Douglas A. Macgregor's Blog, page 23

Modernizing the nuclear triad with a new cornerstone ICBM

As the US modernizes its nuclear triad, the Sentinel program is key to providing a land-based deterrent that outperforms existing missiles and defensive systems. Breaking Defense discussed the Sentinel program with Ben Davies, corporate vice president, and president, Northrop Grumman Defense Systems, who shared updates on the program’s design and testing progress.

An ICBM update and Space Force in focus: AFA day 2 [Video]

Day two of the Air and Space Forces Association conference is a wrap, and Breaking Defense’s Aaron Mehta and Michael Marrow are here to talk about the biggest news from the show — including news about Sentinel and comments from Space Force boss Gen. Chance Saltzman.

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

RTX, Shield AI picked to give Collaborative Combat Aircraft autonomous capabilities

AFA 2025 — The Air Force has selected defense giant RTX and startup Shield AI to supply the autonomy capabilities for the service’s first round of drone wingmen, two sources with knowledge of the process confirmed to Breaking Defense.

RTX will supply the autonomy software, essentially the computer pilot for the drones known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft, to General Atomics’s YFQ-42A. Shield AI will similarly provide autonomy for Anduril’s YFQ-44A, the source said. Aviation Week first reported the wins by RTX and Shield AI.

The Air Force previously disclosed that the service had winnowed the pool of autonomy vendors to five unnamed companies, though officials have since declined to disclose specifics. One source said that ensuing competition knocked out Anduril, which was competing for the autonomy deal separate from its aircraft offering.

An Air Force spokesperson declined to comment, saying only that “all subcontractors are protected by enhanced security measures.”

Anduril, General Atomics, RTX and Shield AI all referred queries to the Air Force.

The Air Force previously awarded contracts for the drone wingmen airframes to General Atomics and Anduril last year, marking the first “increment” of the CCA program. General Atomics’s YFQ-42A more recently took to the skies for its first flight. Anduril’s YFQ-44A is expected to follow in October, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told reporters in a roundtable on Monday.

Although Anduril missed a target to fly the drone by the summer, Diem Salmon, the company’s vice president for Air Dominance and Strike, said the firm is still “well ahead of the program schedule” to achieve its maiden flight. 

“There’s just a little bit more on the software development side that needs to get wrung out. So that’s what’s currently driving our schedule right now,” Salmon said during a briefing with reporters on Monday. “But again, I think that’s going to allow us to kind of leapfrog the overall test plan, because we are kind of tackling that hard part first.”

Details about the second CCA increment are still not known. Meink said Monday the Air Force is still in the “learning phase” for the CCA program, where efforts under the first increment will inform its subsequent iteration.

Day 2 of AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference [Photos]

AFA 2025 — It’s space day at AFA!

Space Force leaders past and present offered a look at where America’s newest military service is headed as competition in the cosmos heats up. “Delivering today’s systems is critical, but we’re also building the architecture of the future and making sure we’re prepared for what our adversaries might do next,” said Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s top officer.

Take a look at some of the main stage speakers from day two, plus more aircraft on display downstairs.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman gives his keynote address at the Air and Space Forces Association’s 2025 Air, Space & Cyber Conference at National Harbor, Md., Sept. 23, 2025. (Jud McCrehin/AFA)Jay Raymond (left), former Space Force chief of space operations, and David Thompson, former vice chief of space operations, speak on a panel moderated by Nina Armagno, former Space Force staff director, Sept. 23, 2025. (Jud McCrehin/Air & Space Forces Association)A model of Saab-Boeing’s T-7 Red Hawk jet trainer, Sept. 23, 2025. (Daniel Woolfolk/Breaking Defense)A 1/6th-size model of the Hermeus supersonic jet sits below a live feed of the company’s production line in Atlanta, Ga., Sept. 23, 2025. (Aaron Mehta/Breaking Defense)Shield AI’s V-BAT vertical takeoff-and-landing drone, sits on display, Sept. 23, 2025. (Daniel Woolfolk/Breaking Defense)Griffon Aerospace displays its Valiant vertical takeoff-and-landing drone, designed for field reconnaissance on the go, Sept. 23, 2025. (Aaron Mehta/Breaking Defense)Trac9 shows its Advanced Deployable Aircraft Mobile System, a portable hangar, Sept. 23, 2025. (Aaron Mehta/Breaking Defense)

Navy preparing for future X-Band Radar competition

WASHINGTON — The Navy today announced it plans to issue a competitive solicitation to design, build and integrate its Future X-Band Radar, a key capability for allowing the service’s surface fleet to detect and track incoming missile threats.

The solicitation for work running from fiscal 2026 through 2033 will be to “design the Future X-Band Radar (FXR), and to build, integrate, and test FXR Engineering Development Models (EDMs) and deliver multiple low-rate initial production (LRIP) units,” according to a Navy notice on the government’s contracting website. The notice does not provide a timeline for when the formal request for proposals will be published.

X-band radars operate using a different frequency and the technology is capable of tracking small objects due to its increased sensitivity.

The future X-band radar would replace the service’s current AN/SPQ-9B Anti-Ship Missile Defense radar, which is installed on a number of amphibious ships, destroyers, cruisers and carriers, and complements the capabilities of the SPY-6(V) family of S-band radars made by Raytheon. The SPQ-9B has been in service since the 1990s and contracts to replace it could be worth billions.

“The AN/SPQ-9B scans out to the horizon and performs simultaneous and automatic air and surface target detection and tracking of low flying Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles (ASCMs), surface threats and low/slow flying aircraft, UAVs and helicopters,” according to Naval Sea Systems Command.

In general S-band radars are commonly used for surveillance and are capable of operating in severe weather conditions.

Such a competition to outfit the Navy’s fleet could include contractors around from the globe. American defense prime Raytheon is already under contract to provide the service with its SPY-6(V) family of radars. Meanwhile, Italy-based Leonardo, France-based Thales and Sweden-based Saab all have their own offerings used by armed forces in their home countries, by NATO nations, and elsewhere around the globe.

Uncertainty over satellite constellation means alternate-GPS capability up in the air as well: Official

AFA 2025 — The Space Development Agency’s (SDA) plans to provide US military operators with positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) signals in situations where GPS is unavailable now are up in the air — as the Space Force reconsiders pushing forward with the agency’s next set Transport Layer data relay satellites.

SDA Director Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo told reporters Monday that the agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) of communications and missile tracking satellites in low Earth orbit will have “organic” PNT capability to ensure the constellations themselves can operate “in case GPS is denied” by adversary jamming.

But there’s a question as to whether SDA will be able to transmit those alternate PNT signals to warfighters on the ground if the Tranche 3 Transport Layer is cancelled, Sandhoo said.

“I don’t have an answer for that,” he during the annual Air and Space Forces Association conference at National Harbor, Md.

SDA originally planned to buy 140 T3 Transport Layer satellites in three different configurations to provide worldwide routing of high volumes of data with low latency, with launching to begin in 2028. SDA in January put out a draft solicitation for 40 of the first variant, called Upsilon, asking for industry responses by Feb. 10.

With regard to PNT, the agency’s planned Navigation Layer would be based on using the laser links among the PWSA satellites, by “leveraging two-way time transfer (TWTT) and ranging” provided, according to an SDA post on LinkedIn. It would have three purposes: maintaining “continuity of operations” for SDA’s satellites, pinpointing GPS jamming and providing that data to Space Force operators, and providing “space-based PNT Services” through a dedicated signal, the agency explained.

The SDA Warfighter Council last August approved the inclusion in Tranche 3 of the “Light Weight Service” developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory to provide the alternate PNT signal, according to the abstract of a paper co-authored by two agency officials among others and submitted to the Institute of Navigation for its upcoming June conference.

The laboratory did not respond to a inquiry from Breaking Defense about the concept.

However, as part of the budget drill for fiscal 2026, the Department of the Air Force and the Space Force now are in the midst of an analysis of whether to replace the T3 birds by buying commercial services from SpaceX’s Starshield network under a mysterious program called MILNET.

The service put $277 million in its first public budget request in FY26 budget request, although there have been multiple reports from Space Force and congressional officials that the program already is underway.

Rutte holds back on Poland’s drone shoot down plan

BELFAST — NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte insisted today that the alliance and Poland are aligned on how to counter drone incursions over allied territory amid Warsaw vowing to unilaterally shoot down “objects” that enter its airspace without permission.

“We all agree that when there is an incursion, when that takes place, we have to act decisively and quickly, exactly as we have done in the Polish case, in the Estonian case and every other case,” Rutte told reporters following a meeting of the North Atlantic Council, called under Article 4 at the request of Estonia. The clause can be invoked if the “territorial integrity, political independence or security” of a member is at risk.

NATO fighter jets shot down Russian drones over Polish airspace earlier this month, an incident that prompted the alliance to launch its Eastern Sentry operation, aimed at bolstering defenses along the Eastern flank — primarily through the deployment of British, Danish, French and German “assets.”

Last week, three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets violated Estonia’s airspace, though Rutte said that an alliance assessment determined that the aircraft posed “no immediate threat” and a decision was consequently made to escort them away from the Baltic nation’s airspace.

The North Atlantic Council in a statement today said Russia’s series of drone incursions across Europe in recent weeks were “escalatory” and “must stop.”

Senior Polish officials have signaled that they will take more assertive action in future incursions over its airspace. Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk said, “We will make a decision to shoot down flying objects without discussion when they violate our territory and fly over Poland,” according to the Guardian newspaper.

Rutte said he had listened to Tusk’s remarks. “I think what [Tusk] he said is that, if necessary, yes, we will shoot down a plane,” but refused to comment further when asked if Warsaw could act alone or is bound by a common set of rules of engagement that apply to all 32 NATO members.

“You can be assured we will do what is necessary to defend our cities, our people, our infrastructure, but it doesn’t mean that we will always immediately shoot down a plane,” said Rutte, appearing at odds with Poland’s position.

Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, told an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council in New York on Monday, “If another missile or aircraft enters our space without permission, deliberately or by mistake, and gets shot down and the wreckage falls on NATO territory, please don’t come here to whine about it.”

Additionally, Lithuania’s parliament approved a plan today for the country’s armed forces to shootdown drones that violate its airspace, reported Reuters.

Meanwhile, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she could not rule out possible Russian involvement related to a drone incursion that led to the closure of Copenhagen airport for several hours on Monday. 

Rutte said that he had been in contact with Frederiksen but because Danish officials are still making an assessment of the incident, it is “too early” to say if there is a link to it and the other drone incursions carried out by Russia.

Posting on X today, Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen called for the establishment of a European drone wall immediately. “Russian drones enter our skies. We complain. They return. We delay. They escalate. We hesitate. Enough,” he added. [I]f we don’t stop Moscow’s tests, one day they won’t be tests.”

How agile companies are providing AI tools to operators

As the Pentagon works to accelerate innovation in areas like artificial intelligence, a key question is how government contracting evolves to open the door to agile non-traditional defense companies. We talked about why this matters with RAFT Founder and CEO Shubi Mishra, and how its AI products and data software solve problems for operators.

Air Force general pledges to ‘get Sentinel done,’ expects Milestone B in 2027

AFA 2025 — An ongoing restructuring of the Sentinel ICBM program is expected to culminate in a new Milestone B decision by mid-2027, a key metric for a troubled program that Brig. Gen. William Rogers said today he has “every intention” of having fully operational before 2050.

“We’ll get Sentinel done, I am confident, before we would be ready to start fielding” a service life extension for the Minuteman III missiles that Sentinel is meant to replace, Rogers said in an interview with Breaking Defense and another outlet on the sidelines of the Air and Space Forces Association conference here.

The Government Accountability Office recently found the MMIII fleet could operate until 2050, but Rogers said Air Force officials were primarily trying to determine exactly how long the legacy missiles could last.

“So that date, I charged the team to plan to 2050 because, not because I don’t think I’m gonna crush that date with Sentinel. I have every intention of beating that,” he said. Instead, that date was forecast to correctly understand the “buffer on the back end, because this is the land leg of our nuclear triad.” Previously, Rogers said that the Air Force assessed the MMIII missiles, which are maintained by Boeing, could operate until 2045. 

“I said, ‘Let’s go five more years and just take a look at what that would mean,’” he said.

Sentinel is in the midst of a widespread literal and fiscal restructuring after in July 2024 Pentagon officials announced that the program, led by prime contractor Northrop Grumman, suffered a projected cost breach of roughly 81 percent. The Pentagon in the process pegged a new pricetag for Sentinel at $141 billion, a number that Rogers said Air Force officials are treating as a “cap.” 

The Pentagon’s review also rescinded the program’s Milestone B decision, DoD parlance for the approval of a program to enter engineering and manufacturing development (EMD). The new Milestone B decision planned for 2027, which must be approved by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, would formally restart the EMD phase, even as work is ongoing. The Air Force plans to acquire 634 Sentinel missiles and an additional 25 for EMD. 

“Our nationwide industry team has made substantial progress under the EMD contract, maturing Sentinel’s design and reducing risk as we prepare for production and deployment of this essential, national security capability,” a Northrop Grumman spokesperson said in a statement.

“We’ve tested every segment of Sentinel, including recent static fire qualification tests on stage 1 and stage 2 segments, we’ve resumed silo design work and made progress designing and testing support equipment. We will continue to work closely with the Air Force to restructure the program to meet the Air Force’s cost and schedule requirements. At this time, we defer questions about the timeline for milestone B to the Air Force Public Affairs Office,” they added.

Although the restructuring temporarily halted some aspects like the design of silos and launch centers, “There’s not much paused at all,” Rogers said. “And, in fact, we paused very little on the program overall,” he added, pointing to work that continued like the development of the Sentinel missile itself. 

Earlier this year, Air Force officials revealed they no longer plan to reuse hundreds of Minuteman III silos to house the forthcoming Sentinel, and instead will now dig new silos, also known as launch facilities. The change is largely driven by discoveries in recent years, according to Rogers, including the need to remediate the presence of asbestos and lead paint, along with “unexpected variations” in the silos’ concrete.

Through updated market research conducted as part of the Sentinel’s restructuring, “The business case was actually better in terms of cost and schedule for just rebuilding new [silos] on the same sites,” Rogers said. 

Rogers said a key way to speed up Sentinel, with attendant benefits like lowering costs, comes in the silo’s design itself. According to the general, a new approach now entails more simple modules “that can be built in a centralized spot” and shipped onsite for easier construction. 

Drilling new silos also affords the opportunity to “mitigate” risks for fitting the Sentinel, which is somewhat larger than its MMIII predecessor, in existing silos. A new silo design would ameliorate those risks, Roger said, and provide more space to maintainers for upkeep. 

As Breaking Defense previously reported, the Air Force recently took its first MMIII silo offline at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. Rogers said that launch facility is the only silo decertified so far, which was shut down to help inform planners of what equipment could be harvested and what steps are required in the process.

When the Air Force originally awarded the Sentinel contract, the service charged Sentinel prime contractor with laying cabling for the missiles’ facilities. As part of the restructuring, a mutual decision was made to reassign that cabling work to the Army Corps of Engineers that for now is focused at F.E. Warren, which Rogers said could in turn more aptly task better equipped telecommunications companies.  

“Some parts of Sentinel’s infrastructure work — like laying fiber across hundreds of remote missile field sites — may be done more affordably by those who specialize in it every day. Rather than having Northrop perform that work, the Air Force and our industry partners agreed it makes more sense to leverage alternate methodologies, such as leveraging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as the design and construction agent for the utility corridor at F.E. Warren, along with local subcontractors,” Rogers said.

“This approach taps into community expertise and strengthens the local industrial base that supports our mission. We’ll also remain flexible with who performs the work to keep the program on cost and schedule while delivering the best quality product,” he added.

The recent GAO review also found that the Air Force could reintroduce multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) for the MMIII fleet to mitigate potential delays with Sentinel, a previous feature of the missiles that was removed due to arms control requirements. Rogers acknowledged that a decision to re-MIRV the MMIII would require a policy change by the US government, though he said such a decision would be technically feasible. 

“Would I be postured to support [it] if I was given the order? Yes,” he said.

Embraer, SNC pushing A-29 for counter-drone mission

AFA 2025 — Embraer and Sierra Nevada Corp. are eyeing a new mission set for the A-29 Super Tucano, pitching the turboprop as an option for the growing counter-unmanned aerial system (cUAS) market.

The benefit, executives from the two firms told Breaking Defense, comes down to a slower-moving jet with a low cost-per-hour to operate — more in line with the speed and cost of a drone.

“Lots of weapons, long loiter time, cost effective to take care of that drone. You don’t need a bespoke F-35 at eleventy billion dollars an hour, right? You can do this in a very cost effective way,” said Ray Fitzgerald, senior vice president for strategy at SNC.

Embraer Defense’s Chief Commercial Officer, Frederico Lemos, highlighted the kind of package an A-29 can carry as a good match for the cUAS mission, whether kinetic or non-kinetic options.

“Matching speeds, excellent connectivity. You can receive a lot of intel to address the threat with the right type of platform,” he said. “You have the machine gun, cannon, you have the rockets, you have the sensor, the right sensor, you have the communications and networking with A-29.”

Asked whether the companies were pushing the cUAS mission or it was something countries approached them about, Fitzgerald said it was “a little bit of both.”

“We do present it, but a lot of people are calling going, hey, I don’t need to put my F-16 or F-18 up against it, or F-35 God forbid, right,” Fitzgerald said. “The dollars per hour those don’t make sense.”

The two men were talking Monday at the annual Air and Space Forces Associations conference outside Washington. They also announced a new deal where SNC is buying an A-29 from Embraer in advance of an expected Foreign Military Sales case that will be announced in the future.

Getting that plane underway means the customer can get ahead of maintenance, pilot training and systems integration — in what Lemos said could cut the timeline for the future customer down by a full year. The A-29 will be produced at the two firms’ joint facility in Jacksonville, Fla., which has been operating at low production levels in recent years. A year ago, Embraer executives warned Breaking Defense of a looming “production gap” at the plant.

However, this week Lemos said the company is “very positive” about future orders out of Jacksonville.

“We are seeing a strong demand from the market, addressing both past challenges in terms of operations and upcoming challenges,” Lemos said. “We see the counter-UAS kind of mission and how relevant the A-29 can also be for this kind of mission”