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.

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.

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.

In May, acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao announced during a Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing that the MQ-25A was moving into the low-rate initial production and deployment phase.

The aircraft is intended to relieve the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornets of the aerial refueling role, freeing up F/A-18E/F aircraft to focus on strike missions.

The memo, dated April 21, 2026, was recently published by the Pentagon within a Modernized Selected Acquisition Report. It was first reported by The War Zone.

The report notes that in March 2026, the USS Theodore Roosevelt Unmanned Air Warfare Center “became the first fully operational/deployable MQ-25 capable aircraft carrier,” with another UAWC aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan slated “to be operational/deployable at the end of [August] 2026.”

The Nimitz-class carrier USS George H.W. Bush was the first aircraft carrier on which the UAWC was installed and tested back in August 2024.

According to the Navy, the integrated Unmanned Carrier Aviation Mission Control System and the MD-5E Ground Control Station are the systems required for the MQ-25 air vehicle command and control — and are critical to the unmanned aircraft refueler’s operations.

In May, the Stingray reached milestone C, which in the defense acquisition process authorizes a program to transition from the engineering and manufacturing development, or EMD, phase into production and deployment, a process that in this instance has been nearly eight years in the making.

Inked in 2018, the $805 million Boeing-Navy contract covered the design, development, fabrication, test and delivery of four Stingray aircraft, a program that the service at the time estimated would cost about $13 billion for 72 aircraft, according to previous Military Times coverage.

Despite its first test flight running a year later than previously planned, on April 25 the Stingray inched closer to operability after completing an approximately two-hour flight around Mascoutah, Illinois.

With the USS Theodore Roosevelt in the fold and able to support MQ-25 operations, deploying the unmanned refueling drone is seemingly only a matter of time.

The contract, awarded through the Office of Naval Research, will result in the delivery early next year of a High-power Microwave Autonomous Vehicle Operational Capability (HAVOC) system that can autonomously identify drone targets to be dropped from the sky with an electromagnetic pulse.

The award follows prototype testing of the similar Expeditionary Directed Energy Counter-Swarm (ExDECS) weapon prototype that Epirus delivered to the Corps for testing last year under a $5.5 million contract.

Compared with ExDECS, the HAVOC system will have three times the power, improved ruggedness and range and autonomous capabilities intended to simplify decision-making for human operators, the company said.

“We’ve tripled the power density nearly in this system. So think of it, from a laser point of view that a lot of people are familiar with, like going from a 50-kilowatt to 150-kilowatt type laser in the same size package. So that directly kind of contributes to lethality, range, these types of things,” Epirus CEO Andy Lowery told Defense News in an interview. “We’ve also very much increased the reliability of the system and its suitability for various types of weather, types of different locations, dust, and all of that, where the Marines are dragging this thing around.”

Lowery called the increase in the weapon’s effective range “significant,” though he said he couldn’t give specifics.

Epirus says its microwave energy beams, powered by gallium nitride transistors, deliver a precise “force field” blow of interference that can take out swarms of drones with minimal collateral damage.

“We’re specifically useful with defending critical points that just have zero fail – cannot get hit – or defending mobile formations,” Lowery said, “Which is a lot of times what the Marines are looking for when they’re [operating] their expeditionary units.”

The HAVOC system will be delivered with a universal sled mount “for seamless integration across the Marine Corps’ manned and unmanned ground vehicle fleets,” according to an Epirus announcement.

The counter-drone advances the Marine Corps is making parallel the work of the Army, which signed a $66 million deal with Epirus in 2023 for the Leonidas counter-drone weapon prototype. Since receiving the first Leonidas system in late 2023 for testing, the service has deployed the systems to the Middle East and Pacific on an experimental basis. Last year, the Army inked a nearly $44 million contract for delivery of two of the systems. Shortly after, Epirus announced the system had downed 49 aerial drones in a single pulse during a live-fire demonstration.

Testing and evaluation with the Army, particularly in deployed environments, helped develop the requirements for the ruggedized and mobile HAVOC system, Lowery said.

“We realized sort of where the system was strong and where it needed to be improved, and so we’ve incorporated all of that learning into this second generation and getting it into a production-ready state,” he said. “We went through some monsoons, actually, and one of our systems was found to have a little bit of a leak in it … some of those monsoons were like dunking it underwater. So we improved upon the waterproofing and the dust-proofing.”

The Marine Corps is likely to build HAVOC into its existing expeditionary drone defense infrastructure following rigorous testing. The service is now fielding the Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System (L-MADIS), a counter-drone weapons package mounted on two lightweight all-terrain vehicles that can be transported via helicopter or MV-22 Osprey.

“No single system’s a panacea, and neither are we,” Lowery said. “But we provide the goalie kind of thing before the final puck gets in the net, where you’ve had leakers or you have overwhelmed your other systems through quantity, mass, swarms. And we’re the final line of defense against those types of threats.”

Firestorm Labs manufactured more than 1,000 parts and 12 of its proprietary 3D-printable first-person view Squall drones aboard the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Essex as it transited toward RIMPAC 2026 in Hawaii, according to a release.

“Every part xCell printed on deck is one that doesn’t need to be flown or shipped across contested waters — cutting the fuel, aircraft hours, and personnel it takes to keep a ship operational,” a social media release said. “Repairs that once meant days or weeks waiting on a resupply run can now happen in hours, on station.”

Firestorm Labs created the xCell as a factory-in-a-box that can be deployed aboard U.S. Navy vessels to churn out unmanned aerial systems and spare parts for expeditionary warfare.

As waves as high as 12 feet crashed against the ship, service members assembled drones that were later flown as adversary aircraft during a counter-drone exercise at RIMPAC 2026 in Hawaii.

The service members also helped print mechanical test components that assessed the efficacy of the 3D printer used for drone production and fabricated military repair parts that crew members of the USS Essex needed.

The Defense Department, and Navy in particular, is laser-focused on building out modular payload capabilities that can deliver mission-ready assets for the service.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle announced the “containerized capability campaign plan” in March at the McAleese Defense Programs conference.

Caudle outlined a vision in which transportable containers housing defense capabilities such as drones and weapons can be deployed to any region in the world.

In May, the Pentagon announced framework agreements with defense companies Anduril, CoAspire, Leidos and Zone 5 to acquire more than 10,000 containerized missiles over three years beginning in 2027.

The move signaled the launch of the “Low‑Cost Containerized Munitions (LCCM) program.”

The extension is in line with the Trump administration’s efforts to curb illicit narcotics flowing into the United States via alleged drug-carrying vessels in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.

Since 2023, Saildrone’s USVs have worked in coordination with the U.S. Navy, supporting the Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-S) and U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command/U.S. Navy Fourth Fleet, per the release.

“The continuity of Saildrone’s presence along the southern border for nearly three years demonstrates the strategic value we bring as the world’s most experienced operators of unmanned surface vehicles,” said Saildrone President VADM (ret.) John Mustin. “Our unmatched ability to remain on station and on mission in critical regions for months at a time is why our fleet serves as a powerful deterrent to bad actors. We look forward to continuing to partner with the Navy in its mission to secure the country’s maritime approaches and southern border.”

The 33-foot-long Voyager is designed for persistent surface and subsurface surveillance and can also conduct nearshore mapping missions and seafloor characterization, the release states.

Able to remain “on mission and on station” for months at a time, the USVs are “both a deterrent and an alarm” along the U.S.’s expansive southern maritime border, according to the company.

Since September 2025, the U.S. military has conducted strikes against alleged drug-carrying vessels in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean in support of what the Pentagon has called continued counternarcotics efforts.

As of June 22, the Trump administration and U.S. military have disclosed 66 strikes, killing at least 196 people.

Called the Guardian Angel, the four-wheeled UGV has already completed live-fire testing.

Thales Australia worked with two other Australian firms to create the new system. One was Chaos 1, which specializes in rapid assessments, prototyping and autonomous-system experimentation.

The second company was W&E Platt, which makes weapon mounts. Indeed, the Guardian Angel features its low-cost Remote Operated Weapon PLATTform, with an image showing the ROWP mounting a Dillon M134D Minigun.

Thales Australia said in a statement that this project showcases its “sovereign industrial strength, ability to meet the nation’s defense and security needs, and capacity to deliver and manufacture autonomous systems and solutions”.

The company said the project was driven by one aim: to keep Australian troops safe.

However, a spokesperson explained to Defense News, “The Guardian Angel is a prototype and wasn’t specifically built for market. It’s part of a program to test and strengthen our capability in autonomous systems and solutions.”

Nonetheless, its completion paves the way for future platforms, in which a containerized mission system could offer capabilities such as medical evacuation, troop support, cargo transport and fire support.

“UGVs can preserve soldiers by operating in high-risk environments while providing a clear tactical advantage, assisting operations on the battlefield,” Andrew Downes, vice president of Land Thales Australia, commented. “They offer scalable, agile, cost-effective capability that can increase operational reach without increasing risk to personnel.”

Meanwhile, Benny Johanson, Founder and CEO of Chaos 1, described the process as “rapid prototyping in true form — little time, extremely chaotic and high risk.“

“In just six weeks we moved from a concept graphic to live-fire demonstration, and many said it couldn’t be done,” Johanson said, adding that the Guardian Angel “proved the sheer horsepower industry can generate for the warfighter at speed.”

Australian industry has developed a number of UGV designs, and the army is actively experimenting with some of them. For instance, it is trialing M113AS4 armored personnel carriers converted into modular robotic vehicles by BAE Systems Australia.

BAE Systems Australia’s largest platform is the ATLAS 8×8, fitted with an unmanned turret and 25mm Bushmaster cannon. It is currently in a prototype demonstrator status.

The Australian Army has also tested the tracked Warfighter UGV from Cyborg Dynamics Engineering. The army is already using the Ground Uncrewed System, affectionately known as GUS and produced by Outlook Industries, for remote coastal surveillance.

A couple of attritable UGV platforms also being tested are GaardTech’s Jaegar-C and DefendTex’s Banshee, small vehicles that can carry kinetic payloads.

“We’re about to bring into the next exercise UGVs. We can practice breaching minefields, for example, with sacrificial UGVs that might drag a tube full of explosives across a minefield — and we can detonate that,” Brigadier Ben McLennan, commander of the Australian Army’s 3rd Brigade, recently told Defense News. “That’s just one application. There’s a raft of other applications we’re making.”

Ukrainian F-16s have destroyed more than 2,500 Geran and Gerbera one-way attack drones, wrote airpower expert Justin Bronk in an analysis of the Ukraine air war for the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

“[The] use of fighters against such drones has consumed an unsustainable number of airframe flying hours and air-to-air missiles … since mid-2024, when the Ukrainian Air Force received its first Western aircraft and trained crews,” the analysis reads.

“Russian industry produces more than 6,000 [one-way attack] drones per month, and fighter aircraft have only a finite number of airframe hours available before they need time consuming deep maintenance cycles to be performed at a factory by expert technicians.”

Ukraine’s fleet currently operates an estimated 39 F-16s, out of about 79 promised by various Western European nations. Ukraine also flies an estimated four Mirage 2000-5 fighters, out of up to 20 promised by France, plus a few Soviet-era Su-27 and MiG-29 fighters.

The F-16s have been a game changer in the Ukraine air war. They enable Ukraine’s small air force to launch stand-off attacks against ground targets using American-made JDAM and French-made AASM Hammer glide bombs. The threat they pose to Russia’s air force became evident earlier this month, when a Ukrainian F-16 reportedly downed an Su-35 over eastern Ukraine.

Ironically, the F-16 has proven such a capable aircraft that it has become a victim of its own success.

“The F-16 fleet has been over-tasked, mostly by C-UAS [counter-drone] interception duties, for which there is almost unlimited demand over time,” Bronk told Defense News.

The root of the dilemmas is that Ukraine is squeezed between multiple aerial threats.

In addition to drone strikes, Russia has launched numerous cruise and ballistic missiles at Ukrainian cities. Russia has become adept at launching massive combined strikes that begin with waves of drones, followed by cruise missiles, such as the Kh-101, and then ballistic missiles, such as the Iskander-M and Kinzhal.

Ukraine has managed to at least partially tame the drone threat by creating dense belts of short-range air defenses, or SHORAD. These SHORAD belts combine short-range anti-aircraft missiles, anti-aircraft guns, mobile machine gun teams and a variety of homegrown interceptor-drones.

The drawback there is maintaining dense SHORAD coverage along the 745-mile front line — plus defending cities in the rear — with short-range weapons.

“What unites all these mobile air defense teams and counter-drone teams is that their equipment and ammunition is relatively cheap and thus their operations are sustainable,” the RUSI analysis noted. “However, they are relatively personnel intensive to deploy at scale and require both force density and geographical depth to be effective.”

These limitations also point to the difficulties NATO would face in creating its own Ukrainian-style SHORAD system.

“NATO cannot replicate the density of SHORAD defenses that Ukraine deploys for C-UAS coverage, due to the huge personnel requirements of doing so on a sustainable basis,” Bronk told Defense News.

However, NATO could invest in radar-guided anti-aircraft guns to protect key installations, such as airbases and headquarters, and develop cheaper drone-killing munitions for aircraft such as the APKWS II rocket.

Nonetheless, this still leaves Russia’s cruise and ballistic missiles, against which SHORAD is largely ineffective.

As with the U.S. and Israel versus Iran’s missiles, Ukraine must carefully manage limited stockpiles of air defense interceptors like the American-made Patriot and the European-made SAMP/T.

Ideally, Ukraine should rely on SHORAD to stop the drones, while reserving its F-16s for other missions, Bronk argues.

“Other systems need to be used wherever possible for [one-way attack] drones so that F-16 capacity can be used to intercept cruise missiles and deliver strike missions,” Bronk explained. “Within the Ukrainian Air Force inventory, it is by far the most efficient asset for this.”

Bronk believes that F-16 stand-off ground attacks could be even more effective — if Ukraine’s high command was less rigid.

“There is potential for the Ukrainian Air Force to have greater effects if squadrons and wings are given more authority to plan strikes themselves rather than being centrally tasked by Army-centric headquarters elements,” he said.

The Defense Department has put out a solicitation for robot boats that are capable of launching small attack drones — with technology mature enough to be deployed to the field within 120 days.

The goal for the Suitable Warfighting Adaptive Payloads, or SWAP-USV, project is to find “mature, market-ready [unmanned surface vessels] fully integrated with two or more mature, market-ready aerial drones to detect, identify, track, and defeat hostile threats,” according to the Defense Innovation Unit solicitation. The call out set a response deadline of Aug. 10.

To make this happen, DIU created a year-long contest backed by $100 million in prize money. DIU wants to “partner with established maritime manufacturers, autonomy developers, sensor manufacturers, and UAS developers to execute a multi-phase Prize Challenge.”

The SWAP-USV project is billed as a solution to a problem that has also plagued missile and drone defense on land: the economics favor the offense.

“The cost-exchange ratio for detecting and neutralizing asymmetric maritime threats in contested environments is heavily skewed in favor of the adversary,” the DIU solicitation states. Nor can the U.S. military continue to rely “on exquisite, multi-million-dollar naval and aviation assets to intercept these inexpensive targets.”

The solicitation paints the picture of a drone boat that can carry, launch and control at least two small UAVs. The UAVs together should be capable of conducting kinetic strikes with a combined payload of at least 2 kilograms, or just over 4 pounds.

DIU wants a mix of recoverable and one-way attack drones that can patrol ocean, coastal and riverine waters, and loiter on station. The drones, according to the solicitation, should “support one or more operational effects, including ISR, comms relay, electronic warfare, payload delivery, or precision engagement of moving or stationary, as applicable, under operator command.”

The Pentagon also wants the system to be mobile enough to fit into a standard cargo container, on road trailers or on C-17 and C-130 transports.

“Solutions that can launch from unimproved locations or provide additional launch flexibility, i.e. remotely from a container, will be looked upon favorably,” DIU noted, adding that the UAVs should be “technically mature and have an established production line.”

Interestingly, among the maritime threats the DIU solicitation cites are “‘go-fast’ smuggling boats, and semi-submersibles.” Drug cartels have used semi-submersibles to transport contraband from South America to the U.S., and such pseudo-submarines are hard to detect.

The SWAP-USV project calls for robot craft capable of “autonomous surveillance and interdiction of defined maritime operating areas, maximizing operational coverage, probability of detection, interdiction effectiveness, and time on station while minimizing daily operating cost, logistics burden, and required personnel.”

The surveillance elements of the solicitation state that the drone boat must be able to “autonomously follow or shadow a vessel of interest, and autonomously intercept a noncooperative, maneuvering vessel. Autonomous execution of these functions is desired but not required.”

The SWAP-USV Challenge, meanwhile, comprises three “sprints,” or phases, each with separate prize money. To sweeten the pot further, companies that pass the test in each phase will be eligible for procurement contracts backed by a $200 million budget.

Sprint 1 calls for in-water testing in fall 2026, with a goal of deploying a system in the field within 120 days.

“Solutions must include a complete mission ready USV with integrated drone capability system available for testing and evaluation within 29 days of down-selection for Sprint 1,” the solicitation specified. There will be $40 million in prize money.

Sprint 2 will have a fall 2026 deadline and in-water testing in early 2027, with the focus on “expanded payloads, upgraded autonomy, and multi-vendor integrations.” The prize money for that timeframe will also be $40 million.

Sprint 3 will take submissions in early 2027, with in-water testing in summer 2027. The goals of this phase will be announced later, but there will be $20 million in prizes.

Companies must specify which phase they want to join. “The government reserves the right to assign applicants to [Sprint] cohorts based on technical and manufacturing maturity,” the solicitation noted.