The deals cover avionics and ejector assemblies Boeing supplies to prime contractor Raytheon, an RTX business, for both the SM-3 Block IB and the newer Block IIA. Both variants operate with the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System to destroy incoming missiles outside the atmosphere.

“These agreements ensure our Warfighters get the munitions they need to win,” Michael P. Duffey, under secretary of war for acquisition and sustainment, said in the Pentagon release. “We are stabilizing our supply chains, expanding munitions production and putting our entire defense industrial base on a wartime footing.”

The frameworks run for seven years and allow Boeing to start building components before a contract is in place, while the three sides negotiate a multiyear deal. The long-term commitment is intended to give suppliers enough certainty to invest in added capacity. Neither the Pentagon nor Boeing released dollar figures or quantities.

“This gives us a clear demand signal to build and deliver SM-3 interceptors at the levels needed to counter threats,” Bob Ciesla, vice president of Boeing Precision Engagement Systems, said in a company statement. “The SM-3 is an essential part of the layered air and missile defense architecture that protects the U.S. and its allies worldwide.”

The approach mirrors a seven-year deal Boeing struck in April to triple production of PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement seekers, part of a broader Pentagon effort to lock in supply from key subcontractors alongside the prime contractors.

Earlier this month, the Missile Defense Agency awarded Raytheon a $745 million contract to produce fully assembled SM-3 Block IIA interceptors for the United States and Japan.

Demand for the interceptor traces back to April 2024, when Navy destroyers first fired SM-3s in combat, helping to thwart an Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israel. Far more interceptors have been launched since, including those fired in Operation Epic Fury.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated the SM-3 inventory at 414 as of December 2025. A May analysis from the center put wartime expenditures between 130 and 250 missiles and warned that replenishment will take years.

Congress has stepped in to keep the Block IB line open, the cheaper of the two variants covered by Friday’s agreements, after the Missile Defense Agency proposed ending new purchases in the fiscal 2025 budget request.

Installed in the nose of a missile or bomb, the seeker locates the target and guides the weapon toward it. Seekers are among the most expensive parts of a guided weapon, and Boeing’s argument is that their cost is what limits how many the military can buy.

Boeing’s Ultra Low-Cost Seeker, or ULCS, is an active seeker, meaning it emits its own radar signal rather than relying on one from an aircraft or a ground station. Boeing built it largely from commercial parts adapted for military use, and it is still in development.

The company said it is looking at using the ULCS in its air and missile defense interceptors, its guided bombs and its cruise missiles, because its design allows for reuse across all three rather than requiring a different seeker for each weapon.

Boeing said the seeker is designed for strikes from the air, land or at sea, in any weather and against moving targets. The company ran several tests on the ULCS earlier this summer.

Engineers checked the sensor design in an anechoic chamber, which absorbs stray signal reflections. The seeker also flew aboard a Beechcraft 1900 over land and water, where Boeing said it found and tracked targets as expected.

At Spaceport America in New Mexico, the seeker tracked a passing drone from a fixed position on the ground. Boeing then mounted it on a rocket standing in for a missile and launched it at a second drone carrying a reflector, which bounced radar back as a full-size target would. Boeing said the seeker survived the acceleration and vibration of every test, and detected and tracked its targets each time.

Reuse across weapons is the major selling point, according to Boeing.

“We are developing ULCS with the goal of sharing a common sensor architecture across several of our programs,” said Bob Ciesla, vice president of Boeing Precision Engagement Systems. He said the seeker is modular and built to an open standard so Boeing can fit it to different weapons and change it later without redesigning it.

Boeing already builds seekers for other weapons, some of them for competitors. The company makes the active radar seeker for the Lockheed Martin PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptor and said it drew on that work for ULCS while aiming to build something cheaper for use against less sophisticated threats.

Steve Wright, Boeing’s senior manager for weapon sensors and advanced guidance, said work remains to be done.

“We still have more work to do, but the rapid testing our teams have completed prove[s] that this capability is real and will fundamentally change how we look at seeker affordability across our programs,” he said.

Boeing said its teams are studying the test data and using the results to shape the next round of work, including several flight tests in 2027 that will attempt to more closely replicate real-world scenarios.

Boeing is not alone in its attempts to exploit modularity. On Aug. 10, Lockheed Martin announced Strigo, a line of radio-frequency sensors, missile datalinks and seeker technologies built around the same modular premise, designed to serve a variety of weapons.

Boeing did not say whether its ULCS is being funded internally or attached to any existing funded weapons program. Nor did it say just how ultra-low the cost of its new seeker will be.

The company said the shared architecture allows Strigo hardware to be reconfigured for different missions, including air defense, missile defense and air-to-surface strike.

Lockheed calls the Strigo Product Center a storefront for “ready-now and near-ready” hardware that it said can be adapted to customer needs. The company said the modular approach also lowers life cycle costs, though it stopped short of citing dollar figures. Lockheed said it has made a $250 million internal investment in the product center to date.

The center was established less than two years ago and has already carried several concepts from initial design through testing, according to the release. The company said the center can move a concept from sketch to tested solution in months rather than years, allowing it to have parts on the shelf before the military even asks for them, in some cases.

Stacy Kubicek, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Sensors and Global Sustainment, said in the release that the product center’s emphasis on early research allows the company to “test and deploy new solutions at unprecedented speed,” adding, “That’s how we turn ‘what if’ into ‘what’s next’ faster than ever before.”

Lockheed said technologies developed through the Strigo family played a role in developing the Increment 2 seeker package for the U.S. Army’s Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), which is replacing the Army Tactical Missile System. The seeker package adds a sensor in a missile’s nose that locates and tracks its target in the final phase of flight.

Lockheed said it flew Increment 2 for the first time in March, travelling 350-kilometers, or more than 217 miles, in a flight that gathered performance data. The company did not report an intercept.

Strigo is the latest in a string of announcements this year in which Lockheed has pitched itself as building weapons faster and cheaper. In March, the company opened a Rapid Fielding Center that builds prototypes and early production runs under one roof, part of a larger plan to build or upgrade factories.

In July, it introduced the PAC-3 ACE, a Patriot interceptor it says will cost less than half as much as a PAC-3 MSE. These latest moves are pitched as supporting the Arsenal of Freedom, the Pentagon’s term for the munitions industrial base buildup.

Lockheed’s release was short on details regarding the size, structure or location of the Strigo Product Center. It did not name any contracts, customers or delivery timelines beyond the PrSM reference.

Boeing’s BSU-111/B Payload Delivery Unit is a wing-and-turbojet engine kit that converts a 500-pound Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) into a long-range JDAM (JDAM LR) dubbed the GBU-75. The result is a gravity bomb with the reach of a cruise missile.

Boeing said it has spent nearly $100 million of its own money on the program.

“Scaling production of the GBU-75 will provide the fleet with an affordable, sustainable solution designed to eliminate long-range land and sea-based threats to U.S. and international forces,” said Bob Ciesla, vice president of Boeing Precision Engagement Systems.

The BSU-111/B wing-and-engine kit is the latest modification to the JDAM family, which has previously seen the gravity bomb receive a tail kit that steered it roughly 15 nautical miles and a wing kit that further stretched that distance to 40.

The Kratos-designed TDI-J85 engine pushes that past 300.

The JDAM LR’s capabilities go beyond land strikes. The QuickStrike Long Range mining variant pairs it with a bomb carrying a ship-tracking sensor. Boeing has shown concepts loading large numbers onto Air Force bombers, though no Air Force buy has been announced.

The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, buys JDAM for both the Air Force and U.S. Navy. The first GBU-75s are bound for the Navy.

The Navy demonstrated the weapon back in April, when Super Hornets released two JDAM LRs over the Point Mugu Sea Range off California.

The April 1 round separated cleanly, fired up its engine and flew 34 minutes before landing within meters of its target. The April 3 round added altitude changes and maneuvering. Each covered roughly 200 nautical miles.

When announcing those tests in April, Capt. Sarah Abbott, the Navy’s Precision Strike Weapons program manager, emphasized the need to give the fleet’s JDAMs greater standoff range.

“As Naval Air Forces in theater continue to rely heavily on JDAM systems, the program recognizes a critical need to provide the fleet with greater standoff range,” she said. “This new capability allows pilots to engage targets from significantly safer distances, maintaining a tactical advantage in contested environments.”

Reusing existing infrastructure is a key aspect of the program’s appeal.

Navy budget documents describe JDAM LR as a modification to the baseline program, built on the existing production line and guidance hardware. Any jet that can drop a conventional JDAM can carry the new variant without modification, according to Boeing’s release.

The award, which had not appeared in the Pentagon’s daily contract announcements as of Aug. 5, is an undefinitized action, meaning Boeing began work before the two sides agreed on a price. The Government Accountability Office has long called these contracts risky because contractors are reimbursed for allowable costs, regardless.

Boeing’s release did not say how many GBU-75s the contract buys, how much they cost or when deliveries begin.

The announcement builds on an eventful few weeks for the company’s Corsair drone boats.

On July 12, three Corsairs struck Iran’s Bandar Abbas naval base in what U.S. Central Command called the first combat use of unmanned surface vessels by American forces.

Weeks earlier, a Navy-operated Corsair helped rescue two soldiers after their Army AH-64 Apache went down near the Strait of Hormuz, a mission Central Command called another first of its kind by an unmanned surface vessel.

Founded in 2022, Saronic first unveiled plans for Port Alpha in February 2025 but stopped short of naming a site or a cost. Plans now include an initial 835-acre site in Cameron County, with room to grow to nearly 4,400 acres. It’s an investment the company puts at more than $3 billion. The site was chosen over competing sites in California and Virginia, among others.

Construction is set to break ground this year, with the yard expected to open in 2028. Initially, the facility will be capable of building vessels up to 850 feet, about the length of a U.S. Navy Wasp-class amphibious assault ship, though future expansion could support vessels longer than 1,200 feet, the company said.

Saronic estimates Port Alpha could create up to 10,000 direct jobs over the next decade, from welding and machining to robotics, software engineering and naval architecture. The company also projects $264.5 billion in economic impact for Texas and $160 billion for Cameron County.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who announced the project from Saronic’s Austin headquarters, said a fully built-out yard would deliver about $750 million a year in wages, a sum he called “game-changing for the population of Texas.”

To help land the project, the state extended an $80 million grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund, according to the governor’s office.

Last month, Cameron County commissioners approved a 95% tax abatement for the project over roughly two decades, according to USNI News. The agreement is contingent on Saronic filling 35% of the yard’s jobs with local residents, and the tax break shrinks if the company misses its local hiring targets, the Texas Tribune reported.

The deal was not without local opposition. According to the Border Chronicle, at least 40 people testified or submitted written statements against the abatement, some questioning why a company valued at $9.25 billion needed a tax break. The June 16 vote passed only after two earlier delays and hours of testimony.

Port Alpha would become Saronic’s third site. It runs a plant in central Texas that turns out the 24-foot Corsair, for which the Navy awarded a $392 million production contract in December, and last year it bought a former Gulf Craft yard in Franklin, Louisiana, where it is spending $300 million to build the larger, 180-foot Marauder.

Dino Mavrookas, Saronic’s co-founder and chief executive, did not specify which ships Port Alpha would build but told reporters the company envisions autonomy playing a role in larger hulls over time, according to USNI News.

“Those ships might not be fully autonomous or fully unmanned on day one,” he said. “But over time, as we look at building out the tech and building out the industry as a whole, there’s no reason that you can’t unman those ships completely.”

Port Alpha arrives amid a federal push to rebuild a U.S. shipbuilding base that has fallen far behind China’s. Saronic tied the project to an executive order on maritime dominance that President Donald Trump issued in April 2025, along with the SHIPS for America Act and a federal Maritime Action Plan, all aimed at reversing decades of decline in commercial and naval ship production.

“America’s maritime future depends on our ability to build again,” said Mavrookas, adding that the yard was built “to deliver ships at a speed and scale not seen since World War II.”

Saronic is one of seven companies competing for the Navy’s medium unmanned surface vessel contract, with at-sea testing set to run through October.

The company said it will work with Texas, Cameron County and local schools to build training and apprenticeship programs for the yard, but did not say when it expects to name customers or specific ship classes for Port Alpha.

The deals fall under the U.S. Air Force’s Family of Affordable Mass Missiles program, or FAMM. The Defense Department said it reached agreements with Anduril for its Barracuda-500, CoAspire for its Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missile and Zone 5 Technologies for its Rusty Dagger.

The move boils down to cost-effectiveness. The Air Force is betting that low-cost weapons can do the work the service once reserved for far more expensive munitions.

Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, designed to be fired at heavily defended targets from a safe distance, cost more than $1.3 million apiece. The service wants its new missiles for a fraction of that, closer to $218,000 per round, cheap enough to shoot many for less than it once cost to shoot one.

The FAMM program splits into a lugged variant carried by fighters and bombers (FAMM-L) and a palletized variant dropped from airlifters (FAMM-P), both with ranges of 250 to 500 miles.

Anduril said its framework agreement runs seven years, with deliveries starting in 2027. According to the company, the Air Force intends to buy up to 8,000 FAMM rounds a year across both variants and all the competing vendors.

The deals are framework agreements, not orders for missiles. They set the terms and promise the companies steady business, giving them a reason to invest in bigger production lines.

The Defense Department said the missiles still have to complete testing and qualification, and that the actual buys depend on Congress approving the multiyear deals the Pentagon is seeking.

Anduril pitched its missile as proof that cheaper weapons can be built at volume.

“Barracuda-500 is specifically designed to expand the United States’ stand-off strike capability,” Anduril said in its release. “By augmenting existing critical munitions inventories with a more affordable, producible, and flexible option, Anduril is enhancing America’s arsenal of munitions, ensuring that we have the capability required to deter our adversaries.”

To keep the vendors competing, the Pentagon is splitting the work among all qualified suppliers under firm fixed-price terms with a minimum order floor, and companies that beat their production schedules become eligible for additional orders.

Budget projections call for 28,000 missiles across all vendors over five years for $12.6 billion, reaching 7,990 rounds in the final year.

The agreements stem from the Acquisition Transformation Strategy, the Pentagon’s push under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to buy weapons faster and from nontraditional suppliers.

Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Michael P. Duffey said the FAMM deals showed the department “expanding the defense industrial base, fielding capabilities faster, and attracting private investment.”

Zone 5 runs its U.S. operation from California but was acquired in June by Kongsberg, a Norwegian defense company. Anduril and CoAspire are based in California and Virginia, respectively.

The agreement comes on the heels of a May announcement that tapped the same three companies, along with Leidos, for the Army-led Low-Cost Containerized Missiles program, a parallel push for ground-launched affordable missiles.

The Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems, or DRPM-UxS, will become “the single joint integrator for all unmanned and autonomous system programs” in the department, according to a June 29 memo the Pentagon made public Wednesday. Its director, yet to be named, will answer to Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg and oversee how the military develops, buys, fields and sustains unmanned systems in the air, on the ground and at sea.

The office’s reach is wide, including small drones in unmanned aircraft groups 1 through 3, unmanned boats, ground robots and counter-drone systems. It also covers the artificial intelligence and swarming software that guides them. Unmanned underwater vehicles will be handled jointly with the Pentagon’s submarine portfolio manager.

The office’s authority stops short of the Pentagon’s major defense acquisition programs, the big-ticket programs that already follow a separate approval process set in law. That means large airframes like the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft and the Navy’s MQ-25 Stingray and MQ-4C Triton stay with the services, as does the Navy’s medium unmanned surface vessel.

Two existing organizations are now moving under the new office. Joint Interagency Task Force 401, which has led the fight against small aerial drones, will expand to countering unmanned threats in every domain. The Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, the Pentagon’s effort to mass-produce cheap drones, becomes a subordinate element. Neither will see its staff or positions relocated, the memo notes.

The new office inherits one of the largest spending increases in the Pentagon’s budget. The department’s latest budget request set aside $53.6 billion for autonomous drone platforms, part of what Pentagon officials called an unprecedented commitment to drones and counter-drone systems.

Separately, the memo names the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s link to commercial tech firms, as the single point of contact for the new portfolio.

The office holds significant power. It will act as the milestone decision authority for its programs, the official who decides whether a weapon advances through development, and it will take precedence on drone acquisition matters behind only Hegseth and Feinberg.

The office can act as the top buying official on its contracts, order the services to shift money between programs through the Pentagon comptroller, and stop any system from reaching the field.

The move also centralizes congressional engagement through the DRPM-UxS, requiring every part of the department to clear its drone-related plans with the office before contacting lawmakers.

The memo says the office’s programs, jobs and people are exempt from the department’s hiring freezes, personnel reductions and reductions in force, and gives its chief the power to hire directly. The memo also lays out a staffing timeline. Once a director is named, hiring is to begin within 30 days, an organizational plan is due within 60 and a full list of the programs moving over is due within 90.

The reorganization is the latest step in Hegseth’s push to field weapons faster, a broader “speed to delivery” initiative that has already drawn warnings from the government’s top auditor.

A Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday found the Pentagon’s independent testing office, which Hegseth cut from 126 civilian jobs to 30 last year, now watches just 15 of about 110 active programs on one fast-track buying pathway, Defense News reported.

It is the latest of several direct reporting portfolio managers Hegseth’s team has stood up to pull the department’s top priorities under Feinberg, and the widest in scope. What this all means for the drone programs already underway inside the services is not spelled out in the memo.

The Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) is the Pentagon’s independent authority on whether new weapons work as intended before reaching the field. In fiscal 2024, DOT&E received $10.6 million specifically to expand its oversight of programs using the Pentagon’s middle tier of acquisition (MTA) pathway, a streamlined process designed to field new capabilities faster by bypassing traditional acquisition steps.

As of February 2026, DOT&E’s oversight list included just 15 of roughly 110 active MTA efforts. The office’s action officers, the staff responsible for assessing individual programs, warned that the services could use MTA and other rapid prototyping pathways to sidestep the operational and live-fire testing requirements written into law.

The gap traces back to a Pentagon reorganization that hollowed out DOT&E’s workforce starting in May 2025. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the office cut from 126 authorized civilian positions to 30, eliminated all but one Senior Executive Service (SES) position and ended contractor support within seven days, according to the memo GAO reviewed.

Hegseth’s memo projected $300 million in annual savings and said the changes would “improve the lethality, readiness, and efficiency of our Armed Forces.” Defense News reported at the time that the cut amounted to more than 50% of the office.

The reorganization unfolded in stages over nearly a year. DOT&E issued six separate reduction-in-force (RIF) notices between June and October 2025 before a continuing resolution paused RIF activity government-wide that November. Staffing partially recovered, reaching 45 positions by September 2025, though it remains well below pre-reorganization levels.

The DOT&E cuts were not an isolated move. They foreshadowed a broader overhaul Hegseth unveiled in November 2025, when he announced the Pentagon would replace its program executive officers with “portfolio acquisition executives” under a system he renamed the Warfighting Acquisition System. “We mean to increase acquisition risk in order to decrease operational risk,” Hegseth said in his National War College address, where he also declared, “Speed to delivery is now our organizing principle.”

The reorganization of DOT&E’s independent testing office reflects an inherent tradeoff: faster fielding, with less independent scrutiny built into the process.

The toll shows up in the numbers. DOT&E’s overall oversight list, not just MTA efforts, fell from 265 programs in fiscal 2024 to 173 in fiscal 2025, a drop of more than 90 programs. The list had held roughly steady for years before that, ranging from 237 to 266 programs between fiscal 2021 and 2024. The one-year collapse marks a sharp break from that trend rather than a continuation of it.

Reasons for the removals, GAO found, ranged from completed testing and program cancellations to mergers and DOT&E’s own determination that oversight was no longer necessary.

Action officers told GAO that workforce reductions left them responsible for more weapons programs, often in areas outside their background, and pointed to specific expertise gaps in electronic warfare oversight. That increases the chance, GAO concluded, that weapon systems reach warfighters with “undocumented shortfalls related to effectiveness, suitability, survivability, or lethality.”

The finding points only to the risk, not a confirmed case of a fielded system reaching troops with an undetected problem.

GAO’s findings echo warnings raised when the reorganization was first announced. Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Jack Reed, D-RI, called the move “reckless and damaging” at the time, warning that a skeleton crew with limited contractor support could leave DOT&E unable to adequately oversee critical defense programs, undermining independent oversight and exposing warfighters and taxpayers to untested systems. Reed made the remarks amid oversight concerns over the administration’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative.

GAO’s review also found the cuts were not evenly distributed, with DOT&E protecting some capacity even as it shrank elsewhere. Two warfare-area directorates were eliminated outright, one covering net-centric, space and missile defense systems, the other handling strategic initiatives, policy and emerging technologies. Two new units focused on cyber and space were stood up and staffed up faster than most of the rest of the office, according to GAO’s data.

The reshuffling reached the top of the office as well. The reorganization eliminated DOT&E’s SES-level deputy director positions, which had given the office standing roughly equivalent to a two-star general in dealings with the services’ acquisition communities. In their place, the office dual-hatted non-supervisory GS-15 action officers into deputy roles. DOT&E’s current director told GAO he is working to convert those into senior GS-15 supervisory positions.

DOT&E has also missed a deadline set by Congress. The explanatory statement accompanying the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, directed the office to report to congressional defense committees within 60 days of the law’s enactment on how the reorganization affected its testing activities. As of May 2026, that report had not been submitted.

GAO issued no formal recommendations but raised several questions for lawmakers. One is whether MTA programs should be written explicitly into DOT&E’s statutory oversight authority, since the pathway currently falls outside the office’s formal mandate.

Another is whether deputy director positions should carry SES rank to ensure continuity. A third is whether DOT&E needs its own repository for test and evaluation data rather than relying on the Institute for Defense Analyses’ contractor-managed system.

The maneuver surfaced in a Wednesday report accompanying the House Appropriations Committee’s fiscal 2027 defense bill, and it runs on money the White House went looking for a week earlier.

In a June 17 budget amendment to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., the Office of Management and Budget asked Congress to steer more than $1.55 billion into the Air Force’s research and development account to keep the airborne battle management jet alive — money the service had left out of its original request after the Pentagon moved to cancel the program just a year ago.

Getting there required two cuts and one deposit.

OMB carved about $651 million from the Navy account that buys the E-2D Hawkeye and $899 million from the Air Force’s other procurement account. It funneled the combined sum into Air Force research, development, test and evaluation.

The House report pins the Air Force half on the Special Update Program, one of the service’s classified procurement lines.

The justification ran identically across all three amendments: The money would “deliver two E-7 Wedgetail prototype aircraft and continue Engineering Manufacturing and Development activities for a program of record.”

The Air Force already has seven E-7s on contract, including two rapid prototypes and five more added under a March modification. However, all are developmental jets meant to prove out the U.S. design before any production decision, which is why the money lands in research and development rather than procurement.

The committee pointed to the war in Iran to make its case.

“The conflict in Iran has reinforced the need for the Air Force to maintain a credible airborne battle management capability, currently being met with the Air Force’s E–3 Airborne Warning and Control System and the Navy’s E–2D Hawkeye programs,” the committee wrote. “As the E–3 is set to retire, the E–7 Wedgetail will serve as modern replacement for lost battle management capability.”

Panel pushes back on taking Hawkeye money

The Hawkeye money, though, was not OMB’s to spend. The House panel backed the E-7 realignment but rejected the Navy offset, restoring the $651 million the White House had taken from the Hawkeye program.

“While the committee wholly supports the E–7 program and funding realignment, the Committee also restored the E–2D program to six aircraft for fiscal year 2027,” the report states. “The committee understands the operational necessity of the E–2D platform; the complementary nature of the E–2D and E–7; and believes that more aircraft, not fewer, are necessary to support our warfighters now and in the future.”

For all the money in motion, it buys prototypes and development work, not a Wedgetail fleet. Lawmakers want to know what comes next.

The report orders the Air Force secretary to brief the House and Senate defense appropriations subcommittees, alongside the 2028 request, on “the full E–7 acquisition strategy, to include required quantity; funding requirements across the future years defense program; and schedules for development and production.”

Prior to the war in Iran, the Air Force wanted to scrap the E-7 program, a platform already flying with Australia, the U.K. and other allies, after an Air Force official said its per-aircraft cost had climbed from $588 million to $724 million, and amid doubts about whether it could survive in contested airspace.

The previous plan was to lean on extra E-2Ds and a future of space-based sensors instead.

The war with Iran undercut that case, exposing a near-term battle management gap that satellites cannot yet fill, compelling the Pentagon to reverse course this spring.

The Air Force made the announcement Wednesday, saying it reached the decision four months ahead of schedule. The contracts went to General Atomics for its FQ-42A and Anduril for its FQ-44A, as part of CCA Increment 1.

The two aircraft were previously designated the YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A. Dropping the Y prefix signals their shift from prototype to production.

Often referred to as “loyal wingmen,” CCA are jet-powered, semi-autonomous unmanned aircraft built to fly alongside crewed fighters such as the F-35 and the planned F-47, extending their sensors and weapons while taking on risk that would otherwise fall to pilots.

“Collaborative Combat Aircraft change how we project power and generate mass in highly contested environments,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach said in the release. “Delivering this capability to our warfighters faster ensures our forces maintain the tactical edge required to deter and, if necessary, defeat any adversary.”

The Air Force is committing to a large CCA fleet, though it won’t happen all at once. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said the contracts reaffirm the service’s confidence that it can buy more than 150 combat-capable CCA by the end of the decade, well below the program’s long-term goal of roughly 1,000.

“By moving fast from competitive selection into full-scale manufacturing, we position ourselves to field highly credible and combat-ready semi-autonomous systems to stay ahead of the pacing challenge,” Meink said in the announcement.

Separately, the Air Force opened a competition for the software that will operate the CCA.

“Mission autonomy is the cornerstone of the CCA concept, and leveraging a competitive, multi-vendor environment ensures we capture the latest technology,” Meink said, noting that this approach capitalizes on current technology while leaving room for future breakthroughs.

Six companies won spots in a six-year pool: Anduril, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Collins Aerospace and Shield AI.

From that group, the service picked three to begin work on autonomous software right away. Anduril, RTX Collins Aerospace and Shield AI will take part in the first of two six-month rounds of head-to-head competition.

The service said those three were chosen based on their ability to meet the program’s schedule and cost demands. The Air Force plans to name a single primary software provider for Increment 1 by summer 2027.

Using an approach the Air Force calls first-of-its-kind, the service will pay the full licensing fee only if a vendor “provides a combat capability aligned with warfighter needs and feedback.”

This arrangement affords the Air Force the ability to acquire and implement state-of-the-art technology that is continually evolving.

Despite three companies getting first crack at developing the autonomy software, the Air Force may award software licenses to any of the six vendors within the pool at any point over the next six years.

Providing the foundation for this strategy is the government-owned Autonomy Government Reference Architecture, a modular, open-systems approach that enables the Air Force to move software between aircraft and avoid being locked into a single vendor.

The service said in February that it had integrated government-owned autonomous software into both prototypes using that architecture, which it called proof the software could move across vendors and platforms.

The contracts come on the heels of the service’s fiscal 2027 budget request, which marked the first time it asked Congress for money to buy CCA rather than just develop them.

The service declined to disclose the value of the contracts or how many of each aircraft the two companies will build.