, or help plan operations to target Americans.”

Trump identified the target as Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, a top figure in ISIS who was labeled a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” by the State Department in 2023 during former President Joe Biden’s administration.

The joint commando raid was the result of extensive intelligence sharing and reconnaissance between the U.S. and Nigeria, according to the Nigerian Army.

The assault on al-Minuki’s fortified enclave in Metele, Borno State, commenced shortly after midnight and culminated in airstrikes on the site following a three-hour clash.

Several of the ISIS leader’s lieutenants were also killed in the firefight.

There were no American or Nigerian military injuries reported as of Monday, a U.S. official told Military Times.

AFRICOM, in a statement, said al-Minuki provided “strategic guidance to the ISIS global network on media and financial operations as well as the development and manufacturing of weapons, explosives, and drones.”

It added that he had a “significant history of involvement in planning attacks and directing hostage taking.”

Officials in Washington and Lagos announced on Sunday that the two countries conducted further strikes against ISIS in Metele in the ensuing days, resulting in the deaths of at least 20 militants.

The Islamic State has transformed the Sahel into a breeding ground for some of its most lethal affiliates, notably ISIS-West Africa, also known as ISIS-WA, and its rival, Boko Haram.

Both groups are especially active in the Lake Chad Basin, which spans Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria.

Myriad factors — including violent extremism, poverty, food insecurity, climate change and weak governance — have converged to make the theater the locus of one of the world’s most intractable humanitarian crises.

The operation that killed al-Minuki was the most dramatic moment so far in the ongoing effort by the Pentagon to aid the Nigerian government in its quest to beat back insurgents.

On Christmas night, American and Nigerian forces carried out joint missile strikes in the Sokoto State. Trump said “ISIS Terrorist Scum” were the targets.

Soon after, the Pentagon deployed roughly 200 troops to the West African nation to assist in training the country’s armed forces as they battle an Islamist insurgency.

Dr. Oman Mohammed, a senior research fellow within the program on extremism at George Washington University, told Military Times that Africa has emerged as a focal point of terrorist activity since the collapse of the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate in 2017.

He said jihadist movements have expanded rapidly across the Sahel, in part through the recruitment of child soldiers who become more susceptible to radical recruitment amid destitution.

“Poverty is the reason that leads to child soldiers,” Mohammed asserted, adding that the Islamic State has infiltrated schools to create conditions in which indoctrinations begin early. “When there is no access to regular schools, imagine: Their teacher is an imam with the Islamic State teaching them how to be terrorists, promising them money. It makes it very concerning.”

According to the United Nations, violence has forced more than 1,827 schools across the Lake Chad Basin to close, depriving thousands of children access to education. Today, Sub-Saharan Africa remains one of the least educated regions on earth.

Mohammed argued that the U.S. must bolster efforts to confront the rise of terrorism in Africa, not scale back.

“Without continued pressure, terrorists will always find a way to plot against the United States, the West and American interests around the world,” he said. “It is their ideology that goes against everything civil and everything democratic.”

The aerial bomb is a winged but engineless weapon that drops from an aircraft at altitude, gliding to its target on the speed and altitude of release, steered by satellite guidance. It costs much less than cruise missiles per shot, carries much larger warheads than most drones and lets aircraft stay outside the densest air defenses.

“The first Ukrainian guided aerial bomb is ready for combat use,” Minister of Defense Mykhailo Fedorov wrote in a Telegram post announcing the milestone, noting the Ministry has already purchased an experimental batch and is gearing up to deploy the bombs on the front.

“Ukraine is moving from importing individual solutions to creating its own high-tech weapons, which systematically strengthen the Defense Forces and provide a technological advantage on the battlefield,” Fedorov said.

Until now, Ukraine had no domestic precision glide bomb. The country has relied on scarce Western donations for strikes beyond the reach of conventional artillery, like American-made JDAM-ERs and ATACMS missiles, British Storm Shadows and French SCALP-EG cruise missiles.

Cheap to produce and free of donor restrictions, the new bombs let Kyiv press the fight at mid-range and conserve scarce longer-range Western missiles for deeper targets — part of a broader Ukrainian push to use tech to change the mathematics of war in its favor after over four years of defending itself against a much larger and richer enemy.

“We are scaling up solutions that increase the range and accuracy of strikes and change the rules of modern warfare,” Fedorov said.

DG Industry, a little-known Ukrainian firm sponsored by the state-backed defense innovation cluster Brave1, started work on the munition 17 months ago, MoD said.

Ukraine had no guided aerial bomb. Now it does.

DG Industry, a Brave1 participant, has completed all required trials and declared the weapon ready for combat after 17 month of development. The bomb carries a 250 kg warhead, hits targets dozens of kilometers behind enemy lines,… pic.twitter.com/EXP0PiLOHl

— BRAVE1 (@BRAVE1ua) May 18, 2026

The team faced a challenging environment, requiring guidance that could survive Russia’s electronic jamming, an airframe that stays stable across release speeds and altitudes and an interface that integrates with whichever aircraft will carry it, according to Brave1.

The result is a system officials say is different from others in its class.

Russia’s UMPK-equipped FAB bombs, for example, are glide kits bolted onto Soviet-era bomb bodies that were never meant to glide. The Ukrainian weapon is purpose-built from the airframe up, not a glide kit.

“This is not a copy of Western or Soviet solutions, but a development of Ukrainian engineers for effective destruction of fortifications, command posts, and other enemy targets tens of kilometers deep after launch,” Fedorov said.

Glide bombs also offer another edge.

Released from standoff distance, they appear over the target only in the last seconds of flight, leaving traditional air defenses little time to react.

They can be harder to detect, too, flying at different speeds, arcs and altitudes than the threats most air defense systems are optimized to track, according to NATO’s Joint Air Power Competence Centre.

Russian Su-34s release the bombs from well beyond Ukrainian air-defense coverage, and once airborne, the bombs themselves are small, unpowered and hard to track.

Ukraine knows from experience how hard they are to stop.

Russia now drops an average of more than 250 guided aerial bombs on Ukrainian positions and cities each day, according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Earlier this month, three FAB-250 strikes on Kramatorsk killed five civilians and injured 12 more, according to regional military officials.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has named glide bombs among Russia’s most dangerous weapons since Moscow began deploying them regularly in 2023.

And they cost far more to shoot down than to produce and deploy.

A UMPK-equipped FAB costs tens of thousands of dollars to manufacture, while a single Patriot interceptor capable of stopping one runs in the millions.

The new Ukrainian glide bomb is built to make that asymmetric cost ratio Russia’s problem, too.

“Soon, Ukrainian guided aerial bombs will be used against enemy targets,” the Ministry of Defense said.

The proposal, called Project Able Baker, would solve two problems, the Air Force said. First, the new Sea-Based Recovery Stations would offer a cheaper way of retrieving reusable heavy-lift rockets so they can be launched again. And, it would provide a new purpose and refurbishment for decommissioned oil platforms before they become environmental hazards.

“This approach aims to provide the U.S. Space Force and its commercial partners with a distributed network of recovery sites that enhance launch cadence, reduce sonic-boom exposure, and leverage existing maritime infrastructure to lower operational costs,” according to an Air Force solicitation posted through the Small Business Innovation Research program.

The Air Force sees these old oil platforms as an alternative to using ships to recover rockets — a method used by companies like SpaceX. One benefit would be “reducing dependence on expensive, custom-built drone ships and facilitating higher launch frequencies,” the solicitation says.

To accomplish this, old oil rigs must be strengthened to handle the “specific plume, vibration, and high-intensity point-load dynamics” of modern rockets, such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn, the Air Force said. The rockets are capable of sending heavy equipment into orbit.

Other desired features of the offshore oil platforms include “passive/active flame deflection, remote fire suppression systems, and precision navigation aids for autonomous landing guidance.”

In addition, these platforms should have “integrated barge or Vertical Takeoff and Landing systems to move boosters from the landing pad to transit vessels.”

The first phase of the solicitation calls for companies to establish the technical and economic feasibility of the concept. The focus is on “structural load analysis, environmental impact assessment, and the development of a regulatory roadmap for operations in federal waters.”

Companies may also be asked to identify at least three offshore platforms that can handle heavy-lift rockets.

Part of the assessment process should include the impact of sonic booms on nearby shipping and coastal populations, as well as the impact on the local ecosystem, the Air Force said. The platforms must align with the federal government’s Rigs to Reefs initiative to turn decommissioned oil rigs into aquatic habitats.

The second phase would involve fabricating and installing “a modular reinforcement kit on a representative deck section of an offshore structure to validate construction techniques and material resilience,” said the SBIR. Testing would use “inert-mass drops (10—25 tons) or static-fire simulations —to capture high-fidelity strain, vibro-acoustic, and plume-interaction data.”

The Project Able Baker SBIR has an unusually detailed list of potential dual-use benefits for the government and commercial sectors.

With the number of space launches and orbital satellites soaring in recent years, the Air Force envisions a series of converted oil platforms that can ease the strain on land-based sites to speed up the entire launch and recovery process.

“By repurposing legacy offshore assets, the system provides a strategic alternative to traditional coastal launch-landing operations, significantly increasing launch cadence while reducing acoustic and debris risks,” the SBIR said.

It would also enable Tactically Responsive Space capabilities “in deep-sea or high-latitude environments, critical for responsive space access.”

China is already building offshore platforms to recover heavy rockets.

Perhaps anticipating scrutiny from environmentalists, the Air Force emphasizes that the Sea-Based Recovery Station concept is an “environmentally conscious solution.”

There are “hundreds of offshore oil and gas platforms in federally controlled waters are reaching the end of their operational lifecycle,” the Air Force said. “Traditional decommissioning and full-removal processes are capital-intensive, costing upwards of $1.6 billion per platform, and often cause significant disruption to established marine ecosystems.”

According to a criminal complaint filed last week, Chuan Wang allegedly denied involvement in the production of military products during an interview with customs officers in 2023 when in reality he ran a company that designs and manufactures unmanned aerial vehicles and drones for the Chinese military.

According to the complaint, Wang entered the United States in 2012 on a visa for visiting students and scholars to conduct research on aeroelastic wing design at the University of Michigan. In his visa application, Wang wrote that he planned to develop a “radio-controlled model airplane with high aspect ratio” and conduct related “design, fabrication, test, flight and analysis.”

A few years later, Wang obtained a 10-year tourist visa, describing himself as a business student employed by a media production company. Federal authorities noted that the employment information Wang later submitted — which required biennial updates — changed multiple times.

In one filing, Wang identified himself as a technical engineer for Volition Innovations Science and Technology. In another, he listed his employer as his father, Zhi Yuan Wang. In a third, he identified Tianxun Chuangxin Tech as his employer.

Then, in July 2023, Wang was interviewed by Customs and Border Protection officers while attempting to board a flight to China from Detroit Metropolitan Airport. When officers asked Wang about Tianxun, investigators said he could not explain his engineering specialty and eventually stopped answering questions. CBP officers then searched Wang and his luggage and seized his phone.

By November 2023, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had opened an investigation into Wang and Tianxun. According to the complaint, investigators found Chinese news articles, promotional materials and other online records as early as 2015 describing Wang as the co-founder of Tianxun, a drone manufacturer supplying the Chinese military.

Authorities also cited blog posts allegedly written by Wang discussing his success at Tianxun and how he developed a passion for drone design in high school. The posts reportedly included photographs of Wang presenting one of his drones to former Chinese air force general Xu Qiliang.

When investigators reviewed Wang’s cell phone, authorities say they found thousands of documents related to the design, manufacture and sale of unmanned aerial vehicles. In a message dated Sept. 13, 2022, authorities say Wang received confirmation of a bank deposit paid by the Chinese military’s Special Weapons Bureau.

Wang was reportedly the twelfth Chinese national tied to the University of Michigan to be charged in a federal national security case since 2023. In all, five were accused of smuggling research material: including fungus and roundworms; one allegedly voted illegally; and five were accused of photographing military equipment.

According to Wang’s online case docket, he has not yet been arraigned on charges for making false statements.

The new two-star command will combine the 7th Infantry Division and the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force, Army leaders announced during the 2026 Land Forces of the Pacific Symposium and Exposition in Hawaii.

Speaking to reporters at the symposium, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Matthew McFarlane, commanding general of I Corps and Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, where the merging units are headquartered, lauded the change as a forward-looking departure from the days “when we’ve waited till all the equipment was produced and [then] created the formations.”

“We made the formations to test and integrate the equipment, and we’re adjusting,” McFarlane said. “We’re keeping an agile posture with making organizational changes.”

While McFarlane acknowledged the Army is still working through organizational details, he did note that the command would merge the 7th ID’s two Stryker brigades and a combat aviation brigade with a multidomain task force — or “forces,” he said — to share fires, space, electronic warfare, cyber and intelligence capabilities with other commands and services throughout the Indo-Pacific.

As part of the transition, which is slated to begin in mid-June, soldiers with the 1st MDTF will “re-patch” into the 7th ID.

The timing of the move, McFarlane added, is reflective of Corps-level successes during recent exercises and war games that replicated what a two-star merger might look like.

“We have opportunities to make sure we’ve got the right mix of capabilities with a two-star command,” he said. “The Stryker brigades obviously provide security on the ground, so it really becomes long-range sense and strike division. ... That’s important because [this command’s] effects can range the entire joint operational area versus just a corps-level battlespace. That’s exciting for the Army.”

The establishment of the far-reaching MDC-PAC, meanwhile, comes as Army leaders continue to hammer home the importance of Indo-Pacific collaboration to curtail emerging threats out of China and North Korea.

Speaking at LANPAC, Brig. Gen. William Parker, commander of the 94th Army Air and Missile Defense Command, acknowledged that the U.S. military “can’t do any of what we do today without allies and partners.”

“We don’t fight alone, and we haven’t fought alone for a long time,” he said. “Our partners help us protect our critical assets and critical formations that we have within this theater.”

Days before the start of the symposium, the U.S. military wrapped up the 41st iteration of Exercise Balikatan, the largest annual bilateral exercise between U.S. and Philippine militaries.

This year’s 19-day exercise was also joined by Australia, Japan, New Zealand, France and Canada, the latter four of which put troops on the ground for the first time as part of the exercise.

“Balikatan 2026 marked a strategic evolution from a bilateral exercise to a full-scale, multinational mission rehearsal for the defense of the Philippines,” U.S. Navy Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said of the event. “That growth reflects the security environment. It reflects the sovereign choices of free nations.”

Over the course of the three-year framework agreement, Anduril will supply the Army with a minimum of 1,000 surface-launched Barracuda-500Ms per year, according to a company release.

“Long-range precision fires and stand-off strike weapons are fundamental to America’s ability to deter our adversaries, but existing solutions are too expensive, too exquisite and too hard to produce at scale,” the release states.

Meant for long-range strikes and designed for a variety of land and maritime targets, SLB-500Ms have a range of over 500 nautical miles and are equipped with a 100-pound munition payload.

The munitions are built into standard 20-foot shipping containers that can be loaded with up to 16 all-up rounds, per the announcement. It can then be transported and placed at the desired launch point, where an operator can use Anduril’s AI-enabled Lattice software or other fire control tech to select targets, munition combinations and coordinate launches.

The “simple” design of the missiles, meanwhile, permits a 30-hour assembly using only 10 common hand tools, furthering the ease of large-scale production, the release states.

Speaking with reporters this week at the 2026 Land Forces of the Pacific Symposium and Exposition in Hawaii, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Matthew McFarlane, commanding general of I Corps and Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, said that developing these types of low-cost munitions is vital to adapting to modern warfare.

“The massive drones we’re seeing be produced around the world — we need to drive down that cost curve so we can make sure we have the lethal means at a lower cost,” McFarlane told reporters.

Discussing the balance between costly Pentagon contracts and lower-cost, emerging technology, McFarlane said that the department needs to continue working with industry partners to drive down cost, emphasizing that the current price points “can only go lower.”

“We got to get it lower if we’re going to prevail against the numbers of things that we think will be thrown our way,” he said.

Anduril is expected to increase production to “single-digit thousands” of Barracuda-500s by the end of 2026, according to the release. Production of the munitions will soon commence at the company’s new 5-million-square-foot facility in Columbus, Ohio.

Alongside Anduril, defense companies CoAspire, Leidos and Zone 5 comprise the Pentagon’s Low-Cost Containerized Missiles program. The program’s assessment phase, which includes the purchasing of test missiles from the companies, is set for June, according to the Pentagon agreement with the four firms.

Through the LCCM program, the Pentagon is aiming to obtain over 10,000 low-cost cruise missiles from the four companies, according to a Pentagon statement.

Acting Army Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve said in an Army budget hearing that the order to halt a planned 9-month rotation to Europe by 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division to Eastern Europe came from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

LaNeve and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said they were informed of the order and had been consulted, but they wouldn’t provide the exact timing of the decision. On May 1, the unit had cased its colors in preparation for deployment, dispatched its advanced team and launched its equipment overseas.

Soldiers began discussing the decision to scrap the deployment publicly early Tuesday morning; the order was confirmed Wednesday by Army Times and other news media.

LaNeve said the decision was made “in the last two weeks” by the Defense Department and Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, commander of U.S. European Command and the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

LaNeve and Driscoll downplayed the move as part of routine manning reviews conducted throughout the year.

“We are constantly in contact with [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] and the combatant commanders … and this is not meant to hide the ball,” Driscoll said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

“This type of conversation is going on throughout the year, every single year, and the Army is always ready to move people and things based off combatant commander and Secretary of War preferences,” Driscoll added.

But lawmakers questioned the timing and the reasons, lambasting the order that Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said sent a “terrible message to Russia and our allies.”

Bacon said he had spoken with Polish leaders who were “blindsided” by the decision and understood that Grynkewich had expressed reservations to the order, saying that it was not without risk.

“This is a slap in the face to Poland. It’s a slap in the face to our Baltic friends. I think it’s a slap to the face in this committee, because we’ve put floors and restrictions on the Pentagon on further reductions in Europe because of what they did with Romania,” Bacon said.

CNN reported Thursday that Hegseth made the decision in relation to the administration’s efforts to pressure Europe to increase its own defenses.

CNN also reported that Hegseth’s order canceled a deployment of 3rd Battalion, 12th Field Artillery Regiment to Germany later this year and a command that oversees long-range rockets and missiles will be removed from Europe.

The news follows an announcement May 1 that the U.S. would withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany — a decision Pentagon officials said was made following a review of “theater requirements and conditions on the ground.”

But critics say the withdrawal is retribution for NATO countries deciding not to join the U.S. in attacking Iran. President Donald Trump repeatedly has criticized NATO countries for not investing more in their own defense and said in March that NATO would face a “bad future” if they didn’t help defend the Strait of Hormuz.

“If there’s no response, or if it’s a negative response, I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO,” Trump told the Financial Times.

Army leaders did not say how many soldiers were affected by the decision or provide the number of personnel in the advanced echelon that now must return to Fort Hood, where the brigade is based.

The order has upended the lives of at least 4,500 soldiers, however, many of whom made preparations to vacate homes and apartments, store belongings and relocate their families.

The order also cost money: in a text message reviewed by Army Times Tuesday, a brigade member estimated the cost and retrieval of equipment at $4 million.

Acting Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez said Thursday the decision was “not an unexpected, last-minute decision,” but lawmakers pushed back on that assessment, with Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., saying he didn’t see how the “statement can be true.”

“These are major decisions that appear to many of the members of this committee to be last-minute decisions,” Scott said.

LaNeve and Driscoll noted that in their roles as chief of staff and secretary, their jobs are administrative and they have no authority in operational decisions.

LaNeve’s multiple references to the law that dictates the structure of the armed forces — and the pair’s lack of response — irritated several committee members.

“We have been very focused on this committee about force posture, and EUCOM in particular not being disturbed, particularly without — what the statute requires — is consultation with us, and we didn’t get that, so we don’t know what’s going on here, but I just tell you we’re not happy,” said Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala.

“It is a pretty dramatic decision to, at the last minute, pull a team that you’re trying to send over there,” agreed Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the committee’s ranking member. “If there’s some strategy behind it, then you guys ought to know, and you ought to be able to communicate it to us.”

The U.S. has roughly 80,000 service members in Europe.

European Command did not respond to a request for comment by publication.

The latest iteration of Project Flytrap, a multinational exercise to test new drone technologies in a realistic conflict setting, pitted U.S. and allied forces against each other in scenarios that featured drone swarms, jamming systems and counter-UAS defenses that continue to redefine modern warfare.

Army leaders have emphasized the need to integrate drones into doctrine and tactics, as they say the rise of inexpensive, mass-produced drones have forced the service to rethink everything from aviation to infantry patrols.

Project Flytrap took place in Lithuania, involved nearly 1,000 personnel and centered around pushing the Army’s technology to its limits amid variable weather and terrain.

Exercise leaders speaking during a Thursday roundtable said soldiers practiced massing unmanned platforms to test the limits of their systems and practice pinning down enemy forces, sometimes using tens of drones at a time.

Sgt. 1st Class Tyler Harrington, a platoon sergeant for Eagle Troop, 2nd Cavalry Regiment, led soldiers in developing counter-UAS tactics during the exercise. The proliferation of drones has changed the basics of soldiering, modifying even the way units conduct basic patrols.

“I’m out there doing my patrols and all of a sudden you hear buzzing. No longer am I just scanning to my 12:00 and around me at ground level,” he said. Now, his troops must look up.

They must also learn to listen.

“You have to now learn the sounds of the drones,” Harrington said, adding a chilling and provocative question, “does it sound like one of the one-way attack drones coming in our potential direction?”

During the roundtable, leaders also highlighted how units used additive manufacturing — like 3-D printing — to quickly create replacement parts and modifications for drone systems in the field.

For the first time, the Army applied testing standards established by Joint Interagency Task Force 401, or JIATF 401, as troops trialed and collected data on over 20 different systems, including drones not yet fielded to the ranks.

The task force, which was established by the Pentagon in 2025, consolidates drone-related acquisition and standards across the country in an attempt to contend with the rapid evolution of unmanned aerial technology in conflicts across the world.

Warfare — from Eastern Europe to the Middle East — has shifted as both state and nonstate actors have begun to attack with hordes of drones that are cheap yet advanced.

The Army is grappling with how to defend its soldiers against these new air threats and also procure and use similar weapons advantageously.

The U.S. and its allies in the Middle East have sought Ukraine’s advice in defending against Iran’s Shahed drones, weapons that the eastern European country has ample experience countering in its war with Russia.

The lessons gleaned from exercises like Project Flytrap tie into broader modernization discussions in Washington.

In a Friday House Armed Services Committee hearing, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said the service was racing to restructure how it fights in a drone-flooded battlefield, “where swarms of drones are going to be attacking an Apache.”

Discussing aviation modernization during budget testimony, Driscoll added, “if you look all over the world, there are not good solutions for that.”

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle announced during a House Armed Services Committee hearing that the USS Gerald R. Ford will arrive at its homeport of Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, this weekend after more than 320 days at sea.

“We’re going to give our heroes a welcome back on Saturday and it’s just an extraordinary ship, extraordinary crew, an extraordinary strike group,” Caudle said. “And the sailors, I could not be more proud of.”

The Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group most recently operated in the Middle East in support of U.S. Central Command and Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Before that, the ship participated in operations for Operation Southern Spear and Operation Absolute Resolve in the Caribbean Sea.

Personnel from Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group’s Carrier Air Wing 8 returned to their home stations on Monday.

Future aircraft carrier Doris Miller delayed until 2034

The Ford began its most recent deployment on June 24, 2025, when it left Virginia for a regularly scheduled deployment to the U.S. European Command area of responsibility.

The carrier broke the record for longest post-Vietnam War deployment on April 15, when it surpassed the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln’s 2020 deployment of 295 days.

The carrier USS Nimitz was at sea for a record 341 days in 2020 and 2021, but part of that deployment saw the ship stationed ashore while it dealt with quarantine periods to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The carrier was forward-deployed in support of American security interests for only 263 days when factoring in isolating periods, according to USNI News.

The USS Midway still holds the record for longest carrier deployment, having spent 332 days at sea during the Vietnam War.

The Ford’s extended deployment, meanwhile, was not without its hiccups.

On March 12, the Ford experienced a non-combat fire in its main laundry room, injuring two sailors and sending another off the ship for further medical evaluation.

More than 600 service members lost access to their racks after some berthing compartments were tainted by the flames, according to The New York Times. Sailors reportedly slept on floors and tables in the aftermath of the fire, which took 30 hours to put out.

Reuters reported that about 100 sleeping berths were affected by the fire, which resulted in nearly 200 sailors needing treatment for smoke-related injuries.

The Ford arrived in Souda Bay, Greece, on March 23 for maintenance, then traveled to Split, Croatia, for further repairs before returning to sea on April 2.

The carrier also faced hefty plumbing issues that affected nearly 650 toilets on board.

Ford personnel have called for assistance with the poorly performing toilets 42 times since 2023, with 32 calls coming in 2025 alone, NPR reported.

Reeves said the shift towards what he described as “tactical credibility” has meant establishing forward locations and stationing troops near Latvia’s eastern border, in the terrain where they would actually fight in the event of a conflict, the Canadian commander told Defense News.

“Right now I have a brigade, there is nothing on the other side of the border that can take out this brigade,” Reeves said in an interview at the Sēlija training range in central Latvia this week. “And when there’s something that can take out this brigade, NATO’s going to put more forces here, I’m confident in that.”

Canada has about 2,000 troops in Latvia, and its contribution to the NATO Multinational Brigade there represents its largest overseas deployment. Alliance doctrine on the eastern flank defended by Canadian troops has shifted following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and while the tripwire logic still exists, it’s now backed militarily by forces expected to actively hold ground rather than just trigger a response and await reinforcements.

NATO agreed in 2016 to establish multinational battlegroups in the Baltic countries and Poland as part of what it called enhanced forward presence, with Canada the framework nation for Latvia. After the invasion of Ukraine, Canada in June 2022 agreed to scale up the battlegroup to a brigade.

From a single garrison in a training area, the Canadian forces are now based in four different areas, with forward locations along the eastern flank providing familiarity with the terrain and improved readiness, according to Reeves.

“And even more important than that, the local population out there is now beginning to trust us and understand us, because they’re going to support us when we fight,” Reeves said. “We are, to use your term, still the tripwire force, but we’ll be even more effective by being out there quicker and understanding the terrain out there even more, and having more support.”

The brigade operates under NATO’s Multinational Division North alongside Latvia’s Mechanized Infantry Brigade.

“I want to see, and I see, signs of the Canadian Army understanding NATO better,” Reeves said. “We haven’t operated in an operational theater with NATO since Afghanistan. Now we’re here, working again in an operational theater with our NATO partners, and we can see where we’re interoperable and where we’re not, and we’re working on that.”

With the brigade actively operating and training every single day, Reeves said soldiers bring lessons identified in Ukraine back to Canada and other NATO countries. “When soldiers leave an operational theater, one of their first tasks is to teach. So now they’re teaching, after having six months or a year of experience trying to learn from the Ukrainian theater.”

The multinational brigade includes troops from 14 nations, and while Reeves said the goal is to have fewer nations at the unit level “because it’s very hard to be perfectly seamlessly interoperable at the lowest level,” he said there’s value in NATO diversity at the brigade headquarters, “because we see problems differently and we see different solutions.”

Lt. Col. Dan Richel, the Canadian deputy commander of Latvia’s Mechanized Infantry Brigade, likewise highlighted the value of different perspectives, in a separate interview. He said the six Canadians embedded in the national formation “definitely learn just as much from the Latvian side that we’re able to bring back home as well.”

He said that the approach of the Latvian brigade as a relatively small formation tends to be practical and time-efficient, able to integrate new equipment and techniques “without worrying about waiting for somebody else to develop that doctrine.”

“The Latvians are definitely very proactive and take a lot of initiative,” Richel said.

Held from Apr. 20 to May 8, Balikatan was a good testing ground for the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, or 3rd MLR.

This agile Hawaii-based unit possesses more than 2,000 personnel. Designed to operate at the tip of the Marine Corps, the MLR was created in March 2022.

1st Lt. Duncan Stoner, the unit’s director for communication strategy and, said his formation “is unlike any traditional infantry regiment in the Marine Corps. The key difference lies in our focus and our toolkit.”

To permit it to operate in dispersed locations, 3rd MLR’s headquarters oversees three subordinate elements.

The first is the 3rd Littoral Combat Team that fires Naval Strike Missiles from NMESIS (standing for Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System) missile launchers. These assets are accompanied by infantry companies for security, and this year they received attack drones for the first time.

Next up is the 3rd Littoral Anti-Air Battalion that handles air domain awareness and air defense utilizing TPS-80 radars and counter-drone systems.

Finally, the regiment possesses the 3rd Littoral Logistics Battalion to sustain operations in distributed, littoral environments.

This year’s exercise was the fourth time the regiment has participated in Balikatan, and Stoner told Defense News: “As the regiment continues to evolve, this exercise is where we validate our tactics alongside our highly capable regional allies and partners.”

Securing maritime straits

One of those tactics was maritime key terrain security operations, where the Marine Corps helped seize remote Philippine islands in the Luzon Strait. This included deployment of NMESIS sections with anti-ship missiles.

Yes, 3rd MLR deployed the NMESIS to the Batanes Islands in last year’s Balikatan, but this year that expanded dramatically to three separate islands. They inserted with the aid of Air Force C-130Js and Army LCU-2000 landing craft.

On May 2, Defense News visited one of those locations in Basco in the Batane Islands, which is closer to Taiwan than it is to the Philippine mainland.

A section comprising a single NMESIS launcher, command vehicle and leader vehicle – all based on the JLTV chassis – deployed to Basco for 72 hours and conducted simulated fire missions against warships attempting to pass through the Luzon Strait.

Staff Sergeant Darren Gibbs, a section chief in the MLR’s Medium-Range Missile Battery, described NMESIS “as an autonomous missile system that’s essentially used for protection of our straits and sea lines.”

He said “training in Batanes allows us a different environment than what we normally operate in, so it gives us unique opportunities to actually utilize the system.”

However, the NMESIS is yet to fire an actual missile in the Philippines.

Stoner explained that Balikatan is “a phenomenal opportunity to strengthen our partnerships, get reps in employing systems like NMESIS, MADIS and our sensing systems, and really exercise our ability to execute distributed command and control.”

Threats from the air

MADIS is short for Marine Air Defense Integrated System. Fielded by the Marine Corps last year, it comprises JLTVs fitted with various soft-kill and hard-kill counter-drone systems.

At an integrated air defense demonstration in Zambales on Apr. 28, Defense News saw a battery of MADIS vehicles take down various kinds of quad-copters and fixed-wing drones.

In that engagement, countermeasure seemed to miss more drone targets than it hit. However, Defense News learned that crews were deliberately practicing tracking the drones and perfecting tactics, techniques and procedures, rather than simply trying to blow them up.

Staff Sergeant Noah Konien, a platoon sergeant in the 3rd Littoral Anti-Air Battalion, praised his crews: “They did an excellent job, focused on what they had to do and did the job very well.”

Being based on Oahu, MADIS crews face limitations when live-firing at home, so Konien was enthusiastic about the opportunity to fire rounds and missiles in the Philippines.

Regionally relevant

There are two MLRs in the Asia-Pacific region, the other being the 12th MLR stationed in Okinawa, Japan.

Stoner explained, “We’re a purpose-built, informed formation designed to operate and persist in contested littoral environments in tandem with regional forces. In real-world terms, our function is to enable and deliver multi-domain effects that expand the decision space for the broader combined and joint force in the region.”

Asked what direction MLRs will go next, Stoner responded that the Marine Corp is constantly evolving. “The MLR is truly an example of modernization in action.”

He added, “Regardless of specific systems, we’re continually experimenting with advanced sensing capabilities, exploring more survivable command-and-control tactics, and pushing the envelope on multi-domain operations to ensure we remain effective and ready in any situation with our allies and partners in the region.”

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing on the DoD years-long struggle to produce a clean financial audit despite claiming around half of the government’s discretionary spending.

Congress passed a measure as part of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act that requires the DoD to produce a clean audit by Dec. 31, 2028. “Clean” means a clear enough accounting of the military’s assets, what was budgeted and spent, along with evidence and documentation, so that the Government Accountability Office can make an accurate assessment of the entire federal government’s finances.

The Marine Corps has been the only service to pass an audit since 2018, when it was first mandated to conduct a full audit. To date, the DoD has never passed a full, clean audit, according to the GAO.

Over the course of Wednesday’s hearing, both the members of the subcommittee on government operations and some of the witnesses had some concern about the department’s ability to pull it off.

“That’s a standard that every other large [government] agency is able to meet, and meet regularly,” Rep. Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., said in his opening remarks.

Knowing that the Pentagon has failed to deliver on that, Mfume said he could not vote for the proposed massive increase to DoD’s budget — from around $901 billion for fiscal 2026 to $1.5 trillion for fiscal 2027.

In 2024, the committee instituted a new system for the DoD’s auditing process, which follows a rubric or scorecard. Since that strategy was implemented, committee chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said, “Progress was made but not enough to ensure full financial transparency and accountability. Financial transparency and accountability are core principles of good government.”

The underlying problems, as both Sessions and Asif Khan, director of the GAO, pointed out, are the internal accounting, budget and expenditure mechanisms across the DoD.

This is not a new issue; in fact, it has been going on for 30 years, according to Khan’s pre-hearing witness testimony.

“In 1995, GAO designated DoD financial management as a high-risk area because of pervasive weaknesses in its financial management systems, business processes, internal controls, corrective action plans, acquisition management and financial monitoring and reporting,” the testimony reads. “In 2025, we expanded DoD’s financial management high-risk area to include fraud risk management.”

That potential for fraud rises with a budget increase like the one proposed, one witness said.

“Any time there is an influx of cash or funds into any organization, the likelihood of increased risk of fraud, waste, and abuse coincides with that,” Brett Mansfield, deputy inspector general for audit in DoD’s Office of the Inspector General.

“I’m not sure if it’s a one-for-one [but] there is definitely a positive relationship between an influx of funds and the increased risks,” he added.

As NATO tries to keep pace with fast-changing drone warfare, the alliance used Latvia’s Crystal Arrow exercise to test unmanned ground combat, equipping opposing forces with wheeled robots. The systems gave the red team an element of surprise over a blue team relying only on aerial drones, said Lt. Col. Andris Brūveris, the Latvian battalion commander leading the opposing side.

“They are force multipliers, and they are here to stay,” said Brūveris, who commands Latvia’s 2nd Mechanized Infantry Battalion, in a briefing with reporters at the Sēlija training area in central Latvia on Monday, during a press trip organized by NATO.

“We are a little bit behind because we’ve been using only the air drones,” he added. “I hope we will move forward with this at a quick pace.”

Ukraine reshaped aerial drone warfare, and now appears poised to do the same for unmanned ground vehicles, with plans to buy 25,000 UGVs by the end of June. For Crystal Arrow, Brūveris relied on Ukrainian veterans for training and tactics, using wheeled robots for gathering intelligence, attacking enemy positions, resupply and casualty evacuation.

At the Sēlija training range, less than 200 kilometers from the border with Russia, the opposing force engaged the blue force using UGVs and aerial drones without direct troop-to-troop contact, according to Brūveris. After two days of reconnaissance, the exercise moved into a kinetic phase on Monday, with the opposing force pushing back the flanks of the blue force.

“We specifically, deliberately employed the UGVs here with the opposing forces to allow the friendly forces to understand what the threat was, and how they would counter that,” Brig. Gen. Chris Gent, Allied Land Command’s deputy chief of staff for transformation and integration, told Defense News.

Brūveris said he made particular use of a small four-wheeled UGV from Estonia-based startup Ark Robotics, likening it to the ground-based equivalent of an aerial first-person view drone. Battle-proven in Ukraine and reminiscent of a toy radio-controlled car, Ark-1 can be used for reconnaissance or to race a 15-kilogram antitank mine into an enemy position at more than 40 kilometers per hour.

“So I can do road reconnaissance, and at the same time, if there is a valuable target, that’s a suicide drone, so I can do the kinetic effect as well,” Brūveris said. “This is really something new for me, and I implement that in my maneuvers a lot.”

In the exercise, the red team used the Ark-1 for reconnaissance up to 15 kilometers away, including when conditions were too windy to fly UAVs on Monday, according to Brūveris. The opposing force used the kinetic drone to take out a road obstacle defended by the blue forces, as well as hit enemy positions.

Ukraine has leaned on unmanned systems to compensate for Russia’s superior numbers, and ground drones are preferable to sending soldiers into unfamiliar terrain, a Ukrainian veteran with the callsign Sleb, in charge of training at Ark Robotics, told Defense News.

Brūveris said Latvian troops will now need to figure out how to fit UGVs into the military decision-making loop, after having done the same for aerial drones.

“The blue force is my sister battalion from the same brigade,” Brūveris said. “They haven’t seen the drones on the ground, I haven’t used the drones on the ground, so it’s a surprise for both of us. We’re both learning, and afterwards, we’ll have a good chat how it works out.”

NATO Allied Land Command is likewise keen to integrate the feedback as the alliance builds up its Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative, and leaders including U.S. Army Gen. Chris Donahue, who commands the alliance’s Landcom as the head of United States Army Europe and Africa, made their way to Selija on Tuesday. NATO covered the cost of travel and accommodation for media attending the exercise and event, including for Defense News.

“What we are really interested in hearing is if these systems are able to provide tactical advantage, essentially, in the way that Lt. Col. Brūveris decided to employ them,” Sean Thorne, a Canadian reserve officer in charge of lessons learned and interoperability at Landcom, told Defense News.

He said Landcom is really looking for “organic, bottom-up experimentation” to understand how UGVs can be used at the tactical level.

What systems to buy and how many remains up to individual countries, with several studies underway about the “optimum force ratio” of crewed and uncrewed systems, Brig. Gen. Gent said. He said the alliance has done the math to decide on, for example, how many UGVs would equal a NATO capability target for a vehicle.

With every nation in NATO trying to shorten the procurement cycle, the next challenge becomes integrating the UGVs into doctrine, training and how troops actually use capabilities, Gent said.

Troops spent two to three days learning the systems alongside Ukrainian veterans and company representatives, according to Brūveris, who called the UGVs fairly simple to operate.

Due to its small size, some troops that received training to operate the UGVs in Crystal Arrow were initially dismissive of Ark-1, according to a Ukrainian with the callsign Backspace, who identified himself as the integration lead for Ark Robotics.

“Even guys from Latvia and Canada, on the first day of our training, they’re laughing, they’re joking that it’s just a toy,” Backspace told Defense News. “But yesterday on the operation, they were shocked. We are doing war like in a movie, because it’s really very powerful.”

Latvian troops were highly motivated, even if Ark Robotics usually takes more time to train troops in Ukraine, said trainer Sleb. A representative for Ukrainian firm UGV Laboratory who identified himself as Denys concurred, saying teaching Latvian operators was “pretty easy.”

“Our task is to learn from them and prepare ourselves, and that’s what we’re doing right now,” Brūveris said of the Ukrainian firms providing training and advice. In the exercise, he used reconnaissance drones at the platoon level, with kinetic ground robots attached to the maneuver companies.

The exercise also allowed suppliers to learn about challenges of the Baltic forest environment, as opposed to Ukraine, according to Brūveris. In addition to Ark Robotics, firms taking part within the NATO Task Force X framework were Latvia’s Natrix, Ukraine’s UGV Laboratory, Poland’s Husarion and Estonia’s Alfatec Group.

Unmanned ground systems are at the stage where FPV drones were in 2023, according to Denys at UGV Laboratory. The company supplied its four-wheeled Simba drone, which can carry a load of more than 200 kilograms. The representative said he expects 2027 to be a boom for the industry. “Because right now it is impossible to fight without these UGVs, we wouldn’t survive without it.”

The Simba is used in Ukraine as a logistics drone to supply forward positions, and while not certified to do so, troops also use it to transport wounded soldiers back on return trips, according to Denys. With the Ukrainian battlefield changing fast, the platform is updated about every three months, and the company is working on a version with a weapon turret, he said.

A first lesson from using UGVs in Latvia was the need to plan missions around terrain and network coverage, with dense and boggy local forest interfering with control signals for the Starlink-equipped ground drones, something less of a concern in more open terrain in Ukraine.

Whereas aerial drone use is easy to plan as long as the weather cooperates, relying on satellite internet to control the ground robots meant planning the axis of advance to take into account tree coverage, according to Brūveris.

Brūveris said the exercise made clear Latvia needs ground-based systems to cover all war-fighting functions, including reconnaissance and strike missions. He said proof of their effectiveness was his company commanders in the field all asking when they would get back the UGVs being used for demos on Tuesday, because the robots were needed in the fight.

“These unmanned systems are the future, because one way or the other, it’s cheaper than people’s lives.”

“The Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations,” Xi told Trump during a summit in Beijing, according to a Chinese government readout. “If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy.”

For decades, Washington’s ties with Taipei have been among one of the most combustible flashpoints in U.S.-China relations. The Chinese Communist Party regards the island as a wayward province destined for reunification. Xi has instructed the People’s Liberation Army to be prepared to invade by 2027.

Since the 1970s, successive American administrations have adhered to a policy known as “strategic ambiguity,” deliberately maintaining uncertainty over whether the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of a Chinese attack.

George Chen, partner for the Greater China practice at the Asia Group, said in an interview with Military Times that Xi’s message to Trump should not be seen as an escalation, but rather an effort to establish boundaries from the outset.

“President Xi’s opening remarks, right in front of President Trump, puts a huge emphasis on Taiwan because Xi wants to make it crystal clear that he has zero tolerance for any moves toward Taiwan independence,” Chen said.

“It’s clear that Xi is not interested in taking the military path for Taiwan issues — at least not yet,” he added. “And he hopes Washington will align with him to avoid bringing military forces into the Taiwan issues, which could only destabilize Northeast Asia.”

The State Department recently stalled a proposed $14 billion arms package for Taiwan, a move that Trump said he would underscore with Xi.

“President Xi would like us not to. And I’ll have that discussion,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday ahead of the planned trip.

U.S. officials, however, have highlighted last year’s largest-ever arms sale to Taiwan, valued at approximately $11 billion, as a sign of Washington’s commitment to Taiwan.

The war in Iran previously forced a postponement of the high-stakes summit in Beijing, which had originally been scheduled for six weeks ago.

Trump and Xi met in the Chinese capital on Friday for a welcome ceremony steeped in pageantry, featuring a 21-gun salute and crowds of children waving U.S. and Chinese flags, followed by bilateral talks, a tour of the Temple of Heaven and a state banquet.

But the trip unfolds against a continued air of crisis and uncertainty around Iran. The fragile ceasefire between Washington and Tehran teeters on collapse, while the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed.

According to a White House readout, Trump and Xi concurred Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon and the Strait of Hormuz needs to reopen.

“The two sides agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open to support the free flow of energy,” the White House said. “President Xi also made clear China’s opposition to the militarization of the Strait and any effort to charge a toll for its use.”

In a subsequent interview with Fox News, Trump said that Xi had signaled interest in facilitating the reopening of the strait.

“President Xi would like to see a deal made,” Trump asserted. “Anybody that buys that much oil has obviously got some sort of relationship with them.”

The president also claimed Xi had assured him China would not supply military equipment to Iran, calling it “a big statement.”

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle spoke about the fiscal 2027 Defense Department budget request at a House Armed Services Committee hearing attended by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle, acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith.

The hearing comes several days after the Navy released a shipbuilding plan that codified the possibility of the service looking to foreign partners for help.

“I will echo some of my Democrat colleagues: As many ships as we can build in the United States, we want to build them,” said retired U.S. Navy SEAL Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis. “I understand that we have to go outside of our lines of communications right now because we just have lost the capacity, but I firmly believe that our American men and women, our tradesmen and women, are the best in the world.”

Van Orden added that filling current Navy production gaps through overseas means was acceptable, so long as the onus was equally placed on reviving the maritime industrial base in the U.S.

Cao told lawmakers that the service needed 540,000 jobs to build the ships in the Navy pipeline. He also stated that a youth movement in the U.S. was needed to bring the workforce up to where it needed to be to address demand.

The acting secretary said the Navy was not investing in foreign shipbuilding, but rather exploring whether foreign models would work for the U.S. fleet, especially with some foreign shipbuilders churning out one to two destroyers a year.

Navy ‘going to study’ possibility of building ships outside US, Phelan says

The Navy’s shipbuilding plan said that the service would “evaluate overseas options and whether allied and partner shipbuilding can supplement domestic production if U.S. industry cannot meet required timelines.”

The sea service wants to spend $2.3 billion over the next five years to purchase five tankers for fuel support, built “potentially” and “initially” at overseas shipyards, the plan says.

This includes two auxiliary ships and the “flexibility for fabrication of some combatant modules overseas.”

Cao also said that U.S. workers, under the new shipbuilding plan, would be traveling abroad to learn shipbuilding techniques from foreign partners to increase efficiency and speed back home.

The sentiment didn’t sit right with some.

“I don’t think you would want to go to a yard of American workers and tell them that you think they need to go overseas to learn their craft,” said Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, a Marine Corps veteran.

Leading U.S. Navy ship manufacturer Bath Iron Works would be forced to lay off workers as soon as next year if a “weak demand signal” for American shipbuilding was approved by Congress, according to Golden.

Republican lawmakers weren’t necessarily opposed to building ships overseas, provided that U.S. resources were still relied upon.

Retired Marine Corps pilot Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., said he wanted to ensure that assembling vessels abroad meant bringing technology and work ethic back to the U.S. to reinvigorate what previously made it a world leader in shipbuilding.

“China’s outproducing us about 200 to one and has about 50 times more ports,” McCormick said. “That’s a problem.”

Retired Navy SEAL Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas, expressed concern over whether foreign-built ships would utilize integral construction materials made in America.

“I would hate to see the steel that we use on our ships and subs come from another country, if we have the capability inside of the United States,” Luttrell said.

While Luttrell echoed the desire to fabricate Navy vessels in America, Caudle stressed the importance of expanding the aperture of shipbuilding to address the need for ships amid threats from adversaries.

“That will ... require some foreign shipyards to actually help me do that, to ... deliver the actual ships I need in a time frame when that’s important,” Caudle said.

“It’s a very large country,” Cooper testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He acknowledged that Iran still possessed “a very moderate, if not small, capability” to conduct strikes on regional neighbors.

Washington and Tehran remain locked in a month-long stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz, with no clear path forward as both sides have rejected proposed off-ramps from the crisis.

Initially, Iran retaliated for the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on its territory by throttling traffic in the waterway — where roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil typically flows. The Iranians accomplished this in part through the mere threat of naval mine warfare, though some vessels were also attacked. The United States, in turn, imposed a blockade on all vessels entering or leaving Iranian ports.

“The Iranian capability to stop commerce has been dramatically degraded through the straits,” the CENTCOM commander said. “But their voice is very loud, and those threats are clearly heard by the merchant industry and the insurance industry.”

Cooper — who did not address how the impasse in the strait might be resolved — asserted that U.S. forces had severely degraded Iran’s warfighting capacity, including the elimination of roughly 90% of its inventory of more than 8,000 naval mines.

He also declared that U.S. forces had “met every military objective” under Operation Epic Fury, citing the destruction of 90% of Iran’s defense industrial base.

Pentagon seeks additional funding as cost of Iran war tops $29 billion

In recent days, media reports have cast doubt on the most expansive claims made by the Trump administration about military triumph over Iran, however. A New York Times report on Tuesday, for example, indicated that U.S. intelligence agencies believe Iran has held onto about 70% of the missiles it had before the war and that it retains access to about the same proportion of its mobile launchers.

Cooper declined to discuss specific intelligence assessments, but contended that the number he’s seen in “open source are not accurate.”

He added: “It’s more than just the numbers. It’s the command and control that’s been shattered. It’s the significant degradation and capability. And it’s the lack of any ability to then produce any missiles or drones on the backend.”

More broadly, Cooper insisted, “Iran has a significantly degraded threat. They no longer threaten regional partners, or the United States, in ways that they were able to do before, across every domain.”

“Most notably, we degraded Iran’s ability to project power outside its borders and threaten the region and threaten our interests,” Cooper continued. “Today, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are all cut off from Iran’s weapons and support.”

Those groups, commonly known as Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” have enabled the Islamic Republic to wield influence across the Middle East while maintaining plausible deniability regarding their armed actions. In the 30 months before Epic Fury commenced, Cooper said, those aligned militias carried out more than 350 attacks on U.S. service members and diplomats stationed in the region.

The draft agreement would open a legal channel for Kyiv to sell its weapons to the U.S. for the first time since it effectively banned arms exports to maintain its own forces at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, CBS News first reported.

The memorandum, drawn between the State Department and Ukrainian Ambassador Olha Stefanishyna, would integrate Ukrainian producers into joint ventures and tech-transfer arrangements with American firms.

The development caps two weeks in which Kyiv adopted an export framework dubbed “Drone Deals,” launched a procurement coalition with multiple European partners and watched Washington lift a 1997 import ban – all while signing four bilateral export contracts and pursuing roughly 20 more across the Middle East and partner countries, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this week.

Zelenskyy touted the new framework at a May 13 summit in Bucharest, Romania, with delegates from NATO’s nine eastern-flank members and their Nordic allies, as seen in a clip of the event posted on X.

“I believe all of us need bilateral Drone Deals,” he said, “using Europe’s production capabilities and Ukrainian expertise proven in real defense during a real war.”

Over four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has built an arms industry that manufactures much of the hardware seen on the battlefield today, but that has struggled to scale up while capped by export bans, funding limitations and manufacturing challenges caused by the ongoing war.

“The Ukrainian military will always have the right to priority and sufficient supply – they will take what is needed, and the volume beyond that will go to export,” Zelenskyy said in a April 28 Telegram post announcing the new policies.

After years of struggling to arm its one million active-duty soldiers, Kyiv has been wary of allowing its domestic producers to sell their weapons abroad at a markup in case they may choose profit over supplying their own military.

But times have changed. Foreign defense funding to Ukraine hit $6.1 billion in 2025, marking a tenfold increase over the roughly $600 million the year before, according to the Ministry of Defense, and the world is turning to Kyiv as the leader in modern warfare and defense tech.

Fears over remaining empty-handed at home appear to have subsided.

“In some production areas, we currently have up to 50% surplus capacity,” Zelenskyy said last month.

Ukraine’s defense production capacity has grown 35 times since the invasion began, from $1 billion to $35 billion, but domestic contracts covered only about a third of that last year – a gap Kyiv’s National Security and Defense Council projects will widen, with capacity expected to hit $55 billion in 2026.

Western contracts pay multiples of what the domestic procurement budget can offer, and those funds are the only capital large enough to fund the scale Ukraine needs to sustain both its front line and its surging arms industry.

Stefanishyna told the Philadelphia Inquirer in April that more than 100 U.S. investors have already expressed interest in Ukrainian defense-tech companies, and the U.S. government bought an initial 1,000 P1SUN drones from Ukraine that month.

Business lost?

Ukrainian producers have been pressing for new and improved export laws for years, but especially since demand from foreign buyers for Ukraine’s drones began surging after the war in the Middle East kicked off earlier this year.

Ihor Matviyuk has spent months turning down orders he cannot legally fill. He heads Aero Center Drones, a Kyiv-based manufacturer building FPV strike platforms and interceptor drones.

Until now, the only legal route has run through state arms-trade companies like Ukrspecexport, Progress and SpetsTechnoExport that take the contract on the producer’s behalf, he said.

“No Ukrainian company can export military goods independently. Companies can manufacture, but they cannot ship,” Matviyuk told Military Times in March.

He said a Western government asked Aero Center for 1,500 interceptor drones earlier this year, a request he’s now received several times over as the Iran war demonstrates how quickly a state can exhaust conventional interceptor stocks defending against mass-drone attacks.

But Matviyuk said he had to turn down the request despite having the manufacturing capacity to do it within weeks without affecting his current contracts.

“We cannot currently export large quantities,” he said at the time. “It’s only possible at the state level.”

The new framework permits five export categories – drones, missiles, ammunition, software and integration services – drawn from Defense Ministry-certified surplus. The Foreign Ministry and intelligence services have naturally blacklisted Russia and its cooperators from buying Ukrainian.

“The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, based on intergovernmental agreements with partners, will define the framework for cooperation – just to ensure that Ukrainian technologies and Ukrainian weapons do not end up in Russian hands,” Zelenskyy said.

It opens three legal channels for producers – independent licensing through the State Export Control Service, routing via specialized state arms-trade companies, and a 15-day “Defense City” preliminary permit that skips Cabinet designation, though the interagency commission still reviews every application under all three routes.

Defense City is a special legal regime for defense manufacturers, launched in January, that grants qualifying firms tax exemptions, simplified customs and the fast-track 15-day export permit regardless of where they operate in Ukraine. Approved firms will also be able to sell through the ten European hubs Zelenskyy announced in February, according to Euronews.

Every signed contract will now move through a 90-day clock at the State Export Control Service and a 17-member interagency commission under the National Security and Defense Council, replacing a licensing regime that set no fixed timelines and left approvals to bureaucratic discretion.

The NSDC commission had sat dormant for eight months until Zelenskyy reactivated it in December. It has made roughly 80 decisions since then, according to Ukrinform.

The new framework is intended to break the bottleneck that turned Matviyuk’s prospective 1,500-interceptor order into a loss, and Zelenskyy said the new timelines should close the room for graft that the old system created.

“We also need automatic export authorizations with a clear and predictable timeframe for approval, so that there is no ground for corruption,” he said.

Kyiv officials have pledged to continue advancing anti-corruption enforcement in parallel – a difficult process that has seen several successes but still has significant work ahead, according to a 2026 analysis by the global watchdog group Transparency International.

Procurement orchestrations

For Kyiv, things are moving forward elsewhere, too, when it comes to fresh approaches to defense purchases with European partners.

Ukraine and five European nations – Finland, Italy, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom – signed the CORPUS Memorandum on April 30 in a Kyiv hotel garage-turned-bunker, launching a defense-procurement coalition that links the countries’ national procurement agencies to coordinate buying, share supply-chain intelligence and open a path to joint contracts.

Ukraine’s CORPUS chair, Arsen Zhumadilov, also heads the country’s Defense Procurement Agency, set up in 2023 to take over arms buying after scandals over inflated food contracts and substandard winter jackets cost then-Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov his job.

One of the DPA’s biggest moves against corruption and approval delays cut out the intermediaries – middleman firms that had been a required layer between state buyers and private manufacturers. Their share of arms procurement has fallen from 81% to 12%.

Zhumadilov’s role in CORPUS places Ukraine’s own procurement agency inside a multinational coalition, rather than leaving it only on the buyer’s side.

“We are starting with the exchange of experience and best practices to build coordination mechanisms, mutual trust, and plan for the future,” Zhumadilov said at the CORPUS post-signing press conference.

Denmark, France and the Netherlands have already registered interest in joining the group, he added.

More bilateral defense procurement partnerships are in the works, too. Kyiv and Berlin announced six new joint ventures over the last month, and Norway inked a parallel cooperation declaration to mass-produce Ukraine’s mid-range strike drones. Zelenskyy has announced plans to open ten export hubs across Europe in 2026, with production lines already running in the United Kingdom.

European leaders increasingly see Ukrainian weapons production as key to allied defense.

“Instead of us thinking that Ukraine needs Europe, perhaps we should think that we in Europe need Ukraine more,” Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, said on May 4.

Officials didn’t specify a target range for the upgraded aircraft. The F-35A — the model on which the Israeli version is based — currently has a range of 1,200 miles, as stated on the manufacturer’s website.

But the ministry mentioned that the development and implementation will involve adapting external fuel tanks based on an existing Cyclone design of the F-16I “Sufa,” Israel’s variant of the F-16, which has a reported range of approximately 1,300 miles.

Elbit Systems was awarded the development contract, valued at approximately $34 million (100 million NIS).

The announcement comes amid a fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran, and roughly a month after the Israeli military operation “Lion’s Roar,” in which the Israeli Air Force struck targets deep inside Iran. During that operation, an F-35I scored the first air-to-air kill ever credited to an F-35 in combat, shooting down an Iranian Yak-130 — a Russian-built jet trainer used in a light-attack role.

Israel currently operates 50 F-35I aircraft across two squadrons. It is beginning to take delivery of 25 additional jets ordered in 2023, and earlier this month announced the opening of negotiations to purchase 25 more — a move that would bring the total fleet to 100 aircraft and expand Israel’s F-35I force to four squadrons.

The F-35I “Adir” is a fifth-generation multi-mission stealth fighter aircraft, manufactured by Lockheed Martin and used by the Israeli Air Force as a model specifically tailored to its requirements.

The aircraft combines stealth technologies, advanced data fusion, the ability to carry internal weapons, and includes Israeli-made electronic warfare, communications, and computing systems, which are embedded in the American infrastructure.

This missile firing of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force’s Type 88 surface-to-ship system from sand dunes near Laoag in northwest Luzon on May 6 was significant for several reasons.

Firstly, this was the maiden deployment of Japanese combat troops on Philippine soil since the end of World War II. Abetted by a reciprocal access agreement ratified by Manila and Tokyo on Sep. 11, 2025, approximately 1,400 Japanese soldiers exercised in the Philippines.

Secondly, the firing of anti-ship missiles presages growing cooperation between Japan and the Philippines, especially as both nations grapple with the specter of an aggressive China in waters around both countries.

If an imaginary curved line is drawn north to south from the Japanese mainland, it would first pass through Taiwan and then continue on to the Philippines. These land masses, plus their archipelagic territories, form a key part of what military planners call the First Island Chain.

Anti-ship missiles positioned on Japanese islands north of Taiwan, and on Philippine islands south of it, have the ability to control who passes through the maritime straits near this democratically governed country that Beijing covets for itself.

In a time of conflict, if the People’s Liberation Army ever invaded Taiwan, the race would be on for either China or the United States and its allies to control these maritime chokepoints.

This is why the deployment and firing of two Japanese Type 88 anti-ship missiles was so important. Such weapons could target any Chinese invasion fleet, or help prevent the passage of Chinese warships into the Western Pacific.

Although only two missiles were fired, as well as a GMLRS rocket from a U.S. Army HIMARS, other anti-ship missile systems such as a U.S. Marine Corps NMESIS and a ship-based Philippine Navy C-Star simulated attacks, too.

The first Type 88 missile hit its target – a former minesweeper dating from WWII – 47 miles away after a six-minute flight.

The Philippines possesses a similar anti-ship missile system – the BrahMos acquired from India – but it did not join in the firing on this occasion.

Meanwhile, the Hawaii-based 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment of the U.S. Marine Corps oversaw command and control of this maritime strike exercise.

Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. and his Japanese counterpart, Shinjiro Koizumi, attended the missile firing, a day after they met in Manila. One topic of their discussion was Tokyo’s recently relaxed policy on selling lethal weapons.

The Philippines is already planning to buy second-hand equipment like Beechcraft King Air light aircraft and Abukuma-class destroyers from Japan.

Highlighting the bilateral friendship, Teodoro said, “No one country can do deterrence, and the more partners that are converged … the stronger we are.”

Exercise Balikatan took place from Apr. 20 to May 8. It involved approximately 17,000 troops from seven countries.

The Army identified the remains of Spc. Mariyah Symone Collington, 19, of Tavares, Florida. Collington served as an air and missile defense crewmember and was assigned to Charlie Battery, 5th Battalion, 4th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command, according to an Army release.

The recovery ends an 11-day search effort for Collington and 1st Lt. Kendrick Lamont Key Jr., of Richmond, Virginia, after the soldiers entered the ocean on May 2 near the Cap Draa Training Area during a joint military exercise.

According to reports, one of the soldiers fell into the water during a hike along the oceanside cliffs after training that day had concluded. The other soldier purportedly jumped in to help, and initial rescue efforts for both failed.

On May 9, Key Jr. was recovered in the water approximately one mile from where both soldiers reportedly entered the ocean. The Royal Moroccan Armed Forces moved his remains by helicopter to Moulay El Hassan Military Hospital in Guelmim, Morocco, and the Army said plans are in motion to repatriate his body.

Since May 2, more than 1,000 U.S. and Moroccan military and civil personnel participated in the search for the two soldiers, with Collington located and retrieved from a coastal cave roughly 1,600 feet from where the pair reportedly entered the ocean. According to the release, “challenging ocean conditions, coastal terrain and the cave’s accessibility complicated search and recovery operations throughout the effort.”

“Spc. Collington was an outstanding soldier whose unwavering enthusiasm and positive spirit uplifted every environment she entered,” Capt. Spencer Grider, commander of Charlie Battery, 5-4 ADAR, said in the release. “Her infectious energy, whether in the office, in the field or among her peers, fostered connection and camaraderie, bringing people together through her genuine warmth and heartfelt sense of humor. Her presence will be greatly missed across our formation.”

The soldiers were involved in African Lion 26, U.S. Africa Command’s largest annual joint exercise, which involved over 40 countries and this year spanned across Ghana, Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia.

The incident remains under investigation.

Speaking at the 2026 Land Forces Pacific Symposium and Exposition, U.S. Army Gen. Xavier Brunson, commander of United Nations Command, ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command and U.S. Forces Korea, called the joint military-industrial approach “the ultimate guardian of peace.”

Delivering the symposium’s opening keynote, Brunson cited military strength, industrial sustainability and allied collaboration as primary components needed to create “a true fortress for all our nations and interests here in the Indo-Pacific.”

“Sustainment is not the tail,” Brunson said, referencing industrial networks capable of supporting far-reaching, forward combat operations across the region.

“It’s the teeth of our deterrence,” he said. “Strategic concepts only survive as long as they are backed by industrial endurance.”

Brunson’s “fortress” reference is a nod to a “fortress chain” of defense burden sharing among regional allies, such as South Korea, who have been ramping up industrial capabilities — weapons replenishment and equipment repair principally among them — to be positioned closer to the fight.

“Korean dry docks have already overhauled [the] USNS Wally Schirra and Cesar Chavez, with two more in the queue,” he said, citing maintenance the ROK has completed on U.S. ships. “That is the operational blueprint. ... We cannot shuttle broken equipment across an ocean for repair while an adversary evolves on our doorstep.”

That type of burden sharing, Brunson said, “complicates every adversary calculation.”

For its part, the Trump administration has increasingly pushed for allies to take on more responsibility for regional defense spending.

Across Europe, defense spending in 2025 surged 14% to $864 billion, according to a report published last month by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Military expenditures across Asia also soared in 2025, with Japan’s defense spending climbing 9.7% and Taiwan’s 14%, among others.

“U.S. allies in Asia and Oceania, such as Australia, Japan and the Philippines, are spending more on their militaries, not only due to long-standing regional tensions but also due to growing uncertainty over U.S. support,” Diego Lopes da Silva, senior researcher with the SIPRI Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme, wrote in the assessment. “As in Europe, U.S. allies in Asia and Oceania are also under pressure from the Trump administration to spend more on their militaries.”

That emphasis has yielded results in South Korea, which Brunson credited with being a “producer of security” rather than a “consumer” while promising to up its defense spending to 3.5% of its GDP.

Shared deterrence responsibilities across the Indo-Pacific were also on display just days before the launch of LANPAC 2026, as the U.S. military wrapped up the 41st iteration of Exercise Balikatan, the largest annual bilateral exercise between the U.S. and the Philippines.

This year’s 19-day exercise was also joined by Australia, Japan, New Zealand, France and Canada, the latter four of which put troops on the ground for the first time as part of the exercise.

“Balikatan 2026 marked a strategic evolution from a bilateral exercise to a full-scale, multinational mission rehearsal for the defense of the Philippines,” U.S. Navy Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said of the event. “That growth reflects the security environment. It reflects the sovereign choices of free nations.”

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle warned members of Congress at a budget hearing for the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense about the service’s impending budget crunch, amid the current rate of operations in the Middle East.

“I will have to start making decisions to change training, operations, certification events, those type of things we do to generate our force, in the July timeframe and their current expenditure,” Caudle said.

That money would have to come from a supplemental funding request, which the Trump administration has not yet submitted to Congress.

US Army abruptly cancels deployment of 4,000 soldiers to Poland

The Iran war has cost the U.S. approximately $29 billion so far, according to the Pentagon’s acting comptroller, Jules Hurst III, who spoke Tuesday at a Capitol Hill hearing.

The price was $25 billion two weeks ago, he said, but had increased due to “updated repair and replacement of equipment costs” and the “general operational costs” of maintaining military presence in the Middle East.

Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the U.S. has significantly depleted its stockpile of munitions during the Iran war, including Tomahawk missiles, Army Tactical Missile Systems, SM-3 interceptors, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems, or THAADs, and Patriot missiles.

The fiscal 2027 Defense Department budget request is $1.5 trillion. Of that, $377.5 billion is allotted for the U.S. Navy, representing a 23% increase from the year before.

U.S. and Iran are currently in the midst of a ceasefire that began in early April.

Though the suspension of hostilities was tested last week when the countries exchanged fire, the Trump administration said it is working to reach an agreement with Iran that would end the war.

President Donald Trump, however, cast Tehran’s most recent peace proposal as “garbage” and Iran warned of a “lesson-teaching response” if the U.S. resumed military operations.

The contract, first announced mid-February, will bring the total amount of cutters being manufactured to 11 to meet President Donald Trump’s executive orders to expand the icebreaker fleet, Military Times previously reported.

Davie Defense, the U.S. arm of the UK-owned maritime group Inocea is set to construct three of the ships at the company’s Gulf Copper facilities in Galveston and Port Arthur, Texas. The other two will be built at the company’s affiliate shipyard in Helsinki, Finland.

During an April 28 House subcommittee hearing on the Coast Guard’s fiscal 2027 budget, Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., questioned the use of Finland’s shipyard in building the latest cutters and whether it was a contradiction to the April 2025 Shipbuilding and Harbor Infrastructure for Prosperity and Security (SHIPS) for America Act aimed at revitalizing U.S. maritime industry.

Adm. Kevin E. Lunday, commandant of the Coast Guard, responded that the contract was well within the signed 2024 ICE Pact — a trilateral agreement between the United States, Canada and Finland to combine collective knowledge, resources and expertise to produce Arctic and polar icebreakers, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

“We needed to begin by leveraging the overseas capability and proven shipbuilding in Finland so we could onshore more work back into the U.S. and rebuild our defense industrial base, and that’s exactly what we’re doing, sir,” Lunday noted.

The first cutter is set to be delivered to the Guard in 2028, with the contract running through February 2035.

“Finalizing this contract represents decisive action to guarantee American security in the Arctic,” Lunday said in a statement. “The Arctic Security Cutters will deliver the essential capability to uphold U.S. sovereignty against adversaries’ aggressive economic and military actions in the Arctic. These cutters will ensure the Coast Guard’s ability to control, secure, and defend our northern border and maritime approaches.”

The announcement comes as the service eyes far-flung frozen Arctic and Antarctic missions as result of the region’s increasing geopolitical importance.

The Coast Guard is currently operating with a lone heavy polar icebreaker, the USCGC Polar Star, and two medium polar icebreakers, the USCGC Healy and the USCGC Storis — which just returned to homeport on Monday after a 36-day deployment to the Arctic. The Storis is the first icebreaker to join the fleet in more than two decades.

According to DHS, the Coast Guard is utilizing the $25 billion provided by the fiscal 2025 budget reconciliation and has already ordered over $13 billion in new fleet assets and capabilities.

With increasing Russian and Chinese naval incursions, DHS is ramping up is facilities and its fleet to facilitate a greater maritime presence in the North. The agency announced last May that it had approved the construction of the service’s first polar security cutter in nearly 50 years, as well as invested $323 million in renovations for its Seattle-based icebreaker facilities and upgrades to shore facilities at Juneau, Alaska.

The five cutters to be delivered by Davie Defense will represent a new class of Arctic icebreakers “designed to conduct U.S. Coast Guard missions in the world’s most challenging maritime environments,” according to the release. “The ASC program will provide the Coast Guard with a modern icebreaking fleet to assure national security, maritime safety and Arctic access.”

An Army official confirmed the decision Wednesday but did not provide details and referred all questions to the Defense Department, which did not respond to a request for information.

During a congressional hearing Tuesday on the Army’s budget posture, neither Army Secretary Dan Driscoll nor Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the Army vice chief of staff, mentioned the deployment cancellation.

But word already had started spreading early Tuesday morning among those affected, with soldiers texting friends and loved ones about the change.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said during his opening statement in the hearing that the Army faces a budget shortfall of at least $2 billion as a result of extended operations that include deployments of the Army National Guard to Washington, D.C., and units to participate in U.S. border control.

Reed wondered what the impact was on training and operations but the topic was not addressed.

According to ABC News, the Army budget shortfall is significantly larger than Reed’s estimate. In the report, Army officials told the outlet the amount actually is between $4 billion and $6 billion.

The Pentagon announced in April that it planned to withdraw roughly 5,000 troops from Germany. Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell said that Secretary Pete Hegseth made the decision after reviewing “theater requirements and conditions on the ground.”

The move would bring U.S. troops levels in Europe to pre-2022 levels, before Russia invaded Ukraine and started a war that has killed more than 43,000 Ukrainian troops and at least 100,000 Russian service members, according to Every Casualty Counts, a British-based non-governmental organization that tracks conflict deaths.

More than 10,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Poland on rotation. The “Black Jack” brigade was expected to deploy for nine months. The Stars and Stripes reported that the Fort Hood, Texas-based tank brigade cased its colors May 1 in preparation for the deployment.

Portions of the 2^nd Armored Brigade Combat Team advanced echelon are already in Poland and equipment is in transit, according to the deployment plan.

Army officials from Fort Hood and U.S. Army Headquarters referred all questions to DoD, which declined to comment.

“We have no comment on this at this time,” the Pentagon press office wrote in an email to Army Times.

This is a developing news story. It will be updated as more information is made available.

Lt. Gen. David Tabor told the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Airland that the fleet is “still able to fulfill our contract of 56 combat lines worldwide” despite the losses, and the service is seeking to backfill the inventory and field a cheaper, more expendable replacement. The 56 combat lines represent the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance orbits the Air Force maintains around the clock for combatant commanders worldwide.

Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., opened questioning at the Senate hearing by citing the long-standing 189-aircraft floor, leaving the current fleet roughly 54 aircraft short. He asked what the Air Force plans to do as the platform takes losses in the Middle East while remaining in heavy demand across other combatant commands.

AI tool has ‘saved a lot of aircraft’ in Epic Fury, AFSOC chief says

Tabor did not address the 189 figure directly but noted that attrition has “really demonstrated the value of the MQ-9.”

“We are concerned about how they’ve attrited, and we’re looking at options to buy back as many of the MQ-9As as we possibly can right now,” Tabor said. The Air Force is working with the Department of Defense to fund the buyback this fiscal year, he said.

The longer-term work, Tabor said, falls to A5/7, the Air Force’s strategy, integration and requirements directorate. He turned the question over to Maj. Gen. Christopher Niemi, military deputy for Air Force Futures and the White House’s nominee to serve as the service’s first chief modernization officer.

Niemi confirmed that he signed off on a requirements document for the next-generation platform on May 11, framing the successor as a deliberate departure from the Reaper platform, designed from the outset for the kind of contested airspace that resulted in the Epic Fury losses.

“We believe what is possible is to take advantage of modern manufacturing technologies so that we could buy something that is more flexible, lends itself more to open architecture, is more easily [produced] in mass numbers,” Niemi said. ”And then ultimately you could use [it] in a more attritable way.”

The cost driver, Niemi said, is the Reaper’s sensor suite. A current MQ-9 with a full sensor package can run “up to $50 million a copy,” he said. A modular successor would allow the Air Force to strip out high-end packages for operation in high-threat environments, driving the price down to a point where losing one, or many, is operationally and financially feasible.

Lt. Gen. Luke Cropsey, military deputy for Air Force acquisition, said the service’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and special operations acquisition team issued a request for information about a month ago. More than 50 companies responded.

“There is a burgeoning interest across the broader defense industrial base on what comes next,” Cropsey said.

The April 14 solicitation, titled “Attritable ISR Aircraft,” seeks “low-cost, fast-to-field, fast-to-deploy, airborne ISR mass to increase mission flexibility and mission surging,” according to a copy of the document.

The service is looking for a threshold range of 200 km (objective: 1,500 km) from launch and recovery to the collection area, and a threshold loiter time of four hours (objective: 20).

Industry “production must be able to scale within months,” the RFI states.

Those specs suggest a smaller, simpler aircraft than the MQ-9, one that trades the Reaper’s exquisite sensor suite and long combat radius for cost, speed of fielding and what Niemi called “affordable mass” in his opening statement.

The math has shifted to match the threat.

The MQ-9 has been the Air Force’s workhorse drone for surveillance and strike missions in U.S. Central Command for nearly two decades, but the aircraft was built for the uncontested skies of the post-9/11 counterterrorism era.

Its losses during Operation Epic Fury have exposed the vulnerability Air Force planners have long understood but never been compelled to fix. The service shelved an earlier MQ-9 replacement effort, MQ-X, in 2012, and a 2020 request for information produced market research but no acquisition program.

The May 11 requirements document and the April 14 RFI together represent the furthest the Air Force has gone toward replacing the Reaper in more than five years.

The search for an MQ-9 successor is intended to follow the Collaborative Combat Aircraft acquisition model, Niemi said, which surveyed industry broadly, narrowed the field down to two companies that are now delivering flying prototypes for testing, and treated open architecture and autonomous operation as design requirements from the outset.

Cropsey said the industry’s response has been strong.

“We have enough interest to really get some, I think, interesting proposals back,” he said.