“We know how to manufacture things. There’s not a problem with that, but UAS, they are different,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Mohan, acting commander of Materiel Command, told Defense News in a recent interview. “We can do the wiring harnesses. We could do some of the microelectronics, but either we don’t have the capability, such as the brushless motors, and we have to buy the machinery to do that.”

The Army’s push comes amid lessons from the war in Ukraine, where inexpensive drones and loitering munitions have reshaped the battlefield and overwhelmed conventional forces.

Ukraine and Russia are churning them out.

Catching up

The United States, by contrast, has struggled to scale production, relying on commercial suppliers and small pilot runs. Officials say that gap underscores the need for a domestic, high-volume industrial network capable of rapidly fielding thousands of drones.

This is a challenge the Army’s SkyFoundry is designed to tackle, even as the service confronts technical, bureaucratic and funding hurdles. The effort is turning depots and arsenals that once built tank parts and artillery shells into a distributed network of drone factories.

The goal is to mass-produce small, expendable, unmanned aircraft — the kind flooding battlefields in Ukraine — at a rate of 10,000 systems per month.

The industrial base has struggled to build capability to mass produce drones. Unlike in Ukraine, “We don’t have that existential crisis,” Col. Eloy Martinez, the commander of Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois, told Defense News on a recent visit.

“We have a lot of laws that we have to abide by … it’s the bureaucratic stuff that’s always downhill,” he said. “How do we break these barriers? How do we reduce that time?”

What’s imperative is that the Army figure out how to move as fast as possible now, according to Brig. Gen. Beth Behn, commander of Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command, told Defense News at Rock Island.

The general had spent six months with Security Assistance Group-Ukraine in the summer and fall of 2023.

“So I had a front row seat to the conflict, and I came back with my hair on fire,” she said. “We have got to adapt.”

Behn returned from the experience to realize how little the dramatically evolving drone threat had penetrated the thinking within the Army.

“We’re almost two years later, and so now we’ve got drone operator courses and we are doing production, and we’ve fielded capabilities to our [Transformation in Contact] formations, so we are moving with speed,” Behn said. “I do think we’re on the cusp.”

SkyFoundry takes shape

Rock Island is primed to 3D print drones, having invested significantly in building a high-tech advanced manufacturing facility on post. One building is filled with various printers capable of producing a wide array of parts and components in various materials, such as metals and composites.

The arsenal is already producing drone bodies and frames using additive manufacturing, and a variety of different 3D-printed options sat on a display table just outside of a massive room dedicated to printing parts.

Rock Island is eagerly awaiting the arrival of a 3D-printing capability from Impossible Objects that will allow it to print 120,000 drone bodies per year.

“We should be installing that or closing the deal on the contract,” Martinez said. “We’ll have that early part of the spring, late winter time frame.”

Once operational, the printer could produce up to 60 small drones per hour at costs falling below $100 a drone, allowing the Army to create systems that can be expendable in combat.

Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania is focusing on wiring harnesses, microelectronics and brushless motors, while Red River Army Depot in Texas will handle battery production and final assembly.

“Rock Island will continue to print bodies. They will continue to print propellers and frames,” Mohan said. “Tobyhanna will do the brushless motors. They will do the wiring harnesses and the microelectronics. Those systems will be shipped to Red River … for final assembly, testing, as well as manufacturing the batteries.”

Mohan emphasized that Skyfoundry is “not a specific location. It’s more of a concept.”

The networked approach is designed to allow each site to specialize in a segment of the manufacturing process while sharing data, digital designs and software updates through a centralized repository.

“We’ve got to have this digital repository,” Mohan said, “so that we can trade not only the electronic files for printing parts, but we have to own the tech data.”

Bluegrass Army Depot in Richmond, Kentucky, is going to serve as the UAS innovation center, he said.

“We already have, we do a lot of really neat stuff with UAS at Bluegrass already, and artificial intelligence enabled security, as well as some stuff for the Special Operations community, and we are gonna merge all of that there,” Mohan added.

The Army is still refining its requirements, Martinez said.

“They want a noun, which is the drone, but they can’t tell us what drone, what type, what their capabilities are,” he said. “So we’re trying to flesh that out.”

The Rock Island team expects to produce drone bodies for the Army’s goal of 1,000 UAS by the end of this fiscal year, with production scaling sharply by 2026, according to Greg Lupton, Rock Island deputy commander.

The initial push to reach production of 10,000 drones per month carries a price tag of roughly $197 million, Mohan said, with $75 million of that going toward brushless motors and wiring capabilities.

“As soon as we get a budget, we will order that machinery,” he said. “It’s about an eight-month lead time.”

The Army plans to spend another $150 million per year over the next three years to sustain and expand the effort.

The modernization push also ties into broader initiatives to reduce reliance on overseas suppliers.

“Ninety percent of UAS parts are coming out of China and Taiwan,” Mohan said. “The systems we’re building, we don’t have Chinese parts in them.”

The drone initiative fits into a broader effort to become less dependent on materials coming from China. AMC is trying to identify where it can set up rare earth mineral processing and lithium production within Army installations and bring manufacturers and mining companies onto those installations.

Red River Army Depot, Mohan noted, sits on top of a large lithium deposit.

“There’s a synergy that we’re trying to aim at there,” he said.

The Army will also need to figure out how to issue and account for the drones, Mohan said.

“The focus right now is to get them at scale to our training centers, so we’ll ship to the National Training Center, JRTC, Joint Readiness Training Center, as well as to those units who have not had the ability to use UAS because they haven’t had the money,” he said.

The first 50 systems will go to I Corps at Joint Base Lewis McChord, Mohan said.

“We are on the cusp of an accelerated sprint on UAS production,” Lupton said. “Once it’s operational, its capacity is significant.”

In 2021 the 1st Multidomain Task Force, 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 17th Field Artillery Brigade at Joint Base Lewis-McChord received all equipment — except for the actual live rounds — for the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon capability it calls Dark Eagle.

The Washington state-based unit was supposed to get the missiles in fall 2023 but several aborted test events forced the Army to push back its fielding plans.

The first three missiles were distributed to the unit earlier this year, with the last of the munitions arriving in July. The fourth round is currently going through acceptance checkouts at Lockheed Martin’s facility in Cortland, Alabama, Lozano said. The final eight are expected to be delivered “by the end of December,” Lozano said.

The Army is also aiming to conduct a hypersonic missile test around the same time.

“That will complete the basic load for battery one, up at JBLM,” he added. “Then … we’ll start working on Battery Two.”

The fielding of the munitions follows a lengthy delay in the testing process. Several tests of the round were aborted in 2023 due to challenges at the range and the hiccups in the process of firing up the missile for launch.

Testing the all-up round was considered critical to ensure the system was safe, effective and ready for fielding.

The U.S. is presently in a race to field the capability and develop systems to defend against hypersonic weapons, which China and Russia are actively developing and testing.

The Army conducted an end-to-end successful flight test of its hypersonic missile at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii in May 2024, which put the initial fielding to the first unit closer on the horizon.

While the process of equipping the Army with the weapon has taken nearly two years longer than planned, service officials have been quick to point out that missile development programs typically take about 10 years. The LRHW program, meanwhile, is only just beyond the five-year mark.

The Army has worked with Leidos’ Dynetics for years to build the industrial base for the Common-Hypersonic Glide Body that will be used by both the ground service and the Navy, as the domestic private sector has never built a hypersonic weapon.

The service also separately produced launchers, trucks, trailers and the battle operations center necessary to put together the first weapon battery.

Lockheed Martin is the weapon system integrator for the Army’s hypersonic capability that will be launched from a mobile truck.

In preparation for receiving the all-up rounds, the Army completed its delivery of the first hypersonic weapon capability — minus the rounds — to the Multi-Domain Task Force unit at JBLM two days ahead of its end-of-fiscal 2021 fielding deadline. The unit has been training on the system since the delivery.

The next phase of production will ramp up quickly once delivery to the first battery is complete.

“The second tranche of production is both Battery Two and the Battery One reload,” Lozano said. “That’s a very complex missile system. Although we’ve gotten through the testing of the system and we’re confident that it works, we’re still working through how to take a prototype system that’s complex and transition it into production, where you have a very repeatable process that drives out quality defects.

“We’re in the middle of that process right now,” Lozano added. “Things that we’re wrestling with every day is we’ll build up part of the missile and we’ll take the boost phase rocket motor and mate it to the missile midsection and then the inspector will come by and we’ll find some defects that we will have to work and address. … We’re learning as we build these missiles.”

Speed, of course, brings added challenges, Lozano acknowledged.

“Just the nature of having gone so fast — if you were doing a typical 10- or 15-year missile program, you drive all this risk out of the program and you’d be delivering on time. You’d just be delivering 10 years from now.”

Yet, “the good news is that we’re making progress now,” he said. “We just have to keep our foot on the gas pedal and continue to push forward and make more progress.”

The LTAMDS is planned to replace the Patriot system, which the company also produces, and is designed to counter such advanced threats as hypersonic weapons. The Army approved the new sensor earlier this year.

Tom Laliberty, Raytheon president of land and air defense systems, recently told Defense News the new $53 million wing is part of an LTAMDS production expansion already exceeding $400 million.

Raytheon has previously invested in software labs, areas for automated subsystem assembly, and an anechoic near-field range for antenna calibration. Laliberty said the new structure, including overhead cranes to move the radar in position, will allow assembly of full radar arrays, integrated with cooling, networking and processing gear.

The company plans to complete the facility by the end of next year, although Laliberty said he hopes the facility will be finished by the end of the year’s third quarter.

The LTAMDS itself has already passed a number of milestones. The Army this year approved the beginning of low-rate initial production for the program, after hundreds of hours of flight tests and radar qualification trials.

Raytheon has already built six prototype units and is now building two improved units incorporating the results of testing and operational evaluation that are expected to be provided to the Army this year for further testing.

Meanwhile, an LTAMDS prototype was sent to Guam for testing and evaluation in an operational environment this year.

Laliberty said Raytheon wants to triple its production rate.

The Army plans to increase builds from six to 12 radars a year under the low-rate initial production contract, but the factory’s planned capacity will be up to 18 radars annually for foreign military sales.

International demand is strong, according to Laliberty.

“There’s been about a dozen formal letters of interest … that ranges from classified briefing, defense design, requests for pricing and availability and then all-up [Letters of Request] for [Letters of Acceptance],” he said.

Poland has committed to buying 12 LTAMDS, along with 48 Patriot launchers as the first foreign customer to buy the new sensor.

So they hooked up their M777 to the novel Artillery Execution Suite during an exercise last month and pulled the lanyard.

Users of the legacy software, the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System, had become accustomed to working around problems.

Troubleshooting was just the normal part of operating the system, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, the 4th ID commander, told Defense News in a recent interview.

The new software, AXS, is a module of the overarching Next-Generation Command-and-Control, or NGC2, envisioned to power all Army battlefield operations.

Exercise Ivy Sting, a series meant to help develop a prototype for NGC2, was deemed the perfect opportunity for a trial run for the howitzer crew, and compare it to the old system.

The tests showed that AXS can drastically shorten what artillerists call the “kill chain,” according to Ellis.

The gun was ready to fire even before the unit finished digging in the two titanium spades on the back of the howitzer used to stabilize it in the ground, he said.

“If you talk to these artillery operators, they will tell you that this was a life changing event for them.”

While the first round of Ivy Sting was focused on the fires C2 element, the division is committed to testing the entire NGC2 prototype. That consists of a four-layer stack: the app layer, data layer, infrastructure layer, and transport layer.

When he took over the service two years ago, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George recognized getting command-and-control right was imperative to future battlefield success and decided to embark on a program to fix the service’s C2 capabilities to avoid operational disruption while creating the necessary clean-sheet system from scratch.

At the same time, the Army began a proof-of-concept of a next-gen C2 system that would be a complete departure from using anything the service already had in its inventory, and the plan was to develop it and scale it for division use within just a few years.

“I put out two years ago that we have to fix the network as our number one priority, that we have to be data centric,” George told Defense News in a recent interview. “It really impacts everything that we do across every warfighting function and to be leaner, lower signature and more lethal, we would need to have something like Next-Gen C2,” he said. “It remains a priority for us.”

Getting NGC2 right means faster decisions in the field. “What we do know is that whoever can make decisions and act the fastest will probably win the next conflict and the network is central to all of that,” Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus told Defense News.

“We are convinced that if we get that part right, there will be a day when our soldiers, instead of carrying multiple radios, batteries, and tethered equipment, will only need an end-user device at the edge,” he said. “That will be all they need for the next fight.”

From the ground up

Starting from scratch, the Army put together a proof-of-concept, with companies like Google, Palantir and Anduril, demonstrating how it would share data seamlessly between command posts while reducing the footprint and signature at Project Convergence, a demo event, at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, in March 2024.

That technological foundation behind the effort showcased a static prototype of the network’s data-sharing architecture, Brig. Gen. Michael Kaloostian, who leads the Army’s Next-Generation Command-and-Control cross-functional team, told Defense News in an interview.

By the next round of Project Convergence earlier in 2025, the Army had a proof-of-principle of the entire four-layer tech stack, which was tested in a live environment with an armored battalion and even contested by an opposing force.

When the digital tools were turned off and the battalion reverted to legacy comms, the difference was stark.

“The OPFOR was using traditional comms,” Kaloostian said, “and our forces were using next-gen C2 and they had a decisive advantage,” he said. “When we took all of that stuff away … it was really kind of parity with the opposing force.”

The Army is now scaling the system to the entire 4th ID division, and by next summer, that division will take it to the next Project Convergence. The division will continue in the lead through Project Convergence Capstone 7 in 2027.

To get there, the service awarded contracts in July for an industry team led by Anduril to build a prototype capability leveraging technology already part of the pilot efforts.

The team will work alongside soldiers in the field throughout the effort to refine the capability across aviation, logistics and sustainment formations.

The Anduril team, which was awarded a $99.6 million contract to deliver a prototype in less than a year, has other tech industry heavyweights like Palantir on board.

The prototype architecture will consist of “integrated and scalable” C2 capabilities using hardware, software and applications through a common data layer, the Army stated in a July 18 announcement.

The service is also providing the 25th ID in Hawaii with another prototype capability.

The Army awarded Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems a contract to lead a team with innovators like Raft and Hypergiant to develop the second NGC2 prototype architecture going to the 25th ID.

Sting and strike

The 4th ID is now embarking on a series of experimentation events with its NGC2 prototype stack called Ivy Sting. These events will occur every month as “a building block” until a culminating event the division is calling Ivy Mass, according to Ellis.

“It’s kind of almost a continual prototyping effort,” Ellis said. “We are not in experimentation anymore. We are the Next-Gen C2 prototype division.”

The Ivy Mass exercise next May will be a large-scale mission rehearsal ahead of Project Convergence at the National Training Center, Ellis noted.

The first round of Ivy Sting last month devoted to fires – connecting sensors to shooters – was the logical place to begin because it forced the Army to integrate every other data source along the way, Ellis said.

“In order to effectively shoot artillery … you have to be able to ingest target data,” he said. “A lot of that comes from the Army Intel Data Platform. You also need to know where all your logistics are, where the artillery rounds are.”

That effort has also given soldiers direct experience shaping the tools they’ll use.

“We didn’t want the perfect product,” Ellis said. “We wanted the product, and now we’re helping make it better.”

Future Ivy Sting events will focus on airspace management, artificial intelligence for targeting, and the integration of operational simulations, which are digital “what-if” tools that let commanders test plans against enemy movement.

“It’s not a video game,” Ellis said, “but … a simulation tool for a commander to use to say, ‘Here’s where all my blue units are. Here’s where I understand the red units to be. What happens if I go left or right?’”

Between each Ivy Sting iteration, soldiers and engineers are also conducting rapid “sprints,” tackling specific digital problems and meeting in what the Army calls solution summits, which are open working sessions where soldiers describe what isn’t working and industry developers push updates back within days or weeks.

“They actually interact with industry partners, and they interact with teammates from across the acquisition community, and they have a back-and-forth,” Ellis said. “What it’s doing is it’s starting to drive two Stings into the future … it’s kind of a roadmap that gets us ready.”

The 25th ID will conduct similar sprints, beginning with one later this fall, called Lightning Strike.

Night and day

The Army is also reworking the typical acquisition system for the effort to support the pace, according to Joe Welch, deputy chief of staff of Army Futures Command.

For one, the Army used a new mechanism it’s calling “fast pass” to get initial requirements for the NGC2 through its oversight paces in order to move quickly to get capability into formations, Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, the Army G-8, told Defense News.

Moving quickly to get systems into soldiers’ hands has resulted in rapid improvement. For one, Ivy Sting has shown the vast difference in performance between using a digital fires thread versus legacy capabilities.

“It’s just night and day,” Welch said.

NGC2’s new partnership model pairing government integrators with commercial teams is reshaping how the Army develops software, he stressed.

“What we’ve set out with our acquisition partners on NGC2 is really this industry team lead, partnership model,” Welch said. “We’re really using this period … to look at what is the most effective working relationship, because this is something we really haven’t done before.”

The Army has also had to reorganize how it budgets for C2 capabilities, Welch noted.

“We looked across all of the disparate budget line items in the Army that had something to do with delivery of a C2 capability,” he said. “In the ’26 budget submit … we have done a lot of that framework that would better support the NGC2 concept.”

By consolidating those funds, the Army hopes to move money faster and sustain momentum across its modernization programs.

The program’s rapid evolution has led to some concern that the system is vulnerable and presents security risks.

“I think as part of any network development or integration work, you’re going to have deliberate processes for identifying seams,” Brig. Gen. Shane Taylor, program executive officer for Army Command, Control, Communications and Network, said in a recent interview. “It could be cyber security challenges. Where can we build cyber resiliency into the system?”

The Army is doing that work as part of Ivy Sting, he said. “There are exercises built into that, or learning demands built into that, where we’re going to look at things like spectrum and look at efforts like red teaming, where we can identify cyber challenges.”

External work in a lab is also reducing risk, he noted.

Already after the first iteration of Ivy Sting, the Army has “rapidly burned down those risks to an acceptable level,” Taylor said.

As Army leaders continue to press on to fund and organize the Army’s number one priority, what drives the soldiers in 4th ID is more immediate, the chance to be part of a generational change.

The 4th ID is known as the first digital division, but it was minted as such in 2003, Ellis said. “We’ve been using that same technology since 2003, so the fact that soldiers now get the opportunity to be part of something new, it’s really exciting.”

Leaders across the Army “feel the pressure very personally to get this right for the rest of the Army,” Ellis said. “Our goal is to deliver a quality product … across the Army.”

The new strategy, which has yet to be published publicly, takes “a much more holistic or comprehensive approach to Army watercraft,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, the Army deputy chief of staff G-8 chief, told Defense News in a recent interview.

The Army “is not going to be able to build watercraft or build ourselves out of this challenge,” Gingrich said. “The time is not there. The resources aren’t there, so … how do we sustain our current fleet and extend the life of it?”

That effort includes service-life extension programs, or SLEPs, for existing vessels. The Army has already made some investments to SLEP watercraft in fiscal 2025 and 2026 “because we knew this was coming, and we knew this was key,” Gingrich said.

The Army will buy some Maneuver Support Vessel Light, or MSV-L, landing crafts but the production numbers have scaled back to five production models. The service is being deliberate about pacing procurement, Gingrich said. When the original prototype is included in the mix, it brings the total to six ships.

“The MSV-Light is actually here in the 8th TSC right now, operating here in Hawaii, and we’re putting it through its paces with the joint force,” Maj. Gen. Gavin Gardner, the 8th Theater Sustainment Command commander, told Defense News. The vessel will participate in the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center rotation in November, he said.

Even so, the Army cannot rely solely on new construction to close gaps, Gingrich said.

“We can’t build our way out of this, so the only way we’re going to be able to do it is to take a look at how do we fill the gaps in capacity and perhaps capability? How do we do that with commercial solutions, or even modified commercial solutions, where we take a commercial vessel that’s several years old, modify it for our needs, and get it out to the force.”

That approach could include soldiers operating government-owned platforms or using contracted crews, according to Gingrich.

The Army has already begun implementing key tenets of the strategy in theater, according to Gardner.

Army leadership has fully supported an effort to “leverage offshore support vessels, OSVs, which is a commercial, contracted shallow-draft watercraft, to help augment our gray-hulled boats,” Gardner said. The vessels’ cranes and “roll-on/roll-off” capabilities also allow the watercraft to access shallow-draft facilities in other countries, he added.

Contracted vessels can offer operational and perceptual benefits, according to Gardner, who described commercial vessels as “a little bit less intrusive.”

“It blends in,” he said. “And quite frankly, … it becomes a challenge for adversaries to find it and target it as well.”

The Army is also deeply interested in pursuing autonomous watercraft, viewing it as a means to transform future sustainment operations.

“We just had some experimental days out here with a couple of vendors … where we have seen what autonomous watercraft can deliver, from a perspective of not only force protection, but what really excites me, for logistics,” Gardner said.

He drew a comparison to World War II–era production, when America mass-produced cargo vessels known as Liberty ships.

“But you were still putting mariners on [Liberty ships] and putting them at risk,” Gardner said. “In the future, if we can develop it appropriately,” the Army could use autonomous watercraft to “create a distribution targeting challenge for any adversary, but also … protect the force,” he added.

Ultimately, the goal is a hybrid fleet that blends crewed and uncrewed platforms, Gardner said.

“We save Army watercraft to do delivery of combat power, while maybe autonomous vessels are delivering that routine sustainment,” he said.

As teaming with humans and robots continues to be developed across the force, “everybody wants to talk about fighter aircraft doing that,” Gardner said. “I want to do that with watercraft and its ability to sustain the Combined Joint Force. I think it’ll be hugely powerful and the Army is moving out that way.”

“I’m pleased to announce that we have officially selected an architecture for this state-of-the-art system that will deploy next-generation technologies across the land, sea and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors,” Trump said. “Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they’re launched from space. And we will have the best system ever built.”

Trump also announced he has appointed Gen. Michael Guetlein, the Space Force’s second in command, to oversee the effort, which has become one of the president’s signature defense projects just months into his second term.

Guetlein, currently vice chief of space operations, previously led the Space Force’s primary acquisition organization, Space Systems Command. There, he oversaw major development efforts and helped streamline the space enterprise’s notoriously fragmented acquisition system. Earlier in his career, he served as deputy commander of the National Reconnaissance Office and program executive officer for programs and integration at the Missile Defense Agency — two of the organizations that will play a significant role in building out the Golden Dome architecture.

“I greatly appreciate your trust in me … and your trust in the team to deliver this,” Guetlein told Trump. “It is a great day for America.”

Trump first announced plans to develop an advanced, layered homeland missile shield in the early days of his second presidency, issuing an executive order that called for a 60-day study of architecture options. The capability is expected to include a mix of ground and space-based interceptors designed to defeat a spectrum of threats — from lower-end weapons to advanced hypersonic and cruise missiles.

While the current homeland missile defense system focuses on threats from rogue nations like North Korea and Iran rather than from peer adversaries like China or Russia, Trump’s homeland missile defense shield would focus on addressing threats from peer adversaries, as well as those rogue threats.

Beyond his cost and schedule projections — and an assertion that Canada had signed on to be part of Golden Dome — Trump was light on details about the architecture and approach to fielding what many analysts and officials have called a bold and challenging endeavor. He alluded to fielding space-based and hypersonic interceptors but offered little more about the scope of the project.

Trump’s promise Tuesday to deliver the layered, integrated system in around “two-and-a-half to three years” would require the Defense Department to field the more advanced elements of the architecture years ahead of schedule. For example, the space-based missile interceptors that he said will be part of the effort have not yet been developed. Meanwhile, hypersonic interceptors are not expected to be developed and delivered until the mid-2030s.

While the more advanced elements of Golden Dome will take time to deliver, several pieces of the architecture are already in various stages of development.

That includes a space-based missile defense and tracking layer comprised of satellites and sensors that can identify and monitor high-end missile threats, which MDA and the Space Force are currently developing and fielding. Those capabilities are part of the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture and could potentially be scaled to support Golden Dome.

Republicans in Congress have largely been supportive of Golden Dome.

In February, Sens. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. — both of whom were in the Oval Office for Tuesday’s announcement — introduced a bill that proposes $19.5 billion for Golden Dome in fiscal 2026.

Their bill, the Golden Dome Act, proposes the addition of Aegis Ashore Systems for U.S. territory — which took years to install in Romania and Poland — and the use of blimps for detecting complex threats. The Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system, or GMD, at Fort Greely, Alaska, would be expanded and upgraded with next-generation interceptors along with a brand-new interceptor site on the East Coast.

Meanwhile, the House GOP included $25 billion for the project in its budget reconciliation package for fiscal 2025 — a number that Trump referenced and validated in his remarks Tuesday.

Asked how confident he is that Congress will fully fund Golden Dome given the administration’s $175 billion cost projection, Trump called the process “easy.”

“It’s amazing how easy this one is to fund,” he said. “Some funding is tough and some is easy. When we say we’re going to save everyone’s lives in a crazy world, it seems to be very easy to get.”

Trump noted that Golden Dome systems will be made in the U.S., but didn’t confirm whether contracts had been awarded. Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., highlighted the work that L3Harris, which is based in his home state, is doing to build out the current space-based sensor architecture.

Sullivan also referenced Lockheed and RTX, who have developed ground-based missile interceptors, while noting that the project will also likely involve more nontraditional defense contractors. Lockheed won the contract last year to build the interceptors that will replace the current ones.

“It’s all across the board in terms of companies. Sen. Cramer and I just met with a bunch of them last week that are interested in this,” he said. “Our technology sector is head and shoulders above any other place in the world, and they’re going to be a key part of this.”

The 181-page document, obtained by Defense News, includes the standard funding tables attached to lawmakers’ annual defense spending legislation, which call for cuts to major service-led efforts like the Air Force’s drone wingmen program, Army missile procurement and the Space Force’s missile warning and tracking satellite architecture.

But the FY25 appropriations process has not been standard. The full-year continuing resolution passed by Congress may lower defense spending, but it also grants the Defense Department far more authority to decide how to spend its budget.

Because Congress failed to pass a full FY25 appropriations bill, the plans now sent to the Pentagon are not legally binding, instead serving merely as spending recommendations, according to Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Congress ceded a significant degree of authority to the executive branch in the FY25 defense budget, and they can’t get that back by issuing a letter that basically says, ‘This is what we intended,’” Harrison told Defense News. “Good luck getting DoD to adhere to this.”

Climate change out, ‘lethality’ in

Congressional appropriators recommend a $1.2 billion cut from the Army’s FY25 request for operations and maintenance FY25, but add an additional $501 million to the service’s personnel account to cover pay raises for junior enlisted service members, according to the document.

Additional funding — to the tune of $265 million — would bolster Army procurement. Another $248.7 million would be added to RDT&E accounts.

While missiles have flowed from the U.S. to Ukraine and the Army has led the way in replacing and replenishing those munitions, lawmakers are recommending a cut of $247 million in missile procurement.

The Army’s future missile defense radar — the Lower-Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, or LTAMDS, is recommended for a $129 million cut. The most capable variant of the Army’s Patriot missile would also be cut by $58 million due to a delivery backlog. The delayed Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon program would be cut by $75 million.

Yet Congress is recommending a $100 million increase for the legacy Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, beyond just the $3.3 million the Army asked for in its FY25 budget as it works to phase the missile out and field the longer-range Precision Strike Missile. Congress proposes a $25 million cut for PrSM procurement and another $10 million for the Army’s pursuit of a second variant.

Certain vehicles buys would also take a hit if the Army took the congressional recommendations. Lawmakers recommend slashing Armored Multipurpose Vehicle procurement by $134 million. The document contains an increase for the Paladin Integrated Management System by $158 million at a time when the service is looking at exactly how it might modernize its howitzer fleet.

Congress also suggests a major funding boost of $248 million for a modular artillery production facility and another $41 million for Army ammunition plant modernization.

Army aviation procurement would be increased as well, to include $240 million for National Guard-bound Gray Eagle unmanned aircraft systems and another $60 million for National Guard UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.

Lawmakers recommend an injection of cash into Humvee modernization for both the active ($90 million) and reserve forces ($50 million) as well as additional $120 million for the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles, or FMTV. Congressional appropriators would also add $167 more in funding for the Family of Heavy Tactical Vehicles, or FHTV.

In RDT&E funding, lawmakers cut more than $140 million deemed to be associated with climate change initiatives, including $29.5 million from the Next-Generation Combat Vehicle program and $7.4 million from a “soldier lethality technology” line. They also recommended cuts to all hybrid electric vehicle prototyping efforts in the force.

Lawmakers proposed additional funding in technology development areas affiliated with lethality enhancements.

Cuts to future Air Force programs

The document recommends a nearly $3.2 billion spending reduction from the Air Force’s original 2025 budget request.

That includes cuts of $2.3 billion from research and development funding, $1.4 billion from operations and maintenance. $130 million from personnel, and nearly $115 million from missile procurement. Aircraft procurement would receive almost $64 million more than originally requested, and “other” procurement programs would see a plus-up of about $679 million.

Lawmakers proposed a $325 million cut to the Next Generation Air Dominance program, which they didn’t justify but simply called a “classified adjustment.” This would bring funding for NGAD — the Air Force’s effort to build a sixth-generation crewed fighter that would fly alongside autonomous drone wingmen and other systems — down to $2.4 billion in FY25.

The document also breaks the high-priority drone wingman program known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft into its own line item, but also proposes trimming more than $70 million. CCAs would have nearly $487 million in funding this year if the document’s funding levels were enacted.

Travis Sharp, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments who studies the defense budget, noted that CCA is one of the programs Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has indicated as a priority for funding.

“This seems to be a case where mostly everyone agrees that CCA is a promising capability, but they don’t agree with what [that] means in spending terms,” Sharp told Defense News in an email.

Funding for the Air Force’s advanced engine development programs would get another $100 million. This would be apart from the program to build cutting-edge adaptive engines for NGAD — known as next-generation adaptive propulsion, or NGAP — which would retain the original 2025 budget request’s proposed funding of $562 million.

The E-7 airborne battle management program would get an overall bump up of $189 million over the 2025 budget request. This is the Air Force’s program to acquire a fleet of up to 26 of the Boeing-made aircraft, sometimes referred to as the Wedgetail, to replace the aging E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system, or AWACS, planes.

Lawmakers want to strike $50 million in funding proposed in the 2025 budget proposal — called an “unjustified request” — for prototyping the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, or HACM. This would leave HACM with nearly $467 million in funding.

Lawmakers would also provide the services money to buy six more F-35 Joint Strike Fighters than originally requested. The Air Force would get another $196 million to buy two more F-35As, and the Navy would receive another $524 million to buy four more carrier-based F-35Cs

The F-35 program would also get a $10 million bump to improve its power thermal management system. The F-35′s Continuous Capability Development and Delivery, or C2D2, approach to developing, testing and delivering incremental improvements to the fighter will receive more than $1.1 billion in 2025.

And the document recommends providing another $200 million for the HH-60W Jolly Green II combat rescue helicopter program to buy two more aircraft than requested.

Space Force missile tracking cuts

The Space Force’s fiscal 2025 funding would drop $700 million under this proposal — a seemingly small decrease presented as the service pushes for its nearly $30 billion budget to triple amid growing threats in orbit.

The reductions include $222 million from the service’s operations and maintenance request, $147 million from research and development and an increase of about $1.4 million to its personnel account.

As the Trump administration crafts a plan to develop a homeland missile defense shield composed of advanced space sensors — a project known as “Golden Dome” — lawmakers are proposing cuts to the space-based missile warning and tracking systems that would likely make up the foundation of that system.

The proposal includes a $283 million reduction to that layered architecture, including $33 million from the Space Development Agency’s low-Earth orbit satellite constellation. Another $180 million could come from the spacecraft the service is developing to monitor missile threats from geostationary orbit and $170 million from its medium Earth orbit layer.

Lawmakers also recommend cutting $246 million from the Space Force’s classified procurement account and adding $351 million to its classified development account. While details on those funding lines are largely veiled, a large portion is used to develop counter space weapons and defensive systems.

The document lays out some potential additions for the Space Force, including $30 million for a Resilient Global Positioning System program that’s being designed to augment the current GPS fleet. The proposal would also create a new funding line for commercial services, appropriating $40 million in FY25. Lawmakers also suggest an $80 million add to fund additional satellite payload processing capabilities at the Space Force’s overtaxed launch ranges.

The Army will carry teams through design and development and plans to select a winner to build an enduring HEL for short-range air defense in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, according to a broad agency announcement for the effort posted to Sam.gov.

The service held an industry day in July and has been collecting proposals with “a lot of interest from those industry partners we’ve seen and some that we hadn’t necessarily seen before,” Rasch told Defense News in an interview at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium here.

“Some of them are teaming up together. Some of them are on their own. But they see what other folks are doing and trying to get better,” Rasch added. “That is where innovation occurs and that’s where we maintain that leap ahead capability over our adversaries.”

The service has spent years developing lasers for various weapons systems and recently deployed four Directed Energy Maneuver-SHORAD Stryker Combat Vehicle-based prototypes to the U.S. Central Command area of operations to evaluate how well a 50-kilowatt laser could fulfill the mission of taking out short-range air threats.

The first prototypes consist of a 50-kilowatt laser from Raytheon. Kord Technologies, a KBR company, is the lead integrator.

Rasch said those prototypes, and other efforts like putting larger lasers on palletized weapon systems and smaller lasers on the Infantry Squad Vehicle and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, have taught the service what could potentially be the sweet spot for balancing laser power needs with other factors that play into taking out enemy air drones of various sizes.

Rasch’s office is currently evaluating 10-, 20-, 50- and 300-kilowatt options for a wide variety of threats and missions. The 300-kilowatt laser is designed for the Indirect Fire Protection Capability, which is a system that will use kinetic, laser and high-powered microwave weapons to destroy threats including rockets, artillery, mortars, drones and cruise missiles. The Army is to receive that laser weapon next year.

“That informed the Enduring High Energy Laser [broad agency announcement] that we put out,” Rasch said. “You’ll notice… that we didn’t reference kilowatts, right? It’s easy to talk about lasers in regards to kilowatts because it’s easy to get your head wrapped around more kilowatts, probably better, less kilowatts, probably not as effective or lethal, but that’s only one factor that comes into how effective the system is downrange.”

For example, Rasch noted, a 50-kilowatt system might not have an ideal beam director “so it’s not making all the proper utilization of beam forming and getting that power down range. You might not be as effective as a 30-kilowatt, so there’s multiple components and multiple levers… that come into play.”

The extensive evaluations have led the Army to see “how those systems perform from the different designs at the system level and at the component level and sub-component level. It’s really, I think, opened up the aperture on what we know about how to make effective laser systems,” Rasch said.

The Army has also learned about what will be needed to sustain directed energy systems in the Middle East.

“It’s a big step to go from lab demonstration of a capability or even taking it out to a range for a week or two to giving it to soldiers for good and then having them take it, quite frankly, in some of the most austere places that you would ever want to put equipment,” Rasch said.

“We’ve actually made some big inroads on how to do sustainment repairs in a really ugly environment where dust particles are really high,” he added. “Ultimately we want to get these systems to … where your soldiers can pull out a piece and put in another piece in a fight.”

In addition to the four prototypes already downrange, Rasch’s office will soon receive prototypes from two additional teams – Lockheed Martin and nLight – each offering different design solutions, which the office will evaluate over the next several years in addition to the original DE M-SHORAD prototyping effort.

The new capabilities will “have significantly longer range than current land-based fires in Europe. Exercising these advanced capabilities will demonstrate the United States’ commitment to NATO and its contributions to European integrated deterrence,” the joint statement reads.

The long-range fires capabilities will include the SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles and “developmental hypersonic weapons,” the statement details.

The capabilities will be resident in the U.S. Army’s Multidomain Task Force already headquartered in Germany.

The announcement lines up with the Army’s plans to fill out its five MDTF units worldwide. Defense News first reported in April that the MDTF in Europe would be fully established in fiscal 2026 with the addition of a Long-Range Fires Battalion, or LRFB, in support of the European theater.

The Army stood up the 2nd MDTF in Europe in 2021. It has two other established MDTF units in the Indo-Pacific theater with plans to build out two more for a total of five MDTFs. Three will be focused on Pacific operations, one in Europe and one will be based in the U.S. at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, and will be capable of rapid deployment where it is needed.

The units are designed to operate across all domains — land, air, sea, space and cyberspace — and are equipped with the Army’s growing capabilities, including long-range precision fires.

The Army’s plan is to complete all MDTF units by FY28, according to a document detailing the Army’s most recent round of force structure analysis obtained by Defense News earlier this year.

Long-Range Hypersonic batteries

The service will consolidate Mid-Range Capability and Long-Range Hypersonic batteries under a LRFB headquarters over the next five years. Long-Range Precision Fires units will also include the service’s Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM, the Army Tactical Missile System replacement, which can be fired from a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launcher.

The 1st MDTF, based out of Joint Base Lewis McChord in Washington State, has already deployed its Mid-Range Capability launcher to the Philippines earlier this year as part of a bilateral military exercise with the country, marking the first time the newly fielded system has been exercised outside of the U.S.

The MRC fits in the Army’s fires portfolio between its PrSM, designed to hit targets over 499 kilometers away, and its ground-launched hypersonic missiles. The Army’s 3rd MDTF recently fired the newly fielded PrSM from the Pacific island of Palau during a recent ship-sinking exercise.

The service chose Lockheed Martin in November 2020 to build the MRC prototype, landing a nearly $340 million contract to take elements from naval missiles – the SM-6 and Tomahawk – to forge the new weapon. The full MRC system has a battery operations center, four vertical launch systems, prime movers and modified trailers.

The Army’s hypersonic weapon capability has been delayed significantly due to testing troubles.

The service completed its delivery of the first hypersonic weapon capability, minus the all-up rounds, to I Corps’ 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 17th Field Artillery Brigade unit at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state two days ahead of its end-of-FY21 fielding deadline.

The original plan was to train on the equipment and receive those rounds in the fall of 2023, but based on a series of failed or aborted tests, that timeline has slid further down the road.

The Army and Navy, which are jointly developing the common glide body for the weapon had to abort flight tests in March, October and November last year to due “challenges at the range,” according to Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office director.

The Army is gearing up for another flight test this summer. If the test is successful, the Army is aiming to field the first rounds to the first battalion at JBLM in FY25.

The Joint Fires Network is a U.S. Indo-Pacific Command initiative to improve coordination between commanders and network any sensor from any platform to feed targeting guidance to any weapon system. Valiant Shield is focused on integrating forces across domains with thousands of U.S. military personnel participating along with 200 ships, aircraft and ground vehicles.

The JFN demonstration during Valiant Shield “integrated technologies with third-party capabilities as part of an enterprise architecture,” Lockheed said in a June 20 statement.

“The exercise showcased the seamless integration of Lockheed Martin’s advanced command and control functions, employing Operational Planning to coordinate real-time decision-making across the theater of operations, with all the Services and operational domains,” it said. “This approach enhanced the agility and responsiveness of joint operations, using live real-time data, and producing joint tasking orders in an operationally relevant environment.”

Lockheed’s digital C2 system combines its fielded battle management, command and control software with other technologies from industry, the company notes.

To participate in Valiant Shield, the company said it made improvements to its C2 Planning Software that included “streamlining operator workflows by making machine interactions intuitive, enabling real-time monitoring, and facilitating seamless integration with other technologies.”

The company also trained operators on high-fidelity mission simulators prior to the exercise to learn how to use the C2 planning system.

Lockheed has now participated in seven exercises to continue to work on refining its digital C2 capabilities, it said.

For example, the company participated in Northern Edge, an experiment in the Indo-Pacific theater that demonstrated synchronization of technology that could feed into the Pentagon’s connect-everything-everywhere campaign called Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2.

The company plans to continue to bring technology to exercises and demonstrations in the Indo-Pacific to help build joint, networked capability.