Anduril’s YFQ-44A drone carried out its first flight at an unidentified California test location Friday, the Air Force said. It follows the first flight of its General Atomics-made counterpart, the YFQ-42A, which took place in August.

“This milestone demonstrates how competition drives innovation and accelerates delivery,” Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said in a statement. “These flights are giving us the hard data we need to shape requirements, reduce risk, and ensure the CCA program delivers combat capability on a pace and scale that keeps us ahead of the threat.”

The Air Force wants to create a fleet of at least 1,000 artificial intellgence-driven, semiautonomous CCAs to fly alongside manned aircraft such as the F-22, F-35 and sixth-generation F-47 fighter jets. The service sees these drones as an affordable way to extend the reach and effectiveness of its fighter fleet, and wants them to carry out a variety of missions including strikes, reconnaissance operations and electronic warfare.

The Air Force selected the two companies for the first CCA contracts in April 2024, and both production-representative prototype models began ground testing in May 2025. The service plans to make a decision on which of these two CCAs to send into production this fiscal year.

Anduril officials said at the Air & Space Forces Association’s conference in September that it was working to ensure its CCA’s first flight would be semiautonomous, not remotely piloted. This meant Anduril’s engineers had to take more time to get its autonomy software right, officials said, but they predicted achieving that step early would allow it to move through testing faster than expected.

“Through flight testing, Anduril and the Air Force are developing those collaborative, manned-unmanned teaming concepts and tactics that will inform how we integrate, fight with, and sustain truly autonomous aircraft,” Jason Levin, Anduril’s senior vice president of engineering for air dominance and strike, said in a company release Friday.

Levin said all of Anduril’s taxi and flight tests of the YFQ-44A have been, and will be, semiautonomous.

“This is a new age of air power,” Levin said. “There is no operator with a stick and throttle flying the aircraft behind the scenes.”

Anduril said it has now gone from a clean-sheet design to flight testing of the CCA in 556 days, less than two years.

Now, AeroVironment is preparing to expand its ability to produce the Switchblade and is working on new ways to launch and control it — including from an MQ-9 Reaper drone.

Brian Young, the AeroVironment executive who oversees the Switchblade program, said Monday the company wants to be ready as the U.S. Army accelerates its own loitering munitions capability through the Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance, or LASSO, program.

“You’re going to see a lot of shift toward that [LASSO] program in terms of the technologies, and then also the scale,” Young, AeroVironment’s vice president of loitering munitions, said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s conference in Washington.

In late 2026 or early 2027, Young said, AeroVironment plans to open a new production facility in Salt Lake City. That facility will one day produce even more than AeroVironment’s primary production facility in Los Angeles does, he said, and allow the company to boost its monthly Switchblade production from around 500 to several thousand.

The Switchblade is a loitering munition that is launched from a tube, and then pops out small wings and flies to its target like a drone before homing in and detonating. Ukraine’s military has made extensive use of Switchblades as it fights against Russia’s invasion.

AeroVironment is also incorporating more modular capabilities, such as radios and GPS components, into Switchblade as part of an open systems approach, Young said. The modular open systems approach is meant to allow users to “plug and play” different capabilities into a weapon and more easily adapt them to different missions.

Young said the company is putting these changes in place to take advantage of the Army’s acceleration of its LASSO program.

AeroVironment also introduced updated versions of its three Switchblade models at the AUSA conference.

The Switchblade 300 — the lightest and most portable variant — has been updated with an armor-piercing explosively formed penetrator payload, Young said.

Young said AeroVironment self-funded and tested this Switchblade 300 update, and the company expects it to be certified ready for use in 2026, after the Army’s six- to eight-month qualification process. AeroVironment hopes the new version of the 300 will also be approved for sales to foreign militaries.

The 300 was originally designed with a fragmentation payload, Young said, which was better suited for battlefields in Iraq or Afghanistan. But today’s conflicts — particularly Ukraine’s war against Russia’s invasion — have been marked by greater use of tanks or other armored vehicles, he said, leading to the 300’s payload update.

“You look at the war going on in Ukraine, they’re really going after these high-value assets that are heavily fortified,” Young said. “So you need something that can pierce through [a] thicker sort of armor, not just a regular commercial vehicle or personnel.”

The Switchblade 400, he said, is AeroVironment’s offering for LASSO and was tailored to fit that program. It is similar to the heavier-duty Switchblade 600, Young said, including a Javelin multipurpose warhead and optics allowing lengthy standoff range. But AeroVironment shrunk its systems, he said, getting its weight down to less than 40 pounds and making it more portable.

Young expects to the Army to soon announce whether it has chosen the Switchblade 400 for LASSO.

AeroVironment is also introducing a block 2 version of its Switchblade 600, which is designed for the U.S. military. This version uses the military’s more advanced M code GPS, improved radios, a secondary payload bay and improved processors to do automated target recognition.

The company expects to start delivering that version in early 2026 and scale up production rapidly through the year.

The Switchblade 600’s block 1 is the version most commonly used in Ukraine, Young said, and AeroVironment has built about 3,000 of those so far.

Young said AeroVironment sees a growing market for loitering munitions like the Switchblade and is trying to expand the varieties it can offer militaries.

“This market isn’t going away,” Young said. “It’s not going to flatten. It’s going to increase. … I think there’s a niche for different sizes of Switchblade. You’ll see the 300, the 600 and the 400 still existing long into the future, [and] probably other variants as well that we have in our back pocket.”

For example, Young said, a smaller Switchblade 300 and its launch tube together weigh less than eight pounds. That means a soldier can march into the field with a handful of them on his or her back, and launch it to pierce the armor of a heavy enemy vehicle.

It would be harder for a soldier to carry more than one of the newer, 40-pound Switchblade 400s into the field, Young said. But its Javelin multi-purpose warhead would give that single Switchblade a significant punch, enough to kill an entire tank.

Ukrainian troops, Young said, often bring multiple Switchblade 600s in the back of a truck and set up stations to launch them.

And AeroVironment is experimenting more with mounting banks of Switchblade launchers on manned and unmanned vehicles, including ground vehicles and unmanned surface ships, Young said.

AeroVironment also in recent months worked with General Atomics Aeronautical Systems to successfully test launch a Switchblade 600 from an in-flight MQ-9 Reaper drone. Young said the company worked to modify a standard Switchblade launch tube to hang under the Reaper’s wing and use the Reaper’s satellite link to also control the Switchblade to its target.

“You can, from anywhere in the world now, operate a Switchblade through that satellite link,” Young said.

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said Monday that Anduril’s collaborative combat aircraft, or CCA, will take its first flight in mid-October. Meink made his comments in a roundtable with reporters at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air Space Cyber conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

Anduril’s drone, designated the YFQ-44A, is one of two that the Air Force is considering for its first increment of the CCA program, along with General Atomics’ YFQ-42A. General Atomics’ CCA took flight for the first time in August at an unidentified location in California.

In a briefing with reporters Monday, Anduril officials said they were “within spitting distance” of the YFQ-44A’s first flight, and expressed confidence in their ability to adhere to the program’s schedule.

Developing a fleet of semiautonomous CCAs to fly alongside advanced crewed fighters like the F-35 and F-47 is a top priority for the Air Force. The service wants a fleet of at least 1,000 CCAs to conduct strike missions, collect reconnaissance, carry out jamming operations and even serve as decoys to lure enemy fire away from the fighters.

The Air Force announced in April 2024 that Anduril and General Atomics had won the first CCA contracts, and the service plans to develop additional CCA versions in an incremental approach.

In a graphic posted online in May, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said CCAs would have stealth comparable to that of the F-35, a combat radius of more than 700 nautical miles — greater than the F-35A and F-22 — and be operational later this decade.

Anduril is now in the final stages before beginning the YFQ-44A’s flight testing, with multiple vehicles undergoing ground testing at the company’s test facility, said Diem Salmon, the company’s vice president for air dominance and strike.

Having several copies of its CCA available will make it easier to launch a “more expansive flight test profile” in 2026, Salmon said.

Anduril deferred to the Air Force when asked about Meink’s prediction of a mid-October first flight.

From the start, Salmon said, Anduril’s goal has been to ensure its CCA is semiautonomous in all aspects, from takeoff to flight to landing. The YFQ-44A has already been conducting semiautonomous taxiing, she said, which means “we hit a button, it goes to the points that’s been designated by that vehicle, completes its taxi [and] returns.”

Similarly, she said, Anduril wants the YFQ-44A’s first flight to involve takeoff and landing at the push of a button.

“There is no stick and throttle,” Salmon said. “It will be able to execute the actual first flight profile, preplanned, using autonomy software on the vehicle.”

While the YFQ-44A’s first flight will not be remotely piloted by humans, Salmon said, there will still be humans on the ground overseeing what the CCA does.

General Atomics spokesman C. Mark Brinkley said it conducts first flights of all new aircraft, including the YFQ-42A, with remotely piloted flights to better collect data and minimize risk.

“The performance data obtained this way is invaluable to the success of our aircraft programs,” Brinkley said. “We have no reason to and no interest in doing it any other way.”

Brinkley said General Atomics’ autonomy track record is proven, and drones such as the Gray Eagle, Reaper, Avenger and others regularly use the company’s automatic takeoff and landing capability.

“YFQ-42A is designed for semiautonomous flight, and that’s not even in question,” Brinkley said. “This is like saying I never expected my baby to crawl, but go straight from the crib to the Air Force Marathon.”

Salmon said Anduril’s decision to jump straight to semiautonomous flight with the YFQ-44A meant its engineers had to work hard to get the software right, and that has taken more time.

“The team has been heads down, getting to that goal for CCA,” Salmon said. “There’s just a little bit more on the software development side that needs to get wrung out. That’s what’s currently driving our schedule right now.”

But achieving semiautonomous flight early, even if it means a later first flight, will allow Anduril to progress through testing more quickly, she said.

“That’s going to allow us to leapfrog the overall test plan, because we are tackling that hard part first,” Salmon said.

Jason Levin, Anduril’s senior vice president of engineering for air dominance and strike, also said the company did not have its own ground control station for a human to handle takeoff and landing, and would have had to develop one if it didn’t go straight to semiautonomous flight. That would have been “a step backwards, because we really want to get to this semiautonomous thing and wring out that problem.”

Levin said development of the company’s CCA has moved quickly, from passing its preliminary design review in 2024 to launching ground testing in May. That is the same month General Atomics’ CCA began ground testing.

The software required to semiautonomously fly the YFQ-44A required a major in-house development effort and a “clean sheet” design, Levin said. The company has developed similar software for other products, he said.

“But to get to the level of rigor and complexity for CCA has been a different beast to handle,” Levin said. “It’s been a parallel effort, [with] the hardware teams working everything from electrical systems, avionics, fuel system and the jet itself, as well as the software” at the same time.

Levin said Anduril’s CCA will first fly with only its semiautonomous flight capabilities intact, and the programming to carry out missions will come later.

Integrating the software with the YFQ-44A’s avionics and other hardware has been the greatest challenge so far, Levin said.

Anduril’s timeline for first flight is a slight slip from its predictions earlier this year. After Anduril’s CCA entered ground testing in May, the company said it expected to begin flight tests this summer.

Anduril officials downplayed the significance of conducting their first flight in the fall instead of the summer.

“It was not a race to get to first flight as fast as humanly possible,” Salmon said. “It was, how do we field this really advanced and novel capability as fast as we can? And with that comes the recognition that the autonomy is the hard part here.”

The Pentagon in recent years has been exploring options for shifting some moving target indicator, or MTI, missions traditionally performed by aircraft to satellites. The Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office have been leading studies and launching prototypes to consider the viability and value of space-based options.

As those demonstrations get off the ground, the Air Force is on a parallel path to replace the aircraft currently used to track air-moving targets — its aging E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System — with the more capable, Boeing-built E-7 Wedgetail. The E-7 has been viewed as a near-term bridge to whatever future architecture the department develops, and the service’s plan is to buy the first two Wedgetail prototypes as soon as 2028.

But as the White House and the Pentagon finalize a budget plan for fiscal 2026, President Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly considering canceling the E-7 buy, according to Aviation Week.

The Air Force wouldn’t confirm the report, but a spokesperson told Defense News the service is “continuing to work with OSD on the E-7A Wedgetail program throughout the development of the FY26 budget request.”

In recent testimony and at events through the Washington, D.C., region, defense officials have emphasized the importance of an air moving target indicator capability that includes both air and space assets — especially as Space Force and NRO analysis is ongoing.

Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton, deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs and requirements, said Thursday that while the space-based demonstrations haven’t yet delivered clear data to inform program decisions, early indicators support a mixed architecture.

“We think there are kind of synergies of having both flavors of this capability right now, but we’re really waiting for some just hard engineering data to understand what we can see from space, and how good is that going to be,” Bratton said during a virtual Mitchell Institute event.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin told House appropriators May 6 that while satellites can provide key sensing capabilities, they’re not ready to take over the full AMTI mission. As a result, aircraft like the E-7 Wedgetail and E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System are still needed.

In a May 13 hearing, U.S. Northern Command Commander Gen. Gregory Guillot told the Senate Armed Services Committee the department needs a layered approach to tracking advanced threats that includes everything from undersea sensors to detect enemy submarines, standoff weapons, aircraft and satellites.

“I think it’s a seabed-to-space approach,” Guillot said.

Tracking ground and air moving targets will play a key role in what Guillot called the “domain awareness layer” of a future Golden Dome capability — an advanced missile defense and defeat architecture championed by Trump.

The Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office have been working closely on the MTI studies and have been largely tight-lipped about what satellites and other prototypes have been launched to demonstrate the space-based capability.

NRO director Chris Scolese has acknowledged in the past that his agency launched some GMTI prototype satellites, and Guillot noted in the hearing this week there are “a number of” AMTI prototypes on orbit today. The service expects to have an operational space-based MTI capability by the early 2030s.

Bratton declined to offer more details on the AMTI demonstrations but said the results of all of the analysis will help answer key questions like, “How good is this capability from space?” and “How is it compatible with existing AMTI capabilities that the Navy and the Air Force fly?”

Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told Defense News there are looming technical challenges surrounding the switch to satellites for MTI missions. Those include questions around power systems and whether a satellite sensor can penetrate cloud cover, he said. The satellites would also need to be more survivable and able to withstand an attack.

A fully space-based MTI architecture is likely years away, Kendall said, and those systems would not be ready in time to retire the E-3 without risking a capability gap.

“We’re trying to get a lot of that functionality into space, but that’s going to take a while, and there’s some technical challenges with that,” Kendall said, adding that the Wedgetail has been a crucial component of the Air Force’s near-term planning.

“There’s a pretty high sense of urgency about getting [the E-7] fielded,” he said.

The House Armed Services Committee will debate the package Tuesday as part of a process called reconciliation, which allows the party with a congressional majority to fast-track legislation without risking a filibuster. House Republicans expect to pass the bill in May and then send it to the Senate for approval.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., called the proposed investment “historic.”

“Our defense industrial base has weakened. America’s deterrence is failing and without a generational investment in our national defense, we will lose the ability to defeat our adversaries,” Rogers said in a statement Sunday. “With this bill, we have the opportunity to get back on track and restore our national security and global leadership.”

The Trump administration’s Golden Dome advanced missile defense shield is among the biggest beneficiaries. The bill suggests adding $24.7 billion for ground and space-based missile defense. That includes $7.2 billion to develop and buy space-based sensors, $5.6 billion for space-based intercept capabilities, $2 billion for a nascent Space Force effort to use satellites to track air-moving targets and $2.4 billion for non-kinetic missile defense effects.

The Pentagon is still crafting its architecture recommendations for Golden Dome, which will include a mix of advanced sensors and potentially a fleet of in-space interceptors designed to defeat enemy missiles. Officials have said this initial analysis phase involves determining which existing capabilities to scale and what new technologies it will need to develop.

The Defense Department plans to request funding for the effort in fiscal 2026. A bill introduced in February by Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., proposes $19.5 billion for Golden Dome in next year’s appropriations. That funding will likely be spread across new and existing programs within the Space Force and the Missile Defense Agency, which could see significant boosts to their relatively small budgets. The Space Force’s annual budget is around $30 billion and the MDA’s about $10 billion.

Aircraft and nuclear triad modernization

The bill also includes $7.2 billion to accelerate the development of new, advanced fighters and drones for the Air Force and Navy.

That air superiority funding includes $900 million to accelerate work on both the Air Force and Navy’s versions of the sixth-generation Next Generation Air Dominance fighter. The Air Force’s Boeing-made F-47 — which President Donald Trump unveiled in an Oval Office ceremony last month — would get $400 million to accelerate its production, and the Navy’s F/A-XX would get half a billion.

The collaborative combat aircraft program, the military’s effort to create autonomous drone wingmen that could fly alongside NGAD or advanced fighters like the F-35, would get $678 million. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have viewed CCAs as an important part of the U.S. military’s future airpower force, and a way to expand its reach at prices cheaper than jets flown by human fighters.

The biggest portion of the reconciliation bill’s air superiority funding would send an additional $3.2 billion to increase production of Boeing’s F-15EX Eagle II fighter. The bill also would set aside $474 million to increase the production of EA-37B Compass Call electronic warfare aircraft, which are being made by BAE Systems and L3Harris out of Gulfstream G550 business jets.

The Air Force and Navy’s efforts to modernize their respective legs of the nation’s nuclear triad would get another $13 billion. That would include $4.5 billion to accelerate the Air Force’s procurement of the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider stealth bomber, which is planned to replace the B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit fleets and be the service’s main aircraft for delivering nuclear weapons.

It also includes $1.5 billion to reduce the risk of the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, which is also to be made by Northrop and will replace the nation’s arsenal of more than 400 Minuteman III nuclear missiles. The Sentinel program’s projected future costs have grown considerably, as the effort to build the massive infrastructure needed to operate the missiles is more complicated and expensive than originally expected.

The bill would provide $168 million to speed up the production of the Survivable Airborne Operations Center program. Sierra Nevada Corp. won a $13 billion contract from the Air Force in April 2024 to build the “doomsday planes,” which would allow the president to direct forces during a nuclear war or other devastating emergency that destroys command-and-control centers on the ground.

Lawmakers also want to provide the Navy $2 billion to speed up the development, procurement and integration of the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile, or SLCM-N, and $400 million to speed up the development of Trident D5LE2 submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

Shipbuilding and Taiwan aid

The bill would include almost $34 billion for U.S. shipbuilding, so far one of the Trump administration’s top priorities for the Pentagon but also a persistent issue in recent years.

Earlier in April, the president signed an executive order related to America’s maritime industrial base, requiring the defense secretary to review what authorities could accelerate America’s lagging shipbuilding industry — some 200 times smaller than that of China.

The legislation includes funding intended to increase production overall and specific Navy systems. It features $4.6 billion for a second Virginia-class submarine in the 2027 fiscal year, $5.4 billion for two more guided-missile destroyers and $3.7 billion for the amphibious assault ship program.

Submarine funding, in particular, is key as the U.S. tries to maintain pace with the timelines envisioned under AUKUS, an agreement with the U.K. to share and eventually develop nuclear-powered submarines with Australia. Even with additional funding from Congress and Australia itself, if America can’t build enough boats to share, the deal will be in jeopardy approaching key milestones in the 2030s.

Alongside these traditional systems is more than $4.6 billion in money for underwater and surface drones, which the Navy has struggled to purchase in large numbers despite rapid advances in technology.

Lawmakers also call for $11 billion to support U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. That includes $850 million in assistance to Taiwan to “protect United States interests and deter Chinese Communist Party aggression.”

Another $4 billion would fund classified military space superiority programs and $528 million for space and ground-based surveillance programs. The proposal also includes $365 million for Army exercises and campaigns in the Western Indo-Pacific and more than $1 billion for infrastructure development in the region.

Scaling munitions and low-cost drones

A further $20.4 billion included in the bill would fund a bevy of key munitions across the services — from ballistic missiles to mines to torpedoes.

Much of the funding would help surge production of weapons otherwise whipped up and down by the Pentagon’s unsteady demand, often cutting munitions to balance out budget requests to Congress.

Some $400 million would go toward accelerating hypersonic weapons development, an area the U.S. has lagged behind while competing with China and Russia.

Far more is slated for the munitions industrial base itself. There is $2.5 billion to stockpile critical minerals, $1 billion for automated munitions factories and more than $4.5 billion in grants to build out parts of the industrial base.

Together, the investments would represent a jolt into a sector that has struggled to deliver on timelines relevant to conflicts around the world, from the wars in Gaza to Ukraine. They would also help build out production of key weapons as the U.S. continues to fear it couldn’t resupply its stores of weapons in a protracted conflict with China, which has a far larger industrial base delivering munitions in much larger numbers.

Republicans also specify a need for more investment in scaling production of low-cost technologies across the Defense Department, proposing $11 billion across a number of offices and programs.

The bill would add $2 billion for the Defense Innovation Unit in fiscal 2025 — more than triple the amount of its prior-year funding. It would also add more than $1 billion each for three efforts: expanding the industrial base for small uncrewed systems, developing and buying low-cost cruise missiles and speeding up procurement and fielding of “innovative technologies.” Finally, it would funnel $500 million toward existing programs to buy attritable, autonomous systems — which likely includes the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative.

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.

Kendall suggested alternative paths for the Air Force’s future combat fleet at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event at the think tank’s Washington headquarters, in which he outlined a report on where the department needs to be in the next 25 years.

Authored by Kendall, the report, titled “The Department of the Air Force in 2050,” amounts to a sort of valedictory in the waning days of his leadership of the department — and a warning of the threats it could face in decades to come.

“The [Air Force and Space Force] missions don’t fundamentally change [by then], but both services need to go through a transformation” by 2050, Kendall said.

The Air Force will need to procure and maintain the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile and B-21 Raider stealth bomber as the core of its portion of the nation’s nuclear triad, Kendall said. It must also accelerate its shift to standoff capabilities that can be launched outside an enemy’s territory, as well as mature survivable stand-in capabilities such as Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD, drone wingmen known as collaborative combat aircraft, or CCA, and a next-generation refueling tanker.

Kendall’s report largely calls for continuing the Space Force’s current mission — just at a larger scale and with new architectures and tactics. It predicts growth in the number of satellites in orbit and in the size of the force that will operate them. While today, there are 10,000 guardians in the Space Force, he suggested that by 2050, there will be “multiples of this number.”

China will likely remain the “pacing challenge” for the U.S. and its allies, Kendall said. He predicted China will continue to develop militarily and be able to challenge the U.S. and its allies not only in the Indo-Pacific region but worldwide. Russia will also remain hostile and a “serious threat,” he said, but its economic weaknesses could hinder its military ambitions.

But many “wildcards” exist that make it hard to predict 25 years in the future, Kendall said, such as unforeseen technological advances, a potential nuclear exchange between nations or a Chinese attack on Taiwan. And the department needs to make several decisions to prepare for the possibility of a very different future.

Options on NGAD

One of the most pressing concerns for the Air Force — which will ultimately be up to the incoming Trump administration to decide — is how to modernize its fighter force to keep control of the skies in a future war.

For years, the service has planned to create NGAD as a family of systems with an advanced sixth-generation platform flying alongside CCAs to replace the F-22 Raptor, which was designed three decades ago to specialize in air superiority. The service originally planned to award an NGAD contract in 2024.

However, Kendall said Monday the service would have needed more than $20 billion added to its budget for research and development for NGAD. The potential cost of the platform turned out to be prohibitively expensive, about three times that of the F-35, which would have only allowed the Air Force to buy a small fleet of NGAD fighters.

Kendall put NGAD on hold while the service reconsidered its options and consulted with multiple airpower experts, but felt it was best to let the next administration make the final decision on how to proceed.

The Air Force felt there was “value” in going ahead with NGAD, Kendall said — but without a budget increase, the service needed to pay for other priorities first.

There are alternatives to an F-22 replacement like NGAD, Kendall said, such as another aircraft that would be an F-35 successor. That successor could, like the F-35, be a multirole aircraft that would be designed for controlling CCAs, he said — and could be “much less expensive” than NGAD.

Another alternative could be to further boost the Air Force’s long-range strike capability, Kendall said. Those capabilities could include long-range cruise missiles.

“That’s something we could do in any event,” Kendall said. “It’s relatively inexpensive, and probably makes some sense to do more that way.”

Kendall expressed hesitancy toward suggestions from some — including Trump adviser Elon Musk — that the Air Force should abandon efforts to build another post-F-35 crewed fighter and instead focus on drones.

“I don’t think we’re quite there yet,” Kendall said. “I think that could be considered.”

But a shift away from an Air Force with pilots would require a major cultural shift, Kendall said — one for which he’s not sure the service is ready.

“The culture and history and the legacy of the Air Force, which I have been steeped in … for my whole life, really, is about the role of the pilot,” Kendall said. “Letting go, to some degree, of that, is an incredibly difficult emotional thing for people to do.”

Space Force grows up

Although Kendall’s report doesn’t predict major changes to the Space Force’s mission, it does call for growth and a sense of urgency in response to aggression in the domain from China and Russia.

The document points to a “revolution” in space technology over the last decade that has changed the cost equation for accessing and operating in the space environment, and Kendall said he expects that to continue to shape global reliance on the domain over the next 25 years.

“We’re going to need a much bigger, much more capable, much more powerful Space Force,” he said at CSIS. “That’s a transformation that’s already started, and we’ve made some pretty good progress on that since just five years again when the Space Force was created and particularly in the last few years as we’ve moved to acquire and field distributed, resilient architectures.”

As part of that growth, Kendall said, the service will need to “expand substantially” its inventory of offensive, or counterspace, capabilities to defend against and respond to aggression from China and other adversaries. That could include a range of capabilities, he wrote in the report, from on-orbit kinetic weapons to others based on the ground. The service should also build improved battle damage assessment capabilities to mitigate any debris created by destroying satellites.

Another growth area for the service is surveillance and targeting — a mission that has traditionally been performed by aircraft. Under Kendall’s tenure, the Air Force has taken steps to shift that work to space-based sensors and communication networks.

The service will also need to invest in more automation of its space domain awareness systems, which observe, track and catalogue objects in space, Kendall said Monday.

“Trying to monitor all that and track it without a high degree of automation is impossible,” he said. “We’ve got to go much more in that direction.”

The report predicts that by 2050, common space-based sensors will share data with the Defense Department and intelligence community. Commercial data will also feed into those systems, making it harder for an enemy to decide which parts of the architecture to target.

Kendall’s report also suggests that long- and short-range missiles will continue to be the “preferred weapon,” making the Space Force’s missile warning and tracking capabilities increasingly important for the joint force. Those capabilities include space-based sensors that can detect and track ballistic missiles as well as hypersonic weapons, which can travel and maneuver at speeds above Mach 5.

“The resilient architectures being fielded now will evolve and be updated multiple times between now and 2050,” the report states. “Because of their importance to nuclear stability, these systems will be a high priority for reliability and resilience, but they also must be adequately survivable in a conventional conflict.”

Even a “reasonably modified” version of the Northrop Grumman-made Sentinel will likely cost $140.9 billion, 81% more than the program’s original cost estimate of $77.7 billion, the Pentagon said in a statement. If Sentinel continues on its current path without being modified, the likely cost will be about $160 billion, it said.

And the military expects restructuring the program will delay it by several years.

“There are reasons for this cost growth, but there are also no excuses,” William LaPlante, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said in a conference call with reporters on Monday. “We fully appreciate the magnitude of the costs, but we also understand the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and not addressing the very real threats we confront.”

The Sentinel is intended to replace the Air Force’s half-century old Minuteman III nuclear missile, which is nearing the end of its life. In January, the Air Force announced Sentinel’s future costs were projected to run over budget severely enough to trigger a review process known as a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach.

Such a review can sometimes lead to a program being canceled. LaPlante said Monday he decided to proceed with Sentinel after concluding it met several criteria, including that it is essential to national security and there were no cheaper alternatives that would meet the military’s operational requirements.

Big changes are coming for Sentinel, however. LaPlante rescinded the program’s Milestone B approval, which in September 2020 authorized the program to move into its engineering and manufacturing development phase. He also ordered the Air Force to restructure the program to address the root causes of the cost overruns and make sure it has the right management structure to keep its future price down.

The per-unit total cost for Sentinel was originally $118 million in 2020, when its cost, schedule and performance goals were set. When the Nunn-McCurdy breach was announced in January, those per-unit costs had grown at least 37% to about $162 million.

Hunter said the per-unit cost for the revised Sentinel program — which include components in addition to its missiles — is estimated to be about $214 million. He said the estimates from the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, or CAPE, office came with a 50% confidence level, meaning the costs could end up higher or lower.

Andrew Hunter, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said he agreed with LaPlante’s decision and pledged to draw up a plan for restructuring Sentinel over the next few months and get to a new Milestone B approval. The entire process for revising the program and getting the Pentagon to approve its new plan, cost and schedule will likely take 18 to 24 months, Hunter said.

Command and launch

LaPlante and Hunter said most of the projected overruns are coming from Sentinel’s command and launch segment, which will include its missile silos and accompanying launch control centers where airmen operate the ICBMs. Revamping that segment will be a major part of the Air Force’s cost control effort, they said, as well as improving its systems engineering and changing how its contract is structured.

LaPlante said changes will include a “scaling back” of the launch facilities to make them smaller, simpler and more cost-effective. Paring down the launch facilities will also shorten the timeline needed to transition from the existing Minuteman III system and the new Sentinel facilities, he said.

Hunter said the new Sentinel facilities will need more communications infrastructure beyond the 7,500 miles of copper cabling now in use for the Minuteman silos and launch centers. The Air Force’s planned modifications to Sentinel include more affordable ways to do that work, he said.

In a statement, Northrop Grumman said it “is making important progress on this highly complex weapon system,” and continuing to achieve milestones to mature its design and reduce risk to prepare for production and deployment in the future.

Northrop said those milestones include designing and developing Sentinel’s facilities, support equipment and missile, and tests of components such as its nose cone and three booster stages.

“We continue to perform and meet our commitments under the EMD contract as we move toward delivery of this essential national security capability,” Northrop Grumman said.

LaPlante said that in “hindsight,” the department didn’t originally have enough information on how complicated Sentinel’s ground-based systems would be to accurately estimate its costs. In the nearly four years since, the Pentagon has much better information on hand, he said.

The Air Force also set up a committee chaired by its most senior leaders to oversee its nuclear enterprise, including its bombers, ICBMs and command-and-control, Hunter said. And the department dedicated a program executive officer to be in charge of ICBMs, set up a Nuclear Systems Center, and is changing the leadership of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center from a two-star general to a three-star general, he said.

Hunter said the Air Force will “do what it takes to sustain Minuteman III to meet these warfighter requirements in the interim.”

Gen. Jim Slife, the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, said Sentinel’s cost growth is not expected to kick in during the next five years, and the hardest choices on what to cut won’t be made until after the program’s new baseline is set.

“It is a decision for down the road, to decide what trade offs we’re going to need to make,” Slife said.

But the service’s planned collaborative combat aircraft — drones that will fly alongside crewed fighters — probably won’t last even a single generation before they need to be replaced or heavily overhauled, Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said Thursday.

Allvin, speaking at the Air and Space Forces Association in Arlington, Virginia, said planning from the start to regularly replace CCAs is the best way to keep their missions simple and costs down, so the service can field them in significant numbers.

“I don’t want a set of collaborative combat aircraft that’s going to last for 25 to 30 years,” Allvin said. “If it’s going to last 25 or 30 years, then it’s gotta do everything but make you toast in the morning.”

Making CCAs into complex, multi-mission aircraft will inevitably drive up the cost, Allvin said, meaning the Air Force could only buy a limited number of them. ‘

Air Force officials have regularly talked about the need for CCAs to augment its crewed fighters and provide what they call “affordable mass.” A smaller fleet of more expensive drone wingmen, as Allvin is trying to avoid, would make achieving that affordable mass goal harder to reach.

Allvin instead envisions technology advancing quickly enough that after a decade, a class of CCAs might be outdated and ready to be replaced – or heavily updated with new technologies.

“That CCA won’t be as relevant — but it might be adaptable, and that’s why we’re building in the modularity,” Allvin said.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has told the service to plan for a CCA fleet of about 1,000 drones to fly alongside the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter and the service’s planned Next Generation Air Dominance fighter. The missions CCAs would carry out will likely vary and include strike operations, gathering intelligence and reconnaissance, conducting electronic warfare, and serving as decoys.

Kendall also made affordability a requirement for the CCA program, and has said each drone must cost a fraction of an F-35′s price tag.

In April, the Air Force announced it had selected Anduril and General Atomics to further develop designs for their CCA concepts, and then build production-representative test aircraft.

At Thursday’s event, Allvin noted the financial stresses the Air Force is facing, including inflation and limited budgets.

“All of those pressures are coming to bear against us, and we do have to ask the fundamental question: What does an effective Air Force look like in the future and how much of that is dependent on external resources?” Allvin said.

But when asked if the service will be able to produce NGAD as it has planned, Allvin did not explicitly commit to the sixth-generation fighter.

“We’re going to have to make those choices, make those decisions across the landscape,” Allvin said. “That’s going to probably play out in the next couple of years.”

Col. Josh Koslov, commander of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, has set an ambitious goal of updating EW systems within three hours, instead of days.

In a webcast hosted by C4ISRNET, Koslov said that three-hour goal — which he once referred to as a “moonshot” — is now within reach.

“We’re very close to that, if not exceeding, in most of the systems that we cover in the spectrum warfare wing,” Koslov said. He went on to say that more than half of the 70 EW systems his organization touches across the Air Force are either at or below the three-hour mark for updating.

But many of those systems have unique elements, he said, and the Air Force’s EW systems need to make more use of interoperability and open architecture standards to simplify the process for rapid data updates.

And Koslov said his wing will need enough resources to develop these data production methods that will allow the military to process this data on a large enough scale to work in war, and then transport the data back to the field.

Koslov and Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, the Army’s program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, said in the webcast that in a future war against an advanced adversary, conditions on the battlefield, threats and targets will likely change so quickly that rapid updates to EW systems will be critical.

‘Data is the weapon’

“We have to be able to continue to add pressure to the adversary in a war in order to seize the advantage and achieve our objectives,” Koslov said. “Data is the weapon that will allow this to happen, and data processing is the way to do that.”

This will include combining data from all sources in the joint force, such as Army units on land, naval ships in the Pacific, or airborne platforms, he said, and then combing through that information to find new threats. The military must then use that data to develop a way to counter that new threat, and then get that new capability back to the field.

To achieve these kind of rapid data updates, Koslov said, the Air Force has revamped its tactics, techniques and procedures to have more of a “warfighting” focus.

When asked whether data updates could be made to systems remotely, or whether they would require something to be physically plugged in, Koslov said that would depend on the EW system. He said information would be transported to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, where the 350th is located, or other reprogramming centers where more people can process the data.

That will be especially useful during a major conflict against a nation such as China or North Korea, he said, in which joint forces would be spread out across the Pacific region.

“When you come out with a new capability, it’s not good if you just get it into one pocket,” Koslov said. “You have to be able to get it across the force. And so centralizing that is going to be the right way to do that as we move forward.”

The Air Force activated the 350th in 2021, and has since been building up its capabilities by adding more units. Earlier this year, the wing stood up two new electronic warfare squadrons — the 388th at Eglin and the 563rd at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas.

The 563rd is focused on building new EW software for operational units to respond to the threats they encounter in the field. And the 388th is focused on studying adversaries such as China to find ways to breach and thwart their digital capabilities.

Koslov said his wing is next focused on building out the 950th Spectrum Warfare Group at Robins, which is expected to be fully activated in 2027. The 950th will be in charge of assessing the EW systems in Air Force’s combat aircraft and improving EW capabilities.

“Everything has to be assessed from a platform perspective — does the platform do what we’ve asked it to do?” Koslov said. “But also our [tactics, techniques and procedures] have to be assessed. … How good are we at fighting and training in the [EW] spectrum?”