Naftaly Mwaniki

ROME — The under-development GCAP fighter and the newly launched American F-47 can be cogs in an integrated allied system of fighters and not competitors, a European official has said.
“The F-47 will be principally a U.S. fighter and not a competitor to the GCAP,” said Italian Air Force Gen. Giandomenico Taricco, who is working on the Anglo-Japanese-Italian GCAP program.
“What we want is for the GCAP to be interoperable with the F-47, to make them two elements in an integrated system,” said Taricco, who is commercial and corporate director at GIGO, the intergovernmental agency running the sixth-generation GCAP program.
The U.S. signaled its arrival in the sixth-generation market in March when President Donald Trump said Boeing would develop the F-47 which could be fielded by the end of the decade.
That would give it a head start on the GCAP plane, which is not expected to be delivered until 2035.
Trump reportedly discussed the F-47 with Japanese Prime Mini..

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday cast doubt on the future utility of airborne battle management aircraft, particularly the E-7 Wedgetail, and said space-based capabilities represent the future of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
Hegseth’s skepticism of the E-7 and touting of space intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, may presage a split between the Pentagon’s top leadership and Air Force leaders and some lawmakers who feel that airborne assets are still the best option for managing battlefields.
The Air Force wants to buy 26 Boeing-made E-7s, which have been flown for years by Australia and are being bought by other nations such as the United Kingdom, to replace its fleet of aging E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system, or AWACS, planes. The AWACS, with its unmistakable massive radar dome high atop its fuselage, has been in service since the late 1970s, but is approaching the end of its life, and its capabilities are falling ..

After spending the better part of a decade transitioning outdated systems and infrastructure to the cloud, the Air Force agency responsible for providing key weather and environmental inputs for military and intelligence operations is starting to see a silver lining.
Air Force Weather started its digital transformation in 2017 amid a broader U.S. government push to migrate away from siloed data centers to more secure, efficient and capable could-based environments. As the Air Force’s largest special-purpose data processing node — crunching around 80 terabytes of data, or the equivalent of 6.6 billion pages of text, a day — the organization was a “big fat target” for cyber threats, according to Fred Fahlbusch, Air Force Weather’s data domain officer and chief of the weather resources, programs, data and cybersecurity division.
So, with fresh funding in hand, it began the process of migrating its operations from physical servers at the 557th Weather Wing at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebr..

The Air Force wants to revive its shelved AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon, or ARRW, hypersonic program — and perhaps move it into the procurement phase.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin told lawmakers in a hearing last week that the service wants to include funding for both ARRW and the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, or HACM, in the fiscal 2026 budget proposal.
“We are looking, and have in the budget submission — assuming it’s what we had put forward — two different [hypersonic] programs,” Allvin told the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday. “One is a larger form factor that is more strategic long-range that we have already tested several times. It’s called ARRW, and the other one is HACM.”
Hypersonic weapons are capable of traveling at more than five times the speed of sound and maneuvering midflight, making them harder to track and shoot down than conventional ballistic missiles and more capable of penetr..

MILAN — After facing delays, the first F-35A aircraft is expected to arrive in Belgium in the coming months as part of a total order of 34 fighter jets, according to manufacturer Lockheed Martin.
In 2018, Belgium selected the American jet and agreed to a €3.6 billion ($4.1 billion) deal for over two dozen of them to be manufactured in the United States.
“Belgium’s first F-35 to arrive in country has rolled off the production line and is gearing up for arrival in Belgium this fall,” Lockheed Martin Europe wrote in a social media post on their X platform.
Deliveries were initially slated to begin in late 2023, but due to delays in the production of the Joint Strike Fighter program, they were pushed back.
In an interview in February with Belgian newspaper Le Soir, Chief of Staff of the Belgian Air Force Gen. Frederik Vansina said the F-35 setbacks also affected the first transfer of the 30 decommissioned F-16s bound for Ukraine.
The Belgian F-16s, which have b..

The Air Force estimates it will cost less than $400 million to modify a luxury aircraft gifted from the Qatari government into President Donald Trump’s flying command center, according to the service’s top civilian official.
That projection is far less than the $1 billion congressional democrats and some aviation experts have said would be required to harden the plane’s defenses and install the countermeasures, encrypted communications and other capabilities needed to fulfill the Air Force One mission.
Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said Thursday in a House Armed Services Committee hearing that the assumptions some are making about the modification costs include things like training and buying spare parts — expenses the service has already accounted for through its broader VC-25B presidential aircraft program. While the Air Force may now need to procure those things earlier, it won’t be paying for them twice.
“There’s been a number thrown around on t..

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — The Swedish government’s offset package has proved decisive in Thailand’s decision to purchase 12 Gripen E/F fighters in three phases.
The economic and technology garnishes helped Saab’s Gripen offer defeat its American F-16 Block 70/72 competitor.
On June 4, the Royal Thai Air Force – or RTAF – held a press conference to announce it was buying more Gripens, with the deal accompanied by a generous package of technical support and offsets.
When final offers were submitted last August, Saab had vowed, “The Swedish proposal will ensure the best return on investment for Thailand that will exceed the contract value through a well-structured, long-term plan that covers key areas of critical technologies and national capabilities for Thailand.”
Saab’s offset package – equating to around 155% of the project’s value – has proved especially appealing to a nation keen to boost its aerospace industr..

TOKYO — As Japanese defense officials move to upgrade a military training infrastructure hard-pressed to produce F-35 pilots, vendors are proposing new planes to fill a gap.
The Japan Air Self-Defense Force, or JASDF, has made small steps to begin turning around what experts have described as an obsolete training ecosystem. Officials have already selected Textron’s T-6JP Texan II as its basic trainer to replace the Fuji T-7, and a T-6 procurement contract should be signed before year’s end.
However, Japan next needs to think clearly about how to replace its Kawasaki T-4 intermediate jet trainers, more than 200 of which entered service from 1988. With the JASDF now flying fifth-generation F-35A/F-35B fighters, the T-4 is deemed unfit for the task of transitioning fighter pilots to such advanced aircraft.
Tokyo is currently mulling its options for new advanced jet trainers. It issued a request for information in October 2024, and the submission deadline closed on May 8,..

Advanced stealth capabilities, new weapons and possibly even an unmanned piloting option could be in the works for Lockheed Martin’s F-35 as the company seeks to boost the jet with sixth-generation technology.
In a webcast of a Wednesday discussion at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York, Lockheed CEO Jim Taiclet expressed confidence the company could have a “meaningful increase” of capabilities for the F-35 ready in two or three years.
Lockheed originally developed these technologies as part of its pitch to the Air Force for a Next-Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD, fighter. But the Air Force ended up going with Boeing’s proposal, and President Donald Trump in March announced NGAD would be called the F-47.
Lockheed hopes to salvage its NGAD loss by making the F-35 more capable and attractive. Taiclet has claimed porting its NGAD technology into a “supercharged” F-35 will allow the company to deliver 80% of the capability of an NG..

Hermeus, a venture capital firm building high-speed aircraft, flew its Quarterhorse vehicle for the first time last week at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the company said.
The aircraft, dubbed Mk 1, is the second iteration of the Quarterhorse high-speed test platform and the first to take flight. Its May 21 flight test brings Hermeus a step closer to its goal of flying the autonomous, reusable vehicle at near-Mach 5 speeds by 2026.
“We’ve proven the viability of our iterative development approach,” Hermeus CEO AJ Piplica said in a statement Tuesday. “But this is just the start. We have much more to do as the bar rises for the next iteration.”
Hermeus had planned to fly Quarterhorse in 2023 and then pushed that date to last summer before eventually hitting the milestone this month. Still, the company touted its ability to go from a clean-sheet design to a flight-ready system in just over a year.
The first flight test focused on validating Quarterh..