Archive: September 9, 2024

Netherlands to add tanks, F-35s, frigates amid warnings of war

PARIS — The Netherlands plans to bolster its armed forces by reconstituting a tank battalion, buying more F-35 fighter jets and adding anti-submarine frigates as the NATO member seeks to field a more credible military force capable of deterring an attack.

The Dutch government will increase defense spending by €2.4 billion (U.S.$2.65 billion) a year, including €1.5 billion additional spending on “combat power,” it said in a paper last week setting out policy for coming years. The country will lift its defense budget to around €24 billion a year, nearly double what the Netherlands spent on defense in 2022.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Dutch need to prepare for scenarios including Russia attacking a NATO member such as Lithuania or Poland, the defense paper said. The Netherlands must be ready to fight a war of necessity rather than the “wars of choice” of recent decades, State Secretary of Defence Gijs Tuinman said in a presentation of the paper on Thursday.

“The ruthless aggression shows that an attack on the NATO alliance is no longer unthinkable,” Defense Minister Ruben Brekelmans said. “The Netherlands must step up to protect our security. We have to get to work to deter our enemies, guard NATO’s external borders and prevent further war in Europe. We have no time to lose in this.”

Brekelmans said the Netherlands may seem at peace, but in reality the country is in a “gray zone” of neither peace nor war, facing daily attacks on digital systems, companies, ports and power grids, and constant spying. He said the Dutch can no longer choose where in the world’s conflict areas they can contribute, but must be ready to defend the national territory.

“This is not just a small change,” Dutch Chief of Defence Otto Eichelsheim said. “It is a turning point in the history of the Dutch armed forces, and it requires a fundamentally different way of thinking. Instead of meticulously preparing and planning every single mission, in the near future our military, our civilians must simply be ready every day, permanently ready for a large-scale conflict. Because deterrence only works if we are credible.”

The government said it wants to enshrine minimum defense spending of 2% of gross domestic product in law. The country had already lifted its 2024 defense budget to €21.4 billion, or 1.95% of GDP, from €15.4 billion in 2023 and €12.9 billion in 2022.

Brekelmans said the Netherlands will still continue to deploy internationally to regions important to its security and prosperity, such as in Iraq and the Red Sea, and play an active role providing military support for Ukraine.

As part of the new focus on home defense, the Netherlands will recreate a tank battalion, after selling its last Leopard 2 tanks in 2011 due to budget cuts, and leasing 18 tanks from Germany since 2015. NATO has been calling on the Netherlands to strengthen its land-based power, including with heavy armor. The country may buy around 50 Leopard 2 A8 tanks, according to Dutch press reports.

A tank battalion costs between €260 million and €315 million per year, based on a 15-year planning period that includes buying the tanks as well as maintenance, spare parts, operating and personnel costs, according to a report to parliament earlier this year. The government will also look into unmanned systems to supplement manned tanks, it said in the defense paper.

To boost infantry firepower, the Army’s Boxer armored personnel carriers will be equipped with heavier cannons as well as anti-tank weapons.

“The armed forces must grow – in manpower, resources, and in weapon systems,” Brekelmans said. “We will have to innovate, to constantly stay one step ahead of our adversaries.”

For the Royal Netherlands Navy, the government will buy two more anti-submarine warfare frigates as well as NH-90 helicopters and uncrewed vessels. The Netherlands last year ordered two anti-submarine frigates from Damen and Thales for €1.9 billion, and the government now says the country needs more protection against underwater threats, including to subsea infrastructure in deeper waters.

The Dutch will also order an additional six F-35 fighter jets on top of the 52 aircraft already announced. Increasing the number of fighters will allow for greater availability and firepower, as well as more sustained operations, the paper said.

The country will invest in supplies of ammunition and spare parts, as well as free up additional funds for logistics, medical support and intelligence.

“It is not only crucial that we can bring more combat power to the table, but also that we can sustain the fight longer,” Brekelmans said. “This is an important lesson from the war in Ukraine, which has now been going on for two and a half years, with no end in sight at this time. Putin is discouraged only when he knows that he is losing not only the first battle, but the entire war.”

The Dutch armed forces face a “major limitation” related to the speed with which equipment and weapons can be delivered, and the country needs to boost the capacity of its defense firms to produce and innovate, according to the minister.

The Netherlands will therefore spend about €1 billion in coming years to beef up defense-industrial production, according to Tuinman, the defense state secretary, who said a strong local defense industry is part of deterrence.

Report shows a smaller US Army aircraft fleet with fewer flying hours

U.S. Army helicopter crews are flying one-third of the hours they did at the peak of the past two decades, as the number of manned aircraft has declined by 20%, according to a government report.

The same report also noted that Army saw the availability of aircraft increase while the fleet has largely gotten younger.

The Congressional Budget Office’s findings, aimed at documenting how the Army is using its aircraft, are based on service aviation data from 2000 to 2023.

In 2011, the Army saw its peak of average flying hours in manned aircraft, the majority of which are helicopters.

Army air crew training revamp to look at aircraft and simulators

At that time, air crews flew an average of 302 hours each year. As of 2023, the average flight hours have dropped by more than one-third to 198 hours, according to the report.

The availability of aircraft for training and operations is up over the period covered in the report. In 2000, the percentage of manned aircraft that were mission-capable was just over 50%, according to the report. It has remained above 60% since 2007 and sits at 68% as of last year.

Report authors credit much of the additional flight time to overseas operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As both wars wound down, a parallel drop in flight hours occurred.

Army Times reported Friday that the service is overhauling its aircrew training as the force adapts to new threats, added capabilities to its aircraft, and grapples with a high mishap rate this past year.

Since last October, 14 soldiers died in 10 Class A mishaps. That puts the service at a 3.22 mishap rate per 100,000 flight hours. That rate is double the annual average since 2011, during the end of the war in Iraq.

Over the same period, the number of manned aircraft decreased as the number of unmanned aircraft, or drones, increased.

In 2000 the Army had nearly 5,000 manned aircraft. As of last year, that number went down to 3,900.

The number of AH-64 Apache helicopters and H-47 Chinook helicopters has remained steady throughout at roughly 600 Apaches and nearly 500 Chinooks over that period.

The report provided graphs but not exact numbers of aircraft.

But the number of H-60 Black Hawk helicopters has risen, according to the report.

The Army had fewer than 1,500 Black Hawks in 2000 and has more than 2,000 now.

Other inventory decreases come from the retiring of the H-1 Iroquois, or “Huey,” and H-58 Kiowa, among other platforms. The Army had nearly 2,000 Iroquois and nearly 700 Kiowa two decades ago. Those programs ended in 2016 and 2020, respectively.

Currently, the service’s manned aircraft fleet includes the Black Hawk, Chinook, Apache, UH-72 Lakota helicopter and the fixed-wing C-12 Huron, a passenger airplane used both to transport personnel and intelligence gathering, according to the report.

There are an estimated 2,100 Black Hawks; 700 Apaches; 500 Lakotas; 400 Chinooks in the service’s manned fleet.

The average age of the manned aircraft fleet has decreased somewhat. At its peak, the Army’s aircraft average age was 17.8 years in 2008, according to the report. By 2019 that number had dropped to about 14 years and has remained near that number since.

Some of that drop is due to the retiring of legacy aircraft and programs to extend the service of the Chinook, according to the report.

But the Black Hawk, the Army’s largest fleet, has seen the average age of a Black Hawk rise from 12 years in 2000 to 18 years in 2023, according to the report.

In February, the Army announced it would end its Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, which sought to replace the Kiowa.

At the same time the service announced its aviation investment rebalance, a program to squeeze more service life out of the Chinook, Apache and Blackhawk through airframe and engine upgrades.

On the unmanned side, which continues to grow, Army has 700 large drones, which include 500 RQ-7B Shadows and 200 MQ-1C Gray Eagles.

In April, the Army announced that it would retire the Shadow drone as it seeks a new option for drone-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George told Army Times that he has prioritized ongoing commercial drone buys, with options to purchase new drones as they’re developed rather than committing to a decades-long program for a single type.

The replacement program, dubbed Future Tactical UAS, saw an $8 million contract award to defense company AeroVironment to deliver its Jump 20 drone system as an interim drone capability for one brigade, Defense News previously reported. The service plans to equip the first unit with a new drone by 2026.

US Army’s next budget invests heavily in drones and electronic warfare

The U.S. Army is planning to ask for more flexible funding for unmanned aircraft systems, capabilities to counter them and electronic warfare tools in its next budget as it takes lessons learned from Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion, according to Christine Wormuth, the service’s secretary.

“I think some of the areas that [Gen. Randy George], the chief [of staff of the Army] and I feel very strongly that we need to invest more in, both from the perspective of the Army… but also the needs of the joint force, is in the areas of unmanned aerial systems, counter-unmanned aerial systems and electronic warfare,” she said Wednesday at the Defense News Conference.

For instance, a Ukraine battalion commander told Wormuth earlier this year during training in Germany, that Russian electronic warfare capabilities were increasing “in ways that were concerning,” Wormuth detailed.

“I think you’ll see that in the budget that goes up to Congress next spring,” Wormuth said. “That’s an area where I think we also need to have more agility in our funding mechanisms because of the technology in those capability areas is changing so rapidly that we can’t afford to get locked into something and then be only allowed to use that something for the next 10 years.”

Both Wormuth and George have discussed the possibility of budgeting differently in order to get some capability into the hands of soldiers much more quickly. One of those possibilities is asking Congress to fund pots of money dedicated for a specific capability rather than budget across a number of specific line items that tend to be a specific product or program.

But both have also acknowledged that getting congressional appropriators on board might not be so easy. “Historically, they’re generally… very skeptical of what they see as kind of slush funds. They have a lot of scar tissue around [overseas contingency operations], and how the department has used that over the years,” Wormuth said.

Even so, “there is such a deep realization that we have got to change more quickly and that technology is changing rapidly right now that we do need to have more agile mechanisms,” she added.

Overseas contingency operations, or OCO, funding, used during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to pay for operations abroad, was a separate account with billions outside of the Pentagon’s base budget. It was often used to get extra funding for a variety of things rather than commit to paying for it within regular funding. Congress eliminated OCO funding beginning in FY22. Now the Defense Department must budget for any overseas operations within its base budget.

The Army plans to present a budget in these areas, according to Wormuth, that, for example, used to have 10 to 12 individual line items and now may have two or three.

“If we keep it relatively narrow and focused and we demonstrate that we can use that agility in those areas effectively, we may be able to sort of have a proof of concept,” she said. “I’m cautiously optimistic.”

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

The Air Force landed two F-35A fighters on a highway in Finland on Wednesday to practice how aircraft might operate in a high-intensity future war.

The F-35s, which were from the 48th Fighter Wing at RAF Lakenheath in England, carried out the landings on the Hosio Highway Strip in Ranua, Finland, under the so-called agile combat employment, or ACE, concept. It was the first time the Air Force had landed its F-35s on a highway, the service said.

The Air Force worries that if war breaks out with an adversary boasting stand-off weaponry, like China, their military could target large American bases in places like Japan and Guam with missile barrages or other attacks. If the Air Force only operated from those bases, a series of those Chinese attacks could potentially devastate its ability to launch aircraft.

The service developed the ACE concept to counter that possibility. The Air Force plans to spread out operations across a given region in “hub and spoke” patterns, using a series of smaller, more austere bases. By dispersing these operations, the Air Force says, enemy forces would have to carry out many more attacks than if they were centralized.

Under ACE, the Air Force could create rough air fields for their distributed bases, or use existing local highways as runways.

The Air Force said the highway landings, which took place during the BAANA 2024 exercise in Finland, showed how NATO allies had improved their ability to work together, and operate under ACE tenets.

“The successful first-ever landing of our fifth-generation F-35 on a highway in Europe is a testament to the growing relationship and close interoperability we have with our Finnish allies,” Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa, said. “The opportunity to learn from our Finnish counterparts improves our ability to rapidly deploy and employ airpower from unconventional locations and reflects the collective readiness and the agility of our forces.”

Finland and other Nordic nations have military-civilian integration, like warplanes using highways, baked into their national defense calculus.

Allied aircraft that also practiced highway landings included a German Eurofighter Typhoon and a Finnish Hawk jet trainer.

Finland formally joined NATO in 2023, spurred largely by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Air Force said Finland’s membership has increased U.S. airmen’s ability to train with Finnish airmen and learn from them, at events such as the 1v1 air superiority exercise held in June at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

US Army aiming for one more hypersonic weapon test by year’s end

The U.S. Army is aiming for one more major test of its Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon by the end of 2024 in order to decide whether to field it to the first unit next year, Doug Bush, the service’s acquisition chief, said Thursday.

The Common Hypersonic Glide Body, which is the all-up round developed jointly with the U.S. Navy, conducted a key successful test earlier this year. The Navy will integrate the round into a ship-launched capability, while the Army will integrate it into a ground launcher.

The Army has worked with Leidos’ Dynetics for years to build the industrial base for the Common Hypersonic Glide Body that will be used by both the ground service and the Navy, as the domestic private sector has never built a hypersonic weapon.

On the heels of the Navy test, “what we’ve got to do is make sure we have a full end-to-end test as close to an operational test that is successful,” Bush told reporters in a Pentagon briefing.

The Army needs to have confidence “it’s safe and effective to actually put in a unit that might have to go to war,” he said. “We haven’t had that test event yet where it’s fully succeeded, but we’re going to have, hopefully have, it this year.”

If the service is able to pull off a successful test, then it will be on track to field it to the first unit as an initial operational capability, according to Bush.

The Army completed its delivery of the first hypersonic weapon capability — minus the all-up rounds — to the 1st Multidomain Task Force 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 17th Field Artillery Brigade unit at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, two days ahead of its end-of-fiscal 2021 fielding deadline.

Hypersonic weapons are capable of flying faster than Mach 5 — or more than 3,836 miles per hour — and can maneuver between varying altitudes, making them difficult to detect. The C-HGB is made up of the weapon’s warhead, guidance system, cabling and thermal protection shield.

The U.S. is in a race to field the capability and develop systems to defend against hypersonic missiles. China and Russia are actively developing and testing hypersonic weapons.

In August, Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office director, told Defense News in an exclusive interview at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, that the Army is “really close” to fielding the capability. But he cautioned that more testing remains before any decision is made on the future of its ground-launched hypersonic missile.

The Navy’s flight test of the industry-manufactured missile — which took place at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii in May — was highly anticipated as part of the joint development program following a series of failed or aborted tests of the Common Hypersonic Glide Body.

The Army and Navy last year had to abort flight tests in March, October and November due to challenges at the range related not to the round but the process of firing up the missile for launch.

Missile development programs typically take about 10 years, Rasch stressed, and while the plan to field hypersonic missiles to a first unit has been delayed by over a year, the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon program is only at the five-year mark.

“We’ve got to make sure this capability works. If the decision is made to implement this, it’s for real, serious reasons, strategic-level reasons, and we need it to work every time,” Rasch said.

Army air crew training revamp to look at aircraft and simulators

After several fatal Army aircraft crashes and the arrival of a more complicated airspace in the future, the service is reviewing and updating how it trains its pilots and its warrant officers in particular.

Those changes will likely include a look at the types of helicopters soldiers are training with, simulator time and effectiveness, new rotor blades and tail rotor drive systems for the Apache and warrant officers sticking to their technical tasks for longer in the careers.

Fourteen soldiers have died in 10 Class A aviation mishaps since October 2023.

That’s more than double the mishap annual average over the past decade, Brig. Gen. Matthew Braman, Army headquarters aviation representative, said at an Association of the U.S. Army event on Wednesday.

Army stands up Arctic aviation command

A Class A mishap is any incident that results in the loss of life or the loss of equipment totaling more than $2.5 million, according to the Army.

On average, an estimated six aircraft crew members die each year in training or operations since 2011. Overall, even non-fatal mishaps contributed to a rate of 3.22 mishaps per 100,000 flight hours.

That high rate prompted a “safety stand up” in April across Army aviation, which included a focus on risk management and mitigation as the service continued normal aviation operations.

Recent Army aviation mishaps include:

A February 12 Army National Guard Apache crash in Utah, injuring two soldiers.A February 23 Army National Guard Apache crash in Mississippi that killed two soldiers.A March 8 UH-72 Lakota crash at the U.S.-Mexico border that killed two Army National Guardsmen and a border patrol agent.A March 25 crash involving an pache helicopter at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington injuring two soldiers.A March 27 Apache crash at Fort Carson, Colorado that injured two soldiers.A May 7 Apache mishap that injured two soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas.An August 7 Apache crash out of Fort Novosel that killed a civilian contractor instructor and injured the Army student pilot.

The tail rotor played a significant role in about half of the mishaps, Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, commander of the Army Aviation Center of Excellence, said.

The center is where the Army trains its air crews.

Brig. Gen. Cain Baker told Army Times Wednesday that as the service analyzed the recent crashes, it found the tail rotor problem specifically in Apache helicopters.

When the tail rotor can’t spin fast enough to provide the amount of thrust the aircraft needs, it can’t counter-balance the spin of the main rotor, causing the aircraft to turn, Baker said.

The tail rotor can experience those strains at higher altitudes and when the platform is carrying too much weight.

Baker said the Army has “plans in place to develop new tail rotor blades and a tail rotor drive system for the Apache.”

He did not share a timeline for those developments.

But training for Army aviators isn’t limited to changing out a few parts on an older model helicopter.

Pilots now face airborne threats they never saw during recent wars, an advanced sensing and detection mission and “launched effects” that commanders want onboard their aircraft.

Those add-on duties and capabilities complicate the tasks and duties of an air crew, especially a two-soldier Apache crew.

As the center builds new air crews and pilots, the Army continues to pursue the next steps through its future vertical lift program, including the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, which planners expect to increase the range and capabilities beyond the legacy UH-60 Black Hawk.

The aviation center is analyzing its entire course of instruction, the defense contracts that manage much of that training, the instructor aircraft and simulators as part of its review of aviation training, Gill said.

In 2013, the service replaced both the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter and its training aircraft, the TH-67 single-engine helicopter, with the dual-engine LUH-72A Lakota light utility helicopters, Defense News previously reported.

Though commanders didn’t have a specific date, officials said that changes at the center should begin in the next year or sooner.

For warrant officers returning to Fort Novosel as they advance in their careers, their training will change the most.

Until recently, even junior warrant officers were working in some brigades as aviation staff officers rather than remaining focused on their technical specialties.

“What we’re trying to do is not create the warrant officer to be a captain-like staff officer,” Gill said.

Instead, warrant officers will return to their roots. Most focus on a particular path for a time, such as crew instruction, aircraft maintenance or aircraft survivability.

Warrants will train those specialties and bring that expertise back to the operational Army, Gill said. Once they achieve the rank of chief warrant officer 5, they will then get training in how to work in a staff.

Pentagon leaders head to Germany for talks on Ukraine military aid

Top U.S. military leaders will be in Germany to discuss Ukraine’s wartime needs as Russia has conducted one of its deadliest airstrikes in the conflict and Ukraine presses its offensive in Russia’s Kursk region.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will host a meeting Friday at Ramstein Air Force Base of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, made up of military leaders from more than 50 nations that have regularly provided funding and weapon systems to bolster Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022.

US to send $125 million in new military aid to Ukraine, officials say

The group’s priorities include bolstering Ukraine’s air defenses and “energizing of the defense industrial bases” of allies to ensure long-term support for Kyiv, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s press secretary, said in a statement Thursday.

“As Secretary Austin has said, Ukraine matters to U.S. and international security,” the statement said.

Ukraine’s allies face renewed calls from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for additional air defenses and loosened restrictions on how far into Russia Ukraine can fire American-provided munitions. He has long pushed allies to go further to support Ukraine’s effort to fend off Russia.

The meeting comes after Russia used two ballistic missiles to target a military academy and nearby hospital this week in Ukraine, killing more than 50 people and wounding over 270 others, in one of the deadliest strikes of the war.

“Air defense systems and missiles are needed in Ukraine, not in a warehouse somewhere,” Zelenskyy said on his Telegram channel this week. “Long-range strikes that can protect us from Russian terror are needed now.”

So far, the Biden administration has kept relatively strict control over how the missiles it provides Ukraine can be used. Ukraine can defensively fire at Russian targets along the border, but the U.S. prohibits their use deeper into Russia, out of concern that such a strike would further escalate the war.

There has been no change in the policy on Ukraine’s use of U.S.-supplied weapons, Ryder told reporters Tuesday.

That the group of military leaders from Ukraine’s allies has continued to meet and agree to send weapons is extraordinary, however. Global pressure on weapons stockpiles has increased and contributors such as the U.S. face competing demands for that aid to bolster security in the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific.

Since 2022, the member nations together have provided about $106 billion in security assistance to Ukraine. The U.S. has provided more than $56 billion of that total.

The group’s meeting also comes as Zelenskyy has signaled a major reshuffling of his cabinet-level leaders. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, one of Ukraine’s most recognizable faces on the international stage, resigned Wednesday before the expected reorganization.

Ukraine also has made a fundamental shift in its tactics in the war, seizing Russian territory in the Kursk region during an offensive that began a few weeks ago. Ukraine’s military is trying to maintain control of that land, while Russian President Vladimir Putin pushes his forces deeper into eastern Ukraine. Both sides are prepared for difficult fighting during the winter.

Both sides have become entrenched over the two previous winters, and Ukrainians have endured brutal conditions without electricity or heat as Russia has targeted its power grid.

Del Toro faces Hatch Act violation for comments on Biden

Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro violated the Hatch Act for statements voicing support for President Joe Biden during a work trip to the United Kingdom in January, according to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

While civilian Defense Department employees like Del Toro are permitted to publicly back political candidates in a personal capacity, the Hatch Act bars federal officials from participating in political activities while serving in their official capacity and in their federal workplace.

The Office of Special Counsel said Thursday that Del Toro breached this policy during several interviews representing the Defense Department to garner backing for Operation Prosperity Guardian, a U.S. and international mission to safeguard shipping vessels in the Red Sea, the Bab al-Mandeb, and Gulf of Aden.

“When speaking in his official capacity on a taxpayer-funded trip, Secretary Del Toro encouraged electoral support for one candidate over another in the upcoming presidential election,” Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger said in a statement Thursday. “By doing so, he crossed a legal line and violated the Hatch Act.”

How the Hatch Act changes after Election Day

“This is especially troubling because Secretary Del Toro has himself acknowledged that military work and partisan politics should not be mixed,” Dellinger said. “As he stated just this past July: ‘It is more important than ever for us to remember that the [Department of the Navy] is an apolitical body… Public trust and confidence depend on this.’”

During an appearance at the Royal United Services Institute on Jan. 25, Del Toro fielded a question regarding concerns the U.S. could adopt a more isolationist approach in the event of a different administration following the 2024 election. In response, Del Toro said that the U.S. and the world “need the mature leadership of President Biden.”

“I’m confident that the American people will step up to the plate come November and support President Biden for a second term as our Commander-in Chief, so that we can continue to work together as free democratic countries respect each other around the globe,” Del Toro said.

Later that day, Del Toro made similar remarks about the world deserving a second term with Biden in the White House in an interview with BBC News Sunday.

Del Toro self-reported his comments on BBC News Sunday on Feb. 1, noting that he aimed to address the significance of strong international alliances and national security issues.

“In retrospect, I believe my response should have been delivered more broadly without reference to specific candidates,” Del Toro wrote.

After opening an inquiry into the incident, the Office of Special Counsel later learned of Del Toro’s remarks at the Royal United Services Institute.

Del Toro’s lawyer defended these statements, pointing out they were not included in prepared remarks, were “fragments of answers” provided in response to questions from foreign press, and that Del Toro had no intent to influence the election. Del Toro’s attorney also said that failing to answer questions from the BBC’s Laura Kuennsberg could have also portrayed a bad image and indicated a lack of support for the current administration.

“Failing to be responsive may well have suggested to her — and the BBC audience — that Secretary Del Toro was not fully supportive of the US President. That could well have proved embarrassing on the international stage to Secretary Del Toro, President Biden, and the Biden Administration,” Del Toro’s attorney, Michael Bromwich, said in a letter to the Office of Special Counsel.

Still, the Office of Special Counsel said that self-reporting the comments on BBC did not “absolve” Del Toro from misconduct and that he did back a second Biden term in the White House.

“Secretary Del Toro’s statements with overt reference to the election conveyed electoral support for one candidate and opposition to another candidate, and thus, constituted political activity,” the Office of Special Counsel said in their report on the matter.

As a result, the Office of Special Counsel referred the matter to the White House for further appropriate action. Penalties for violating the Hatch Act include removal from service, reduction in grade, a reprimand, or a civil penalty up to $1,000.

Pentagon Pentagon Spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters Thursday that the Defense Department is aware of the Office of Special Counsel’s report, and noted that Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks approved a memo this year outlining political engagement processes for military and civilian Defense Department personnel.

Ahead of the presidential election in November, Del Toro released guidance in July instructing commanding officers to review limitations on political activities with their sailors, since the Department of the Navy is an “apolitical body.”

Banned activities for active duty sailors include attending partisan political events as a service member, writing partisan political articles or letters that attempt to sway votes for a candidate or cause, and speaking before a partisan political gathering.

Air Force’s NGAD revamp could open up more business to smaller firms

The Air Force is rethinking its approach to how it will fight a future air war as it considers a new path forward for its Next Generation Air Dominance fighter system, top officials said Wednesday.

And the revamping of NGAD and the air superiority concept could open up more opportunities to smaller and non-traditional firms to compete for elements of the Air Force’s next fighter, officials said.

Major prime contractors in the aerospace world bring vast and unique experience that will be needed for a redesigned Next Generation Air Dominance family of systems, Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Jim Slife said at the Defense News Conference in Arlington, Virginia, Wednesday. Those primes have already done considerable work on a future fighter system that must be leveraged, Slife said.

But “niche capabilities” that smaller firms specialize in will also be vital to creating “whatever NGAD turns into,” Slife said.

“There are absolutely parts of whatever this mission engineering that we do, for this [air superiority] space, that will open the door to non-traditional contractors as well as the major primes,” Slife said. “It’s a yes-and.”

The Air Force put its years-in-the-works NGAD effort, which had originally been expected to award a contract this year, on hold this summer. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in a June interview that NGAD was on track to cost about three times as much as an F-35, placing its potential price tag at as much as $300 million apiece. At that cost, the Air Force would only have been able to buy a small NGAD fleet.

Kendall said the Air Force planned to redesign NGAD to bring its costs down and better integrate its planned drone wingmen, which the service calls Collaborative Combat Aircraft.

At Wednesday’s conference, Slife said the Air Force is conducting a wholesale rethinking of how it will achieve air superiority against a major adversary such as China as it reconsiders its way forward with NGAD.

“You get two different answers if you frame the question as, ‘How do we achieve air superiority in a contested environment?’ [versus] ‘How do we build a 6th-gen manned fighter platform?’” Slife said. “Those are not necessarily the same question.”

Since the Air Force drew up its original ideas for NGAD, Slife said, technology has advanced much quicker than anticipated. Concepts such as autonomously-flown drone wingmen are now within the Air Force’s reach, and the service wants to better fold those capabilities into NGAD.

And with those advancements in technology, Slife said, nothing is off the table.

“There are capabilities that we [now] have that perhaps we would want to be part of this mission space going forward, that weren’t baked into where we started with the NGAD system,” Slife said. “I wouldn’t rule anything out, but I also wouldn’t rule anything back in.”

The Air Force’s recent experience with NGAD shows the importance of flexibility in major acquisitions as the threat evolves, Hunter said.

“It definitely prioritizes towards … not being over-specified for any particular problem set, or any particular approach to the problem set,” Hunter said.

When asked if a revised NGAD contract might come in 2025, Hunter said, “We’ll have to wait and see what our analysis delivers.”

Production scaling woes delay next Space Development Agency launches

Plans for the Space Force’s Space Development Agency to kick-start its next phase of launches this month is on hold due to supplier delays, according to its director Derek Tournear.

September was supposed to be the start of a 10-month streak of regular SDA launches to put the agency’s Tranche 1 satellites — which will provide initial operational capability — in low Earth orbit. Those spacecraft will now likely fly at the end of this year or early next, Tournear said Wednesday at the Defense News Conference.

The delays are primarily linked to financial troubles among some SDA vendors who have struggled to scale their manufacturing capacity, he said. That includes California-based Mynaric, which supplies optical terminals to several of the agency’s satellite providers and has struggled to ramp up production.

“These are things we have to work through with our primes, our spacecraft providers, to make sure they can continue to pull that schedule in when they have those kinds of delays,” Tournear said.

The Tranche 1 satellites are part of SDA’s broader proliferated space architecture, which it envisions will eventually include hundreds of missile tracking and data transport spacecraft operating from low Earth orbit, about 1,200 miles above the equator.

SDA started launching its Tranche 0 satellites in April 2023 and as of February has put all 27 of those spacecraft in orbit. That launch plan also hit a snag after supply chain issues tied to the COVID-19 pandemic stalled the first mission by about six months.

A July report from The Aerospace Corporation raised questions about whether these early setbacks indicate the agency’s plan to build and launch satellites on a two-year cadence — refreshing technology with each new tranche — is too ambitious. The study highlights the challenge of continuous modernization and production scaling within a still-maturing small satellite industrial base.

“These examples may become less common as SDA launches and operates more and more satellites, but developing and integrating new technologies without disrupting launch schedules or existing capabilities will not be easy,” it states.

Tournear attributed the launch delays to “growing pains” within the industrial base and the agency, which was formed five years ago. The two-year launch and technology refresh cycle is key to SDA’s model, so he doesn’t see that approach changing. Instead, the hope is that as companies learn and adapt to this model, they face fewer supply and schedule challenges.

If things progress as planned, he added, many of those kinks will be worked through by the time Tranche 2 satellites start to launch in 2026.

“I think as industry grows, they get more into this mindset of production delivery versus program management, which is a different mindset for people doing defense contracting,” Tournear said. “I think we’ll see that they’ll be able to hit the milestones a little easier, but right now we’re in that growing pain.”

Once in orbit, the Tranche 1 satellites are slated to hit their operational acceptance milestone by 2025. SDA is also working to field the ground systems that will operate those spacecraft. An agency official told Defense News those systems are in their testing phase and SDA will hold a readiness review this fall. The agency previously planned to have authority to operate the ground segment in the spring, but is now aiming to hit that milestone before Tranche 1 launches.

Tranche 2 satellites are in the design phase, with companies either completing or approaching a critical design review.

Meanwhile, SDA convened its warfighter council last month to discuss requirements for Tranche 3 satellites, which will fly in 2028. The council is made up of combatant commanders and other military users who sign off on the agency’s capability plans.

For Tranche 3 transport satellites, SDA is seeking more advanced phased arrays, which will allow spacecraft to connect with more users on the ground — particularly tactical forces that rely on an S-band signal.

On the missile warning and tracking side, Tournear said the goal is to achieve global missile defense coverage through its Tranche 3 satellites, which means those spacecraft will be able to track an advanced missile through its entire flight, transmit data and intercept.

SDA hasn’t determined the number of satellites it will need in Tranche 3, but Tournear noted that the agency plans to issue solicitations for those spacecraft next year.