American Rheinmetall Vehicles and General Dynamics Land Systems were chosen from a pool of bidders in June 2023 to continue into a detailed design phase of the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle.

Both teams are designing a hybrid vehicle featuring a suite of lethal capabilities to include a 50mm cannon, a remote turret, anti-tank guided missiles, machine guns employed through an advanced third-generation, forward-looking infrared sensor, an integrated protection suite, kitted armor, and signature management capabilities as well as intelligent fire control, according to Army officials.

The total value of both contracts is approximately $1.6 billion; the overall program is expected to be worth about $45 billion, according to the Army.

The last preliminary design review wrapped up in August, and the service will have a quick turnaround to complete critical design reviews in order to begin building physical prototypes, Dean said in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference this week.

Here’s who will move forward in the Bradley replacement competition

“At that point [when] the design is final, all of the elements and parts are defined, and at that point the contractor is ordering all their material to build prototypes,” Dean said.

Prototypes will take 18 to 20 months to construct after the critical design reviews wrap up. Once prototypes are delivered, the Army will move into a test and evaluation phase with both competitors before deciding on a winner in fiscal 2027. The first vehicles are expected to be fielded in fiscal 2029.

The Army is moving on an aggressive schedule between completion of a preliminary design review and a critical design review, Dean said.

Such a schedule is possible because of the designs taking place in a digital engineering environment and frequent soldier touch points in physical and virtual mockups, Col. Kevin Bradley, who is in charge of combat vehicle modernization within Army Futures Command, said in the same interview.

“Having soldiers get in and actually see what the seating in the back looked like, how their evacuation drills would go, definitely was beneficial to both vendors in giving them feedback to help adjust designs to better suit what we were looking for in the requirements,” he said.

“I would say we’ve had everything from small user interface changes up to, in one case, at least a fairly significant structural change to the base design,” Dean said. “There are some fairly dramatic shifts, and this is the time to do them.”

American Rheinmetall Defense’s team includes Textron Systems, RTX, L3Harris Technologies and Allison Transmission as well as artificial intelligence-focused company Anduril Technologies.

GDLS is teamed up with GM Defense; Applied Intuition, a specialist in modeling and simulating autonomy for the automobile industry; and AeroVironment, which is providing its Switchblade loitering munitions for integration into the design. GDLS also continues to work with General Dynamics Mission Systems to incorporate networks, radio gear and cyber capabilities.

NEW YORK — RTX Corporation, the defense contractor formerly known as Raytheon, agreed Wednesday to pay more than $950 million to resolve allegations that it defrauded the government and paid bribes to secure business with Qatar.

The company entered into deferred prosecution agreements in separate cases in federal court in Brooklyn and Massachusetts, agreed to hire independent monitors to oversee compliance with anti-corruption and anti-fraud laws and must show good conduct for three years.

The money the company owes includes penalties in the criminal cases, as well as civil fines, restitution and the return of profits it derived from inflated Defense Department billing and business derived from alleged bribes paid to a high-ranking Qatari military official from 2012 to 2016.

The biggest chunk is a $428 million civil settlement for allegedly lying to the government about its labor and material costs to justify costlier no-bid contracts and drive the company’s profits higher, and for double-billing the government on a weapons maintenance contract.

The total also includes nearly $400 million in criminal penalties in the Brooklyn case, involving the alleged bribes, and in the Massachusetts case, in which the company was accused of inflating its costs by $111 million for missile systems from 2011 to 2013 and the operation of a radar surveillance system in 2017.

RTX also agreed to pay a $52.5 million civil penalty to resolve a parallel Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the bribery allegations and must forfeit at least $66 million to satisfy both probes.

At a hearing in Brooklyn federal court, RTX lawyers waived their right to an indictment and pleaded not guilty to charges that the company violated the anti-bribery provision of the Foreign Corruption Practices Act and the Arms Export Control Act. They did not object to any allegations in court documents filed with the agreement.

RTX said in a statement that it is “taking responsibility for the misconduct that occurred” and is “committed to maintaining a world-class compliance program, following global laws, regulations and internal policies, while upholding integrity and serving our customers in an ethical matter.”

The various legal resolutions came to light over the span of several hours.

First, at the Brooklyn hearing, prosecutors revealed that RTX was to pay a $252 million penalty to resolve criminal charges in the bribery case. Then, court documents hit the docket in Boston showing another criminal penalty of nearly $147 million to resolve the missile and radar case.

Finally, hours later, the Justice Department issued a press release putting the total north of $950 million.

Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in a statement that the resolution of the cases “should serve as a stark warning to companies that violate the law when selling sensitive military technology overseas.”

A message seeking comment was left for the Qatari embassy in Washington.

RTX said in a July regulatory filing that it set aside $1.24 billion to resolve pending legal and regulatory matters. Its president and CEO, Christopher Calio, told investors that the investigations largely involved issues that predated the Raytheon-United Technologies merger that formed the current company in 2020.

“These matters primarily arose out of legacy Raytheon Company and Rockwell Collins prior to the merger and acquisition of these companies,” Calio said. “We’ve already taken robust corrective actions to address the legacy gaps that led to these issues.”

Before Wednesday, paperwork in Raytheon’s criminal cases was kept under seal and not publicly available. Because of that, the company’s name was left off the Brooklyn court calendar, leaving the nature of the case a mystery — and reporters scrambling to figure out what it was about — until the hearing began.

According to court documents, Raytheon employees and agents offered and paid bribes to a high-ranking Qatari military official to gain an advantage in obtaining lucrative contracts with the Qatar Emiri Air Force and Qatar Armed Forces.

The company then succeeded in securing four additions to an existing contract with the Gulf Cooperation Council — a regional union of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — and a $510 million contract to build a joint-operations center for the Qatari military, the court documents said.

Raytheon made about $36.7 million in profit from the Gulf Cooperation Council contract additions, which involved air-defense system upgrades, and anticipated making more than $72 million on the joint-operations center, but the Qatari government ultimately did not go forward with the deal, prosecutors said.

The Qatari military official represented his country on the Gulf Cooperation Council deal, served as an adviser on the joint-operations center project and ran procurement for the Qatar Emiri Air Force, prosecutors said. Raytheon bribed him by inking at least $2 million worth of sham contracts with a company he owned, prosecutors said.

In the price inflation case, Raytheon allegedly lied to the government about the costs it would incur in building three Patriot missile firing units — known as missile batteries — leading the U.S. Army to agree to a $619 million contract.

In a 2013 email cited in court papers, a Raytheon employee told a Pentagon official that the company’s expected costs had increased when, according to prosecutors, they actually went down. Prosecutors said the government overpaid by about $100 million.

Raytheon was also accused of misleading the U.S. Air Force in 2017 about the costs associated with operating and maintaining a radar surveillance system, including by arguing that it needed to give employees lucrative compensation packages to maintain adequate staffing.

In reality, prosecutors wrote in court papers, the company “was secretly preparing to reduce the pay” of site employees “in order to improve the company’s profitability.”

The contract was fraudulently inflated by $11 million, prosecutors said.

Wednesday’s penalties are just the latest legal fallout from RTX’s business dealings.

In August, the company agreed to pay the State Department $200 million after disclosing more than two dozen alleged violations of the Arms Export Control Act and International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

Among the allegations were that the company provided classified military aircraft data to China and that employees took company-issued laptops containing sensitive missile and aircraft information into Iran, Lebanon and Russia.

PrimerAI announced on Oct. 14 that an update to its AI platform can achieve a near-zero hallucination rate, a result that the company believes has broader implications for the Defense Department and defense industry as a whole.

The term “hallucinations” in AI parlance refers to models spitting out incorrect results.

“In high-stakes environments where precision and time lines are crucial, Primer’s enhanced platform emerges as a game changing solution,” the company’s press release said.

PrimerAI CEO Sean Moriarty explained what’s important about the change to the system in a phone interview with Military Times.

While many AI platforms experience a hallucination rate of 10%, Moriarty said, PrimerAI had whittled it down to .3%.

The biggest boon of the update was the ability to fact-check its own results.

This proprietary system, which the company says captures over 99% of errors before they reach users, is called the retrieval augmented generation verification system. Large language models, or LLMs, which are AI systems that can understand and process human language, already use retrieval augmented generation when given a prompt. ChatGPT is a prime example.

What makes PrimerAI’s system novel is that once it generates a response or summary, it generates a claim for the summary and corroborates that claim with the source data, according to Cindy Ma, senior product manager at PrimerAI.

This extra layer of revision leads to exponentially reduced mistakes, said Ma, who provided an in-person demonstration of the system at the Association of the United States Army’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 14.

DOD must accelerate AI adoption amid growing threats: PrimerAI CEO

PrimerAI believes that for the Defense Department, providing a large buffer against inaccuracy is paramount because small hallucinations can trigger dramatic responses.

“Imagine a world where an LLM is saying an adversary has five times as many aircraft carriers as they actually have,” Moriarty said.

Moriarty acknowledged that there’s always room for error despite the aim for flawlessness. Even if high-quality reference data is the foundation of an AI system’s analysis, there are still pieces of the puzzle that get warped. Data itself can be tainted by human judgment.

“Our present world is not a zero-defect world, although we strive for zero defects,” Moriarty said.

“We were seeing a lot of these power systems emerge that were different pieces of a microgrid, but right now, all of the microgrids that are out there use proprietary interfaces to talk,” Cory Goetz, who is the technical management division chief for the Army’s Expeditionary and Sustainment Systems program manager’s office, told Defense News shortly before the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

In order to develop the capability to get all of these systems to communicate, Goetz said, the Army decided to develop what it calls the Tactical Microgrid Standard, or TMS, in partnership with industry.

The standard was published officially in 2023, allowing for an open architecture for competitive procurement of power systems that can tie into an expeditionary microgrid architecture, Goetz explained.

“It allows us not to have to pure-fleet everything in the Department of Defense with tactical power. If someone has a good system, say it’s an energy storage system, if they make it with TMS, we can incorporate it into what we do after, of course, verifying it’s compliant,” he added.

The standards initiative is the basis of an effort called the Small Tactical Expeditionary Power, or STEP, project, which consists of small systems with hybrid capability that soldiers can operate quietly, toggling between fuel-burning energy production and batteries, Goetz said.

Then the Army is working on a Universal Power Gateway capability on the TMS basis. Its idea is to tie any power source or power storage capability into the service’s Advanced Medium Mobile Power Source (AMMPS) generator, made by Cummins.

“The UPG, that’s an emerging requirement that we see pointing to a program of record,” Goetz said. “It allows us to tie into those vehicles that will be exporting power in the future, and then be able to hybridize our generators for resilience and efficiency.”

As result, hybrid-electric vehicles would become nodes bundling what are now individual power connections to generators.

The program office is also working to push the microgrid standard to industry “in a more wholesale way, in a more organized way,” Goetz said.

Officials have created a user group, currently counting 40 companies, that they hope will draw relevant companies into a conversation of adopting and advancing the standard.

The program office hopes to field the STEP capability in fiscal year 2028, with the UPG initiative following a year later, though early variants of either project could be ready sooner.

Launched Effects, or LE, is the service’s term of art for an envisioned unmanned segment among its aerial platforms, capable of delivering a wide range of capabilities such as targeting, reconnaissance, surveillance, network extension or kinetic strike. Launched Effects can be deployed from both air and ground vehicles.

The effort represents a new direction in the Army’s aviation portfolio, which prioritizes drones and the more loosely defined category of LE platforms as the tip of the spear in enemy contact.

“We were able to accelerate the long-range efforts by about a year,” Brig. Gen. David Phillips told Defense News in an interview before the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

This means the Army will likely put out a request for proposals for what is considered more of a Corps-level asset in the third quarter of fiscal 2026. The service was originally looking at focusing on small and medium launched effects first and had yet to secure funding for the long-range version.

At the same time, the Army is making sure it is collaborating with the joint force to ensure it is not duplicating efforts.

“We have been paying close attention to the maturity of longer-range capability,” Phillips said.

The Army also continues to mature its medium-range capability which is in a prototyping effort well underway using Anduril Industries’ Altius 700 aircraft. Collins Aerospace, a Raytheon Technologies company, is the mission system provider, and Aurora Flight Sciences is the system integrator. Technology Service Corp. and Northrop Grumman Information Systems are providing modular payloads.

“We completed some additional flight testing off of an MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, last month and we’re looking at a way to deliver that capability faster,” Phillips said.

The medium-range LE will also be developed in conjunction with Program Executive Office Missiles & Space to fill its requirement for a helicopter-fired Long-Range Precision Munition.

The service was debating whether it made sense to pursue a separate LRPM program through PEO M&S or if the capability essentially could be classified as an LE and was therefore a redundant effort.

The Army’s ruling is that “it is a Launched Effects Medium Range. It’s captured in that requirement and that’s [how] we’re going to go about the acquisition process,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, who overseas the programs and resources division of the Army staff at the Pentagon, told Defense News.

As part of the requirement, the Army is looking at ways to accelerate the lethal version of the medium-range LE to meet the service’s need for an air-launched precision munition.

“We’re being more efficient and effective that way,” Phillips said.

The Army has already issued a request for white papers for a short-range LE.

“We’re squarely in the evaluation space,” Phillips said.

The service plans to launch an effort late this year or early next year that will lead to a user demonstration aimed at getting feedback from the force.

The method is similar to what the service has done with other small, unmanned aircraft systems efforts. “That may sound familiar, that model, but it’s working for us in the small UAS space,” Phillips said.

A year ago, the Army selected McQ, Textron Systems, General Dynamics Land Systems and Oshkosh Defense to design and build prototypes for the system.

The Army decided then to adjust its pursuit of three robotic combat vehicles of different sizes, moving forward instead with a single size that can keep up with crewed combat vehicles, Dean said at the time. And then the Army would equip the platform with different mission payloads to fill specific battlefield roles.

Each vendor delivered two prototypes in August, and all of the prototypes are now at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, Dean said.

“We’re on track to down-select in about the March timeframe from those four vendors to one and that’ll give us the base platform,” Dean said.

The chosen vendor will deliver eight prototypes for the next phase. “Then once we have that, that vendor will actually do another prototype spin. … We’ve tiered the requirements so they’re going to add some new requirements when they go into the second prototypes.”

While Dean said he prefers to keep as many vendors in a development effort as long as possible, funding is always a consideration. “It does come down to money. There’s a profile that we have to stay within. Unfortunately, the profile that we have really almost only allowed us to retain one. We looked at at least two and then that was still outside what we were able to afford.”

Who’s in control?

The Army has also settled on the Armored Multipurpose Vehicle, or AMPV, as the designated control vehicle for the robots, chosen because the control vehicle needs to keep up with the first unit designated to receive the robots, which will be a platoon in an Armored Brigade Combat Team, according to Col. Kevin Bradley, who is in charge of next-generation combat vehicle modernization within Army Futures Command.

The service looked at a number of concepts for a control vehicle from Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles to Stryker combat vehicles to even a truck-based one, but “the user community gelled on what they wanted,” Dean said.

A unit that has been working through how to operate and fight with RCVs at the National Training Center, for one, said using a control vehicle that was different from anything else in the formation became “very easy to target,” and the opposing force in a recent training event would go after the control vehicle easily to take the robots, according to Bradley.

The RCV’s first fielding is expected in fiscal 2028, which means the control vehicle will need to go under contract in FY25 because the AMPV has a two-year production lead time. Then from FY27 to FY28, the integration work to make it a control vehicle will occur, Dean detailed.

Tough road

While the RCV base platform prototyping and the control vehicle effort is moving forward smoothly, the Army’s work to develop off-road autonomy software is proving more difficult.

In June the Army conducted an off-road autonomy software assessment. “The good news is we are moving forward in that area. The bad news is industry is nowhere near where people think in terms of off-road autonomy. There’s still a lot of development to do,” Dean said.

The Army plans to hold another evaluation in December which will become routine in order to continue software development.

Three companies are working directly with the Bradley’s Next-Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team and PEO GCS on autonomy capability – Forterra, Kodiak Robotics and Overland AI.

So far the evaluations for autonomous behavior haven’t even been truly off-road, Dean said. “We’re talking trails and unimproved road conditions. Building an autonomy algorithm that can identify the entire range of things it might encounter is challenging because you have a pretty big data set.”

The evaluation in June took place at Fort Cavazos, Texas, and in one instance the robot needed to cross a creek at the bottom of a hill and would need to navigate a series of switchbacks to get down. “It couldn’t navigate the switchbacks,” Dean said.

“We are still working through the negative obstacle problem. You see a dip ahead of you. It could be a puddle, I can drive right through it, or it could be a cliff, and the sensors sometimes have difficulty evaluating what’s safe to navigate,” he said.

The evaluation in June involved too much human intervention, Dean said, but it’s still better than having to tele-operate a system continuously and deal with latency issues at certain ranges and speeds.

Overall, based off a major training event at Fort Irwin, California, this summer “we saw that robots provided benefits to the organization particularly in the reconnaissance and security role for long-duration observation and security posts,” Bradley said.

But the service is still working through tradeoffs with power, range and the ability to make decisions at a distance and the desired level of control, he added.

“That was really what we were trying to tease out, that math problem of you want to be able to see 4K video to make decisions of shoot, don’t shoot, to maintain that kind of ethical high ground, then that requires a certain amount of bandwidth that’s impacting how far you can go, also impacts how much control you have,” Bradley said.

“Our focus is an ecosystem looking at how we improve the supply chain, but also ensuring that we could keep that supply chain in motion — given a peer adversary like China — [when] we’re not able to [establish] fixed sites and keep them there for long periods of time,” Brig. Gen. Shane Upton, the Contested Logistics Cross Functional Team lead within Army Futures Command, told Defense News.

“Quite frankly, the lessons we’ve seen in Ukraine, the lessons we’re seeing recently in the Middle East — if it’s static for too long, especially resupply or logistics nodes, it becomes a target,” he said.

Upton’s team soon plans to take an abbreviated capabilities document on requirements for autonomous watercraft to the Pentagon for approval.

Smaller, autonomous watercraft, particularly in the Pacific, present a dilemma to adversaries “if there’s enough of them out there,” Upton said.

“You really don’t know which one to target,” he added. “Also, unmanned air systems that move cargo off those systems onto land — or even to a point of need directly to widely, distributed forces — [are] a focus area.”

The other near-term pursuit for using autonomous systems to distribute supplies will be larger cargo drones with greater range, he added. The team is writing a capabilities document to define those characteristics as well.

The Army demonstrated cargo drones at Project Convergence, the service’s periodic effort to experiment with future concepts and capabilities.

“We’ve rapidly seen the need that we absolutely want to use [unmanned aircraft systems] in supply and distribution, but it has to have more capacity and range than some of the smaller ones,” Upton said. “The smaller [craft] are very purpose built and very effective for [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance], lethal effects. They’re low cost. They can be attritable. When we’re talking about moving [supplies], we need a greater capacity for lift and they’ve got to go longer ranges.”

Upton attended an industry meeting just prior to the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference with an eye on larger cargo option developments as his team works to design an ecosystem of autonomous supply delivery.

Watercraft systems were already taking a huge step forward through extensive development work by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps prior to the establishment of the Army’s Contested Logistics CFT, which was almost two years ago.

The industry for small, autonomous watercraft is growing, Upton added, and there are several companies that have gone from creation to having boats in the water in less than a year.

After one particular company stood up, less than six months elapsed before it was conducting experiments with the Navy in the Atlantic Ocean. The organization now has the ability to make several hundred boats a month, Upton said.

Another consideration with cheap autonomous vessels is the possibility of using them as decoys. The Navy and Marine Corps are also looking into the possibility of adding lethal effects to some of the watercraft, Upton said.

Advancements in larger cargo drones and faster craft are coming as well, he noted following a recent meeting with industry developing systems in the commercial space.

Upton cited additional emerging tech features, such as hydrogen-powered drones that can travel 1,000 miles and carry 1,000 pounds, as promising developments.

As officials hedge their bets, companies have continued to put technology in front of the service in order to show the purported benefits, arguing that the technology is ready for prime time in the Army’s modernization plans.

MACK Defense has brought a commercial, fully electric, medium-duty truck to the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference this week to keep the conversation about hybrid capabilities with the service going, the company’s CEO David Hartzell told Defense News.

Bringing the truck represents MACK’s overall push to prove that hybrid technology is ready for military prime time, Hartzell said. The company is participating in the U.S. Army’s competition for a new Common Tactical Truck and, while it is not a requirement for the CTT to have hybrid power, it is the only competitor to build hybrid prototypes for evaluation.

“This is a vehicle customers can come and buy today. They’re operating on streets around the country today,” Hartzell said.

General Dynamics Land Systems again has brought a hybrid-electric Stryker combat vehicle to the show designed to be a command post where silent watch is a critical component achieved by turning off the engine but still powering communications equipment.

GM Defense is featuring a diesel-powered, electric Next Generation Tactical Vehicle at AUSA as well.

“GM has invested billions into battery technology, battery plants to drive the cost of batteries down, to drive the size of batteries smaller, lighter and the power up,” JD Johnson, GM Defense vice president of business development, told Defense News during a trip to Milford Proving Ground, Michigan.

Defense News drove the new tactical vehicle, which uses the Chevy Silverado truck with the same Duramax engine in the U.S. Army’s Infantry Squad Vehicle, paired with an electric battery capable of producing roughly 300 kilowatt hours of power output with a 15-gallon fuel tank. The vehicle still takes JP-8, the fuel choice of comfort for the U.S. Army.

GM Defense had wanted to compete in an Army competition to build an Electric Light Reconnaissance Vehicle. The Army said it was ready to start a prototyping program last fall, but that program was abruptly canceled.

“I think one of the challenges out there is there is still not a lot of understanding and knowledge in this space,” said Pete Johnson, GM Defense vice president of business development for integrated vehicles.

Company executives hope the Next-Generation Tactical Vehicle prototype can help address lingering concerns.

The Army has evaluated the possibility of converting even combat vehicles like the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle for hybrid propulsion, an effort led by the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office.

Industry teams now designing a Bradley replacement, dubbed the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle, bank on hybrid capability in their proposals, though nothing is expected to come to fruition until the 2030s.

Money and priorities

The Army maintains that just because it hasn’t fully committed to hybrid capabilities in tactical or combat vehicles doesn’t mean the service is disinterested.

“It’s not a hard sell to anyone in the Army,” Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told Defense News. “I think wheeled vehicles is our biggest opportunity. It’s the same exact tech that’s all over the commercial sector now. A lot of people drive these cars. It’s becoming kind of normal.”

The Army is “just working on carving out the money to do it,” Bush said. “Wheeled vehicles is a thing that we’ve been challenged to maintain really high production rates on, and it’s just competing with a lot of other needs in the Army,” he said.

While the investment is significant up front, “the long-term payoff, even a 10-15% fuel reduction, multiplied times a bazillion vehicles, is huge,” Bush said. “If we do this right, it’ll free up money down the road because we’re being more efficient with the vehicles.”

The capabilities a hybrid vehicle would bring are also becoming increasingly important in the modern battlefield where silent watch and silent drive help U.S. troops evade detection by increasingly sophisticated sensors.

“Industry is doing so much good research in this area, we don’t have to develop it,” Bush said. “We just need to make sure it’s safe.”

But introducing the technology to the Army’s vast inventory of ground vehicles still comes with challenges, according to Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, program executive officer for ground combat systems.

“Hybrid brings a bunch of things: extended range from the same amount of fuel, silent drive, the ability to export power or to use generated power differently to provide more mission capability,” Dean said.

“The challenge going back to the current fleet is it’s very expensive to do the equivalent of a heart transplant on a combat vehicle like that,” Dean said. For the Stryker program, for example, it cost $450 million and took eight years just to upgrade an engine and power train.

“And that’s a much simpler problem than converting a vehicle from purely internal combustion to hybrid-electric,” Dean explained.

“I would love to have hybrid-electric projects on all of our combat platforms, but the reality is we probably can’t afford to do that, so we have to be very pointed in where we apply it,” he said.

Army Futures Command has been working on a Formation Layered Protection requirement and is releasing what it calls a “characteristics of need” statement to industry, Col. Kevin Bradley, the Next-Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team lead within AFC, said in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference this week.

Bradley’s team, along with Program Executive Office Ground Combat Systems, is using the AUSA forum to discuss the needs statement with industry and seek feedback.

The Army is looking for ways to protect dismounted soldiers, vehicles and full formations from a variety of threats. Potential approaches include masking vehicles or hardening them with both active and passive protection tactics. And the service will determine what is “the optimal mix for a formation to protect itself and those around it,” Bradley said.

The service has been focused on chasing after interim active protection systems with varied success. The Army outfitted some M1 Abrams tanks with Rafael’s Trophy APS and sent them to Europe. While the capability — which has been in theater over the past four years — does offer protection, there are tradeoffs like the extra weight of the system.

The Army had a tougher time finding an APS that would work on Stryker combat vehicles or Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles. Artis, a Virginia-based company, developed Iron Curtain, which was the first system considered a candidate for the Stryker. But the Army decided in 2018 it would take too much time and money to mature it.

Artis came out earlier this year with a new APS called Sentinel that the firm said is able to defeat top-attack threats, a growing challenge as forces face skies saturated with loitering munitions and other armed drones.

After Israeli firm Elbit Systems redesigned Iron Fist APS into a version called Iron Fist Light Decoupled, it is now on contract to be installed on the Bradley’s M2A4E1 configuration, Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, program executive officer for ground combat systems, said.

“All of the APS systems we have today are really point defense to a specific vehicle,” Dean said. The Army wants to figure out “how can that be expanded so that [it] can protect multiple vehicles with one system and might reside some place differently.”

For example, perhaps a robotic vehicle could help protect a group of platforms for a unit, meaning that not every vehicle would need a heavy countermeasures installation, Dean said.

The Army needs to figure out “which capabilities do I apportion to an individual platform, which ones do I apportion to the formation? That’s the hard conceptual work that Futures Command has to do,” Dean said.

Some solutions don’t necessarily have to be kinetic, he added. The 3rd Infantry Division, for example, recently used decoys to better hide command posts during a National Training Center rotation.

Masking capabilities is one area that the Army would like to investigate further, Bradley said. “We haven’t seen a whole lot of great solutions on the industry side. I’m really interested to see what, when they look at that problem set, what are some of those low-cost options that can be fielded largely to the force.”

One of the biggest concerns, he noted, is that current APS countermeasures are routinely more expensive than an incoming projectile. “I think there’s a lot of space there to really reduce the shot cost.”

Several vendors at the AUSA exposition unveiled new technologies showing how the protection market is changing.

Leonardo DRS is featuring a kit designed to augment force protection from top attack and loitering munitions threats. The effort is based on data from the company’s own systems in Ukraine as well as the conflict in Gaza, according to company vice president Charlene Caputo.

The system is able to effectively discriminate between things like birds and drones, a challenge many companies are trying to tackle. The radar kit can sit on any vehicle, she noted.

General Dynamics Land Systems, as part of a “mission command on the move” concept, banks on reducing the electromagnetic signature of a hybrid-electric drive Stryker, pairing it with an APS suite. The company is also presenting a robotic vehicle with spoofing technology meant to confuse enemies over the actual whereabouts of a mobile command post.

“We have a nine-seat variant,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, of the Army G-8 staff, told Defense News in an interview at the Pentagon. “We know that’s not the right configuration or the only configuration.”

The GM Defense-built ISV is in the inventory of three Brigade Combat Teams, where soldiers have put the vehicles to the test in large-scale training rotations. Earlier this year, the Army shipped several vehicles to remote islands in the Pacific where Defense News observed one being driven onto a CH-47 Chinook helicopter during an exfiltration mission.

The Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence is now compiling lessons learned. “We are looking at what do we need. A five-seater for a kind of reconnaissance version? Do we need some sort of weapons carrier? I know eventually we’re probably going to get into some launched effects capabilities on there. I’m assuming that’s the direction we’re going.”

GM Defense won the contract to build ISV in June 2020. The program was approved for full-rate production in April 2023 and the Army currently plans to buy a total of 2,593 ISVs over the course of the program. Many of the vehicles have been delivered to the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions.

While the Army has only purchased the troop carrier variant, the Canadian Army is a customer of the utility version that allows for flexible space in the back to add various weapon systems. Ottawa has purchased 100 of the vehicles to take on deployment to Europe as part of the country’s NATO mission, JD Johnson, GM Defense vice president of business development, said last month.

Canada is the lead nation in Latvia for an alliance troop presence there aimed at deterring a Russian attack.

“We built a version of the ISV that is a utility vehicle because what we found out really quickly, and we knew that the troops would, is their soldiers all jump into ISVs and take off and, guess what, their mortars or counter-[unmanned aircraft systems], that stuff can’t keep up with them,” JD Johnson said.

GM Defense officials said they were confident the Army would similarly find the utility variant useful as part of the program of record, or the overall buy. “That’s very clear. They’ve signaled that strongly. Now they just have to get through their bureaucratic humps to get there,” Pete Johnson, vice president of business development for integrated vehicles, said.

The company is also seeing a growing international interest. GM Defense is planning to enter the ISV in a U.K. competition centered on land mobility. The British Army has already test-driven the vehicles at the National Training Center at the beginning of the year, according to JD Johnson.

The United Arab Emirates also wants to buy them, JD Johnson said. “We have a tender from them right now. Angola wants to buy them. We have a tender from them right now. There are countries that are struggling with their own capacity as everybody is upgrading their militaries. You see this as a way for contributing to Ukraine,” he added. “We’ve had inquiries from a couple different countries saying, ‘If we could buy 100 or so vehicles, how quickly could we get them?’”

The ISV, which is produced in Concord, North Carolina, was built with plenty of room to grow, JD Johnson noted. “If you were to go to Concord right now, you’d see in the neighborhood of 60 of these vehicles there waiting to be delivered to a customer.”

The other services are also considering the ISV for things like base defense, in the case of the Air Force, and for other things like rescue missions, Pete Johnson said.

At the Association of the U.S. Army, GM Defense is showing the ISV’s potential role in the Army’s push to establish human-machine integrated formations. The ISV on the exposition floor will be set up as a control vehicle for a robotics and autonomy platoon that is towing a Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport robot and hauling a Silent Tactical Energy Enhanced Dismount military cart, or STEED.

The service’s current arsenal is either old, as is the case of the towed M777, or lacking the desired range for future conflicts against near-peer armies, exemplified by the latest version of the Paladin self-propelled howitzer, made by BAE Systems.

The recent cancellation of an effort to mount an unwieldy long barrel on a Paladin body — length determines range, generally speaking — has forced the service to start from square one yet again.

The Army quietly halted the yearslong prototyping effort, dubbed the Extended Range Cannon Artillery, or ERCA, a year ago, announcing only this March that “engineering challenges” had turned out to be insurmountable, as acquisition chief Doug Bush put it.

In short, the program struggled with technology associated with the 30-foot-long gun tube the Army wanted in order to achieve a 70-kilometer range. Even manufacturing 58-caliber guns at Watervliet Arsenal, New York, the country’s one-stop shop for cannon tubes, would have required extensive investment to build at a desired rate.

Now the service is looking for fresh options available abroad, with urgency dialed up by the results of a tactical fires study completed this year that said the Army risks falling behind.

“We’re leaving our aperture wide, because our studies have shown that by 2035 against a near-peer adversary in large scale combat operations, we absolutely need an ERCA-like capability — and where we pursue that now is pretty important,” Brig. Gen. Rory Crooks, who is in charge of long-range precision fires modernization within Army Futures Command, told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

“We want to make sure that we can lean toward introducing this capability to our forces by the 2030s,” he added. “So, what that’s driven us to do is to look for mature and available platforms out there, both domestically produced and foreign. … We’re going to determine what is mature, what is available.”

Global roadshow

While making up for time lost with the long-barreled Paladin, the service gets a chance to evaluate prospective gun candidates in their countries of origin.

“Things are a bit delayed,” Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told Defense News, “but that’s because we’re kind of doing a global roadshow rather than making everybody come to Yuma, which is the feedback we received, which is reasonable.”

The Army had held a demonstration of available mobile howitzers at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, in 2021, but the service put the pursuit to find a ready-to-go system on the backburner in favor of investment in ERCA.

The team traveling to demonstrations and gathering information is “up and running,” and all demonstrations are now scheduled, he said in an interview prior to the AUSA conference.

“We had many companies interested, which is good, and what we’re really asking to see is what they have that’s producible today, already in production or ideally already fielded, so that we could adapt quickly for U.S. Army use,” Bush said. “When combined with new munitions, [that] gets the ranges that were envisioned in the original ERCA requirement.

“I hope we can do this faster for the Army than starting all over with a whole new development program. I would much rather spend dollars procuring things to appeal to soldiers than doing [research and development] for that last 1% specialness we seek. That’s a constant frustration, to be honest.”

The companies chosen for demonstrations are American Rheinmetall Vehicles, Elbit Systems America, General Dynamics European Land Systems, BAE Systems and South Korea’s Hanwha.

Demonstrations will begin this month and run through December, Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, the Army’s program executive officer for ground combat systems, told Defense News.

The companies will show specific capabilities that the Fires Center of Excellence has defined as key driving capabilities needed for future fights.

“What do you need for long-range division fires? What do you do to replace towed artillery?” Dean posed. “Ultimately, we also need some cannon modernization in our existing self-propelled howitzer fleet. There are systems on the market that could do any two or three such requirements, and what we’re trying to do through the demonstration is help the Fires Center choose.”

While Elbit demonstrated its Atmos self-propelled howitzer system in 2021, the company has chosen to put its Sigma howitzer in front of Army officials this time around.

Sigma is in full-rate production in Charleston, South Carolina, and is fielding the cannon system to the Israeli Defense Forces, according to Luke Savoie, the company’s president and CEO.

Sigma’s base is an Oshkosh Defense 10x10 platform, designed to be “highly mobile,” with fast road speeds and the ability to go off-road, Savoie said. The system is able to shoot any direction while moving, he added.

“I don’t want to be forced to face my vehicle toward the enemy ... so 360-degree shooting has been something that we’ve done a lot of investment in,” Savoie added.

Sigma is fully automated, with the three-person crew never needing to leave the cab of the vehicle to fire from the howitzer’s deep magazine, according to Savoie.

Rheinmetall, meanwhile, will demonstrate the RCH 155, a howitzer developed through a joint arrangement between the company and KNDS and created from an association of Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and Nexter, according to company officials. The system is integrated onto a Boxer armored fighting vehicle.

Archer, a BAE Systems mobile howitzer, will make a return in the upcoming demonstration. The company brought Archer to Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, in 2021 and has taken feedback from the effort and made a variety of improvements, according to company vice president Jim Miller.

Archer’s base platform is a 6x6 articulated Volvo truck and will be featured at BAE’s booth on the AUSA 2024 expo floor. It will be test-fired for the U.S. Army in Sweden, where it is fielded to the Swedish Army.

“It’s the same one that’s in Ukraine,” Miller noted, referring to European donations of the weapon to Kyiv’s forces.

While Archer is on a Volvo platform, it has also been integrated onto a German 10x10 MAN truck for an ongoing competition in Switzerland. Meanwhile, BAE is in a design effort with Oshkosh to put it on one of their 8x8 trucks, Miller said.

“It’s a very modular system,” he noted.

Archer engineers have been collecting a great deal of data out of Ukraine, Miller added. The system can be moving down a road, receive a mission and, within 30 seconds, stop and begin shooting — with an autoloader — fast enough to get four or five rounds off within 20 to 30 seconds. It’s then able to hit the road again in another 30 seconds, Miller said.

Hanwha USA officials told Defense News the company would demonstrate its K9A1 system. It is showcasing the A2 version at AUSA’s annual conference for the first time. The K9A2 has a fully automatic handling system and turret and an increased fire rate of 10 rounds per minute, officials said.

These capabilities are an upgrade from the six to eight rounds per minute capability of its legacy A1 variant. The K9A2 is slated to be the only tracked vehicle that will be demonstrated this fall.

General Dynamics Land Systems plans to demonstrate its Piranha system on a 10x10 platform using the same gun mounted on the KNDS-Rheinmetall RCH 155.

The Army plans to wrap up demonstrations and move into a competitive evaluation through all of fiscal year 2026, eventually coalescing around the core features of an envisioned capability it calls “mobile tactical cannon,” Crooks said.

“By the end of FY26 we anticipate downselecting, and by FY27 we anticipate having a contract awarded for a certain number of cannons,” Crooks added.

But it’s not necessarily a simple acquisition pathway. One challenge lies within mechanical engineering to ensure charges are compatible.

“We’re seeing in Ukraine — and we have done the work to understand — what [munitions] you can shoot out of what [artillery],” Bush noted, referring to a multitude of round variations tied to specific gun barrels.

Another challenge is related to software and ensuring designs can be compatible with the Army’s artillery fire control and communications systems, Bush said.

“If we go with a system we don’t currently operate, one option would be to buy some limited number of whatever is extant on that platform with a path to then adapt it over time to Americanize some of the electronics,” he added. “But I think the urgency of the need will drive that decision.”

The Army’s artillery solution doesn’t just rest with a mobile tactical cannon, Crooks emphasized.

“Our studies have shown that we have to have a new mission cycle time,” he said.

The operational environment — in Ukraine, for example — is showing the service that “we’re always under some kind of persistent surveillance,” Crooks said.

“Whereas in the past, a cannon crew could roll into position, get in place — at their leisure almost — and then it [wouldn’t be] until that first round cleared the muzzle break that they would anticipate counter-battery effects,” he said. “Now, once we stop, that’s when the clock starts.”

Meanwhile, the Army hasn’t given up hope that the M109 Paladin can be further enhanced, even though its 39-caliber gun tube is incompatible with most of the munitions being used by the rest of the world, according to Crooks.

“That platform is upgradable, potentially to a 52-caliber cannon that could shoot farther,” said Bush, adding that the large inventory of the weapons resident in the Army makes for a good reason to continue investing.

Finally, BAE in November will run the M109, with a Rheinmetall 52-caliber gun tube, through a live-fire qualification event in Minnesota, according to Miller.

Projecting projectiles

One of the Army’s more successful efforts to get better range out of cannon artillery is developing new rounds that, when fired from any caliber cannon, still achieve greater distances with better accuracy.

The Army’s XM1155 is an artillery projectile with the ability to fire within desired cannon ranges, Crooks said. And there is other work ongoing on the propellant.

Combined, those two efforts “might allow us to achieve ranges that are really, truly relevant to a division-deep area,” he noted.

The XM1155 program includes Boeing and Nammo’s ramjet capability and BAE’s Scorpio guided projectile round.

BAE’s recently rebranded “Scorpio” projectile has been fired from 39-caliber tubes and M777 howitzers and has achieved over 100-kilometer ranges in tests, Miller said.

A year ago, the Boeing-Nammo team set a new record for the longest indirect fire test of the ramjet-powered 155mm projectile with the ERCA prototype.

The Army still needs a new propellant, however, considering its current version is highly corrosive, contributing to gun barrel degradation and erosion.

Rheinmetall officials have said the company is focused on helping the service change the material used in 39-caliber barrels, because the same material won’t cut it in a 52-caliber tube.

Company officials said they are hoping to bring the solventless-based propellant technology to Virginia’s Radford Army Ammunition Plant for tests.

The service is also considering layering rocket capability at the brigade level, Crooks said, because adversaries are expected to have rockets at that echelon as well.

The Army is developing a capability of reducing the diameter of rockets, so a Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS, pod can carry up to 30, a dramatic increase from the six-per-pod solutions like the Guided MLRS.

The service will also have to decide what to do about towed artillery systems, a capability some officials in the service believe is now dead.

The emplacement and displacement stop times associated with towed howitzers take much too long in operational environments like Ukraine. While Ukrainian forces have found ways to continue to use them, they require extra camouflage elaborate cover and concealment.

“They’re really versatile, and they’re great for light forces in that respect,” Crooks said, but “we know we have to do something to get faster [with] emplacement, firing and displacement, and there’s probably some physical limits we’re going to hit with towed artillery.”

The Army plans to finish a second iteration of its previous tactical fires analysis by the end of the year, which could lead to further trade studies and possible future investment, Crooks said.

The question is whether the Army will have the money.

“We’re leaning forward, as we do future budgets, to try to make sure we have that option to go fast if the choice is made to go fast with an existing system,” Bush said, “because it means more than just the system. It also means ammunition and charges. … So, that’ll be a big decision.”

During a recent rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, a team from the Army’s Tank-Automotive & Armaments Command passed a digital file of a repair part to a team that printed the replacement at the tactical edge.

“That was a heavy lift and we don’t have it right yet,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Mohan, Army Materiel Command’s deputy and acting commander, told Defense News, “but we know that we can do it now.”

The effort was a part of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s vision of transforming how the service fights and adapts in the heat of battle.

While the Army has tried 3D printing at the tactical edge, which describes units closest to combat, it has previously come with a large footprint such as an entire trailer.

Officials at Army Materiel Command have started 3D-printing more parts because supply chains are still strained from the coronavirus pandemic, Mohan explained, and because of “exponential growth” of requirements coming primarily out of units in Europe.

AMC has begun using more advanced manufacturing techniques to make widgets that are no longer under contract or which the original contractor no longer stocks. “We’re targeting those parts,” Mohan said. “If we have the tech data, it’s relatively easy to map it and then load it into a digital repository.”

If the Army doesn’t own the data, it has to reverse engineer it and run the part through a first article test just like it would a brand new part, Mohan noted.

The command, back in 2020, came up with an overarching strategy for how it wanted to tackle 3D printing and additive manufacturing across the force, establishing a hub of manufacturing capability at Rock Island Arsenal, Illinois, along with 25 other various depots, plants and arsenals in support.

While the repository is still a nascent capability, the Army has about 1,000 parts mapped and loaded in it and is finding that some of the parts are improvements over what original equipment manufacturers provided.

“The long-term vision is that we have this centralized hub of data and then we map both the [organic industrial base] and other capabilities all the way down to the tactical level and say, ‘Okay, we can see what type of machinery we have at each one of our depots and arsenals and then all the way down to the tactical level,” Mohan said. “And the units at the tactical level will be able to access the data based upon the capability that they have.”

The Army does not want a unit with very nascent 3D printing capability to try to make complex parts, Mohan cautioned, so “we’ve got to get the control measures in place and we’re working on that.”

The Sustainment Center of Excellence is working with AMC to enhance training of the soldiers who are doing advanced manufacturing at the tactical level as well, Mohan noted.

For the fan shroud replacement part printed in the field at Fort Johnson, it was “a very simple part,” Mohan said, but when using titanium, some parts the service wants to print can take roughly four days to complete.

“We don’t expect that capability is going to be down at the tactical level,” he noted.

“We’re having discussions about the future, where [is] that tactical capability best suited for an expeditionary Army? Is it down at the brigade level? Is at the division level or the corps level? I think it depends on what we’re going to try to accomplish from repair parts printing,” Mohan said.

AMC is also making improvements to some of its parts manufacturing processes using additive manufacturing capability at the Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center at Rock Island, Arsenal, according to Mohan.

“We’re using 3D printing and advanced manufacturing techniques to make us faster in forgings and castings,” he said. Casting molds are typically made with sand using a wood mold to shape the sand mold, which can take weeks, Mohan explained. “Now we’re 3D printing molds with an advanced material that’s heat resistant.”

The Army has “shaved weeks off of parts and castings by integrating advanced manufacturing techniques into our existing processes,” he said.

The service is racing toward a goal of shoring up all major single sources that provide parts or materials for 155mm munitions by the end of 2025.

“There’s going to be a lot of ribbon cuttings between now and the end of the year,” Doug Bush, the Army’s acquisition chief, told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

The Pentagon is investing billions of dollars to increase the capacity of 155mm munition production as it races to replenish stock sent to support Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion, which began in early 2022, and to ensure the U.S. has what it might need should conflict erupt across multiple theaters at once. The Army planned to spend $3.1 billion in FY24 supplemental funding alone to ramp up production.

Prior to the war in Ukraine, the U.S. could build about 14,400 of the artillery shells per month. But as Ukrainian forces burn through the ammunition for howitzers sent to the country, the U.S. recognized quickly that replenishment could not be done with the current infrastructure.

The service has set a target of producing 100,000 artillery shells per month, but Army officials have shared it has fallen slightly behind schedule. Even so, the Army is now producing 40,000 shells a month, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said at the Defense News Conference last month, adding that the plan is to reach 55,000 shells a month by the end of the year.

How Europe’s diverging artillery munitions complicate Ukraine support

“Part of what’s enabling that are things like the brand-new plant that we opened up in Mesquite, Texas, a couple of months ago. We’ve got a new load, assembly, pack plant in Camden, Arkansas, that’s going to be opening up pretty soon. So those are examples of where you see the payoff in that investment in the organic industrial base,” she said.

The Army had been making 155mm shells at a single plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and a privately operated facility nearby. All of the shells were transported to one place – Iowa Army Ammunition Plant – where they are packed with explosives.

The service quickly went under contract with General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems to build a new, mostly automated facility in Mesquite to build more shells using production systems from Turkey. And it also contracted more shell production with a company in Ontario, Canada – IMT Defense.

Shell production will go from basically one facility to four by early next year, Bush said.

The load, assemble and pack process will, by early next year, be conducted at two other facilities outside of Iowa — General Dynamics in Camden, Arkansas, and Day & Zimmerman in Parsons, Kansas, Bush said.

The Army awarded $1.5 billion in contracts to companies globally to procure bulk energetics like TNT and IMX-104 explosive as well primers and fuses in 2023.

Even so, the Army is also setting up two locations to produce propellant. “This is the propellant that goes inside the modular artillery charges right now, it’s only done in one place. It’s Valleyfield in Canada,” Bush said. Another propellant production facility will be set up at Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia and the facility in Canada will have a capacity increase, he added.

US Army awards $1.5B to boost global production of artillery rounds

The Army is planning to design and construct a domestic TNT production facility, which will likely be at Radford, Bush has said in the past. Once a contract is awarded, the plan is to build it in 48 months. Currently, the U.S. relies entirely on TNT from allies.

The only place that made combustible cartridge cases – Armtec Defense Technologies – was in Coachella, California, well-known for its music festival, but also for being located along the San Andreas Fault with a high risk of large earthquakes. Day & Zimmerman will produce the cases at another location in Texarkana, Texas.

The Army is also setting up two locations producing propellant charges – American Ordnance in Middletown, Iowa, and General Dynamics in Camden, Arkansas.

“There [is] still the occasional single point, if you go down far enough, I’m not sure we can ever eliminate them entirely,” Bush said. “But we can build in more redundancy than we had before, which was, frankly, a very fragile setup where I could give you grid coordinates for like, four buildings in America, and if one of those, something happened tomorrow, we weren’t making anything … it definitely isn’t acceptable now, and we’re trying to get away from it.”

The truck is a new hybrid vehicle that GM Defense has developed to show the Army what is possible for a Humvee-type capability that meets the needs of modern warfare. The Army does not yet have a requirement for a new Humvee, or High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or something else to replace the 40-year-old vehicle with 50-year-old technology.

But the Humvee, while a longtime workhorse for the Army, is becoming an increasingly unsafe platform. Rollovers have plagued the fleet, resulting in a rise in deaths from the accidents in recent years, which spurred the implementation of some safety measures. The Army has replaced some Humvees with the newer Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, but the service wants to retain a slightly smaller vehicle akin to the Humvee in its inventory, scaling back plans to go whole hog on JLTV within the vehicle size segment.

GM Defense has designed what it’s calling the Next-Generation Tactical Vehicle, taking the Chevy Silverado truck and the same Duramax engine used in the U.S. Army’s Infantry Squad Vehicle and pairing it with an electric battery capable of producing roughly 300 kilowatt hours of power output and a 15-gallon fuel tank.

“Think about the technology that was the foundation for Humvee,” JD Johnson, GM Defense vice president of business development, said in a recent interview at General Motors Milford Proving Ground. “The automotive industry has moved way on from that and our soldiers deserve [more], not just from the driveability and performance, but from the ability to support all their various missions.”

Silverados come off the production line every 54 seconds. The company added an offroad package to the truck and maximized commercial-off-the-shelf features, according to Pete Johnson, GM Defense vice president of business development for integrated vehicles.

GM also integrated “a myriad” of different advanced technologies from some of its electric vehicle programs, including the Hummer EV, and incorporated lessons garnered from its successful rapid production of the Infantry Squad Vehicle, which used a Chevy Colorado chassis, Pete Johnson added.

While the vehicle still uses an engine now familiar to U.S. soldiers, it incorporates energy storage and the ability to use that energy to both drive and power other systems to enhance the Army both from an operational and sustainment perspective, Pete Johnson said.

Because of the electric-power capabilities, the vehicle can operate at low thermal and acoustic signatures.

“If you look at Ukraine, the fight going on right now, one of the risks is if they find you, they can kill you,” Pete Johnson said. Ukrainian soldiers started evacuating casualties from the frontlines with non-tactical vehicles because they were quieter than military vehicles, the company learned from those on the ground, he added.

The technology in GM’s new ride allows for silent drive, Pete Johnson said, meaning the vehicle is able to power systems without idling an engine. In the vehicle, the driver can switch between “silent mode” and regular engine mode with the flip of a switch.

The electric battery also helps decrease the battery requirements for units on the battlefield. The Army has gone from a platoon carrying roughly 48 lbs of batteries in Desert Storm and Desert Shield to carrying 1,200 lbs of batteries. “It’s unreal, the amount of kit now that requires energy,” Pete Johnson said.

The company has also incorporated instantaneous torque technology that allows for effective and agile offroad capability, according to Pete Johnson. The design reduces sustainment burdens and logistics tails because hybrid electric vehicles use fewer parts and less fuel and other batteries on the battlefield, he added.

The company also took safety into account in a number of ways, Pete Johnson said. “We’re disheartened every time we read an article where a soldier, marine, sailor is killed by a rollover … but we’re taking the best modern technology ... and we’re building integrated rollover protection systems,” he said.

The Infantry Squad Vehicle already has that capability.

While electronic stability control and antilock brakes are in every single vehicle produced since 2012, “there’s almost no military vehicles that have that,” Pete Johnson said. While the Army has been applying add-on kits to Humvees, that DNA is embedded in the proposed Next-Generation Tactical Vehicle, he said.

The vehicle is transportable in a C-130 and C-17 aircraft and can be sling-loaded by a CH-47 Chinook cargo helicopter or an MH-53 King Stallion helicopter.

GM Defense is showing the vehicle at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington. The floor model incorporates a Kongsberg remote weapon station, a Lockheed Martin Javelin anti-tank missile launcher and a Drone Buster to counter unmanned aircraft system threats in the back along with a Hoverfly tethered drone for reconnaissance.

“All of that is one platform that you really couldn’t do today” with the power sources onboard vehicles, Pete Johnson said.

Why not send the Raytheon-made Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, or LTAMDS, to units stationed in the Pacific, the Middle East or Europe to get a sense of how the new equipment works in field, he suggested.

The process would essentially outsource service test and evaluation procedures currently confined to controlled environments in the United States to what the Army calls the “tactical edge,” one step in a wider transformation initiative that prizes change driven by the deployed.

“We bought several prototypes. We know what that capability is – whether it’s three times better or five times better, it’s better than what we have and it may not be exactly where we [want to be] at, but how can we take the same approach to putting it inside of our formation,” George said in a recent interview with Defense News.

He is now waiting for a briefing coming soon on how the Army could move more quickly with LTAMDS.

“It’s not how we normally do business,” he said, but the approach is gaining traction, propelled by a shared understanding that the pace of fielding new capabilities is the key benchmark for winning wars. “We can’t use old hardware processes when we can do things differently nowadays.”

After a series of devastating program failures, the Army has made major moves over the last decade to try to modernize its force faster, from the creation of a four-star command focused on pushing modernization efforts to the finish line, to the establishment of an office in charge of rapidly developing tech in some of the most challenging areas like hypersonic flight.

Over the years, Army officials have called for dramatic cultural changes within its modernization and acquisition communities in order to get things done, but even with nearly a decade of trying reform measures, lack of funding and red tape can still serve as roadblocks.

George became Army chief in the fall of 2023, entering the job with a reputation of bucking the status quo.

As a brigade commander in Afghanistan, George was known as the guy who outfitted his entire brigade with lighter equipment including non-standard, high-quality hiking boots because they were better than the standard-issue footwear.

At the Pentagon, George continued on that path.

He canceled two major development programs — the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft and the Extended Range Cannon Artillery system — in favor of other avenues. And he did it before the programs entered the costlier phases of development and production.

George has scrapped legacy programs like the Shadow Unmanned Aircraft System in favor of a wide variety of commercial-off-the-shelf options while still pursuing a tactical UAS competition to replace the older system.

He has also worked to inject nascent capabilities into operational environments at a larger scale, compared to small soldier touchpoint events of the past, in order to understand if novel equipment can work as intended and to gauge the second-order effects on the organizations tasked with absorbing it.

He calls this effort “Transforming in Contact.”

“When the chief is talking about transforming in contact, if you take a step back, he’s talking about changing culture in the United States Army. He’s changing culture at the tactical edge. He’s changing culture with the acquisition process. He’s changing culture with the requirements process,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, whose job is pairing funding with programs as chief of the G-8 staff, told Defense News.

“We’re seeing that. We’re seeing [the Army] implement it, look at themselves on the battlefield,” he said. “They are learning, they are changing their tactics, techniques and procedures.”

Flexible Funding

Earlier this year, George began discussing the possibility of the Army asking for more flexible funding in its budget for certain capabilities. Such requests are usually touchy subjects with lawmakers, who fear losing oversight outside of the yearly appropriations cadence, a perception the chief has sought to counteract.

“I think everybody recognizes that we have to change,” he said in the recent interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference. “What we’re doing is we are now going to fund a capability rather than a specific program.”

The three target capabilities the Army is pursuing for flexible funding in the fiscal 2026 budget request will be unmanned aircraft systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare. In future years, the Army is considering a more flexible budgeting approach with network capability as well, George noted.

“The chief and I feel very strongly that we need to invest more in ... unmanned aerial systems, counter-unmanned aerial systems and electronic warfare,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said at the Defense News Conference in September. “When you look at what’s happening in Ukraine, we look at the lessons learned from Ukraine, clearly the role of drones, the role of capabilities to take down drones, that is going to be hugely important.”

In essence, the Army is asking to buy capability, “not things,” Alex Miller, the Army chief’s technology officer, told Defense News.

“What that allows is, generally, everyone races to be the number one provider of a thing, but the flexibility lets multiple contenders in the market and gives the Army some flexibility if a performer is not performing, if they’re not being a good teammate, we cut them loose,” he said. “And if other people come into the market, because we want to encourage that, we can bring them in as teammates.”

The Army is also looking at gaining more flexibility in research-and-development funding accounts in future years, George said.

While flexible funding means moving money around to buy specific capabilities, “we don’t want anybody to think that we’re doing things willy-nilly, and we don’t,” George said.

But Congress also needs to allow the Army to make adjustments that, for example, might cost more. “If you can imagine, [if] industry out there had to go and ask permission to make a software adjustment and it took 90, 120, 180 days, things would stop working,” George said.

The Army is working with Congress on the proper notification system that will allow lawmakers and congressional staff to see what the Army is doing and have a forum to ask questions or flag specific activity, Gingrich said.

In one way, flexible funding is just “consolidation and streamlining” line items in the base budget associated with drones, counter-drone capabilities and electronic warfare, Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo said in a recent interview. That consolidation “would give us much more flexibility within certain program line items to do more competitions, to be able to insert technology and to be able to procure from multiple vendors after a competition, to be able to pivot and react to emerging threats and shifting technologies at the pace that we need to.”

Generating requirements

The Army has struggled in the past to lock in requirements but maintain enough flexibility as it progresses through technology development for new weapons systems. Requirements were too numerous, rigid or specific, and when they could not be met programs were canceled.

Through Army Futures Command, or AFC, the process for establishing requirements has changed. Rather than setting rigid requirements, the service has begun to adopt characteristics it is looking for in a capability and is using prototyping to understand what is possible.

Command officials now start the process with a statement outlining needs and desired characteristics, a few pages of prose, articulating the problem the Army wants to solve and what it is looking for, according to Gen. James Rainey, who heads Army Futures Command.

Even so, more refinement is coming to how the service writes requirements, Gingrich, Army G-8, told Defense News. “I think it will require a relook of threshold and objective capabilities. I think threshold is kind of your minimum viable product. I think we’re learning, perhaps, we set objectives maybe a little farther … extend the bar a little bit higher,” Gingrich said.

In the Army G-8, which is responsible for conducting the Army Requirements Oversight Council, or AROC, where requirements are approved, Gingrich said he’s beating back the misconception that he’s there just to execute that process on a rigid, calendar-based timeline.

“Our job as staff officers is to ensure that soldiers are getting appropriate output and outcome, not that I manage the AROC process,” Gingrich said.

Gone are the days where the requirements approval process takes a certain amount of time in staffing or requires program managers to fill out 100-page long slides for AROC presentations, he said.

“I am not averse to change. Neither is the chief. We’ve changed what we present to him at the AROC,” Gingrich said. “The calendar is dynamic. We look at it every week, and we shuffle.”

Better buying

Taking a page from how Ukraine continues to adapt against evolving Russian tactics, the U.S. Army knows it needs to be iterating technology in real time, according to the AFC commander. The war-torn country is on its fourth or fifth major revolution in terms of how it fights with unmanned systems, Rainey said recently.

“The more technology-based something is, the more you need to be able to adapt fast,” he said. That includes the Army’s three rush priorities of drones, countering drones and electronic warfare.

The Army, as part of transforming in contact, has already bought things like commercial-off-the-shelf UAVs for companies within 15 months. The service bought loitering munitions in about 18 months, Rainey said, and set up a directed requirement and put proliferated low-earth orbit capability in its Arctic Brigade in 60 days.

“I don’t want to overstate it, we haven’t totally solved the problem. But we’ve demonstrated the ability to see something happen rapidly, get a requirement written, acquisition process, and turn that into something in a real formation,” Rainey said.

The Army already has the tools in its acquisition playbook to get units what they believe they need, rotating brigades through the deployment cycle with the transforming-in-contact principle in mind, according to Doug Bush, the service’s acquisition chief.

The service designated three brigades to take new capabilities and try them in operational environments at scale. The third and latest brigade is in the midst of its turn at the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center.

“For example, on these first two rounds, it’s largely been taking things we were already doing and kind of focusing them in,” Bush told Defense News. “It’s buy-try-decide,” a method already in practice with the Army’s acquisition shop, “but at a larger scale,” he noted. “Now it’s an entire brigade, not like one platoon trying something.”

The focus on commercial technologies, like drones, that the service can get more quickly using different authorities outside of the regular defense acquisition process is “one of the things that I hope makes transforming in contact more successful,” Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the Center for a New American Security’s defense program, told Defense News. “The big question is, how they go from these few units that have been chosen as sort of the experimenters to actually fielding at scale.”

One idea coming from the initiative is that the Army doesn’t necessarily have to field standard sets of capabilities across all Army brigades over a set number of years, Camarillo, the Army under secretary, noted.

“I think there has been a revolution in our thinking about that over the last few years, in recognizing that it’s okay for different brigades to have some equipment that’s different from what’s fielded in the past, and also different equipment from other brigades,” Camarillo said.

The other shift in thinking, he added, is recognizing that some capabilities can be treated almost like consumables. “We don’t need to worry about buying and procuring over multiple years and sustaining it because we know that it’s going to be replaced very quickly over time. UAVs and tactical UAVs are a good example of that,” he said.

George certainly isn’t the first Army chief to try and bend the service acquisition bureaucracy into shape for modern conflicts, so only time will tell what ends up sticking. For Pettyjohn, one of the questions to watch is whether the experiment of having the faraway tactical edge dictate improvements can cement itself in the processes at home. “I don’t know if they’ve totally closed those loops,” she said.

In July, Avio signed with Raytheon to develop “critical solid rocket motors for defense applications,” as well as partnering with the U.S. Army “for the development and fast-prototyping of a solid rocket motor for surface-to-air applications.”

The demand in the U.S. for Avio’s wares and know-how reflects the demand for rocket motors driven by conflicts around the world as well as a narrowing in supply options following the 2018 purchase of Orbital ATK by Northrop Grumman.

Avio is working on opening a U.S. production site, but will start out by working on its new American workload at its Colleferro site in Italy.

“Today we manufacture 200-300 rocket motors a year at Colleferro and can triple that in 4-5 years on present commitments,” Avio CEO Giulio Ranzo told Defense News.

Avio already works on the propulsion and other components for the Aster 30 missile, as well as solid-propellant rocket motor of the new CAMM-ER air defense missile, while its core business is space, putting 120 satellites into orbit in the last 12 years thanks to 24 launches of its Vega launcher.

Ranzo said approximately two more years would be needed for Avio to qualify Solid Rocket Motor (SRM) products at its Colleferro site as per recent U.S. contracts. The approach would however be faster and safer than waiting for the new facility in the U.S. to start its qualification phase ahead of volume manufacturing, he added.

“U.S. officials have said production in the U.S. would be the ideal, but they understand that takes time. Establishing new capacity cannot be done in months,” he said.

“There are plenty of startups trying to enter this market, but this requires decades of experience in production at scale and a large and authorized site to handle explosives” he added.

Few details have emerged about the two U.S. deals, but Ranzo said, “We have just worked on the new CAMM-ER missile which means we have fresh technical knowledge. Most equivalent systems in the U.S. date to the 1980s.”

Avio set up a U.S. subsidiary, Avio USA, in 2022, appointing as CEO James Syring, a retired U.S. Navy vice admiral and former director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.

Syring told Defense News, “There has been a consolidation of the industrial base, essentially leaving Northrop Grumman and Aerojet as the sole SRM manufacturers, but even before that there has been a longstanding capacity shortfall for the production of rocket motors and missiles vs current demand.”

He added, “This is not a new thing. You talk to customers and prime contractors and they say they would order double if they could. The ongoing conflicts have exacerbated the situation.”

Syring said the company’s expansion aims to top up lagging U.S. production capacity as opposed to capturing market share there.

“We hear ‘Buy American’ a lot, and that is why we are working to establish by a sizeable U.S. factory presence to serve all customers,” Syring said.

He added, “The Department of Defense has been vocal about the need to leverage international production capabilities, given the maxed out supply base. The DoD has been supportive of us getting established.”

As well as capacity, Avio also offered innovations, according to Syring. “Avio has innovative technology and capabilities for booster cases, thermal protections and nozzle manufacturing that no U.S. rocket motor supplier has.”

The defense technology company, based in California, debuted two versions of the drone Thursday. The first is a baseline model able to perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations, known in the military as ISR. The other is Bolt-M, a version of the drone that acts as a munition.

This second model of the drone is under contract with the Marine Corps on its Organic Precision Fires-Light program, trying to deliver loitering munitions small enough for troops to stash in a rucksack. Aerovironment and Teledyne FLIR are also competing for the program, worth up to $249 million.

Anduril would not share further details on the contract, including the number of units ordered or dollar amount. A Pentagon notice from April said the deal came with a floor of around $6.5 million and was for an indefinite delivery and quantity of systems.

“We’re looking at the next six months for the immediate deliveries that we have,” said Chris Brose, Anduril’s head of strategy. Brose said further sales will depend on direction from the Marine Corps, which is testing several systems now and will decide on a purchasing plan this fiscal year, but that he hopes Bolt can also compete for Army contracts.

The Organic Precision Fires contract is one example of the U.S. military trying to bring online the kind of small drones changing how wars are fought around the world. In particular, the war in Ukraine has been a sandbox for soldiers testing and deploying such drones in high numbers — either to scout artillery targets or directly attack them with small warheads. American drone firms, including Anduril, have sent their systems to Ukraine and kept in close contact with its military to apply lessons from the war.

Like many of the firm’s offerings, Bolt has some level of autonomy. The drone uses Anduril’s Lattice software, and in a release the firm said troops can operate the drone with a touchscreen — picking targets, how far the drone should stay away from them and then what angle it should use to attack. The ability to perform such simple tasks on its own allows troops the freedom to multitask rather than piloting the drones the whole time.

Rather than opt for a fixed wing model, Anduril built the drone as a quadcopter, able to take off and land vertically. Troops can unpack and fly Bolt in less than five minutes, the firm said. According to the announcement, it can stay airborne for 40 minutes and has a range of about 12.5 miles.

The drone can carry a payload of up to three pounds, and can shift between warheads intended to strike personnel and equipment, designed in partnership with Kraken Kinetics, based in North Carolina.

“When we say target, we’re talking targets in all domains. Obviously the mind immediately goes to striking targets on land, but we also see counter-maritime applications” and counter-air targets as well, Brose said.

The survey found that the “NATO dividend” is working best for dual-use companies that are gaining traction from membership in the alliance to grow at a faster pace than pure defense groups.

Significantly, the survey revealed that many of the industry’s established companies, including the Finnish state controlled defense group Patria, are scaling up investments in the face of expanding their international reach to take advantage of NATO-sphere partnerships and contract opportunities.

Dual-use companies offering solutions for both civil and military use are not just experiencing rapid growth, but are also attracting indigenous and international investors, said Jakob Sandell, Tesi’s research director.

“Finland’s oldest defense companies date from the 1800s, yet as a whole the industry is still young but developing quite rapidly now. New companies are being established at a higher rate and their growth figures are impressive,” Sandell said.

In first, F-35s land on Finnish highway to drill for future wars

The Tesi survey identified 368 companies operating in the indigenous defense sector, of which 144 were designated as “fast-growing startups and growth companies.”

Over one-third of Finnish companies offering dual-use products (DUPs) have venture capital and private equity investors as owners, the survey noted. Venture capital investors are currently the single biggest investor group in DUP companies. The growth capital needs in those firms has risen in line with investor interest and a boom in export licenses and sales.

New capital is required to ensure dual-use companies can meet increasing demand for products, orders and the wider opportunities presented by Finland’s membership of NATO, said Keith Bonnici, investment director at Tesi.

“Testimony to the country’s competitiveness in the defense industry generally is that Finnish companies include the world’s largest defense contractors amongst their customers, as well as NATO countries’ defense forces,” Bonnici said.

Some of Finland’s more established defense-only companies, the Tesi survey found, are producing moderate but positive growth albeit susceptible to weak profitability.

“It’s more difficult for companies focused entirely on defense materials and technology … to attract investments. Many investors are bound by financing agreements that may prohibit investing in technologies used for war purposes. This limitation does not apply to companies offering dual-purpose solutions since they operate with a specific commercial purpose,” said Bonnici.

Finland’s membership in NATO has opened the door to a “vast new array” of projects and commercial opportunities for startups like Varjo Oy, a company offering virtual- and mixed-reality solutions for flight training applications

“NATO membership has made a positive impact on Varjo’s operations. It has opened doors that were once largely closed to doing business with NATO countries in Europe, the United States and beyond,” said Varjo’s chief executive Timo Toikkanen.

Varjo opened a new secure manufacturing facility near Helsinki in August to bolster production and delivery of high-resolution, extended-reality (XR) solutions that are used in defense training and simulation, a niche market the company forecasts will be worth $900 million by 2027.

The U.S. Air Force and Navy currently use Varjo XR headsets in their virtual training programs, with additional prototypes slates for the air service for evaluation.

The NATO dividend is also lifting orders for Finland’s mature defense groups like Patria, which continues to deliver Patria 6x6 armored vehicles to the Finnish Defense Forces (FDF) as part of Finland’s commitment to strengthening its land forces in support of deeper collaboration with the alliance.

The FDF’s Logistics Command Unit signed an agreement to purchase 91 6x6 armored personnel carriers (APCs), with equipment, from Patria in 2023.

The 2023 deal included an option to procure an additional 70 six-wheeled vehicles. The FDF, which exercised its option to purchase 41 additional Patria APCs in January 2024, is now utilizing that right to acquire the remaining 29 vehicles. These are slated to be delivered by year-end 2025.

The Patria 6x6 APC procurement is linked to the European Common Armoured Vehicle System (CAVS) joint development program partnered by Finland, Latvia, Sweden, and Germany.

The landscape for growth and contracts among native defense companies has substantially improved due to Finland’s ambitious capital spending commitments to the NATO alliance. Finland’s defense budget will rise by 12% to a record $7.3 billion in 2025. The increase in capital spending is $550 million above Finland’s defense budget in 2024.

The acquisition of fighter jets and armored vehicles from Patria are among the priciest items in the 2025 budget, which also includes spending of $80 million towards Finland’s NATO contribution.

The increased level of funding is earmarked to help establish an alliance command structure in Finland and enable land forces to be stationed as part of the reinforcement of the NATO’s eastern flank along Finland’s 833-mile border with Russia.

Rafael officials unveiled the upgrade in a briefing here last week held ahead of the AUSA arms exhibition in Washington next week, where the company will exhibit its wares.

At the briefing marketing executive Ehud Nir showed a video of the system undergoing live-fire testing, with a countermeasure destroying a drone hurtling toward a vehicle’s turret from high above.

The company declined to specify how the upgrade works or when the capability was first introduced on Trophy, saying only the system had undergone numerous development cycles since first being fielded more than ten years ago.

The top-attack capability is available by way of a software upgrade to existing Trophy installations, according to Rafael.

Rafael inks news deal to put Trophy system on UK’s Challenger 3 tanks

Trophy is a defensive system equipped with so-called soft defense measures, such as electronic warfare, and an active defense system that includes physical interceptors destroying incoming projectiles before impact with a vehicle’s body.

It consists of a number of sensors and a radar with four antenna panels mounted around the vehicle. The interception process engages only if the system detects that a threat will damage the vehicle.

The system is in use on the Israeli Merkava Mark 3 and 4 tanks and the Israeli Namer armored personnel carrier. Trophy is also found on American Abrams tanks and has been tested on Stryker APCs and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. In February 2021 Rafael signed a deal with Germany to equip the country’s Leopard 2 tanks.

Rafael claims a 90% effectiveness rate for Trophy.

Editors note: This story was updated on Oct. 8 to correct an editing error in a reference to Trophy maker Rafael.

The group, known as Star Blizzard to cyberespionage experts, targeted its victims with emails that appeared to come from a trusted source — a tactic known as spear phishing. In fact, the emails sought access to the victims’ internal systems, as a way to steal information and disrupt their activities.

Star Blizzard's actions were persistent and sophisticated, according to Microsoft, and the group often did detailed research on its targets before launching an attack. Star Blizzard also went after civil society groups, U.S. companies, American military contractors and the Department of Energy, which oversees many nuclear programs, the company said.

North Korean charged in cyberattacks on US bases, defense firms

On Thursday, a U.S. court unsealed documents authorizing Microsoft and the Department of Justice to seize more than 100 website domain names associated with Star Blizzard. That action came after a lawsuit was filed against the network by Microsoft and the NGO-Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a nonprofit tech organization that investigated Star Blizzard.

Authorities haven't gone into details about Star Blizzard's effectiveness but said they expect Russia to keep deploying hacking and cyberattacks against the U.S. and its allies.

“The Russian government ran this scheme to steal Americans’ sensitive information, using seemingly legitimate email accounts to trick victims into revealing account credentials,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in announcing the U.S. actions against Star Blizzard. “With the continued support of our private sector partners, we will be relentless in exposing Russian actors and cybercriminals and depriving them of the tools of their illicit trade.”

Star Blizzard has been linked to Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. Last year, British authorities accused the group of mounting a yearslong cyberespionage campaign against U.K. lawmakers. Microsoft said it has been tracking the group’s activities since 2017.

Microsoft said it observed Star Blizzard attempt dozens of hacking efforts targeting 30 different groups since January 2023. The tech giant's cybersecurity experts say Star Blizzard has proven to be especially elusive.

“Star Blizzard’s ability to adapt and obfuscate its identity presents a continuing challenge for cybersecurity professionals,” the company wrote in a report on its findings.

U.S. authorities charged two Russian men last year in connection with Star Blizzard's past actions. Both are believed to be in Russia.

Along with American targets, Star Blizzard went after people and groups throughout Europe and in other NATO countries. Many had supported Ukraine following Russia's invasion.

A message left with the Russian Embassy in Washington was not immediately returned Thursday.

The office is part of Europe’s defense industrial strategy adopted in March, and one role will be connecting the bloc’s startups and innovators with Ukraine’s defense industry and armed forces, the European Commission said in a statement on Friday. The office also aims to strengthen Ukraine’s integration into the European defense-equipment market.

The office may help Ukrainian defense firms and startups gain access to EU funding as they develop military technology to help the country fight off Russia’s invasion, with financing one of the main hurdles to ramping up Ukraine’s weapon production. For EU defense firms and startups, the hub in Kyiv may help them tap into Ukraine’s battlefield experience and find partners in a country at the cutting edge of military drone development.

Ukraine has become a world leader in drone technology, with annual production capacity of up to 3 million drones, the country’s Minister of Defence Rustem Umerov said in a Sept. 20 post on Facebook, on the occasion of the innovation office opening.

European drone makers haven’t waited for the EU office to establish their footprint in Ukraine, with Latvia’s Atlas Aerospace setting up an R&D office in Kyiv last year and Germany’s Quantum Systems opening a factory and a development hub in the country in April.

Ukraine has more than 1,100 innovators in defense technology, including more than 500 working on unmanned aerial vehicles, more than 160 developers of robots, at least 150 firms working on AI applications and more than 110 on electronic-warfare tools, according to Brave1, a defense-tech collaboration platform set up by the Ukrainian government.

The country is holding a defense-tech investment summit in Kyiv later this week to court international investors, bringing together officials, military and manufacturers. The summit is probably one of the few such events to advertise the availability of “safe and fully equipped shelters” available across the city to ensure the well-being of attendees, as the Ukrainian capital continues to face a threat of Russian missile attacks.

The EU in December already opened an office in Kyiv for its research and innovation program Horizon Europe, which at that time had been funding more than 120 projects in Ukraine.

Separately, Denmark on Monday announced plans to set up a defense-industry hub in Kyiv, saying that will strengthen the opportunity for Danish companies to cooperate more directly with Ukraine’s defense firms. The hub is expected to be up and running before the end of the year, the Danish Defence Ministry said in a statement.

“The situation in Ukraine clearly shows that wars are not only won on the battlefield, but to a large extent also in industry,” Danish Minister for Industry and Business Morten Bødskov was quoted as saying in the statement. “With the new hub, we are laying the stepping stones for new development cooperation and increased trade, so that Denmark can continue to contribute to Ukraine’s fight for freedom.”

Meanwhile, Denmark placed an order with Rheinmetall for 16 of the company’s Skyranger 30 mobile air-defense turrets and ammunition for more than €100 million ($112 million). The turrets are scheduled for delivery in 2027 and 2028, with additional vehicle equipment for an 8-wheeled platform that will be used by the Danish armed forces, the company said in a statement on Monday.

The Skyranger turret with its 30mm revolver cannon and airburst munitions is “particularly suitable” to counter drones, according to Rheinmetall. The Danish order follows a first purchase by Austria, with Germany’s Bundeswehr also buying the system, the company said. For the Bundeswehr, the Skyranger will take the role previously filled by the Gepard air-defense systems, which had already been taken out of the Germany inventory before being sent to Ukraine.

Commercial use of space now dwarfs the military, with thousands of new satellites joining potential menaces such as Russia’s roving Luch Olymp inspector satellite. Defense firms including Safran and space-data specialists such as True Anomaly and Vyoma see an opportunity to help defense departments adapt to the ever-growing volume of extraterrestrial activity, they said at an industry summit in Paris last week.

The number of active satellites in orbit has more than tripled in just four years, according to European Space Agency data. Most of the new space activity is happening in low Earth orbit, where agile spacecraft zip around at 27,500 kilometers per hour, while much of the surveillance by Western militaries is built on systems adapted to decades of tracking relatively static geostationary orbits.

“Space is becoming more and more challenged, more and more competitive, and we have to prepare for problems in the future,” Gen. Philippe Adam, the head of French Space Command, said at the Space Defense & Security Summit on Sept. 17.

In response, France’s Safran is adding ground stations to track satellite radio emissions, German firm Vyoma expects to launch its first telescope into low Earth orbit next year for visual reconnaissance, while Colorado-based True Anomaly in April won a U.S. Space Force contract for a maneuvering satellite that can take a close look at potential adversaries in various orbits.

Governments spent $58.4 billion on space defense and security in 2023, with $40.2 billion contracted to industry, according to industry consultant Novaspace, which organized the summit. Spending included $4 billion for space-domain awareness.

Space is “more and more congested and contested,” said Maj. Gen. Brian W. Gibson, director for plans and policy at U.S. Space Command. “It’s important for all of us, like any other domain, to make sure we don’t lose sight of our military responsibilities for protection and defense.”

Earth has around 10,200 active satellites in orbit, from around 3,000 in September 2020, according to an ESA count, with companies including SpaceX and Amazon planning many more. That’s in addition to more than 40,000 pieces of space debris circling Earth big enough to blast apart your typical satellite.

U.S. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said last week space-domain awareness and counter-space capabilities are critical needs that require more resources in fiscal 2026, while the head of U.S. Space Command Gen. Stephen Whiting said Wednesday that current space tracking is insufficient for future conflict with countries fielding advanced space capabilities.

The U.S. is the biggest spender on space defense and security with $38.9 billion, followed by China and Russia, and France trails in fourth place with $1.3 billion, Novaspace says. Yet whereas defense dominated the first three decades of the Space Age, military payloads now make up a fraction of the total, according to the ESA data.

The European Union expects 50,000 more satellites to be launched in the next decade, mainly into low Earth orbit, or LEO, as cheaper rockets and the development of nanosatellites have made space accessible even to startup firms and universities. That only heightens the challenge of tracking space traffic and spotting bad actors, military leaders at the summit said.

The lack of a full picture of space and the absence of regulation create a “really, really high” probability of miscalculations that could potentially lead to crisis or even war, said Maj. Gen. Isaac Crespo Zaragoza, chief of staff of Spain’s Space Command. He said developing some degree of space awareness is a priority for the service.

“We have no map of space, it’s a drama for the military,” said Col. Ludovic Monnerat, head of space domain for the Swiss Armed Forces.

There’s so little available space-awareness data and so much demand that the market exceeds supply, according to Vyoma CEO Stefan Frey. His company will initially focus on tracking objects for military customers, before expanding beyond defense as its fleet grows to 10 or 12 satellites, Frey told Defense News.

The “new, very dynamic world” of agile satellites no longer allows for planning to take days, and the amount of unpredictable debris in orbit means the latency of observations needs to be reduced dramatically, Frey said. Vyoma will be able to spot most LEO objects every 45 minutes once its constellation is in place, according to the CEO, who said European militaries right now might be receiving observations every four to eight hours.

Space awareness is key to security and stability, and “clearly an area that needs to be invested in,” according to True Anomaly CEO Even Rogers. He expects a future where optical, radio and radar data from space and on the ground is fused into a “rapid, real-time picture of the environment so that operators can make good decisions.”

The challenge of low Earth orbit is the fast speed at which objects move, meaning reaction times of even two hours might be too slow, compared to maneuvers in geostationary orbit that might be planned days in advance, said Philippe de Mijolla, Safran vice-president of sales and marketing for satellite communications and space awareness.

Safran is expanding its network of ground-based radio antennas tracking geostationary objects to add data on low Earth orbits, the executive told Defense News. The company has been gathering experimental LEO data for nearly two months, and expects to start selling the data as part its WeTrack service early next year, he said.

Safran is growing the tracking network to 125 stations from 94, spread across France, the U.S., Thailand and Australia, though de Mijolla said he’ll happily ask his board to fund additional antennas if demand is there.

Militaries have to work with civilian and commercial operators to keep track of it all, according to Adam. “Their concern about security and safety is exactly the same as ours,” the general said. “Civilian or commercial integration is an essential part of our discussions right now.”

Civilian operators require better space-domain awareness to call out unacceptable behavior in orbit, from persistent jamming to a cyberattack or a close approach, said Rebecca Cowen-Hirsch, head of government strategy and policy at commercial operator Viasat, which faced of a cyberattack by Russia in February 2022 just before the invasion of Ukraine.

Switzerland’s Monnerat said space needs rules of behavior, and those endangering functionality and safety of orbits should be named and shamed. Safran’s de Mijolla said the ability to attribute hostile actions in space will be an active deterrent that can hopefully prevent conflict there, “something we all want to avoid.”

Governments already rely on industry for space awareness and response, with the U.S. awarding contracts to True Anomaly and Rocket Lab USA in April for rendezvous and proximity operations. Safran provides its radio-frequency monitoring data to countries including France, the U.S. and Switzerland.

France last week turned to local nanosatellite builder U-Space as a partner for two satellites in low Earth orbit, one to provide detailed data on nearby objects and another able to target them. That follows a contract for France’s Hemeria to build the Yoda patroller satellite for geostationary orbit. “We need to be up there to see what’s happening,” Adam said.

Orbital threats include multiple rendezvous and proximity operations, not only by Russia’s Luch Olymp, but also others, said Philippe Rosius, head of the Galileo Security Monitoring Centre within the EU Agency for the Space Programme. And there’s a daily threat of natural or man-made debris in space that threatens satellites, he said.

China and Russia are able to deploy anti-satellite weapons, while India and others have the capacity, Rosius said. Russia’s test in 2021 using a missile to destroy one of its own satellites generated more than 1,500 pieces of trackable orbital junk that may remain in orbit for decades, according to U.S. Space Command.

Kinetic weapons are the most dangerous and risk creating an unsustainable space environment, which is why the U.S. and some its allies have committed to not testing them there, said Rogers at True Anomaly. “You can’t win so well that you screw up the domain for future generations.” Adam said France wants to avoid putting kinetic weapons in space that would risk creating debris.

The EU in March presented the bloc’s first-ever strategy to protect its space assets, highlighting a need for near-real time monitoring and better capability to identify and attribute threats, citing the “highly political” nature of attributing a menace to a third country and deciding on a response.

“This is really key, to understand these threats, before being able to mitigate them and to take actions to continue operating in space in a safe and secure manner,” Rosius said. “Threats against the space system and the space environment will not cease, and will increase in the coming years. So we need to be ready to continue protecting our critical infrastructure.”

MDA director Lt. Gen. Heath Collins revealed earlier this summer that the agency would soon choose between Raytheon and Northrop who were competing to design the Glide Phase Interceptor, or GPI.

Lockheed Martin was one of three original companies picked to work on design concepts for GPI in November 2021 but by June 2022, MDA had chosen to proceed with only Northrop and Raytheon.

MDA made the decision in favor of Northrop together with the Japanese government, which is signed on to co-develop the capability.

The company’s win comes after it recently lost another big MDA competition to develop the Next-Generation Interceptor that will replace interceptors that make up the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System. That system is designed to defend the continental U.S. from intercontinental ballistic missile threats from North Korea and Iran. Lockheed Martin was chosen earlier this year in another early downselect.

The decision to move to just a single vendor prior to reaching preliminary design review is out of the ordinary, but Collins told Defense News last month that MDA, like the rest of the Defense Department, had “to make really tough prioritization and resource-informed decisions. ... We were no exception, so we had to take a look at how we balance and make decisions on the capability we bring.”

MDA will “have to assess the risk of that design, any corrective actions ... or mitigation activities we want to take,” Collins said, discussing next steps after MDA chooses a single vendor. “And then we would re-baseline the program based on that with an updated, independent cost estimate.”

Northrop Grumman said in a statement that during the next phase of GPI development, it will continue to refine its preliminary design intended to fire from the U.S. Navy’s Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense destroyers and Aegis Ashore using the standard Vertical Launch System.

The company will move quickly by using digital engineering. It plans to demonstrate system performance in hypersonic environments before the preliminary design review and complete flight experiments early, according to the statement.

“Today’s decision represents a turning point for hypersonic glide phase defense,” Collins, the MDA director, said in the statement.

While the U.S. has some capability to track and counter hypersonic threats regionally in the terminal phase, the ability to defeat hypersonic missile threats during the glide phase of flight is difficult because of the nature of a hypersonic missile’s ability to maneuver in unpredictable ways at high speeds.

But while GPI is a necessary capability, fielding is not planned until the 2035 timeframe. Tom Karako, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that “something else is going to be needed in the meantime — a future terminal interceptor of some kind.”

Congress wants MDA to move more quickly. Lawmakers mandated in the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act that the agency reach full operational capability by the end of 2032 and provide no fewer than 12 GPIs for tests by the end of 2029.

Several companies were competing to build the second increment of the service’s Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport (S-MET), robot, including General Dynamics Land Systems, an Anduril and Hanwha team, and Teledyne FLIR.

GDLS won the first contracts in 2019 and 2020 to build the first increment of the vehicle.

Under the newest contract, American Rheinmetall and HDT will each build eight prototypes for a combined total of $22 million, the service said in a statement.

“S-MET Increment II addresses capability gaps associated with excessive physical burdens, recharging batteries during continuous operations, and reducing sustainment burden for semi-independent operations,” Kyle Bruner, the Army’s project manager for force projection within the Program Executive Office Combat Support & Combat Service Support, said in the statement.

Using the robot also “reduces Soldier load and enhances small unit combat effectiveness by reducing fatigue and injury caused by excessive physical loads, shifting the burden to the robotic platform,” he added.

The first increment of S-MET is a radio-controlled, eight-wheeled platform that can carry various payloads and generate power for electronic systems. While the first increment is capable of carrying 1,000 lbs, the Army’s goal for the second increment is to double the weight the robot can carry, the service said.

Additionally, the second increment should have higher exportable power to handle unmanned aircraft systems, run more quietly and have a dismounted wireless mesh communication network integrated into the system.

The system is also required to be modular and open in order to upgrade it easily and cost-effectively, the Army stated.

The service plans to award a production contract for S-MET Increment II following the prototyping phase and developmental testing in late fiscal year 2027. The service’s current plan is to buy up to 2,195 systems.

The Army is pursuing a different robotic combat vehicle for heavy maneuver forces, but the S-MET vehicle could be the more common robot of choice for lighter formations, the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Ground Combat Systems, Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, said in an interview in late 2023.

S-MET “is a very capable, small platform, and we’re seeing a lot of value with experimentation,” Dean said.

The Swedish company, which plans to break ground by the end of the year, said it will use the facility for final assembly and integration of shoulder-fired munitions and precision fire systems.

Manufacturing work will begin in early 2026, according to a company statement.

“We are making a long-term commitment not only to the U.S. defense industrial base, but to the local community as well,” Erik Smith, president and CEO of Saab in the U.S., said. “Saab plays a positive role in the communities where we live and work, creating jobs and investing in the local community, and we look forward to joining the Grayling community.”

The Michigan site, chosen from six possible locations, presented the “most efficient way to execute the work that we have to get done,” Smith told Defense News. The 388-acre plot is located near the largest Army National Guard training base in the country, and the region also has an experienced workforce needed for the type of production.

Smith first told Defense News of Saab’s plans to grow its footprint in the U.S. with a new facility focused on manufacturing ground combat weapons and missile systems in March. He noted six states were in the running.

The new site is part of a global manufacturing push by the company to quadruple its global capacity to produce its ground combat weapons, he said.

“As this facility ramps up, what you will see is a combination of products that Saab is very well known for and some new products that really haven’t hit the market yet.”

The new facility will create at least 70 jobs, the company statement notes. There is potential to hire even more employees as the facility gets up and running, according to Smith.

The site size “allows for expansion for when we need it,” Smith said. “I do envision engineering capacity there as well as the business evolves,” he added, but noted, “right now we are pretty laser focused on manufacturing capacity.”

The facility will feature advanced manufacturing capability and an innovation center to enhance munitions production capacity stateside, according to Smith. He also said it will support the production of components for the Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb, or GLSDB, system and close combat weapons.

Saab joins a wide variety of defense manufacturers in Michigan, a state with a long legacy of weapons production.

“We built the arsenal of democracy to win WWII and will keep rolling up our sleeves to protect our national defense,” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said in the company statement. “We are building on our economic momentum and strong reputation as a leader in advanced manufacturing.”

Saab will now have 10 facilities operating in the U.S. Other locations include West Lafayette, Indiana, for aerospace advanced manufacturing; Syracuse, New York, for radar and sensor systems; and Cranston, Rhode Island, and Quincy, Massachusetts, for autonomous and undersea systems.

The facility will follow a similar model to what Saab did with its West Lafayette site, Smith told Defense News. In that case, the first engineering and manufacturing development fuselages were built in Sweden, then, in parallel, Saab built the Indiana plant with high-end technology to produce the fuselages beginning with low-rate initial production.