President Trump has nominated Anduril Industries executive and veteran Michael Obadal to be the Army’s next under secretary.
If confirmed, Obadal would be the service’s no. 2 civilian and have a lead role in setting the Army’s budget priorities and overseeing modernization efforts.
Anduril executive and Army veteran Michael Obadal, nominee to be Army under secretary
After 27 years in the Army, Obadal retired from the Army and joined Anduril where is a senior director, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Anduril is currently involved in several major modernization efforts, to include potentially taking over for Microsoft as the prime contractor on the Integrated Visual Augmentation System program and currently delivering prototypes for the service’s new intelligence ground station.
Obadal earned a bachelor’s degree from the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in 1996, and the military college noted that he retired as an Army colonel after beginning his career as an attack helicopter officer, “with both overseas and stateside posts, before commanding units and task forces throughout Army and Joint Special Operations.”
He has also served as an ambassador for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, according to the VMI.
Obadal would serve alongside newly-confirmed Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a former Army armor officer who then went on to have a career in investment banking and venture capital (Defense Daily, Feb. 25).
U.S. Space Force wants cost estimates on modifying the design of Boeing‘s [BA] future Protected Tactical Enterprise System (PTES) ground segment that will initially support Boeing’s Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) satellites to an architecture that includes commercial medium earth orbit (MEO) and geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) applications.
Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC) awarded Boeing a nearly $440 million contract on March 1 last year for the 12th WGS satellite (Defense Daily, March 6, 2024).
PTES is to provide military forces with a joint ground platform for protected communications through the WGS satellite constellation, commercial satellites and future Space Force Protected Tactical Satellites running the Protected Tactical Waveform (PTW), an advanced beam-forming technology to provide anti-jam capabilities in electromagnetically contested spectra.
SSC had said that PTES would achieve initial operational capability last year with the expected launch of the 11th WGS satellite, but the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan Centaur to carry the satellite is still undergoing certification. ULA is a Boeing/Lockheed Martin [LMT] partnership.
PTES Initial Operating Capability will include the installation at two WGS teleports of computing and communications hardware–“Joint Hubs” (JHs)–that use current antennas and Satcom support equipment.
“The initial JHs are being developed and deployed to support WGS operations, according to a business notice. “A Joint Hub Variant (JHV) will be developed along with MMS [mission management system] upgrades to support operations on other satellite systems including those in MEO. The purpose of this RFI [request for information] is to conduct market research on the expected cost, schedule, and required effort associated with modifying the design of the WGS Joint Hub for commercial MEO and GEO applications.”
“PTW over Commercial (PTWoC) will extend PTES support of PTW to operate over commercial Satcom in GEO and MEO,” Space Force said. “This requires additional terrestrial PTES Joint Hubs and changes to the MMS. The need for Joint Hubs supporting commercial GEO satellites can be satisfied with baseline WGS PTES Joint Hubs…GEO Joint Hubs Variants (GEO JHV). Modifications to the JH will be needed to support MEO satellite operations, which will be designated MEO Joint Hub Variants (MEO JHV). The strategy is to minimize the military unique requirements and maximize commercial-ready technology in fielding of the PTWoC GEO JH for commercial constellations. The goal is to procure a commercial-ready satellite system and focus on software upgrades, integration, installation, and on-orbit acceptance.”
The stopgap funding measure passed by the House and pending before the Senate to avert a government shutdown includes $33.3 billion for shipbuilding, a slight boost above the Navy’s request, and supports building a potential third Arleigh Burke-class destroyer (DDG).
Along with the $1.5 billion add for the DDG program, the continuing resolution contains several adjustments to Navy shipbuilding accounts such as cuts to the Constellation-class frigate and an increase for Ship-to-Shore connectors.
Artist rendering of the first Flight III DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the future USS Jack H. Lucas (DDG-125). (Image: Huntington Ingalls Industries)
The House on Tuesday voted narrowly along party lines to pass the CR, which would keep the government open through Sept. 30 and boost defense by about $6 billion, with the Senate set to consider the legislation this week facing a shutdown deadline at midnight on Friday (Defense Daily, March 11).
The CR specifically funds $7.95 billion for DDG-51 procurement and $83.2 million for advance procurement, adding about $1.55 billion above the Navy’s request to cover funding for an additional third destroyer that the Navy did not seek in its budget.
The move follows the Senate Appropriations and Armed Services Committee’s moves to seek a similar boost for a third destroyer in their respective spending bill and National Defense Authorization Act (Defense Daily, Aug. 1 2024).
Meanwhile, the CR largely adheres to the Navy’s requested funding levels for the Columbia and Virginia-class submarine, seeking $3.36 billion and $3.62 billion for the respective programs.
For the Constellation-class frigate program, the CR includes only $232.2 million down from the Navy’s request for $1.1 billion.
The CR, however, adds $480 million for Ship-to-Shore Connectors after the Navy did not include funding those ships in its FY ‘25 budget request, which follows similar plus-ups from House and Senate appropriators.
The full-year CR also includes $2.39 billion to cover the costs for completing prior year shipbuilding programs.
Final passage of the CR will require picking up votes from Democrats in the Senate, and several have already pushed back on the measure for its cuts to non-defense spending (Defense Daily, March 10).
Shield AI on Wednesday announced Gary Steele as its new CEO beginning in May, charging him with helping the startup transition to an established company.
Steele’s has more than 30 years of experience with technology companies, including founding and serving as CEO for 19 years of the cybersecurity and compliance firm Proofpoint until departing in 2022. The software company went public in 2012 and then was taken private in 2021 by the private equity firm
Thoma Bravo in a $12.3 billion acquisition.
Steele will start as Shield AI’s CEO and board member May 13. After departing Proofpoint, he became president and CEO of the data collection, indexing, and analysis firm Splunk, which was later acquired for $28 billion by digital communications technology company Cisco [CSCO], where he continues to lead Splunk and the parent’s “Go-to-Market” effort that includes sales, partner, and marketing execution.
At Shield AI, Steele’s charge is to take the company to the next level by leveraging his expertise and experience growing and transitioning successful technology companies.
“Over the past year, with demand for autonomy solutions at scale and the growth of our aircraft business, it became unmistakably clear that Shield AI required a leader with not only deep software expertise but proven experience scaling technology organizations,” Ryan Tseng, co-founder and current CEO of the company, said in a statement. “Gary Steele is the best leader for the next chapter of our growth.”
Tseng will become president and focus in engaging with U.S., foreign policy, defense, and aerospace and defense company leaders.
Shield AI’s Hivemind software is used to autonomously pilot aircraft, primarily small and medium-sized drones, and the company also supplies the V-BAT Group 3 unmanned aircraft system to the Marine Corps and other customers. Shield AI also provides an aircraft-based ViDAR multi-spectral sensor for automatically detecting maritime targets in high sea states.
Tseng and his brother Brandon, who is also co-founder and president, have grown their company to more than 900 employees, raised more than $1 billion in funding, and made it the fourth multi-billion-dollar technology company behind SpaceX, Palantir Technologies [PLTR], and Anduril Industries.
Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) wants the U.S. Air Force to ensure that its upcoming fiscal 2026 budget has funds to update Minot AFB, N.D.’s weapons storage for RTX‘s [RTX] future AGM-181 Long-Range Standoff (LRSO) nuclear-tipped cruise missile and ensure that the service upgrades its three ICBM bases concurrently to accommodate the Northrop Grumman [NOC] LGM-35A cruise missile.
Hoeven is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense panel. The three ICBM bases are Minot; Malmstrom AFB, Mont.; and F.E. Warren AFB, Wyo.
Hoeven 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.
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 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 (Defense Daily, July 8, 2024).
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 siloes, launch centers, “and the process, duration, staffing, and facilities to execute the conversion from Minuteman III to Sentinel.”
The latter is to be significantly larger than Minuteman III and may require new siloes.
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 has said that it wants LRSO to be operational in the early 2030s.
Defense Department plans to reduce its civilian workforce will make it difficult on the U.S. Space Force’s acquisition offices and lead to program delays unless some requirements are dropped, the acting Space Acquisition Executive said this week.
The actual impact will be hard to quantify, but the Space Force is “a heavily acquisition force” and civilians provide “continuity” within the various systems program offices, and so a reduction in force “will impact us in a pretty great way,” Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, said March 11 at a Washington Space Business Roundtable luncheon. The Space Force operates under the Department of the Air Force for policy management.
The civilian acquisition workforce is involved across the range of functions so if people are doing testing or acquisition, if they go, someone else has to do the work, or it does not get done, Purdy said. Civilians also fill important roles across the Space Force’s mission areas, and the service lacks enough uniformed personnel to transfer them from operational roles to make up for job cuts elsewhere, he said.
“Now sometimes we can be efficient and not do some work, but a lot of this work is required at different levels in the hierarchy, and until we get rid of that requirement, then we’re basically going to be delayed,” he told reporters. “And that’s the key, is that if we’re getting rid of the people, we need to get rid of the requirements that’s driving a lot of that work.”
Small program offices rely more on contractor support yet the Trump administration is targeting reductions in services supplied by the private sector, Purdy noted, adding “we have to watch that as well.”
“What I hope we can do is find enough work to stop doing,” he said. “If there’s paperwork that we can stop doing or doing in an easier way, we can help balance some of this workload.”
In February DoD instituted a hiring freeze while it analyzes its personnel needs. The service expects to reduce its civilian workforce between 5 and 8 percent, and began to lay off 5,400 probationary employees (Defense Daily, Feb. 21).
Probationary employees, typically those in their first two years of federal service, are being let go across the federal government as part of President Trump’s government efficiency effort being led by Elon Musk. However, the administration has not drawn a connection between eliminating new employees and increased efficiency.
In response to a question about the job reductions starting with probationary employees, Purdy hedged a bit by saying he does not know all the personnel rules but suggested he is not keen on cutting the new blood.
Purdy believes “there is a lot of pent-up demand” for retirements, mentioning Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA), human resources tool that allows federal agencies to temporarily lower the eligible age for retirement as part of a restructuring of downsizing. Rather than “target aspects of categories,” he would prefer the department smarten its approach to workforce cuts.
“And so, I wonder, ‘Hey, can we go down that route…and if there are folks that want to leave and they just want the additional funds ability of VERA, etcetera, versus other approaches?’” he said. “But, you know, I’ll do whatever leadership wants.”
The Navy’s top procurement official and several independent analysts told lawmakers Tuesday that boosting wages and working through labor shortages are the most important factors in fixing naval shipbuilding.
“I am not an economist by training, but I work in an organization chock full of economists, and every time I have this conversation with people at my place, they say, Well, why don’t we just pay these workers more? And I think that is ultimately going to be a key part of the answer here,” Eric Labs, Senior Analyst for Naval Forces and Weapons at the Congressional Budget Office, said during a hearing before the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee.
HII’s Ingalls Shipbuilding division shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss. (Photo: HII)
He said during shipyard visits one could see the lack of major wage differential between a fast food or service job advertising $18 an hour plus benefits vs. shipyards at $20-$21 per hour.
“But shipyard work is hot, it’s cold, it’s dirty, it’s unpleasant. So in my view, the differential between retail or even other manufacturing sectors in the areas that surround the shipyard has got to be much, much greater than it currently is,” Labs continued.
He added beyond wages, the shipyards need to improve the worker’s quality of life from logistics getting to and around the yards to benefits and affordable housing.
“So anything that sort of goes down the path of increasing the wages for the killed laborers that we have in these shipyards, I think is something worth considering and discussing.”
Labs said the Shipyard Accountability and Workforce Support (SAWS) effort the Navy and industry developed last year is only one option for near-term improvements but shows they are “on the right path. Because to me, when I look at, well, where were we in those earlier years when we were producing ships faster, and where are we now? The big issue to me is labor.”
Brett Seidle, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition, concurred attracting the workforce and improving wages is a key issue.
“This workforce piece, this atrophy of that sector, in my opinion, is fundamental to everything that we’re talking about. We really have to find a way.”
He noted decades ago when the minimum wage was $3.35 per hour while manufacturing labor was paid 3-4 times that amount at $13 per hour, but “today it’s 1.2, 1.3x. We’re trying to get after that.”
Seidle argued if current shipyard workers were paid closer to three to four times competing pay, people would show up “in droves to work in this environment. It’s a very purpose driven life supporting the Navy, they’d be all about it.”
He boasted the Navy’s efforts with buildsubmarines.com has still led to over three million hits, 2.5 million applications and 9,700 employees hired in the submarine industrial base in 2023, a 40 percent improvement over the previous year, followed by another 10,000 hired in 2024.
Seidle called that real progress that will help out later in the process to drive production.
The General Dynamics Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, Conn. (Photo: GD Electric Boat)
In January, Matt Evans, Deputy Program Manager for the Maritime Industrial Base, said the overall shipbuilding industrial base needs to hire about 25,000 new trades workers per year over the next decade to meet production and sustainment needs, including attrition, retirements, and performance metrics (Defense Daily, Jan. 17).
In 2023, Matt Sermon, then Program Executive Officer for Strategic Submarines, said the submarine industrial base alone needed to hire about 100,000 skilled workers over the next decade to hit the two Virginia-class attack submarine (SSN) plus one Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine annual production goals. That does not include further workforce needed for the extra 0.33 annual submarines that would be needed to make up for SSN sales to Australia under AUKUS (Defense Daily, Jan. 31, 2023).
However, Sermon said that number would rise to 130,000 when adding submarine sustainment in the public and private shipyards for the current goals.
During the hearing, Shelby Oakley, Director of Contracting and National Security Acquisitions at the Government Accountability Office, and Ronald O’Rourke, Naval Affairs Analyst at the Congressional Research Service (CRS), agreed wage issues are a primary problem, but there are similar issues with the ship design workforce.
Oakley said the Navy’s own in-house design workforce has “significantly atrophied” since the end of the Cold War, affecting the design progress and understanding how mature designs are before the service makes critical procurement decisions.
Likewise, O’Rourke said the Constellation-class frigate program’s design completion problems are related to the ship design workforce, because “once you abandoned the parent design strategy, you threw that into the hands of the ship design community to redesign the ship well, we have a shortage of ship designers in this country, naval architects and marine engineers. So that’s another workforce issue.”
He said designer problems are also wage related, as people can take engineering jobs elsewhere in the economy.
Beyond wages improvement, O’Rourke also pointed to the utility of distributing work geographically, as the Navy is starting to do with submarines and is starting to plan for frigates.
“Federated ship building can allow us to tap into regional labor markets across the country that are not already tapped out for their potential to generate people who would be interested in ship building. So wages and geographic distribution,” O’Rourke said.
Rocket Lab USA [RKLB] on Tuesday evening said it intends to acquire German optical communications company Mynaric in a $75 million deal that would bring a key supplier in house, expand its international footprint, and, it highlighted, strengthen the supply chain for laser communications terminals, which the small Munich-based firm has struggled to manufacture.
Mynaric is supplying its Condor Mk3 optical communications terminals to Rocket Lab,
Northrop Grumman [NOC], and York Space Systems for satellites each company is building for a space-based mesh network the Space Development Agency envisions for assured, global military data transmission and connectivity. The 300-plus employee company is also supplying the terminals to Loft Federal as part of that company’s work on an SDA experimental testbed called NeXT (Defense Daily, May 2, 2023).
Last year, Mynaric disclosed production delays of the Condor terminals due to “lower-than-expected yields and component supplier shortages of key components.” In August, the company’s CEO Mustafa Veziroglu stepped down after less than two years in the role after the company reported production delays and slashed revenue guidance.
In February and again on Tuesday, the company said it is ramping up and increasing deliveries of the terminals.
As with its existing space-related products, Rocket Lab said it can offer the market Mynaric’s terminals affordably and “at scale” to meet growing demand.
Rocket Lab bills itself as “the end-to-end space company,” providing launch vehicles, spacecraft, and various subsystems such as software-defined radios, solar cells, structures, and more. The company is also modifying a barge to enable sea-based landings of its reusable Neutron medium-lift rocket, which is expected to launch later this year.
In addition to SDA, the two companies share customers including constellation operators, prime contractors, and civil government agencies, Rocket Lab said.
“Rocket Lab intends to scale production and introduce efficiencies to Mynaric’s existing manufacturing capability to further support SDA and other opportunities, providing these customers with improved confidence and assurance their terminals will be delivered on schedule and on budget,” the company said.
Rocket Lab also touted the production assets, intellectual property, products, and backlog it would get through the deal.
The California-based company has launch sites in New Zealand and Virginia. Acquiring Mynaric would be its entrée into Europe, opening “incremental” growth there for its products and services, it said.
The $75 million purchase price would be payable in cash or stock. Deal terms include an additional $75 million in potential earn-out provisions based on Mynaric meeting future sales targets.
Mynaric is undergoing a restructuring under German law. Once completed, Mynaric’s lenders would own the company. Rocket Lab said it has entered into a non-binding term sheet agreement with the lenders to acquire a controlling position in Mynaric. The acquisition is expected to close once the restructuring proceeds are complete.
Rocket Lab said it may fund the Mynaric deal and future acquisitions with proceeds from equity offerings. On Tuesday, the company also said it has filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell shares of its stock to raise up to $500 million to fund future growth, including potentially the Mynaric acquisition.
The House on Tuesday narrowly passed a stopgap funding measure to avert a pending government shutdown with a 217-213 vote, sending the bill to the Senate.
The lower chamber voted along party lines to pass the continuing resolution to keep the government open through Sept. 30, with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) as the sole Republican to oppose the measure and Rep. Jarden Golden (D-Maine) as the lone Democrat to vote in favor.
House Speaker Mike Johnson gives his remarks in honor of WWII Ghost Army veterans, formerly assigned to the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops and the 3133rd Signal Service Company, during a special ceremony at Emancipation Hall, U.S. Capitol Visitors Center in Washington, D.C., March 21, 2024. (U.S. Army photo by Henry Villarama)
“The choice before us was simple: you either support keeping the government open and working for the American people – or you want a reckless government shutdown. House Republicans acted to meet the nation’s fiscal deadline,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), chair of the Appropriations Committee, said in a statement following passage.
House Republicans unveiled their CR proposal over the weekend, with Congress facing a government shutdown deadline at midnight on March 14.
The measure slightly boosts the defense topline, to include an $8 billion for U.S. Central Command and European Command to spend on “military operations, force protection, and deterrence.”
The CR also allows the Pentagon to move out on new start programs, which are otherwise blocked while under a stopgap funding measure.
Final passage of the measure will require picking up votes from Democrats in the Senate, and several have already pushed back on the measure for its cuts to non-defense spending (Defense Daily, March 10).
“Instead of turning the keys over to the Trump administration with this bill, Congress should immediately pass a short-term CR to prevent a shutdown and finish work on bipartisan funding bills that invest in families, keep America safe, and ensure our constituents have a say in how federal funding is spent,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.
Responding to a potential need from U.S. Space Command for new unclassified space situational awareness (SSA) capability, the acting chief of space acquisition policy last week directed the U.S. Space Systems Command (SSC) to analyze commercial solutions that can fill that need and how quickly.
That analysis will give the SSC, which acquires and maintains assets for the U.S. Space Force, potential options and tradeoffs, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, said on Tuesday at an event hosted by the Washington Space Business Roundtable. Purdy’s role also makes him the Space Acquisition Executive within the Department of the Air Force, which the Space Force falls within.
Purdy signed an Acquisition Decision Memorandum (ADM) after SSC received responses to a Request for Information issued last fall about the unclassified commercial geosynchronous space situational awareness need. He said this has “been an ability that the international market’s been clamoring to provide.”
Later, during a gaggle with reporters, Purdy said the commercial space situational awareness effort would be akin to the existing Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, known as GSSAP, which was built by Northrop Grumman [NOC] with five of six satellites still in service. The program was originally classified and later declassified.
The GSSAP spacecraft maneuver to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations to monitor and inspect other space assets.
Results of the ADM will not necessarily result in a replacement to GSSAP, but if missions are “split out,” that could result in commercial solutions, including from international providers, to potentially be used for operations with “blue satellites,” which are friendly systems, Purdy said.
Rendezvous and proximity operations against “red” assets are “more of a political issue at the national level,” he said, pointing out that “there’s ways you can divide the problem up.”
The Space Force is interested in a proliferated commercial constellation, Purdy said. As for international offerings, he said there is interest from international companies to “provide money to kind of get after that, or provide a system to that.” Moreover, “There is interest on the operational side to do that,” he said.
This week, or shortly, Purdy is also planning to sign additional ADMs aimed at ways to onramp commercial solutions that could quickly, and less expensively, provide capabilities in mission areas currently being served by legacy systems.
Regarding existing systems, “we’re looking for anything that looks particularly expensive, particularly slow, those kinds of systems,” he told attendees. “Hey, what else is out there for commercial, which, frankly, is what everyone’s been asking to be done. So that’s what the intent is.”
These mission areas include communications, ground systems, commercial solutions to Northrop Grumman’s ground-based Deep-Space Advanced Radar Capability, and others, Purdy told reporters.
“We basically had our team look for the last couple of weeks at many of our programs, looking for anything that looks like it could use some commercial competition,” he said. “And so, it’s a whole host of them.”
Purdy likened the emerging approach to space-related systems competitions to how the Space Development Agency conducts rolling procurements of satellite systems for the transport and tracking layers of its Proliferated Warfighting Space Architecture where multiple winners are selected for each tranche.
Instead of being locked in with a single vendor for a decade or more, as is typically the case, and in turn locks out competition for just as long and prevents industry from continually investing in research and development (R&D), Purdy wants to introduce regular competition.
“I’m like, ‘Hey, is there a place where there’s one winner for the next 15 years? he said. ‘Is there a way to bring in competition like Space Development Agency has?’ It’s less than I’m not happy with them and more about is there competition routes that we can do…parallel efforts much like Space Development Agency, and can we bring them all the way to completion so that we’re operating both. So, I constantly have an R&D cycle, a procurement cycle, an operation cycle with multiple companies.”
A common theme with acquisitions of existing capabilities is the amount of time and expense they take, which is driven by requirements, he said.
Going forward, “we’re going to have to roll back requirements,” Purdy said. While an operator may want these requirements, “I owe it to them, as an acquirer and the community to find out, ‘Hey, is some of these new commercial options, is this a good trade off, because they weren’t around a few years ago when we started the program,’” he added. “So, we’ll see. They may not like them, and that’s fine, that’s their decision. But I want to have that opportunity to give that.”
