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).
General Atomics (GA) on Monday said it has acquired North Point Defense (NPD), a provider of signals intelligence exploitation software and sensor integration, adding to its capabilities in SIGINT to deliver intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance solutions for platforms in all domains.
Terms of the deal for the Rome, N.Y.-based company were not disclosed.
NPD was acquired by GA Integrated Intelligence, Inc. (GA-III) previously known as GA Commonwealth Computer Research, Inc.
“The integration of NPD technologies into a division of GA-III is a strategic shift, enhancing GA’s ability to innovate rapidly and provide greater value to customers with end-to-end ISR solutions that are more efficient, effective, and technologically advanced,” Brian Ralston, president of GA-III, said in a statement.
NPD’s financial adviser on the deal was Baird.
GA, which is based in San Diego, on Monday also introduced its Quadratix software enterprise, a cross-collaboration and cross-functional effort to promote interoperability across the company’s divisions, including Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI), GA-III, Electro Magnetic Systems, and other holdings. In addition, the new enterprise will also merge the company’s solutions around autonomy, artificial intelligence and machine learning, airborne ISR, land-based advanced sensing, sea-based threat detection, space-based mission and operations, and cyber exploitation.
The new software enterprise will benefit GA’s customers, the company said, highlighting improved collaborative autonomy for GS-ASI’s Predator unmanned aircraft systems and future autonomous jets by being able to leverage work on autonomy, AI and ML across GA.
“We’ve transcended a one-for-one software build and arrive at an integrated suite of software solutions for our aircraft and our customers,” Linden Blue, CEO of GA-ASI, said in a statement. “We’re moving out fast to meet our users’ toughest challenges by grouping these solutions together under the Quadratix umbrella.”
BAE Systems has won a $151 million contract to deliver a prototype ground-based command and control system for the Space Force’s missile warning and tracking capabilities, the service’s Space Systems Command said on Monday.
The 32-month contract for the Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution (FORGE) C2 system follows awards made by SSC in early 2024 to BAE, General Dynamics
[GD], Omni Federal, and Parsons [PSN] to develop FORGE C2 architectures (Defense Daily, March 1, 2024). The values of those early prototype awards were not disclosed.
The FORGE C2 prototype to be delivered by BAE will be ready for SSC’s Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared satellite missile warning system. Lockheed Martin [LMT] is the prime contractor for the Next-Gen OPIR Geosynchronous Earth Orbit satellite that is set to launch this year, and Northrop Grumman [NOC] is building the Next-Gen OPIR Polar satellites. Both companies are responsible for two satellites.
“This is the second phase of the FORGE C2 effort that will support our Next-Gen OPIR program while continuing to support legacy space systems such as the Space-Based Infrared System,” Capt. Santiago Duque, SSC FORGE C2 chief program manager, said in a statement.
SSC used an Other Transaction Authority managed by the Space Enterprise Consortium to award the contract to BAE. OTA’s are designed to speed the procurement process.
AURORA, Colo.—Lockheed Martin [LMT] is developing the Common Multi-Mission Truck System (CMMT–“comet”)–what could serve as a drone, sensor, or a high-subsonic cruise missile that is to cost $150,000 per unit or less and to be a modular weapon that military forces can alter on the go for different missions from cargo planes, fighters, and bombers at ranges up to 1,000 miles, a company official said on Monday during a briefing at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium here.
In addition, a smaller CMMT version could serve as a “long-range launched effect” from helicopters, Lockheed Martin said.
Long-range cruise missiles, such as Lockheed Martin’s AGM-158A Joint Air-to-Surface Strike Missile and AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), can cost $1.5 million per copy.
“We understand that in a global conflict, in the kind of conflicts we’re gonna have maybe against a peer competitor, being able to get mass on targets is important,” Michael Rothstein, vice president of air weapons and sensors at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, told reporters here on Monday.
“We know we gotta be able to produce at more rate, and we know we have to work not only with some of the exquisite high-end weapons…such as JASSM and LRASM, but we are also listening and understanding that there’s a need to bring more affordable mass to that target–think of it like a low-cost cruise missile, like a lower-cost kind of JASSM,” he said.
While the Trump administration may alter Air Force plans, the service said last year that its inventory of high-end munitions is sufficient and that the service was moving to field lower-cost,
$100,000 models in the coming years to bolster capacity to deter China and Russia (Defense Daily, Nov. 13, 2024).
Such munitions may include the “Franklin” low-cost cruise missile–so named as a nod to soul legend Aretha Franklin and her hit song Respect. The homage is also meant to connote “respect” for the low-cost, high-punch missile under development, though the “Franklin” name may change, Air Combat Command has said.
Last fall, an Air Force official said that a low-cost cruise missile is in the final stages of development by Leidos [LDOS] and has made the cut line for funding by U.S. Special Operations Command’s fiscal year 2026 budget request (DefenseDaily, Oct. 4, 2024). SOCOM has conducted tests of the Black Arrow Small Cruise Missile on an AC-130J aircraft.
Since 2021, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Rapid Dragon program has tested the launch of palletized munitions, such as JASSM, from cargo aircraft, such as the C-17 and C-130J (Defense Daily, Dec. 17, 2021).
“As the Air Force is thinking about affordable mass, you take that same concept, [and] you resize potentially the pallet,” Rothstein said on Monday. “Instead of holding a JASSM maybe it holds something a little smaller, and instead of putting maybe 9 in this box of pallets, you put 25 of them [in] for this weapon we call ‘comet.’ But you really need to think about CMMT as an air vehicle because from the get-go this air vehicle was designed digitally…with open architectures that will make it much easier for suppliers to plug and play their components in ways that we really haven’t done as well before.”
“We designed [CMMT] with supply chain in mind,” Rothstein said. “One of the things we’re gonna do later this year is show the ability to plug and play three different engines on the same day.”
Conceivably, a cargo aircraft could carry 100 CMMTs in a “four pack of 25,” Rothstein said.
Lockheed Martin said that is has worked with its Skunk Works division to ensure the company can build many CMMTs rapidly to be weapons, drones, or sensors and to ensure that CMMT can easily undergo maintenance in the field.
The Department of Energy issued a memo dated Thursday Feb. 27 saying telework and remote work agreements will be terminated, with exceptions, and all employees will return to in-person work.
The memo, obtained by sister publication TheExchange Monitor on Friday, said DoE was pursuing President Trump’s executive order from his first full day in office, Return to In-Person Work. Exceptions were granted for employees with a telework agreement approved for a “reasonable accommodation due to a disability or qualifying medical condition,” military spouses, and employees approved to work overseas.
The following must return to work at a DoE facility:
Political appointees, senior executive service, senior level, scientific and professional managers and supervisors by March 17.
Non-bargaining unit employees with telework agreements by March 24.
Non-bargaining unit employees with remote agreements with a duty station within 50 miles from a DoE facility where primary work is located by March 31.
Non-bargaining unit employees with remote work agreements whose duty station is more than 50 miles from a DoE facility where primary work is located by May 5.
Bargaining unit employees by a date to be determined.
