Airforce

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has ended its experiment to create a heavy cargo seaplane.
The nearly three-year-old Liberty Lifter program was intended to design and build — and possibly float and fly — a long-range, low-cost seaplane that could take off and land in rough seas. DARPA said in 2023 that it wanted the plane to have roughly the same size and capacity as a C-17 Globemaster, which can carry more than 170,000 pounds of cargo such as M1 Abrams tanks.
In a statement to Defense News, DARPA confirmed it had concluded the Liberty Lifter program in June. Aviation Week first reported the ending of the Liberty Lifter program.
“We’ve learned we can build a flying boat capable of takeoff and landing in high sea states,” program manager Christopher Kent said. “The physics make sense. And we’ve learned we can do so with maritime building techniques and maritime composites.”
But DARPA said it will not move forward with building an aircraf..

U.S. Air Force fighter pilots integrated two Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie drones into an aerial combat training exercise at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base in what the Air Force has described as “a major leap in human-machine teaming.”
Pilots of an F-16C Fighting Falcon and an F-15 Strike Eagle controlled two Valkryie drones each while flying, wielding them while performing combat maneuvers. The pilots successfully used their skills in harmony with the unmanned aerial vehicles in realtime.
“With this flight, we mark a crucial step in developing capabilities that harness human-machine teaming to overcome complex threats and expand our advantages,” Brig. Gen. Jason E. Bartolomei, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, said in a release.
“By developing and integrating autonomous platforms with manned systems, we can quickly adapt, increase combat effectiveness, and reduce risk to our aircrews in contested environments.”
The Air Force Research..

On Monday, more than a dozen retired top Air Force generals — including six former chiefs of staff — released a letter urging Congress to reverse Pentagon plans to kill the E-7 Wedgetail program and slash F-35 procurement.
“On behalf of the Air and Space Forces Association’s 125,773 members, we write to express our alarm at recent proposals to reduce the next fiscal year’s procurement of F-35As to only 24 aircraft and terminate the E-7 Wedgetail program,” the 16 retired general officers said in the letter to the top Republican and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, which was posted on AFA’s website. “During a period of heightened tension throughout the world, we believe such reductions will severely and unnecessarily undermine our service members’ ability to deter, and if necessary, prevail in future conflicts.”
Former Air Force chiefs of staff Gens. Merrill McPeak, Ron Fogleman, Michael Ryan, John Jumper, Michael Mos..

COLOGNE, Germany — A push by French warplane maker Dassault Aviation to raise its profile in the Future Combat Air System program is bringing new turbulence to the French-German-Spanish effort, according to news reports.
The prospect of increasing Dassault’s workshare responsibility for some parts of the program to 80% vis-a-vis Airbus Defence and Space, the industrial counterpart representing Germany and Spain, risks opening fresh wounds in a program sustained mostly by the political will of Sebastien Lecornu and Boris Pistorius, the French and German defense ministers, respectively.
Reports about a formal redistribution of influence in the program’s main combat aircraft prong first surfaced on Sunday in the German defense publication Hartpunkt, followed by a report on Monday by Reuters.
The FCAS program aims to field sixth-generation replacement warplanes for France’s Rafale and Germany’s Eurofighter aircraft sometime in the 2040s, with date in the middl..

PARIS — Dutch and Norwegian F-35 fighter jets will be stationed in Poland under NATO command to protect supplies of equipment to Ukraine, the Dutch defense ministry said.
The Dutch F-35s will be based in Poland from the start of September to the start of December, following a request from NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, or SHAPE, the Netherlands’ Ministry of Defense said in a statement on Monday.
“It is essential that we contribute to the defense of NATO territory and the security of Europe,” Dutch Minister of Defense Ruben Brekelmans said in the statement. “We are once again doing so with our most advanced capabilities.”
Deploying the Dutch F-35s to monitor airspace above Eastern Europe will protect military equipment intended for Ukraine, Brekelmans said. Stationing the jets in Poland will also allow for a quick response to violations or imminent violations of NATO airspace, according to the minister.
“In this way, we ..

FAIRBANKS, Alaska — When Neros Technologies was founded in 2023, there wasn’t much demand in the U.S. military for small, first-person-view drones.
“It took us a while to find the right customers and end users who were excited about the technology and wanted to move very quickly,” Soren Monroe-Anderson, Neros CEO and co-founder, told Defense News during a recent Defense Innovation Unit test event here.
But the company believed strongly there was military utility for small, cheap, attack drones — a reality playing out daily on the battlefield in Ukraine. So, in the firm’s early days, Monroe-Anderson and others traveled to the war-torn country to better understand how the systems were being used and what capabilities were needed.
Those visits helped sharpen the company’s focus in three areas: production, supply chain and rapid iteration, said Monroe-Anderson, a 22-year-old professional drone racer and hobbyist turned weapons-maker.
Neros worked quic..

The Air Force wants to retire its final 162 A-10 Warthog attack jets in fiscal 2026, as part of a plan to divest 340 total aircraft.
The Pentagon also plans to cancel the E-7 Wedgetail program over what an official said were “significant delays” and cost increases.
The service released its list of planned aircraft retirements as the Pentagon released its belated 2026 budget plan, which calls for a $211 billion discretionary budget for the Department of the Air Force. That includes a $184.9 billion discretionary budget for the U.S. Air Force itself, and a $26.1 billion discretionary budget for the Space Force.
The Pentagon also wants to add another $38.6 billion in “mandatory” spending as part of the budget reconciliation bill, which would include $24.7 billion for the Air Force and $13.8 billion for the Space Force. If that passes, the department would receive $249.5 billion in total funding, which would be a 17.2% increase over enacted spending in 2025.
But if ..

PARIS — France’s military is expanding into what it calls “very high altitude,” or near-space, with a test on Monday shooting down target balloons at an altitude of more than 20 kilometers, and this week detailing the strategy for what the country sees as an increasingly contested area.
France is upgrading radars to detect objects between 20 and 100 kilometers altitude and adapting fighter jets and air defenses to intercept high-flying targets, Philippe Koffi, in charge of strategy for air, land and naval combat systems at the Directorate General for Armament, said in a press briefing here on Thursday. Next steps will include lasers, space planes and stratospheric drones.
Near-space will become increasingly militarized, similar to what happened in low Earth orbit and on the sea floor, Armed Forces Minister Sebastien Lecornu said at the Paris Air Show on June 17, where he outlined France’s very-high altitude strategy.
The minister and other officials discus..

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — The United Kingdom will buy 12 F-35A fighter jets, marking a significant boost to the country’s nuclear deterrence posture, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said.
Announced ahead of the NATO summit held this week in The Hague, the government called it “the biggest strengthening of the UK’s nuclear posture in a generation.” The new procurements will allow Britain to “join NATO’s nuclear mission” by reintroducing to the Royal Air Force so-called dual-capable aircraft: airframes that can carry both conventional and atomic payloads. Seven other NATO countries, including the U.S., Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, Greece, and Italy, currently operate such platforms.
The NATO airborne nuclear mission involves European partner countries delivering American B-61 nuclear bombs on behalf of the alliance in the case of a nuclear war. Under the agreement, even though the bombs are carried by European planes and European pilots, the U.S. would have the fin..

TOKYO — Japan’s army announced Tuesday that it conducted a missile test for the first time on Japanese territory, as the country accelerates its military buildup to deter increasingly assertive China.
The test-firing of the Type 88 surface-to-ship, short-range missile was conducted Tuesday at the Shizunai Anti-Air Firing Range on Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido.
About 300 soldiers participated in Tuesday’s exercise by the Ground Self-Defense Force’s 1st Artillery Brigade, using a training missile targeting an unmanned boat about 40 kilometers (24 miles) off the southern coast of Hokkaido, officials said.
Officials were still examining the results of the test, the GSDF said.
Due to space limitations and safety concerns, Japan has previously conducted missile tests in the territories of the United States, a treaty ally, and Australia, a top Japanese defense partner where vast training grounds are available.
Tuesday’s first domestic missile..