US Marine Corps wants to further speed up Force Design overhaul plans

WASHINGTON — The presumed future commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps wants to accelerate the service’s implementation of its Force Design 2030 modernization effort.

Indeed, acceleration was the prevailing theme at this week’s Modern Day Marine conference, with leaders discussing ways to push the boundaries of defense funds, the federal acquisition process and relationships with industry to overhaul the force as quickly as possible. The effort is part of a move to deter China from starting a fight, but would also help the U.S. enter any battle with a decisive advantage, they say.

“I am incredibly proud to tell you today that we are well ahead of where we thought was even possible back in 2019,” Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David Berger told the crowd June 27, referring to the year he was sworn in as commandant and started planning the generational change.

But, he said, “we need to be ahead of our competitors, we need to be ahead of where we are right now.”

Berger will relinquish command of the Corps on July 10, and current Assistant Commandant Gen. Eric Smith will take over as acting commandant. The Biden administration nominated Smith to serve as the next service chief, but lawmakers have not yet confirmed him for the position due to a hold on all military nominations.

“Force Design is on track. We need to accelerate those areas where we can,” Smith said during his hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee.

If given a larger budget, Smith added, “I’m committed to putting that to things that we are already doing: accelerating being more lethal, accelerating being even more ready … because we don’t know when the fight starts.”

The commands he’ll lead say they heard the message loud and clear.

“I think Gen. Eric Smith is going to come in and we’re going to really press the accelerator,” Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, the deputy commandant for combat development and integration, said in a June 28 panel discussion.

He told Defense News afterward that he wants to accelerate the development and fielding of sensors and weapons that can find, track and kill enemy targets; surface connectors and other means of transporting Marines and supplies in and around the Pacific theater; and advances in logistics and sustainment.

Lt. Gen. Christopher Mahoney, the deputy commandant for programs and resources, told Defense News he and his team are doing what they can on the money side.

“Just about every program that is directly associated with the leading edge of Force Design, we are trying to — last year was accelerate, this year is accelerate and fortify,” he said, which means not only moving faster but ensuring the whole government and industry participants can support fielding new technologies at scale.

Mahoney cited NMESIS — the Navy/Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System — which is a long-range anti-ship missile launcher affixed to the back of an unmanned truck, noting the program is doing well in its cost, schedule and performance, and Marines would receive the technology by the third quarter of this year.

But he would like to field more systems — and faster. That doesn’t just require more money, he said, but also changes to contract agreements and the ability of industrial base partners to deliver their goods faster.

Mahoney expressed concern over “program saturation,” or the inability for production lines to keep pace despite the availability of funds. Still, he said, he’ll keep pushing on programs like the AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar, the Common Aviation Command and Control System small form factor, and the CH-53K heavy-lift helicopter, among others.

For Mahoney, the modernization push might have 2030 in its name, but he worries the intelligence community and other experts are talking of a potential conflict before then. “Earlier than that is much more consequential,” he said, so if a program can’t be developed and fielded by 2026 or 2027, “we immediately become bifurcated from a certain amount of relevance.”

For his part, Lt. Gen. Edward Banta, the deputy commandant for installations and logistics, said the Corps is considering alternative ideas like tension fabric structures for hangars or maintenance facilities, instead of more traditionally constructed buildings that would take longer to design and build.

He also said his command is trying to quicken the pace on determining which goods to pre-position, plus where and how many. His command also wants to use artificial intelligence to inform requirements and demand signals for spare parts and other supplies.

Lt. Gen. Matthew Glavy, the deputy commandant for information, wants to accelerate investments in connecting sources of data to those who could use it. The Marine Corps has data as well as the storage and computational power to support it, but still relies on industry for algorithms and analytics to make the most of that information.

“If we can connect all those things, we can move faster than the adversary,” Glavy said. He noted the aviation side had done well using the Common Aviation Command and Control System to gather and distribute data, but he wants to see advances for all warfighting functions, on the personnel side, and to support training and education.

How to move quicker

Though there are barriers to moving faster, leaders pointed to a few examples as models for how to do so.

During a June 27 panel, Brig. Gen. Stephen Lightfoot, the director of the Capabilities Development Directorate under Heckl’s command, said the Medium-Range Intercept Capability will provide the three Marine expeditionary forces with modern, ground-based air defense. The technology was specifically developed to counter Chinese investments in long-range missiles.

Lightfoot said the system, which pairs the Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar, the Common Aviation Command and Control System, and the Israeli Tamir interceptor missile, had consistently performed well in testing over the last four years and received additional funding from Congress to move faster.

Following the latest testing in September, where the Medium-Range Intercept Capability “defeated multiple targets with aggressive and relevant threat profiles,” the Marine Corps was able to sign off on a decision to field prototype systems. The fiscal 2024 budget request would support fielding three batteries over the next five years.

Stephen Bowdren, the program executive officer for land systems, said the fact that the Medium-Range Intercept Capability combines three known systems has helped it progress rapidly. The Israeli military has tested the Tamir missile thousands of times, he noted, “so why should I test that in a typical fashion over a year or two, when I’ve got all this test data available in Israel?”

The Marine Corps had to negotiate an agreement to use Israeli data, and work through a weapons evaluation board to accept the foreign data instead of conducting independent testing at home.

“These are the kinds of permissions we’re seeking, these are the kinds of steps we’re taking so that … we can move out quickly,” Bowdren said.

In-construction amphibious ship catches fire at Ingalls Shipbuilding

WASHINGTON — A fire broke out Thursday night in the amphibious assault ship Bougainville, which is still under construction at Ingalls Shipbuilding, the company confirmed, with several shipyard employees being treated for smoke inhalation.

Ingalls Shipbuilding fire and safety personnel responded to a call for a fire in the Bougainville superstructure, or the portion that rises above the flight deck level.

“The fire was extinguished and two shipbuilders were transported to the hospital for smoke inhalation and were released later in the evening. Four other shipbuilders were treated for smoke inhalation onsite. No additional injuries have been reported,” Kimberly Aguillard, an Ingalls Shipbuilding spokeswoman, told Defense News. “Our shipbuilders responded immediately and within a short amount of time the fire was extinguished. A full review of the events, including a detailed timeline, is under development.”

The cause of the fire remains under investigation, but initial findings indicate hot work was being performed nearby. Hot work can create sparks that can, as has been the case in previous shipboard fires, ignite flammable materials like rags, papers and oils.

Aguillard said the fire and smoke was contained to a small number of compartments.

“Initial indications are that damage is limited to the immediately impacted compartments and no damage to the remainder of the ship nor the shipyard was incurred,” she added.

Bougainville is the third America-class amphibious assault ship. Construction began in October 2018, and the ship is scheduled to launch from its land-based construction area into the water later this year. The ship was originally expected to deliver to the U.S. Navy in fiscal 2024, but service budget documents now show an October 2025 delivery date.

Ingalls Shipbuilding is a subsidiary of HII, which was ranked as the 17th largest defense company in the world in the Defense News Top 100, based on defense revenue.

Autonomy is here. DoD shouldn’t let it pass it by.

Hardly a day has gone by without news of Russia’s war of aggression since they invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Amidst the tragedy of the present war, we see glimmers of the future of war. A future that’s coming faster, not slower. A future we can’t afford to miss.

Uncrewed ships strike crewed ships. Uncrewed aircraft strike ground targets and other aircraft. Expendable platforms negate expensive capital platforms. Uncrewed assets coordinate in such a way that the sum of effects is greater than the parts. Commercial capabilities outmaneuver exquisite government programs.

Creativity matched with capacity overcomes capability. At the heart of it all is autonomy.

The Defense Department needs to get on board or risk being left behind. The commercial sector has invested around $200 billion in self-driving vehicles alone over the last decade on top of investments in air and maritime drones. During the 2022 Super Bowl, 500 coordinated drones performed at halftime, and in 2021, a Chinese company created an aerial light show with over 5,100 simultaneous drones. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense still has no autonomous program of record or commercial acquisition strategy set to deliver reliable, scaled autonomous platforms for our warfighters.

That said, there are signs of promise. In December 2020, I, Preston Dunlap, led the Department of the Air Force to achieve the first collaborative flight of an XQ-58 drone alongside an F-22 and F-35 while enabling the F-22 and F-35 to communicate with each other for the first time via a communications translator — all in less than a year. This opened eyes to what’s possible and paved the way for what is now known as collaborative combat aircraft.

The next year, in September 2021, the Navy established Task Force 59 to kick start the integration of maritime drones into the service’s Central Command fleet experiments. Since then, Task Force 59 has conducted well over 30,000 hours of testing and brought commercial companies closer to their operational customers while simultaneously collecting data undersea and on the surface throughout the region.

And in October 2022, Air Forces Central established Task Force 99 with a similar goal for the U.S. Central Command air domain, later followed by Task Force 39 for U.S. Army Central Command.

At the heart of this progress is software.

I, Stephen Wilson, backed the stand-up of Kessel Run to bring agile software to our air operations centers. As senior leaders in the Air Force, we both championed initiatives such as Platform One and Cloud One to deliver software at scale, not just for a single platform, but for the Space Force and Air Force enterprise as a whole through a development security operations — or DevSecOps — approach that mirrors best practices found in Silicon Valley.

These efforts became crucial in helping push the Department of Defense-wide software modernization initiative, which, together with the creation of the Chief Digital and AI Officer, have the potential to enable software and algorithmic deployment across the department.

These efforts are essential, but not sufficient. Operational capabilities must be delivered at scale.

The House Armed Services Committee’s version of the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act includes language to study enterprise software approaches and develop plans for investment in collaborative autonomous systems. We applaud the legislation’s recognition of the importance of autonomy, but we’d encourage Congress to take even further action now to deploy software and systems for our warfighters.

A good start would be the Autonomous Systems Adoption & Policy (ASAP) Act introduced by Congressmen Rob Wittman (R-Va.) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.). The bill would establish and resource a Joint Autonomy Office with the sole purpose of expediting development and delivery of autonomous systems.

If enacted and funded, the legislation has the potential to scale the early successes of initiatives like enterprise software, collaborative combat aircraft, and Central Command Task Force experimentation into programs or simply go direct to commercial procurement.

How quickly the Pentagon can adopt commercial best practices in the development of autonomous systems and the rapid deployment of those systems will likely be decisive in combat. We’ve seen this already in relatively small numbers in Ukraine. Now imagine integrating thousands or tens of thousands of autonomous aircraft, ground vehicles, submarines and ships. We’ve done it for Super Bowls and light shows. Why not for our military?

It’s time to scale autonomy and get tech in the hands of those who need it most.

Preston Dunlap is the founder of consulting and investing firm Arkenstone Ventures and an adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corp. He serves on autonomy company Applied Intuition’s federal board. He was the first chief technology officer and chief architect of the U.S. Space Force and Air Force and also served four defense secretaries, including as director of program analysis.

Retired Air Force Gen. Stephen Wilson is a senior fellow at the National Defense University and a member of autonomy company Applied Intuition’s federal board. He previously served as vice chief of staff of the Air Force and deputy commander of U.S. Strategic Command.

Pakistan gets lifeline from IMF with new $3 billion bailout

ISLAMABAD — The International Monetary Fund has agreed to provide $3 billion to Pakistan in badly needed relief to help bail out the impoverished country’s ailing economy.

The nine-month agreement must be approved by the IMF’s Executive Board, which is expected to make a final decision in mid-July, a top IMF official, Nathan Porter, said in a statement Thursday.

The announcement followed talks earlier this week between Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif and Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the IMF, who both suggested that the sides were close to reaching an agreement.

Pakistan unveils increased defense budget, IMF decries spending plan

Porter, the IMF’s mission chief to Islamabad, said Pakistan’s economy has faced several heavy blows recently, such as the devastating floods last summer that killed 1,739 people, caused $30 billion in damage and negatively impacted millions of Pakistanis. The country was also hit by an international commodity price spike in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Porter said despite the authorities’ efforts to reduce imports and the trade deficit, reserves have declined to very low levels and liquidity conditions in the power sector also remain acute.

“Given these challenges, the new arrangement would provide a policy anchor and a framework for financial support from multilateral and bilateral partners in the period ahead,” an IMF statement read.

Porter said over the past few days that Pakistani authorities had “taken decisive measures to bring policies more in line with the economic reform program supported by the International Monetary Fund,” including lawmakers passing a revised budget.

The proposed package is higher than what Pakistan was expecting as it awaited the release of a remaining tranche from a 2019 bailout of $6 billion that expired Friday. That deal was signed by Sharif’s predecessor, former Prime Minister Imran Khan.

There were uncertainties about what would happen after June, said Mohammad Sohail, who heads Topline Securities, a brokerage house in Pakistan. “Now this funding of $3 billion for nine months will definitely help restore some investors’ confidence,” Sohail said.

On Friday, Sharif tweeted that the arrangement will help strengthen Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves, enable the country to achieve economic stability and put it on the path of sustainable economic growth.

Sharif thanked the IMF for the new, stand-by arrangement as the deal is called. Later Friday, he expressed his gratitude to China, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates for their financial help over the past months. He said his government has prepared a master plan for economic revival.

Speaking in the eastern city of Lahore, Sharif also reiterated his criticism of Khan over violent opposition protests last month and blamed the former premier for the country’s economic turndown.

“If we fully implement our plan … we will achieve the target of a stable economy and become a prosperous country,” Sharif said.

Finance Minister Ishaq Dar also welcomed the agreement with the IMF.

Talks between Pakistan and the IMF had stalled in December after the global lender delayed the last crucial tranche of the previous bailout. The two sides were at odds over what the fund said was Islamabad’s unsatisfactory compliance with the bailout conditions.

T-7 Red Hawk trainer jet takes its first flight

The Air Force’s new T-7 Red Hawk training jet flew for the first time Wednesday in St. Louis, Missouri, the company said in a release.

Its flight marks the beginning of the T-7′s final development phase before Boeing starts producing military-ready jets. Red Hawks will replace the Air Force’s six-decade-old T-38 Talon trainers as the main platform that prepares American and foreign pilots to fly fighter and bomber aircraft.

Over the course of the hour-long trip from St. Louis Lambert International Airport, Maj. Bryce Turner, a test pilot with the 416th Test Squadron at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and Steve Schmidt, Boeing’s chief T-7 test pilot, gauged how smoothly the plane maneuvered and tested secondary systems like the auxiliary power supply, Boeing spokesperson Randy Jackson said.

The pair vetted how well the plane handled positive and negative g forces, as a pilot experiences when accelerating or flying upside down, and practiced in high-altitude airspace, Jackson said.

“The stable performance of the aircraft and its advanced cockpit and systems are game-changers for U.S. Air Force student pilots and instructors alike,” Turner said in the release.

As the first Air Force training jet designed in the 21st century, the T-7 offers students a digital cockpit, more realistic simulators and software that can be updated as real-world threats evolve.

The airframe that flew Wednesday is one of five test aircraft that will be delivered to the Air Force before it starts receiving fully finished jets at its schoolhouses. The Air Force plans to buy 351 Red Hawks starting in December 2025 under a $9.2 billion contract awarded in 2018.

But design problems with the escape system and ejection seat have set the production timeline back by multiple years.

Air Force officials now plan to decide in early 2025 whether to begin building operational jets, meaning the service would start receiving aircraft two years later than originally intended.

Some problems stem from an effort to make the jet more accessible to pilots of any race or sex. Earlier airframes were primarily designed to accommodate men based on body measurements from decades-old military studies. That means many women’s torsos or arms are too short to safely operate the jets or to eject.

The Air Force has said that testing showed T-7 pilots could be at high risk for concussions, unsafely speeding up when their parachutes open, or losing their visor. Further tests earlier this year aimed to resolve those concerns.

Jackson said a successful high-speed test in February laid the groundwork for future rounds to ensure the escape system is safe, but did not say whether specific issues remain.

Boeing claimed in the release that the T-7′s cockpit egress system is the “safest of any trainer.”

“This first flight with the Air Force represents our team’s commitment to delivering a new level of safety and training for fighter and bomber pilots,” said Evelyn Moore, Boeing’s T-7 program manager, in the release. “We remain focused on engineering ways to better prepare warfighters for changing mission demands and emerging threats.”

Meanwhile, T-38 maintenance issues have slowed the training pipeline amid a longstanding fighter pilot shortage.

Air Force Times reported in March that a private contractor’s delays in restoring the T-38′s J85 engines threatened to slow pilot production for at least another six months. The engine enterprise may not fully recover until April 2024, despite improvements in the supply of spare parts and repair rates, the service said.

“It’s an old engine. … There’s a lot of moving parts,” Air Education and Training Command boss Lt. Gen. Brian Robinson said Feb. 16. “But as a customer, I just want to produce pilots.”

Marines on target for active, Reserve recruiting and retention goals

WASHINGTON ― The Marine Corps will meet its recruiting goal for 2023, stands ahead of schedule for 2023 retention goals and already has reached more than a quarter of its retention goal for 2024.

And the service is developing a reenlistment smartphone application that would allow Marines to “sign the dotted line” again at the click of a button.

That work stands amid a multiyear struggle the rest of the military branches are facing in recruiting, ― though the Army also met its retention goal four months early, which was announced in early June.

The Marine announcements came Wednesday here at the Modern Day Marine Expo during a panel that featured the heads of recruiting, training, plans and the Reserve.

Maj. Gen. William Bowers, head of recruiting command, said, “Now, you’ll read out there that less than 10% of the youth are quote ‘propensed’ to serve.”

“We like to replace ‘propensed,’ that kind of points the finger at the youth for not wanting to join to inspired, which puts it back on us.”

New in 2023: Update on Marine recruiting and retention numbers coming

The numbers matter, but leaders said other factors have led to the rise in recruiting and retention success.

Maj. Gen. Roger Turner, head of Plans, Policies and Operations, said, “It’s really a culture shift in the Marine Corps, where maybe a few years ago there was a kind of ‘recruit and replace’ and that was the paradigm.”

“And now we’re more of a recruit, train and retain force. I think we’re changing that and that’s one of the biggest factors we’re seeing on retention success.”

As of June, the Corps has hit 110% of its 2023 retention goal, keeping 6,925 first-term Marines in uniform, 700 ahead of schedule.

The service reached 104% of its subsequent term retention goal, meaning Marines who’ve are on their second or greater enlistment term.

And 27% of the Marines eligible for reenlistment in 2024 already have signed up.

Those figures were provided by Michael Strobl, PhD, with Manpower & Reserve Affairs.

Strobl noted that a key move made by leadership included engaging commands throughout the Corps and setting retention at the top of their personnel priorities.

That involved having commanders sit down with Marines early in their enlistments and ask, “What will it take to keep you?” And then listening to them, Strobl said.

“That’s probably the single biggest contributor to our success,” Strobl said.

And even for those Marines who still didn’t want to stay on active duty, leaders found ways to encourage them to look harder at the Reserve.

And the Marine Corps Reserve is exceeding its own retention goals as well.

Lt. Gen. David Bellon, commander of Marine Forces Reserve, said Wednesday that 4th Marine Division is currently at 138% of its retention requirement already for 2023. The fiscal year concludes at the end of September.

A big hurdle for Marines looking to reenlist includes administrative hassles. A 20-document process could eat up a lot of time for those interested in staying in.

Through a commandant-directed retention initiative, the process has now shifted to a 24–36 hour process that’s seen a 72% increase in first-term, top tier reenlistments, officials said.

As part of the program, officials are seeking out top tier Marines, those who’ve met or exceeded major Marine and job-specific goals and display above-average scores and reviews compared with their peers and allowing them to reenlist up to two years before the end of their contract.

And they’re trying to move even faster by developing a smartphone application for reenlistment.

Lt. Gen. Kevin Iiams, head of Training and Education Command, said, “In a day and age when you can refinance your mortgage on your smartphone you should be able to reenlist on your smartphone.”

As the Corps hits those targets, it’s also seen a dramatic increase in the number of Marines volunteering for recruiting duty, a job historically avoided or seen as a hardship by many Marines.

Though the Corps is meeting its mission to recruit new Marines, demographic and generational hurdles have placed a greater emphasis on retaining experienced Marines beyond their first term.

Bowers laid out the numbers picture during the panel.

Among the 40 million in the millennial generation who were between the ages 17–24 as the United States was recruiting troops for the Global War on Terror, about 30% were qualified.

Currently, Generation Z has about 33 million in its population and only 23% are qualified for military service.

That’s meant a smaller pool to pull from, placing greater weight on retaining military members for all the branches.

But recruiting success, the Corps also met all its goals in 2022, has come despite the smaller pool and major obstacle such as a population less familiar with the military and less qualified than previous generations.

“We are the only service on track to make (recruiting/retention goals) this year,” Bowers said. “I can tell you that’s true, we’re going to make it and we’re on track to make it next year.”

But the pointy end of the spear, as military folks like to say, is the recruiter. And recruiter burnout has been an aspect of military life for generations.

Something different has been happening lately for those selected for Marine recruiting duty, though.

“We’re seeing 70% volunteers, that’s more than double in less than one year,” Bowers said.

The major general credits a couple of moves with the recruiter shift.

Historically a command screening team would look across the Corps and identify top-performing Marines and select them for recruiting duty, an important “B Billet,” that stands outside of their primary military occupational specialty. Other examples include drill instructor duty and embassy duty.

But if those top Marines didn’t like where they were going to be sent to recruit or simply didn’t want to be a recruiter, they often left the Corps when their current contract ended, Bowers said.

“So, we started the ‘recruit the recruiter program,’” Bowers said.

That meant that Marines who volunteered for recruiting duty got their pick of duty station, a bonus and their pick of their post-recruiting duty.

“Basically, a chance to shape the next eight years of your career,” Bowers said.

At the same time the Corps is taking a hard look at demographic shifts and where to find the best talent. They’re standing up recruiting stations in Austin, Texas, and Orlando, Florida, Bowers said.

“We’ve had a lot of volunteers for Austin, Texas,” he said.

Aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln suffers electrical fire in port

Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified the affected ship. It was the Abraham Lincoln.

WASHINGTON — Sailors from the crew of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln extinguished an electrical fire that broke out on the ship around 2 p.m. on June 28, according to the service.

Nonessential personnel were evacuated from the ship for a short period, but no one was injured during the event, Cmdr. Zach Harrell, a spokesman for Naval Air Forces, told Defense News.

According to a statement from Harrell, “the in-port emergency team aboard aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) responded to an electrical fire in the forward emergency diesel generator compartment.”

He said the fire was extinguished within about 10 minutes.

Harrell noted that no foul play is suspected, and an “assessment is underway to determine the extent of the damage to the ship.”

The ship was conducting planned maintenance, otherwise known as a planned incremental availability, while pier-side at Naval Air Station North Island when the fire occurred, Harrell said.

Pressed to prove value of amphibious ships, Marines seek to add drones

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy’s amphibious ships are as much of a Swiss Army knife as the Marine expeditionary units that deploy aboard them. They function as miniature aircraft carriers, launchers for small watercraft, and global transports for thousands of personnel and their accompanying vehicles and weapons.

But fears that these ships must do more to justify their sustainment costs are driving a new directive in the latest update to the Marine Corps’ strategy.

A June update to Force Design 2030 calls, in part, for a “holistic mothership experimentation campaign plan” that addresses how the Corps’ prized amphibious ships might house and launch unmanned aircraft and vessels, along with an undefined array of other warfighting technology.

“Amphibious warfare ships are the cornerstone of maritime crisis response, deterring adversaries, and building partnerships,” the document states. “In the future, amphibious warfare ships will offer even more capability, serving as ‘motherships’ for a variety of manned, unmanned, and human-machine teamed systems.”

By Oct. 1, the document directs, the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory will develop that “mothership experimentation” in order to investigate new gear configurations that further the service’s goals.

“Given the exponential growth of anti-access and area-denial capabilities, coupled with the increasing range of sensors, and expanding weapons-engagement zones, we will begin experimenting with amphibious platforms as motherships to distribute and extend the range of our capabilities,” the updated document explains. “These platforms will host a variety of manned, minimally-manned, and unmanned systems — air, surface, and subsurface — to sense and enable our forces with the aim of confounding adversaries and complicating their ability to target the joint force.”

Shon Brodie, director of the Corps’ Maritime Expeditionary Warfare Division, told Defense News this exploration of new missions and configurations for amphibious ships is in part an expansion of a longtime tradition. The amphibious transport dock Portland, for example, was used to recover the Artemis I mission’s Orion spacecraft from the Pacific Ocean following its successful NASA mission.

But he also acknowledged ongoing efforts of Marine Corps leadership to communicate why the service still needs the ships.

“By leaning into [the mothership concept], you’re demonstrating the increased value of the amphibious warfare ship,” Brodie said. “And you’re recognizing that you have to equip the force in it in a different way, in a modern way.”

‘Hiding in plain sight’

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger has said the service needs no fewer than 31 amphibious ships, a statement members of the Expeditionary Warfare Division vigorously defended. That minimum requirement is down, under budget duress, from the 38 ships the service said it needed until 2019.

The last two Defense Department budget requests have pushed for the early decommissioning of several Whidbey Island-class dock landing ships, while throwing the brakes on plans to invest in new San Antonio-class amphibious transport docks to replace them. Rather than defending amphibious ships, the Navy has backed funding for newer ship classes and long-range weapons.

For its part, Shipbuilder HII in June 2022 demonstrated what a mothership role for amphibious shipping might look like when it launched, operated and then recovered a large-diameter unmanned underwater vehicle from the waterline-level well deck of a San Antonio-class amphibious ship.

“As the unmanned community examines the range and depth of support platforms that are out there, there’s a lot of assets that are hiding in plain sight that can be put to use now in their current form to support tests and demonstrations,” said Jim Strock, an independent consultant specializing in naval expeditionary capabilities and requirements, and the former director of the Marine Corps’ Seabasing Integration Division.

Strock supports the Corps’ pursuit of a mothership role for amphibious ships, but contends the service should increase the aperture. While amphibious vessels remain in high demand for training and deployments, which competes with experimentation needs, he noted the service also has access to a variety of expeditionary sea-basing ships built to serve as lily pads for launching missions and storing equipment.

“I would hope that senior leadership would be looking at innovative uses of alternative platforms to help compensate for shortfalls in amphibious ships in the near term,” Strock said.

The next steps in developing “mothership” tasks for amphibious ships involve reviewing literature on concepts and experimentation, then assessing how many Marines and sailors are needed onboard to monitor and operate additional systems, Brodie said. While drones of various kinds are the most likely add-ons to amphibious ships, Brodie noted, these additions are likely to prompt corresponding upgrades to make the platforms more survivable, more lethal and more self-sustaining.

“In a distributed environment, the more I can have that ship operate independently and not be dependent upon other assets, the better it is,” he said. “But then there’s the cost. It’s a balance. … You’re almost building an ecosystem. Anytime you make a change to a ship, it has a corresponding change to the whole system.”

Are cheap drones the answer to tension in the Taiwan Strait?

The more we learn about the war in Ukraine, the more we come to know that drones will play an increasingly important role on the modern battlefield. But how is the U.S. military thinking about what role these aircraft might play in future wars? When paired with modern sensors, could they offer an asymmetric advantage in future competitions?

To help answer these questions and many others, we spoke to Clint Hinote, a lieutenant general in the U.S. Air Force. For the last several years, Hinote has led a team of Air Force officers with the goal of solving the problem of projecting air power in the Pacific. Early in our conversation, Hinote summarized more than a decade’s worth of experiences in trying to fight against China’s military in the Western Pacific: “Not only were we losing the wargames, we were losing the wargames faster.”

He has, he told us, made it his mission to bring the losing to an end.

Hinote described for us the breakthrough thinking on ways in which old and new technology can be brought together to frustrate any attempts China might make to invade nearby territory, especially Taiwan. He described the need for a truly joint command-and-control system — not as a system with separate nodes for Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps forces, but one that uses a mixture of air and naval forces, including submarines. Drones — relatively inexpensive drones — are an important new element that could complicate China’s invasion plans. In the simulations that Hinote has conducted, drones play an especially important role.

If fielded at low cost and in high numbers, drones present China with a dilemma that Hinote and other specialists believe Beijing could not effectively counter. Swarmed with such drones, China might be forced to ignore the cheapest, smallest ones, which would let them operate in a contested battlespace, providing surveillance and targeting solutions for other weapons-delivery platforms — both air and sea — in the vicinity. Or China could engage the relatively inexpensive and numerous drones with relatively more expensive — and limited — defense systems to try to destroy them.

Either way, as Hinote put it, “they either have to expend very expensive missiles to shoot them down, or they have to suffer the consequences of whatever they’re doing.” This is a problem U.S. military planners know all too well: If it takes expensive weapons to destroy inexpensive targets, you are on the losing end of the cost curve with every target that is exchanged.

For decades, American military strategists have worried that U.S. adversaries were far better at imposing costs on us than we were on them. For over two decades, insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan used improvised roadside bombs to kill and maim U.S. forces. Countering these efforts came at considerable cost, and still does: In 2021, in the final days of U.S. troop involvement in Afghanistan, 13 American service members were killed by a bomb — an extraordinary loss.

Thinking about cost-imposing strategies is a favorite pursuit of Hinote’s. A centerpiece of one of his ideas is what the Air Force calls low-cost attritable aircraft technology, or LCAAT. These are relatively small, cheap and expendable drones. Hinote has been running simulations with researchers at Rand Corp. that deploy LCAATs in a mesh network, which can be used to identify and destroy targets while they saturate the airspace. Even when a link the chain is broken — an LCAAT is destroyed — the network remains.

One idea out of these simulations is to use LCAATs to watch shipping traffic in the Taiwan Strait. We might think of these drones — laden as they are with off-the-shelf, mass-produced sensors — as flying iPhones. An invasion of Taiwan would have to come via ships — warships — and the best way to know if an invasion is coming is to see the ships on the move. The best way to do that is to have lots of small, inexpensive drones flying over the strait, talking to each other and sending signals back to aircraft, submarines and ships that have the weapons needed to destroy the warships.

The drones would be so small and light that they could be sent aloft with bottle rockets and cost around $500,000 apiece. The missiles China would need to use to destroy them cost a few million dollars each — a viable cost-imposing strategy.

When we talked to Hinote about what it would take to put a system of LCAATs into place, he was more circumspect. He gave us the sense that there was momentum moving in the right direction, but he was not sure change would come fast enough. This type of change, he told us, “is going to be pretty radical, certainly from the military point of view, and there is not yet a sense of urgency at all levels to align around that level of change.”

What Hinote wants is a plan. While we won’t know for some time whether Hinote and his many colleagues in the Air Force have seized on exactly the right idea, what we do know is this: He wants to bring the losing to an end, and LCAATs might well be part of the way to do that.

Andrew Hoehn, the senior vice president for research and analysis at the think tank Rand, formerly served as a strategist for the U.S. Defense Department. Thom Shanker, the director of the Project for Media and National Security at George Washington University, previously reported and edited for The New York Times. This commentary was adapted from their book “Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons, and New Threats.”

US State Dept. clears $15B sale of missile defense system for Poland

WASHINGTON — The U.S. State Department has approved a possible $15 billion sale to Poland of an integrated air and missile defense system that includes the U.S. Army’s 360-degree threat detection sensor, which is still in development, according to a June 28 announcement.

The sale, according to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, would include the RTX-made Patriot Configuration-3+ with modernized sensors and components including 48 Patriot launch stations; 644 Lockheed Martin-manufactured Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement missiles; and 12 Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensors, or LTAMDS, which RTX is developing for the U.S. Army.

Amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of neighboring Ukraine, Poland is clambering to buy high-end defense capabilities. It reached an agreement with the U.S. in 2018 to buy RTX-made Patriot systems bolstered by an advanced battle command system that the U.S. Army was still developing.

Poland’s first order, which includes two Patriot Configuration-3+ batteries, came with a $4.75 billion price tag. As part of the deal, Northrop Grumman delivered two firing batteries of its Integrated Battle Command System, which was delivered to Poland earlier this year and will be operational by the end of the summer. Poland will be the first country to operationalize IBCS, ahead of the U.S. Army, which funded and oversaw the development of the Northrop-made system.

IBCS is not included in this latest potential deal.

The possible sale marks the entrance of the second phase of Poland’s pursuit to establish a robust midrange air defense capability under its Wisla program. Polish Defence Minister Mariusz Blaszczak announced in May 2022 that his country would launch that second phase of the program, which would cover the acquisition of three divisions — or six batteries of the Patriot system to include the U.S. Army’s LTAMDS, which is still in the prototyping phase.

The Army has struggled with the LTAMDS prototype delivery schedule. RTX ran into problems building the first radars during the pandemic, but the service still aims to deliver at least four of them by the end of 2023. An operational assessment of the sensor is expected in the latter portion of fiscal 2024.