DARPA’s No. 2 Sees Quantum Sensing as Threat to Stealth

June 25, 2025 | By John A. Tirpak

The rise of quantum sensing is could someday overcome the advantages of stealth aircraft, making them easier to identify and increasing the need for speed, self-defense measures and other means of evading an enemy, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s No. 2 official said.

The “stealth era” may be coming to a close as future sensors emerge, Rob McHenry said on a webinar hosted June 25 by the Air and Space Forces Association’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to hide, in an operational sense, in a realistic way,” McHenry said, “due to the sophistication of sensor fusion and track, using AI and other techniques.”

How soon that will happen is still anyone’s guess, as quantum remains an attractive but elusive technology. McHenry’s comments come as the Air Force continues to invest in new stealth technologies and platforms intended to evade increasingly sophisticated air defenses. These include the B-21 bomber, now in testing, the future F-47 fighter, and new hunter-killer drones. In addition, some stealth attributes could eventually be given to larger, slower jets, like tankers and transport planes as a self-protection measure.

Retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, dean of AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said the need for stealth remains vital. “Stealth increases the probability of penetration, and decreases the probability of intercept of the stealthy aircraft,” Deptula said. “What Mr. McHenry raises is that those probabilities may be changing—but the fact is that they will continue to exist.”

Deptula said a modern stealth aircraft operates with “an associated set of other mission assets that employ real-time effects using advanced electronic warfare, cyber, space effects, and kinetics.” It is in combination wiith these that stealth is most effective.

“Add that up and factor in the dynamic variables of combat and it’s quite formidable,” he said. “Detection is but one element of a series of actions that must be taken to defend against stealth. After detection, the low-observable target must be tracked, the track must be transferred to an interceptor, then to a weapon, then to a fuse, and the fuse must be properly designed for the target. Each one of these elements in the kill chain are complicated by stealth, which decreases the probability of intercept.”

McHenry said the U.S. needs to develop more defensive capabilities, particularly in the air domain. While naval vessels are “designed to take a hit and keep fighting,” he said, aircraft are not. “We don’t have anti-missile missiles on our tactical aircraft,” he said. “You assume you’re going to get shot at and you can do something about it.”

Quantum’s threat to stealth could also benefit U.S. defense, McHenry said, enabling U.S. defenders to more quickly recognize stealthy aircraft fielded by rival nations, like China, whose air combat technology is increasingly approaching that of the U.S.

Quantum sensing collects atomic-level data on time, temperature, rotation, and more to pinpoint an object’s location with unprecedented accuracy.

Quantum sensing is transitioning from a science “to an engineering discipline that we can deploy in real-world situations,” McHenry noted. Once that technology can be fielded, “if you emit a kilowatt of energy, you’re going to be seen and you’re going to be engaged,” he said.

“The ability to do that in small, lightweight form factors is going to be fundamentally different than anything we’ve had before,” McHenry continued. “And so, while we’re worried about … the implications of that for the stealth era and what’s next beyond that, we’re also obviously leveraging that fully to go after the adversaries and be able to track things … virtually anywhere, anytime.”

Cyber, Electronic Warfare Key to Winning Future Fights, DARPA Official Says

June 25, 2025 | By Matthew Cox

The U.S. military needs to ensure pilots value non-kinetic weapons just as much as missiles and guns to avoid losing the next war, a top Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency leader said.

Cyber and electromagnetic warfare are now crucial tools for modern warfare, but they are not emphasized enough as the go-to weapons for fighter pilots, DARPA Deputy Director Rob McHenry said during a June 25 event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. In most pilot training exercises, such non-kinetic effects are separated from tactical operations training.

“They don’t actually see it. They don’t touch it. They don’t know it in the same way they know all the other combat capabilities that they’re responsible for,” McHenry said. “I think all of these are fundamental mistakes that will cost us the next war, because cyber effects are going to be deployed at every level of combat in any future operation.”

U.S. Strategic Command stood up the Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations Center in July 2023, a key step in emphasizing non-kinetic warfare, but more can be done, according to Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a retired Air Force brigadier general who sits on the House Armed Services Committee.

“There’s a lot of studies, and there’s a lot of paper, but paper doesn’t jam and paper doesn’t hit missiles,” Bacon said at another Mitchell Institute event on June 24. “We need to have more capability output, and I’m just not seeing enough of it right now.”

To McHenry, non-kinetic effects need to be buttons on the cockpit controls. Just as pilots have a red button to fire a missile, they need to have a “blue button there that’s going to launch the cyber effect,” he said.

If the U.S. was to engage with China to defend Taiwan, for example, that would be an “electromagnetic armageddon, the likes of which we have never seen before,” McHenry said. Both sides will seek to jam each other’s radars and communications.

The problem is, “we currently have no capability to even test our systems and comprehend what that could look like operationally,” McHenry said.

DARPA has been working on a program dubbed the “Digital RF Battlefield Emulatory,” or DRBE, since 2019 that consists of the largest supercomputer on the planet designed to accurately model the bandwidth needed in real-world radio-frequency environments. As part of the effort, DARPA has selected Cerberus Systems and Ranovus to deliver wafer-size semiconductors that will provide new supercomputing capability to DRBE with a fraction of the power needed by current computer technology, according to a Cerberus press release.

“It’s a 12-inch wafer with more than a million cores on it that does real-time full physics simulation of the RF environment,” McHenry said. “You can literally hook [DRBE] up to the RF backend of a radar or communication system, and this computer will do all the physics modeling of how that RF energy operates in the environment.”

The next step will be to scale the capability up to simulate “real-world combat” using non-kinetic weapons, he said.

“That’s a gap we have to fill, because we could be counting on capabilities that … are not having the operational impact that we thought they would, because we simply can’t test any of that,” McHenry said.

15 Tons of Bombs and 1 Tiny Toilet: Around the World on the B-2 Spirit

June 25, 2025 | By David Roza

Flying a stealth bomber loaded with bunker-busting ordnance around the world and back in 37 hours might sound like science fiction. But in reality, executing such a mission in the B-2 Spirit depends on mundane details: topping off the gas tank, staying hydrated, avoiding thunderstorms, and being careful not to overload a small toilet in the 25-square-foot crew compartment.

At least, that was retired Air Force Col. Mel Deaile’s experience when he and his co-pilot, Brian Neal, flew a record-setting 44.3-hour B-2 sortie to strike targets in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001.

“Instead of looking long-range, ‘Hey, we’re going to Afghanistan,’ it’s more about making sure we get to the next air refueling on time,” Deaile told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “We can’t miss this air refueling, otherwise this mission will be short-lived.”

A U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bomber flies over the Indo-Pacific area of responsibility, Sept. 10, 2024. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Samantha White

On June 22, 14 Airmen aboard seven B-2s joined Deaile and Neal atop the list of aviators with the longest nonstop stealth bomber sorties when they struck Iranian nuclear sites in a bid to delay Tehran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon.

Dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer, the mission marked the second-longest B-2 flight in the plane’s history, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said. About 125 U.S. planes, including the B-2s and fourth- and fifth-generation fighters, participated in the mission that dropped 75 precision-guided munitions on three sites across Iran. U.S. submarines launched Tomahawk cruise missiles in coordination with the air assault.

The B-2s dropped 14 Massive Ordnance Penetrators on the sites at Fordow and Natanz in the first operational use of the 30,000-pound weapons. Taking off from their home at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., on June 21, the crews flew east over the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, struck their targets in Iran, then turned around and flew back to Missouri, filling up at dozens of tankers along the way.

The operation was “planned and executed across multiple domains and theaters with coordination that reflects our ability to project power globally, with speed and precision, at the time and place of our nation’s choosing,” Caine said at a press conference following the attack.

The circumstances were similar 24 years ago, when Deaile and Neal climbed into a B-2 nicknamed the “Spirit of America” and took off into the night toward southwest Asia. Prior to that, Deaile had flown a 25-hour sortie in a B-52 and a sat in a simulator for about 20 hours nonstop, but none of his previous cockpit time rivaled the task ahead.

“There is no preparation, no simulator requirement for a 44-hour mission,” he said.

The aircraft was loaded with 16 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) to destroy air defenses, but 70 percent of the targets changed mid-flight, he said. The switch forced the pilots to reprogram the JDAMs and redo other calculations to ensure mission success.

“You’re reviewing target folders, reviewing timing, checking our fuel consumption so that we’re not going to run out of gas over the Pacific,” he said.

That may have occurred during the Iran mission, too. Another former B-2 pilot told Air & Space Forces Magazine that, once over the target area, B-2 pilots can use the bomber’s radar to create target coordinates that are “usually even more precise than intel has provided.”

A U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit is prepared for operations ahead of Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, June 2025. U.S. Air Force photo

Flying high for that long can also leave people parched. Deaile and Neal drained multiple water bottles throughout the flight—but the aircraft’s chemical toilet was too small to hold 44 hours’ worth of output. Instead, the Airmen used “piddle packs,” plastic bags filled with a kitty litter-like substance that turns urine into a gel.

“We’re filling up two piddle packs per hour, and piddle packs weigh so many pounds, so we were trying to figure out how many pounds of solidified pee we were going to have to offload from this aircraft when we finally landed,” Deaile said.

The answer? About 100 pounds.

“Those are things that you do to pass the time,” he said.

Rest is another issue. While many civilian airliners and some military aircraft bring multiple crews for long-haul flights, the B-2 has just two pilots for the entire mission. Deaile recalled one person was often unconscious in a sleeping bag atop a modified Army cot behind the ejection seats.

It wasn’t high-quality sleep, he said, “but at that point, any sleep is good sleep.”

Both pilots had to be in their seats during critical phases of flight, such as air refueling, so the two switched places after meeting a tanker every four or five hours. To keep themselves going, the crew brought coffee, water, sandwiches, pretzels, and pre-packaged meals designed specifically for in-flight consumption. But sitting in a cramped cockpit for prolonged periods doesn’t tend to work up an appetite, Deaile recalled.

“You’re not really burning calories,” he said.

His crew had the advantage of flying in daylight across the Pacific, so the sun didn’t set until they approached Pakistan. That meant their bodies didn’t start releasing melatonin, a hormone which helps the brain prepare for rest, until late in the flight.

The crews on this month’s Iran strike may have had a more difficult time, since they flew east into the darkness, Deaile said. The Airmen could have taken amphetamines called “go” pills that are commonly used by troops to stay alert on long flights.

“It definitely accelerates the heart rate,” Deaile said. “It is not a fun feeling.”

B-2 Spirit bombers assigned to the 509th Bomb Wing conduct operations in support of Bomber Task Force Europe 20-2 over the North Sea, March 12, 2020. U.S. Air Force photo/Master Sgt. Matthew Plew

Last weekend’s B-2 mission and those flown in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks share another key feature: Their crews were charged with the responsibility of completing a high-profile mission ordered by the president of the United States.

“We practiced crew procedures, the timing and coordination, because you want to eliminate the possibility of things not going to plan as much as you can,” Deaile said.

His mission stretched about two hours longer than expected after local air operations coordinators asked them to fly back over Afghanistan to use their last four JDAMs on a few remaining targets. Then it continued another 15 minutes when the B-52 landing ahead of them at Diego Garcia, a small island in the Indian Ocean, suffered an emergency. Around the airfield the B-2 went.

“We looked at each other like, ‘Can we not get this thing on the ground?’” Deaile recalled. When they finally touched down, he said, “we were just glad to be back on terra firma.”

A U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit lands after supporting Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, June 2025. U.S. Air Force photo.

The crews who flew the Iran mission no doubt felt the same relief—and they’re unlikely to be the last. Air Force officials expect to see similarly long flights as the service prepares for a potential conflict with China in the vast Pacific.

Those long-haul sorties would disproportionately affect the tanker and transport crews tasked with ferrying gas, equipment, and troops around the region each day.

To practice, a C-130 transport last year flew 26 hours from Texas to Guam, while a KC-46 tanker flew a nonstop 45-hour lap around the world from Kansas a few months later. Air Mobility Command aims to help crews maximize their performance over long sorties with sleep pods, wearable health monitors, and reflex tests. At the 2023 iteration of Mobility Guardian, the Air Force’s major biennial mobility exercise, the command relaxed its rules barring “go” pills so Airmen could get the jolt they needed to rush equipment to the Pacific.

“In an era of great power competition, crews need the ability to operate longer than they have in the past,” one of the KC-46 pilots said last year.

That task will likely grow more difficult as aircraft like the B-2 age. The Spirit of America was just 8 years old when Deaile flew to Afghanistan, he said. Now that the aircraft are 24 years older, deploying one-third of the B-2 fleet across the world and back on the same night—plus sending out a few more over the Pacific as a decoy—is itself an accomplishment.

“That’s a monumental task. A huge hats-off to the maintainers and logisticians who got those jets ready,” Deaile said. “The maintenance need is not going down as they get older.”

NATO Allies Agree to Spend 5 Percent on Defense

June 25, 2025 | By Chris Gordon

NATO members pledged to ramp up military spending at their annual summit as they look to address growing fears about Russia’s ambitions and meet President Donald Trump’s demands that European nations contribute more to their own defense.

The alliance members vowed to try to spend 5 percent of their annual gross domestic product on defense at their June 25 meeting in The Hague, Netherlands.

“United in the face of profound security threats and challenges, in particular the long-term threat posed by Russia to Euro-Atlantic security and the persistent threat of terrorism, Allies commit to invest 5 percent of [gross domestic product] annually on core defense requirements as well as defense- and security-related spending by 2035 to ensure our individual and collective obligations,” The Hague Summit Declaration stated.

Trump has pushed for such a move since 2017, arguing European countries have overly relied on the U.S. nuclear backstop and some 80,000 U.S. troops for security on the continent.

But White House pressure is just one factor. European nations also worry about the durability of America’s commitment to the alliance and fear that Russian President Vladimir Putin may try to wrest control of sovereign territory beyond Ukraine.

Not all NATO nations are expected to meet that goal. Germany, for example, is planning a major increase in defense spending, but Spain has been reluctant to commit to the target. The alliance has no way to enforce a minimum contribution.

To make it easier for the allies to hit 5 percent, NATO has broadened its definition of security spending. Under the alliance’s approach, allies committed to spending 3.5 percent on “core defense requirements” by the middle of the next decade and another 1.5 percent on critical infrastructure, civil preparedness, and their industrial bases. They also pledged closer collaboration on weapons production.

The U.S. spends roughly 3 percent of its GDP on defense and may not meet the 5 percent target itself. But U.S. officials have defended the country’s contribution by noting that Washington has done much of the heavy lifting in past decades and has to pay for other responsibilities worldwide as well.

Though Trump was in the Netherlands for less than 24 hours, he appeared to warm to America’s European allies. The president affirmed his commitment to NATO’s mutual-defense clause, which he had previously suggested the U.S. might not honor.

“They want to protect their country, and they need the United States, and without the United States, it’s not going to be the same,” Trump said in a news conference alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “I left here saying, ‘These people really love their countries. It’s not a rip-off.’ And we are here to help them protect their country.”

Many leaders had rushed to placate Trump in hopes of retaining U.S. support for the alliance.

“Daddy has to sometimes use strong language,” NATO’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte said, referring to Trump’s criticism of European allies. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda mused that the alliance should adopt a new slogan: “Make NATO Great Again.”

Trump also appeared to mend relations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, following a fiery White House meeting earlier this year where the wartime leader was accused of being ungrateful for military aid. Trump expressed frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin and suggested he may consider supplying Ukraine with more Patriot missile interceptors—a prized defense against ballistic missiles that Kyiv desperately needs.

In a marked departure from previous NATO summits, Ukraine, which is not a member of the alliance, was mentioned in the official declaration only in passing.

But the summit—the outcome of which was largely agreed upon beforehand—seemed to calm nerves about America’s commitment to Europe in the U.S. and abroad, despite the Trump administration’s long-term desire to shift the Pentagon’s focus to the Pacific.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, the nominee to lead U.S. European Command and serve as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces, told senators this week that the U.S. should not ignore European security in favor of preparing for a potential conflict with China.

“Our adversaries are converging, and the risks of conflict with one or more of them grow each and every day,” Grynkewich said at his June 24 confirmation hearing. “While the Indo-Pacific has risen in importance over the previous two decades, European and American security remain as intertwined as our history, our cultures, and our economies. As such, a strong NATO capable of defending Europe remains essential to American interests.”

Speaking in Washington on June 25, the U.S. Army’s top general in Europe said he did not believe America would downsize its forces on the continent—a comment reinforced by Army officials speaking to reporters later in the day.

“I don’t think that our force posture is going to change at all in Europe,” Gen. Chris Donahue said at an event hosted by the Association of the United States Army. “Nobody has said anything to me about it.”

“We have a deterrence problem in Europe, and everybody’s got to step up,” he added. “We don’t need to generate drama. Just look at the facts. Do what’s right.”

In the end, Donahue said, “the U.S. military will always lead in Europe.”

Army Blocks Air Force’s AI Program Over Data Security Concerns

June 25, 2025 | By Shaun Waterman

The Army has blocked the Air Force generative AI chatbot, NIPRGPT, from its networks, citing cybersecurity and data governance and highlighting the challenges the U.S. military faces in assessing risk when adopting cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence.

NIPRGPT, developed as an experimental project of by the Air Force Research Laboratory, aims to give military personnel a generative AI Large Language Model (LLM) comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but free of the security, data protection and privacy concerns posed by consumer AI products.

But the Army flagged the program as risky and on April 17 pulled the plug on it for anyone using Army networks, an unusual decision that exposed a rift between the two military services.

“NIPRGPT was shot dead,” said one Army user who wasn’t authorized to speak to the media.

IT security for the U.S. military is a patchwork—each network or system commander has the power to make their own decisions about what risks to accept. So when one commander makes a risk calculation, others are under no obligation to accept it, meaning tools like NIPRGPT can be allowed in some commands but not others.

The result can impact user trust, tool consistency, and the sharing of capabilities across joint operations—and is also a major stumbling block to the swift adoption of cutting-edge technologies.

‘It Was My Call’

Chief Technology Officer Gabriel Chiulli of the Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Agency told Air & Space Forces Magazine that the NIPRGPT block was part of a wider move by the Army to transition from experimentation with AI LLMs and launch into full implementation using real Army data.

“The block was focused on getting us to a governance framework for AI used in a production state,” he said. “We were trying to make sure we had the guardrails in place for how we’re doing AI for real.”

So NIPRGPT might have been fine for experimenting, but not for mission requirements.

“It was my decision to make the call,” Chiulli said.

Air Force officials declined to comment.

Weeks after the block was implemented, the Army deployed its Army Enterprise LLM Workspace, a platform that allows users to access locally hosted secure LLMs. It’s powered by Ask Sage, which bills itself as “a LLM agnostic, secure and extensible Generative AI platform,” and was founded by Nick Chaillan, a controversial former Air Force Chief Software Officer.

“I built the entire architecture to be able to run anywhere from a backpack to a cloud, to run air-gapped, to run on classified systems,” Chaillan told Air & Space Forces Magazine. Ask Sage provides a secure interface, or virtual wrapper, around multiple commercial generative AI models, so that data can be loaded once and then used with multiple models without any additional charge, Chaillan said.

“The platform provides a layer between the user and the model which enables data to be identified, tagged and associated with its user … on a very granular basis,” he said. The system tracks access permissions, so that only those entitled to access certain data can get to it.

“We’re the only product that has that kind of zero trust, data centric security stack,” Chaillan said.

Ask Sage has FedRAMP high clearance and is authorized for both Controlled Unclassified Information and Secret and Top Secret classification levels, achievements that Chaillan called “A very heavy lift” including penetration testing and red teaming.

The company announced a $10M deal to expand its military user base last week, extending the Army Enterprise LLM Workspace to the Joint Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), and all Combatant Commands.

Risk and Reciprocity

Banning NIPRGPT on Army networks highlights a challenge long recognized by software providers: the lack of reciprocity among government users when it comes to the Authorization to Operate (ATO) in government IT systems. An ATO is a prerequisite for any software program or service to run on a government network.

Defense Department policy encourages reciprocity among its myriad agencies and commands, but it doesn’t require system owners to recognize ATOs issued elsewhere in the department, a former technical advisor to the Air Force told Air & Space Forces Magazine. The former advisor asked for anonymity because their current employer had not authorized them to speak to the media about Air Force issues.

“You can, by policy, choose to reject somebody else’s ATO and forbid stuff from your system,” the former technical advisor said.

Within the Air Force, some authorizing officials were “known to be more strict or less strict, or more forward thinking, or more traditional” than others. Still, banning something with an ATO from another service was “a big lever to pull,” the former technical advisor said: Though “not unheard of, it is a little bit out of the ordinary.”

But John Weiler, a long-time advocate for IT modernization and procurement reform in the Pentagon found the block surprising: “I’ve been in this business 35 years and I’ve never heard of anything like this ban,” he said. “It’s unprecedented.”

Data driven decision

Chiulli said a key driver behind his decision was the discovery that Soldiers were using experimental LLM chatbots in ways that created risks to army data.

The Army surveyed personnel about their daily use of NIPRGPT, CamoGPT and other generative AI models in a research study called Project Athena.

Survey respondents “gave us use cases that made me just want to make sure that—if they’re doing those type of things with Army production data … then I want to make sure that I can give them that capability as an Army system provider,” he said.

Guidance given to NIPRGPT users was not clear, Chiulli added. “There’s a lot of different disclaimers on the homepage for NIPRGPT,” he said, “a lot of different Do’s and Don’ts,” which might leave Army personnel confused about “whether they actually are allowed to do that stuff.”

The login page of NIPRGPT is considered “Controlled Unclassified Information” and not accessible to the public. Air & Space Forces Magazine was unable to independently verify this statement.

The Army wanted to ensure there was clarity and consistency in rules about how to use AI, Chiulli said.

“We were worried about duplicative [and divergent] guidance,” he said. “I might give guidance out from an Army perspective, about Army data, and it may be in conflict with Air Force [guidance], right?”

The Army was also concerned “to ensure we have some policies out there for records management,” he said, so that generative AI chatbots could be responsive to FOIA requests and other records retention mandates. “When someone calls up and says, ‘I need to know what someone did [on this issue],’ We need to have all [those records] ready to go.”

Issuing guidance would not have been a sufficient response, Chiulli said, noting “Soldiers will soldier: They’ll go and use stuff that’s useful whether or not they’re supposed to use it, as long as they can get to the website.”

Turning Off the Spigot

Other than security, the biggest factor in the move away from NIPRGPT was cost, Chiulli said.

NIPRGPT was free to the users from every service, but there were doubts that the funding model was sustainable, and concerns about what would happen if and when NIPRGPT had to transition from R&D dollars to sustainment dollars.

The Army feared that the Air Force might pull the rug out from the program.

“I don’t know when that spigot was going to turn off,” he said of the free access to NIPRGPT, “There’s always a bill. We need to be very cognizant of the cost model. Whether it’s free for one year or six months or seven years, at some point, you have to pay.”

More importantly, said Chiulli, Army users needed to understand that—even if they weren’t paying—the service did cost money. “I think there needed to be a general understanding across our users that AI is not free.”

A new cost model

Chiulli said that one of the cost advantages of the Army Enterprise LLM Workspace is the flexible way Ask Sage is billed.

Most Software-as-a-Service offerings, like Ask Sage, are billed by the “seat.” The military service or agency buys a certain number of user licenses—each representing the right of one person to use the service.

But Ask Sage bills by the token—the units that Generative AI puts together to form the sentences it produces. The tokens can be assigned to anyone and reassigned if necessary, Chaillan said. They can also be used at any classification level, so if a customer has bought tokens for an unclassified system and then finds they need classified access, they can use the same tokens. Either way, the costs are born by individual users based on their volume of use.

Iran, Proxies Still Threaten US Troops Despite Setbacks: CENTCOM Nominee

June 24, 2025 | By Rachel S. Cohen

Iran and its proxy groups across the Middle East remain a threat to American troops in the region despite being weakened by conflicts on multiple fronts over the past few years, the nominee to run U.S. Central Command said June 24.

Protecting American troops will remain the command’s top priority in the wake of U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend, as well as the potential for retaliation by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, CENTCOM Deputy Commander Vice Adm. Brad Cooper told the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill.

Tehran still possesses “considerable tactical capability,” he said, pointing to Iran’s June 23 attack on the U.S.-Qatari Al Udeid Air Base, and its proxies are still capable of antagonizing U.S. assets and interests.

“You see the blood that’s on the hands of the Iranians . . . with hundreds of attacks against American service members,” he said. “They have, and they continue to be, threats to the United States.”

But Iran is strategically “weakened” and tactically “degraded,” Cooper added. He characterized its proxies, particularly Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as “significantly degraded.”

“It would be a priority of mine to deter conflict through both the deterrence of Iran and those proxies,” Cooper said. “I think we’re going to have to continue to watch them very closely.”

Cooper—who would be promoted to admiral if confirmed—is next in line to command U.S. troops in the Middle East at the region’s most volatile moment in years. His remarks are among the earliest public assessments by U.S. defense officials of Iran’s current military standing as it begins a fragile ceasefire with Israel following nearly two weeks at war.

Israel and Iran on June 24 publicly committed to pause fighting after Israel’s surprise attack on Iranian military leaders, nuclear facilities, and scientists sparked 12 days of airstrikes that killed several hundred people across both countries. U.S. stealth bombers hit three Iranian nuclear facilities June 21, and Tehran launched a brief retaliatory volley of short- and medium-range missiles against Al Udeid two days later.

Air defenses intercepted that incoming fire; President Donald Trump said no Americans or Qataris were harmed.

This month’s escalation marks the most intense period of conflict between Israel and Iran in years after decades of tension that has occasionally turned deadly.

Israel continues its campaign to eliminate Iran-linked Hamas from the Gaza Strip in response to the group’s 2023 attack that killed around 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 civilians hostage. More than 56,000 Palestinians have died in the war so far, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Israel has also continued bombing Lebanon after a November ceasefire ended its 14-month war with Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy.

In Yemen, the Iran-backed Houthi militia attacked American ships and drones “about 500 times,” as well as Israeli targets, in retaliation for the war in Gaza before agreeing to stop in May, Cooper said.

Though Iran continues to supply the Houthis extremely well, Cooper said, it’s up to the rebels to uphold their end of the ceasefire.

CENTCOM has introduced “dozens of specific measures” to protect U.S. troops at sea and on bases across the Middle East, he said.

“If I look back specifically toward the Tower 22 incident and the ensuing now 17 or 18 months, we’ve made considerable improvements across the board—layered defense employing both kinetic capability and nonkinetic capability,” Cooper said, referring to the January 2024 drone attack on a U.S. military outpost in Jordan that killed three American soldiers and injured nearly 50 others. The U.S. has blamed an Iranian proxy for the attack.

“We really are leaps and bounds ahead of where we were before,” Cooper said.

He warned that the next fight against Iran’s network may be underground, as the militias turn to subterranean tunnels and compounds that are harder to find and destroy.

“This is a serious issue that we will have to look at in the future,” he said.

Greater investment in sensors and munitions can help address that problem, Cooper said. He also called for faster delivery of counter-drone equipment to guard U.S. assets.

“Our role from a military perspective is to remain ready for a wide range of contingencies and protect our people, and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Cooper said.

Military officials also worry about the growing cooperation between world powers that have traditionally been at odds with the United States. As Iran’s military might has faltered, its leaders have sought closer ties with Russia, China, and North Korea, creating a “troubling” new axis that warrants more attention, Cooper said.

“We’ve certainly seen the tactical implications of support from Iran to Russia,” he said, referring to military aid powering Moscow’s war in Ukraine. “We’ve seen tactical implications of Chinese companies providing sensors and weapons and components to Iran, who ship them to the Houthis, who shoot them at Americans. I think we need to call those types of things out more, but clearly that emerging foursome . . . is one that we need to pay attention to.”

He pledged to call out China’s efforts to bolster Iran’s economy through oil purchases and its military aid to the Houthis.

“They’ve had a 10-year period of three ships in the Gulf of Aden,” he continued. “They’re there for counter-piracy, but they haven’t caught a single pirate. They’ve turned a complete blind eye to the years of flow of weapons into the Houthis that have ended up getting shot at Americans. I think that’s unacceptable.”

The U.S. will continue partnering with friendly forces in Syria, Iraq, and at sea to curb weapons transfers to groups that plan to use them against American troops and civilian shipping vessels, he said.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, the Joint Staff’s operations director who is nominated to run U.S. European Command and serve as NATO’s top officer, told senators at the hearing the U.S. should keep an eye on Iran’s supply of drones to Russia for use in Ukraine as well.

The partnership among America’s adversaries opens the possibility of a war on multiple continents against countries with complementary military capabilities, he said.

“As we start to think about potential conflicts against great powers, we do need to worry about the potential for simultaneity of those conflicts and think about how we posture ourselves and our allies to help deal with that,” he said.

Northrop Exec: Industry Can Create Surge Capacity—If It’s in Contracts

June 24, 2025 | By John A. Tirpak

The Pentagon can get the weapons production surge capacity it wants, but it has to be willing to pay companies to create it, according to a top executive with Northrop Grumman, which builds the B-21 bomber.

Tom Jones, Northrop Grumman’s corporate vice president and president of the company’s aeronautics sector, said the Pentagon has to make any surge capacity requirement an allowable cost on contracts. Lacking that compensation, it would be hard to justify, he said June 24 at a Center for a New American Security panel on the future of the defense industrial base.

“The fastest way” to add surge capacity—whether for munitions, aircraft, or other items—“would be to have spare factory space sitting around that you could go into and utilize,” he said.

But “the way the system is set up right now, none of that is allowable cost. So, for a contractor to build a spare building on speculation that someday it might be needed, it actually ties up a bunch of cash [and] you aren’t actually able to recoup the cost of that.

The question is not academic—funds to surge production are being debated in the reconciliation bill before Congress, which would add $4.5 billion to the B-21 program for what lawmakers called “expansion of the production capacity” of the aircraft, “including tooling and expansion of the supplier base.” While lawmakers want the funds to go toward “the purchase of aircraft only available through the expansion of production capacity,” they did not specifically calling for an increase in planned B-21 production.

Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden, in an April 22 call with reporters, said the company took a charge of $477 million in the first quarter, part of which was to set up accelerated B-21 production. The changes to the manufacturing process, she said, “positions us to ramp to the quantities needed in full-rate production” and “ramp beyond the quantities in the program of record.”

The Air Force hasn’t revealed what the maximum rate of B-21 production will be, but former Pentagon acquisition and sustainment chief William LaPlante has said the program was deliberately set up with a very low production rate to protect it from budget cuts. Sources have said the rate is likely to be about seven aircraft a year. By contrast, the B-2 production line was set up to build 132 airplanes at about 20 aircraft per year.

“It really comes down to, in the case of aircraft … it’s the factories, it’s floor space, it’s tooling. Once you get that running—and your supply chain—I think you have a lot of ability to look at how you can scale, ramp production surge,” Jones said.

“So I think number one, we need to look at how we can get the allowability of surge capacity in there,” Jones said. He also said he’s “bullish on advanced manufacturing techniques” and “determinate manufacturing.”

Determinate manufacturing refers to designing parts with such precision that they go together without the need for a lot of tooling or adjustment on the assembly line.

“You’re not going to get completely away from tooling, but anything that can reduce the amount of tooling, again, goes into reducing the lead time that you need to set things up,” Jones said.

Another way to defray the cost of having greater production capacity is to use the additional space “to do prototype manufacturing so that the factory is basically full, maybe not with the end product, [but] where you had a factory that was generating revenue.”

Jones also said new programs need to incorporate surge into their thinking about parts.

“Think about how we deal with diminished manufacturing sources, or DMS. There’s a cost trade there that says, ‘if I’m towards the back end of my production, I’m probably just going to make a lifetime buy’” of parts. But if more are needed later, “you have to [do]…redesigns around that. So maybe making more conscious decisions as we’re in production … to make sure that if we ever need to step on the gas, we don’t have a 12-month or 18-month redesign cycle in there, because we bought enough for 100 and now suddenly there’s a need for 150 and we don’t have enough parts.”

He also said industry is getting good at training unskilled workers to perform very complex assembly line tasks, which he said has been done “pretty successfully on the B-21 program,” and this can also help accelerate or surge production on programs.

Workers can make “a phenomenal living in the trades, in the right neighborhood,” he said.

“I like to say the B-21 is put together by bartenders, babysitters, and baristas,” he added. “Why do I say that? Because when I go out and walk the floor and I talk to people out there, I go, ‘what was the last job you had before you came here?’ And those are the answers I get; ‘I was a server at TGI Fridays.’ Right now they’re putting together the most sophisticated aircraft in history of the world, right? And doing a hell of a good job at it.”

Industry now knows “how to take those people in, how to train them, how to give them skills, how to put the infrastructure and make sure the quality is there, and you can have a lifetime career.” So as far as surge production, “I think that we can get there again. It gets back to, you need a clear sign that we’re doing this. You need to budget like we’re going to do it, and we need to have constancy in that demand.”

US Needs Troops in Syria to Stop ISIS Comeback, CENTCOM Nominee Says

June 24, 2025 | By Chris Gordon

The Islamic State militant group remains a threat in Syria and a U.S. military presence is still needed there to deal with it, Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper said in his confirmation hearing to become the next head of U.S. Central Command.

The Pentagon has already decided to significantly reduce the number of troops in the country from 2,000 to fewer than 1,000. But Cooper told the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 24 there is a continued need for at least some presence. And he argued that the complex situation in Syria needs to be weighed before making additional troop cuts.

“Presence is indispensable in the execution of the counter-ISIS mission today,” said Cooper, who currently serves as the deputy commander of CENTCOM, which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East. “We have led it. We lead it today, and I anticipate we’ll lead it into the future. Every decision made on force posture is going to be conditions-based as I look to the future.”

Pentagon officials declined to say how many U.S. troops are currently in Syria in response to queries from Air & Space Forces Magazine.

U.S. troops were sent to Syria to advise and support the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which helped collapse the ISIS self-styled caliphate in 2019 and is now trying to prevent the group’s resurgence.

The U.S. and the SDF stayed clear of Syria’s civil war, which led to the overthrow of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Russia.

The country’s new president is Ahmed al-Sharaa, who led the Islamist rebel group Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) that swept to power last December and has vowed to establish a tolerant, multi-ethnic state.

After months of deliberation, the U.S. has thrown its support behind the new Syrian leader. President Trump announced last month that he would lift sanctions on the country, a decision he made with encouragement from Saudi Arabia while Trump was in the Middle East.

Syria, however, is still coping with sectarian violence. In March, hundreds were killed, according to nongovernmental monitoring groups, in an attack in western Syria largely aimed at the Alawite sect, to which Assad belongs.

That has led to concern that the Islamic State group might seek to exploit tensions as it attempts to make a comeback. On June 22, Syrian authorities blamed the Islamic State group for blowing up a church outside Damascus, which killed at least 25 people.

“We are focused on this problem set every single day,” Cooper said when asked about the church bombing by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). “ISIS remains a threat, and as we look to the future, and if confirmed, I will remain nose down on this threat. It is an absolute priority.”

Despite the tenuous situation in the country, Cooper said the U.S. was right to back Sharaa and that he was a vital partner in the campaign against ISIS.

“ISIS thrives in chaos,” Cooper said. “If the government of Syria, now seven months into their existence, can help suppress that ISIS threat, along with the U.S. forces in the region, that stability helps create our own security.”

U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack, who has also taken on the duties of the U.S. envoy to Syria, has been trying to support the new Syrian government. And the involvement of Sharaa’s government in the campaign against ISIS may determine if further U.S. troop cuts can be made safely in the months and years ahead.

“I think, given the dynamic nature of what’s happening today, that assessment [of required U.S. troops in Syria] in the future could look different than it does today, perhaps,” Cooper said.

Secretive Space RCO Plans to Launch First ‘Full-Up’ Satellites Soon

June 24, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

As the Space Force races to embrace its space control mission, its Rapid Capability Office is expanding from simply developing payloads to delivering complete satellites.

Much of the work done by the Space Rapid Capabilities Office is classified, but director Kelly D. Hammett told AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies on June 24 that “in the next year or so, we’ll be launching our first full-up satellites.”

Hammett didn’t specify what those satellites will do, but in an unusual twist, he said the SRCO will control the spacecraft through launch and early operations under an agreement with Space Operations Command.

The office has launched payloads on classified missions before. But the move to launch and operate entire satellites hints at a growing role for the Space RCO. It’s also part of an “evolving story” in how the office handles programs, Hammett said—following through from developing technologies and into production and fielding.

Product Lines

The Space RCO is charged with delivering “timely and operationally relevant space superiority and resiliency capabilities.” As Hammett put it more simply at April’s State of the Space Industrial Base Conference: “We work on space control.”

That includes “about a dozen” programs centered on Space Control, what the service’s newest mission. Space Control refers to the ability to protect U.S. space assets and defend U.S. forces from space-enabled attack.

At that conference, Hammett said his team was working with Space Systems Command, USSF’s primary acquisition command, to develop “product lines” from those programs: different satellite components for orbital warfare that can be plugged into systems as needed

At the Mitchell Institute, he expressed interest in the ability to “pick those product line buses off the line and add the special payloads and whatever else is required.”

Hammett added, “It’s a vision we’ve been discussing for a couple of years.” Now Space RCO will be more involved in the acquisition and fielding process. The office transfers programs to SSC for full-scale production, he said, and it’s now working on more program “transitions.”

“Transition is where we actually field something. Like, we’re only going to buy a few of these, and we’re going to then transition to … Space Operations Command,” he said. “And then it’s their job to go out and place systems.” Yet control and fielding of satellite product lines “is probably a little bit more where we are going to head,” Hammett added.

Maneuvering Satellites

Hammett’s interest in satellite buses is key to space control. In order to dodge threats and pursue targets in geosynchronous orbit, “we have to pursue high-thrust, high Delta V bus capabilities,” he said.

The Space RCO recently solicited industry for input on a “Dynamic Space Operations bus” designed for such maneuvers. The request for information is classified, but Hammett hinted at what could be the key to making it work: “I think you want to have some refueling or replenishment capability,” he said. “The term we should probably be using is maneuver and logistics. Space warfighting logistics is what you want—and whatever it takes to get there.”

Astroscale is among the companies pursuing development of a refueling satellite, such as the APS-R in this rendering.Astrosclae

The Space RCO is one of several Pentagon organizations to invest in satellite refueling demonstrations, Hammett added.

“We have funded a refueler to go dock with one of the systems that we have, actually systems that have both ports, so that we can demonstrate the feasibility of both,” he said. “We can then make trades on cost and complexity and all those types of things from the warfighting perspective.”

He did not say whether that refueling operation will include satellites the Space RCO controls. Regardless, flying satellites in orbit will likely help Space RCO refine and develop its R2C2 command and control software.

“We are now building out the R2C2 platform and the services that you need to fly systems at GEO: mission plan, deconflict, and then go out,” Hammett said.

Challenges

As the Space RCO prepares for its first flight operations, it will face challenges. “One is having a cadre of experienced flight planners and operators that can extend our mission space from ‘we designed it, we delivered it, we tested it,’ to now, ‘launch it, and then go through the launch and early ops and those stages,’” Hammett said. “We don’t have a stable of folks to do that. We are trying to onboard a team that is larger and has more experience in that area.”

That raises questions about how soon the office will be able to take on such tasks. “That just gets back to policy questions that we’re going to have to get through,” he added. “A number of the capabilities we are delivering are not things that we do right now. So if we make those visible, that will tip our hand in some cases.”