After more than a dozen MV-22 Osprey incidents involving what is known as a hard clutch engagement, or HCE, military officials now say that they have finally made progress in understanding the deadly issue. “While the ultimate root cause has not yet been verified, the HCE team has narrowed down the scope of the investigation to a leading theory,” Neil Lobeda, a spokesman for the Osprey's Joint Program Office, told Military.com in an email. That theory, according to Lobeda, is something called “out of phase engagement.”
Northrop Grumman plans to produce medium caliber ammunition inside Ukraine under a project bankrolled by Ukrainian dollars, a company official said. Although several European defense firms have committed to large-scale manufacturing programs inside Ukraine’s borders, Northrop’s coproduction agreement is the first publicly acknowledged deal between a U.S. defense prime and the Ukrainian government for a manufacturing project inside Ukraine.
When he arrived at Iraq’s Al Asad Air Base in April 2023, Master Sgt. Peter Pease began preparing his team of security forces to expect the unexpected. Then the unexpected came true. On Oct. 18, with less than three weeks to go in Pease’s deployment, a drone attack on Al Asad destroyed two aircraft hangars and caused minor injuries to a small number of troops as tensions in the Middle East flared at the start of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) F/A-18F Super Hornets will test launch prototypes of the U.S. Air Force’s air-launched Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) over ranges in that country as part of the development of that weapon. HACM, which the Air Force hopes to begin fielding in at least limited numbers in 2027, is intertwined with U.S.-Australian efforts that are set to help the latter country acquire its own air-launched hypersonic cruise missile capability.
Delays in Lockheed Martin’s F-35 program and Boeing’s lackluster performance on its own defense efforts could be driving recent—and unexpected—comments from Air Force leaders that it might not build a next-gen fighter jet. Aviation observers were thrown for a loop last week when service chief Gen. David Allvin declined to commit to building the future Next Generation Air Dominance aircraft—a program that was once the service’s top air dominance priority.
Mark Rutte, the outgoing Dutch prime minister, is expected to become the next head of NATO after winning over Hungary’s prime minister with a promise not to deploy Budapest’s forces or spend its money supporting Ukraine.
The drones now leaving ISR Defence’s factory in Ukraine look exactly like those made there before Russia’s invasion but the components inside have completely changed. It is an exercise the company has gone through repeatedly to keep its drones aloft.
The U.S. Space Force has embarked on yet another attempt to modernize ground systems used to command and control military satellites. This time, it’s turning to the commercial sector and the cloud with a program called Rapid Resilient Command and Control (R2C2). The R2C2 program started over a year ago but made headlines recently when it unveiled a roster of 20 companies selected for an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract valued at $1 billion over five years.
The Space Force’s first-ever chief technology and innovation officer, Lisa Costa, has retired from her position in the federal government. Costa took helm of the Space Force’s Chief Technology and Innovation Office in 2021, where she was charged with creating strategies and policies to advance research, development, test and evaluation across the service. As CTIO, she worked to deploy relevant tech to ensure the Space Force—which some have called the Defense Department’s first truly digital service—had an edge over U.S. adversaries.
The U.S. State Department on June 19 approved the potential sale to Taiwan of approximately $360 million-worth of drones capable of one-way attack. In separate announcements, the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency said the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office—the closest thing the island democracy has to an embassy in the U.S.—had requested 291 ALTIUS 600M-V drones made by Anduril and 720 Switchblade 300 All Up Rounds made by AeroVironment and related equipment, for an estimated $300 million and $62 million respectively.
The U.S. military’s moving season is here again. You’ve got your orders, you’ve researched your next duty station, and moving boxes are sprouting like springtime flowers all over your barracks room, apartment, or house. But how does everything, you know, actually get there? There could be thousands of miles between this assignment and your next one, and covering that distance with all your worldly possessions like some kind of dust-bowl hobo is a daunting task.
