Air Force Wants to Kill E-7 Wedgetail Buy

June 26, 2025 | By Rachel S. Cohen

The Air Force plans to cancel its program to purchase a fleet of E-7 Wedgetail airborne target-tracking jets as part of the fiscal 2026 budget, a senior defense official confirmed June 26.

The decision was driven by “significant delays with cost increases” and concerns about the fleet’s ability to weather attacks by the advanced anti-aircraft weapons the U.S. military expects to face in future wars, the defense official told reporters at a briefing on the Defense Department’s 2026 spending request.

Instead, the Pentagon now hope to buy five more Navy E-2D Hawkeye planes to fill the airborne early warning role before relying on satellites to share data on enemy aircraft and missile movement—a move critics say would hinder the U.S. military’s ability to wage air combat in the years ahead.

“We wanted to be able to span the globe,” a second senior military official said. “We are bullish on space, and we think that that’s a capability that can be achieved, actually, faster than the E-7 will deliver at this point.”

The proposal marks a major shift away from one of the Air Force’s top-priority acquisition programs and leaves the service’s battle management community in limbo as it retires decades-old workhorse jets without a concrete replacement.

Though Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth foreshadowed the move in budget hearings on Capitol Hill over the past few weeks, this is the first time Pentagon officials have directly acknowledged the E-7 program’s impending demise.

The Air Force declined to answer questions about the decision. A Boeing spokesperson declined to comment.

Last year, the service inked a $2.6 billion contract with Boeing to deliver two Wedgetail prototypes in fiscal 2028. It had wanted to buy 26 E-7s in total to replace the 1970s-era E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System jets, about half of which have already retired.

But the Government Accountability Office recently estimated the price of developing the two E-7s had grown to $3.6 billion—a 33 percent increase—and said the U.S. Wedgetail’s first flight had slipped by nine months to May 2027. The first set of combat-ready jets was slated to be in place by 2032.

The Air Force is requesting nearly $200 million for Wedgetail development next year, about one-third of the development money it received in fiscal 2025 and two-thirds of what the service had planned to ask for in 2026, according to official budget documents. It also wants another $200 million for Wedgetail-related procurement. It’s unclear what will happen to the funds already promised to Boeing if the program ends.

Congress has the final say over whether the cancellation can move forward. Lawmakers have pressed defense officials for more information on the new path ahead, airing concerns that ending the E-7 program in favor of yet-unproven tools in space could hurt military readiness and their local communities.

House appropriators included $500 million in development funds for the Wedgetail in their proposed 2026 defense budget bill, arguing that a “combination of air and space assets for mission sets such as early warning are necessary today and will be required well into the future.”

At a Senate defense appropriations subcommittee hearing on the Air Force budget earlier in the day, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) challenged Air Force leaders to justify the cancellation and questioned the about-face from their previous support for the E-7.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin characterized the move as a difficult decision made by the Department of Defense as it considered operations across air, land, sea, and space. The Air Force will consider how to stitch together the remaining air battle management assets to ensure potential threats don’t slip through, he said.

Murkowski wasn’t sold: “We don’t want to be operating off of a wing and a prayer here,” she said.

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s top officer, said potential vendors have already presented “promising” data on a space-based airborne target-tracking network. New equipment could start sharing data by the end of the decade, he said.

Space Force Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein’s previous estimate that satellites designed to track airborne targets should enter operations in the early 2030s is “not too far off,” Saltzman added.

Spokespeople for members of Oklahoma and Alaska’s congressional delegations, who represent the two domestic AWACS bases, did not immediately respond to questions about whether the lawmakers would seek to block the cancellation as part of the annual defense spending and policy bills.

But Doug Birkey, executive director of the Air and Space Forces Association’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, hopes lawmakers step in.

“Effective combat airpower requires air battle management,” he said. “It comes down to empowering fighters, bombers, refuelers, electronic attack aircraft, and more to better understand the battlespace so they can maximize opportunities, while seeking to minimize zones of undue vulnerability.”

It’s a “make-or-break moment” for the mission after decades of deferred modernization, he said. The AWACS fleet has struggled to remain viable as more are decommissioned; about half of the E-3s could execute at least one of their core missions in fiscal 2024.

“Space-based [airborne moving target indication] represents a terrific potential capability, but it’s not an operational capability today,” Birkey said.

He worries about the potential impacts on the pilots who would fly the E-7 and the air battle managers who work alongside them.

“We should not repeat mistakes made in the 1990s, when the Air Force divested too much electronic warfare capability,” he said. “That career field has yet to recover.”

Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with the Michigan-based consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory, said in an email that dropping the buy sends a message about the Trump administration’s skepticism of America’s foreign military alliances and interoperability with other nation. Part of the Wedgetail’s appeal was that Australia already flies the E-7, the United Kingdom has ordered its own fleet, and the NATO alliance plans to begin replacing its own AWACS jets with Wedgetails within the next decade.

‘15 Years of Incredible Work’: The Inside Story of the Mission to Bomb Iran’s Nuclear Sites

June 26, 2025 | By Chris Gordon

The 36-hour operation by the U.S. military to fly deep into Iranian airspace and drop massive bunker-buster bombs on a heavily fortified nuclear complex traces its roots to the work of intelligence analysts over 15 years ago, according to a new account from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. Dan Caine.

On June 22, seven U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bombers dropped 12 30,000-pound bombs on the Fordow enrichment complex, which is built inside of a mountain. But this was no hasty operation. Rather, the U.S. began grappling with the challenge of how to destroy Fordow soon after Iranians began building it.

Iran began working on Fordow in 2006, experts on the Iranian program say. In 2009, an analyst at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency was shown photographs of a major construction project in the mountains of Iran.

The DTRA is a little-known part of the Department of Defense that is charged with countering weapons of mass destruction and which is headquartered in Fort Belvoir, Va., a short distance from Washington, D.C.

Soon after the first analyst started, another intelligence official was brought in.

“For more than 15 years, this officer and his teammate lived and breathed this single target: Fordow, a critical element of Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” Caine said. “He watched the Iranians dig it out. He watched the construction, the weather, the discard material, the geology, the construction materials, where the materials came from. He looked at the vent shaft, the exhaust shaft, the electrical systems, the environmental control systems—every nook, every crater, every piece of equipment going in, and every piece of equipment going out.”

The Fordow site is believed to have begun enriching uranium in late 2011. While the Iranians say their program is entirely peaceful, Western officials say the enrichment was part of a complex set of steps that Iran was taking to position itself to make nuclear weapons. In March, the U.S. intelligence community told Congress that Iran’s Supreme Leader had not yet given the go-ahead to make a bomb.

“In the past year, there has been an erosion of a decadeslong taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public that has emboldened nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus,” U.S. intelligence officials warned in a report to Congress.

The U.S. analysts had already determined that Fordow was part of Iran’s option for becoming a nuclear weapons state.

“You do not build a multilayered underground bunker complex with centrifuges and other equipment in a mountain for any peaceful purpose,” Caine said.

The analysts faced a challenge: how would they approach blowing up a facility inside a mountain?

“They began a journey to work with industry and other tacticians to develop the GBU-57,” Caine said. The bomb has a warhead encased in steel and is fused to blow up an estimated 200 feet underground.

The weapon has been under development since 2004 by the Air Force and DTRA, but is known to have been refined since then. During Caine’s press conference, officials showed video of a December 2020 test of the weapon—the Massive Ordinance Penetrator, or MOP.

“In the beginning of its development, we had so many PhDs working on the MOP program doing modeling and simulation that we were quietly and in a secret way the biggest users of supercomputer hours within the United States of America,” Caine claimed.

“They tested it over and over again, tried different options, tried more after that. They accomplished hundreds of test shots and dropped many full-scale weapons against extremely realistic targets for a single purpose: kill this target at the time and place of our nation’s choosing,” the chairman continued.

Days into Israel’s air war on Iran launched on June 12, Iran began to cover the ventilation shafts—two of which would become the bombs’ entry points—with concrete, Caine said.

“The planners had to account for this. They accounted for everything,” he said.

On June 21, the seven B-2s piloted by 14 Airmen, from the Active-Duty Air Force and the Missouri Air National Guard, and ranging in rank from captain to colonel, took off from Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo. They headed east over the Atlantic and onward to the Middle East, where they met up with fighters. Caine said a crew member told him afterwards by video conference, that it “felt like the Super Bowl—the thousands of scientists, Airmen, and maintainers all coming together.”

A U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit takes off to support Operation Midnight Hammer at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., June 2025. Air Force photo.

“We think, we develop, we train, we rehearse, we test, we evaluate every single day—and when the call comes to deliver, we do so,” Caine said.

“There’s a lot of success to go around here,” added Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin during a Senate hearing June 26, referring to the Airmen involved in the operation. “They may not have fully understood the geostrategic impact it had, but they knew that was their job to do, and they knew that the mission depended on them. … The Air Force makes the ridiculously complex look routine, but that doesn’t come without effort.”

The fighters led the strike package, officials have said, and launched some 30 munitions at Iranian surface-to-air systems, though none engaged U.S. forces.

The B-2s attacked Fordow, where six bombs were dropped on each of the two main ventilation shafts, first to destroy the concrete covers and then the next four to penetrate the facility. The sixth was a “flex” weapon in case of a weapons failure. Two MOPs were also dropped on the Natanz complex.

The GBU-57s operate through an “overpressure” effect, a shockwave generated by the bomb’s explosion when it is deep underground. The bomb’s fuses are calibrated so that it does not explode until it has penetrated the rock and entered a subterranean facility.

Caine pointed to satellite imagery of the attack and the test video of the weapon’s previous performance as evidence of the strike’s success.

The families of the pilots were informed of their secret mission on the evening of June 21—around the same time the world found out the United States bombed the Fordow and Natanz sites, and launched 30 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Isfahan facility.

“The Joint Force does not do [battle damage assessment] by design,” Caine said. “We don’t grade our own homework. The intelligence community does.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the weapons had a “devastating effect,” as the Trump administration has tried to distance itself from a Defense Intelligence Agency report that indicated the attack may only have set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months.

Satellite imagery showed trucks outside the Fordow facility in the days before the attack. That has raised concerns among non-governmental experts that the Iranians might be trying to cart away some of the enriched uranium and perhaps nuclear-related equipment. Hegseth said he had no information that enriched uranium had been moved from Fordow and said he believed the U.S. hit “what we wanted to hit in those locations.”

Neither Hegesth nor Caine addressed whether uranium and equipment might have been diverted away from two other sites that the U.S. targeted at Isfahan and Natanz.

There is, however, little doubt that the B-2s executed one of the biggest, more important, and most grueling airstrike missions in history. All told, 125 aircraft were involved in the mission, including refueling tankers, fourth-generation fighters, F-35s, and, according to President Donald Trump, F-22s.

“Here’s what we know following the attacks and the strikes on Fordow,” Caine said. “First, that the weapons were built, tested, and loaded properly. Two, the weapons were released on speed and on parameters. Three, the weapons all guided to their intended targets and to their intended aim points. Four, the weapons, they functioned as designed—meaning they exploded.” The chairman quoted the pilot of a trailing jet as saying, “This was the brightest explosion that I’ve ever seen. It literally looks like daylight.”

Three U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirits return from supporting Operation Midnight Hammer at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., June 22, 2025.

Roughly 12 hours later, the B-2 entered the landing pattern at Whiteman—one four-ship, and one three-ship. Unnoticed on the way out of the base, just after midnight on June 21 local time, they returned with local news crews staged in Knob Noster, Mo. On June 25, Army Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command, went to congratulate the B-2 crews and maintainers at Whiteman.

“Operation Midnight Hammer was the culmination of those 15 years of incredible work—the aircrews, the tanker crews, the weapons crews that built the weapons, the load crews that loaded it,” Caine said. “Our adversaries around the world should know that there are other DTRA team members out there studying targets for the same amount of time, and will continue to do so.”

How the 2026 Budget Shapes the Future Air Force Fighter Fleet: What’s In, What’s Out

June 26, 2025 | By John A. Tirpak

The Air Force is planning on buying only 24 F-35s in fiscal 2026—half the previously planned amount—and instead acquire 21 more F-15EXs, Pentagon officials revealed in their June 26 budget proposal to Congress—major shifts for the service’s tactical fleet.

In the proposed budget, the Air Force plans to retire all of its A-10 close air support aircraft, two years ahead of schedule, while pouring $3.5 billion into the new F-47 fighter. In other aviation moves, the Air Force plans to increase production capacity for the B-21 bomber, while the Navy is putting their next-generation fighter, the F/A-XX, on hold.

The budgetary moves largely mirror the amounts in the reconciliation bill currently being debated in Congress. The fighter numbers, however, come well short of the Air Force’s longstanding goal of acquiring 72 fighters a year.

“F-35 procurement is reduced from 74 to 47 aircraft,” a senior Pentagon official said in a background briefing for the press. The move maintains “minimum production rates” of the multiservice fighter while adding funds for the Block 4 upgrade, while making a “significant investment in spares, of about $1 billion, to address sustainment and readiness challenges.”

A F-35A Lightning II assigned to the 95th Fighter Squadron soars through the skies during exercise Checkered Flag 25-2 at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., May 14, 2025. **U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Zeeshan Naeem**

Of those 47 fighters, the Air Force only plans to buy 24 of the F-35A variants; half of the 48 projected in previous years. The procurement total is set at $3.55 billion.

The F-35 cuts were not driven by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demand for an eight percent shift in DOD spending, the official said, but was “the fastest way to get our warfighters a jet that they could go flying in” and get it to “an up-and-ready status. So a lot of that money got shifted over into sustainment to make sure that we have a strong supply base and that we’re able to do the operations and maintenance that we need to do on those jets.” The official added that “we’re dedicated to Block 4” and want “to make sure that stays on time, and that we wanted to reinvest those resources to keep that effort going.”

The F-15EX program, which in the last budget request was reduced to 98 aircraft (100 with developmental jets), will get a boost of $3.1 billion to buy 21 additional fighters, the official said. This move will preserve “industrial base capabilities” while leveraging the F-15EX’s long range capabilities, large payload, and ability to complement stealth fighters.

Together, the F-35 and F-15EX buys total only 45 aircraft—just over half the Air Force’s longstanding goal of 72 new fighters per year to keep the fighter fleet age and availability steady.

Asked to comment, an Air Force spokesperson said the goal of 72 fighters a year “is not currently achievable. We make fighter production decisions based on the funding available and the ability of industry to deliver aircraft.”

If the Air Force’s previous plan to buy 48 F-35s had continued along with 21 F-15EXs, it could have bought 69 jets, still shy of the goal.

The newly-named F-47—previously the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter—“is moving forward with $3.5 billion in funding following President Trump’s March 2025 decision to proceed with Boeing’s development,” the official said, describing it as the “first manned sixth-generation fighter.” The Pentagon’s research, development, test, and evaluation budget document show the F-47 moving from advanced technology development to prototyping, with a bump of $1 billion from the 2025 funding level.

“We did make a strategic decision to go ‘all-in’ on F-47,” the official said.

The Navy’s F/A-XX counterpart to the F-47—a contract for which was considered imminent last month—will only receive “minimal development funding,” and be put on hold, the official said. The $74 million going to that program will finish the design and “preserve the ability to leverage F-47 work,” but the Pentagon is worried that there aren’t enough “qualified industrial base engineers” available to conduct both programs simultaneously.

Defense leaders worry that “the industrial base can only handle going fast on one program at this time,” and the F-47 is a “presidential priority.” The idea is to “go all-in on F-47 and get that program right, while maintaining the option for F/A-XX in the future.”

There’s “an active conversation” among President Trump, Defense Secretary Hegseth, and Navy Secretary John Phelan whether to continue with the program, the official added.

Another key future element of the Air Force fighter fleet are the Collaborative Combat Aircraft drones being built and tested by Anduril Industries and General Atomic Aeronautical Systems. The CCA budget for fiscal ’26 is $807 million, the official said, “and that is really to fund accelerated platform development efforts [and] to sustain autonomy development.” That’s a significant bump from the $494 million the Pentagon had previously projected.

The B-21 development program, meanwhile, is slated for $4.74 billion—$2.3 billion in the base budget and $2.4 billion from the reconciliation bill—which the official said would “speed up production.” The total amount requested for the B-21 was $10.3 billion, the official said; which includes production.

The official said that the Air Force “will divest the remaining 162 A-10 aircraft” two years early, in fiscal 2026 instead of fiscal 2028, as previously planned. Those retirements will produce savings down the road but will actually cost $57 million in fiscal 2026.

The Air Force is also requesting $1.08 billion for F-22 modification procurement, which includes an infrared search and track system and stealthy, long-range fuel tanks and pylons, among other modifications. The Air Force seems to have dropped its yearslong effort to get Congress to allow the retirement of 32 of the oldest F-22s.

Pentagon Editor Chris Gordon contributed reporting.

Space Force Spending Could Hit $40B in 2026

June 26, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

Extra funds for the Golden Dome missile defense shield could push Space Force spending to $40 billion in 2026, a 30 percent leap from this year, if the reconciliation bill being now before Congress and the President’s new budget proposal both pass.

But with $13.8 billion in one-time reconciliation funds, the outlook for future years remains unclear.

The White House said last month that the Pentagon’s “base” budget earmarked just $26.4 billion for the five-year-old Space Force, a decrease versus prior years. But in more detailed plans unveiled June 26, the total picture came into focus.

If combined, reconciliation and the budget measure would make 2026 the first year ever that defense spending reached $1 trillion. But lawmakers, industry executives, and experts worry that piling extra funds into a one-time supplemental bill, rather than the base budget, will not yield the kind of sustained growth in defense spending necessary to improve readiness and modernize for continuing and emerging threats.

“I have said for months that reconciliation defense spending does not replace the need for real growth in the military’s base budget,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in May.

Reconciliation, the critics say, only provides a temporary increase, and since budget planners base future spending on the prior year’s base budget, relying on supplemental spending adds risk to major programs.

Eric Fanning, CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, called the reconciliation bill “a sugar high” at a conference last month, warning industry would see it as an inconsistent demand signal. Getting the bill through Congress, meanwhile, has proven more challenging than the White House had hoped. As Anthony “Lazer” Lazarski, of Cornerstone Government Affairs, said on a recent Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies’ podcast, passage has proven to resemble “a very large pig going through the python.”

For the Space Force and Golden Dome, it’s unclear how much can be accomplished with a $13.8 billion down payment on space-based missile interceptors and new tracking and targeting satellites. Some estimates for the total cost of such a system have ranged from about $175 billion to more than $540 billion.

For now, most of that of the reconciliation money earmarked for the Space Force is for Golden Dome-related research, development, test, and evaluation, according to senior officials and budget documents.

Most details related to Golden Dome are classified. Until Space Force Gen. Michael A. Guetlein is confirmed as its program manager, a defense official said, “the breakout and funding for those efforts” won’t be released. The military services have yet to release its “justification books” detailing all its spending plans for fiscal 2026.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, is taking a “‘one budget, two bills’ approach for the FY ’26 budget,” according to a senior budget official speaking on background. Documents released by the Defense Department and the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 25 and 26 layout how USSF would spend its money:

Space Force 2026 Budget

Category	Combined	Base Budget	Reconciliation
Military Personnel	$1,505,137,000	$1,496,908,000	$8,229,000
O&M	$5,910,348,000	$5,888,163,000	$22,185,000
RDT&E	$29,034,380,000	$15,486,466,000	$13,547,914,000
Procurement	$3,657,987,000	$3,393,637,000	$264,350,000
Totals	$40,107,852,000	$26,265,174,000	$13,842,678,000

Long Range Kill Chains

According to a DOD budget document, about $7.7 billion in reconciliation spending will fund “Long Range Kill Chains” for the Space Force. In 2025, when the Space Force earmarked just $244 million for the program, it noted a focus on ground moving target indications from space. For 2026, the billions under that category appear to be for other space-related work; ground moving target indication is now in a new account, funded with a little more than $1 billion.

The reconciliation bill is still a moving target itself. The latest reconciliation bill language released by the Senate Armed Services Committee included $150 million for ground targeting satellites, $125 million for military space communications, and $350 million for space command and control. It also includes $2 billion for airborne targeting satellites, $5.6 billion for space-based interceptors, and $7.2 billion for space-based sensors. It is unclear if these together fund “Long Range Kill Chains.”

Missile Warning

In addition to the Long Range Kill Chains program, the DOD budget document details major funds going to missile warning programs that could be part of Golden Dome. The Space Development Agency’s “Tracking Layer,” which will include numerous small satellites in low-Earth orbit, would get $2.58 billion total if both measured passed, including more than $800 million from reconciliation.

The Next-Gen Overhead Persistent Infrared program, which includes elements on the ground and in geosynchronous and polar orbits, would receive nearly $1.9 billion, including more than $900 million from reconciliation.

Both would receive hundreds of millions of dollars more than was projected in the last future years defense plan issued a year ago. Among missile warning program, the one program that would appear to face a cut is the planned Resilient MW/MT medium-Earth-orbit constellation, which appears to face a modest $28 million haircut, from $714 million to $686 million.

All told, missile warning programs account for more than 12 percent of the entire Space Force budget.

SATCOM

Satellite communications continues to be another area of major investment. The DOD budget document details $1.23 billion in research and development for Evolved Strategic SATCOM, which are for communicating with nuclear forces, and $571 million for jam-resistant tactical SATCOM technology.

Pentagon Editor Chris Gordon contributed to this report.

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.