Land

Cummings Aerospace is now ready to manufacture its Hellhound loitering munition at what equates to low-rate production, CEO Sheila Cummings told Defense News in a recent interview at its new production facility near Huntsville, Alabama.
The company chose a space next door to Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, home to the program office and testing and development for Army aviation, in 2021 and designed and built a facility intended to produce large numbers of the drones.
Never-before-seen footage of Cummings Aerospace's Hellhound S3 in a flight test at Pendleton, Oregon, on January 2025.“The work we have done to date, not only with the development of the vehicle, but preparing for major acquisition and production of these vehicles, has been a huge focus for us,” Cummings said. “We’re really excited that we are now at manufacturing readiness level 7.”
The classification equates to a defined production workflow at the facility and the establishment of work inst..

Instead of traipsing blindly through the byzantine labyrinth that is the regular defense acquisition process to modernize its nearly 40-year-old M1 Abrams tank, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George has ordered the service and its industry partners to move much more quickly to get something better, his chief technology officer, Dr. Alex Miller, told Defense News.
“We don’t want to turn into Pentagon Wars,” Miller said in a recent interview at the Pentagon, referring to a satirical comedy exposing bureaucratic dysfunction of the 1970s development of the Army’s Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.
The Army has long adhered to acquisition timelines in which a program could be greenlit, but then take a decade to proceed through technology maturation “so that the government can feel comfortable and understand all the potential risks that could ever happen,” Miller said. “Because you have to understand all of the environment and all the technology s..

The U.S. Army has formallyapproved a new air and missile defense sensor to replace its aging Patriot for low-rate production, according to its system developer Raytheon.
The service has been workingon replacing its aging Patriot air and missile defense system for over 15 years, initially running a competition for a full system before canceling those plans in favor of developing a new command-and-control system and a new radar separately.
The Army’s Lower-Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, or LTAMDS, “is a huge, significant capability,” Maj. Gen. Frank Lozano, program executive officer for missiles and space, said in an exclusive interview with Defense News at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, last month. “We anecdotally say it doubles legacy Patriot radar capability and not only does it double it, it provides you 360-degree capability.”
The radar is a major modernization element for the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense system, along with a fully ..

U.S. Marines will test one of the service’s newest counter-drone defense systems during this year’s Balikatan military exercise in collaboration with the Philippine military, according to the Marine Corps.
Marines with the 3rd Littoral Anti-Air Battalion’s Ground-Based Air Defense Battery will conduct live-fire training with the ground-based Marine Air Defense Integrated System, or MADIS, a short-range, surface-to-air system that specializes in the detection and destruction of unmanned aircraft systems, at the annual joint drills currently underway in the Philippines.
The exercise willmark MADIS’ second live-fire training, following training in January at the Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island of Hawaii, and the first time the system has been deployed outside the United States with a U.S. Marine Corps unit.
“The MADIS is a unique weapon system that enhances both the survivability and lethality of [the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment] by extending the reach o..

The United States Army and General Dynamics have opened a new facility to load, assemble and pack 155mm high-explosive artillery munitions in Camden, Arkansas.
The move aims to expand production of a key munition and comes as part of a larger effort to increase production capacity and restore the U.S. industrial base for military equipment.
“The Army must transform and get war-winning capabilities into the hands of soldiers now, including key munitions,” said Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. “The Army remains committed to delivering relevant munitions at speed and scale to our soldiers, the joint force, and allies and partners. It is not lost on us that a key component of victory on the battlefield starts in our production facilities.”
The Army is making artillery great again
The projectile facility is reportedly in the final stage of production. It is where the 155mm munition bodies are filled with explosive material, assembled and then packed. The Camden facility ..

The U.S. Army is working toward finalizing its design by the end of the year for the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft that will ultimately replace the UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter, as the service hopes to speed up its fielding to earlier than 2030, according to the project manager in charge of the effort.
The service has had “unprecedented access to the design [in] real time” of FLRAA through Bell’s rigorous digital engineering, Col. Jeffrey Poquette, the service’s project manager for the program, said in a recent interview. The Army chose the Textron subsidiary at the end of 2022 to build a tiltrotor aircraft that is expected to fly twice as fast and twice as far as a Black Hawk.
Bellbeat out a Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky and Boeing team following a competitive technology demonstration phase where each built a flying demonstrator. Sikorsky and Boeing’s Defiant X featured coaxial rotor blades.
The design process for FLRAA, which will culminate in a critical design r..

The Marines are slated to receive the first batches of four dozen mobile fires and missile platforms key to the Corps’ plans to fight dispersed across multiple islands alongside the Navy.
Between now and March 2026, the Corps will receive batches of its new Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, or NMESIS, which includes a Naval Strike Missile mounted on a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle platform with semi-autonomous and autonomous capabilities to launch remotely.
The system provides coverage for Navy and partner vessels from coastal positions and gives joint forces combined land and sea targeting options. It is the Corps’ first modern ship-killing missile.
The first six systems were fielded to the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment in November, Nick Pierce, product manager for NMESIS at Marine Corps Systems Command, told Marine Corps Times ahead of the annual Modern Day Marine exposition.
Osh Kosh Defense unveils new version of Marine Corps remote fires vehicle at Army show
..

Drilling Marine Corps reservists across the command’s components may see an increased emphasis on job proficiency and readiness as Marine Corps Reserve Command prepares for wide-ranging mobilization exercises set to begin next year.
Speaking at the Modern Day Marine Expo in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Reserve operational planner Lt. Col. Doug Toulotte said the exercises — the first of their kind in decades — will kick off no later than the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, stress-testing the Corps’ ability to mobilize its select reserve component in the event of a major military contingency.
Toulotte noted that the last Defense Department-wide reserve mobilization plan was completed in 1988, and the last study on reserve mobilization was published in 1947, leaving the Defense Department and the services with significant unknowns about how moving reserve forces into the active ranks en masse would work in practice, and how the active components would receive, train and integrate th..

A nearly $11 billion plan to overhaul Marine Corps barracks condition and maintenance by 2037 may have to ditch a component that would have placed staff noncommissioned officers in enlisted barracks to mentor Marines and maintain order.
Speaking at the Modern Day Marine Expo in Washington on Wednesday, Marine Corps Installations Command unaccompanied housing team lead Eric Mason said the program, which resembles a similar program in use by the Navy, had run into some “legality issues.”
“It seems that our Marine Corps legal team doesn’t see things the way the Navy sees them,” Mason said, “meaning that if we have a senior or staff personnel that lives in the barracks that are getting [basic allowance for housing], it requires them to have two entitlements. And they couldn’t get behind that. So our legal team is still looking at how we do this.”
A 2023 pilot program at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California, moved eight SNCOs into N..

The Marine Corps’ stand-in forces need to possess physical toughness and a natural inquisitiveness in order to succeed, Marine Corps Special Operations Command leaders said Tuesday at an annual defense conference.
Maj. Gen. Peter Huntley, commander of Marine Corps Special Operations Command, spoke at a Modern Day Marine panel in Washington about how a changing military landscape requires multifaceted Marine Corps Raiders who possess both a grittiness synonymous with the Marine Corps and an eagerness to learn and adapt to evolving information systems.
“It’s gonna be nasty, it’s gonna be brutish, it’s still gonna take tough, rugged people,” Huntley said of what the global military landscape requires of the Marine Corps Raider.
But he said that environment would also drive the need for MARSOC personnel with the cognitive ability to adapt to new technologies and the desire to adapt.
Marine Corps stand-in forces, outlined in the Marine Corps’ plan to prep..