Collaborative autonomy software developer Scientific Systems Company, Inc. has entered the sea drone fray, introducing a small unmanned surface vessel (sUSV) designed for expeditionary interceptor, contested logistics, and other missions for the Navy and other customers.
The Vehicle for Expeditionary Naval Over-the-Horizon Missions (VENOM) autonomous sUSV (AUSV) features SSCI’s Collaborative Mission Autonomy (CMA) software architecture as the centerpiece to enable swarms of sea drones to operate with humans in the loop rather than remotely controlling each craft.
The nine-meter-long craft has a range exceeding 500 nautical miles at 24 knots in moderate sea states, and loiter for 130 hours, which is above expected Navy requirements, SSCI said on Wednesday. The small boat can achieve a sprint speed over 35 knots.
Another feature of the VENOM is that the hull is made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), a globally available commodity that does not require expensive molds and can be built with relatively low skilled labor to drive affordable mass, Kunal Mehra, SSCI’s CEO, told Defense Daily in an interview. The HDPE allows for distributed manufacturing near the point of need, he said.
SSCI’s boat manufacturer is Tideman Marine, which can build hundreds of the small craft each year, Mehra said. That could be thousands of VENOMs annually “with the right demand signal from the customer,” he added.
The portable CMA architecture package enables multi-domain autonomy at the tactical edge. The company has been developing the technology for 20 years to “operate from the sea floor to space,” and it can be integrated on legacy and new platforms, he said.
“What we do is integrate all the mission systems on board, so the radars, the cameras, so that we can detect obstacles, comply with navigation requirements, and then the big thing we’re bringing is the swarming software that enables multiple of these vessels to collaborate together to execute a mission,” Mehra said.
SSCI’s autonomy package is being used by Zone 5 Technologies for its entry into the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle program, and has been tested aboard a General Atomics MQ-20 Avenger unmanned combat air vehicle (Defense Daily, March 4, and Jan. 16, 2024).
The boats are manufactured by Tideman Marine, which like SSCI, is headquartered near Boston. Sea Machines supplies the autopilot.
The recently passed reconciliation bill includes $1.5 billion for sUSVs, and even more for medium USVs, and the Navy’s fiscal year 2026 budget request asks for $1.5 billion for maritime autonomy.
“We think over the next 18 months there’s going to be a big uptick in the procurement volumes for these kinds of systems,” Mehra said.
VENOM has been demonstrated in government-sponsored events, Mehra said, although he declined to provide specifics. The company said it has demonstrated seakeeping, autonomy behaviors, is available for sale, and ready to scale production and delivery.
House and Senate defense authorizers would prohibit a reduction in U.S. ICBMs below 400, and the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) sets a date of fiscal 2033 for initial operational capability (IOC) for the LGM-35A Sentinel future ICBM by Northrop Grumman [NOC].
That IOC is more than four years past what the U.S. Air Force had aimed for–May 2029–before Sentinel’s critical Nunn-McCurdy cost breach in January last year.
“Not later than September 30, 2033, and subject to the availability of appropriations for such purpose, the secretary of defense, acting through the secretary of the Air Force, shall ensure the LGM-35A Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile weapon system achieves initial operational capability, as defined jointly by the commander of United States Strategic Command and the Commander of Air Force Global Strike Command,” according to the SASC’s fiscal 2026 defense authorization bill.
Nuclear analysts have said that the lapse in the U.S.-Russia New Start Treaty next February could lead to a rethinking of minimum deterrence levels for the U.S. and whether multiple independent re-entry vehicles on fewer missiles will be a way forward for the ICBM force. The Air Force has operated under the minimum deterrence rubric of 400 Minuteman III operational missiles with 50 in reserve.
The House and Senate defense authorizers language thus far heads off that rethinking.
On Jan. 18 last year, the service said that it notified Congress that Sentinel had breached Nunn-McCurdy guidelines, primarily due to construction design changes, and then DoD acquisition chief William LaPlante ordered a root-cause analysis. The latter led last summer to the DoD decision to continue the program, due to its stated importance to strategic deterrence, but also to the rescinding of the Sentinel Milestone B engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) go-ahead from 2020.
Last summer, the Air Force pegged Sentinel cost at $140.9 billion, 81 percent higher than the September 2020 estimate when the program was approved for EMD–a rise that DoD said has less to do with the missile than the command-and-control segment, including silos, launch centers, “and the process, duration, staffing, and facilities to execute the conversion from Minuteman III to Sentinel.”
Air Force plans have called for a Sentinel launch center for at least 24 of the missile alert facilities and for 3,100 miles of new utility corridor for Sentinel.
The civil works for Sentinel may also include hardening silos to account for improved accuracy of Russian and Chinese nuclear missiles.
In late March and early April, Air Force leaders held community town halls in Kimball, Neb.; Pine Bluffs, Wyo., and Raymer, Colo., at which the service said that it would build new silos for Sentinel, which has a significantly larger design than its predecessor 1960s-era Minuteman missile series. The service had planned to renovate the 450 Minuteman silos for Sentinel.
SASC’s fiscal 2026 bill would require the Air Force to sustain at least 450 silos for Minuteman III.
AFGSC has been considering “green fields” and re-use of developed sites for the Sentinel silos, and Air Force Gen. Thomas Bussiere, the head of AFGSC, has said that he has approved the silo plans for two of the three ICBM wings (Defense Daily, June 17). The latter are at Malmstrom AFB, Mont., F.E. Warren AFB, Wyo., and Minot AFB, N.D.
The U.S. Air Force and other military services need to put more muscle behind base and shelter hardening to protect critical aircraft and other assets, Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s military construction, veterans affairs, and related agencies panel, said on Tuesday.
“We have all kinds of sites right now where we’ve got multi-million dollar equipment, planes and things sitting out in the open that aren’t covered at all,” Boozman told a discussion at the Hudson Institute. “So there’s just a lot that we need to do. Military construction, MILCON has been underfunded for many, many years, and it’s hard to keep up with what we’ve got, much less go forward. So we’ve got to put some dollars in that coffer and make it such that we can go forward with some of these things.”
The use of small drones hidden before launch during last month’s Ukrainian Operation Spider Web and Israeli Operation Rising Lion against Russia and Iran, respectively, “really woke up our military leaders to the fact that we’re so vulnerable,” Boozman said.
“Now I have the opportunity to visit with a lot of the military brass, especially this time of the year because it’s the appropriation season,” he said. “We’re going to mark our bill up this week…and this is really the number one topic that they’ve asked me about.”
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s military and foreign affairs panel is investigating the measures the federal government uses to protect military installations from drone surveillance and attacks, and last month Rep. William Timmons (R-S.C.), the panel’s chairman, asked DoD, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Transportation to submit a list of documents related to the agencies’ counter-drone efforts, including a list of drone flights around military installations since January 2022 and “relevant policies, memoranda, and interagency agreements guiding the detection, identification, tracking, and mitigation of unauthorized unmanned aerial systems over or near military installations and other federally protected sites” (Defense Daily, July 9).
In February, Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, the head of U.S. Northern Command, told Congress of over 350 drone incursions last year at more than 100 domestic military installations, and, at an April hearing of Loomis’ subcommittee, U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Paul Spedero, vice director for operations on the Joint Staff, said that U.S. military bases have “very little to somewhat more comprehensive” technologies to detect and track drones.
Guillot said in February that he had the authority to defeat drone threats at about half of the 360 military installations in the U.S.—those half being “covered installations” having duties in such areas as nuclear command and control, integrated tactical warning and attack assessment, missile defense, national security space, and air defense.
“I worry that almost any defensive system we come up with could ultimately be overwhelmed by numbers, and I fail to see any assured means of protecting our truly vital assets, like B-21s, B-2s, potentially ships pier-side other than passive protection.” Tom Shugart, an adjunct senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security’s defense program, said during the Hudson Institute discussion on Tuesday.
Concrete Sky: Airbase Hardening in the Western Pacific, a January report by Shugart and Timothy Walton, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, advised the U.S. “expanding the capacity and hardening of airfields in the continental United States, the Indo-Pacific, and beyond.”
China has “almost 400 hardened shelters within 1,000 miles of Taiwan,” Shugart said on Tuesday. “They have 134 air bases now within 1,000 miles of Taiwan. In the entire Western Pacific, as far as we could tell, and nobody’s told us we missed anything, the U.S. Air Force bases have added 22 hardened shelters. Two of them are pretty far up in Northern Japan, well outside of 1,000 miles from Taiwan. The other 20 are in South Korea, which I’m not sure if we’ll get to use those or not, so near zero effective hardening within.”
The January report by Shugart and Walton said that a “major, multi-year campaign of bundled construction at airfields inside and outside the United States—especially in the Indo-Pacific—would create a sustained push for military construction activities at bases, allow the creation of consortia of commercial contractors, and reduce construction costs.”
“As an element of this campaign, the United States could execute joint contracts with those allies that are also hardening their infrastructure,” the study said. “Additionally, the DoD should adopt appropriate hardening measures, especially when undertaking new military construction activities. For example, its current plan to forgo the construction of approximately $30 million hardened aircraft shelters for new over-$600 million B-21 bombers is a foolish decision that endangers the U.S.’s ability to strike globally. Similarly, in response to a recent spate of likely foreign drones flying over key military bases and installations, the DoD should harden key airfields, including by building HASs [hardened aircraft shelters].”
The report authors said that they derived their estimated $30 million B-21 shelter cost from “the cost of F-35A shelters that the United States constructed in Kunsan, Republic of Korea, in 2020″–inflated to fiscal year 2024 dollars, adjusted for the Ellsworth AFB, S.D.’s area cost factor, and quadrupled [for] the [B-21] shelters’ dimensions to account for the B-21’s size.”
The House Armed Services Committee late on Tuesday voted to advance its version of the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, with the panel adopting measures to add $1 billion for the Virginia-class submarine program and $500 million for a DDG-51 destroyer.
HASC approved the defense policy bill following a marathon markup where it considered hundreds of amendments and debated potential limits on the Golden Dome missile defense project, which were voted down, and Ukraine aid provisions, with the panel supporting another $100 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI).
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chair of the House Armed Services Committee member, during a hearing on the fiscal 2023 defense budget request. (DoD Photo by U.S. Air Force TSgt. Jack Sanders)
“Equipping an innovative and agile military requires an efficient and streamlined acquisition process. The FY26 NDAA supports modernization and fundamentally reforms defense acquisition by cutting red tape, eliminating bureaucratic hurdles, and encouraging innovation. It refocuses acquisition on its most important mission: getting our warfighters what they need when they need it,” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the HASC chair, said in a statement following the markup.
HASC unveiled its NDAA proposal last week that supports an $848 billion topline for the Pentagon, largely adhering to the Trump administration’s FY ‘26 discretionary spending request, and which features a bipartisan acquisition reform proposal from Rogers and Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) as its key area of focus (Defense Daily, July 11).
The markup began with adopting several bipartisan packages of amendments, which included measures directing the Air Force and Navy to provide more detailed information on their respective F-47 and F/A-XX sixth-generation fighter programs and blocking the use of funds to cancel the E-7A Wedgetail airborne early warning aircraft effort (Defense Daily, July 15).
Ultimately, HASC voted 55-2 to advance its FY ‘26 NDAA to the full House for consideration, with Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Sara Jacob (D-Calif.) voting against the legislation.
An amendment from Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), adopted as part of a large bipartisan package of amendments, adds $1 billion for the Virginia-class submarine program by making reductions to about two dozen Navy procurement and research development accounts, including cutting $200 million for the AN/SLQ-32 electronic warfare system and $100 million for “Strategic System Missile Equipment.”
“A bipartisan table change amendment addresses partially the Virginia shortfall and our mark’s inclusion of incremental funding authority for Columbia-class will ensure that the program’s accelerating production will not seize up because of this funding gap. These fixes are not the final word and will require additional work through conference in the future,” Courtney said.
Meanwhile, a separate package of amendments included a provision from Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) that would add $500 million to support incremental funding for the construction of one Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer (DDG-51).
The increase would come from reducing $250 million from the Navy’s account for completing prior year shipbuilding programs and $250 million designated for “outfitting” in its procurement account.
One of the few debated amendments that received bipartisan support was a measure from Smith to add another $100 million for USAI above the $300 million already authorized in the HASC NDAA mark, with the panel voting 47-10 to adopt the provision.
The boost for USAI, which provides funds for the Pentagon to buy capabilities to bolster Ukraine’s defense capabilities, would come from reducing the Navy’s accounts for frigate development by $84.2 million and test and evaluation support by $15.8 million.
“Given the ambivalence that we have seen from the Trump administration since the start, it is undermining support for Ukraine and emboldening Vladimir Putin,” Smith said. “I think it’s really important for Congress to make it clear that we don’t want to see that happen. We don’t want to see that support collapse.”
HASC defeated an amendment by voice vote from Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) that would have removed the entirety of USAI funding from the bill.
The panel also voted along party lines against adopting several measures that would have provided more oversight related to pausing security assistance for Ukraine, which follows the Pentagon’s recent decision to temporarily halt weapons shipments to Kyiv.
HASC, however, did adopt a measure from Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), that was included in a large bipartisan package of amendments, directing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to brief the committee by December on the details of any decision the Pentagon made to review, pause or cancel weapons transfers to Ukraine.
Turner in his amendment notes HASC is aware of recent cases where DoD made such a decision “without adequate interagency deliberation or timely consultations with Congress.”
President Trump last week announced a new plan for NATO countries to purchase “billions of dollars” in U.S. military equipment that will be provided to assist Ukraine, including Patriot air defense systems (Defense Daily, July 14).
HASC also debated amendments on the Golden Dome missile defense project, with the panel defeating a measure from Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) that looked to place limits on funds for related space-based missile defense architecture work until more details were provided to Congress.
Moulton, the top Democrat on the HASC Strategic Forces Subcommittee, noted the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the 20-year cost of developing the space-based component of Golden Dome could range from $160 billion to $542 billion, adding “and we all know which end of that range will be right.”
“Most importantly, multiple witnesses testified to the subcommittee that there have been no significant policy deliberations on the impact of Golden Dome on strategic stability. There’s a lot of classified reporting on the Russian and Chinese responses to this and let’s just say that none of it makes us sleep better at night. It’s an invitation to an arms race,” Moulton said.
Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), the HASC Strategic Forces chair, said Moulton’s amendment would have restricted the $25 billion included in the recently-passed reconciliation bill to get the Golden Dome project started.
“I would draw my colleagues to the fact that [the amendment] prohibits any design work from being done on a space-based interceptor until full lifecycle cost estimates for the system have been completed. There’s simply no way for the department to comply with this requirement. It’s impossible to estimate the lifecycle costs of a system before any design work takes place. The result of this amendment would be to take space-based missile defense capabilities off the table,” DesJarlais said.
Firestorm Labs, which has developed and expeditionary manufacturing capability for “point-of-need production” for drones and their parts, has raised $47 million in a Series A round that will be put toward hiring engineers, opening a larger production facility, expanding a partnership program, and accelerating in-theater production.
The funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates
with participation from the venture arms of Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Booz Allen Hamilton [BAH], Decisive Point, and Washington Harbour Partners.
Firestorm’s factory-in-a-box is called xCell, which can be transported to where it can more quickly support warfighters by additively manufacturing its Tempest unmanned aircraft system (UAS) airframe, third party UAS, payloads, spare parts, and allow for assembly. The distributed manufacturing platform also allows users to reconfigure Tempest for different missions, including strike.
“We’re thrilled about this milestone because it empowers Firestorm to deliver critical, battlefield-ready solutions faster and at scale,” Dan Magy, CEO and co-founder of the San Diego-based company, said in a statement. “Our unique ability to 3D-print modular airframes on-site dramatically reduces production timelines, costs, and logistical constraints, giving the U.S. and allied forces the adaptive technology they urgently need in complex and contested operational environments.”
The funding round builds on an earlier $12.5 million seed round and incudes $12 million in venture debt from J.P. Morgan.
Earlier this year Firestorm announced two awards with the Air Force valued at more than $100 million combined (Defense Daily, Jan. 23, and March 13). The startup will provide Tempest to the Air Force as a testbed for autonomy, sensor payload experiments, and communications architectures, and to help it scale the UAS and xCell.
Venture-backed power management startup Chariot Defense on Wednesday emerged from stealth with an $8 million seed round it has been using for hiring and product development as the San Franciso-based company eyes bringing its energy solutions to the tactical edge of the battlefield.
Chariot Defense is entering the market with two main products, expeditionary high voltage power systems that can store, manage, and distribute energy to meet the growing demand for power at the lowest warfighting echelons being driven by the use of unmanned systems, counter-unmanned aircraft systems—including those based on directed energy—radios, artificial intelligence-based computer systems, and more.
Soldiers are using drones in military exercises, keeping them airborne for six hours instead of 24, because they have to go back to base and recharge the batteries, Adam Warmoth, Chariot’s CEO and co-founder, told Defense Daily on Monday in an interview.
“So, there’s this power problem at the edge, and we’re creating a lot of flexibility there,” he said.
The low signature, relatively lightweight Amphora power systems can deploy pre-charged or charge from existing alternating and direct current power sources such as generators, solar cells, military vehicles, and other outputs while powering multiple other systems and sensors.
Warmoth previously worked as a program manager for counter-drone systems at Anduril Industries, which provides these products to the Defense Department, including U.S. Special Operations Command under a nearly $1 billion award (Defense Daily, Feb. 1, 2022).
“Basically, in my time at Anduril, we were fielding counter-UAS systems at the edge, and were realizing that power was our constant limiting factor,” Warmoth said.
The systems driving demand for more power are being used at lower echelons, including the squad level, which require low-observable operations, Warmoth said. This means power sources must be low signature, “lightweight, distributed, and independent for longer, without resupply,” he said.
The Amphora systems include lithium ion battery storage and software-defined power electronics to enable flexible energy management at the edge, making them more efficient and configurable than traditional systems, Warmoth said.
For example, using a generator-only approach to meet power needs requires them to be sized to peak demand, Warmoth said. At Anduril, the company would field systems needing peak power loads of 10 kilowatts, which required a 1,500-pound generator, while the average load was 500 watts, or 5 percent of peak, he said.
Chariot leverages commercially-developed battery technology and applies its software and integration expertise to its products. Amphora 24 weighs 180 pounds and supplies 5 kilowatts of power. The Amphora 400, which weighs 500 pounds, can put out 35 kilowatts, and is about a quarter of the size and weight of the Army’s 30 kilowatt generator, which weighs about 2,200 pounds.
Chariot’s Amphora 400, which weighs 500 pounds, can put out 35 kilowatts, and is about a quarter of the size and weight of the Army’s 30 kilowatt generator, Warmoth said.
Amphora 24 was used earlier this year at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana as part of the Army’s Transformation in Contact 2.0 exercise, demonstrating that it could charge off their AC and DC sources, store the energy, and then distribute it to the systems that needed to be powered, Warmoth said. In one instance, a company with the 101st Airborne Division used Amphora for an infiltration operation and was able to use the system for 36 hours with no other source of power generation before drawing it down, he said.
During the Naval Post Graduate School’s Joint Interagency Field Experimentation at Camp Roberts, Calif., in February, Chariot observed a laser system running on three generators at high-idle, ready to fire, Warmoth said. For most of the time, when the laser is not firing, the generators would only need to be on low-idle to keep the cameras and other sensors operating, he said.
On top of this, the generators are loud and give off a thermal signature. With an Amphora unit, the generators were turned off yet had the power available when needed for 500 laser shots, and the flexibility to just provide power to the various sensors, eliminating wasted energy and limiting observable signals, Warmoth said.
“Directed energy is one of the biggest places where this has the biggest impact,” he said.
Chariot has sold two Amphora units to the U.S. military, one that is operating in Alaska and the other at Camp Pendleton, Calif., neither of which requires field service repair support, he said.
The seed round was led by General Catalyst and XYZ, with participation from Cubit Capital, Ravelin, Forward Deployed VC, Pax, New Vista, D3, and Brave Capital.
Anduril Industries in May successfully completed flight tests of the munitions variant of its Barracuda-100 autonomous air vehicle under an Army testbed program aimed at proving out multiple ranges, missile maneuverability, and passive, autonomous terminal guidance using a government-developed seeker.
The High-Speed Maneuverable Missile (HSSM) program is developing technology for “a compact, fast, maneuverable missile capable of short range engagements to long range, non-line-of-sight attack beyond 120 kilometers in degraded and contested environments,” the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Aviation & Missile Center (AvMC) said on Tuesday.
The missile exceeded its performance criteria, sped over 500 knots, and conducted high-G maneuvers “at end game and at ingress,” Stev Milano, senior director for advanced effects at Anduril, told reporters.
“Throughout each of these we hit the targets as we anticipated, but most importantly, we instantiated the terminal guidance maneuvers that were the most interesting to the Army customer,” Milano said.
The government-developed imaging missile seeker used in the flight testing is the Precision Target Acquisition Software (PTAS) target acquisition and track suite that the Army said enables autonomous capabilities from “boost to impact.” PTAS features a long wave infrared camera in the seeker to provide video feedback as it seeks out the target image.
“PTAS exceeded expectations at the May test event,” M. Shane Thompson, a principal investigator at DEVCOM AvMC, told Defense Daily
in an email reply to questions.
The seeker technology was integrated with Anduril’s Lattice for Mission Autonomy operation system, which also integrates the vehicle management system and other sensors so “you could make route planning and mission planning updates to while in flight,” Milano said.
The HSSM program began in 2023 with design reviews and trade studies, and in less than two years—by the end of 2024—Anduril had conducted transonic wind tunnel, captive carriage, glide, engine, and multiple powered flights of the Barracuda-100M.
For the recent flight tests, the Barracuda-100M was boosted by a government provided rocket motor from a rail on an L-29 aircraft and then flew to the targets using an Anduril-designed turbojet engine, Milano said.
The Barracuda-100 can fly more than 100 nautical miles and carry about 40 pounds of payload depending on the mission, he said, adding that it has 10 times the range as any other capability in a similar form factor such as a Hellfire missile.
“This takes a leap from existing systems to a future that will significantly shape the battlefield,” Lt. Col. Shane Kohtz, senior science and technology officer at DEVCOM AvMC, said in a statement.
Depending on the mission, Milano put the unit cost of Barracuda-100M at roughly $200,000 once it is fielded. Anduril is keeping tabs on the Army’s operational needs for future programs of record that will require the same form factor as Barracuda-100, he said.
Later this year, Anduril will begin ground-launched tests of Barracuda-100M that will end with a live-fire demonstration at a government test range in 2026.
Anduril in 2024 unveiled its family of Barracuda low-cost, expendable, multi-mission autonomous air vehicles (Defense Daily, Sept. 12, 2024). In addition to the Barracuda-100 and 100M, the company offers the Barracuda-250 and -500, each coming in “M” variants and providing more range and payload capacity. Milano said the Barracuda-250 and 500 are also in flight-testing.
Barracuda-500 is competing in the Air Force and Defense Innovation Unit Enterprise Test Vehicle prototype project (Defense Daily, March 4).
Satellite operator Globalstar has a new Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Army to assess the company’s devices for low probability of intercept and detection communications.
Globalstar said the primary focus of the CRADA is to assess its ultra low size, weight, power and cost (SWaP-C) devices, which have built-in support for satellite connectivity and are designed to operate in environments where traditional communications are limited or unavailable.
“The dynamic nature of the OTA [over-the-air] messaging structure enables our devices to function with inherent low-probability-of-intercept (LPI) and low-probability-of-detection (LPD) capabilities,” the company explained. This has implications for covert sensing, unmanned systems, congested logistics tracking, and tagging/tracking/locating applications.
“This collaboration reflects our growing engagement with defense and federal partners,” said Globalstar CEO Paul E. Jacobs. “We’re proud to bring our decades of satellite expertise and emerging terrestrial innovation to support the Army’s evaluation of next-generation satellite capabilities.”
The House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday adopted measures to its version of the next defense policy bill directing the Air Force and Navy to provide more detailed information on their respective F-47 and F/A-XX sixth-generation fighter programs and blocking the use of funds to cancel the E-7A Wedgetail airborne early warning aircraft effort.
HASC is set to work through hundreds of amendments during its marathon markup of the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which was still ongoing as of Defense Daily
’s deadline, with much of the debate centered on the potential acceptance of a Qatari-donated 747-8 airliner that President Trump wants to use as Air Force One and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s involvement in the “Signalgate” incident.
Artist rendering of F-47 NGAD. (Image: U.S. Air Force)
“[This NDAA] is a strong bill that will help reform acquisition systems, revitalize the defense industrial base and build the ready, capable and lethal fighting force we need to deter China and other adversaries,” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the HASC chair, said in his remarks to open the markup.
HASC unveiled its NDAA proposal last week which supports an $848 billion topline for the Pentagon, largely adhering to the Trump administration’s FY ‘26 discretionary spending request, and which features a bipartisan acquisition reform proposal from Rogers and Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) as its key areas of focus (Defense Daily, July 11).
“This bill represents the most comprehensive and effective swing in acquisition reform that I’ve seen in my almost 29 years here on the committee,” Smith said.
During the markup, the panel adopted a package of bipartisan amendments to the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee portion of the bill that included the provisions related to F-47, F/A-XX and E-7A.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) proposed the F-47 amendment, which would require the Air Force secretary to submit a report to the congressional defense committees by March 2027 offering greater detail into plans for the F-47 program.
The Air Force selected Boeing to build the future F-47 fighter aircraft, which will replace the F-22, with the service having requested $900 million in the reconciliation bill and another nearly $2.6 billion in its FY ‘26 budget request to continue development efforts (Defense Daily, March 21).
The required report would cover a description of the F-47’s system requirements, employment concepts and projected costs, schedule and funding requirements for FYs 2028 through 2034 as well as details on the acquisition strategy for the F-47 program of record, “including consideration of implementing a middle tier acquisition pathway or major capability acquisition pathway.”
Bacon’s amendment also seeks specifics on the Air Force’s proposed fielding strategy for the F-47, to include “estimated force structure requirements, strategic basing considerations, an estimate of military construction requirements, an estimate of personnel training requirements and an integrated total force fielding concept, including an analysis of Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve operational integration and associations.”
In a budget request document, the Air Force said it plans to examine strategic choices on F-47 development by the end of January 2026 (Defense Daily, June 27).
For the Navy’s F/A-XX, an amendment adopted from Rep. Sarah Elfreth (D-Md.) cites concern from HASC over the lack of commitment for the platform in the Navy’s FY ‘26 budget request and directs a briefing on the plans for the program.
“The committee is also deeply concerned about public reports that the Department of Defense does not intend to obligate or expend $750 million that Congress provided in the Reconciliation Bill for F/A-XX. Further, the committee is concerned that the Navy had to place funding for this critical program on their Unfunded Priorities List submitted to Congress,” Elfreth writes in her amendment.
“Given that the U.S. fights as a joint force, failure to fund this program will lead to a significant mismatch in state-of-the-art integrated battlespace capabilities from the maritime domain, allowing an adversary to concentrate their efforts in the direction of land-based and forward-deployed expeditionary forces,” Elfreth added.
The Navy’s FY ‘26 budget requests only $74 million for the F/A-XX program in the budget “to complete the design of that aircraft,” with a senior defense official previously explaining that the funding level keeps options open while maintaining minimal development funding to allow industry to prioritize the Air Force’s F-47 fighter program (Defense Daily, June 27).
The service’s unfunded priorities list recently submitted to Congress included $1.397 billion dedicated to the “Air Wing of the Future,” stating it will allow the service to award the sixth-generation fighter contract to industry (Defense Daily, July 9).
Elfreth’s amendment directs the deputy secretary of defense to brief HASC by December on plans to obligate authorized F/A-XX funds and to provide details on the planned timeline for when the Navy will award an engineering and manufacturing development contract to move the program forward.
“The committee is also deeply concerned that F/A-XX prime- and subcontractors have invested significant capital resources toward the design and development of this new aircraft and its mission systems. Failure to adequately fund this program in FY26 and through the Future Years Defense Plan could have detrimental consequences on the level of future resources investment from industry partners toward this key capability,” Elfreth writes.
After rebuking plans to end the Boeing E-7A prototyping effort and authorizing $800 million to continue the effort in its NDAA proposal, HASC also adopted a measure from Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.) blocking the use of funds to cancel the program.
The provision follows a similar move to the House Appropriations Committee, which added an increase and adopted a measure to protect funds for the E-7A program in its FY ‘26 defense spending bill (Defense Daily, June 13).
Meanwhile, HASC is set to vote later this evening on a proposal from Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) that would block the use of funds to retrofit the Qatari-donated 747 jet for use as Air Force One as well as several measures related to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app to discuss plans for military strikes in Yemen.
“We’re being asked by the administration to overlook a unilateral decision without Congress’ approval, with no appropriation that has been lawfully given to the administration, to approve a third Air Force One aircraft, which supposedly is going to be delivered before the two planes that have been underway for retrofit since the first Trump administration,” Courtney said of his proposal.
Bacon joined Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) in offering a bipartisan amendment that would condemn the sharing of sensitive national defense information, after having expressed opposition to a similar measure that would fence off some Office of the Secretary of Defense funds until a DoD Inspector General’s review of the Signalgate incident has concluded.
“It strips out what I think are consequences that would hobble the OSD but yet it let’s us state the truth that what was done by the secretary [of defense] was not right,” Bacon said. “When you [have] responsibility, you take responsibility when you make a mistake and you own up to it.”
The U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii plans to replace eight 105mm and six 155mm howitzers with 16 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers by Lockheed Martin [LMT].
The 25th Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., are part of the Army’s “Transformation in Contact” initiative.
“We are integrating long-range precision fires that increase the ability to increase our operational reach,” Army Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, the commander of the 25th Infantry Division, told reporters on Tuesday. “It also provides us a platform that we can better protect ourselves with because we can shoot and then rapidly move to an area that affords us better protection.”
The 25th Infantry Division will still retain one battalion of cannons–two batteries of eight 105mm howitzers each–and on battery of 155mm howitzers.
The division incorporated HIMARS during Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center (JPMRC) training last October and in training in the Philippines over the last two years, “but now this [HIMARS] capability will be organic” to the 25th Infantry Division, Evans said on Tuesday.
Long-range precision fires are part of the Army’s $4.3 billion unfunded priorities list for fiscal 2026, and 25th Infantry Division leaders are thinking about such fires in conjunction with drone, counter-drone and electronic warfare (Defense Daily, July 9).
“We are also transforming our intelligence, information, and electronic warfare battalion into a multi-domain fires battalion that increases their capability to see and sense farther than previously, ” Evans said. “All of that will be organic to the division artillery and supporting the division to be able to set conditions for the joint force.”
The Army Transformation Initiative details cuts to programs such as the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, Humvee, AH-64D Apache, the M10 Booker and Gray Eagle UAS in what the service has said is an effort to boost readiness and fund programs more relevant to a China scenario and others involving high technology adversaries.
This fall, the JPMRC exercise is to prove out the 25th Infantry Division’s HIMARS formation and “will validate our second mobile brigade, which is our 3rd Brigade–the employment of Infantry Squad Vehicles; increased drones on the battlefield to include short-range reconnaissance that can reach out 2-3 kilometers all the way to long-range reconnaissance drones which will allow us to see and sense up to 40 kilometers,” Evans said.
