Defense in the Local Economy

Anduril and General Atomics will develop their Collaborative Combat Aircraft for the Air Force, beating out Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, the service announced on April 24. But any of the non-selected companies can compete to actually manufacture the eventual design, the Air Force said.

Small one-way attack drones widely used on the frontlines of Ukraine and against U.S. outposts in the Middle East have fundamentally altered the definition of air superiority, Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. James C. “Jim” Slife said April 24. "Our traditional conception of what things like…

Boeing lost $222 million on two key Air Force programs in the first quarter of fiscal year 2024: $128 million on the KC-46 aerial refueling tanker and $94 million on the T-7 trainer, where the total losses already exceed more than $7 billion and $1 billion, respectively.

The Space Force must invest in high-level training based on the lessons learned from an unprecedented level of electronic warfare (EW) used by both Russia and Ukraine in the conflict there, one of the service’s top EW leaders said on April 24. “What we have seen in the Ukraine-Russia conflict…

Lockheed Martin projects more than a billion dollars of losses on a classified program, but company officials said April 23 they are confident it will turn profitable by 2028 and become a "franchise" system in the U.S. military.

South Korea conducted the final live-fire drills with its F-4 Phantoms and AGM-142 Popeye missiles amid the largest U.S.-South Korea air exercise of the year.

The full-up Tech Refresh 3 for the F-35 won't be delivered until 2025, Lockheed Martin officials said April 23. A "truncated" version will be delivered this fall so users can start taking delivery of their jets, and then be able to exploit the full capabilities once the complete upgrade is…

Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said reforms underway to the Space Force’s deployment and training model are the “most drastic change accompanying the establishment of the Space Force” in a note distributed to Guardians on April 19. “It fundamentally alters how we prepare for operations,” Saltzman wrote…

An Air Force C-130J crew braved a long flight around half the planet last week as part of an experiment testing how quickly they could respond to a crisis in the Indo-Pacific. Dubbed Hazard Leap, the test kicked off on April 20 when two full crews in a C-130J assigned…