Archive: June 6, 2024

MBDA offers mini missiles for Rheinmetall Skyranger air-defense gun

MILAN — MBDA Germany and Rheinmetall Electronics have announced the integration of a new guided missile for countering small drones into the Skyranger 30 air-defense turret, offering new technology in the race to protect ground formations against loitering munitions and related threats.

The Germany-based companies signed a letter of intent to that effect at the ILA 2024 Berlin aerospace show on June 5.

The cooperation will also involve the integration of the interceptor missile into other Rheinmetall military vehicles as well as the development and production of a launcher into the company’s various turret types and digital system architecture.

The combination of the weapons – a rapid-fire gun and a small interceptor missile — is viewed as an alternative to bridge existing capability gaps in mobile defense against drones at close and very close range, according to a June 5 company statement.

MBDA Deutschland & @RheinmetallAG Pressemitteilung: Integration der Small Anti Drone Missile (SADM) in den Skyranger 30 & weitere militärische Plattformen beabsichtigt 👉 https://t.co/uzJjxqv1jD
SADM basiert auf dem MBDA Enforcer Flugkörper, der aktuell bei der Bundeswehr als LWM… pic.twitter.com/ano8Arbxt7

— MBDA Deutschland (@MBDADeutschland) June 5, 2024

“The current conflicts have clearly shown that drone defense is one of the key challenges for armed forces – in order to provide the best possible solution for this, we are joining forces with Rheinmetall and their turret solutions to close capability gaps in drone defense,” Thomas Gottschild, managing director at MBDA Germany said.

In recent weeks, both Ukrainian and Russian forces have attempted to field countermeasures to protect their combat vehicles, especially battle tanks, against the growing array of drones deployed on the battlefield.

A specific type has emerged as exceptionally difficult to defend against: first-person-view drones, or FPVs. These systems, which at their core bear resemblance to steerable miniature warheads, can drop explosives on targets or ram a warhead into them.

According to air warfare experts, FPVs and loitering munitions are challenging as they provide a beyond-line-of-sight capability that allows operators to trail tanks on the move or ones heading to hiding spots.

DARPA sees automated tools helping streamline software certification

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working to push tools it’s developing to automatically prove that software is secure out to the commercial sector and help companies overcome the cumbersome Pentagon verification process, according to Benjamin Bishop, deputy director of transition in the agency’s Adaptive Capabilities Office,

“One of the things that we hear from the warfighter is we’ll have a technology solution that is available, but getting it through that process to have the authority to operate and be able to get it through the approval process is very laborious,” Bishop said Wednesday said at the annual C4ISRNet conference. “I will add, for good reason, because in the past these DOD steps have shown improvement to generate a higher quality solution.”

While humans doing math can prove software works as it’s designed, there are tools that can look at file metadata, which contains proof that the software is secure, and automatically verify its safety, he explained at the virtual event.

DARPA’s program Automated Rapid Certification of Software, or ARCOS, is working on developing that capability, Bishop said. The goal of the program is to automate the evaluation of software assurance evidence to enable certifiers to determine rapidly that system risk is acceptable, according to the agency.

The capability is viable, he added, but “what I’m really interested in is not just that it’s technically viable, but we can we do it in a way that can be adopted across the DOD ecosystem?”

In order to do so, the DOD will need to provide incentive for commercial partners to use it, Bishop noted.

“We have seen big tech or large tech companies are embracing some of these tools and they’re moving out with it because they see the value in these methods,” according to Bishop.

Another element in developing such a capability is ensuring its user friendliness. “Are there ways that we can get these tools, not only to be able to be acceptable by the certifying organizations but can they be used by people that don’t have PhDs,” Bishop said, “to be able to navigate these tools.”

Workforce issues a non-technical barrier to DOD cyber competition

If the Defense Department expects to maintain a competitive edge in cyber warfare and other emerging technologies on the digital battlefield, then it has to be able to develop these tools quickly — something that can be difficult in a bureaucratic environment.

As it so often does, the U.S. government is looking to the private sector for inspiration, and it’s seeing commercial partners leveraging these tools already, officials from the U.S. military and the Pentagon said at the 2024 C4ISRNET Conference on Wednesday. That’s in no small part due to the fact that many of these companies have the workforce on hand to use them and can recruit competitively on pay.

“We have seen Big Tech and large tech companies embracing some of these tools, and they’re moving out with it because they see the value in these methods,” said Benjamin Bishop, deputy director of transition in the Adaptive Capabilities Office of DARPA. “But a lot of those companies … can pay salaries for this talent that may not translate to other companies in the defense industrial base because their focus area is different.”

There’s also a need, he said, to make these capabilities accessible not just to certifying organizations and those with specialized training or expertise, but to the broader workforce to move U.S. military strategy forward holistically. And it needs to happen fast enough so that the latest technology is not mired in acquisition regulation and rendered obsolete.

“How do we navigate the the non-technical barriers to our transition?” said Bishop. “How do we get the tools into the hands of the warfighters in order to maximize their success?”

The proliferation of digital threats in recent years has forced cybersecurity to become the responsibility of every Pentagon office, civilian and military. Bishop noted that the cyber-contested environment is rapidly become a standard character of war, and the Biden Administration, too, has set top-down goals for every aspect of government to be equipped with security measures in place, whether they contribute directly to national defense or not.

Marines fast track qualified cyber, signals recruits to rank of gunny

“To me, that’s not necessarily a technology problem,” said Bishop. “How do we get the technology to be … understood by the systems that have to certify these products, but also understood by the workforce that’s across our defense industrial base and also in uniform?”

And while partnering with the private sector can and does work, the military itself must develop its own cyber expertise, he said.

On top of trying to meet general manpower goals, the services, too, are recruiting cyber experts to their ranks and contend with how to compensate them uniformly despite different pay scales, [Military Occupation Specialty] titles, and promotion processes, according to Bishop.

Is the Pentagon’s more targeted approach to CJADC2 paying off?

The Defense Department in recent years has taken a more targeted approach to connecting forces across operational domains — and, according to military leaders and outside experts, it’s starting to yield results.

In the early days of the Defense Department’s pursuit of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, the focus was on full interoperability among and within all of the military services. Bryan Clark, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, said the vision, while well-intentioned, was too broad in its scope.

“That was a little bit too ambitious for what the technology and our requirements and acquisition process can achieve,” he said June 5 at a virtual C4ISRNET Conference. “I think by building it from the bottom up to a larger aggregation, we’re going to see more success with JADC2 going forward.”

That bottom-up approach, Clark said, has meant that rather than try to connect everything, the department is addressing the most urgent operational problems through joint and service-level experimentation campaigns.

The military services each have their own versions of this. The Army calls its approach Project Convergence, the Navy Project Overmatch and the Air Force has the Advanced Battle Management System. The Chief Digital and AI Office also holds regular technology sprints through an event known as the Global Information Dominance Experiment, which bring together the services, combatant commands, Joint Staff and international partners to test out CJADC2 capabilities.

In February, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced the Defense Department had delivered a baseline CJADC2 capability that was validated through a GIDE event held late last year. The department hasn’t revealed specifics on what was fielded but Hicks said it was improving information-sharing in the field.

Mark Kitz, the Army’s program executive officer for command, control, communications-tactical, said during the conference that experiments like GIDE and Project Convergence have helped highlight the sensor-to-shooter connections that are highest priority for the services.

They’ve also led to a heightened focus on interoperability, which has yielded some tangible results, he said.

For example, during the most recent Project Convergence event that wrapped up in March, known as Capstone 4, the Army and the Navy directly integrated their kit and were able to bring together their data environments.

“And so, Project Convergence offered sort of this real opportunity for us to bring these capabilities together in a real operational way and . . . get through sort of the challenges of data interoperability,” Kitz said.

During the same exercise, the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management team, led by Brig. Gen. Luke Cropsey, brought a tool that allows the service to see how its air picture integrates with its sensing environment — a capability that could directly benefit the Army.

“The investments that Gen. Cropsey and his team were making were directly related to a gap in the Army’s architecture,” Kitz said.

US adversaries have ‘formidable’ electronic warfare tools, officials warn

U.S. adversaries around the world are deploying “formidable” electronic warfare tools, and the Pentagon must either find ways to dominate the electromagnetic spectrum or prepare its forces to operate in contested or even denied environments, officials said at the C4ISRNET Conference.

“I think the biggest takeaway is that our near-peer adversaries, and then elements like Hamas, have formidable EW capabilities,” Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, the Army’s program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, said during Wednesday’s virtual event. “It’s really about making sure that our systems, our soldiers and our commanders have that kind of freedom of maneuver within the EMS.”

The electromagnetic spectrum, or EMS, consists of the energy waves produced from radios, cellphones, radars and the like. The EMS environment has become highly contested, presenting a difficult battle space in which actors are vying for dominance.

Maintaining situational awareness is necessary for military commanders to communicate and guide weapons to their targets. EMS is becoming increasingly used by U.S. adversaries such as Russia in its war against Ukraine, the militant group Hamas in Gaza and the Yemen-based Houthi rebel group in its attack on ships in the Red Sea.

It comes down to a select few advanced capabilities facing off against “non-exquisite capabilities in mass,” Barker said. “And sometimes, you know, that mass can be quite overwhelming.”

“We’re realizing we have to build essentially an EW arsenal across the landscape to be able to go at these different types of threats,” he added.

At the same conference, Col. Josh Koslov, the head of the Air Force’s 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, said interoperability among low-cost weapon systems will help hold the line in electronic warfare.

“They have to be able to talk to each other,” he said. “And so if we fight a near-peer tonight, we’re going to fight with the capabilities we have today. And so how do we make the systems that we have today more interoperable and able to share information, and then the systems that we’re bringing online?”

Koslov added that “super close” alignment between the warfighter and acquisition “is incredibly important as we move forward, and then making sure that we’re developing the requirements that drive interoperability from the beginning.” This means a reduced focus on major weapon systems, and more of a focus on the data that those weapon systems use, he noted.

He pointed to the use of low-cost tools that “create strategic and operational impacts” in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, adding that the U.S. needs to develop a system capable of countering that approach.

Defense spending bill forces Israel arms transfers, nixes Ukraine aid

The House defense spending panel on Wednesday advanced the first draft of its annual Pentagon funding bill over objections from Democrats, who cited a provision that would block the president’s authority to withhold arms transfers to Israel and a lack of security assistance for Ukraine, among other partisan provisions.

The $833 billion defense appropriations bill for fiscal 2025 would bar the Pentagon from using funds “to withhold, halt, reverse or cancel the delivery of defense articles or defense services” for Israel, and force the president to transfer withheld weapons to the Israeli military within 15 days.

The bill also drops an annual $300 million in Ukraine security aid that defense appropriators have provided since 2014; revives an effort to move Mexico from U.S. Northern Command to U.S. Southern Command; and bans the Pentagon from implementing President Joe Biden’s executive orders on climate change.

“Why, after this Congress has repeatedly demonstrated broad bipartisan support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian tyranny, are we considering a bill that fails to fund the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative?” Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said in a statement on Wednesday. “In addition to fighting Russian aggression, USAI helps Ukraine integrate with NATO and Western forces, directly supporting our broader national security and defense objectives.”

The Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative allows the Pentagon to place contracts for longer-term military aid for Kyiv. The FY24 defense policy bill Congress passed in December authorized $300 million for the initiative through FY25, but that money will not be available next year if appropriators decline to fund it in the spending bill.

Still, $300 million is a small trickle compared to the $13.7 billion in the initiative’s funding Congress passed in April as part of a massive foreign aid bill, which included a total $60 billion in economic and security assistance for Ukraine.

Assistance for Ukraine has divided the GOP caucus, with members admonishing Democrats for waving Ukrainian flags on the floor after the House passed 311-112 the $60 billion assistance package for Kyiv in April.

The defense spending bill marked up Wednesday also funds several more F-35 fighter jets than the Pentagon requested. It does not provide funding for a second Virginia-class attack submarine. The procurement decisions override parts of the FY25 defense authorization bill the House Armed Services Committee advanced 57-1 in May.

While the authorization bill sought to cut F-35 procurement amid growing frustration with manufacturer Lockheed Martin, defense appropriators sought to buy eight more of the fighter jets than the Pentagon requested. Defense appropriators also ignored the Armed Services Committee’s authorization for $1 billion in incremental funding to procure a second attack submarine in FY25.

“A Virginia-class submarine is a big-ticket item, so obviously it’s a much bigger deal than $300 million in Ukraine assistance,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama who supports Ukraine aid, told Defense News on Tuesday.

Israel and Gaza

Democrats also denounced the bill’s new language banning the president from withholding weapons transfers to Israel, as well as the return of several other “harmful policy riders” Republicans unsuccessfully sought to include in the FY24 spending bill, which Congress passed 286-134 in March.

“Instead of building on the bipartisan conclusion to the fiscal year 2024 appropriations process, the fiscal year 2025 defense appropriations bill includes the same outrageous policy riders that were rejected by Congress only two months ago,” Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the defense spending panel, said in a statement Tuesday.

McCollum criticized the provision forcing the president to transfer weapons to Israel in a Democratic summary accompanying the bill. “No other country has carte blanche on the use of their military assistance from the United States,” her office wrote.

The House in May passed a separate bill in a 224-187 vote with more stringent language intended to undo Biden’s hold on a single shipment of roughly 3,500 air-to-ground munitions for Israel. The last president to publicly withhold weapons shipments to Israel was Ronald Reagan in 1982 after seeing pictures of civilians killed in Lebanon.

Biden said he withheld the shipment in April, which includes 500- and 2,000-pound bombs, out of concern Israel would use them in Rafah, where more than half of the Gaza Strip’s population have fled since the Israeli campaign against the militant group Hamas started in October. Nonetheless, he has approved several other arms transfers for Israel.

Despite warnings from the White House, Israel proceeded with its Rafah offensive, displacing roughly 1 million Palestinians and further curtailing humanitarian aid deliveries.

In addition to the bill’s annual $500 million in aid for Israeli missile defenses, the FY25 legislation provides $80 million above the president’s budget request for anti-tunneling cooperation with the U.S. and another $55 million above the budget request for counter-drone development, including “directed energy and laser technology cooperation.”

The State Department spending bill for FY25, which the foreign aid panel advanced Tuesday, also includes Israel’s annual $3.3 billion in foreign military financing. And the foreign aid bill Congress passed in April includes another $14 billion in Israel military aid.

Both the FY25 Pentagon and State Department spending bills ban funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which delivers humanitarian assistance in the Gaza Strip, drawing further ire from McCollum.

“According to a March report from the World Food Program, nearly half the population — over 1 million people — have completely exhausted their food supplies,” she said Wednesday. “Palestinian civilians, many of them children, are struggling with catastrophic hunger and starvation.”

Other policy riders Democrats oppose include moving jurisdiction of U.S. military operations with Mexico to Southern Command — a bid that failed last year. Calvert and Republicans argue that moving Mexico to Southern Command would better enable counter-fentanyl trafficking operations against Mexican drug cartels.

Additionally, the bill would ban the Pentagon from using funds to implement Biden’s climate executive orders, including one that would prevent the Defense Department — the world’s largest institutional fossil fuel emitter — from disclosing carbon emissions.

Germany leans into Eurofighter with new order of 20 jets

COLOGNE, Germany — The German government will buy 20 more Eurofighter combat aircraft in addition to 38 already on order, a move intended to bolster the country’s defensive posture while propping up the aerospace industry, according to Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

He made the announcement Wednesday on the opening day of the Berlin Air Show, where Germany’s major contractors are eager to display how tens of billions of extra euros for defense, prompted by Russia’s war against Ukraine, had jolted a sleepy industry from which politicians have traditionally sought a healthy distance.

Now, the 20 new Eurofighters, expected to cost about €2 billion (U.S. $2.2 billion), will help aircraft manufacturer Airbus keep the production line humming “continuously,” Scholz said.

He announced additional “perspectives” on future exports of the jet, made in conjunction with the U.K., Italy and Spain — a reference that some industry officials took to mean yet another sizable tranche is in the offing.

Beside the four core nations, the air forces of Austria, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait and Qatar also have Eurofighters in their fleets. The issue of exports to some Middle Eastern nations with questionable human rights records periodically leads to political flare-ups here and, by extension, to friction with European co-producers less squeamish about such things.

Germany’s newest line vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia is that the monarchy will be allowed to buy more Eurofighters through Britain as the seller.

Airbus is currently working on a tranche of 38 Eurofighters of the Quadriga configuration at a cost of almost $6 billion. The last of those jets is slated for delivery in 2030.

Meanwhile, Germany is involved in a next-generation aircraft under the banner of the French-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System. Whatever type of aircraft that effort ends up producing is meant to see the light of day in 2040, though that date appears to be slipping.

To hedge against additional delays, or even program failure, officials in Germany and France are incrementally souping up their legacy fleets — the Eurofighter in Germany and the Rafale in France — with new capabilities, though leaders have said there is no alternative to FCAS.

US Space Force sorts through industry ideas to boost satellite sensors

The U.S. Space Force is working with industry to understand what capabilities can help expand the service’s portfolio of space domain awareness satellites, amid a growing demand for sensors in geosynchronous orbit.

The service operates a fleet of satellites under its Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program. They are about 22,000 miles above Earth and essentially serve in a neighborhood watch function. They also perform rendezvous and proximity operations, drawing close to other satellites to observe and provide data on them.

In March, Space Systems Command asked companies for ideas on how to augment that constellation with smaller, maneuverable spacecraft equipped with different sensors that can be refueled in orbit.

Col. Bryon McClain, the command’s program executive officer for space domain awareness and combat power, said June 5 his office is sorting through the influx of ideas from companies to determine how they might shape future Space Force requirements.

“The team is looking at that, and we’re fundamentally looking at how does that change our future architecture,” he said during the C4ISRNET Conference, held June 5. “How can we take that information, working with our warfighter and the requirements team, to understand the specifics of what we need?”

It will take time for the service to transition to a new satellite architecture, McClain said, adding that he doesn’t expect the shift to the more advanced capabilities to happen until around 2026 or 2027. That’s due largely to budget constraints as well as the demands of the existing mission.

“We have an ongoing mission set for on-orbit space domain awareness, and we need to make sure that’s covered,” he said.

McClain didn’t share specifics on the types of capabilities the service might adopt, but did say the changes are aligned with a push from senior Space Force leaders to build smaller systems that rely on less “exquisite,” military-unique technology and more on commercially available capabilities.

“Those two ideas, those mentalities, really go hand in hand, and we’ve tried to embody that,” he said.

The Space Force has been leveraging commercial space domain awareness capabilities through several initiatives, including its Joint Commercial Operations cell in Colorado Springs. McClain said the next step for the service is to better understand the dynamics of the private sector markets.

As an example, McClain noted that demand for small satellites has fueled significant growth in the commercial spacecraft bus market. The service needs to understand the capabilities of those buses so that it can tap into that existing pool rather than design military-unique requirements; otherwise, it will miss out.

“Now, the push that I have when I’m working with industry, and the request that I always have, is please make sure that I’m not packing in unique requirement sets in [requests for information] or [requests for proposals] that force you to deviate from that commercially available product to start going toward a military-unique product.”

US security demands continued nuclear triad investment

In a world where instability and threats are on the rise, it is disturbing that some in Congress are calling to weaken America’s strategic nuclear deterrent, even to the point of offering legislative proposals to severely curtail vital modernization efforts. The reality is that the safety and security of our nation demands a robust, modern nuclear triad — one that deters adversaries, reassures allies, and promotes stability.

This is not a new development; it is an enduring reality, especially given the increasingly aggressive behavior of America’s nuclear-armed adversaries. As former U.S. Strategic Command leader Adm. Charles Richard explained a few years ago: “I will tell you, the current situation is vividly illuminating what nuclear coercion looks like and how you, or how you don’t, stand up to that.”

Given what is at stake, the latter course of action is not a viable option. We must continue to invest in nuclear triad modernization efforts.

In the Cold War, the U.S. was primarily concerned with deterring the Soviet threat. Today, that threat is far broader and more complex. It involves China’s nuclear breakout, a modernized Russian nuclear arsenal, and Iran and North Korea’s aggressive nuclear ambitions. However, the U.S. is still reliant upon nuclear triad capabilities from the Cold War, with some elements dating back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Aging equipment and infrastructure cannot be sustained indefinitely.

The need for a modernized set of nuclear triad capabilities comes down to a very simple but crucial precept: to cause an adversary decision-maker to refrain from certain acts, under certain circumstances, out of fear that if they take those actions, they will fail to achieve their objectives and/or suffer unacceptable consequences. This is deterrence 101, and it demands that we hold our adversaries in check with a robust, modern nuclear triad. That is what the Cold War-era phrase “peace through strength” described — that we could secure our goals of peace and stability through an effective strategic deterrent.

This approach has been incredibly successful since the end of World War II. However, the advanced age of our nuclear triad is eroding its deterrent value. Adversaries understand that it is increasingly difficult for the U.S. to sustain and, if necessary, employ these systems, and they’re taking advantage of these circumstances to modernize, upgrade and increase their nuclear arsenals. It is time for a reset.

The nuclear modernization strategy outlined by the Department of Defense, multiple presidential administrations, and several sessions of Congress has continued to support the highly integrated, mutually reinforcing approach afforded by the triad. Nuclear ballistic missile-equipped submarines, when deployed at sea, provide the attributes of stealth; it is very hard to detect these vessels, thereby assuring the U.S. will have means to retaliate, even if other elements of the enterprise are struck.

Bombers are a far more visible and flexible leg of the triad, clearly signaling U.S. resolve to adversaries and allies when they deploy to hot spots around the globe.

The always-on-alert land-based intercontinental ballistic missile leg of the triad ensures that a sufficient volume of highly responsive nuclear-armed missiles reside on U.S. soil, such that an adversary will not think they can get away with a first strike on the U.S. homeland. Add this to an adversary’s calculus: It may be one thing to strike a nuclear-equipped submarine or bomber somewhere around the world, but striking an ICBM site on U.S. territory would be akin to crossing a suicidal threshold.

The new triad components include the Columbia-class submarine, the B-21 Raider bomber and the Sentinel ground-based strategic deterrent enterprise. New bomber- and submarine-launched cruise missiles are equally necessary to counter adversaries’ coercive strategies and to strengthen assurance with our allies. And all must be tied together with a modernized command-and-control system.

Individually, each are massively complex. Combined, they represent a generational level of effort that demands significant resources, concerted focus and sustained political will.

Northrop says Air Force design changes drove higher Sentinel ICBM cost

Of course, challenges have emerged tied to unforeseen engineering hurdles, supply chain issues and learning curve factors. This has translated to budget increases and schedule slips. While frustrating, such turbulence should be expected given the scale and scope of the programs.

Many of these challenges stem from too little investment in the triad for too many years. Notably, cost projection increases tied to the Sentinel program are largely not about the new ICBM. Instead, they are tied to the silo infrastructure, which is in poor condition and must be rehabilitated far more than originally thought. While regrettable, the reality is that deferred bills eventually come due.

Those who question the necessity of an effective nuclear triad should consider events around the globe. China is aggressively expanding its sphere of influence through force in the Pacific. Russia continues its illegitimate invasion of Ukraine. Iran is destabilizing much of the Middle East, and North Korea continues to threaten our allies across the Pacific as well as our homeland with its nuclear weapons.

The threats are very real and extremely serious. Our adversaries have interests and values fundamentally opposed to our own. Hoping that they will miraculously seek peace is unrealistic. We need to ensure our national leaders are empowered with credible, reliable military options to manage these threats. That begins with an effective, modern nuclear triad. We must stay the course.

Retired U.S. Air force Gen. Kevin Chilton is the explorer chair at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. He previously led U.S. Strategic Command.

US Defense Secretary Austin’s chief of staff to step down this summer

PARIS — Kelly Magsamen, who has served as chief of staff to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin his entire tenure, will step down at the end of June.

Austin announced the change in a statement, crediting her for “every initiative I have launched to defend our nation,” which includes work in the three areas of the world that now consume the Pentagon’s attention: the Indo-Pacific region, Europe and the Middle East.

Magsamen’s last week has been an illustration of that split. She joined Austin for the Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s largest defense conference, where he met with world leaders and in particular China’s new defense minister. Then she joined him for trips to Cambodia — where she sat beside him in meetings with the country’s leadership — and Paris, where Austin is staying during the 80th anniversary ceremony of D-Day.

Another defining part of her time in office was when Austin was hospitalized earlier this year after complications from a surgery to treat prostate cancer. Magsamen did not inform others in the Pentagon nor the U.S. government — including the president. The Pentagon has since explained the delay by saying she was also sick, and Austin took the blame for the delay, sitting for a grilling in front of the House Armed Services Committee in February.

A review of the incident ordered by Austin recommended protocol changes but didn’t result in staff discipline.

Magsamen has worked across Washington’s national security institutions, including previous stints at the State Department and the National Security Council.

“Kelly’s leadership, counsel, and selfless service made our nation safer, made the lives of our people better and more rewarding, and rendered the heavy burden of this office of mine a good bit lighter,” Austin said in the statement.

Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh didn’t say where Magsamen is headed, only that the chief of staff is “taking time off before she pursues other opportunities.”