General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) last month demonstrated its MQ-20 Avenger unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) flying with a government furnished reference architecture that enables air vehicles to integrate with compliant autonomy software, in this case Shield AI’s Hivemind artificial intelligence pilot that flew the aircraft.
The demonstration was part of the Air Force Test Center’s Orange Flag-1 exercise at Edwards AFB, Calif., and was the first of several planned autonomy flights in 2025 between the two companies, Shield AI said.
GA-ASI, a business of General Atomics, said the MQ-20 was equipped with the government’s Autonomy-Government Reference Architecture, a pilot interface for autonomy software, for operations focused on air-to-air engagements. The company uses the jet-powered UCAV as a testbed for future autonomous collaborative platforms.
GA-ASI, and Anduril Industries, are both developing autonomous air vehicles for the first increment of the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program (Defense Daily, March 4).
The A-GRA is designed to enhance interoperability across autonomous military platforms and help the government avoid vendor lock through open and common interfaces.
“This flight showcased how advanced autonomous systems can seamlessly operate on open-architecture platforms without vendor lock, ensuring warfighters have access to the best mission autonomy solutions available,” Mike Atwood, vice president of advanced programs for GA-ASI, said in a statement. “GA-ASI is building an open platform that supports these kinds of industry collaborations, which is key to accelerating the future of autonomous aviation and ensuring mission-ready autonomy solutions.”
GA-ASI also said the recent flight demonstrated the ability to transition between autonomy systems in flight over proliferated low Earth orbit satellites using Shield AI’s pilot software. The Avenger switched between GA-ASI’s software, government software, and Shield AI’s software “as needed,” proving out the aircraft can upgrade software as fast as it is developed, the company said.
Shield AI has also flown its Hivemind AI pilot on its unmanned aircraft system platforms, a test variant of the Air Force’s F-16 fighter, and unmanned aircraft built by Kratos Defense & Security Solutions [KTOS]. Hivemind is designed to enable autonomous flight in contested environments with limited or now communication, and where adversaries are trying to jam the aircraft.
“Hivemind flying the MQ-20 is a major step forward in demonstrating operational autonomy at scale and a proof point for the power of industry-led innovation,” Christian Gutierrez, VP of Hivemind Solutions at Shield AI, said in a statement. “We’re investing our own resources into this to accelerate our larger goal, flying autonomy on as many platforms as possible.”
The Air Force and Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) in January selected Anduril Industries and Zone 5 Technologies to move into the second phase of the Enterprise Test Vehicle (ETV) prototype project that will provide affordable air vehicles that feature modularity to enable subsystem testing for future air launched weapons, and can be built at high rates.
Under the six-month second phase of the ETV contract, Anduril said on Tuesday it will demonstrate autonomous teaming capabilities of its long-range Baracuda-500 autonomous air vehicle, continue improving the manufacturability of the system, and highlight its modularity for adaptability to different missions.
The Air Force Armament Directorate and DIU last June awarded first phase ETV prototype contracts to Anduril, Integrated Solutions for Systems, Leidos [LDOS], and Zone 5 (Defense Daily, June 3, 2024).
Zone 5 said it has selected Scientific Systems Company, Inc. to provide the Collaborative Weapon Autonomy software suite to be integrated onto the company’s ETV prototypes. The California-based company said the software enable multi-vehicle operations through decentralized operations to increase the chances the air vehicles will hit their targets.
“The software allows weapons to adapt to changes in target prioritization in real-time and enable opportunities to optimize weapon employment playbooks,” Zone 5 said.
The prototype project includes the companies taking an open architecture approach for rapid subsystem integration. In the first phase, the companies had to conduct a flight-test of their respective air vehicles.
Anduril said that later this year it will conduct more flight tests to demonstrate the collaborative autonomy capabilities of its system, “including simultaneous vertical launch of multiple Barracuda-500 systems, in flight system-to-system communications, and how Lattice for Mission Autonomy enables the execution of novel collaborative autonomous behaviors designed to increase effectiveness in contested environments.”
Lattice is Anduril’s artificial intelligence-based open systems platform for large-scale integration and use of autonomous systems under human supervision.
Anduril last September introduced its family of modular Barracuda turbojet powered air vehicles, all of which include cruise missile variants (Defense Daily, Sept. 12, 2024). The software-defined systems are designed for high-rate production because it is made with fewer parts, relies heavily on a commercial supply chain, and non-specialized labor and tools.
Over the next few months Anduril will produce ETV prototypes “using manufacturing processes and equipment that are representative of future full-rate production techniques, continuing development towards a production variant capable of rapidly scalable manufacture in 2026,” it said.
Barracuda is designed for launch from air, ground, and sea-based platforms.
AURORA, Colo.–The U.S. Air Force will likely fare “extremely well” in a GOP budget reconciliation bill, a service official suggested on Tuesday at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium here.
that sets a blueprint for passing Trump administration priorities via the reconciliation process, to include spending an additional $100 billion on defense over four years, while Senate Republicans said that they want $150 billion more over those four years (Defense Daily, Feb. 26).
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called for an 8 percent annual cut in DoD funding over the next five years for a possible reallocation to higher defense needs.
“The reconciliation is gonna be just part of what gives us opportunities to start new programs,” Maj. Gen. Joseph “Solo” Kunkel, the Air Force director of force design, integration, and wargaming, said here during a Tuesday panel discussion on future air superiority. “I think the Air Force is gonna do extremely well in those [reconciliation] discussions. I think you’ll see the Air Force on top.”
“I think that also goes into this 8 percent budget cut,” he said. “We’re not doing the 8 percent budget cut because we’re gonna cut the military. We’re doing an 8 percent budget cut because we realize there’s gotta be a shift in TOA [total obligation authority] between organizations, between [military] services so I think we’re also gonna do well when you take a look at the 8 percent budget cut and how it’s reallocated among the services. The Air Force provides easy policy options for decision makers. We always will. More Air Force makes sense, now more than ever.”
Budget reconciliation would allow the Senate, when the bill gets there, to pass billions of dollars in Trump administration priorities without requiring the 60-vote threshold needed to break the filibuster, while the House will require a near-unified GOP caucus to support the measure facing likely unanimous Democratic opposition.
During Tuesday’s panel discussion on future air superiority, Air Force Gen. Kenneth “Cruiser” Wilsbach, the head of Air Combat Command, said that manned fighters, such as the Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-22 and F-35, will continue to play a significant part.
While General Atomics and Anduril are soon to deliver their Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) prototypes to Creech AFB, Nev., for flights under the direction of the Air Force CCA Experimental Operations Unit at Nellis AFB, Nev.’s 53rd Wing, “in 2025, we don’t have the artificial intelligence [AI] that we can plug pilots out of aircraft and plug AI in them to the degree that the AI can replace a human brain,” Wilsbach said.
“Someday we will have that, I trust, but right now, we don’t so it does require this manned and unmanned teaming, as we go forward,” he said. “In the future, maybe not. It would be great not to put humans at risk in the battlespace, but for right now, the human brain is the best intelligence that we have.”
Top Trump adviser Elon Musk has suggested a near-term end to manned fighter aircraft, such as the F-35 and the Air Force’s manned Next Generation Air Dominance fighter–now on hold, and their replacement by AI-enabled drones (Defense Daily, Dec. 19, 2024).
“The American way of war is always advancing, always putting the knife on the throat of the enemy, always having options,” Kunkel said on Tuesday. “In the history of war, fights always collapse, and eventually you end up fixing bayonets. I think the same is gonna be true with this future fight. You’re gonna wanna be in a position where there is someone that can continue to take the fight to the enemy when the autonomy breaks down, when the links break down. I think you want someone there that can continue to put the knife on the enemy’s throat. I don’t see us fully stepping away from manned aircraft ever.”
AURORA, Colo.–The U.S. Air Force has bestowed “mission design series” (MDS) designations on its two Increment 1 Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) prototypes.
The General Atomics
Gambit offering is the YFQ-42A and Anduril Industries‘ Fury is the YFQ-44A, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Allvin told the Air and Space Forces’ Warfare Symposium here on Monday. “Y” signifies prototype aircraft, “F” fighter/air-to-air mission, and “Q” a drone.
First flights are on track for this summer, Allvin said.
David Alexander, the president of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. (GA-ASI), said in a statement that the “YFQ-42A continues a long and distinguished history for GA-ASI that dates back to the 1990s and the debut of the RQ-1 Predator, which later changed to MQ-1 Predator.”
“The YFQ-42A designation follows the Air Force’s decision to designate GA-ASI’s highly common predecessor aircraft as the XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station [OBSS],” GA-ASI said. “The XQ-67A was ordered by the Air Force Research Lab to support the development of concepts necessary to implement the vision for CCA.”
OBSS had its first flight in February last year, GA-ASI said, and the Air Force decided to narrow the CCA Increment 1 field to GA-ASI and Anduril last April, as the service moves to a possible competitive production decision on CCA Increment 1 in fiscal 2026 (Defense Daily, Apr. 24, 2024).
“This MDS represents the first aircraft type of a YFQ designation, signaling a new era of uncrewed fighter aircraft,” Jason Levin, Anduril’s senior vice president of engineering, said in a statement. “It reinforces what we already knew. Our CCA is a high performance aircraft designed specifically for the air superiority mission, acting as a force multiplier for crewed aircraft within the real constraints of cost and time.”
AURORA, Colo.–If the balloon goes up or if significant new orders for the F-35 materialize near-term, could Lockheed Martin
[LMT] ramp up its annual global production of the fighter above 156?
“We look at several different things when it comes to making the 156,” Chauncey McIntosh, Lockheed Martin’s vice president and general manager of the F-35 program, said in an interview after a briefing to reporters on Tuesday at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium here.
“First, we wanna make sure in any production system as you go out and build and design a system, consistency and making sure as we have the right tooling, and then we manage that with affordability; what does it take from the acquisition of parts going into the system for the rate there; and then also the customer delivery schedules that we have,” McIntosh said.
“We wanna make sure we strike affordability there,” he said. “I think it would be a bad decision for both the services as well as for, particularly if you think about our small businesses, if we say, ‘Ramp up to 190, then ramp back down to 120,’ as you look in the future. We wanna make sure that we cut a nice number that supports both our customers as well as all of our business partners to produce an output. The 156 number is one that I feel comfortable in and sticking with. If the number of our customers continues to surge, and we see a need to go up, we’ll definitely have those dialogues with our customers and then with our supply base to say, ‘Hey, we think we’re gonna be at this for another 10 years, and let’s go make that change.'”
Supply source diversification would also be key to increasing F-35 production above 156 annually.
In 2023, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman [NOC], Rheinmetall AG, and German officials broke ground on an F-35 center fuselage Integrated Assembly Line in Weeze, Germany near the Düsseldorf-based Rheinmetall.
Rheinmetall said that the Weeze plant will, starting in 2025, build at least 400 F-35A center fuselages (Defense Daily, Sept. 6, 2023).
Lockheed Martin delivered 110 F-35s in 2024, including new aircraft and those parked awaiting upgrades. The company said that it expects to deliver 170-190 aircraft in 2025 and again in 2026.
The Technology Refresh-3 (TR-3) effort for the fighter, which allows Block 4 sensing and weapons upgrades continues, as TR-3 adds data processing, storage, and multipath connectivity to DoD’s classified cloud computing environment. As the U.S. Air Force moves out on its Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, Lockheed Martin said that it had demonstrated last fall the ability to control eight autonomous drones from the F-35.
At the AFA Warfare Symposium here, the company said that it has delivered more than 1,130 F-35s and that the fighter has surpassed one million flight hours.
Mach Industries in January successfully flight-tested its Viper vertical takeoff cruise missile under an Army contract for Strategic Strike, showcasing the startup’s speed in developing the man-portable long-range weapon that is designed for use by maneuvering forces against in GPS and communications-denied environments.
The jet-powered Viper currently has a 290-kilometer range but as the cruise missile is refined its range will far exceed that threshold, Ethan Thornton, the 21-year-old CEO and founder of California-based Mach Industries, told Defense Daily
last week ahead of the announcement.
The carbon fiber airframe carries a 22-plus pound warhead that combined with the long-range can hit “high-payoff targets, such as radar arrays and artillery pieces, well beyond the forward line of troops,” the company said on Tuesday. Strategic Strike is designed to “launch beyond enemy radar range, reducing the probability of detection, and increasing launch team survivability,” it said.
The Army Applications Laboratory (AAL) last September awarded the company a contract to develop Strategic Strike, which Mach Industries used to redesign its Viper missile and conduct the Jan. 25 flight test in 14 weeks to meet the service’s requirements. The value of the award was not disclosed.
The objective in the first test was achieving vertical takeoff and transition to flight. In the coming months, additional tests are planned for terminal strike and munitions integration, and eventually kinetic testing this year depending on access to a government test site, Thornton said. By year-end, the goal is to get Viper to a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 8, which is flight qualified, and also integrating the global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-denied navigation capability, and be ready to deploy, he said.
The contract calls for Mach Industries to build and kinetically test five airframes this year, conducting a demonstration for the Army, and achieving TRL 8, which includes designing the system for manufacturing, Thornton said.
Mach Industries is working “through a variety of channels” to be ready in 2025 “to bring Viper into low-rate initial production and procurement,” he said. The company will also be partnering with international customers, Thornton said.
Soon, the company plans to announce plans for increasing manufacturing capacity, not only for Viper, but also for two other late-stage development efforts by Mach Industries. One is Glide, a high-altitude-dropped transonic glider for deep strike in GNSS-denied environments that can target specific radio frequency signals, and STRATOS, a stratospheric balloon.
Thornton said the company wants to be able to produce its products in the “high hundreds or thousands” monthly.
Flexibility in how Viper can be launched is important, Thornton said. Whether from the back of a truck, the ground, or sea-based, “the goal is to be very flexible and decentralized” and essentially “launch it wherever you want to,” he said.
The company was founded several years ago and in fall 2023 announced it had closed a $79 million Series A funding round. Mach Industries currently has 110 employees.
AAL is the innovation organization of Army Futures Command, charged with leveraging the commercial and non-traditional defense industry to quickly get technology to soldiers.
“This is the model we look to have as a company is to align venture dollars around critical warfighter needs and very rapidly bring important unmanned systems into the fight on behalf of the country,” Thornton said.
AURORA, Colo.–Last fall, U.S. Space Force decided to switch the lead platform for the Military GPS User Equipment (MGUE) Increment 1 aviation card from the Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bomber to the Army Gray Eagle drone, the head of Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC) said on Monday.
“The biggest thing on MGUE 1 is the lead platform changed to the Army’s Gray Eagle,” Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant told reporters here at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium when asked about the latest developments in MGUE. “The card-level certification is anticipated this summer. The Army program manager…tells me his test is on track for this year for the aviation platform.”
Northrop Grumman
[NOC] is the B-2 contractor, General Atomics the Gray Eagle.
The MGUE Increment 1 program had planned to begin a year-long combined developmental and operational testing on the B-2 in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024 (Defense Daily, Jan. 31, 2024).
L3Harris Technologies [LHX], RTX [RTX] and BAE Systems have received MGUE contracts.
Since the late 1990s, the Pentagon has been developing the GPS M-code to have a stronger signal and more advanced encryption to counter jamming and spoofing, and the first GPS M-code capable satellite went aloft in 2005. But GPS M-code initial operational capability has seen delays due to required upgrades of ground and user equipment for hundreds of vehicles, ships, and aircraft.
Turning around satellite ground system program performance was a primary, stated focus area of former space acquisition chief Frank Calvelli, and MGUE was one of three programs he said were of particular concern (Defense Daily, Dec. 9, 2024).
The Department of the Air Force is planning an environmental assessment to evaluate the impacts of building and operating two landing pads at a remote Pacific atoll in preparation for testing and demonstrations that would begin this year of rocket-based logistics to move cargo around the world in hours.
A draft environmental assessment and draft Finding of No Significant Impact are expected to be available for public review in early April, beginning a 30-day public review period. Johnston Atoll, an unincorporated U.S. territory which is between the Hawaiian and Marshall Islands, is remote, controlled by the U.S. government, able to be secured, accessible by air and maritime transport, and will support the removal of reentry vehicles by barge, the Air Force says in a March 3 notice in the Federal Register.
The atoll was assessed as the “safest and most viable location” to meet the requirements.
The development, test, and experimentation effort is called the Rocket Cargo Vanguard program, and will examine the use of commercial rockets for Defense Department global logistics needs the U.S. Space Force can provide to combatant commanders. The goal is to transport cargo “in hours anywhere around the globe,” the notice says.
“Current military modes of transportation require days to weeks of planning and logistics to provide materiel to distant locations at the time and place of need,” it says.
“If you’re really gonna deliver cargo somewhere on the planet using rocket technology, then by definition, you’re saying you need launch timelines on a tactically responsive cadence,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman told reporters on Monday at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colo. “You don’t say, ‘Hey, we need this cargo at this place on the Earth, but it’s okay, if it happens three months from now.’ That just doesn’t do it so I really like in pushing that envelope for payload delivery, you’re also pushing the envelope on an operational concept around tactically responsive space.”
The Navy’s senior official leading maritime security assistance to Ukraine said their experience defending against Russia’s invasion is informing U.S. operations as a kind of battle lab and argued unmanned systems have moved from the experimentation stage to operationalization and rehearsal.
Speaking during a panel at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in January posted by the think tank on Feb. 27, Rear Adm. Michael Mattis said the way Ukraine and Russia have used and defended against unmanned systems by quickly adopting software, tactics and equipment can teach others.
A Ukrainian Magura V5 maritime strike drone. (Image: Defense Intelligence of Ukraine, Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine)
“I think there’s lots of lessons here that we need to take seriously. And we have a lot of work to do…what we call the Black Sea Battle Lab, what’s happening there where you can learn and see with a thinking adversary, a real electromagnetic spectrum challenge that is going on there,” he said.
Mattis underscored the Black Sea has one of the most “acrid environments for electromagnetic signals” in the world, but Ukraine keeps generating effects against Russia and they respond to each other.
The kinds of operations combined with the challenges for the electromagnetic spectrum there means the U.S. would never get these kinds of lessons or information from regular experiments.
“And so that is why this battle lab is so important for us to study and learn.”
Mattis called himself essentially the single accountable officer in the Navy looking at Ukraine and trying to transition their lessons to the Indo-Pacific Command area of operations, as well as the Navy more broadly.
He argued while the Black Sea situation is definitely applicable elsewhere, it is focused on sea denial in “constrained water spaces.”
“I think what we’re seeing actually, is that a nation with no navy has been able to defy a nation with one of the premier navies in the world. The overall erosion of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea Fleet is they’ve lost 40 percent of their fleet due to [unmanned surface vessels] strikes, deep strike, and other activities that have eroded them,” he said.
Given these tactics are especially useful in these constrained spaces with limited ranges, Mattis does not see these unmanned tactics applicable the same way to potential conflict in a place like the Philippine Sea, with one million square miles without land.
“Probably not the tactic to use there. But for the Black Sea, for the Baltic, for the Celebes or Sulu Sea, and INDOPACOM, the Taiwan Strait, for example, those would all be ripe areas for sea denial capabilities to be used. Have to have the range and the ability to generate the mass that’s needed.”
Mattis also underscored despite Ukraine’s success against Russia’s Navy the experience proves it as an evolving fight that does not remain static.
“This isn’t something that Ukraine has locked in and it’s going to be permanently good. It is something that if you’re able to stay ahead where the evolution of the fight in the maritime goes, these sea spaces are ripe for sea denial capability.”
He called this an action, reaction, counter-action fight in Ukraine that means you must create solutions to lead problems with constant innovation and adaptation, not just reactively solve the latest problem. Staying ahead of these kinds of constantly changing unmanned tactics is “essential.”
Mattis also argued U.S. forces learning from Ukraine’s operations in the Black Sea have moved robotic autonomous systems past experimentation and “we are now in a period of operationalization and rehearsal.”
“So our ability to create [anti-access/area denial (A2/AD)] bubbles and defeat A2/AD bubbles with robotic autonomous systems is an essential capability that we must develop. And, again, those are clear lessons out of the Black Sea. And we must move with alacrity and a sense of urgency that we haven’t seen,” he continued.
Mattis said they are in the early stages of a revolution in warfighting, so it is still on the scale of evolutionary changes, but “it has the potential to be revolutionary if we can integrate these effects with other effects.”
Under 6th Fleet, Mattis leads Task Force 66, which he characterized as a sort of unmanned task force akin to Task Force 59 in the 5th Fleet/Middle East, but with more of an integrated all-domain effects approach so they integrate conventional and Special Operations Forces.
Mattis said the task force is all-domain because robotic autonomous systems are not enough to generate the needed effects, but they can help provide advantages with lower costs.
“But as we’ve seen with what Ukraine has done, with deep strike, with space and cyber effects, with the ability to integrate undersea, surface, air effects with missiles and other things, you can generate significant effects in a meaningful way at much lower cost. And that’s the key here, much lower cost and much lower risk to mission and risk to force. And so those are all the advantages, but the complexity remains.”
However, Mattis noted drones have been a completely different story in land warfare because defensive capabilities make it hard to create the same kind of strategic effects with drones.
“What we instead see is sort of like a World War I drone hellscape, more than anything else. It’s possible if you’re able to get behind those defensive lines. We saw that in Kursk, for example. But well defended lines with drones, it’s sort of a stalemate – World War I-ish.”
Despite the maritime successes, he emphasized unmanned solutions are insufficient to all operations, but one piece of the puzzle that can create a sea denial effect in the right ocean region.
The U.S. has approved just over $3 billion in new arms sales with Israel, with the Trump administration confirming plans to bypass the typical congressional review process and fast track the deals.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday he has approved using emergency authorities to expedite the three new foreign military sales cases, which include providing Israel with more 2,000-pound bombs, precision-guidance kits, munitions support and bulldozers.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deliver joint statements to the press in Jerusalem, Israel. Photo: U.S. Department of State
“This important decision coincides with President Trump’s repeal of a Biden-era memorandum which had imposed baseless and politicized conditions on military assistance to Israel at a time when our close ally was fighting a war of survival on multiple fronts against Iran and terror proxies,” Rubio said in a statement. “The Trump Administration will continue to use all available tools to fulfill America’s long-standing commitment to Israel’s security, including means to counter security threats.”
The largest of three FMS cases approved for Israel is a $2.04 billion deal covering over 35,000 MK 84 and BLU-117 bombs, built by General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems [GD], and 4,000 Penetrator warheads.
“The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to U.S. national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self-defense capability. This proposed sale is consistent with those objectives,” the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said in a statement.
The State Department also approved a $675.7 million FMS case with Israel covering MK 83 MOD 4/MOD 5 General Purpose 1,000-pound bomb bodies, nearly 4,800 BLU-110A/B General Purpose 1,000-pound bomb bodies, 1,500 KMU-559C/B Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kits for the MK 83 bombs and 3,500 KMU-559J/B JDAM guidance kits for the MK 83 bombs, built by Boeing [BA].
Rubio noted the decision to approve the sale of more 2,000-pound bombs follows the Biden administration’s move to pause a shipment of such weapons last spring amid concerns related to protection of civilians as Israel was planning an operation into the Rafah area of Gaza (Defense Daily, May 8, 2024).
“The decision to reverse the Biden Administration’s partial arms embargo, which wrongly withheld a number of weapons and ammunition from Israel, is yet another sign that Israel has no greater ally in the White House than President Trump,” Rubio said.
The third FMS case with Israel that will be expedited, with Rubio using the emergency authorities and waiving the congressional review requirement under Section 36(b) of the Arms Export Control Act, is a $295 million deal covering D9R and D9T Caterpillar bulldozers.
“The proposed sale will improve Israel’s capability to meet current and future threats by improving the ability of the Israeli Ground Forces to defend Israel’s borders, vital infrastructure, and population centers,” the DSCA said in a statement.
The $3 billion in new FMS cases follows the Trump administration’s approval of more than $7 billion in arms sales with Israel in early February, covering Hellfire missiles, bombs, precision-guidance kits and support equipment (Defense Daily, Feb. 7).
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) last week filed several Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to block the arms sales to Israel announced in early February, stating the exports would clearly violate the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the Arms Export Control Act as Israel has used such weapons previously “to destroy huge swathes of Gaza and Lebanon.”
“[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has used our bombs to damage or destroy almost 70 percent of the structures in Gaza, including hundreds of schools. All of this has been done in clear violation of U.S. and international law. With Trump and Netanyahu openly talking about forcibly displacing millions of Palestinians from Gaza – in other words, ethnic cleansing – it would be unconscionable to provide more of the bombs and weapons Israel has used to kill so many civilians and make life unlivable in Gaza,” Sanders said in a statement.
The Senate in November voted down three resolutions proposed by Sanders to block several offensive weapons sales to Israel, offering a similar argument that the arms deals violated U.S. and international law due to Israel’s actions in Gaza, while the measures received support from several Senate Armed Services Committee members, to include Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Angus King (I-Maine), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) (Defense Daily, Nov. 22 2024).
