Marines Corps’ landing ship taking longer, costing more than planned

A key vessel Marines need to move around in a potential island shootout with China is two years behind schedule, could cost nearly triple its original estimate and the short-term fix isn’t cheap.

The Navy’s landing ship medium program expects to award its design and construction contract in fiscal year 2025, two years later than originally planned, according to the Government Accountability Office’s Annual Weapons Systems Assessment, released Monday.

The concept, formerly called the light amphibious warship, was launched in 2020 to procure 35 such stern landing vessels.

The ship would hew closely to commercial designs to lower its signature and provide the recently formed Marine littoral regiments with options for maneuvering in areas close to shore and within island chains, especially in the Pacific.

Marines expect ‘big year’ for drone, ship and logistics testing

The current ship being used for testing is the stern landing vessel, a modified commercial watercraft that allows users to offload and onload directly from the beach.

“It is a shore-to-shore logistics connect to get heavy things that we can’t put on airplanes or don’t want to have a big ship coming in to bring, get it from Point A to Point B to move; maneuver it from Point B to a more advantageous position at Point C; and then sustain that position,” Assistant Commandant Gen. Christopher Mahoney said in March.

Original design features for the landing ship medium concept include:

A length of 200 to 400 feet. A draft, or depth of the vessel beneath the waterline, of 12 feet.A crew of about 70 sailors.The capacity for carrying 50 Marines and 648 short tons of equipment. 8,000 square feet of deck cargo space Transit speed of 14 knots and a cruising range of 3,500 nautical miles.Roll-on/roll-off beaching capability for beaches with a 1:40 grade. A helicopter landing pad. Two 30 mm guns and six .50-caliber guns for self-defense. A 20-year service life.

Source: Congressional Research Services

The first of three planned regiments became operational in 2023. The Navy is developing a bridging strategy, according to the report. Marine Corps Times has reported on ongoing experimentation with commercial vessels modified to meet the service’s landing needs throughout the past two years.

But those solutions require “significant modifications,” according to the report, costing upward of $115 million per modified vessel.

A 2020 report by Congressional Research Services that was updated in April noted that Congress could consider adapting the existing fleet of Army logistics support vessels for at least some of the Marines’ requirements.

The Army has more than 100 such vessels in its fleet, according to that report. Dozens of those vessels have similar capabilities to the landing ships the Corps is seeking.

At the time the Army had sought to divest some of its watercraft fleet. But since then, the service has shifted its logistics needs to the Pacific and now wants to expand the fleet, Defense News reported.

Under the current timeline, the Navy expects to award the construction contract for the ships in March 2025 and have the first ship delivered by January 2029. On that schedule, the Navy expects to conclude operational testing by July 2030 and hit initial capability by December 2034, according to the Government Accountability Office report.

Another report released in April shows a much higher overall cost for the program than officials originally planned.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated the initial 18-ship program could cost between $6.2 billion and $7.8 billion in 2024 inflation-adjusted dollars, Marine Corps Times’ sister publication Defense News reported in April.

That translates to $340 million to $430 million per hull.

That’s three times more than the original estimate of $2.6 billion for the program ― or $150 million per ship.

If the Navy gets the green light to buy the full fleet of 35 landing ships, as the Marine Corps has requested, the program will cost between $11.9 billion and $15 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office report.

Congress wants to restore nukes on conventional B-52 bombers

Congress is laying the groundwork to restore nuclear weapon capabilities on roughly 30 B-52H Stratofortress bombers that had been converted to drop only conventional munitions as part of the New START arms control treaty with Russia.

Both the Senate and House defense policy bills for fiscal 2025 would require the Air Force to once again make these conventional bombers part of the nuclear triad nearly a decade after removing those capabilities to comply with limits under the New START treaty. The current treaty is set to expire in February 2026.

Lawmakers are eager to beef up the U.S. nuclear arsenal given Russia’s suspension of the treaty and China’s rapidly expanding strategic warhead production. Opponents of the measure argue that the directives will make it more difficult to negotiate a new treaty while complicating efforts to significantly extend the lifespan of the B-52 bomber fleet first introduced during the Cold War.

“The treaty expires in 2026, and the prospect of Russia coming to the table for serious arms control discussions is incredibly unlikely,” House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said last week upon introducing the amendment to the FY25 defense policy bill, legislation the House passed 217-199 on Friday. “We need to be prepared to face a nuclear environment without any treaty limitations.”

The House bill would require the Air Force to begin reconverting the bombers within a month after the current treaty expires and complete the restoration of their nuclear capabilities by 2029. The House passed the B-52 amendment by voice vote over objections from Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

“The Department of Defense is not interested in doing this,” said Smith. “What they’re interested in doing is investing in the B-21, which is the next generation nuclear-capable bomber. This would cost a great deal of money. Also, they’re currently trying to extend the life of a number of B-52s out to 2050, which they think they can do. This would be another added expense to that.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee voted 22-3 on Friday to advance its version of the bill with a similar provision directing the restoration of nuclear capabilities across the entire B-52 fleet.

The Air Force’s 76 B-52s are the oldest bombers in its fleet and have been flying since the early 1960s. During the Cold War, the Air Force flew nuclear-armed Stratofortresses along the edge of Soviet airspace.

Today, it remains one of the key elements of the U.S. nuclear triad, and is capable of carrying the AGM-86B air-launched cruise missile, or ALCM, nuclear weapon.

Not all B-52s have that capability. The Air Force in 2015 began removing nuclear capabilities from about 30 B-52Hs to comply with New START requirements.

The Senate ratified New START in 2010. The treaty limits both countries to 1,550 deployed warheads. Although Washington and Moscow agreed to extend the treaty for five years in 2021, Russia suspended its participation in New START in 2023 amid heightened tensions with NATO over its invasion of Ukraine.

Air Force Global Strike Command declined to comment about the potential restoration of nuclear capabilities to the rest of the B-52 fleet.

Mark Gunzinger, a former B-52 pilot and director of future concepts and capability assessments at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said that if it does happen, the reconversions would probably take place during depot maintenance at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, as the B-52 fleet receives top-to-bottom upgrades.

Later this decade, the Air Force will begin a sweeping overhaul of the B-52 fleet, giving the six-decade-old bombers new engines, radar, avionics, digital cockpit displays, wheels and brakes, and other improvements.

The modernization is so significant that the service plans to redub these bombers the B-52J. The service eventually plans to have a fleet of two bombers, with the B-52J flying alongside the new B-21 Raider once the Air Force retires the B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit.

Deployed warheads

President Joe Biden’s arms control adviser Pranay Vaddi told the annual Arms Control Association conference in Washington this month that the U.S. has reached out to Russia about negotiating a follow-on agreement to New START but that Moscow has been unwilling to engage.

He said the Biden administration does not currently plan to increase the number of deployed warheads, though those decisions would be contingent on Russian and Chinese actions ahead of New START’s expiration.

“The reasons for having an increase in your day-to-day deployed nuclear weapons has to be pretty compelling for a decision to be made to do that,” said Vaddi. “One of the main triggers for that or the latest indicators that we have to pay attention to is what the [People’s Republic of China] ends up doing.”

“Those are important considerations for us to bear in mind as we march toward February 1, 2026.”

The U.S. deploys some 1,770 strategic nuclear warheads while Russia deploys around 1,822, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative. China currently has around 500 operational warheads and the Pentagon expects Beijing will reach 1,500 by 2035.

Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, argued the B-52 amendment and other measures in the defense bill could make negotiating a follow-up treaty with Russia more difficult.

‘Cost prohibitive’

“This provision as well as some other provisions that are in the bills that purpose steps to increase the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons are extremely premature, counterproductive and – given the skyrocketing cost of the existing nuclear weapons modernization program – they’re cost prohibitive,” Kimball told Defense News. “Some members of Congress unnecessarily panic and are looking for ways to increase the US stockpile without a clear national security rationale.”

Another provision in the Senate defense policy bill from Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska, the top Republican on the Strategic Forces panel, would require a plan to develop an additional 50 Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles on top of 400 ICBMs already deployed.

Gunzinger said that with Russia no longer adhering to the New START treaty, it makes sense to bolster the B-52 fleet’s nuclear capabilities given the potential threats the United States could face from China and Russia, as well as Iran and North Korea.

“We’re now facing a situation where there’s two nuclear peers,” Gunzinger told Defense News. “We have a nuclear triad that’s sized for a single nuclear peer, Russia.”

Gunzinger said the restoration could probably be done without much difficulty. The necessary wiring is probably still in place, he said, and physical components that had been removed could be re-installed.

“It’s doable, and that’s the beauty of maintaining bombers that can be re-equipped with the appropriate [nuclear weapons] components,” he said. “It’s a hedge against future uncertainty, and we are now in a future where it’s not one that we expected, even just a few short years ago.”

Four lessons on sea denial from the Black and Red seas

In the early morning hours of Feb. 1, 2024, six Ukrainian sea drones destroyed the Russian missile ship Ivanovets in the Black Sea. The day prior, 2,000 miles away in the Red Sea, the U.S. Navy destroyer Carney successfully shot down three Iranian drones and an anti-ship ballistic missile fired by Houthi forces.

Two events, disparate in geopolitical context, present evidence that land-based maritime forces play a decisive role in naval operations. It does not take an act of imagination to see how U.S. Marines, the world’s foremost land-based maritime force, operating with a suite of high-end anti-ship weapons and uncrewed systems, would prove instrumental in a sea-denial campaign.

Since the dawn of the gunpowder age, land-based forces along coastal areas have challenged navies in their quest to dominate coastal seas. But in the last two decades, long-range precision weapons have proliferated among state and nonstate actors due to their plummeting costs. This development continues to favor terrestrial forces and has given new life to the sage wisdom of the 18th century naval strategist and tactician Adm. Horatio Nelson, who said: “A ship’s a fool to fight a fort.”

Using small, distributed littoral forces; civilian and military sensors; sea and airborne drones; long-range missiles; and an aircraft on one occasion, Ukraine has severely damaged or destroyed 24 Russian warships, including a submarine. Without any naval ships of its own, and relying exclusively on landward littoral forces, Ukraine has eliminated more than a third of Russia’s naval tonnage in the Black Sea, imposed costs into the billions of dollars, broken Moscow’s naval blockade of Odesa and other coastal cities, and created a badly needed maritime lifeline for merchant shipping.

In the Red Sea, we see a seemingly different picture. Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis, operating under the pretext of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, are disrupting the free flow of global trade by attacking both commercial and naval vessels in the Red Sea. Like Ukrainian forces, they rely on drones and long-range missiles; but unlike Ukraine, they have sunk few ships.

There are lessons here, which may prove critical to future policy and resourcing considerations.

First, and most obviously, relative strength matters. The disparity between coalition and Houthi capabilities in the Red Sea is far wider than between Ukraine and Russian naval power in the Black Sea. Ukraine’s forces are well equipped, supported by NATO intelligence and technology, and confront an opponent of modest naval strength.

Houthi forces, by contrast, lack comparable support and face the world’s premiere naval force — a U.S. carrier strike group with a half dozen U.S. and coalition destroyers and frigates.

Second, counting the number of ships sunk is a shallow measurement of success. Using this metric, Ukraine’s scorecard is clear. But any objective assessment will also reveal that the Houthi’s sea-denial campaign has altered global trade routes, imposed global economic costs, enhanced its international profile, and perhaps most importantly tied up a significant portion of American naval power at a time when demand for our naval ships outstrips supply.

Third, fighting land forces with naval forces is costly. Fortunately for U.S. and coalition forces, the cost has been only monetary.

Since November 2023, the U.S. Navy has conducted more than 450 strikes, intercepting more than 200 drones and missiles. Naval forces are capable of countering enemy weapons with a range of capabilities, yet most far exceed the cost of the munition they are intended to destroy.

One-way Houthi attack drones have been estimated to cost as little as $2,000 to produce. Any defensive weapon that costs a dollar more puts us on the wrong side of the cost curve — and some counter-air missiles cost millions of dollars.

In the Red Sea, the costs have been acceptable to date, but we are in a new age of drone warfare, and production has skyrocketed. Ukraine and Russia, for example, each aim to acquire more than 2 million drones in 2024. A land-based force that employs drones at scale against one at sea will quickly deplete the latter’s defensive magazine — and that nation’s budget.

Finally, these maritime conflicts demonstrate that ground forces, difficult to locate and destroy, have a stubborn way of persisting. In the Black Sea, Russia has not employed its maritime firepower decisively against Ukraine’s anti-ship forces. In fact, it has retrenched almost entirely, choosing to relocate its fleet away from the threat.

By contrast, U.S. and coalition naval forces in the Red Sea have taken the fight to the Houthis, conducting dozens of strikes, destroying their missiles, drones and delivery systems. And yet, even in this lopsided contest, Houthi forces continue their disruption.

As we continue to observe Ukraine’s success in the Black Sea and the ongoing fight in the Red Sea, it will be important to temper our enthusiasm with a dose of humility. Winning and losing are fluid characterizations in combat, yet learning should be a constant.

Gen. Christopher Mahoney is the assistant commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Europe’s armor industry must merge, Arquus boss says

PARIS — The European market for light and medium armored vehicles has too many players and needs to consolidate, as some companies currently lack the size necessary to push research and development, according to Emmanuel Levacher, the CEO of French armored-vehicle maker Arquus.

Joint European purchasing of armored vehicles is also needed to bring the industry together, with various national programs too small to result in high production volumes and economies of scale, compared to U.S. acquisition programs that can be a factor 10 or 20 bigger, Levacher said in a briefing with reporters at the Eurosatory defense show in Paris on Tuesday.

Belgium’s John Cockerill in January agreed to buy Arquus, and that deal is expected to go ahead next month, Levacher told Defense News. The combined company targets defense revenue of €1 billion ($1.1 billion) by 2026, an amount that the Arquus CEO says is enough to invest around €50 million to €100 million a year in “new capacities, new technologies and so on.”

Arquus posted 2023 sales of €600 million, and the company invested €20 million of its own money in R&D as well as €30 million of French government funds, according to Levacher.

“We can still do lot of things, we are also quite agile, but I think there is a limit to also being able to finance new development, innovation and R&D,” Levacher said, “It’s not an exact science, but I think if we would be the double our size it would be better. There is an issue of reaching a critical size.”

Consolidation of European armored-vehicle programs will be key to bringing the industry together, according to the Arquus CEO. He said just joining up the industrial players wouldn’t be enough, as that would still leave European orders fragmented. “Then you will not reach what we want to achieve, which is economies of scale and reaching higher volumes, which is really the key.”

Levacher said the French-German Main Ground Combat System program to develop a future main battle tank is a demonstration of “how difficult it is to align the needs of different European countries.”

Europe can help by synchronizing and aligning R&D programs, which allows firms “to learn to work with each other and build some trust between the different companies,” Levacher said. “And then little by little, we may go together on some programs.”

The executive said an example of cooperation is the Famous program financed by the European Defence Fund, which is providing the basic building blocks for the French-Belgium program for the VBAE small reconnaissance vehicle. Finland’s Patria presented an all-terrain vehicle developed within the Famous program at Eurosatory on Monday.

Europe’s fragmented armored-vehicle industry faces competition in export markets, with firms from Turkey, South Korea, Israel and South Africa competing for international orders. Turkish firms are also increasingly a competitive threat in Europe, where they are “quite aggressive” in vying for orders for armor, according to Levacher.

With Turkey a NATO member, its companies offer products that are “very close” in terms of concept and regulation to those offered by European Union firms. Turkish defense armored-vehicle makers are competitive on cost, if not necessarily cheap due to the cost of technology that needs to be included.

“They have very good players in Turkey, and they have invested a lot in product and technologies,” the Arquus CEO said. “We respect them very much, because they have made a lot of progress. It’s nothing surprising that labor cost is a bit lower in Turkey, so that makes a bit of the difference.”

Governments increasingly demand localization as a condition for contract awards, including European clients such as Belgium, which is “not a very exotic country for us.”

“This is the way the world is,” Levacher said. “We cannot just export the hardware as we used to do 30 years ago. So now it really comes together with service and with localization, and this is true in many, many countries, even smaller countries which do not have a local industry, but they would like to develop some capacities.”

Arquus has sold 11 Bastion four-wheeled armored personal carriers to Ukraine, with another batch of 100 units to come, Levacher told Defense News. The VAB Mk3 6-wheeled APC “would be relevant” for Ukraine as long as it can protect itself from drones, according to the CEO. “In the Ukraine war, all the armored vehicles are under huge threats, but as long as it maybe can protect itself, especially from UAVs, that would make sense.”

The company is also seeing more demand for the Caesar 155mm howitzer, for which Arquus makes the six-wheel chassis, not only from France and Ukraine but also other markets.

Artis forms Sentinel vehicle protection venture with UAE’s Bin Hilal

Virginia-based defense contractor Artis, with an active protection system it says is capable of defending vehicles from attacks from above, is forming a joint venture with the United Arab Emirates’ company Bin Hilal Enterprises to offer its system overseas.

Artis and BHE signed a memorandum of understanding the Eurosatory international defense conference in Paris on June 18.

Artis told Defense News in January that it had been demonstrating its Sentinel All-Threat Defeat System, formerly known as Improved Iron Curtain, at a West Virginia range. The system had international interest, particularly in the Middle East, it said.

“The JV will offer original equipment, manufacturing and engineering services, and will extend to lifecycle support, spare parts, field services, warranty support and training,” an Artis statement said, and “will meld the extensive active protection experience of Artis with the business and cultural acumen of BHE.”

The companies will immediately work to provide Sentinel to local and regional allies, the statement notes.

“This MOU represents a critical component of our international growth strategy and directly supports our commitment to the United Arab Emirates,” Artis CEO Keith Brendley said in the statement.

“Sentinel is a third-generation APS, and is the most advanced system in the world. It is the only active protection system that can protect against all threats, including providing top-attack protection from a swarm of drones,” he said. “Sentinel also mitigates sabot rounds and fuzed threats.”

Artis said previously it has demonstrated the Sentinel can protect vehicles and infrastructure from nearly all direct-fire threats, including tank-fired rounds, anti-tank guided missiles, rocket-propelled grenades and loitering munitions – otherwise known as exploding drones, which target vehicle and infantry alike, often with deadly effect.

Iron Curtain

The Virginia-based business has spent 20 years refining and expanding a capability versatile enough to handle nearly all threats to combat vehicles, including top-attack threats, long before the war in Ukraine and the use of loitering munitions highlighted the need for such robust protection.

The U.S. Army, years ago, evaluated the company’s Iron Curtain active protection system for combat vehicles but never adopted the technology.

The Army launched an effort in 2016 to rapidly field interim solutions to protect Abrams tanks, Stryker combat vehicles and the Bradley infantry fighting vehicles. The service pursued options through a demonstration phase.

The service had selected Iron Curtain as an interim protection system in 2017 for the Stryker but decided against fielding the system after the testing and demonstration phase in 2018. Service leaders said at the time that while Iron Curtain worked in concept, it would take too much time and money to mature the system.

Artis developed its first design for top-attack protection through a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency around 2008, Brendley told Defense News. The company has since continued work on the design through investors. But Sentinel’s capability gained significant traction through a contract with the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, awarded shortly after the service rejected Iron Curtain for the Stryker, he explained. Artis concluded its work with the office in June 2023.

Artis has yet to acquire a first customer, but according to Brendley, “the APS market is like any other market. If you take a look at emerging markets, automobiles or smartphones, what have you, the markets are always there, but they didn’t materialize until the right product came along and we think we have the right product. I think the market is going to respond to that.”

Citing missile mismatch, Lockheed snarls at HIMARS challenge in Europe

PARIS — Tensions are running high in the race to decide Europe’s artillery rocket system of choice, with Germany emerging as a decisive player in a race between teams Rheinmetall-Lockheed Martin and Elbit-KNDS.

On the opening day of the Eurosatory trade show here, all eyes were on the German-American duo, which have paired up to offer a European-made rocket launcher based on Lockheed’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to Berlin.

The trans-Atlantic team is trying to claw its way back into a tender for Germany’s next multiple-launch rocket launcher in which Elbit, offering its PULS weapon, was seen as having a leg up. The German armed forces have already purchased five PULS systems to replace weapons donated to Ukraine , and army formations in neighboring Netherlands, which are closely linked to their German Bundeswehr counterparts, are also slated to get the system.

US Army sends HIMARS rocket launcher island-hopping in the Philippines

The Israeli company’s offer rests on the proposition that the PULS will be able to fire the ubiquitous GMLRS missile, which prospective European customers already have in their inventories, and which Washington has given to Ukraine to fend off Russian invaders.

At the Eurosatory trade show here, Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger, whose company would build the launcher truck, pushed back against that idea without naming the competitor.

“Others speak about being able to fire a kind of missiles being universal, a claim most often not even true, promoting fragmentation of development funds and national egoisms, while not being utilized on the Ukrainian battlefield at all,” he told reporters on June 17.

Howard Bromberg, vice president of strategy and business development for land forces at Lockheed Martin, was more direct. “Our MLRS Family of Munitions cannot be integrated into the PULS system – if Germany was to opt for PULS they could not gain access to our missiles,” he told Defense News.

The same would apply to the U.S. Army’s newer Precision Strike Missile, a Lockheed spokesman added.

Elbit and KNDS signed a cooperation agreement last year to begin the joint production of the EuroPULS rocket artillery system, a Europeanized version of Elbit’s existing PULS system. At the time, the Israeli firm suggested the weapon’s open-architecture concept would enable the firing of other makers’ missiles.

An Elbit spokesman said the company had no comment on Lockheed’s claims. It’s unclear what role the U.S. defense giant would have in a potential government-level arrangement on missile interchangeability.

Germany has been on the hunt to replace its aging MARS 2 systems for some time now. Although it has yet to select a replacement, the possibility of localizing the production of the rocket launchers will likely be an important consideration at play.

A funding decision by the German Bundestag had been expected before the summer, but was recently postponed until the end of the year, German defense trade website Hartpunkt reported earlier this month.

France preps Europe’s fastest classified supercomputer for defense AI

PARIS — France plans to build Europe’s most powerful classified supercomputer to take the lead in artificial intelligence for defense purposes, Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced at the Eurosatory defense show here.

The Armed Forces Ministry will make computing time available to the Higher Education Ministry and other government departments, and also allow French defense firms to run AI solutions in a secure and protected environment, according to Lecornu. Lecornu said he’s not providing details on the capacity of the super calculator for AI applications, which is planned for 2025.

France in March announced plans to reallocate €2 billion of funding from the 2024-2030 defense budget to artificial intelligence. Lecornu said AI will be a differentiating factor between countries, creating a break between those left behind and those who manage to hang on.

“The challenge for the French team is obviously to be among those that stand out in this field,” Lecornu said. “When it comes to military AI, we’ll be the European power that’s best prepared, that’s going to devote the most resources to it.”

France, with its army that deploys operationally, will be capable of developing “not theoretical AI but combat AI, and that fundamentally is going to change the game.”

France turns to AI for signals analysis in underwater acoustics war

Lecornu said the technology is already being used in the French Army “everywhere,” with the Caesar howitzer using AI to aid with target acquisition by drone, a development resulting from the needs of Ukrainian gunners in their war against Russia, while the Air Force uses artificial intelligence in pilot training.

In terms of capacity sharing with civilian applications, the ministry will use the same model as that used by the French Atomic Energy Commission in the 1960s, Lecornu said. The Armed Forces Ministry in March announced the creation of a ministerial agency for artificial intelligence in defense, known by its French acronym Amiad.

“It’s such a revolution, artificial intelligence, in many respects as profound as the atom in the aftermath of World War II,” Lecornu said. “The particularity of our business is that it’s unthinkable to run AI on potentially classified material in a network that isn’t completely secure.”

France isn’t the only country to have identified AI as a military priority. U.S. Department of Defense spending on AI nearly tripled in the one-year period ending in August 2023 to $557 million, according to analysis by the Brookings Institution published in March.

The fastest supercomputer in Europe is Finland’s LUMI, with a performance rating of 380 Petaflop/s, or 380 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, which puts it in fifth position globally, according to the Top500 ranking as of June. Two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers use architecture by Eviden, a unit of French company Atos: Leonardo in Italy and MareNostrum in Spain.

One challenge France faces is retaining skilled engineers, with competition from tech companies such as Google and Apple that offer better salaries, Lecornu said. Retaining talent is a question of sovereignty, and it’s an issue the AI agency will tackle, according to the minister, who didn’t provide details on how that might be achieved.

France rethinks military light-drone acquisition as Army falls behind

PARIS — France is changing its acquisition process for light military unmanned aerial vehicles to become more nimble and signed a pact with local drone makers as the country’s Army threatens to fall behind in a technology that military leaders say is remaking warfare.

French Armed Forces Minister Sebastian Lecornu signed a “defense UAV pact” at the Eurosatory defense show here on Monday that provides the basis for working with the nation’s industry on defense drones below 150 kg (331 lbs), French armament agency DGA said.

The country “may have run up a bit of a delay” in the area of drones, and rather than developing drones for the coming years, France will cooperate with UAV makers to make a technological jump to the next generation of drones for the early 2030s, Lecornu said in a speech at Eurosatory.

All aerial drones that France sold to Ukraine were developed in-house by manufacturers without development input from the French armed forces, retired Maj. Gen. Claude Chenuil, a fomer military-acquisition executive, said during a round table discussion at Eurosatory. He said the Ukrainian armed forces will be using 1 million drones this year, compared with a French Army target to buy “a few thousand drones.”

France is investing €5 billion ($5.4 billion) in drones through 2030 as part of its military programming law, with the stated goal of developing a French loitering-munitions industry by the end of this decade, as well as achieving swarm-flight capability. The defense budget law included a target for the Army to have 3,000 tactical drones by 2025.

Ukraine war drives push for arming smaller drones

Drones are changing combat, from loitering munitions to intelligence gathering, “and if we’ve fallen behind, it’s high time that we catch up,” said Maj. Gen. Erwan Salmon, the head of the ground combat management unit at DGA.

France needs to be able to acquire drones quickly and renew them as required by the pace of drone innovation, as well as be able to mass produce UAVs, “that’s the whole point of the defense drone pact,” Salmon said. That will require changing acquisition strategies to avoid ending up with drone systems “completely out of step with the innovations.”

French defense contracts often start from an armed forces requirement, after which the armament directorate drafts the specifications before organizing a contract, leading to programs that can take 10 years between the expression of a need and delivery, said Bastien Mancini, the CEO of French drone manufacturer Delair.

“Structurally, this is not possible with drones,” Mancini said. “Technologies are evolving fast. We need to be able to shorten lead times.”

The armament directorate will probably need to set up some financing to be able to quickly buy and test off-the-shelf products, to determine whether they should be acquired in larger numbers, Salmon said. The directorate’s acquisition service is looking into financing of technology bricks that could underpin the development of new systems, he said.

The defense UAV pact will be a useful forum for industry cooperation, including between smaller French drone makers and larger defense firms, according to Éric Lenseigne, vice president for drone warfare at Thales. Given the size of the French market, exports will be needed to reach critical size, and export commitments could be an area of further cooperation, Lenseigne said.

Thales estimates the global market for drones of less than 150kg to be worth more than €2.5 billion, with growth rates of 14% per year, according to Lenseigne, with the market expected to remain “dynamic” even in case of cessation of hostilities in Ukraine.

Four French drone makers – Parrot, Eos Technologie, Delair and Hexadrone – have delivered drones to Ukraine, where they seem to be doing “a good job,” Mancini said.

Still, the industry for military UAVs in France is fragile, with the development of an industrial-scale drone requiring an investment of €5 million to €10 million, compared with revenue for Delair of around €30 million this ear, according to the CEO. “So consolidation is bound to come naturally.”

There will be a minimum threshold of buying required to allow the French drone industry to develop new solutions and payloads, according to Col. Hervé Mermod, program coherence officer with the French Armed Forces General Staff. France would need to finance a strategic reserve that would pay for maintaining an industrial capacity to scale up drone production in case of need, he said.

Leonardo seeks global firms to build, tweak its new attack helicopter

ROME — Italy’s Leonardo is seeking industrial partners around the world to get on board its new AW249 attack helicopter as it flies two prototypes, readies two more and brings the platform to the Eurosatory trade show in Paris.

Bigger and faster than the aging Italian army AW129 Mangusta it is set to replace, and the only new attack helicopter now being developed in the West, the AW249 will be able to control unmanned aerial vehicles using large screens and helmet displays inspired by the F-35 combat jet.

“Because of the open architecture and our plan to keep it in service for at least 30 years, we are open to industrial collaboration to allow countries to become partners in the development of specific configurations, customizing equipment systems and localizing production for larger numbers,” a company spokesman told Defense News before Eurosatory.

Potential customers getting their industries involved could hail from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, said the spokesman.

The plan recalls how Leonardo, then known as Finmeccanica, licensed the use of the baseline design of the AW129 to Turkey, which beefed up the helicopter and later sold its renamed T-129 to Nigeria and the Philippines.

Industry eyes Ukraine war to sharpen proposals for NATO helo fleet

But the spokesman said Leonardo’s approach was very different this time.

“We are not telling governments to take a baseline and develop their own, we are inviting customers to join us from an industrial perspective,” he said.

Weighing in at 8.3 tonnes, the new AW249 is nearly double the 4.35 tonne maximum take-off weight of its predecessor while its top speed of 155 knots (178 miles per hour) outstrips the 126 knots of the AW129.

“What we have kept is the agility, the maneuverability, while adding capabilities,” said the spokesman.

Armaments include guided and unguided 70mm rockets, air-to-air infrared guided missiles and air-to-ground radio frequency or fiberoptic guided missiles, while the AW249 pilot will be able to task UAVs, control their payload and view images they send.

Discussions on allowing the heliopter to control loitering munitions are underway with the Italian Army, which will be the launch customer for the AW249 with first deliveries in 2027.

Getting in step with fifth-generation technology, the helicopter will feature a 20-inch display for the pilot and co-pilot, with the choice of putting up video and data on the screen or on the helmet display.

Leonardo officials said pilots will be able to put a map up in their visor, but out of vision so it enters the pilot’s visor display when the pilot turns their head.

Swapping data between screen and helmet also applies to sensor fusion data, which is built using sensors including infra-red imaging, radar, LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging radar, a low light camera and satellite terrain images.

The platform is nearing readiness after Italian defense and Air Force officials became seriously interested in the coaxial rotor technology used on Lockheed Martin’s Defiant-X. That enthusiasm has now waned since the Defiant-X lost out in the US Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft program (FLRAA) program in 2022, and then saw its next hope for adoption, the U.S. Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program, cancelled.

That, according to Leonardo officials, vindicates the firm’s decision to stick with conventional designs like the AW249, while adding new capabilities.

“The U.S. decision reinforces our road map,” said the spokesman.

“Whatever industry decides to develop to meet national requirements that involves different architecture, the cancellation of FARA is moving it far to the right,” he said.

Pentagon’s contracting speed lane sometimes no faster, says watchdog

The Pentagon’s fast-track pathway for buying equipment often doesn’t move any faster than the normal process, according to a new report from the government’s watchdog agency.

The Government Accountability Office unveiled its annual report on the Defense Department’s buying practices, covering many of the largest items in the military’s shopping cart, from aircraft carriers to intercontinental ballistic missiles.

GAO studied more than 30 of the most expensive items on order, costing a little more than $1 trillion. The total cost of those fell by about $1.7 billion since the year before, due to changes in inflation and a drop in purchases.

Still, several of these big-ticket items are running above the contracted price. The estimated total may rise, the report warned, plus there are issues with speed.

For the largest weapons programs still awaiting delivery, it’s taking 10 years for the Pentagon to place an order and then receive the system. That’s longer than the average noted last year.

But for programs that have started delivering, the delays are even longer. The average time, the authors found, rose from 8 years to 11 years.

Alongside these major programs, GAO also studied some meant to be smaller and more nimble. These “middle-tier acquisitions,” or MTA, work like a toll road alongside a highway — a quicker route for weapons that the Pentagon needs more urgently.

The trouble is that the speed limit isn’t much faster, the report found.

“Although the MTA pathway was designed for speed, GAO found most MTA programs do not plan to implement leading practices to facilitate that speed,” it said.

These programs are meant to reach the field within five years, according to the Pentagon’s own guidance. However, GAO found some middle-tier programs are still following a “linear” process: five years for prototyping and another five for development.

“While the MTA pathway offers flexibilities to create efficiencies in the acquisition process, the warfighter may continue to wait years — if not more than a decade — for a solution that may ultimately no longer be relevant,” according to the report.

One of the core problems the Pentagon faces as it tries to buy weapons moving forward is purchasing software. Weapons, like technology more broadly, depend more on the lines of code that make them work. To avoid going obsolete, that software must stay up to date.

But the DOD struggles to buy this evergreen technology, and one of the reasons listed in the report is employees. The department doesn’t have enough people who understand software, the report argued. Instead, many of the most software-intense programs in the Pentagon require the expertise of contractors.

“DOD has taken initial steps to establish a cadre of personnel with software expertise, but its efforts are in early stages,” the report said. “While DOD expects to request more funding, as of March 2024, the cadre consisted of one federal employee with limited assistance.”

GAO offered three main recommendations: strategies to make MTA programs move faster, clearer guidance on the Pentagon’s software workforce, and the funding and goals needed for that workforce.

The top deputy for Pentagon acquisition and sustainment, who has since moved to a policy role, partially agreed with the recommendations and said some may be included in the DOD’s next update to its buying practices, expected this month.