Military

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday announced sweeping changes to the way the Pentagon buys and fields uncrewed air systems, or UAS, with a goal of establishing “UAS domain dominance” by 2027.
Hegseth announced the policy changes in a video recorded on the Pentagon’s front lawn. With Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” playing in the background, a quadcopter delivered a memo announcing the policy changes, which Hegseth then signed.
“While our adversaries have produced millions of cheap drones, before us we were mired in bureaucratic red tape,” he said in the video, which he posted from his official X account. “Not anymore.”
Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance @DOGEpic.twitter.com/ueqQPc7rKI
— Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (@SecDef) July 10, 2025The memo lists three broad goals: bolstering the U.S. drone manufacturing base, delivering thousands of low-cost systems to military units over the next few years and integrati..

PARIS — France proposed to partners Germany and Spain to “rethink” the work share on the Future Combat Air System project in order to stick to a schedule that would see a future fighter enter into service from 2040 onwards, the country’s Directorate General for Armament said.
While the program has made significant progress, including deciding on the shape of the fighter demonstrator, it’s currently encountering difficulties, the DGA told Defense News in an emailed reply to questions. France therefore recently proposed to its partners to redesign their cooperation based on “strengthening industrial leadership,” the armaments agency said.
“France, as the program’s lead nation, is proposing to its government and industrial partners that they draw lessons from the first years of cooperation in order to continue to ensure that the schedule is met and the project is successful,” the DGA said. “The principle and details of this..

PARIS — France proposed to partners Germany and Spain to “rethink” the work share on the Future Combat Air System project in order to stick to a schedule that would see a future fighter enter into service from 2040 onwards, the country’s Directorate General for Armament said.
While the program has made significant progress, including deciding on the shape of the fighter demonstrator, it’s currently encountering difficulties, the DGA told Defense News in an emailed reply to questions. France therefore recently proposed to its partners to redesign their cooperation based on “strengthening industrial leadership,” the armaments agency said.
“France, as the program’s lead nation, is proposing to its government and industrial partners that they draw lessons from the first years of cooperation in order to continue to ensure that the schedule is met and the project is successful,” the DGA said. “The principle and details of this..

A promising Air Force Research Laboratory system designed to integrate drones into air traffic management systems at military installations could one day be installed at bases around the world.
AFRL’s Collaborative Low-Altitude Uncrewed Aircraft System Integration Effort, or CLUE, fuzes data from radars, counter-UAS systems and other sensors to create a shared operating picture for air traffic controllers, security forces and UAS operators.
John Sawyer, a UAS analyst for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment — which is leading efforts within DOD to partner with the Federal Aviation Administration to improve airspace integration — said CLUE is a game changer.
“Your security teams see more than just what their Counter UAS sensors are seeing. Your air traffic controllers can now see the drones. Your UAS operators can now see everyone else,” Sawyer told Defense News on the sidelines of a June 25 Defense Innovation Unit ..

A promising Air Force Research Laboratory system designed to integrate drones into air traffic management systems at military installations could one day be installed at bases around the world.
AFRL’s Collaborative Low-Altitude Uncrewed Aircraft System Integration Effort, or CLUE, fuzes data from radars, counter-UAS systems and other sensors to create a shared operating picture for air traffic controllers, security forces and UAS operators.
John Sawyer, a UAS analyst for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment — which is leading efforts within DOD to partner with the Federal Aviation Administration to improve airspace integration — said CLUE is a game changer.
“Your security teams see more than just what their Counter UAS sensors are seeing. Your air traffic controllers can now see the drones. Your UAS operators can now see everyone else,” Sawyer told Defense News on the sidelines of a June 25 Defense Innovation Unit ..

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..

Two new aircraft carriers will yet again experience delays in delivery, after already having previously delayed in past years, Navy budget documents reveal.
The delivery of the Navy’s next Ford-class aircraft carrier, to be christened the John F. Kennedy, will now be delayed by two more years, the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget justification documents show.
It had been scheduled to be delivered this month. Delivery is now pushed back until March 2027. Before this latest setback, the carrier had already been delayed by an estimated one year.
Additionally, another repeat delay is in store for the future carrier Enterprise, which was scheduled to be delivered in September 2029. The budget documents now show that “due to delays in material availability and industry/supply chain performance,” it is now projected to be finished in July 2030.
This is not the first delay for the Enterprise, either. It was scheduled for delivery in 2028 before being pushed back to 2029 last..

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..