“They are bringing on capability, I won’t say daily, but at least monthly, that puts our assets at risk,” Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess, the commander of U.S. Space Forces-Space, told reporters at the annual Air & Space Forces Association conference in National Harbor, Maryland, on Wednesday.

“China is definitely our biggest threat,” he said.

According to Schiess, the Chinese are building a “kill chain,” or attack process, for targeting U.S. maritime, land and air forces “at greater distances than we’ve ever seen.”

“They’re using space to be able to make those distances even greater,” Schiess explained. “On top of that, they are adding counter-space capabilities that then put our assets at risk.”

Space Force intelligence suggests the Chinese military likely views counter-space operations as a way to deter and counter U.S. military intervention in a regional conflict.

Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said China’s operations in space are among its “most concerning” military activities.

“It’s the ultimate high ground. Space strengthens our intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance [ISR] and targeting capabilities. In other words, it’s our best eyes and ears. And if our adversaries can have better ISR and can have better space-based ISR and targeting capabilities than we do, and deprive us of that high ground, then that is very, very dangerous,” he told Military Times on Thursday.

Should the Chinese military be able to destroy or outperform U.S. space-based capabilities, Bowman said that would lead to fewer early warnings about threats and more difficult combat engagements.

“And when you aggregate that, that can result in a lost battle or war,” Bowman said.

Schiess said the U.S. military must continue to put up more satellites, including ISR satellites, to protect its forces.

According to the most recent space threat fact sheet published by Space Force intelligence, China had more than 1,189 satellites in orbit as of July 2025, representing an on-orbit increase of about 927% since the end of 2015.

More than 500 of those are ISR-capable satellites with optical, multispectral, radar, and radio frequency sensors, which the Space Force says increases China’s ability to detect U.S. aircraft carriers, expeditionary forces and air wings.

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.”

“We’re not gonna not have a chief,” Meink said during a roundtable with reporters after being asked about the potential vacancy of the service’s top two uniformed positions.

Allvin surprised many in August when he announced he would retire in November, about halfway through his four-year term as the service’s 23rd chief of staff. Allvin said he would remain chief of staff until his successor is nominated and confirmed.

The service has been without a vice chief since February, when President Donald Trump fired Gen. Jim Slife, along with multiple other top Pentagon leaders. The White House in July nominated Gen. Thomas Bussiere to be the next vice chief, but Aviation Week reported earlier this month that his nomination was withdrawn.

Meink declined to comment about the likelihood of a chief of staff nomination coming soon, saying the process has to work its way through the administration. But he reiterated that he and Allvin will work together to ensure a new chief of staff will be in place in time for Allvin’s departure.

Defense One reported in August that Allvin’s abrupt retirement was prompted by his strong push for an Air Force reorganization, the “Reoptimization for Great Power Competition,” which began under the previous administration.

At Monday’s roundtable, Meink said he and his leadership team at the Air Force are still considering what organizational changes might be needed, but decisions are not far off and will be rolled out in the next few months.

In a keynote address at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air Space Cyber conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Meink highlighted the service’s lackluster aircraft readiness as one of its major challenges.

“We have some of the best aircraft,” Meink said, citing the F-22 and F-35 fighters and the B-2 bomber as examples.

The scope of the readiness challenge “surprised me a bit,” Meink said.

“I knew there was a readiness challenge,” Meink said. “I didn’t appreciate how significant that readiness challenge was.”

The Air Force’s aircraft readiness rates have steadily trended down for several years, and last year hit a recent low. The fiscal 2024 fleet-wide mission-capable rate — which measures how many aircraft are able to carry out their missions on an average day — hit 62%, meaning nearly four in every 10 aircraft were unable to perform their job at any given time.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin raised alarms about the decline at AFA’s Air Warfare Symposium in March. During that speech, Allvin displayed a chart showing another statistic, aircraft availability, which had declined from 73% in 1994 to 54% in 2024.

One major factor driving declining readiness rates, experts agree, is that the Air Force’s planes are decades old — and getting older all the time. Allvin’s chart in March showed that over the past three decades, the average aircraft age in the fleet almost doubled from 17 to nearly 32 years old.

Meink said Monday that the Air Force has “some of the best aircraft” of any military, and praised the F-22 Raptor, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the B-2 Spirit bomber.

But he pointed to Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia, where F-22s are stationed, as an example of the problems the Air Force is facing.

The F-22 is “a phenomenal platform,” Meink said. “But when I go out to Langley and there’s a number of aircraft, nonoperational, sitting around the ramp that aren’t even being worked on because we simply don’t have the parts to do that — that’s a problem, right? We have to fix that.”

In an afternoon roundtable with reporters, Meink said maintenance and sustainment have been a major cost driver for the Air Force over the last roughly 15 years. Lawmakers, the administration and top Pentagon leadership are working to help increase the Air Force’s maintenance budget, he said.

But with the Air Force’s resources stretched thin, Meink said, it must be efficient and focus maintainers on its top priorities — systems that will be able to survive in a future war’s highly contested airspace.

“If a system is not capable of operating in a contested environment, then we need to be second-guessing and/or thinking about how much money we’re dumping into readiness on those platforms,” Meink said.

And as the Air Force retires older, outdated aircraft, Meink said, it will be able to shift skilled maintainers and other resources to planes that will be needed in a future conflict. Meink pointed to Ukraine’s success in using modified quadcopters worth a few thousand dollars to destroy multimillion-dollar Russian drones as an example of the new air warfare environment the U.S. will have to operate in.

Meink said the Air Force also must hold its contractors accountable for the reliability of their systems.

“When we’re getting a part that’s supposed to last 400 hours, and it lasts 100 hours, that’s unacceptable,” Meink said. “We need to work with the government and contractors to make the right investments to improve the serviceability and reliability of our weapon systems and the parts we’re putting in those weapon systems.”

William Bailey, who is performing the duties of the assistant Air Force secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said the increasing modularity of new aircraft and other in-the-works systems will allow them to be more easily maintained and replaced.

Bailey also said the acquisition community plans to conduct a deep dive into the service’s supply chains to identify where “pinch points” are holding up the delivery of vital spare parts.

The Air Force must use also advanced data analytic techniques to better understand the state of its weapon systems, Meink said.

Allvin, speaking at the Air and Space Forces’ Air, Space and Cyber Conference, said that Boeing’s team worked quickly to start manufacturing the sixth-generation fighter after their selection was announced in March.

“It’s the platform that, along with the rest of the [accompanying family of] systems, is going to ensure [air] dominance into the future,” Allvin said. “In the few short months since we made the [F-47] announcement, they are already beginning to manufacture the first article. We’re ready to go fast. We have to go fast.”

The F-47, previously known as Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD), is intended to replace the F-22 Raptor. Little is known about the highly classified aircraft, but it is expected to have state-of-the-art stealth capabilities, weapons and engines and fly with autonomous drone wingmen known as collaborative combat aircraft.

In May, Allvin posted a graphic online that said the F-47 will have a combat radius of more than 1,000 nautical miles, and be able to fly at speeds greater than Mach 2, or more than 1,500 miles per hour.

In that May post, Allvin said the Air Force plans to buy at least 185 F-47s, which would match or exceed the size of the F-22 fleet.

For the Air Force to succeed in a future war, Allvin noted that it must be able to overwhelmingly dominate adversaries in the sky, and said the F-47 will provide that capability.

“It’s not enough just to be able to stick the jab,” Allvin said. “You’ve got to be able to let your adversary know you can put them on the canvas.”

During his AFA keynote, Allvin lauded the people working on the F-47 and said their enthusiasm will ensure the program will be successful. He showed video of Boeing employees at the company’s fighter production facility in St. Louis, Missouri, cheering loudly the morning they found out President Donald Trump was about to announce they will build the F-47.

“Those aren’t people who just show up to work,” Allvin said. “Those are people who are committed to do something great for the nation. And there are Americans on shop floors all across the country, in the labs, out on the flightlines doing the tests. They want to put together the dominance for the future.”

The uniforms were initially slated to arrive in 2022, but the COVID-19 pandemic presented a slew of problems, including supply chain issues, that delayed the schedule. Fabric shortages and fabric color-match problems also contributed to delays.

After the pandemic subsided, the service planned to address the PT uniform release once again. However, the U.S. Space Force was stood up and attention was redirected toward issuing Space Force PT uniforms.

Now that the Space Force has begun rolling out its PT uniforms, the Air Force said it will fulfill its promise to deliver new PT uniforms.

Uniforms are expected to arrive at select CONUS Army and Air Force Exchange Service stores beginning in November, according to an Air Force spokesperson, with some optional uniform items currently in development, such as the long-sleeve shirt and sweatshirt, set to be released later.

In April, the Air Force said the new uniforms had started rolling out at basic military training that month, while the Army and Air Force Exchange Service said the uniforms would reach exchange shelves in July. However, the July deadline was missed.

“The fielding of a new uniform required time for mandatory government sources to find, and collaborate with, domestic fabric manufacturers to meet the technical requirements of the PT uniform materials,” an Air Force spokesperson said. “That process took longer than expected.”

The collection includes a jacket, two shorts — a running short with a spandex liner and a pair of standard gym shorts — pants, long- and short-sleeve T-shirts with moisture-wicking material and two sweatshirt options that include a hoodie and a crewneck.

The new uniforms were rolled out only to fit-testers and those in basic military training, said Don Lee, acquisition program manager for the Combat Ready Airman program, at last week’s Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

Fit-testers were utilized to assist with the tailoring process, Lee said, making sure the uniform’s materials fit the body while still allowing movement. Basic military training use focused on the uniform’s durability, testing the clothing’s ability to go through multiple wash and dry cycles.

In July, the Air Force began providing the short-sleeve shirt, running shorts, all-purpose shorts and track suit to airmen in basic training, according to a service spokesperson.

The revamped uniforms mark the first time in two decades the Air Force has updated its physical training uniforms.

The uniform, which airmen will be required to wear beginning in 2026, is similar to the current iteration but now comes in sizes for both men and women.

Courtney Mabeus-Brown contributed to this report.

Those capabilities will be crucial to military operations, Whiting said, as both Russia and China have tested and built weapons that could threaten U.S. space operations in the near future. He pointed specifically to Russia’s development of a nuclear space weapon and China’s recent launch mishaps that have created a cloud of debris in low Earth orbit.

“We must heed the clear signals from our strategic competitors,” Whiting said Wednesday in a speech at the Defence Space Conference in London. “When someone tells you what they are preparing to do, believe them. We must prepare accordingly to safeguard our collective interests in space.”

The Space Force, which is responsible for developing and buying capabilities to meet Space Command requirements, has a number of efforts underway to help operators better characterize and track objects in orbit — whether it’s a debris field or an adversary satellite or weapon. The service today relies on the more than 50-year-old Space Defense Operations Center for this mission but plans to replace that capability by the end of next year.

On the maneuverability side, the service is crafting a strategy for how it will build and buy the capabilities needed to support more dynamic space operations. That could mean partnering with commercial companies to refuel a spacecraft or provide a propulsion boost that allows it to travel into non-standard orbits to track an enemy satellite. Space Systems Command, the Space Force’s primary acquisition hub, is planning a refueling demonstration in 2026.

Whiting said current space tracking systems are “insufficient” for future conflicts with countries who have advanced military space capabilities. And while industry has demonstrated some promising capabilities for dynamic space operations, he said the military needs such systems as soon as possible.

“We need these systems delivered on accelerated timelines, at scale,” he said. “Now is the time for all of us to work together across our nations and organizations to identify solutions that deliver national capability by 2027.”

The service’s acquisition arm, Space Systems Command, chose L3Harris, Astranis, Axient and Sierra Space to create design concepts for the program. From that pool, it will select a subset to finalize their designs and build prototypes and then will pick one or more firms to build the first eight satellites. Command officials wants those spacecraft to be ready to launch by 2028.

The Pentagon has become increasingly concerned about GPS signals — used to guide weapons and help units navigate — being jammed or spoofed by adversaries. Russia has taken advantage of this vulnerability in Ukraine, using electronic warfare to jam signals on a regular basis.

The Resilient GPS program, or R-GPS, is meant to augment the Space Force’s current constellation of GPS satellites with a fleet of smaller spacecraft that will transmit a set of signals widely used by the military and civilian agencies.

The service used an accounting tactic provided by Congress to shift funding from elsewhere in its budget to award initial contracts. Known as a quick-start, the transfer authority came in the Fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, allowing the Defense Department to reprogram up to $100 million in funding to start high-priority programs before they are approved as part of a formal budget cycle.

“Thanks to the Quick-Start authority that was approved by Congress, we were able to field and award contracts for these low-cost satellites in less than six months,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in a statement. “This authority allows us to move faster and start new Space Force and Air Force programs.”

The early funding has allowed Space Systems Command to conduct market research, host an industry day, release a solicitation and award the first round of contracts in less than six months.

The Space Force did not disclose the value of those awards. However, it has told Congress it expects the program to cost $1 billion over the next five years. To date, it has shifted $40 million in FY23 funding to support he effort and has asked lawmakers to realign another $77 million in FY25 toward R-GPS.

The House Appropriations defense subcommittee has cast doubt on whether the effort will be as resilient as the Space Force hopes. In its version of FY25 defense spending legislation, the panel proposed denying the service’s request to realign FY25 money and questioned whether quick-start authorities should be used for the effort.

“While proliferation may provide some advantages, it is not clear how these additional satellites increase the resilience against the primary jamming threat to GPS, compared to alternative concepts for position, navigation, and timing systems being pursued elsewhere in the Department of Defense,” lawmakers said in a report accompanying the bill, released in June.

They also took issue with the program’s focus on resilient satellites versus improving the GPS ground systems and user equipment. The Space Force has said the goal is for the satellites to use existing devices.

Once the first R-GPS satellites are fielded, Space Systems Command officials envision updating the constellation with new technology on a regular cadence, similar to the Space Development Agency’s approach to fielding missile warning and data transport satellites as part of its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.

The service said each new batch of R-GPS capability will include up to eight satellites, but didn’t disclose how regularly it plans to field those spacecraft.