The decision marks another example in Europe of national security factors seeping into political decisions that were deemed civilian in nature before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In this case, the issue is about two dueling interests: sustainable-energy independence and surveillance of the national airspace. That is because wind farms can interact with radar signals, reducing the quality of the situational air picture or even outright blocking out parts of the sky.

“The reaction time in the event of a missile attack could go from 2 minutes to 60 seconds with wind farms in the way,” Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson wrote in a series of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter. They were accompanied by a schematic drawing of the wind farms casting a “shadow” behind them in which missiles and cruise missiles would stay undetected.

The perceived threat clearly comes from Russia, with Jonson pointing out that “the proximity to the heavily militarized” Russian exclave of Kaliningrad was “important in this context.”

Experts speaking to Defense News for this story said wind farm radar interference is a known issue. And some expressed concern that as more and more wind farms are built, the effects could get worse unless countermeasures are put in place.

“Radar interference can impede air traffic control, weather forecasting, homeland security, and national defense missions,” U.S. Department of Energy spokesperson wrote in an email to Defense News, while also stressing that “the vast majority of wind projects … pose no significant impacts to radar missions.”

Radar performance

There are a number of ways that wind turbines, and especially large groups of them, can mess with the readings from a radar system. For one, they can show up on the screen because, just like any other object, they bounce back the electromagnetic waves that radar relies on. The fact that they are moving – the blades are spinning, and the turbines can change orientation – can make it more difficult for analysts to filter out the noise and find actual threats in the skies.

With the wingtips rotating at a speed of up to 370 kilometers per hour (around 230 mph), they move fast enough for doppler radars to sense them as moving objects, resulting in a false positive on an operator’s screen.

Benjamin Karlson leads the Wind Turbine Radar Interference Mitigation program at the American Sandia National Laboratories. His team has tested various concepts at mitigating the problem, he said, but “there’s no silver bullet.” Radar-absorbent coating is expensive and leaves the problem of a blind spots; temporary shutoffs lead to losses for the operators of wind farms; and infill, or fallback, radars are but costly workarounds.

Governments and private companies have been aware of the issue for decades, with the topic first being presented to the U.S. Congress in 2006. Considerable research has occurred in both the U.S. and U.K.

In the United States, “the communication between the developers and the federal agencies has grown over the years,” said Karlson. The Department of Defense, Federal Aviation Administration, the country’s weather service NOAA and others all have a stake in approving new wind farm developments. Despite these hurdles, Karlson said he wasn’t aware of a single case where a wind farm proposal had to be denied outright, though adjusting the placement of individual turbines, or tweaking their dimensions, is a more common practice.

“Most potential conflicts are dealt with through minor and routine mitigation measures in the federal project evaluation process,” the Department of Energy said in a statement.

Radar systems vary greatly so what might work for one can be completely ineffective on another. Over-the-horizon radars, for example, might be especially affected by offshore wind farms. As the name suggests, these systems have a much greater range than other radars, which are generally limited to the line of sight of the antenna and so cannot see past the curvature of the earth.

The longer-range variants bounce their beams off the ionosphere layer of the atmosphere before the waves travel back close to the surface – where wind farms can get in the way and may completely block out the signal. “There is no way of mitigating that aside from not building turbines,” said Karlson.

In his announcement, the Swedish defense minister did not specify what radar systems’ signals the country was concerned about blocking, and Karlson said that there was not enough information to make an educated guess.

Additionally, “the wind farms could also lead to reduced intelligence-gathering capabilities and disrupt sensors used to detect submarines,” Jonson said in his announcement. Altogether, the construction would have “unacceptable consequences for Swedish security.”

“Clearly, the Swedish government thinks there is a big concern,” said Karlson.

Energy requirements

Simultaneously, wind energy presents a crucial pillar in the clean energy transition, a topic that has gained exceptional pertinence in a Europe starved for energy since the Russian war in Ukraine. Traditionally, Europe obtained a large part of its energy from Russia, which controls vast oil and gas reserves and over decades built a network of pipelines to European countries to sell its hydrocarbons at a competitive price. While the green-energy transition predates the war, it has been turbocharged by it: Russia has used its leverage over European energy supply as a leverage and a weapon in its hybrid warfare, while European leaders have rushed to ween their countries off of Russian gas and oil.

According to the Swedish Energy Agency, the “supply of electricity in Sweden is stable.” Simultaneously, however, the government agency warned that “Sweden will have rising electricity prices” as a direct result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The planned wind farms would have had the potential to contribute significantly to Sweden’s renewable energy production, with the rejected plans seeing turbines stretching all the way from the Åland Islands along the east coast down to Öresund.

While the government blocked the construction of the 13 proposed wind farms in the Baltic, it also greenlit the construction of the “Poseidon” wind farm off the country’s western – NATO-facing – coast, with a maximum of 81 turbines producing up to 5.5 terawatt hours per year.

Sweden’s government has committed itself to double the country’s annual electricity production in the next twenty years, in anticipation of higher consumption. A buildup of the country’s nuclear power capacity is supposed to bear the brunt of this burden, though critics have pointed out that demand is expected to increase faster than new power reactors can go online.

Similar trade-offs between wind farm construction and radar visibility have had to be made in other European countries. The British and French ministries of Defense have objected to developments over similar concerns, and various other government agencies across the continent have issued guidelines for distances that should be maintained between wind farms and different types of radar stations.

Both energy independence and climate change have increasingly entered the realm of national security in national government across Europe and the world, with leaders seeing them as integral parts of their countries’ defense and prosperity. The Swedish government’s decision points the spotlight on one dimension of this interaction that has, until now, flown under the radar.

The agency is also working with Thales on quantum sensors for electronic warfare that will allow monitoring of a broad swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, Patrick Aufort, the head of the agency, told Defense News at last week’s Eurosatory defense show in Paris. Those sensors will be available within the next five years, he said.

France in 2022 earmarked €1.8 billion, or U.S. $1.93 billion, to develop quantum technologies, a rapidly evolving field that exploits the laws of quantum physics to create new forms of computing, communication and sensing. Quantum gravimeters measure falling, laser-cooled atoms to detect tiny variations in gravitational pull, which could be used to detect the mass of an adversary submarine. There are no methods for submarines to shield themselves from such sensors, according to a 2020 policy brief from the European Leadership Network.

The gravimeter “is particularly useful for the first applications we’re doing here, mapping the seabed,” Aufort said. “But afterward, we can imagine other uses for the gravimeter, notably for positioning, notably for detecting the existence of a cavity on the seabed.”

French defense-procurement agency DGA has been funding work by the French national aerospace research office Onera on quantum gravimeters since 2006, with a first demonstrator in 2016. The office has worked with France’s Muquans, now part of the technology firm Exail, to industrialize the production of the gravimeter.

The second development France is working on is quantum-based, electronic-warfare sensors, which will allow for a higher probability of intercepting emissions in the electromagnetic spectrum, including radar and communications, according to Aufort.

“Quantum technologies allow you to have both a much better resolution on what you’re going to detect and, above all, to have instant detection over a very wide bandwidth,” Aufort said. “You have access to much greater bandwidths, and so a higher probability of interception, because emissions are in fact fleeting.”

Quantum-based electronic warfare sensors can use laser-cooled quantum bits that interact with any incoming electromagnetic waves, measuring tiny changes in a qubit’s quantum state. Today’s analysis relies on rotating through different bands to monitor the entire spectrum.

France is working in particular with Thales on such quantum sensors, which are “a question of, I’m not going to say months, but years, in the next five years,” Aufort said.

The head of the defense innovation agency said quantum computers are also a “question of years,” and they may be a mix of traditional high-performance computing with a quantum part. The DGA in March awarded contracts to five domestic computer research startups to develop technology that will allow France to have two universal quantum computer prototypes by 2032.

The agency, tasked with analyzing overhead imagery, monitoring buildup of foreign materiel and mapping the Earth for military purposes, on May 6 published a commercial solutions opening asking companies to pitch their products for Project Aegir, meant to deepen U.S. understanding of what’s happening around the world.

Ballooning demand for commercial analytics and unclassified intelligence tied to the Indo-Pacific is motivating the move, according to NGA leadership. The region is home to some of the world’s largest militaries, ports and economies, with China increasingly making its presence known. Washington considers Beijing its top threat and has warned of consequences should its global ambitions go uncontested.

Improved maritime domain awareness — a deep understanding of what’s happening on, below, or near the water — is needed, and the private sector holds answers, according to NGA boss Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth. The appetite for imagery and analysis is growing, as showcased by the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars.

The Project Aegir solicitation “underscores our commitment to staying ahead of evolving threats and supporting frontline efforts against [illegal, unreported and unregulated] fishing, illicit trafficking, and other activities that pose threats to global security,” Whitworth said in a May 6 speech at the GEOINT conference in Florida.

He later told reporters much of the push came from Adm. John Aquilino, the former head of INDOPACOM. Adm. Samuel Paparo now holds the job.

Outcomes of the project, he added, could prove useful in hot spots such as the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Houthi rebels based in Yemen have for months targeted commercial and military vessels with drone and missile attacks. U.S warships Carney, Gravely, Laboon, Mason and Thomas Hudner have destroyed dozens of overhead threats since October.

Companies interested in the opening have until May 24 to submit responses, after which some will be selected for review by the Defense Innovation Unit. A $1.5 million pilot program could then follow, documents show.

Pillar 2 of the agreement focuses on advanced tech the nations can develop and field together. There are eight working groups focused on cyber, quantum, artificial intelligence, electronic warfare, hypersonics, undersea warfare, information sharing, and innovation, each with a list of ideas to quickly test and push to operators.

Leaders told Defense News how this process is playing out in the undersea warfare working group and how they aim to bring new capabilities to the three navies as soon as this year.

Dan Packer, the AUKUS director for the Commander of Naval Submarine Forces who also serves as the U.S. lead for the undersea warfare working group, said April 4 that the group has four lines of effort: a torpedo tube launch and recover capability for a small unmanned underwater vehicle; subsea and seabed warfare capabilities; artificial intelligence; and torpedoes and platform defense.

On the small UUV effort, the U.S. Navy on its own in 2023 conducted successful demonstrations: one called Yellow Moray on the West Coast using HII’s Remus UUV; and another called Rat Trap on the East Coast using an L3Harris-made UUV.

L3Harris’ Integrated Mission Systems president Jon Rambeau told Defense News in March that his team had started with experiments in an office using a hula hoop with flashlights attached, to understand how sensors perceive light and sound. They moved from the office to a lab and eventually into the ocean, with a rig tethered to a barge that allowed the company’s Iver autonomous underwater vehicle to, by trial and error, learn to find its way into a small box that was stationary and then, eventually, moving through the water.

Torpedo tube launch

Rambeau said the UUV hardware is inherently capable of going in and out of the torpedo tube, but there’s a software and machine learning challenge to help the UUV learn to navigate various water conditions and safely find its way back into the submarine’s torpedo tube.

Virginia-class attack submarines can silently shoot torpedoes from their launch tubes without giving away their location. If submarines can also fill their tubes with small UUVs, they’d gain the ability to stealthily expand their reach and surveil a larger area around the boat.

During a panel discussion at the Navy League’s annual Sea Air Space conference on April 8, U.K. Royal Navy Second Sea Lord Vice Adm. Martin Connell told Defense News that his country, too, would accelerate its work on developing this capability. He said the U.K. plans to test it on an Astute-class attack submarine this year, and then based on what worked for the U.K. and the U.S., they’d determine how to scale up the capability.

Packer said this effort will “make UUV operations ubiquitous on any submarine. Today, it takes a drydock shelter. It takes divers. It takes a whole host of Rube Goldberg kinds of things. Once I get torpedo tube launch and recovery, it’s just like launching a torpedo, but they welcome him back in.”

He added that the team agreed not to integrate this capability onto Australia’s Collins-class conventionally powered submarines now, but Australia will gain this capability when it buys the first American Virginia-class attack submarine in 2032.

On subsea and seabed warfare, Packer said all three countries have an obligation to defend their critical undersea infrastructure. He noted the U.K. and Australia had developed ships that could host unmanned systems that can scan the seabed and ensure undersea cables haven’t been tampered with, for example.

Connell said during the panel the British and Australian navies conducted an exercise together in Australia involving seabed warfare. This effort took just six months from concept to trial, he said, adding he hopes the team can continue to develop even greater expeditionary capability through this line of effort.

Packer said a next step would be collectively developing effectors for these seabed warfare unmanned underwater vehicles — “what are the hammers, the saws, the screwdrivers that I need to develop for these UUVs to get effects on the seabed floor, including sensors.”

The primary artificial intelligence effort today involves the three nation’s P-8 anti-submarine warfare airplanes, though it will eventually expand to the submarines themselves.

Packer said the nations created the first secure collaborative development environment, such that they can all contribute terabytes of data collected from P-8 sensors. The alliance, using vendors from all three countries’ industrial bases, is working now to create an artificial intelligence tool that can identify all the biological sources of sounds the P-8s pick up — everything from whales to shrimp — and eliminate those noises from the picture operators see. This will allow operators to focus on man-made sounds and better identify potential enemy submarines.

Packer said the Navy never had the processing power to do something like this before. Now that the secure cloud environment exists, the three countries are moving out as fast as they can to train their AI tools “to detect adversaries from that data … beyond the level of the human operator to do so.”

For now, the collaboration is focused on P-8s, since foreign military sales cases already exist with the U.K. and Australia to facilitate this collaboration.

Connell, without specifying the nature of the AI tool, said the U.K would put an application on its P-8s this year to enhance their onboard acoustic performance.

Packer noted the U.S. is independently using this capability on an attack submarine today using U.S.-only vendors and algorithms, but the AUKUS team plans to eventually share the full automatic target recognition tool with all three countries’ planes, submarines and surface combatants once the right authorities are in place.

And finally, Packer said the fourth line of effort is looking at the collective inventory of torpedoes and considering how to create more capability and capacity. Both the U.S. and U.K. stopped building torpedoes decades ago, and the U.S. around 2016 began trying to restart its industrial base manufacturing capability.

“The issue is that none of us have sufficient ordnance-, torpedo-building capability,” Packer said, but the group is looking at options to modernize British torpedoes and share in-development American long-range torpedoes with the allies ­— potentially through an arrangement that involves a multinational industrial base.

Vice Adm. Rob Gaucher, the commander of U.S. Naval Submarine Forces, said during the panel discussion that these AUKUS undersea warfare lines of effort closely match his modernization priorities for his own submarine fleet.

Pursuing these aims as part of a coalition, he said, strengthens all three navies.

“The more we do it, and the faster we do it, and the more we get it in the hands of the operators, the better. And then having three sets of operators to do it makes it even better,” Gaucher said.

The head of the Air Force, Gen. Marcelo Kanitz Damasceno, and the chief executive of Embraer Defense and Security, João Bosco Costa Jr., attended the company’s announcement during the FIDAE air show, which runs April 9-14 in Santiago, Chile.

During the presentation, a backdrop showed a C-390 Millennium transport aircraft, a type in service with Brazil, labelled as a maritime patrol aircraft and carrying anti-ship missiles.

The Air Force has started looking for options to replace its P-3AM Orion maritime patrol aircraft beginning in 2031, a military source in the capital of Brasilia told Defense News.

Already, companies appear keen to win a potential contract. Apart from Embraer’s announcement, the American firm Boeing put out a news release just ahead of the air show that emphasized its history in supplying the region with defense platforms.

At the show itself, Tim Flood, Boeing’s senior regional director for international business development in Europe and the Americas, specifically pointed to Brazil as the first potential customer in the region for the P-8, according to an article from Janes.

French defense firm Airbus also attended the show, promoting its C-295 twin turboprop maritime patrol aircraft. The Air Force already operates 10 of them in a maritime search and rescue role.

“A decision is set to be made by 2026,” the military source told Defense News, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic. “If the idea of developing a C-390 MPA is favored, there will be no tender, and a contract will be awarded to Embraer soon instead.”

“If not, a tender for bids will run between 2026 and 2027. The target will be to acquire a minimum of six aircraft, spread in two batches, with [the cost] under current estimations — if P-8 or an equivalent is selected and ordered — amounting to $3 billion,” the source added. “Deliveries of the new MPAs would start in 2031, to be completed in 2036.″

Why now?

The exploration and refinement of substantial reserves of oil and natural gas in Brazil’s littoral areas in the late 1990s drove the country to bolster its maritime surveillance capability, with the Navy and Air Force both playing critical roles.

However, the Air Force’s maritime patrol fleet at the time — the small, twin-engine turboprop Embraer P-95 Bandeirante, a version of the Embraer C-95 Bandeirante fitted with a nose-mounted AN/APS-128 radar — lacked the necessary range and endurance, among other capacities.

In the early 2000s, Brazil purchased 12 former U.S. Navy P-3A maritime patrol aircraft. The transaction was followed by a contract award to the Spanish company CASA, a subsidiary of Airbus, to refurbish and upgrade the aircraft. The plan was to modernize eight of them to more closely match the P-3C, with the remaining set of four used as a source of spare parts. They would be known as P-3AM aircraft.

The work led to an increased range and a 16-hour endurance, as well as the fitting of a new mission system built around the Airbus-made Fully Integrated Tactical System. The aircraft also received electro-optical, acoustic and magnetic anomalies sensors. They were also integrated with Boeing’s AGM-84L Harpoon Block II anti-ship missiles.

The P-3AM began entering service in 2011, with the last one delivered in 2014.

But according to the military source, the P-3AM fleet’s maintenance costs have increased substantially in recent years. To keep the P-3AM fleet operating would require “a substantial investment,” the source added, plus they would need upgraded mission systems, driving the cost higher.

Noting “older platforms also have limitations for capability growth,” the source said Brazil decided “to procure a new aircraft with a larger life service span, and also with a wider margin to grow capacities in order to meet future requirements.” This approach, the source added, would be more cost-effective.

“Options are being explored, and the idea to develop an MPA version of C-390 is popular, but it is yet to be seen if it is technically and financially feasible. To bring other nations and firms onboard, as customers and industrial partners, may be necessary,” the military source said.

The All-Domain Sensing Cross-Functional Team will grow out of the Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing/Space CFT, taking its current staff and director, Michael Monteleone, and expanding the mission to focus on broad deep-sensing capabilities.

The APNT/Space CFT has “solved the very hard problem and that is transitioning to [program managers] and [program executive offices] now, so that created some headspace,” Rainey said March 26 at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium.

Monteleone and four to five newly created billets will be added in Washington, D.C., because “that is kind of the center of gravity of all-domain sensing,” Rainey said. However, the majority of the team will remain in Huntsville, Alabama, where APNT/Space CFT was based.

The All-Domain Sensing CFT is expected to reach initial operational capability within six months, Rainey added.

While many details aren’t yet finalized, Rainey said the team will “work on the sensing architecture inside the Army and inside the joint force.”

“We have found ourselves in a situation where we actually don’t have a sensing problem, we have a ‘doing something’ with all the sensing that is happening problem across the joint force,” he explained.

Another area of focus includes processing and disseminating data coming off of a large proliferation of different sensors in order to rapidly make sense of the battlefield, which in turn helps leaders quickly make operational decisions, Rainey said.

“The Army cannot continue to build human analysts to keep up with the amount of data. We have to bring [artificial intelligence] and machine learning to bear,” he added. “Not to replace humans, but how do we take a thousand pictures that might be a tank and get it down to 10 or 100 that then our humans can discern?”

Rainey noted that industry can help.

Deep sensing will also improve reconnaissance and surveillance as well as long-range fires targeting.

Platforms could also include things like high-altitude, fixed-wing, solar-powered platforms, other unmanned aircraft or crewed spy planes with more capable sensors. The Army is experimenting with all of these capabilities.

The service is currently reviewing capabilities like high-altitude balloons to determine where they might reside within formations and how units might use them at places like the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. For example, the Army is experimenting with high-altitude balloons at the service’s major experimentation capstone event Project Convergence this month.

The Army will continue to review and evolve cross-functional teams as it continues to modernize and take programs from development into fielded systems.

Army Futures Command, which was established more than five years ago to tackle the service’s toughest modernization challenges, set up cross-functional teams to focus on different capabilities the service needs to fight in a multidomain environment against high-end threats and advanced adversaries.

The original teams focused on long-range precision fires; next-generation combat vehicles; future vertical lift; the network; positioning, navigation and timing; air and missile defense; soldier lethality; and the Synthetic Training Environment. The idea was to convene a whole range of Army officials, from training and doctrine writers to sustainment experts to acquisition officers to system operators, to ensure the success of a program.

The intelligence gathering platform, dubbed Rizwan, is described as an “offshore supply ship” by online shipping monitor MarineTraffic. Pakistan reportedly acquired the vessel from China last year with no fanfare, and the ship was spotted during a stopover in Jakarta, Indonesia, in June 2023, while sailing home.

It is a compact vessel some 87.2 meters long, with two large radar domes on the stern, which along with other sensors point to an intelligence gathering role.

Neither the Pakistan Navy nor the Ministry of Defence Production, which handles military acquisitions, would discuss the ship’s role and capabilities when asked by Defense News.

However, a source with knowledge of Rizwan’s operations, speaking on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the topic, confirmed to Defense News it is an “information gathering ship.” The source declined to provide further details.

Collin Koh, a senior fellow at the Singapore-based Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies think tank, said Rizwan appears to be an affordable and flexible design.

He told Defense News that the ship is based on the hull of an offshore support vessel, which makes “economical sense,” and that “aside from the huge radome that should serve as the electronic intelligence array, the platform might be able to accept varying mission modules if necessary.”

The ship looks to be dimensionally comparable to Norway’s intelligence gathering vessels Eger and Marjata, Sweden’s Artemis, or Germany’s Oste class, he added.

But Koh doubts Rizwan “has the onboard power capacity for telemetry missile tracking, like those found on the Chinese Yuan Wang series.” Instead, he explained, Rizwan is likely focused on gathering electronic and signals intelligence thanks to “onboard signals processing and analysis capabilities.”

He also said Rizwan’s modular configuration could support mission-specific equipment for hydrographic and oceanographic activities such as undersea gliders that can be launched from the stern deck.

Pakistan probably bought Rizwan in response to recent Indian acquisitions, as the two nations are archrivals, Koh added. And due to the relatively small size of Pakistan’s Navy, a dedicated electronic and signals intelligence platform will reduce the intelligence gathering burden on the service’s aircraft, ships and submarines, he explained.

These platforms would have mainly used electronic sensory measures to capture electromagnetic emissions, but “would have little or no capacity at all to process and analyze the signals,” he said. As a dedicated platform, Rizwan could therefore better monitor Indian naval activity “while freeing up the fleet combat assets for their primary duties.”

Rizwan’s acquisition should be seen in the broader context of Sino-Pakistani relations — specifically Beijing’s support for Pakistan’s military modernization efforts and attempts to keep India occupied in the Indian Ocean rather than beyond that area, said Pakistan analyst Mansoor Ahmed, an academic at Australian National University.

Alongside indigenous development as well as acquisition and production programs with the Dutch and Turkish governments, Chinese help is instrumental in advancing elements of Pakistan’s naval modernization plan. Such support is seen in Pakistan’s Hangor II submarines, long-range unmanned combat drones and anti-ship missiles.

“These and other projects will help plug gaps in fleet air defense, battle management, [electronic warfare], and [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] for a potent [anti-access/area denial] capability through three surface task groups operating in the Arabian Sea,” Ahmed said.

They will also transform Pakistan’s Navy into a “regional maritime force and will significantly reduce the overall asymmetry with the Indian Navy,” Ahmed added. It will also help keep India’s Navy “effectively engaged in ways that it will not be able to spare a large part of its assets for deployment beyond the [Indian Ocean region].”

The FY25 request includes $4.2 billion for Marine Corps ground procurement — up slightly from the $4.0 billion request in FY24 — as well as $3 billion more for research and development across its portfolio.

Among these efforts is the move from the NMESIS — the Navy/Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System that transforms an unmanned Joint Light Tactical Vehicle into a remote anti-ship missile launcher — to a Long Range Fires program with even greater range.

The Corps’ original NMESIS system uses the Naval Strike Missile, with an advertised range of greater than 100 nautical miles. Service leaders have said they’d like to see that range increase tenfold — which the Corps would realize with the addition of the Long Range Fires program.

Budget documents show a pause in NMESIS procurement, with zero units included in the FY25 request, after 24 in FY24 and 97 in FY23.

A new Long Range Fires program picks up where NMESIS leaves off in the budget, with the Corps asking for eight units in FY25 and 46 across the next five years.

Marine Corps spokesman Maj. Kevin Stephensen told Defense News these two are separate but complementary ground launcher programs.

“NMESIS is based on the Naval Strike Missile and provides a small, highly deployable missile launcher. This system is being fielded to the Marine Littoral Regiments as part of Force Design and will be the primary ground launched anti-ship capability in the Marine Corps,” he said, noting the procurement in FY23 and 24 completed the Marines’ needed initial capability.

Budget documents show that, while the Corps is done buying its initial tranche of launchers, it asks for money for 90 Naval Strike Missiles to boost the inventory as it stands up additional batteries.

Looking ahead on NMESIS, Stephensen said that the Corps is testing additional capabilities in FY25 that will be incorporated into a new production baseline that will begin in FY26.

The Long Range Fires program, on the other hand, “is based on the larger Tomahawk missile and provides a longer range but less deployable and mobile system that is being fielded to the 11th Marine Regiment in Camp Pendleton,” Stephensen said.

Whereas the NMESIS will hop around theater with highly mobile small units, the larger and heavier Long Range Fires “will deploy as requested by the Combatant Commander in support of long range strike missions,” Stephensen said.

Indeed, the Corps asked for 22 Block V Tactical Tomahawk missiles in the request. Long Range Fires “will support land and future maritime strike requirements and addresses capability gaps defined in the Joint Requirements Oversight Council,” according to the budget documents.

Elsewhere in the ground procurement budget, the Corps asks for funding for its Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar. The service purchased its last radar in FY23 but continues to make improvements to the sensor that’s at the heart of its Marine Littoral Regiment formation.

Stephensen said the money would cover upgrades such as retrofitting the first three systems built during low-rate initial production from the initial gallium arsenide semiconductor to the newer gallium nitride, more resilient communications to meet Pentagon-mandated GPS M-Code and Crypto modernization requirements, kits to upgrade four radars with an extended range mode and continued software development to integrate items including Naval Integrated Fire Control and Non-Cooperative Target Recognition.

Budget documents show this G/ATOR upgrade effort will cost $51.3 million and is meant to “provide unprecedented reach, volume, and precision in the execution of Operational Maneuver from the Sea, allowing naval forces to project and sustain power deep inland,” according to the documents.

The Corps’ procurement budget also asks for $810.3 million to buy 80 Amphibious Combat Vehicle 30mm variants ­— which adds a cannon atop the vehicle, compared to the personnel transport variant the Marines first bought — $340.5 million for 674 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles and 340 companion trailers, and $180 million for Marine Air Defense Integrated System Increment 1 systems that deploy atop the JLTV.

The research and development budget request includes $60.2 million for the ACV program to complete prime contractor test support for the ACV-30 variant, and to continue design work and build three production readiness test vehicles for the ACV recovery variant.

Within the Navy’s aviation procurement account, the Corps requests funding for 19 of its CH-53K King Stallion heavy lift helicopters, which would kick off a two-year block buy for the helos themselves and a five-year multiyear procurement contract for the engines.

The Pentagon will release an updated DoD Arctic Strategy this spring to help answer these questions, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Arctic and Global Resilience Iris Ferguson told Defense News.

Not only do all the services have their own operational requirements and acquisition needs related to Arctic operations, but five combatant commands — U.S. Northern Command, European Command, Indo-Pacific Command, Transportation Command and Strategic Command — also have separate interests and priorities above the Arctic Circle.

The Arctic and Global Resilience Office, established in September 2022, is meant to be a home and a clearinghouse for these issues, Ferguson said in a Feb. 21 interview. One of the office’s first tasks was to understand which requirements overlap and which are distinct, and then to start to prioritize them.

An Arctic Campaign Team, led by O-5 and O-6 officers but also looping in top service leadership, resulted from this requirements integration process.

The DoD Arctic Strategy, which could be released by the end of April, will highlight how the Arctic has changed in the last five years, both in terms of climate change and its impact as well as Russia and China increasingly acting alone and together to destabilize the region.

A “ways and means” section, Ferguson said, will for the first time try to unpack all the services’ and combatant commands’ acquisition needs so industry can begin to understand where they can help out.

Each service’s needs will look a bit different: the Army’s 11th Airborne Division in Alaska needs additional cold-weather gear to operate in the Pacific side of the Arctic; the Air Force and Space Force are focused on homeland defense missions across the northern border; the Navy conducts submarine and anti-submarine patrols in European Arctic waters but is seeking ways to increase its surface ships’ ability to operate there.

What’s common, though, is the need for greater domain awareness and communications.

Ferguson said DoD and industry can help define what communications they need and what architectures are best suited for that difficult high-latitude environment — be it satellite communications, high frequency communications, ground-based communications or something else. They can also tackle what intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance is needed to understand the full threat picture, from missiles coming across the top of the world to submarines lurking under the ice towards American shores.

Ferguson said the bottom line is that the U.S. military needs the ability to monitor and respond to any threat from the north, and that means having the ability to detect.

Once the strategy is released, and with it a prioritized list of acquisition and research needs, she said she intends to attend all the big trade shows this year to talk to industry about opportunities to tackle these challenges.

Ferguson said the strategy would highlight three main points: enhancing U.S. capabilities with a focus on domain awareness; engaging with allies and partners not only for collective operations but also collaborative capability development; and “calibrated presence” in the Arctic to create a deterrent effect.

These priorities nicely match what U.S. Fleet Forces Command wants for the Navy’s Arctic efforts: maintain an enhanced presence, strengthen cooperative partnerships, and build a more capable Arctic maritime force.

After giving a speech on the Artic at an American Society of Naval Engineers’ Arctic and Antarctic operations conference on March 6, Fleet Forces commander Adm. Daryl Caudle told reporters the Navy would need to take a look at its access, basing and overflight across the Arctic. He said the U.S. relies heavily on its European allies and partners for this, but the Navy needs to consider if it needs additional facilities to operate out of the Aleutian islands, for example, or how it may leverage a deep water port that’s coming to Nome, Alaska.

Caudle said the key is to be able to monitor the Arctic, conduct replenishment operations to sustain forces operating there, and have some sort of personnel recovery capability.

Today, the bulk of U.S. Navy Arctic presence comes from the submarine fleet that operates under the ice, and the P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol and anti-submarine warfare plane that flies above.

As such, he said, Naval Submarine Forces is the type commander with Arctic responsibilities, the undersea warfare directorate on the chief of naval operations’ staff (OPNAV N97) is the primary resource sponsor for Arctic operations, and the Undersea Warfare Development Center is in charge of Arctic doctrine.

“Is that correct? Does that get after the total picture? No, it does not,” Caudle told reporters, noting these efforts didn’t account for aircraft carriers, surface ships or amphibious ships with Marines operating in the region and what their needs were.

He suggested the Navy might need to consider standing up an Arctic office to work across communities, to ensure the Navy is investing in the full breadth of requirements to support Arctic presence.

Asked what that presence should look like from the surface ship community, the admiral said “nothing demonstrates presence better than a surface ship.”

Though the presence of U.S. submarines does deter adversaries’ military behavior, Caudle acknowledged surface ships flying the American flag sends a clearer signal.

Going forward, he said he’d like to see some portion of every deploying carrier strike group spend at least a little time north of the Arctic Circle.

“Zero [presence] is definitely not right, but I think a continuous presence is probably not right either,” he said. “I think the right amount is that amount necessary to build our strategic messaging campaign that we’re not going to cede the Arctic to anyone. We’re going to keep it free and open for the flow of commerce, we’re going to protect people’s [exclusive economic zones], and we’re going to have the capability to be in those waters at our timing and tempo.”

More details will come toward the end of the month when Army Futures Command commander Gen. Jim Rainey unveils the new CFT at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, the chief said.

George told reporters at the March 7 McAleese & Associates annual defense forum in Washington that the Army is seeing a wide variety of technology that can help the service see farther and better including high-altitude balloons with a variety of payloads.

Deep sensing will help with reconnaissance and surveillance as well as long-range fires targeting.

“It gets back to the sensors and how that’s going to look inside our formations, that’s what we’re working toward,” George said.

Deep sensing platforms could also include things like high-altitude, fixed-wing, solar-powered platforms, other unmanned aircraft or manned spy planes with more capable sensors. The Army is experimenting with all of these capabilities.

The service is currently taking capabilities like high-altitude balloons and figuring out where they might reside with formations and how they might be employed by units at places like the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, George noted. For example, the Army is experimenting with high-altitude balloons at the service’s major experimentation capstone event Project Convergence now underway.

Army Futures Command, which was established more than five years ago to tackle the Army’s toughest modernization challenges, set up cross-functional teams to focus on different capabilities the service needs to fight in a multidomain environment against high-end threats and near-peer adversaries.

The original CFTs are Long-Range Precision Fires, Next-Generation Combat Vehicles, Future Vertical Lift, the Network, Precision Navigation and Timing, Air-and-Missile Defense, Soldier Lethality and Synthetic Training Environment. The idea was to convene a whole range of Army officials, from training and doctrine writers to sustainment experts to acquisition officers and even system operators, to ensure the success of a program.

A year ago, Rainey said there would be some changes to CFTs down the road as programs are fielded and that some new CFTs would emerge.

At last year’s Global Force Symposium, Rainey unveiled plans for the Army’s newest CFT, one that would focus on contested logistics and would be based in Huntsville nested near Army Materiel Command, which handles logistics capabilities.