Frank Kendall, the Air Force’s 26th secretary who served under former President Joe Biden, said in a Thursday roundtable hosted by Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies that gathering experience in the field and through simulations help operators establish trust with autonomous systems, like the Collaborative Combat Aircraft.

“You have to accumulate a basis for trust over time, and so I think we just need to think carefully about how we structure things in order to make that opportunity,” Kendall said during the roundtable.

Earlier this week, the Air Force announced that it conducted the first-ever live-fire test of an inert AIM-120 from an Anduril-made YFQ-44A. The CCA recently completed an end-to-end, beyond-line-of-sight strike against a simulated target, the service announced, but did not specify when the exercise occurred.

The Air Force is scheduled to continue live-fire testing with General Atomics’ YFQ-42A this fall.

Kendall said that using the aircraft in Red Flag, the service’s leading large-force aerial combat training simulation held at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, will be “fascinating,” but he worries about the force using initial setbacks as an excuse to “retreat” instead of pushing ahead.

The former secretary was optimistic that institutional support will be enough to overcome those setbacks, saying that enthusiastic operators want to see the aircraft’s full potential realized.

Kendall recalled when he once asked an Air Combat Command crew who were developing CCA tactics why there wasn’t more resistance.

“[A young fighter pilot’s] answer was, ‘Sir, these things are going to save our lives.’” Kendall recalled.

The simulations define the exercises, he added, saying that it showcases how the aircraft protects crew fighters effectively right now even as the force needs to develop more sophisticated tactics.

“The guys with the CCAs are beating the crap out of the guys without them, and not losing any manned fighters,” he said.

Kendall said that computerized, man-in-the-loop simulations are the best tool to assist operators in learning how to use the aircraft effectively since more trials can be completed. Integrated simulations have been used by the Air Force for roughly 30 years.

“In simulators with cockpits their sensors are showing them simulated threats as well as their friends, and then they basically fight a battle together,” he explained.

Kendall referred to a time when he took a flight in an F-16 modified by artificial intelligence. In flight, the aircraft’s testers would collect data points, he said, and run a million simulations to adjust the software overnight to complete the flight again the following day.

The first increment CCA aircraft in the program are “all the same” as weapons carriers, but in Increment II, Kendall stipulates that the force can begin equipping them with sensors and possibly distributed electronic warfare capabilities.

China is working on this autonomous system capability as well, he added, stating that air battles could soon be CCA versus CCA. Intelligence is going to play a significant role in how well the U.S. understands their systems, tactics and vulnerabilities, he said, noting that it’s a “hard game” to play.

In Increment I, the Air Force showed interest in obtaining 100 to 150 aircraft, the first phase of a longer-term goal of eventually fielding 1,000 CCAs.

In a training first, the Guardsman, using a handheld touchscreen tablet, controlled the Optionally Piloted Vehicle Black Hawk and planned its tasks during Exercise Northern Strike 25-2, a large, biannual multinational exercise sponsored by the National Guard Bureau that took place in Michigan this August. The exercise sees units practice a wide variety of offensive and defensive operations jointly in battle scenarios.

The Guardsman, whose name has not been released, used the OPV Black Hawk to transport a 2,900-pound water buffalo slingload entirely by remote control, according to the Thursday release.

Additional first-time demonstrations that took place during the exercise included delivering airborne troops to drop zones at different altitudes and a simulated medical evacuation, the release noted. The airborne drop exercise saw the helicopter perform a back-to-back action while controlled by the Guardsman operating the OPV from a Coast Guard vessel over 70 nautical miles away on Lake Huron. After ordering the helicopter to unload cargo, the soldier then used it to drop airborne troops.

The OPV Black Hawk also completed a first-ever performance of six hookups and dropoffs of HIMARS launch tubes, according to Sikorsky’s parent company Lockheed Martin.

“In contested logistics situations, a Black Hawk operating as a large drone offers commanders greater resilience and flexibility to get resources to the point of need,” said Rich Benton, vice president and general manager of Sikorsky, in a release.

Although it retains the ability to be operated by a pilot, the OPV Black Hawk can be programmed to perform tasks remotely and optionally controlled as it carries out its assigned duties.

Matrix technology, a system developed in a joint program by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Sikorsky, allows the aircraft to transition from piloted to uncrewed, according to DARPA.

Sikorsky also utilizes Matrix techonolgy in its completely autonomous take on the UH-60L Black Hawk, nicknamed the “U-HAWK,” which it unveiled during the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual convention this year in Washington.

WASHINGTON — The Association of the United States Army rolled out its annual conference from Oct. 13-15 in Washington, beckoning defense industry officials, lawmakers and military personnel from around the globe to assess the future force and the threats personnel may soon encounter.

Anchoring this year’s themes were efforts geared toward modernizing the force through next-gen weaponry and vehicles, personnel training, long-range artillery, unmanned systems, defense capabilities, network domains and much more.

Such efforts, meanwhile, continue to be influenced by conflicts abroad that demand battlefield tech evolution at breakneck speed.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is dragging toward another brutal winter as manned and unmanned innovations continue to reshape modern warfare. Arsenal developments throughout the increasingly contentious Indo-Pacific persist in response to territorial assertions by Beijing. And tensions endure in the Middle East, where regional attacks by Iranian proxies, Syrian upheaval and Israel’s war in Gaza are under the microscope of the international community.

Army officials attending the conference emphasized the service’s need for transformation as the technologies, policies and spending at the core of these conflicts intersect with the Army’s global mission.

Defense News and Army Times covered these discussions — and much more — from the show. Catch up on all of our top stories from this year’s AUSA conference and be sure to read more of our latest coverage at defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/ausa.

Modernization

Early drops of new Army command software delight artillerists in drill

Never mind the mere beta status of the Army’s new app for operating howitzers, soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado, were itching to find out whether four decades of the existing, error-prone system were finally coming to an end.

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

The new software, AXS, is a module of the overarching Next-Generation Command-and-Control, or NGC2, envisioned to power all Army battlefield operations. The tests showed that AXS can drastically shorten what artillerists call the “kill chain.” Read more here.

Driscoll goes scorched earth on Army buying inertia

In what may be a first for the staid Association of the U.S Army’s annual meeting in Washington, the Army secretary kicked off the conference with an F-bomb.

Dan Driscoll, who has served as the Army’s civilian leader since February, announced major coming changes to Army purchasing, parts repairs and technological adoption in a heated address that accused construction contractors of corruption and stressed that the lives of soldiers were on the line. Read more here.

Inside the US Army’s new modernization mega-command

The Army created a new four-star outfit – Futures Command – in the late summer of 2018, right in Austin’s city center, empowered with a mandate to quickly develop new requirements for modern capabilities.

As Austin’s high-tech evolution continues, so does the Army’s. The service announced earlier this year that it would combine the new Army Futures Command with the 52-year-old Training and Doctrine Command, effectively doing away with two four-star-led organizations to create a brand new one. Read more here.

Next-gen tank to reach soldiers for testing by end of 2026

The Army’s already-accelerated plan to field its next-generation M1E3 Abrams tank will hit a major milestone before the end of next year with its first soldier touchpoint, a General Dynamics executive revealed Wednesday.

Speaking at a panel alongside Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Randy George, Danny Deep, executive vice president for Global Operations at GD, said a “pre-prototype” of the M1E3 would be sent to the fighting forces so they could kick the tires. Read more here.

First shots in future fights will be fired in cyberspace, leaders warn

The next conflict likely won’t start with bullets or missiles at a distant overseas location, but instead could be a cyber strike on the homeland.

“The first shots will be fired in the cyber domain,” said Maj. Gen. Jake Kwon, director of strategic operations for the Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff. “The Army has to think differently, and we have to fight faster.”

To move faster on cyber, Kwon said several initiatives must be met. First on the list is artificial intelligence-driven mission command, with the top goal to achieve decision dominance. Read more here.

General Atomics successfully tests next-gen artillery round

A controlled artillery round that can hit targets from 120 kilometers away in GPS-denied environments was successfully tested at U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona.

General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems’ Long Range Maneuvering Projectile, or LRMP, was fired from an M777 howitzer platform using M231 powder charges during an August test, the company announced. Read more here.

Training

Boeing and Leonardo join forces to modernize Army aviator training

U.S. aerospace giant Boeing and Italian firm Leonardo are uniting to offer a contractor-owned, contractor-operated solution for the U.S. Army as the service embarks on an effort to revamp its flight school, the companies announced Monday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington.

The two aerospace leaders are going to submit an offering to the Army’s Flight School Next program aimed at creating a more flexible and scalable approach to rotary-wing training focused on going back to the basics — particularly using a single-engine helicopter. Read more here.

Here’s what’s new in soldier gear in 2025 and beyond

From cold weather gear to loitering munitions, Program Executive Office-Soldier, the center for all things soldier gear, has been upgrading and fielding new equipment to troops, with more in store in the coming year.

This past year, the office has lightened body armor, added blood coolers for lifesaving measures and put together new cold weather gear for soldier testing, among other equipment. Program officers met with Army Times before the Association of the U.S. Army Annual Meeting & Exposition to showcase some of its equipment. Read more here.

Next Generation Squad Weapon continues fielding, seeing upgrades

The Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapon continues to field to units and see upgrades, including a carbine version that’s currently under development.

The M7 and M250, both of which fire a new 6.8mm-caliber round, are the Army’s replacements for the M4 and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, respectively, among the close combat force.

Col. Jason Bohannon, program manager for soldier lethality at Program Executive Office Soldier, told Army Times in a recent interview that in addition to ongoing fielding of the weapons systems, some are already having upgrades applied. Read more here.

Soldiers need better way to evacuate casualties, enlisted leaders say

Top enlisted leaders who work on U.S. Army medical and operational needs are being increasingly vocal about modernization necessities when it comes medical evacuation and its associated tasks in a future large-scale combat with a near-peer enemy.

Casualty numbers in the Russia-Ukraine war point to what would likely be large-scale casualty events in future conflicts that will far eclipse the numbers seen by U.S. troops in recent campaigns like those in the Global War on Terror, a panel of command sergeants major said this week. Read more here.

These soldiers are finding ways to see enemy drones before they strike

Soldiers with the 1st Cavalry Division have found ways to help armored vehicles pair sensors with drones to spot enemy drones before they strike.

Col. Nicholas Dvonch, division artillery commander, and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Trenton Huntsinger spoke with Army Times recently about the progress of the division’s experiment.

The soldiers have taken passive sensors — the size of a baseball home plate — and mounted them on armored vehicles to detect enemy drones and pass that information back to their air defense element. Read more here.

Armored soldiers get first live-fire work on Switchblade 600

Soldiers with the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division recently tested the Switchblade 600 Loitering Munition System during an exercise at Fort Hood’s eastern training area, marking the first time the system has been live-fired on the Texas installation.

Personnel from 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team in September conducted the trial in support of the Army’s Transformation in Contact initiative aimed at modernizing armored formations for future conflicts. Read more here.

Personnel

A new barracks task force aims to improve military living conditions

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has formed a new “barracks task force” to improve living conditions for U.S. service members in barracks across the globe.

“For too long this Department has neglected its responsibilities to set and maintain the appropriate standards for barracks, and that ends now,” he said in a memo.

The Barracks Task Force will be led by the Assistant Secretary of War for Energy, Installations and Environment. The team must develop an initial barracks plan that will identify investment opportunities and create department-wide policies for barracks standards that will prioritize air and water quality for troops. Read more here.

Army expands MOS program that allows soldiers to skip certain training

The Army recently announced a slew of military occupational specialties, or MOSs, that are being added as eligible jobs within the service’s Civilian Acquired Skills Program, or ACASP, an initiative that allows soldiers with particular sets of skills to skip certain portions of training early in their Army careers.

With the latest addition of 17 job specialties, which officially were added on Oct. 1, the number of jobs that qualify for the ACASP has climbed to 60.

Under the program’s guidelines, qualified recruits, meaning those who acquired job-specific certifications or training as civilians, are eligible to go into the service with modified training and at a higher rank than their peers. Read more here.

Infantry brigades shift to mobile brigades in Army transformation

Over the next two years, the U.S. Army will convert 25 Infantry Brigade Combat Teams into new formations known as Mobile Brigade Combat Teams as part of the service’s “Transforming in Contact” initiative, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said at a media roundtable in September.

As part of the service’s initiative to rapidly deliver new capabilities to operational units, three brigades are already undergoing the MBCT transition. Their leaders recently discussed some of the changes. Read more here.

Army secretary to soldiers: help get ‘human stupidity’ out of the way

U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll encouraged soldiers and families to help the Army get “human stupidity” out of the way to improve life on installations.

In a session that lasted over an hour, Driscoll, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George and Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer said they were working to improve quality-of-life measures for soldiers and their families. Read more here.

College-style dining facilities coming to Army bases

The U.S. Army has signed a contract to create dining venues at several installations aimed at revamping soldiers’ culinary experience, the service announced Sept. 30.

The Army Nonappropriated Fund Contracting Office at Installation Management Command, G9, awarded Compass Group USA a concession contract Aug. 28 to create college campus-style facilities at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Stewart, Georgia; Fort Carson, Colorado; Fort Hood, Texas; and Fort Drum, New York. Read more here.

Army begins ‘talent panels’ to cut 6,500 manned aviation jobs

The Army has officially embarked on its effort to relocate some 6,500 junior officers and warrant officers who it says are no longer needed in the aviation field.

Aviation officials say, however, that they hope to reach that target without forcing many troops out of the service.

Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, commander of the Army Aviation Center of Excellence and Fort Rucker, Alabama, told reporters at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting on Wednesday that talent panels launched this month are intended to keep decision-making power with the soldiers and would not immediately lead to involuntary transfers or reductions. Read more here.

Industry

Printing with sand: How Rock Island Arsenal keeps Army gear humming

In the forge at Rock Island Arsenal, workers in silver heat suits and darkened face shields shovel fire unfazed as flames lick their feet and legs. Their work is older than the nation’s railroads.

A short drive down the road is Rock Island’s advanced manufacturing center built during World War II. The interior is brightly lit, clean and the only sound is the low hum of 3D printers at work. Despite the differences, both facilities serve the same mission: to keep the Army supplied and ready now and in the future. Read more here.

US Army’s first hypersonic battery to be fully equipped by December

The U.S. Army’s first unit to receive hypersonic weapons will get a battery’s worth of rounds by the end of the year, Maj. Gen. Frank Lozano, the service’s program executive officer for missiles and space, told Defense News in a recent interview.

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

Army scrutinizes supply chain risks to deliver MV-75 aircraft by 2027

The U.S. Army has conducted a thorough assessment of supply chain risks to build the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, the MV-75, and is aiming to deliver the prototype aircraft in fiscal 2027, the program executive officer for Army aviation, Brig. Gen. David Phillips, told Defense News in a recent interview.

Following calls from Army senior leaders to dramatically accelerate the MV-75’s fielding, plans conveyed earlier this year to hit production of the advanced tiltrotor by FY28 still stand. Read more here.

New Army helo engine still powering on despite uncertain future

The U.S. Army has not yet terminated the Improved Turbine Engine Program despite the service proposing to end the program as part of its major transformation initiative laid out in May.

While the service continues to look at different courses of action with the program, it has continued its testing program. The Army had already installed the General Electric-designed engine, designed to replace all the engines in both UH-60 Black Hawk and AH-64 Apache helicopters, into a Black Hawk at Sikorsky’s facility in West Palm Beach, Florida.

The aircraft first flew in May with the new engine and has since been tested in forward flight at up to 4,000 feet. Read more here.

Anduril, GDLS team up on smarter battlefield radar

Anduril Industries is partnering with General Dynamics Land Systems to integrate its Spark Radar onto armored vehicles and other ground platforms, aiming to strengthen maneuver force protection against emerging threats such as drones and precision munitions.

The collaboration brings Anduril’s radar and battle management technologies into GDLS’ vehicle designs from the start, rather than adding them after production. The companies said the integration is a step toward coordinated, multi-vehicle defense systems that connect sensors, radars and command nodes across formations. Read more here.

Army accelerates PrSM output as ATACMS nears sunset

The Army is finding ways to accelerate its new Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM, as it begins to field it more widely to the force while sunsetting its 40-year-old tactical missile system, Maj. Gen. Frank Lozano, program executive officer for missiles and space, told Defense News.

The service is expecting a production contract for the first increment of PrSM by the end of the month, with Lozano noting, “We will put Lockheed Martin under contract for 400 missiles.” Read more here.

International

Where to stash combat gear in the Indo-Pacific? The Army wants to know

The U.S. Army is revising the worldwide distribution of forward-deployed equipment, dubbed preposition stock, as officials weigh its utility and cost, Lt. Gen. Chris Mohan, the acting Army Materiel Command commander, told Defense News.

The effort was designed to stage weapons, vehicles, equipment and supplies at key global locations so forces can rapidly respond to crises. In recent years, the Army has moved from viewing the use of Army Prepositioned Stock kit as a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency situation to regularly dipping into the stocks for major training exercises.

While APS has long been a cornerstone of U.S. power projection, Mohan acknowledged the system must adapt to new strategic realities, particularly as the Pentagon shifts greater focus to the Indo-Pacific theater. Read more here.

Army Korea’s move to longer duty tours to come in stages, general says

The Eighth Army in Korea is already accepting soldier transfers under a new “tour normalization” system that began Oct. 1. But not every installation in the country is ready yet to accept soldiers and their families for longer tours.

Speaking to reporters at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting on Monday, Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor, Eighth Army commander, said the unit had embarked on a phased implementation model, with the southern installations, including Camp Humphreys, adopting tour normalization before the northern ones. Read more here.

I Corps adapts to meet modern challenges in the Indo-Pacific

The U.S. Army’s I Corps is at a moment of strategic transition, shouldering the responsibility of shaping the service’s readiness across the vast, complex Indo-Pacific theater.

Overseeing that effort is Lt. Gen. Matthew McFarlane, under whose command the Corps, through continuous exercise and training, is rethinking itself as both a forward campaign-capable headquarters and a practical force provider for homeland defense.

Defense News sat down with McFarlane in a recent interview to discuss how the Corps is preparing for various phases of conflict and recap lessons from its expansive training campaign. Read more here.

How the US Army, NATO are creating a new Eastern Flank Deterrence Line

The U.S. Army and its NATO allies are rapidly aligning resources to develop a new “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line” aimed at developing combat capabilities that can measure up to possible Russian attacks, according to service commanders in Europe.

U.S. Army Europe and Africa commander Gen. Christopher Donahue “wants to go fast on this,” Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza, the Army’s V Corps commander, told Defense News in a recent interview. Read more here.

New program aims to put nuclear generators on Army bases around the world

U.S. officials on Tuesday announced a program to locate small nuclear power generation reactors on U.S. Army bases around the world.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced the Janus Program, aimed at developing microreactors to generate power without relying on diesel fuel, at the Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington. Read more here.

Unmanned

Sikorsky turns the venerable Black Hawk into a true unmanned aircraft

The UH-60 Black Hawk has previously flown without a human pilot, but now it’s fully reconfigured to be an unmanned aircraft capable of flying a variety of missions, according to Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky.

The company is unveiling the unmanned aircraft system version of the Black Hawk at the Association of the U.S. Army’s conference, marking Sikorsky’s latest leap in autonomous helicopter development. Read more here.

Army’s big drone ambition runs into the hard part: scaling up

The U.S. Army is racing to turn its aging organic industrial base into a modern drone factory network — and learning just how hard it is to move from prototypes to mass production.

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

No drones for Army squads, teams, 25th Infantry Division leader says

Amid a push to put more small drones in the hands of soldiers across the force, the U.S. Army is learning that there’s a ceiling to the number of unmanned systems that units can handle.

Col. Dave Lamborn, commander of 2nd Mobile Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, out of Hawaii, told a panel during the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting in Washington that in division testing, the Army’s smallest units could be overtasked by the challenge of operating drones on top of all their conventional duties. Read more here.

General Atomics, Hanwha to work on short takeoff version of Gray Eagle

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems announced Tuesday it is teaming up with South Korean firm Hanwha Aerospace to develop and produce a short-takeoff-and-landing version of the Gray Eagle drone.

The two firms signed the partnership agreement Tuesday, General Atomics said, and will work together to design and build a production-representative version of the drone. General Atomics said it has already flown a self-funded prototype, which the company said shows it can quickly move from development to delivery. Read more here.

The Army’s new watercraft plan banks on autonomy, commercial ships

The Army’s long-awaited watercraft strategy charts a course that prioritizes sustaining an aging fleet, leveraging commercial solutions and accelerating experimentation with autonomous vessels, according to senior service leaders who helped craft it.

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

AeroVironment eyes new factory, drone launches for Switchblade

In recent years, AeroVironment’s Switchblade loitering munition has become a critical weapon in Ukraine and played a growing role in multiple nations’ arsenals.

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

The event took place as part of the Defense Department’s Technology Readiness Experimentation, or T-REX, a semiannual showcase and evaluation staged at Camp Atterbury in Indiana. The event aims to validate prototypes built to fill urgent capability gaps across the military services and combatant commands.

Lt. Col. Matt Limeberry, commander of the Pentagon’s Rapid Assessment or Prototype Technology Task Force, told Defense News in an interview Monday that DOD plans to host at least two Top Drone schools each year.

The goal, he said, is to provide a chance for service members, industry and academia to prove out tactics, operational procedures and drone capabilities on a test course that mimics the kinds of terrain and adversary effects an operator might see in the field. It also allows the department to validate and refine its own counter-uncrewed aircraft system sensors.

“It’s a dual effect of data collect but also benefits the warfighter and industry flying through this threat-represented and emulated environment,” Limeberry said.

For the inaugural, four-day event, the task force set up a training course at the Muscatatuck Training Center just south of Camp Atterbury, designing it to imitate an urban setting and focusing on maneuverability, endurance and reconnaissance. Two companies, Vector and Code 19, flew drones alongside two service partners — the Army’s Combat Lethality Task Force and its Aviation Center of Excellence.

The drones were a mix of untethered first-person view systems and fiber-optic-connected drones.

The department also staged a trial at a separate test range at Camp Atterbury that was supporting T-REX where the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team conducted live fire demonstrations.

Limeberry said he was impressed with how well service members participating in Top Drone performed, navigating and identifying targets. For future events, he hopes to expand the trials over multiple weeks to allow operators to “refine” their tactics against more complex obstacles.

The department is also building a secondary Top Drone course at Camp Atterbury to emulate a more dense, wooded environment.

“As we continue to scale the complexity, it will be an a la carte menu of [electronic warfare] jamming and providing a real-world, adversarial threat-informed environment that we need to fly with and through to make sure that we’re staying competitive,” Limeberry said.

Senior leaders in the Pentagon in recent months have ramped up their drive for what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called “drone dominance.” The intent is for the military services to not only field more drones to operators, but also develop the organizational and training infrastructure to support broader adoption by 2027.

Top Drone supports that push as did much of last month’s T-REX event, which focused on low-cost, attritable attack drones as well as counter-uncrewed aircraft system technologies like interceptors and sensors.

Over the course of the two-week showcase, the department assessed 58 technologies, some of which were sponsored by a military service or combatant command and others brought by firms that had never engaged with the Defense Department but had technology with the potential to address a critical capability gap.

Of those technologies, some number will progress into joint, rapid experimentation and others will require further development and iteration or experimentation. Limeberry noted that DOD has a number of innovation pathways aimed at further maturing technology and T-REX is a good way to identify which route makes the most sense for a particular capability.

“The goal of T-REX is to come out and you find your best transition partner, an innovation pathway that fits the need of your company or fits the need of the government, depending on where the gap and critical need is,” he said.

Decisions about which technologies will transition into the rapid experimentation phase are pending, Limeberry said. He expects the team will brief Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael in the coming weeks and have a determination before the end of September.

Along with the technology demonstrations, T-REX also featured static displays from another 50 companies whose capabilities are in an early stage of development. Those capabilities may be considered for participation in future T-REX assessments.

“They were showcasing emergent and urgent capabilities but didn’t have the capacity yet to fully assess and put their prototypes into the environment, so we put them on a prototype technology display,” Limeberry said.

The 21 satellites, all built by York Space Systems, flew on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The spacecraft are part of SDA’s Transport Layer, designed to provide fast, secure communication capability to military operators.

The launch represents a new phase for SDA, which since 2019 has been crafting plans for a large constellation of government-owned missile tracking and data transport satellites in low Earth orbit. Its first spacecraft, Tranche 0, launched in 2023 and 2024 and have been used to demonstrate capabilities like laser communication between satellites, with the ground and recently between a commercial partner’s satellite and an SDA terminal installed on an aircraft in flight.

Once on orbit, the Tranche 1 satellites launched today will build on that work. Following initial payload health and safety checks, the spacecraft could start providing operational capability to combatant commands and other users within four to six months, according to acting SDA Director Gurpartap Sandhoo.

“This is the first time we’ll be able to start working with our COCOMs, our joint force to start integrating space into their operations and getting the warfighters used to using space from this construct,” Sandhoo told reporters prior to the launch. “This is the first time we’ll have the space layer fully integrated into our warfare operations.”

SDA’s first user group, whom Sandhoo called “early adopters,” includes military operators in the Indo-Pacific. This initial work is key, he added, to familiarize the services and combatant commands with the capability SDA can provide.

“Doing the warfighter immersion is going to be critical because they have to get trained on this and we have to provide this capability,” Sandhoo said. “That’s what Tranche 1 will start doing.”

Tranche 1 will include 154 satellites — 126 for the Transport Layer and 28 for the Tracking Layer. The first 21 spacecraft will bring a limited coverage and capacity, but that will increase over time as more reach orbit.

Starting with today’s launch, SDA plans to fly a new batch of Tranche 1 satellites each month for 10 months, with six of those missions carrying transport spacecraft and four flying missile warning and tracking satellites. The first few launches will be dedicated transport missions, but Sandhoo said tracking satellites will start to fly early next year.

The next mission is slated for mid-October and will feature satellites built by Lockheed Martin.

By the end of Tranche 1, Sandhoo said, SDA hopes to be providing regional capacity. Tranche 2, scheduled to start launching in late 2026, will further expand the constellation’s reach.

The agency is making headway on future missile tracking capabilities beyond Tranche 2 — which could provide essential support for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile shield — but the longer-term future of the Transport Layer is uncertain. The effort is fully funded through Tranche Two, but the Space Force has paused work on Tranche 3 amid an ongoing study considering whether the constellation is the best solution to meet the U.S. military’s data transport needs.

Sandhoo said the stalled funding will delay SDA’s plans to expand from regional to global transport coverage.

SDA’s deputy director, Gurpartap Sandhoo, will lead the agency in an acting capacity.

Tournear has been at the helm of SDA since 2019, overseeing much of the agency’s early work to define what is now the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture — a constellation of hundreds of missile warning and tracking and data transport satellites.

The leadership transition comes as SDA approaches a key milestone: proving the viability of its concept for a proliferated satellite constellation that is continuously updated on a two-year cycle as technology and threats evolve.

SDA launched its first satellites, dubbed Tranche 0, in 2023, and has been demonstrating the ability to track missile launches and share data among satellites, with ground operators and recently with moving aircraft via laser communication links. Later this week, the agency is slated to launch its next batch of satellites, Tranche 1, which will build on that work and provide a baseline operational capability.

In a LinkedIn post Monday, Tournear said his tenure overseeing the innovative agency’s growth was “a tumultuous journey.”

“At the time of SDA’s establishment, many thought that [proliferated low Earth orbit, or pLEO] was a terrible idea,” he said. “Convincing detractors of the virtues offered by pLEO was not easy, but through several major wins, the tide shifted. Now, SDA is not alone pushing for pLEO; this concept has been adopted and advocated by the Space Force at large, and incorporated into almost every mission area.”

In an interview with Breaking Defense, Tournear said that in his new position with Auburn, he’ll be helping build up the university’s space education and research ecosystem, adding that the role fell into his lap.

Sandhoo joined SDA in July and was previously the vice president and chief architect at Quantum Space and director for emerging technologies at Northrop Grumman. He also served as deputy director at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency and was the head of the spacecraft engineering division at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

SDA’s Chief Program Officer Michael Eppolito will serve as acting deputy director.

The mid-August special user demonstration at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington was part of a project called Launched Effects, a term the Army coined to describe a class of autonomous system that isn’t quite a drone or a loitering munition but can be launched from the ground or a vehicle to provide a range of effects — from targeting and surveillance to kinetic strike. The systems are designed to scout high-value targets in hard-to-reach terrain where a soldier might not have a clear picture of what’s happening on the battlefield.

The service plans to field short, medium and long-range Launched Effects, or LEs, in the coming years, and a key part of its strategy is to continuously iterate on and update those systems based on soldier feedback and mission requirements. That’s a departure from more traditional acquisition programs that can take years to set a requirement, develop and test a system — all before an operator ever touches it.

The Army’s approach closely aligns with a push from senior leaders in the Pentagon to significantly ramp up efforts to arm U.S. military units with drones and other unmanned systems. In late April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed Army leadership to equip every division with launched effects by the end of next year. Following Hegseth’s memo, the Army announced a new strategy, the Army Transformation Initiative, that emphasizes the need for more autonomous systems.

Then in June, Hegseth issued a broader directive, instituting a wave of acquisition reforms aimed at making it easier for the services to buy and field unmanned systems. The goal, he said, is “drone dominance” by 2027. While the Pentagon hasn’t defined what that end state looks like from a quantity perspective, the message is clear: Senior leaders want to get autonomous systems into the hands of operators, and fast.

In an interview after the demonstration, the Army’s program manager for uncrewed aircraft systems, Col. Danielle Medaglia, said that while the service’s Launched Effects initiative predates these Pentagon directives, the urgency and high-level tasking from Hegseth is key to aligning priorities within the service and making sure the program sticks to its delivery timelines.

“What this did was really allowed us to get the advocacy we needed to issue launched effects as quickly as possible to the soldiers,” Medaglia told Defense News. “We have been given that flexibility from the Army acquisition executive to do exactly that, and by saying, ‘field to each division by 2026,’ that also helped align all of our teammates.”

Soldier feedback

The three-week event here had multiple aims, but chief among them, officials said, was soldier feedback on whether the first batch of short-range Launched Effects systems is user friendly and relevant to their mission needs.

In March, the service chose three off-the-shelf short-range systems that will serve as a baseline for the effort: RTX’s Coyote Block 3, Anduril’s Altius 600 and AEVEX Aerospace’s Atlas. It bought a limited number of each vehicle and distributed them to three units during the user demonstration in August, with each unit focused on a single system.

Brig. Gen. Cain Baker, director of the Army’s Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team, said in an interview that while the service has experimented with Launched Effects at several exercises, the user demonstration was the first time it gave them to operators for hands-on training.

“Getting that feedback from the soldiers, from the commander in the field, helps us drive industry from the standpoint of what are the pros and cons of the capability,” Baker said. “From a larger perspective across the Army, it drives our doctrine, our organization, the materiel solution, the training aspect.”

During the first week of the demonstration, each of the three 7th ID units participating in the event conducted initial equipment training on their assigned system. They learned how to set up the LEs, integrate them into their mission planning and use the flight controllers. They also conducted simulated flights.

In week two, they operated the systems live for the first time, running through the setup protocol and tracking their flight path.

For the third week, the units once again flew their systems but this time they applied them to a tactical scenario and had a chance to operate multiple vehicles at one time.

According to soldiers and service officials, the demonstration was largely a success. Army leaders — from engineers to program executive officers — said they were impressed with how quickly soldiers adapted to the new equipment and their enthusiasm around incorporating them into operations.

Medaglia said it’s too early to provide a distilled rundown of the lessons learned, but she noted that the event provided invaluable data that will shape future training, requirements and operational concepts.

“Each of those units did not interact with each other and you saw them fight it in their specific way, with their experience and their type of expertise,” Medaglia said. “It really opened our aperture on how we could leverage LE moving forward.”

Defense News was on site during the second week of the demonstration, when units were transitioning from the classroom to the training ground.

Spc. Jacob Richter, whose unit experimented with AEVEX’s Atlas, said he came into the demonstration with no experience operating drones. He said the classroom and simulation training prepared him well for the live flight and described the system as easy to use.

“It was a seamless transition,” Richter said. “The flight simulator they had mimicked the flight almost perfectly. There was almost no change.”

Access to LEs means units can use an autonomous system to scout a target or gather other intelligence, and then a second vehicle can act as an attack drone for the strike mission. Richter and 1st Lt. Zach Glenn said the scout capability could allow them to fly further into restricted spaces and lessen some of the security concerns that come with sending human operators to perform that mission.

“We can use the scout drone to know what’s ahead of us, and we can also use the attack drones with the scout to eliminate the assets we’re worried about,” Glenn said. “If we’re worried about the enemy detecting any type of [electromagnetic] signature we’re putting off with our radios, we can eliminate that ahead of time. It’s just added security. It’s another tool in the toolkit we can use.”

Lt. Col. Michael Wallace, battalion commander for the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, said getting feedback from soldiers like Glenn and Richter allows him to refine operational concepts based on their experience with the system.

“They’re identifying some of the limiting constraints of employing it, they’re seeing what the capabilities are, how to integrate it into their operations,” Wallace said. “They’re providing that to guys like me that have a little bit more experience on how to refine that and nest it with how we fight and how we do operations.”

Wallace noted that getting systems in the hands of soldiers is about more than familiarizing soldiers with how they work — it’s a chance to let them experiment and decide how the technology might augment or support their mission in a way someone on the outside might not have envisioned.

“I think that’s what all these great civilians are out here trying to do is get the items in the hands of the warfighter so that we don’t see it for the first time when we’re downrange,” he said. “We’ll continue to iterate on it, provide feedback and ultimately they can help inform a capability that’s going to make the whole Army more lethal and more ready.”

Continuous iteration

The Army plans to leave some number of systems behind with units at Joint Base Lewis-McChord to continue training and improving the capability, but the service is still defining its longer-term strategy for fielding the first round of Launched Effects.

In late July, the Army approved the program’s acquisition strategy, which uses what’s called an urgent capability acquisition pathway — an approach reserved for high-need programs slated to field in two years or less. That label, according to LE Product Manager Lt. Col. Hunter Gray, gives the program flexibility to move fast, regularly update its requirements and reopen competition to new vendors.

“It’s something that allows us to move very quickly, to adopt technology that’s ready to issue to units today and to iterate — to provide a continuously upgraded capability that’s driven by user feedback and the most current state of the technology that we’re seeing in industry,” Gray told Defense News.

That level of openness will require the service to find a balance between leveraging commercially-available equipment and making sure the systems it delivers are operationally relevant. The plan right now is to initially field off-the-shelf platforms like those it demonstrated last month and then survey industry every six months to see what new capabilities might be available, never committing to a single vendor but rather always soliciting new ideas solutions.

Maj. Chris Dudley, assistant product manager for Launched Effects, said in an interview at the event that the Army’s strategy is a significant departure from other acquisition programs that spend years on the front-end building an exquisite system with little to no operator input.

“We’re sort of inverting the process and trying to get it into the soldiers’ hands first, and then we’ll iterate and develop on the findings that we have,” he said.

As the Army makes its plans for fielding the baseline short-range LE systems, the service is also eyeing medium and longer-range systems using the same acquisition approach. Officials said the recent special user demonstration will inform the process for buying, fielding and crafting training plans for those platforms as well.

At the same time, the service is working to make sure that its architecture for Launched Effects is modular — from the launchers they fly from to the controllers used to operate them. Having a plug-and-play infrastructure not only makes the system versatile and simpler to integrate, but it makes it easier for vendors to design systems that fit those specifications.

Baker, director of the Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team, said the plan is to have that architecture defined over the next 18 to 24 months.

“What we want is really an agnostic capability to launch from air to ground,” he said. “What we don’t want is to buy one type of specific launched effect to do one type of mission set and then another launched effect to do another mission. We want modularity with the program.”

Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress from Alabama, who stood beside Trump during an Oval Office announcement, insisted it was former President Joe Biden who politicized the basing process.

“This delegation has worked together, both chambers, both parties, to make sure that Huntsville was the place that Space Command called home,” Sen. Katie Britt said during the event. “Obviously, the Biden administration chose to make this political.”

The announcement is just the latest development in a yearslong back and forth about which of the two states should host the the military command, which is charged with operating the Defense Department’s space assets.

The headquarters has been provisionally based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, since 2019. In 2021, just as Trump was leaving office at the end of his first term, the White House announced Huntsville, Alabama, as its pick for the headquarters.

The decision sparked pushback from Colorado lawmakers, largely led by former Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., who called the Air Force’s selection process “fundamentally flawed.” A series of Government Accountability Office and DOD Inspector General reports followed, identifying issues with transparency and credibility in the Air Force’s basing process but concluded that the service followed the law in choosing Alabama.

Despite the conclusion of the watchdog investigations — and then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s support for relocating the command to Huntsville due to estimates that the move would save DOD $426 million — the White House announced in July 2023 that it had abandoned the first Trump administration’s decision and that Space Command would remain in Colorado.

Trump’s announcement that he would revert to his earlier, 2021 decision to base the command’s headquarters in Alabama was widely expected. However, his insistence Tuesday that the move was closely linked to Colorado’s embrace of mail-in voting — a major concern for the president — was not previously publicly identified as part of his administration’s justification.

More than once during the briefing he called Colorado’s policy of allowing voters to submit ballots by mail as “crooked” and claimed it influenced his decision.

“When the state is for mail-in voting, that means they want dishonest elections,” Trump said. “That played a big factor.”

As president, Trump has been forward leaning on space policy. During his first term in 2019 he created the U.S. Space Force and reestablished Space Command as the 11th combatant command.

Later in the briefing, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-AL, indicated the new command would be named the “Donald J. Trump Space Command Center.”

The Space Force and Space Command deferred questions about the claim to Tuberville’s office. A spokesman for the senator said he “is exploring avenues to make that the official name.”

“Sen. Tuberville believes that naming U.S. Space Command headquarters after the guy who created Space Force and has brought Space Command back to life is more than appropriate,” the spokesperson told Defense News in an email.

The successful proof-of-concept demonstration took place in July between a General Atomics Electromagnetics optical communications terminal that was mounted to an aircraft and a commercial satellite operated by Kepler Communications in an orbit around 311 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth. While SDA has shown several times it can connect satellites from its initial data transport constellation, or tranche, the airborne link up was a first.

“Now it becomes an effort to fold this into actual tranches where we can operationalize this,” Nathan Getz, director of SDA’s Data Transport Cell, told Defense News in a recent interview.

The communications capability is an integral part of SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, or PWSA. The laser communications links and optical terminals allow satellites to pass data amongst themselves, with users on the ground and with aircraft and other systems. The goal is much faster, higher-volume data transmissions than traditional systems, which rely on radio frequency beams and in-demand spectrum access to send information.

Along with demonstrating the link between those satellites and General Atomics’ airborne terminal, the experiment proved the ability to make a connection between two optical communication terminals, or OCTs, built by different firms — crucial for SDA, which is relying on a mix of commercial vendors and more traditional defense contractors to build out its architecture. The agency has established an open OCT standard to help with that compatibility.

“This demonstration not just achieved the milestone for SDA-compatible communications across the air and space domains, but very importantly proved the robustness of the SDA standard for communications between OCT’s built by two different companies,” Gregg Burgess, vice president of GA-EMS’ Space Systems division, said in a statement.

SDA is on a path to launch hundreds of data transport and missile tracking satellites in the coming years as part of the PWSA through an incremental development and fielding approach. It’s partnering closely with companies offering proven technology and is delivering capability in batches, also known as tranches, that can be replaced or augmented every two years or so with new, more advanced spacecraft.

The agency began launching its first satellites, dubbed Tranche 0, in April 2023, and the next batch, Tranche 1, is slated to start flying later this month. Together, the two tranches are meant to prove out SDA’s iterative development approach.

The successful air-to-space demonstration was part of an ongoing experimentation campaign involving both SDA Tranche 0 satellites as well as commercial spacecraft. That work contributed to significant progress earlier this spring on space-to-ground connections between SDA and commercial satellites and ground terminals. Since achieving its first successful space-to-air connect in July, Getz said, SDA has repeated the experiment several times.

“It’s become, I don’t want to say routine, but now every time we go up, we’re pretty much connecting, we’re exchanging data, gigabits of data,” according to Getz. “It’s a lot of expertise on the industry side as well as SDA. We kind of built this cookbook of how you make this work, and now we’re seeing some success.”

The demonstration comes as agencies both internal and external to the Defense Department are closely watching for proof that SDA’s development approach and operational concept are the best option for the military.

The Space Force this summer revealed it is evaluating additional options for proliferated satellite communications, including a separate space-based network called MILNET, which is so far relying largely on the SpaceX’s Starshield for satellites, terminals and operations support.

In February, the Government Accountability Office released a report that called into question whether SDA’s go-fast strategy was causing it to bypass key capability development milestones. The analysis recommended the agency hold off on launching its Tranche 1 satellites until it demonstrated required laser communications capabilities with the Tranche 0 spacecraft already in orbit.

GAO found that while SDA at that time had made progress in some areas — like developing an optical terminal standard, testing the capability in a lab and maturing some of the enabling technologies — it hadn’t been able to validate the technology on orbit as fast as it had hoped.

According to Getz, SDA has made “night and day” progress since the release of that report. At the time, he said, the agency was “on the steep part of the learning curve.” Since February, Getz said, SDA has learned a lot about the technology and its use on the Tranche 0 satellites.

“We’re using the SDA satellites constantly, not only for what I’m talking to you about — space-to-air, space-to-ground — but also space-to-space,” he said. “It’s ongoing all the time. There are contacts being scheduled. It’s getting more automated. So, it’s a little bit like a snowballing effect where it takes a little while to get going and then things start speeding up.”

Up next for SDA is to continue expanding the envelope of its experimentation and using what it’s learned to inform future satellite development and operations, Getz said.

While the initial space-to-air connect involved a commercial satellite, Getz said SDA is working toward demonstrating the capability with its Tranche 0 satellites, which are located around 621 miles (1,000 kilometers).

SDA is also planning more work with commercial firms whose terminals comply with SDA’s standards.

“We’re using our own satellites, we’re also working with commercial partners here to bring capabilities and advance capabilities,” he said. “A major message here is that SDA does both and that there is a pretty robust industry response to SDA and the SDA ecosystem. As we build out the tranches, we’re also looking to leverage commercial capabilities.”