Douglas A. Macgregor's Blog, page 10

Hanwha open to acquiring other US shipyards, expanding Philly

AUSA 2025 — The head of Hanwha Global Defense said “everything is on the table” moving forward as the company aims to increase ship production capacity inside the United States, including both expansion at its new Philadelphia shipyard and acquisitions of other existing yards.

“We would like to recreate the capacity we have at our shipyard in Korea, in the United States,” Michael Coulter, the company’s CEO and president, told Breaking Defense in an interview Monday. “We are all-in on Philly, and we’re looking at expanding even in and around Philly Shipyard, but ultimately, it’s a geographically isolated island where there’s not enough space to do everything that we’d like to do. So, we are looking at other opportunities.”

Asked specifically if that includes further acquisitions, Coulter said “We’re looking at everything. Everything’s on the table.”

Since closing its $100 million acquisition of Philly Shipyard last December, the South Korean conglomerate has aggressively expanded its presence in the United States to include recruiting Coulter, a former Leonardo DRS executive, in his current role as the head of global defense.

RELATED: Hanwha’s new global defense chief eyes aggressive expansion in every direction

The shipyard is currently building National Security Multi-Mission Vessels (NSMV) — platforms being purchased by the Transportation Department for mariner training — and commercial tankers ordered by Hanwha Shipping.

While the contracts to build NSMVs pre-date Hanwha’s acquisition of the shipyard, Coulter said the theory behind the company ordering ships from its own shipyards revolves around training the workforce.

“We are in the process already of hiring the right workforce [and] transferring the technology, but it’s going to take a little bit of time to get there,” he said. “The idea is a lot of that work is going to end up happening for the first ship or two in Korea. But we’re bringing workforce from the United States to Korea to understand how it’s done. … As we proceed through the ship class, we’ll do more and more work to ultimately build them here in Philly.”

Separately, Coulter said that Hanwha is actively approaching other American shipbuilders to become an outsourcing partner for larger programs, a concept that major primes and the Pentagon have described as “distributed shipbuilding.”

“I wouldn’t say they’ve [talks] progressed very far, but I would say we have put the offer on the table, both with the US government, US Navy, and all of the major shipbuilders in the United States that we’re interested in being a partner,” he said. “We believe we have technology that can help the United States solve its shipbuilding problem, and we’re interested in having those conversations.”

Since Hanwha acquired Philly Shipyard, several other international companies have moved or shown interest in making similar purchases inside the United States. Reuters reported in September that South Korea’s HD Hyundai Heavy was considering such an acquisition, and Canada’s Davie is working through the process of purchasing facilities in Texas where it plans to build icebreakers.

Big news in microreactors and counter-drone systems for days at AUSA Day 2 [Video]

As the crowd at AUSA 2025 was powering up with coffee this morning, Army officials were talking about powering military bases with nuclear microreactors, a favorite subject for Breaking Defense Editor-in-Chief Aaron Mehta.

So that was an obvious topic of conversation for Aaron and Deputy Editor Lee Ferran to get into for the Day 2 wrap up video, which also dove into the ubiquity of counter-drone systems at the show and how the Army plans to take advantage of the myriad of options.

Make sure to check out our AUSA landing page for all our stories, and our multimedia page for daily video roundups and photos from the conference.

Army Secretary teases significant shakeup, ‘streamlining’ of Army acquisition offices

AUSA 2025 — Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll today teased a in the way the service buys its weapons and platforms, saying that he wants to adopt more of a private sector-like model that “speeds up the cycle of innovation for us.”

Speaking with reporters at the AUSA conference here in Washington, DC, Driscoll said he wouldn’t get ahead of what he called a “big announcement” expected out of the Pentagon on acquisition reform in coming weeks, but he did signal the Army’s acquisition structure is about to change significantly.

Driscoll said that there will be a “consolidation and streamlining of how we buy things in the Army,” criticizing the current 12 PEOs as being too “siloed.”

“Those groups have been and that leadership has been so poor for so long that we are going to try to mimic what works really well in the private sector,” he said. “So if you were looking at what made SpaceX or Tesla work really well, my impression is that it was combining manufacturers and engineers, putting them all on the floor together. Forcing them to work together, and that speeds up the cycle of innovation for us.”

For the Army, what this looks like is “putting people who create our requirements in with our soldiers, in with our lawyers, in with our training, T2COM [Transformation and Training Command], and having all of them work together,” Driscoll said. The groups will “probably” report directly to the Chief of Staff and Driscoll himself, he explained, adding that they will be “held accountable to very tight deadlines” through a model that puts getting out a minimum viable product quickly at the top of their priorities. 

The plan will also see a tactical shift that “basically means: buy small numbers of things, get it in the hands of soldiers, iterate with the company when we think it works pretty well, field it in a division or two, and then when we think it is ready, scale it across the entire Army,” Driscoll said. 

The upcoming acquisition shakeup is just one flash in the pan of the larger continuous transformation the Army is facilitating, including through the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI). That initiative has involved a rethinking of major programs, appearing to paint a dim future for vehicles like Humvees and Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, Breaking Defense previously reported. In terms of aviation, Army has halted buys of General Atomics’ Gray Eagle drone, is shelving AH-64D Apaches, stopping a Future Tactical Uncrewed Aircraft System competition, possibly ending General Electric’s development of the Improved Turbine Engine Program and potentially reducing the quantity of High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation Systems.

Driscoll, however, said only one program had been out-and-out canceled under ATI: the M10 Booker. For some other programs, Driscoll said, the service just decided to “not buy more.”

“We were changing our demand signal,” he said. “And so what we’ve tried to do in nearly every instance, when we tell a company, ‘Hey, we’re changing our demand signal on you,’ is then meet with them to try to clearly tell them what we think we need in the future, because we want them to be successful. We want them to build the things that we need, and we need that expertise.” 

“Our defense industrial base has been gutted for so long that what we’re trying to do is be very thoughtful partners on a go-forward basis to help empower them to be succeed and continue to grow and hire and do all of the things that we need our organic industrial base to do,” he added.

Howitzers, helos and drones: Day 2 of AUSA [PHOTOS]

AUSA 2025 — The country’s biggest defense trade show is now in full swing. From howitzers to handguns, companies are vying for a piece of the US Army’s acquisition budget while mulling what Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s vision of emulating Silicon Valley’s innovation could mean for industry.

While longtime American prime contractors are revamping old designs for new needs, foreign companies are also betting their own proposals could help shape the Army’s priorities. And the service is actively listening to industry’s pitches — including live demonstrations — on electronic warfare, power generation, drones and counter-drone technology through its new FUZE program to get weapons and software into troops’ hands faster.

Check out more scenes from the first two days at AUSA 2025, and find our full coverage of the show here.

Hanwha Defense USA pitches its 155 mm, 52-caliber K9 Thunder self-propelled howitzer at the Association of the US Army’s Annual Meeting & Exposition in Washington, DC, Oct. 13, 2025. (Rachel Cohen/Breaking Defense)Honeywell’s Samurai anti-drone system is one of myriad counter-drone technologies on display at AUSA 2025, Oct. 13, 2025. (Daniel Woolfolk/Breaking Defense)The Bell 505 Jet Ranger X is a contender for the Army’s Flight School Next program. (Daniel Woolfolk/Breaking Defense)Conference attendees try out Trijicon’s firearm sights and scopes, Oct. 13, 2025. (Aaron Mehta/Breaking Defense)GM Defense’s Infantry Squad Vehicle-Utility is based on the Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 and can be adapted to carry mortars, counter-drone equipment and more. (Aaron Mehta/Breaking Defense)Attendees roam the halls of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in downtown Washington, DC, Oct. 13, 2025. (Daniel Woolfolk/Breaking Defense)Name a more iconic duo. We’ll wait. (Aaron Mehta/Breaking Defense)

Lockheed, Germany’s Diehl sign PAC-3 MSE pact to boost supply chain resilience

AUSA 2025 — Lockheed Martin and German manufacturer Diehl Defense signed a pact today for “collaboration opportunities” to expand the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) interceptor global supply chain.

The Memorandum of Understanding, inked here on the floor of the annual AUSA exposition, puts in motion a push to build out greater supply chain resilience for the in-demand weapon system, which is used for taking out ballistic and cruise missiles as well as neutralizing hypersonic threats.

It is “essential” to have a “dual source, maybe a third source … supply chain management capability in order to ramp up quickly … to bring more material in the market or in Europe supporting Ukrainian civilians for the fight against the Russians,” Torsten Cook, senior vice president for ground-based air defense at Diehl, told Breaking Defense. 

The MoU with Lockheed Martin is a “first step” to delivering on such an ambition, he shared, stressing that sourcing “European components” for PAC-3 MSE will be prioritized.

Cook also shared that Lockheed could “participate” on a “local footprint in Germany” by investing in the supply of thermal batteries. Diehl subsidiary Eagle Pitcher supplies the equipment on PAC-3 and a host of weapon systems including Stinger, IRIS-T and the Evolved SeaSparrow Missile (ESSM), according to company literature [PDF]. 

The US and Germany belong to a group of 17 partner nations that have selected the advanced Patriot interceptor, according to a Lockheed Martin statement.

As Breaking Defense previously reported, the US giant secured a $9.8 billion award for the production of nearly 2,000 PAC-3 MSE interceptors and supporting hardware in September.

In a related development, Boeing announced today that it has been awarded multiyear contracts, valued at an estimated $2.7 billion for additional PAC-3 seekers. More than 3,000 seekers, based on a production rate of 750 units annually through 2030, will be manufactured as a result, the company shared in a statement.

“Boeing is working closely with prime contractor Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Army to further increase production rates and meet new targets for the PAC‑3 interceptor,” added Boeing. “Scaling seeker output is critical to ensuring the Patriot system can continue to defend service members, civilians and critical infrastructure worldwide as threats proliferate.”

Israel’s Uvision looks to cement US Army ties after nearly $1B loitering munition win

JERUSALEM — A recent, nearly $1 billion contract between the Army and a team-up of Israeli firm Uvision and US-based Mistral Inc. for loitering munitions is, Uvision hopes, the beginning of a longer-term relationship under the service’s Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance (LASSO) program.

The Uvision-made Hero 120 loitering munition “is combat-proven and fielded, and we take those lessons learned around the world and they get fed back into the system and we continuously to improve the capabilities, and we are uniquely positioned as Army moves forward to meet them,” Jarmin Blanton, vice president of Business Development, Sales and Marketing at Uvision, said in an interview.

The company announced on Oct. 3 it and Mistral had won a multi-year $982 million Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity contract “to procure, field, train and sustain” the HERO 120 under the Army’s Lethal Unmanned System program. But Blanton said the company thinks the drone would be a good fit for the LASSO program, which he said would make it a more permanent feature of US Army operations in the future.

LASSO is run out of Program Executive Office — Soldier, which in 2023 described it as a “man-portable, tube launched, lethal payload munition, unmanned aerial system.”

The Hero-120 was previously acquired by US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in a $73 million deal with Mistral and Uvision in 2024. The company says the munition, which is shaped like a missile with a cruciform wing that deploys after it is launched, uses a 4.5 kg (nearly 10 pound) warhead and has a range of around 40 to 60 km (25 to 37 miles) and 60 minutes of loitering time. The company describes Hero 120 in a statement as a “mid-range loitering munition optimized for precision engagement of armored and high-value targets.” 

Blanton described the munition as “a soldier-portable munition to defeat tanks, and other targets; for the infantry battalion and brigade level for Infantry Brigade Combat Teams (IBCT).”

Ran Gozali, CEO of Uvision Group, noted in the company’s Oct. 3 announcement that “this award reflects the growing demand for loitering munitions and validates the operational value of the HERO 120 and the HERO family of systems.” 

The award to Mistral and Uvision follows a prior, also nearly $1 billion award for loitering munitions from AeroVironment for its Switchblade platform — an award Mistral had protested.

The Army is in the midst of an aggressive push for unmanned systems, including loitering munitions, after seeing the tactics’ lethality on the battlefields of Ukraine.

As such, Blanton said Uvision expects to start delivering the platform to the Army at the “beginning” of 2026, “and the systems will then go out to infantry brigade combat teams and deliver hardware and training and logistics and support.”

But the platform is not a static one. Blanton said Hero 120 is “combat proven and fielded, and we take those lessons learned around the world and they get fed back into the system and we continuously to improve the capabilities and we are uniquely positioned as army moves forward to meet them,” Blanton said. 

Like other Israeli systems, the Uvision family of systems seeks to be modular and plug-and-play. Blanton says the system is “agnostic to radio, warhead and launcher. We listen to where the customer wants us to go and partner to make our supply chain more robust … our system is composed of American technology and an American supply chain.”

Changes are also dictated by the modern battlefield. Blanton said that one issue is working in GPS-denied environments or contested environments, meaning places where adversaries might have air defenses or ways to stop modern munitions. Another issue for these types of weapons is swarming technology. 

“We are working on collaborative behaviors and more robust [systems] less susceptible to jamming and interference and making systems modular and plug-and-play so you can adapt when the adversary changes,” he said.

Army to host ‘recurring’ competitions for counter-drone tech

AUSA 2025 — Rapid changes in drone warfare require defenses that can evolve just as quickly, according to US Army officials who said the service plans to run competitions “at least” every two years to help field cutting-edge defenses against smaller drones for Army units. 

“We need to ensure that we continuously outpace the threat,” Col. Guy Yelverton, the project lead for the Army’s counter-drone product office, said during a panel discussion here at the annual AUSA conference Monday. “So we will have these competitions at least at an every two-year cycle, to make sure that we know and understand the capabilities out there from our industry partners, and that we continue to provide our warfighters the best capability so that we outpace that threat that’s evolving.” 

Yelverton said the Army has five different lines of effort to field defenses against drones, and that competitions are aimed at furthering two key ones: ensuring every soldier has kit they could carry on them, and unit common equipment like a sensing array that could be mounted on a Humvee.

The contests would further hone skills for two other lines of effort, which are focused on protection for fixed sites and counter-drone air defense batteries, according to a slideshow accompanying the panel. (The efforts by Yelverton and his colleagues focus on the threat of smaller drones, since officials say larger Group 4 and 5 unmanned systems typically require traditional air defense systems like Patriot batteries or fighter jets.)

The Army is currently wrapping up competitions focused on a new fire control system and is evaluating counter-drone equipment that could be commonly carried by soldiers, Yelverton said, which follow an award last year to AV subsidiary BlueHalo for a next-generation drone-killing missile. The colonel then previewed a number of competitions coming up for fiscal 2026, which will solicit industry for unit common equipment, sensors and electronic warfare.

“We have about 12 vendors out there showing us their kit,” Yelverton said of the ongoing competition for soldier common equipment. “And if they’re all good, we’ll select all 12, because we need a lot of capability in the counter UAS [unmanned aerial systems] environment.”

Maj. Gen. David Stewart, the Army’s director of long-range fires and integrated air and missile defense, said that Group 3 drones occupy a vexing middle ground for soldiers due to their speed, maneuverability and size. Stewart said Monday that swarms consisting of Groups 1 and 2 drones “almost equal to that” of a Group 3 attack. According to Col. Marc Pelini, high-power microwave weapons are likely the best tool to address the swarm problem.

“I think that that’s probably the most economical and combat-effective approach,” said Pelini, the military deputy for the Army’s fires future capability directorate. Pelini emphasized that any microwave systems will need to be capable of hitting targets “at least a kilometer or two” away. (The Army is also testing platforms like a Coyote interceptor that could fly to drone swarms and fry their electronics.)

Still, officials stressed that layers of defenses are required to defeat modern drone threats. 

“I don’t think there’s a silver bullet that can address the full range of the threats,” Pelini said. “So you need kind of a Swiss Army Knife of effectors to completely protect yourself from an engagement perspective.”

Leonardo DRS, KNDS team up for US Army howitzer offering

AUSA 2025 — Leonardo DRS is partnering with European land defense specialist KNDS to throw their hat in the ring for the US Army’s forthcoming howitzer competition, the company announced.

The two signed a “strategic teaming agreement” to offer the Army the CAESAR self-propelled howitzer, a “combat-proven” system that Leonardo DRS said “addresses the U.S. Army’s need for greater range and improved mobility.” Though KNDS makes the CAESAR, Leonardo DRS, the US arm of Italian parent Leonardo, will be the integrator and prime for the project.

“The ability for soldiers to rapidly and reliably put artillery on target is a crucial mission the U.S. Army is addressing, and we are proud to use our deep experience in integrating best-of-breed capabilities to support this future mission,” Aaron Hankins, senior vice president and general manager of the Leonardo DRS Land Systems business unit, said in the company announcement on Monday.

The US Army’s quest for a new long-range artillery has progressed in fits and starts in recent years, most recently waiting through a months-long pause as the Army was “re-evaluating” its needs under the wide-ranging Army Transformation Initiative. Before the pause, Army officials had embarked on a globe-trotting tour to examine existing self-propelled howitzers, seeing at least five companies’ wares, though KNDS was not listed among them at the time.

But late last month the Army posted a fresh request for information, stating, “Comprehensive analysis has confirmed the importance of 155mm self-propelled artillery system-of-systems to the Army.”

The Leonardo DRS-KNDS team-up will likely face stiff competition from other artillery makers, including the five firms the Army singled out last year for demonstrations: Germany’s Rheinmetall, Israel’s Elbit, Britain’s BAE, South Korea’s Hanwha and America’s General Dynamics. For the foreign companies, however, it appears the Army could require a local partner or facilities.

Though the Army said “the scope and organization of a soldier experiment for self-propelled artillery is still being defined,” the September RFP suggested that the service is primarily looking for US-made and -manufactured solutions.

For example, the RFI directs respondents to “provide a summary of your current supply chain and current suppliers used in the USA, including a map of major supplier locations. Highlight major supplier locations outside of the USA.”

Lockheed and Army’s 25th ID to kick off Lightning Strike to prototype NGC2

AUSA 2025 — Lockheed Martin and 25th Infantry Division will incrementally test a prototype for the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control through a series of events dubbed Lightning Strike.

The Army awarded Lockheed a $26 million Other Transaction Authority in September to provide an integrated data layer for 25th ID as part of the service’s NGC2 effort, which aims to provide commanders and units a new approach to manage information, data, and command and control with agile and software-based architectures.

Lightning Strike, which will kick off around February, is a similar concept to what 4th Infantry Division and its industry partner, Anduril and its team of vendors, are executing through the 4th ID’s Ivy Sting series.

“We’ll do a series of Lightning Strike demonstrations which ultimately lead to participation in Project Convergence [Capstone 6] next year,” Chandra Marshall, vice president and general manager of multi-domain combat solutions at Lockheed, said in an interview at the annual AUSA conference. “We’re working through with the 25th ID right now on exactly what we’re going to demonstrate at each of those Lightning Strikes. Not completely defined yet, but we’re framing it out right now with them.”

Though both Lockheed and Anduril are building NGC2 prototypes, Army officials have previously said they view the two not as competing but complementary efforts. Lockheed is building a different capability than the Anduril team at 4th ID, and the Army has maintained it wants to inject a diverse set of capabilities and vendors to prototype and inform what the eventual NGC2 ecosystem will look like.

The Army awarded Lockheed and its team through an ongoing commercial solutions offering, in which companies can continue to submit white papers based on capabilities that could be just for small slices of NGC2, such as transport, or it could be the entire stack. The intent is to be able to onboard new capabilities and vendors if they have a viable solution that works better than what currently exists.  

Marshall explained Lockheed is developing what equates to a software architecture stack, equating it somewhat to the operating system that would run an ecosystem of other, even third-party applications. The goal of NGC2 is to eventually consolidate the tools’ disparate staff and warfighting functions used into applications on a single architecture to provide greater situational awareness on the battlefield.

“Ultimately, I think where the Army is going is they want to own the data. Our job is to help them facilitate an architecture that allows them to do that and allows us to look across different applications and figure out what makes the most sense from incorporation in the future,” Marshall said.

Likewise Richard Calabrese, director of strategic growth at Lockheed, said the Army wants the tech to be “open and scalable, to bring in new applications.”

“One of the strengths of Lockheed Martin is to be able to facilitate, helping to bring disparate sources from small businesses, non-traditionals or other large primes into this architecture. That’s what we bring to bear. Is that pipeline, the DevSecOps pipeline and the ability to bring together and integrate,” Calabrese said during the same interview. “If you look at our architecture, it really is comprised of a whole host of commercial products being brought together to create the various levels of the stack.”

Part of the work is to make sure that the current architecture at 25th ID works and if not, figure out how. The Army division has already received a bevy of modernized network equipment under what the Army calls C2 Fix. As the Army was developing the NGC2 concept, certain priority units required modernized kits to fulfill the “fight tonight” mission, which primarily involved existing capabilities but architected in a different manner.

“Our job is to then verify, does the full stack architecture run on the C2 Fix hardware and we’re trying to demonstrate as many vertical slices through the stack as we can. … We’re not locked into specific hardware. It’s not like this is the hardware you have to make it work. They’re looking for us to help inform them of what the architecture needs to be. I think they would say we’d love for that C2 Fix hardware to be the final solution, but if you’re exercising it and it requires more bandwidth or CPU or whatever, then tell us that so that we can scale the hardware appropriately,” Calabrese said.

The first iteration of Ivy Sting that tested the parallel NGC2 prototype at the 4th ID focused on a narrow use case of new artillery fire command and control software. Calabrese said a “fires app” might be the first thing Lockheed toys with as well, before perhaps a logistics capability, then “we’ll just keep adding.”

“The objective here is, through these Lightning Strike events, is to make incremental progress towards broadening and proving out that the full stack architecture works, including things like [denied, degraded, intermittent, and limited] environments and stuff computing at the edge,” he added.

General Atomics, Hanwha to produce Gray Eagle drone in South Korea

AUSA 2025 — General Atomics and South Korea’s Hanwha Aerospace have signed a deal to jointly develop and produce a short takeoff and landing (STOL) version of the US company’s Gray Eagle drone with the ultimate goal of establishing a production facility for the aircraft in South Korea.

Under the agreement, signed today on the show floor of the Association of the US Army conference, the companies will build a production-representative drone with first flight set for 2027 and delivery scheduled for 2028. Work is set to begin immediately, and although no customers were announced as part of the agreement, the companies intend to market the Gray Eagle STOL variant to the Pentagon and South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense, they stated in a news release.

General Atomics and Hanwha intend to stand up a production facility in South Korea for the manufacture and final assembly of the Gray Eagle, with General Atomics remaining responsible for final integration of mission systems. For the first aircraft, both companies would handle elements of production, with General Atomics carrying out work in California and Hanwha doing its work at its facilities in Korea, General Atomics spokesman C. Mark Brinkley told Breaking Defense.

“We are talking to a number of potential customers and anticipate new orders to arrive in parallel to standing up the production lines and building the first production representative aircraft,” he said.

General Atomics first introduced its STOL variant of the Gray Eagle in 2021, and since then has flown its test aircraft — known as Mojave — in a number of demonstrations.  In one such flight, General Atomics and Hanwha operated Mojave from the South Korean Navy’s amphibious landing ship ROKS Dokdo while the ship was underway off the coast of South Korea.

“Co-producing GE [Gray Eagle] STOL in South Korea and the U.S. will create jobs and help Hanwha secure talent in related fields as well as foster our domestic (Korean) UAS industry ecosystem,” Jae-il Son, president and CEO of Hanwha Aerospace, stated in a news release. “Hanwha is poised to become a comprehensive UAS company capable of executing everything from design to production and maintenance based on our capabilities, which span from fighter jet engines to radar and avionics equipment.”

Both companies “are committed to investing in this project and building development and production capabilities in South Korea,” GA-ASI President Dave Alexander stated.