The Air Force’s innovation arm has awarded Slingshot Aerospace a small award to further develop an artificial intelligence capability that rapidly analyzes data about spacecraft in low Earth orbit to check for nefarious activity and safeguard assets, the company said on Tuesday.
Under the Rapid Analysis of Photometric Tracks for space Object Identification and behavior Recognition (RAPTOR) program, Slingshot is leveraging its own global network of land-based optical sensors and related analytics that capture unique digital fingerprints of each spacecraft that the company’s Agatha AI model is applied against to track objects of interest, maintain custody of objects, and detect anomalies proactively and reactively.
Slingshot’s overall technology platform, which includes the ability to provide contextual intelligence, is leveraged against the data to “dramatically reduce that sphere of uncertainty and then what this AI now does is it’s even more precise on predicting,” Tim Solms, the company’s CEO, told Defense Daily on Monday.
The value of Slingshot’s one-year Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research award with AFWERX was not disclosed.
At the start of this year RAPTOR could go from observation to insight for a customer in just under nine minutes, Solms said. By the end of 2025, “we expect to be below a minute from observing an anomalous activity, curating that data, applying the AI to it, and then being able to hand off that insight to an operational user,” he said.
The Defense Department’s need for space domain awareness is increasing as it pursues capabilities for warfighting in space, with U.S. Space Force’s goal being to provide space superiority for the joint force. Earlier this month, Gen. Michael Guetlein, vice chief of space operations, said U.S. near-peer adversaries are conducting or pursuing cyber-hacks, jamming, spoofing, lasing, kinetic, and even dogfighting capabilities in space (Defense Daily, March 20).
Space is where “we’re going to see first moves,” Solms said of a potential future conflict.
“So, our ability to identify and persistently monitor and assess is absolutely part of national security,” Solms said. “So, Raptor supporting the mission of the DoD, tracking, identifying nefarious in-space activities, safeguarding critical assets, That’s all a part of being able to see what’s going on.”
Slingshot, which is based in El Segundo, Calif., and has 145 employees, said that RAPTOR can also “examine the fingerprints of newly launched satellites to determine their type, mission, and whether further inspection is needed.”
The company has a catalog of about 14,500 active spacecraft and debris through its network of more than 220 optical sensors in 22 locations worldwide. The network generates more than 4.5 million photometric observations nightly, allowing Slingshot to create the fingerprints for each spacecraft and debris that its AI model can leverage.
The State Department has approved a potential $5.6 billion deal with the Philippines for the sale of 20 F-16 fighter aircraft and associated weapons.
The Defense Security Cooperation Agency notified Congress on Tuesday of the new foreign military sale.
An F-16D Fighting Falcon pilot assigned to the 40th Flight Test Squadron flies over the Florida Gulf during a routine training event June 6, 2019 (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Joshua Hoskins)
The new FMS case specifically covers 16 F-16C Block 70/72 and four F-16B Block 70/72 jets, built by Lockheed Martin [LMT], and follows Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recent visit to Manila.
“Our partnership not only continues today, but we are doubling down on that partnership, and our ironclad alliance has never been stronger,” Hegseth said during a joint press conference alongside Philippine Secretary of National Defense Gilberto Teodoro. “This morning, I also had a chance to meet with President Marcos and Secretary Teodoro and I just had a, as I described, very productive discussion about how to not just continue, but accelerate the progress in the US-Philippines Alliance. We agreed on the next steps to reestablish, and that’s key, reestablish deterrence in the Indo Pacific region.”
Hegseth at the meeting also announced that the U.S. and Philippines agreed to several defense cooperation measures, including deploying a new Marine Corps anti-ship missile system, the Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) (Defense Daily, March 28).
The new FMS case also follows the Biden administration’s announcement last July on plans to provide the Philippines with $500 million in Foreign Military Financing funds to help the country modernize its armed forces and coast guard (Defense Daily, July 30 2024).
Along with the F-16s, the sale would also include 24 GE Aerospace [GE] F110 engines, 22 AESA radars, guided missile launchers, anti-aircraft guns, AN/AAQ-33 Sniper Advanced Targeting Pods, over 100 AIM-120C AMRAAM missiles “or equivalent missiles,” 40 AIM-9X Block II Sidewinder missiles and guided bombs.
“The proposed sale will enhance the Philippine Air Force’s ability to conduct maritime domain awareness and close air support missions and enhance its suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) and aerial interdiction capabilities. This sale will also increase the ability of the Armed Forces of the Philippines to protect vital interests and territory, as well as expand interoperability with the U.S. forces,” the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said in a statement.
President Trump’s pick to serve as his new top military adviser told lawmakers on Tuesday the Pentagon needs a “sense of urgency” to get “real purchasing growth” with its budget and said he’d lean on his private sector experience for improving tech innovation at the department.
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine acknowledged he was an “unconventional” nominee during his confirmation hearing to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he faced an array of questions on a past interaction with Trump and his commitment to remaining apolitical.
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, President Trump’s nominee to serve as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Photo: U.S. Air Force.
“I acknowledge that I am an unconventional nominee. These are unconventional times,” Caine said. “As we sit here now, our nation faces an unprecedented rise in global risk. Our adversaries are advancing, global nuclear threats are on the rise and deterrence is paramount. Our national defense requires urgent action and reform across the board. We must go faster. We must move with a sense of urgency.”
Trump in February fired Air Force Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown, Jr. as his joint chiefs chairman and then announced he would nominate Caine to be his replacement as the nation’s top uniformed officer (Defense Daily, Feb. 24).
Caine, a former F-16 pilot and deputy commanding general of a joint task force that fought ISIS in Iraq, retired from the military in December and was most recently the associate director for military affairs at the CIA from 2021 to 2024.
His Air Force biography notes that from 2009 to 2016 he was a part-time member of the National Guard and “a serial entrepreneur and investor.”
Caine, 56, retired from the Air Force as a three-star in December and would likely be the first Joint Chiefs chairman to have never served as a four-star prior to assuming the role, as well being the rare official that would have to return to military service for the position
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the SASC chair, called Caine an “excellent choice” for the chairman position and pushed back on assertions he’s “unqualified” for the role.
“It’s difficult to imagine a better joint and interagency background for a nominee of this position. Our threat environment is complex and Gen. Caine understands how the services can work together to meet today’s dangers,” Wicker said. “Based on my conversations with the nominee and based on his actions in uniform, I’m confident that Gen. Caine will give President Trump his best military advice. He will do so without bias, as he’s required to do. He would not consider whether the president may like or dislike that advice. That’s exactly what a United States president deserves.”
In response to a question from Wicker on whether he believes DoD needs real growth in the defense budget “to maintain deterrence” against adversaries, Caine said DoD must “move quickly and figure out how we can get real purchasing growth over time.”
“We definitely must have a sense of urgency related to the budget. I think it comes down to, ultimately, finding more deployable or allocatable capital and there’s really three ways to do that. We can find greater efficiencies in the budget through cost savings, we can reprogram from different programs or we can get a higher topline. I think of it more as a business model where we get revenue,” Wicker said.
Wicker said Caine’s private sector “can serve [him] well” in the joint chiefs chairman role, while Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) asked how the “unconventional” nominee would get after changing the culture around innovation at the Pentagon.
“We have to stop admiring the problem and we have to start executing. And I think your point about culture is where it all starts. I think we have to take ownership and an entrepreneurial mindset to all of these reforms that are in front of us. And we can’t do this alone. We have to do it with you here in the Congress in order to actually make these changes,” Caine said.
Cramer during the hearing cited the Space Development Agency as “the most disruptive, innovative” office at the Pentagon, while adding that the decision to put SDA Director Derek Tournear on leave, reportedly related to his involvement with a bid protest decision, was the result of a “witch hunt” from the end of the Biden administration.
“Everybody that says they’re an innovator is an innovator except in this case we should check further into it. All the while, satellites don’t go up. All the while, China goes at the speed of China,” Cramer said.
After leaving DoD in December, Caine joined venture capital firm Shield Capital and he is also currently a partner at Ribbit Capital, an adviser to Thrive Capital and chairman of the national security advisory board at Voyager Space, according to his LinkedIn profile.
“I’ve also had the privilege of serving alongside incredible business leaders, starting and scaling companies as an entrepreneur and along the way I learned what a different kind of grit looks like. Our American entrepreneurial spirit is a force multiplier and my time as an entrepreneur has made me a better general officer and leader. And if confirmed, I’ll bring more of that spirit into the joint force,” Caine said, noting that new senior leaders at the Pentagon have “deep, substantive business backgrounds.”
Caine added that falling behind on the pace of technology development is a “huge problem” at the department.
“Technology is evolving so quickly that every time we field capabilities, they’re obsolete often times when they hit the force and that’s not acceptable,” Caine said. “I think it goes back to…having agility in our requirements and building a system of acquisition that allows us to take advantage of the current technologies, not those of the past. If confirmed, I’ll work with the Joint Staff, the joint chiefs and, of course, OSD to pick up the speed, pace and tempo of fielding the capabilities we need that are not obsolete.”
“We need a mix of both startups that are new entrants to the industry, but we also do need the primes…There are components that the primes can only do and we have to leverage that capability. Then there’s a bunch of things that new entrants will do to move forward,” Caine added
Wicker during the hearing also tasked Caine, if confirmed, to prioritizing modernizing the requirements process, asking the nominee whether he believes it should be “entirely torn down and rebuilt.”
“The solution is probably somewhere in the middle. I don’t know that we need to tear the whole thing down. I definitely agree that we need to improve the speed and agility of our requirements process. Technology is evolving so fast, our requirements process does not evolve at the same time,” Caine said.
Caine did seem to have some tentative support from Democrats on the panel, with SASC Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-R.I.) noting the “unusual conditions” around his nomination and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) stating his military record is “exemplary and lengthy” and that he served with “extraordinary distinction.
“If confirmed, you will be the most visible military officer in the nation. It will be critical for you to represent the force with total professionalism and trustworthiness. Frankly, I am concerned about the health of civilian-military relations in our country. Over the past several months, the military has been dragged into dangerous political fights. Public trust in the military is eroding, and I fear that the military’s trust in civilian leadership has been shaken,” Reed said.
Lawmakers pressed the nominee on a story Trump has told about meeting Caine while he was serving in Iraq, where the former lieutenant general reportedly said he “loved [Trump]” and would “kill for [him]” and that he put on a MAGA hat.
Caine denied the accounting of that story and pledged to remain apolitical if confirmed for the military adviser role.
“For 34 years, I’ve upheld my oath of office and my commitment to my commission and I have never worn any political merchandise,” Caine said. “I went back and listened to those tapes and I think the president was actually talking about somebody else”
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said on Tuesday that the U.S. Air Force may be able to re-use some Minuteman III silos to house the future Northrop Grumman [NOC] LGM-35A Sentinel and that the Air Force is increasingly discussing possible concurrent upgrades to house Sentinel at the three ICBM bases–Malmstrom AFB, Mont., F.E. Warren AFB, Wyo., and Minot AFB, N.D.
The Air Force plan has been to conduct sequential upgrades of the bases with Minot being the third and final base.
Cramer is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s (SASC) strategic forces panel.
“We get briefed on it [Sentinel] a lot actually, as you might imagine, and they are talking more and more like there’ll be more like concurrent infrastructure development, which I think is great,” Cramer said in a brief interview off the Senate floor.
“I was just up there [at Minot] a few weeks ago,” he said. “When we went down into one of the silos and looked at the Minuteman, it’s really kind of remarkable how much of that infrastructure is in great shape. To the degree that it’s possible yet to modify the design of Sentinel to utilize existing silos, it would be a tremendous opportunity. We’ll see. Some of them [silos] are gonna have to be [replaced]. Some of them are full of water.”
The Sentinel design is significantly larger than Minuteman III and may require new silos.
“I don’t know why you’d make a bigger missile when you had a certain sized silo,” Cramer said. “The current [Sentinel missile] design is bigger [than Minuteman III]. I do think they’re gonna use the existing footprint, however. If you’ve ever been up to one [Minuteman III site], you know how much room there is inside the fence line. There may be some opportunity for [Sentinel missile] design change. We’ll see.”
Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense panel, has pushed for an acceleration of Sentinel and a reduction in program cost through simultaneous upgrades to the three ICBM bases and through an Air Force identification of construction savings (Defense Daily, March 12).
Initial operational capability (IOC) for Sentinel now looks to be years past the Air Force’s initial goal of May 2029 for Sentinel IOC.
The Air Force is restructuring the program after a Nunn-McCurdy cost breach.
On Jan. 18 last year, the Air Force 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 to the DoD decision last July 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.”
Secretary of the Air Force-nominee Troy Meink has said Sentinel is needed for deterrence (Defense Daily, March 28). “The ground leg of the nuclear triad–Minuteman III and, over time, Sentinel–are foundational to strategic deterrence and defense of the homeland,” he wrote in written answers to SASC before his nomination hearing. “If confirmed, I commit to exploring ways in which the program may be able to regain schedule and reduce cost.”
In response to a question from Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) at his nomination hearing last Thursday, Meink said that he would seek to apply lessons learned from the Nunn-McCurdy breach and would seek to accelerate Sentinel fielding.
The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) lacks the resources to adequately assess commercial unmanned aircraft system (UAS) vendors and their wares at scale, limiting the Defense Department’s access to the rapidly innovating domestic drone industry and forcing government buyers into more costly options, an industry official said on Tuesday.
A related effort in the private sector to clear UAS for use by federal civilian and state agencies also suffers from scant resources, leaving them short of options and facing higher costs, Mike Ledbetter, chief operating officer at Huntsville, Ala.-based drone manufacturer COLSA Corp., told the House Homeland Security Committee.
During the latest once-a-year assessment conducted by the DIU to refresh the Blue UAS Cleared List, there were 369 submissions that participated, resulting in acceptance of 23 drone platforms and 14 components, Ledbetter said, equating the relatively light results to limited resources.
“These rates do not match the pace that American drone manufacturers are producing new systems or developing advanced technologies that could support emergency management or border security use cases,” he told the committee, which examined the use of UAS by the Department of Homeland Security. “The impact is that federal and state agencies who had previously invested in fleets of UAS is manufactured in restricted nations now have very few and increasingly expensive options for bringing their UAS operations into compliance.”
The commercial drone manufacturing market is dominated by China, particularly the Chinese firm DJI. To expand access to non-adversarial drones, DIU hosts the annual Blue UAS Challenge to update its list of cleared drones that meet supply chain and cybersecurity requirements.
DIU in February announced the latest list of new manufacturers, their drones, and related components, that are nearing Blue UAS approval (Defense Daily, Feb. 18). COLSA did not make the list.
A separate assessment effort conducted by the Association of Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International, called the Green UAS program, to address non-DoD needs has resulted in only seven platforms being cleared, Ledbetter said in his written statement for the committee.
“A company of our size with a successful track record in federal contracts makes the support to these agencies low risk,” he wrote. “However, there is a challenging process to be evaluated and certified for sales to either defense or civil agencies.”
Ledbetter pointed out that COLSA has built and delivered more than 1,400 drones to the U.S. Army, developed software that enables swarms of drones to operate, and has developed a line of commercially available UAS.
The U.S. Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and its counterparts in the U.K. and Australian governments launched the second annual AUKUS Pillar II Maritime Innovation Challenge this week, this time focused on undersea communications and autonomous systems control.
This challenge series started in 2024 as a way for the defense innovation systems of all three countries to securely share rapid developments in certain technologies.
AUKUS logo (Image: Australia Department of Defense)
The 2024 challenge focused on offensive and defensive electromagnetic spectrum technologies as part of AUKUS Pillar II (Defense Daily, March 26, 2024).
The 2024 winners were announced six months after the event kicked off (Defense Daily, Sept. 30, 2024).
While AUKUS Pillar I focuses on sharing nuclear-powered attack submarine capabilities with Australia, Pillar II covers other technologies like electronic warfare and unmanned systems.
This iteration of the challenge is specifically focused on undersea command, control and communications with undersea communications and control of autonomous systems.
DIU said AUKUS partners are looking to research innovations that allow synchronization and teaming of multiple undersea systems. It specifically said it invites innovations that provide near-real time communications between undersea vehicles (UVs); near-real time communication from UVs to command and control systems (C2)/battle management systems (BMS); near-real time communications between seabed systems to UVs, C2 and BMS; systems that can optimally allocate the right asset to the right task; and provide optimal bandwidth use and effective range while performing in a contested or congested environment.
In its March 31 announcement, DIU noted the challenge is being run in all three countries as a two-stage competition. DIU’s counterparts are the U.K.’s Defense and Security Accelerator (DASA) and the Australian Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator (ASCA).
Stage one will have submissions evaluated for desirability and technical merits by evaluators from each of the AUKUS countries. Any successful submissions from stage 1 can be invited by any AUKUS partner to submit a detailed proposal for stage 2.
“Terms and conditions for the competition have been harmonized as far as possible across the three nations but it should be appreciated that individual AUKUS partners have separate national requirements for awards,” DIU said in its announcement.
Defense Innovation Unit logo
Respondents who are offered and entered into a contract with an AUKUS partner after stage 2 will then be required to develop the technology into a prototype level and deliver a demonstration at a multinational maritime exercise.
DIU noted the final contract deliverables can be shared by all three AUKUS partners “to enable the three partners to consider their suitability for any future use or possible exploitation by one or more AUKUS partners, however no such future use or exploitation is guaranteed to occur.”
Up to $8 million in funding is available and all three countries expect to fund three to 10 proposals for capabilities that can achieve a minimum of Technology Readiness Level 6. Stage 1 submissions are due by April 28, stage 1 decision release date is planned for May 26.
DIU is looking to start contracts in November 2025 and the project itself will be a 12 month-long duration.
Australia’s Defense Ministry noted in February that two of the three Australian winners last year, Advanced Design Technology and Penten, entered into $5 million worth of contracts with ASCA.
The head of the naval nuclear propulsion program this week argued submarine shipbuilding is improving, in part thanks to new technologies.
While the U.S. Navy and submarine industrial base are trying to build the equivalent of an annual 500 percent increase in submarine tonnage from 2004 to now, Adm. William Houston said they are trying to leverage new technology like automated robot inspectors and drone-based monitors.
Artist rendering of the future Columbia-class nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarine (SSBN), which will replace the Ohio-class submarines. (Illustration: U.S. Navy)
“We now have automated robots to do inspections for us in tanks – that goes ahead and takes tank inspections from 300 days in a critical path in a shipyard down to 30 days. For some of our radiation measurements we take instead of establishing platforms and putting our radiation detection devices on them, we’ll actually put a drone through, and we’ll fly the drone and actually take measurements real time, and actually get that feedback real time,” Houston, the director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, at the Department of the Navy/Department of Energy, said March 31 during a U.S. Navy Memorial virtual SITREP speaker event.
He said additive manufacturing is helping the Navy make things like large reactor plant valves that improves quality, reduces machining and improves timing of the larger work.
Houston also named methods like automatic welding and using robotic inspections.
“An example is automatic welding. We have machines now that can do a more precise, better quality weld than an actual person can do, and so we are leveraging that. There’s still a human in the loop that’s supervising the machine, but we will do a weld that would take several weeks, and we’ll do that in an eight-hour period. Another thing that we do is for inspections. We will do inspections with robotics as we’re manufacturing components, and in some cases, it takes three weeks to do the inspections by person. We can do them in about eight hours.”
Houston underscored operating these machines and maintaining high quality work requires a higher skilled workforce, reiterating the oft-used “new collar” workforce idea.
“The quality is there, but it requires a higher skilled workforce to operate these machines, and we’re giving them that training. These are high tech jobs. We don’t call them blue collar. We don’t call them white collar. We call them new collar because it’s really a combination of the two.”
Houston emphasized even while they are getting better at building submarines, the demand is increasing.
General Dynamics Electric Boat conducted a keel laying ceremony for the first Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, USS District ofColumbia (SSBN-826) at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, June 4, 2022. (Photo: U.S. Navy)
While in FY 2024 the Navy sought to produce two Virginia-class attack submarines (SSNs) and part of one Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine (SSBN), the Navy is now trying to move into serial production of one SSBN per year until the Columbia-class is completed.
Houston argued the submarine production increase from the first Virginia-class submarine in 2004 to two Virginia Payload Module-equipped Virginia-class submarines and one Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine is the equivalent of moving from one to five standard Virginia-class attack submarines due to the increased size and weight.
He said the Navy expects to be at the pinnacle of its submarine production capabilities in 2032, “but we are right now building more submarines in terms of tonnage than we did at the height of the Cold War, and that mountain of submarines we need to construct is only going up.”
However, he acknowledged this is in the environment of significantly less shipbuilding capacity that atrophied after the Cold War ended.
“What happened to our industrial bases? We allowed it to atrophy. We went from 12,000 suppliers down to 5,000 and we are rebuilding that now. It’s a national endeavor… it’s incredible how much national effort we have on restoring that industrial base. Once you lose it, it’s very, very difficult to bring back. And going from that low-rate production where we’re building one Virginia in 2004 to an equivalent of five times that, 20 years later, is pretty incredible.”
Military leaders cut the ribbon at the Navy’s new Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence (CoE) in Danville, Va., on Oct. 5, 2022. From left: Rear Adm. Jason M. Lloyd, chief engineer and deputy commander, Ship Design, Integration and Naval Engineering, Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA); Rear Adm. Scott Pappano, program executive officer, Strategic Submarines (PEO SSBN); Whitney Jones, director, Submarine Industrial Base; Matt Sermon, executive director, PEO SSBN; and Vice Adm. William Galinis, commander, NAVSEA. (Photo: U.S. Navy courtesy of Institute for Advanced Learning and Research)
Houston welcomed one way the Navy is working to improve submarine production, by outsourcing more work and modules to suppliers away from the coastal production shipyards.
“We are building parts all over the country. We’re building them in the middle of Indiana. We’re building them in Utah. We don’t build submarines other than on the East Coast, but we’re building parts for them on the West Coast right now. So we need to not only make the parts, but to make the large modules. And we are moving out with what we call a focus factory, to actually build large components that will actually fill, fit into the modules the way we build the submarines, and it’s across the country, so it’s not just one location.”
Houston also gave the latest timeline for the second Columbia-class submarine, at 80 months total, or almost seven years.
“We’re actually on that schedule right now for construction on that. And the cost of a Columbia, depending on which year’s dollars you’re in, it’s between eight and a half and $9 billion.”
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a recent interview rebooting plutonium pit production is key to bringing nuclear power forward for energy and defense during the Trump administration.
Plutonium pits, the bowling-ball shaped fissile core placed inside a thermonuclear weapon to trigger its explosion, were produced at the highest rate during the Cold War from 1952 to 1989 in the U.S. at Rocky Flats Plant near Denver. The Environmental Protection Agency shut the plant down in 1992, and then-president George H. W. Bush stopped production of fissionable plutonium for nuclear weapons that year.
“We went through a period, about three decades, without making any new nuclear weapons, which meant our whole arsenal was getting older, was getting obsolete,” Wright told Fox Newsin a video interview with Lara Trump linked in the Fox article. He added that “we don’t need to grow our nuclear stockpile, but modernize our weapons.” Lara Trump is the president’s daughter-in-law.
Wright said in the written Fox article that restoring plutonium pit production would be the way to modernize an aging stockpile. “We’ve built one in the last 25 years, and we’ll build more than 100 during the Trump administration,” he said.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in October produced a “diamond-stamped” first production unit of a plutonium pit for the W87-1 warhead planned to go on the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile. While “diamond-stamped” means the pit is ready to be deployed for the nuclear stockpile at war-reserve quality, NNSA has not publicized how many pits have been produced after the first production unit.
Section 3120 of the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act put into law that NNSA produce 30 plutonium pits by 2026 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where plutonium pits were first produced during the Manhattan Project in 1945. Acting NNSA Administrator Teresa Robbins said at the Nuclear Deterrence Summit in January that the goal was now to have the “capability” to make 30 pits at Los Alamos “in or near 2028.”
The Defense Department’s new loan program to boost investment in critical manufacturing areas garnered $8.9 billion financing requests against a loan capacity of $984 million, the department said on Tuesday.
More than 200 manufacturers from 38 states applies applied for loans from the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) initial credit facility seeking amounts between $10 million and $150 million to scale their manufacturing equipment needs in areas such as advanced materials, microelectronics, and space technology, DoD said.
OSC expects to approve financing and make loans to selected applicant later in 2025.
OSC last September released its first Notice of Funding Availability, which began the application process for companies seeking to scale production of technologies deemed critical to national defense (Defense Daily, Oct. 1, 2024). At the time it said it would make loans between $10 million and $150 million to about 10 applicants in the covered technology areas.
Then Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin established OSC in December 2022 to attract private investment to scale critical technology supply chains for DoD.
The U.S. Air Force has awarded Boeing [BA] a nearly $2.5 billion two-and-a-half year contract for sustainment of the company’s C-17 cargo aircraft for Australia, Canada, India, Kuwait, the NATO Airlift Management Program, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.
“Work will be performed at various locations including but not limited to Long Beach, California; San Antonio, Texas; Robins Air Force Base, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; McCord AFB, Washington; and various locations around the globe, and is expected to be completed by Oct. 31, 2027,” DoD said in a Monday contracts announcement.
The large dollar award follows an even larger one for Boeing last month, as the Air Force chose the company over Lockheed Martin [LMT] to develop the service’s F-47 manned Next Generation Air Dominance fighter under a cost-plus contract that could be worth $20 billion or more (Defense Daily, March 21).
The Air Force is examining alternative uses for the C-17, including as a carrier of palletized, long-range cruise missiles and supply drones.
Last year, an Air Force C-17 test flew Silicon Valley-based SandboxAQ‘s Magnetic Navigation (MagNav) system–leveraging quantum magnetometers and artificial intelligence–as the aircraft’s prime alternative to GPS (Defense Daily, Aug. 20, 2024).
“Although the technology had been demonstrated before, the groundbreaking event was the first instance where MagNav was the primary method of navigation in flight,” Joint Base Charleston, S.C., said at the time. “This world-first demonstration is a huge step toward developing Assured Position, Navigation, and Timing [PNT], which will be crucial in a near-peer fight.”
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and executive chairman of its parent, Alphabet, Inc. [GOOG], heads SandboxAQ’s board of directors.
In January 2023, SandboxAQ received a Direct-to-Phase-II Small Business Innovation Research contract, worth up to $1.25 million, from the Air Force’s AFWERX innovation arm to research quantum navigation.
