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After roughly seven years, the Army has decided not to continue down its current path to find and procure an unmanned aircraft that replaces its now-retired Shadow drones for Brigade Combat Teams.
While it knows what it doesn’t want, the service is still trying to figure out exactly what it does want and how to acquire capability rapidly.
“It’s not that we don’t want a Future Tactical UAS. It’s just the one that was being developed didn’t meet our needs,” Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus told reporters at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference.
As part of a larger directive issued by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to make major changes to structure, formations and programs, the Army decided to cancel the FTUAS program just as two vendors had just wrapped up a competitive flight demonstration phase.
“There’s a misnomer of, ‘We’ve killed FTUAS,’” Mingus said. “We stil..

NASHVILLE, Tenn. − For the first time, the Army’s UH-60M Black Hawk utility helicopter lifted off the ground into a hover at a Sikorsky test facility, powered by the improved turbine engine that has been in development since the mid-2000s, according to the service’s program executive officer for aviation.
But as the Improved Turbine Engine Program leaps that hurdle toward the finish line, the effort is in jeopardy as the service looks to cut large programs to make way for the pursuit of what it sees as higher priorities amid the need to cut its budget by 8% as directed by the defense secretary.
Army Vice Chief of Staff, Gen. James Mingus told reporters at the Army Aviation Association of America confab here that the service is waiting to see where it lands with the fiscal 2026 budget. Officials are trying to gauge how much flexibility the service has in the budget reconciliation process to fully understand if it can afford to pay for ITEP.
“The future of ITEP is largely go..

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The U.S. Army is planning to buy half the spy planes it had previously planned to procure, according to an executive order outlining initial plans of an Army secretary-directed transformation initiative.
In the May 7 document obtained by Defense News, the order requests an implementation plan within 30 days on how the Army will adjust to build six High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, or HADES, as opposed to buying 12 of such planes.
A year ago, then-director of Army aviation Maj. Gen. Wally Rugen showed a slide during the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference in Denver, Colorado, indicating the service planned to field 14 HADES aircraft by 2035.
While the executive order appears to represent a slash to the program, “We never had a defined number in any document about how many HADES we were going to build,” Andrew Evans, Army Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Task Force director, told reporters in a Th..

Top generals in the Pacific are aiming to create “positional advantage” using a combination of land forces and maritime assets to counter Chinese military aggression in the region.
Some units, such as the Japanese Self-Defense Force, are positioned inside the first island chain around China. While others, such as the Australian Defence Force and Armed Forces of the Philippines, are farther out but plan to use terrain as they monitor Chinese military maneuvers.
Leaders from those three militaries discussed their respective roles alongside the head of U.S. Army Pacific, Gen. Ronald Clark, on Wednesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual Land Forces Pacific conference in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Lt. Gen. Roy Galido, commanding general of the Philippine Army, said changes in the operational environment, in part due to modern technologies, have “radically altered the definition of key terrain.”
Army task forces ‘centerpiece’ for deterring China: INDOPACOM bos..

NASHVILLE, Tenn. − The U.S. Army is close to establishing a set of requirements for purpose-built expendable drones it will buy in the future, according to the service‘s project manager for unmanned aircraft systems.
The service recently released a market survey looking for what it’s calling Purpose-Built, Attritable Systems, or PBAS, and is headed into an Army Requirements Oversight Council review of the requirements sometime in June, Col. Danielle Medaglia said Wednesday at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference.
The PM UAS within Program Executive Office Aviation is working with the Maneuver Center of Excellence to develop the requirements for PBAS, she noted.
While the initial focus for the program was the massively popular first-person view drones that were made battlefield famous in the war in Ukraine, the Army sees these attritable drones possessing a much wider range of capabilities and control mechanisms. They will be “a multifunct..

NASHVILLE, Tenn. − The U.S. Army is pursuing concepts to deploy ultra-long-range effects to surveil deep in the battlespace, according to the service’s Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Task Force director.
“We may have to have standoff capability that we’ve not yet envisioned today,” Andrew Evans said Wednesday at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference.
The Army is already focused on developing launched effects from both ground and air platforms for short, medium and long-range distances.
“What we’re going to do in the intel space is demonstrate what we call ultra-long-range launched effects,” Evans said.
“What we’re looking at doing is something that represents a thousand miles past the prime mover, so imagine a system that can deliver a launched effect that can get itself into a position of launch and then a thousand miles beyond that, which is over-the-horizon sensing. You’re getti..

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The U.S. Army will field its first Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, commonlyknown as FLRAA, to the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the Army vice chief of staff told an audience at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference Wednesday.
“That decision was based on their mission profile and theater demands,” Gen. James Mingus said in prepared remarks. “This decision makes sense, the 101st is a formation built to deploy rapidly and operate in austere conditions. The 101st flies into real world contested environments, across wide terrain, often without the luxury of fixed support infrastructure. They need speed, endurance, and reliability.”
The operational insights from that first fielding “will shape initial doctrine, sustainment models, and maneuver concepts,” Mingus stated. “And we’re not waiting for a distant out-year to make this thing real. Under the..

The U.S. Army will consolidate its Futures Command with its Training and Doctrine Command under a new command called the Army’s Transformation and Training Command, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said during a House Appropriations defense subcommittee posture hearing Wednesday.
The naming comes a week after the service announced sweeping changes to its command structure and formations, with the intention to transform the force while scrapping programs that don’t meet current threats or its vision of overmatching those threats in the future.
The new command’s headquarters will be in Austin, Texas, George said, which is where Army Futures Command is headquartered now.
AFC, a four-star command, was established during President Donald Trump’s first administration under then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, whom Trump has sought to disgrace since returning to office, including by having Milley’s joint chiefs chairman portrait removed from the Pentagon hallway where ..

TAMPA, Fla. – The secretary of defense championed special operations forces as a key leader in the Pentagon’s priorities of maintaining high standards and meeting threats with asymmetric tools.
“Special Operations have never been more important in our country,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at the annual Global SOF Foundation Special Operations Force Week in Tampa.
Hegseth noted that over the past three years SOF-specific missions have risen by 200%. And over the past six months, SOF units have killed 500 enemy combatants and captured another 600 in operations throughout the globe, Hegseth said.
That increase was coupled with a 35% surge in deterrence support that has been requested of SOF units and Special Operations Command.
SOCOM must improve high-risk training oversight, report says
The head of that command, Gen. Bryan Fenton, echoed his boss’ comments, stressing the asymmetrical nature of what the force does.
“We’re the scalpel, but if t..

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — While the U.S. Army has exquisitefirepower with its expensive long-range precision fire systems, it also wants to amass cheap rockets to target drones or overwhelm an enemy.
“If you’re familiar with the rocket pods we have for [guided multiple launch rocket systems], I would like to fill those rocket pods with 50 to 100 rockets,” Gen. James Rainey, Army Futures Command commander, said Tuesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. “What we could put in that box … it’s not as good as [guided multiple launch rocket systems], but it can visit a lot of hate on the enemy in the right conditions.”
Rainey said the Army is engaging industry right now and is not just talking to companies that make rockets but industry that could disrupt manufacturing processes to build thousands of rockets or companies that can mass produce energetics, replacements for rocket motors or use add..