Can the Air Force make its next-gen fighter jet cheaper than the F-35?

Since the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s inception, the Defense Department and industry have struggled to wrestle down its price tag to roughly $80 million or $100 million per jet, depending on the model.

It’s been a grueling battle involving inflation, supply chain crunches, evolving requirements and developmental problems, and remains ongoing to this day.

But now, looming over the horizon, Air Force leaders face an even harder challenge: Developing a sixth-generation fighter, a successor to the F-22, that can be produced at or below the cost of an F-35.

It’s an ambitious goal, and one being increasingly floated by Air Force leadership, even as the service continues to sort out what its next-generation platform will entail.

But outside experts caution that cutting costs on an advanced platform could sacrifice capability.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall first suggested the F-35′s price tag as a cost goal for the future fighter program, known as the Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD, platform in a June interview with Defense News.

At the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air Space Cyber conference in September, Kendall doubled down.

“The F-35 kind of represents, to me, the upper bounds of what we’d like to pay for an individual [NGAD] aircraft,” Kendall said. “The F-15EX and the F-35 are roughly in the same cost category. I’d like to go lower, though.”

How the Air Force can rein in that cost remains unclear. The price tag for NGAD’s original concept was coming in at about three times the price of an F-35, Kendall said in June. That sticker shock prompted the Air Force to pause its NGAD contract effort — which had been set to be awarded this year — and rethink its plans for a future air dominance platform.

Meanwhile, some aerospace experts worry that the Air Force is setting an unachievable pricing goal for NGAD — one that might require the fighter to be so watered down that it becomes an irrelevant asset for war and leads to the program’s demise.

“I think it would be extremely challenging, if not unrealistic, to get the kind of capability and performance that they need in NGAD [for] less than the cost of an F-35,” Heather Penney, a retired F-16 pilot and senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told Defense News. “I’m concerned at the way that Secretary Kendall and the senior leadership have been talking about NGAD, because it feels a lot like they’re boiling the frog, that they’re getting people ready for a program cancellation.”

The Air Force is consulting with airpower experts, including former chiefs of staff Norton Schwartz, John Jumper, and Dave Goldfein, to help it figure out how it will dominate the skies for decades to come, Kendall said.

“We’ve got the A-team on this, and we’re moving pretty quickly … to get to some answers,” Kendall said. “Then, by the way, we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to pay for it. Which I think may, at the end of the day, be our biggest problem.”

Cloudy skies ahead

The Air Force wants NGAD to replace the F-22 Raptor fleet sometime in the 2030s. For years, Air Force leaders emphasized how vital NGAD would be to win future wars and it sought to retire older air frames to free up money to develop the system.

But NGAD’s cost has become its Achilles’ heel, and rumors began to spread earlier this year that the program was in trouble.

Kendall told Defense News in June that the service was still planning to build a next-generation fighter, but that it needed a redesign to bring its price tag down and allow the Air Force to buy it in significant numbers.

“We are looking at the NGAD platform design concept to see if it’s the right concept or not,” Kendall said in June. “We’re looking at whether we can do something that’s less expensive and do some trade-offs there.”

Next-gen fighter not dead, but needs cheaper redesign, Kendall says

The Air Force envisions NGAD as a “family of systems” that include not only the sixth-generation crewed fighter, but also multiple autonomous drones known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA, along with advanced sensors, weaponry and other technology.

The service has been secretive about the details of what NGAD will include and its capabilities, but in recent years has started planning for NGAD to be accompanied by CCAs, which will be drone wingmen for crewed fighter jets, accompanying jets on missions and performing a variety of functions.

The Air Force first started working on NGAD before conceiving of autonomous CCAs, Kendall said, and as NGAD is redesigned, it needs to be structured to better integrate those drone wingman and what they can offer.

Kendall said last month that CCA could help lighten the load for NGAD fighters.

“Once you start integrating CCAs, and transferring some mission equipment and capabilities, functions, to the CCAs, then you can talk about a different concept, potentially, for the crewed fighter that’s controlling them,” Kendall said. “So there’s a real range in there.”

The Air Force also wants to power NGAD with a cutting-edge “adaptive” engine, which would shift to the most efficient configuration as flying conditions change, a capability once considered for the F-35.

And as the entire Pentagon pivots to preparing for a possible war with China, the Air Force is rethinking how it would achieve air superiority against Beijing, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Jim Slife said at the Defense News Conference in September.

At the same time, Kendall has also left the door open to other ways of dominating the skies against rival nations like China.

“NGAD itself is still a possibility, it’s one of the things we’re looking at,” Kendall said. “We’d like to get [the price tag] down from [multiple times the cost of an F-35]. But if that turns out to be the most cost-effective operational answer, that’s what we’re going to do, and go fight for the money to have it.”

US Air Force eyes NGAD deliveries by 2030. Can it be done?

But that pursuit could come with a cost, he warned.

“You end up with small numbers,” he said. “The more the airplane costs, the fewer of them you’re going to have. Numbers do matter, so it’s a trade-off.”

Will the numbers add up?

Whatever NGAD ends up looking like going forward, it faces multiple headwinds that could make bringing it into the F-35′s price range difficult, if not impossible, said John Venable, senior resident fellow of aerospace studies at the Mitchell Institute, a national security think tank that focuses on air and space power.

The Air Force has benefited by not being the only customer for the F-35, he noted.

By the mid-2040s, the Defense Department plans to have purchased about 2,500 F-35s for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps combined. The United Kingdom, South Korea, Germany, Israel and about 15 other allies and partner nations are also buying their own Joint Strike Fighter fleets, which allows Lockheed Martin to build as many F-35s as it can and bring the cost down by producing in bulk.

But the F-22 didn’t have that advantage, Venable said. The Air Force was the only customer for that fifth-generation jet, and originally planned to buy about 750 of them from Lockheed Martin.

That fleet was drastically slashed by former Defense Secretary Bob Gates, and the Air Force now has 183 F-22s, which cost $143 million each.

This time around, the Air Force does not plan to sell NGAD to other countries, and it’s not working directly with the Navy on a sixth-generation fighter.

The Navy calls its NGAD effort F/A-XX. In an Oct. 2 Defense Writers Group roundtable with reporters, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti said the Navy is now in the process of selecting from three potential vendors to create F/A-XX.

US Air Force eyes fleet of 1,000 drone wingmen as planning accelerates

The Air Force has not officially said how many NGAD platforms it wants, but last year Kendall suggested it might be around 200.

The B-21 — which maker Northrop Grumman has touted as the first sixth-generation aircraft — had an average unit procurement cost of about $692 million apiece when it was rolled out in 2022.

This further casts doubt on the feasibility of a sub-$100 million sixth-gen NGAD fighter, Venable said.

“You really think that you’re going to get an airplane that has that much more capability at the price point of an F-35, when you’re only going to buy [about 200] of those, and you’re not going to sell it to anybody else?” Venable said. “It’s just not a realistic expectation. … The range, the sensor payload, the stealth capabilities of this new system — all of those things are going to cost money to get right.”

Venable fears the steady drumbeat of questionable news for NGAD is jeopardizing its chances of ever becoming a reality.

“The way you kill things today is to study it until it’s no longer viable,” Venable said. “Because the threat is so much higher, NGAD is not going to be viable in the 2030s because of the delays. And so this is where you go down that slippery slope.”

If the Air Force kills NGAD, that will make other elements of the Air Force’s planned future airpower such as the B-21 and CCAs more vulnerable, Penney said.

And if NGAD is excessively whittled down to bring its cost under control, she said, that could also essentially defeat the purpose of creating a sixth-generation fighter.

To survive a fight against China — which would take place over vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean — NGAD would need to have considerable speed and range, she said.

And if an NGAD fighter has to fly a long distance for its mission, it needs to be able to carry enough of a weapons payload to make the trip worth it, and be a credible enough stand-in force to deter China.

But if those capabilities end up getting pared down so NGAD can survive a budget crunch, she added, that could compromise the jet’s entire reason for being.

“If you go too cheap, it’s not going to be relevant for the things that the need it to be able to do,” Penney said.

Potential solutions

One avenue the Air Force could take will be to increase the modularity of NGAD, Penney said, so more elements such as sensors and processors could be developed separately and later bolted on.

Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Andrew Hunter said earlier this year that the service is looking at the “design concept” for NGAD, or the elements that drive a program’s cost, such as its size, propulsion needs, and the complexity of its mission systems.

“These things all interact and kind of say, this is how much the thing you’re looking at is going to cost,” Hunter said. “As we look at the design concept, we want to get that right, and we are looking at an affordable design concept.”

When asked if the Air Force would release an entirely new solicitation for NGAD following the program’s review, Hunter said that it’s not yet clear what path the Air Force will take. If the review finds the program only needs slight changes, he said, “there may not need to be a huge change to our approach.”

But if the review finds the Air Force needs something dramatically different than its current NGAD path, he said, that will require a more significant shift.

A shift in strategy on NGAD could bring Northrop Grumman back into contention. Last year, Northrop chief executive Kathy Warden told investors the company didn’t plan to bid on the Air Force’s version of NGAD as a prime contractor. But at a conference in September, Warden said Northrop is watching what the Air Force does on NGAD, and that a “material change to the program” would prompt the company to take another look at it.

No matter what NGAD’s final price ends up being, the Air Force will need to be able to afford to field it in sufficient numbers to fight a fierce, vast war against a comparable military, and fly long ranges to get to the battle, Hunter said.

“That’s the puzzle we’ve got to solve, and I grant you, it’s a very challenging puzzle,” he said, adding that there’s more than one way the Air Force can settle on a design for the air superiority it requires.

The Air Force could also finish its NGAD review and conclude there’s no way to bring its price under that of an F-35, Hunter conceded.

“That is possible, yes, but we’ve got to do the work,” he said. “We’ve got to do the analysis. And we know what would be most advantageous.”

United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan flies second certification mission

United Launch Alliance, one of the Pentagon’s top satellite launch providers, launched a second flight of its new Vulcan rocket — a significant step toward certifying the vehicle to fly national security missions.

The rocket flew from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida early this morning. The flight was previously slotted to carry Sierra Space’s space plane, Dream Chaser, but development delays changed those plans. Instead, Vulcan flew a dummy payload and conducted several engine demonstrations and experiments as part of the mission.

ULA CEO Tory Bruno called the mission “nominal” during a launch webcast, though he noted there was an “observation” related to a solid rocket booster that the company will look into.

ULA is owned by defense giants Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Along with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, it’s one of two companies with rockets cleared to fly national security space missions for DOD and the intelligence community. The company is in the process of replacing its legacy Atlas V and Delta IV vehicles — longtime workhorse rockets for the U.S. government — with the more powerful Vulcan.

That process requires ULA to complete two certification flights of its new rocket, the first of which went off without a hitch in January. Following today’s launch, ULA will collect data from the mission, perform its own analysis and then hand that package off to the Space Force, which will conduct its own review. The service will then compare the data and decide whether to certify the rocket.

Bruno told reporters Oct. 2 that if the Space Force deems it a clean mission, the data analysis process will take a matter of weeks to complete and final certification should follow soon after.

Maintaining that timeline is important both for ULA and the Space Force as the company is scheduled to fly two military missions before the end of the year. One of those, USSF-106, includes an experimental spacecraft called Navigation Technology Satellite-3 that will demonstrate capabilities to augment the service’s GPS constellation.

The second mission, USSF-87, is a classified Space Force launch.

“We do need to certify to support our national security space customer who has missions that are relatively urgent,” Bruno said.

Those two missions will lead ULA into a busy year of launches. Its Vulcan and Atlas V rockets are manifested to fly a combined 20 commercial and Defense Department missions in 2025. Bruno said he’s confident in the company’s ability to meet that challenge, highlighting a slew of construction projects underway to expand its launch and manufacturing capacity.

“My infrastructure is coming together, and I feel really great about that. And, you know, the factory’s crushing it,” he said. “Having said all that, yeah, this is a big deal. This is a big increase in launch rate for us, and there’s a lot of work to get done.”

ULA has spent between $5 billion and $7 billion to develop Vulcan and another $1 billion to build the infrastructure to support it, according to Bruno. The rocket was supposed to start launching military missions in 2022, but faced a series of setbacks, including development and testing snafus involving its BE-4 engine, built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

Those delays have put at least two military satellite launches on hold, causing Space Force officials to question whether ULA can manage a projected uptick in the military’s launch cadence. In May, Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, sent ULA a letter relaying those concerns and calling for Lockheed and Boeing to pull together an independent review team to review ULA’s readiness.

The team started its work in June and Bruno said it has since finished its review. He said the review yielded “great suggestions” but largely confirmed that ULA is “on a very solid track to ramping up and meeting all of our obligations and plans.”

The review team is in the process of briefing Lockheed and Boeing leadership as well as the Space Force, so Bruno wouldn’t discuss the findings in detail. But he said the process identified new tools the company could use to improve production and operational planning and management and offered ideas to improve resilience.

“Everything they brought to me as recommendations I thought were great ideas, and I plan to do them,” he said.

Russian hacking group targeted US military contractors

A hacking group tied to Russian intelligence tried to worm its way into the systems of dozens of Western think tanks, journalists and former military and intelligence officials, Microsoft and U.S. authorities said Thursday.

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

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

North Korean charged in cyberattacks on US bases, defense firms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

French Navy orders underwater drones for deep-sea surveillance

BREST, France — The French Navy has ordered an autonomous underwater vehicle from Exail that will surveil critical infrastructure at depths of up to 6,000 meters, the company announced.

The architecture of the new drone will be based on the firm’s Ulyx, a vehicle co-developed with Ifremer, the national institute for ocean science and technology. The platform will primarily be used to carry out reconnaissance operations across the seabed, covering sensitive infrastructure like submarine cables, many of which lie at a depth of 6,000 meters.

Ensuring the protection of those assets has proven increasingly difficult, even for major navies. NATO officials have warned that Russia could target undersea cables to disrupt Western activities.

A number of countries have followed closely the development of Moscow’s submarine fleet, as the country possesses the ability to cut cables on the ocean floor.

During a media visit to the FREMM Normandie frigate of the French Navy, organized here ahead of the Euronaval trade show in Paris next month, officers touched on the increased activity seen in recents years in the waters surrounding the Brest naval base, where the ship was stationed.

Last December, two French frigates, the Normandie and the Auvergne, followed closely a Russian submarine that was transiting off the coast of the Brittany town, according to French media.

The transit route is one that Russian submarines are reported to have taken in recent months to reach areas nearby Ireland.

France has identified the safeguard of its sovereignty of the seabed as a key priority in the French investment plan for 2030.

As part of the capability-building process set out in the Ministerial Strategy for Seabed Warfare, adopted in 2022, the French Navy will buy autonomous as well as remote-controlled undersea vehicles

For the latter category, officials selected French vendor Travocean with its DeepSea vehicle.

The new underwater drone will incorporate several made-in-France components designed by Exail, including acoustics sensors and the Phins inertial navigation system.

An Exail representative declined to say when the delivery of the AUV would be, saying only that it would be before 2030.

New pact boosts defense-industry goals in EU lending scheme

BERLIN — The European Union’s funding and defense branches are moving closer together in a bid to strengthen the continent’s military-industrial complex, with an updated agreement between the European Investment Bank and the European Defence Agency being concluded on Wednesday.

The European Investment Bank, which funds businesses and projects across the bloc to enhance Europe’s competitiveness, will now receive industry guidance from the European Defence Agency, a joint press release said on Tuesday. The partnership “aims to provide increased investments to strengthen the EU collective defense capabilities,” the statement further said.

The EIB has traditionally been strictly civilian. Restrictions on its lending and funding policies ruled out funding most military projects or procurements. Those rules have been weakened in the past half-decade, especially since the war in Ukraine.

A memorandum of understanding between the EDA and the EIB was signed as early as 2018, with the latest agreement as an update to the original document. While the watershed moment came in February 2022, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a collection of small moves aimed at steering the Brussels bureaucracy towards defense outcomes has effectively eroded a longstanding taboo, as Defense News has previously reported.

“The EIB Group is implementing its objectives outlined in the Defence Action Plan, and is committed to helping scale up this industry,” said Jiří Šedivý, the chief executive of the European Defence Agency.

By collaborating with the Agency, the EIB and its components are meant to be better informed about needs of the defense sector. This will “reinforce our shared goal of enhancing European security,” said Marjut Falkstedt, chief executive of the European Investment Fund, a part of the EIB tasked with supporting small- and medium-sized enterprises across the continent. The fund has played a significant role in the EU bank’s efforts to enter the security space.

European governments have allocated more funding to military matters since Russia invaded Ukraine and the resulting loss of a sense of security on the continent. Simultaneously, the EU has become more assertive in the defense space, a field traditionally considered a prerogative purely of the 27 member states’ national governments and NATO.

For the first time ever, the European Union this year will get a dedicated defense commissioner, nominated by Ursula von der Leyen after her re-election as the Bloc’s head and expected to be confirmed by November. While far from a traditional defense minister – national governments aren’t willing to give up that much power to Brussels quite yet – the new commission post will likely work to coordinate joint procurement and further European military integration. Both trends have increasingly entered the policy mainstream across the continent.

Simultaneously, some have called for the EU to play a more prominent role in defense procurement and funding. This is where the EIB and its subsidiary institutions come in. The bank has set itself a target of funding €8 billion ($8.8 billion) through its Strategic European Security Initiative until the end of 2027, of which it has already disbursed €2 billion ($2.15 billion) in the program’s first two years.

New Zealand, Australia swap senior military commanders

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — The armed forces of New Zealand and Australia have swapped deputy commanders at their respective joint forces headquarters, signaling that they consider the defense of their nations an interconnected affair.

New Zealand’s Defence Minister Judith Collins and Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles welcomed the appointments during the Oct. 2 South Pacific Defence Ministers’ Meeting (SPDMM) in Auckland.

The two joint forces headquarters are responsible for the planning, control and conduct of their respective country’s military operations.

The appointment of New Zealand Army officer Maj. Gen. Hugh McAslan is the highest-level senior posting of an officer from a foreign military into the Australian forces. The corresponding Australian appointment went to Army Brigadier Michael Bassingthwaighte.

Chief of New Zealand’s Defence Force, Air Marshal Tony Davies, said: “With this reciprocal arrangement that has seen an Australian Army Brigadier appointed as Deputy Commander Joint Forces New Zealand, I am confident we will continue to work well together as allies to ensure our security.”

Equipment currently operated by both countries includes the P-8 and C-130J-30 maritime and transport aircraft and Bushmaster vehicles. New Zealand’s replenishment ship, HMNZS Aotearoa, is supporting Australian warships as the Royal Australian Navy’s own supply vessels are unavailable until early next year.

Pentagon taps commercial vendors for low-cost, throwaway drones

Pentagon officials want to build America’s arsenal of cheap, disposable drones, staple weapons of the war in Ukraine, pinging commercial vendors for systems with mass-production potential.

The Defense Innovation Unit released a solicitation this week for one-way, uncrewed aerial systems that can fly at ranges of 50 to 300 kilometers in low-bandwidth, GPS-denied environments.

“Recent conflicts have highlighted the asymmetric impact low-cost, one-way unmanned aerial systems have on the modern battlefield,” DIU said in the notice. “The Department of Defense must be able to employ low-cost precision effects at extended ranges.”

DIU plans to hold a live flyoff demonstration as soon as December to evaluate the proposed systems.

Small, one-way attack drones have featured heavily in recent conflicts — from Ukraine to the Middle East. Since last fall, the Iran-backed Houthi militia group has targeted commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, using aerial vehicles, uncrewed surface vessels and cruise missiles. Last week, the group launched what the Pentagon termed a “complex attack” on U.S. ships in the region.

On Monday, Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the Pentagon would focus the next round of its Replicator effort — a process for quickly fielding high-need technology at scale — on countering drone threats like these. But the department also recognizes the impact these systems can have and wants to stock up on its own supply.

“Reliable, affordable, and adaptable long-range UAS platforms that allow for employment at scale will maximize operational flexibility for the joint force,” DIU said.

A DIU spokesperson told Defense News that while the drones the department wants could perform attack missions, it’s also interested in systems that can fly electronic warfare, ISR and communications relay payloads.

According to the solicitation, the vehicles should also be hard to detect and track, have several pathways for two-way communications and be equipped with mission planning software. Critically, the department wants modular systems that can integrate new hardware or software in a matter of hours.

“Proprietary interfaces, message formatting or hardware that require vendor-specific licensing are not permitted,” DIU said.

The notice doesn’t detail how many systems the department might buy and it doesn’t set a cost target. The spokesperson said that omission was intentional because DIU’s selections won’t be based on the cost of a particular drone, but on the cost of the effect the platform achieves.

“The best way to think of what we’re targeting is a cost per effect,” the spokesperson said. “If we launch one $1M platform or ten $100k platforms and generate the same effect, then the cost per effect is the same and that’s what we want to focus on.”

Navy warships helped take down Iran’s attack on Israel, Pentagon says

Two Navy destroyers launched around a dozen interceptors to help defend Israel against a massive attack by Iran on Tuesday, the Pentagon said.

Pentagon spokesman Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder declined to say what kind of ordnance was used by the warships Cole and Bulkeley, or whether their intercept were successful, but he said the operations took place while both ships were in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Iran’s direct and widespread missile attack on Israel Tuesday was the second of the year, and once again threatened to spark all-out war in the Middle East, a grim future that the United States has worked to stave off since the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

The sky lit up over central and southern Israel Tuesday evening as ballistic missiles collided with air defense interceptors. Both the Pentagon and the Israel Defense Forces said they were still assessing the attack, but that Iran had launched around 200 missiles and there had been no recorded casualties.

“Initial reports indicate that Israel was able to intercept the majority of incoming missiles and that there was minimal damage on the ground,” Ryder said.

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called Iran’s response “failed and ineffective,” but warned that it was also a “significant escalation.”

What will the surge of US forces to the Middle East cost the military?

“This [result] was first and foremost the result of the professionalism of the IDF, but in no small part, because of the skilled work of the U.S. military and meticulous joint planning in anticipation of the attack,” Sullivan said.

Iran’s attack comes a week after Israel assassinated the leader of Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia group that Tehran has armed for years. The strike in Beirut, followed by operations Israel launched across the border, have escalated a burgeoning conflict in Lebanon.

The U.S. has already surged forces to the Middle East to help defend Israel and its own forces. It continued to do so this week, sending three fighter squadrons, including F-15s, F-16s and A-10s. This almost doubles the number of fighters in U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East.

Over the weekend, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also ordered the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to remain in the region as a bulwark against a wider war. Another carrier, the Harry S. Truman, is heading to U.S. European Command.

These posture changes will add “a few thousand” U.S. forces to CENTCOM, according to the Pentagon, adding to the 40,000 already there — 6,000 more than normal.

The U.S. insists the surge in forces has helped avert an a wider war in the region, an assessment Ryder repeated from the podium Tuesday, despite the recent attacks.

“We’ve been working very hard from the beginning to prevent a wider regional conflict.,” he said. “Certainly, the type of aggressive action that we saw by Iran today makes that more challenging.”

American forces, meanwhile, are under an elevated threat from Iran-backed proxies in the region.

Last week, the Houthis, a militia group in Yemen, launched what the Pentagon called a “complex attack” with aerial drones and cruise missiles on U.S. ships in the Red Sea, though officials said no ships were struck and no sailors were injured.

Iran’s attack Tuesday included around two times as many ballistic missiles than a similar barrage this April, which largely featured aerial drones that are much easier to intercept, Ryder said. No U.S. forces were targeted in the attack Tuesday, he continued.

Austin spoke with his Israeli counterpart to discuss the attack and the “severe consequences” that would follow for Iran. Ryder wouldn’t elaborate on what those consequences will be, nor whether the U.S. would assist Israel in a direct strike on Iranian territory.

Iran fires missiles at Israel

The Israeli military says Iran has fired missiles at Israel and is warning Israelis to shelter in place. The announcement Tuesday followed warnings from a senior U.S. administration official that Iran was preparing to “imminently” launch a ballistic missile attack on Israel.

The U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence, said the U.S. is actively supporting Israeli defensive preparations.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a warning Monday to Iran, which backs Hezbollah and Hamas.

“There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach,” Netanyahu said, just days after an airstrike south of Beirut killed the leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah group, which is backed by Tehran.

The Israeli military earlier warned several southern Lebanese communities near the border to leave their homes, shortly after starting what it called a limited ground operation against Hezbollah targets.

Hezbollah’s acting leader, Naim Kassem, promised the group will fight on following the death of its long-time chief Hassan Nasrallah and several of the group’s top commanders who have been assassinated in recent days. Kassem said the group’s fighters are ready and the slain commanders have already been replaced.

Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire across the Lebanon border almost daily since Oct. 8, the day after Hamas sent fighters into Israel and sparked the war in Gaza. It’s been almost a year since some 250 people were abducted from Israel, and friends and family are worried about their loved ones as attention turns away from hostages and north toward Lebanon.

Defense tech companies can apply for Pentagon loans starting next year

The Pentagon announced its first direct lending tool Monday, offering loans to U.S. companies that make in-demand defense component technologies.

Nearly $1 billion has been set aside for the Defense Department to award direct loans ranging from $10 million to $150 million.

The Defense Department hopes the effort will help companies fund the construction and equipment needed to scale production across 31 technology categories deemed critical to U.S. national security. That includes areas like space launch, microelectronics fabrication, edge computing and quantum sensing.

“DOD now has proven financial tools to enable millions of dollars of investment in national security priorities at limited cost to the department and the taxpayer,” Defense Department Office of Strategic Capital, or OSC, Director Jason Rathje said in a statement.

The effort is geared toward businesses who need flexible financing options in order to attract additional investment and “unlock growth opportunities,” OSC said in a LinkedIn post Monday.

Pentagon’s strategic capital office finalizing investment framework

For a company to receive an OSC loan, it must meet certain eligibility requirements established by DOD and the Office of Management and Budget to make sure projects are economically viable, low-risk for the government and mature enough to quickly enter the commercial market.

The office will accept initial applications between January 2 and February 3. Following review, OSC will notify firms if their projects were selected to move to the next phase of the application process.

OSC set up shop in December 2022 to help the Pentagon steer private capital toward the technologies and supply chains that are most important to DOD and broader U.S. economic security. The office is distinct from other department initiatives in that it focuses on investments in components rather than capabilities, and on lending funds rather than spending them.

Congress gave OSC lending authority as part of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which was signed into law in December. OSC released its inaugural investment strategy in March, creating a framework for the lending program that it expects to refresh on a regular basis as threats change and technology advances. The document outlined 12 initial priority areas, including biotechnology, quantum science, microelectronics, space-enabled services and sensor hardware.

The office’s strategy is to partner with other government agencies to offer cost-effective tools that incentivize private capital firms to invest in the technology DOD needs.

“As used by OSC in collaboration with federal partners, these financial tools will enable capital providers to invest in critical technologies that would otherwise be less attractive because the cost of capital is too high, the timelines for repayment or liquidity are too long, or the technical challenges are too risky for a nascent commercial market alone,” OSC said in its strategy.