Last October, CNN interviewed a former advisor to ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad who told the outlet that Tice, a veteran Marine Corps captain and freelance reporter, had died in 2013. Debra Tice describes the event as a “crash” that sent her health into a tailspin. She became unable to eat, losing weight and becoming so weak she couldn’t leave the house, she said. Gastroenterologists and other physicians, she said, ultimately concluded that her symptoms were based in trauma, not disease.

Beyond the reports that her son was dead, Tice said she was blindsided by a wave of condolence cards and messages, not only to her, but also to her other six children.

“It was the first time that they had all kind of been pinged, and a lot of it was kindness,” Tice told Military Times on Aug. 14, the day after the anniversary. “But, this mom was like, ‘Don’t touch my children.’”

Tice rejects the account of Assad’s advisor, Bassam Al-Hassan, noting that he failed an FBI polygraph. No physical proof exists that Austin Tice is no longer alive.

The Tice family has in recent months called for an investigation of the possibility that Austin was moved from Syria to Iran under the control of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has managed some secret detention facilities in Syria. They’ve emphasized that they want the U.S. to reach out to Iran amid negotiations over the ongoing conflict to ask for full information sharing on Austin’s case.

“Our government needs to be asking what they know about Austin every time they’re with them [at the negotiating table],” she said.

For Debra Tice, the next objective is clear: meet in person with Jay Clayton, the newly confirmed director of National Intelligence, who was sworn in earlier this month.

“I really don’t know anything about him, but I just wanted to share with him how important his role is in getting Austin out,” she said.

Recently departed DNI Tulsi Gabbard had taken the unprecedented step of allowing the Tice family to review all the information the government had collected on Austin – eight four-inch binders covering the period from his abduction to October 2024, she said. In addition to various documented medical issues and times Austin had been moved, Tice said, she saw what she believes is evidence that he could have been recovered by the State Department shortly after he was first abducted.

To date, Tice said, she has only ever met with one Secretary of State: Antony Blinken, who in 2024 offered a $10 million bounty for information about Austin’s whereabouts. Debra Tice maintains that decision was unhelpful because it tends to flood channels with bad info.

She’d like Clayton, the new DNI, to open the binders again and show the family anything learned since October 2024. She’s also hoping to make international trips: she’d like to connect with Israel’s office of the national coordinator for hostages and the missing, an office parallel to the State Department’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. She also hopes to make a second trip to Syria, she said, as well as a new journey to the Vatican to meet with Pope Leo XIV.

“I’m just getting everything warmed up again,” Tice said, “And reminding people that, you know, I’m still trying to find my son.”

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.

American officials are backpedaling too. Trump on July 20 told the Financial Times that the U.S. has to be “a little bit careful of who we license to.” Despite that, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday posted on X that the two sides have “now reached an agreement.”

The glacial progress may reflect American defense giants’ fear that Kyiv could become a defense industry competitor — rather than posing risk to technology or intellectual property — a Republican official on Capitol Hill told The Atlantic.

“Their real worry is that the Ukrainians will find a way to improve the Patriot and then produce them at scale faster and for much less money than what the existing production lines in the U.S. could do,” the official said, adding that the companies will publicly frame their concerns around “IP theft and tech transfer” instead.

Ukraine’s weapons industry, honed by nearly five years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, has been booming since the U.S.-Israel war with Iran began in the spring. The conflict with Iran has drained an estimated two-thirds of America’s pre-war Patriot interceptor inventory, sparking discussion about inventory and strategy.

Some defense partners are eager to work with Ukraine, a country with rare recent experience fighting a large-scale land war, and have shown strong interest in collaborating with Kyiv to develop and field cheaper, faster-to-produce alternatives to million-dollar weapons.

The race toward competition is problematic for the defense giants, the official said — not because Ukraine might steal the Patriot — but because the country’s partners might outbuild it, cutting into the current monopoly on antiballistic capabilities and profits.

Trump first pledged the license at the July NATO summit in Ankara, promising Ukraine permission to produce Patriot missiles for the first time.

“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That’s pretty cool. This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving ‘em enough,” Trump said, adding that the companies had not yet been consulted on the plan.

Zelenskyy said the next day that the question had been “resolved politically,” telling reporters that technical teams needed to start work “without delay, so that we can get licenses very quickly and start production in Ukraine as soon as possible.”

Five days after Trump’s pledge, Ukraine, nine European countries and defense heavyweights including Eurosam, Leonardo, Thales and Saab launched a coalition in Paris to field Freyja, an entirely new antiballistic system built around a Ukrainian interceptor priced at roughly one-fifth of a Patriot round.

A week after that, Lockheed unveiled its own cheaper, faster-to-produce Patriot missile at the Farnborough International Airshow, advertising the PAC-3 ACE at roughly $2 million a round – less than half the price of the round Ukraine fires at Russian ballistic missiles today.

The Patriot line rarely moves that fast. Its current top round, the PAC-3 MSE, was first accepted by the U.S. Army in 2015 and took until 2018 to reach full-rate production, per the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance.

On July 21, one day after the ACE debut, Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, described production talks with Ukraine as simply “early,” telling reporters the company will “support the US Army and the [Trump] administration on what they want to go do,” according to Breaking Defense.

Raytheon’s process “has just started,” with the company working with the U.S. government “to determine what is feasible and what is best for Ukraine,” its president of land and air defense systems, Tom Laliberty, said at the same show.

Two days later, Zelenskyy wrote in a post on X that he was “grateful for the company’s readiness to take our partnership to an even higher level, where Ukraine would co-produce, together with Raytheon, some of the most vital air defense assets – Patriot interceptors,” after meeting representatives of the group.

But when Zelenskyy asked Trump for “several hundred” interceptors at a July 28 Oval Office meeting, the president refused, citing America’s shrunken stocks, The Atlantic reported.

Three days later, Trump reversed course on the license entirely.

“We have not agreed to that,” he said at a Camp David Cabinet meeting. “We’re talking about it, but it’s a hard thing to give away that kind of technology.”

Then, U.S. NATO Ambassador Matthew Whitaker dampened expectations further on Aug. 3, telling Fox News that “we do not allow anybody but US manufacturers to make those in the United States,” adding that a long-term production agreement “will not be concluded before this winter,” per Euronews.

The deal’s current status is unclear.

“The decision has been made,” Zelenskyy said during an interview on Ukrainian television over the weekend, according to United24. “It was made by the President of the United States and other important American government institutions.”

American officials have yet to respond to Zelenskyy’s latest comments.

Task Force Falcon Strike will utilize one-way attack drones composed of unmanned systems from above, on and below the sea, managed by U.S. military support staff and regional partners, according to a Thursday release.

The move to launch this unit follows CENTCOM’s establishment of Task Force Scorpion Strike in December 2025, a Middle East-based task force equipped with one-way attack drones as the military strived to integrate drone technology across the services.

“Task Force Falcon Strike will expand on Scorpion Strike’s success given the tremendous innovation happening among our regional allies and partners,” Adm. Brad Cooper, CENTCOM commander, said in the release. “Integrating and deploying our new capabilities together will help us rapidly realize the new possibilities that are on the horizon.”

Scorpion Strike was the first to launch an aerial attack drone from a U.S. Navy warship last December, the month of its announcement. The unit also deployed one-way unmanned aerial systems during Operation Epic Fury and during strikes on Iranian port facilities in July with unmanned attack vessels at sea, the statement highlights.

CENTCOM began consulting with and officially inviting regional partners to join Falcon Strike, aiming to expand attack-drone capabilities across the Middle East into a “unified multi-domain, multinational deterrent.”

“The United States military has a lot of strong partnerships and friends in the region,” Cooper said. “We are collectively stronger when we integrate and deploy new capabilities together.”

The release did not specify which regional partners CENTCOM is working with on the unit.

Personnel from the U.S. Special Operations Command Central, located at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, will lead Falcon Strike’s staff of U.S. and regional representatives after it launched Scorpion Strike, the release states.

The announcement comes as the U.S. continues its war with Iran, which has depleted the U.S. munitions stockpile and caused military leaders to weigh the possibility of developing cheaper anti-drone technology at a faster pace.

“This is the first rotation in the 15-year history of the program to be certified as a MAGTF, and that’s a big deal,” Col. George Flynn, commanding officer of MRF-D 2026, explained to Defense News.

Flynn noted that being certified validates the MAGTF’s credibility and proficiency because, if called upon, a commander “knows the force is going to be able to accomplish all those tasks it’s assigned as part of its task order to facilitate operations in the theater.”

“What makes it special purpose is just the uniqueness of how it’s placed here in Darwin in support of the Pacific theater,” Flynn continued. “We’re responsible for being ready for the full spectrum of operations from full-scale combat to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.”

This certification process was completed in early May during an exercise in the Philippines, making “an incredible statement” on its ability to respond to crises.

Flynn said MRF-D is authorized to have 2,500 personnel, but he typically has around 2,000 in his SPMAGTF. They arrived in Darwin in March, with his task force including, among others, the California-based 1/5 Marines and MV-22B Ospreys from the Hawaii-based VMM-268.

High tempo

Flynn pointed out that “the Marine Corps, we always seek to deploy”.

MRF-D has maintained a heavy operational tempo, with the commander saying personnel had traveled to six or seven different countries to date.

“We’re busy, but Marines are having a great time. For this deployment, we’ve had 13 planned operations, activities, investments or exercises,” Flynn said. “We’ve been in the Philippines, we have forces in Indonesia right now, and we have forces that are getting ready to go to Tahiti to do training with the French. And we’ve certainly been all over the Australian continent.”

The latter includes major exercises with the Australian Army’s Darwin-based 1st Brigade and Townsville-based 3rd Brigade. Operating with the 1st Brigade is particularly helpful to both parties, since that formation now specializes in littoral warfare.

“We get to share good practices,” Flynn noted. “We have a great relationship with 1st Brigade.”

Asked about difficulties operating in such far-flung locations, often simultaneously, Flynn acknowledged, “It’s a good challenge to have. It allows us to demonstrate our ability to be distributed, and how well we can achieve operational reach throughout the region.

“I think it goes to demonstrate that, where needed, Marines can show up and provide the support that Marines are capable of providing.”

He said the SPMAGTF’s expeditionary mindset, its ability to get to locations quickly and to sustain itself, has “really been eye-watering to watch.” Flynn noted formations typically “spend their workup getting to their max level of readiness and then, once that deployment starts, that readiness starts to degrade over time.”

However, this is not the case with MRF-D, as “we have the unique ability to gain and maintain readiness throughout the deployment,” he said. This is due in part to “the expansive training areas throughout the continent that give us some wonderful opportunities to be most ready when called upon.”

Capability growth

“We have a robust C2 [command-and-control] capability down to our supporting elements as well, and we’ve been able to work with those systems and demonstrate … the ability to go up and down on different communication systems using satellite capabilities down to high-frequency capabilities and the like,” Flynn told Defense News. “At no point have I ever felt challenged with being able to command and control the force based on the capabilities that we’re working with.”

The Marine Corps continues to evolve for modern combat, too.

“Our Sec War has been adamant about increasing capabilities of the force with regards to small UAS [unmanned aerial systems] and first-person-view, one-way attack drones. We’ve had the opportunity to experiment with those systems out here, and you saw some of that at the counter-landing live-fire in the Philippines,” Flynn said. “So, we’re definitely using those. We’ve also used others like logistics-based unmanned aerial systems to facilitate movement of logistical requirements throughout the training areas here in Australia.”

However, he noted the Marine Corps “is actively still working through to increase capabilities” in counter-drone systems.

Perhaps one of the biggest helps to the SPMAGTF would be more assets for “lift and the ability to move the force around the theater,” Flynn shared.

Nevertheless, he said, “I’m beyond happy with what we’ve been able to demonstrate with our operational reach, and I think it’s just the opportunities that exist to further achieve interoperability with our allies and partners with moving the force around the theater is something that we should continue to look at going forward”.

Positive vibes

Asked about what he has gained from leading the deployment, Flynn said, “Every day, I get a chance to lead all these Marines and sailors that are under my command, and how they generally seem to understand their purpose, and they operate with happy hearts out here.

“The relationships we’ve built with the Australians and with other nations, allies and partners we’ve got a chance to work with — and just a demonstration of what it means to be a MAGTF operating in the Pacific theater — has just been really powerful for me personally.”

Flynn said MRF-D has contributed to a free and open Indo-Pacific theater.

“I think our presence, our posture and our ability to demonstrate that we can get into locations and be responsive to countries in need facilitates that free and open Indo-Pacific. All countries in this area have their own sovereignty and we respect that, and we stand by to support and protect that sovereignty as required.”

Each MRF-D deployment lasts six months. The current one ends in October, just before the wet season arrives in northern Australia.

The report, published Wednesday, examined Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data sourced from FlightRadar24 for aircraft models historically linked to Russian private military contractors or the Ministry of Defense, filtering for flights touching Mali, Burkina Faso or Niger.

Burkina Faso received the most flights of the three countries, at 56, followed by 38 to Mali, while Niger recorded only six, the report found. C4ADS attributed Burkina Faso’s volume in part to its position as a transit point between Mali and Niger, and to the intensity of attacks by Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara during the period.

The busiest single operator was Flight Unit 224, a Russian Ministry of Defense-owned airline sanctioned by the United States in May 2023. The Russian Special Flight Squadron, which transports senior officials, conducted 14 flights, while Russia’s Ministry for Emergency Situations carried out 12. Despite the ministry’s ostensibly humanitarian mandate, prior media reporting linked it to military cargo transport to Mali, Syria and Iran.

C4ADS also flagged several private carriers it said remain unsanctioned by the U.S., EU or U.K. despite documented links to Russian military logistics, including Kyrgyzstan-registered Sapsan Airlines.

On routing, C4ADS said state-owned aircraft such as Flight Unit 224’s RA-82030 typically refueled at Russia’s Khmeimim air base in Syria and at Libyan sites including Al-Khadim before continuing to the Sahel. Private carriers more often transited commercial hubs in the United Arab Emirates, Algeria and Türkiye.

Defense News published an investigation in April on a shadowy fleet of Russian military-affiliated cargo aircraft making more than a hundred flights to Algeria over the preceding year. Flight-tracking data, interviews and satellite imagery suggested the network was being used both to deliver fighter jets to the Algerian air force and as a logistics system for onward flights into the Sahel and West Africa.

C4ADS said its findings were preliminary and intended to identify avenues for further inquiry rather than draw firm conclusions, citing limitations including inconsistent ADS-B coverage and the possibility that operators manipulate transponder data to conceal destinations. The organization pointed to a growing number of flights through Togo and Algeria before or after Sahel stops as a subject warranting additional scrutiny.

Companies will be able to request range access even if they do not have an ongoing partnership with the government, according to the release. The effort, the Army says, is designed to hasten the development and testing of drones, counter-drone systems, long-range fires and cheap interceptors.

The service said it is launching four ranges in the U.S. and one internationally. The ranges include Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, West Cibola Range in Arizona, Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center in Mississippi, Camp Grayling in Michigan and Africa Multidomain Training and Experimentation Center in Morocco.

“A company with a good idea shouldn’t need a team of lawyers and a program of record just to prove their equipment works,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said in the release. “So we fixed that. One front door — testrange.army.mil — a real person to walk you in, and on the other side, everything the modern battlefield demands: contested airspace, degraded signals and the space to test at real scale.”

The move comes as the Pentagon implements sweeping changes to speed up drone and counter-drone acquisition. The Defense Department created the Joint Interagency Task Force 401, a unit charged with streamlining counter-drone efforts, which recently launched an online marketplace.

It also follows reports that the U.S. has depleted around two-thirds of the Patriot missile interceptor inventory it had before the country’s war with Iran. Though Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disputed a CNN report that said military commanders had warned U.S. interceptor stockpiles were critically depleted, the Pentagon is pressing the defense industry to expedite the production of critical weapons.

Companies can request to use the ranges using an online portal, but the service cannot guarantee a specific location or timeline. The website includes range parameters and a list of capabilities that can be tested at each site.

Additionally, the Army announced that Camp Grayling will host an “electromagnetic unreliability test event” for the private sector beginning in September and then likely on a quarterly recurring basis. The event will simulate conditions seen in Ukraine during the country’s ongoing war with Russia.

Dugway Proving Ground, for instance, offers long-range fires testing, while West Cibola Range is currently only available for drone and counter-drone assessments.

The initiative has been led by the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command in collaboration with the Mississippi and Michigan National Guard and U.S. Africa Command, according to the release.

Following a NATO summit in Ankara, Trump was transferred from Air Force One to a military plane via a catering truck in an extraordinary deception prompted by an Iranian assassination threat, U.S. media reported.

The White House did not disclose the change, and it remained a secret until The Washington Post first reported it on Monday. Some media commentators questioned whether the operation left Trump’s aides and journalists traveling with him at risk aboard the plane presumed to be carrying the president.

“I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “I think it was at greater risk because that would be the plane I think that they would be more likely to go for.”

Trump was accompanied by several close aides when he secretly transferred from Air Force One to a smaller military aircraft in Turkey last month, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, executive assistant Natalie Harp and Oval Office operations director Walt Nauta made the move in the catering truck with Trump, along with several lower-profile aides, the Post reported. No Cabinet officials joined Trump in the truck, according to the newspaper.

After a day of social media memes portraying Trump as hiding out in the catering truck, the image-conscious president, who often promotes memes of himself as a bold and courageous leader, said he was following the direction of the Secret Service, the agency that protects the president.

“Well, it’s only up to Secret Service. I just follow what they’d like to do, so I go by Secret Service and the military,” Trump said.

“I guess there was a threat out there. I didn’t really ask too much about it. I get a lot of threats,” Trump said.

The White House said at the time that the president was flying aboard Air Force One from Turkey to Britain. But moments after Trump boarded the plane, he left it in secret via the catering truck and boarded another aircraft for the flight to Britain, the Post said on Monday, quoting unnamed sources.

Trump had taken a newly renovated Qatari-donated jet to Ankara for the NATO summit but unexpectedly announced he would use an older Air Force One when departing the country, a move that prompted questions about the newer plane’s security.

The trip to NATO was the first international travel for the new plane, whose speedy upgrades triggered questions over its cost and security, and took place as hostilities escalated with Iran, which borders Turkey.

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.

Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg told defense-industry leaders in an Aug. 5 memo that they have 21 days to submit plans for “significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities.”

“Years-long development cycles are not acceptable,” Feinberg wrote. “We must dramatically accelerate our program schedules and expand our production capacity now.”

The memo also asks companies to propose specific capital investments and facility expansions and to explain how they would work with the Pentagon to increase weapons production. Feinberg also called on industry to demonstrate its willingness to “put skin in the game.” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the responses will help inform the department’s fiscal 2028 budget request.

The increased demand comes as the U.S. has used large quantities of advanced munitions during the conflict with Iran, with recent estimates showing declines in stocks of key missile interceptors.

A Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis estimated that U.S. stocks of Patriot interceptors fell from 2,330 before the war with Iran, to between 759 and 827 after the latest round of operations. THAAD interceptor stocks fell from 452 to between 234 and 278.

The Pentagon’s challenge is not identifying how many interceptors have been used, but how quickly they can be replaced. CSIS estimates the delivery timeline for Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptors at about 42 months and about 53 months for THAAD.

The urgent 21-day deadline was communicated to arms manufacturers like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and RTX.

RTX said in July that it had received its first U.S. domestic production order for GEM-T Patriot interceptors in more than 30 years, in a roughly $442 million Army contract. The order comes as the Pentagon not only seeks to increase production of newer Patriot and THAAD interceptors but also to expand its capacity for the components required to build them.

On July 27, the department announced seven-year framework agreements with industry to expand production of key propulsion components for PAC-3 MSE and THAAD interceptors. L3Harris said its PAC-3 agreement will nearly triple production of a range of propulsion products supporting the interceptor, while its THAAD agreement is intended to quadruple production of key propulsion components.

Feinberg’s memo asks companies to identify the areas where they can increase and accelerate production and delivery, and what would be required from the Pentagon in order to make that happen. The department will use the responses to determine what industry can deliver faster and what additional resources may be needed.

The memo’s scope extends beyond weapons used in the Iran conflict. Feinberg identified 16 critical programs under consideration for accelerated production or increased procurement in the fiscal 2028 review, including the Next Generation Interceptor, the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS), a mobile air defense radar system and a space-based missile-tracking system.