MDA is developing the Next-Generation Interceptor after canceling a previous effort to field a redesigned kill vehicle in August 2019 for the ground-based interceptors which make up the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system (GMD) designed to protect the U.S. homeland from intercontinental ballistic missiles from Iran and North Korea.

MDA wants to field NGI by 2028, but Congress is pushing for an earlier deadline and industry teams have said they could deliver initial interceptors by the fourth quarter of fiscal 2027, one year ahead of schedule.

“The NGI program is on track to start product development in 2024 but the program is planning to overlap design and production activities to accelerate flight testing,” the GAO report states. “Any major design issues could disrupt this strategy.”

GAO found NGI’s schedule to be “already optimistic when compared to development timeframes of similar weapon systems,” and added that the agency is also struggling to meet testing goals across the board, which could further derail the ambitious schedule.

The program’s cost has also gone up by hundreds of millions of dollars in the last year, the GAO found. Even so, it has yet to rise above planned funding levels.

Yet the GAO said, “MDA officials expect further increases due to supply chain issues and rising material costs.”

On time

MDA is working to field NGI by 2028 as threats grow rapidly in complexity and capability.

While the NGI program is meeting schedule goals now, GAO showed skepticism that NGI would maintain its timeline. Historically, the office said, comparable technology development has taken longer.

The agency is buying long lead materials for the interceptors, particularly for ones to be used in upcoming flight tests, but GAO notes NGI designs “are not yet mature, and any changes could necessitate rework on interceptors currently in early production.”

The agency was carrying two teams through a competitive design phase. Lockheed Martin and its Aerojet Rocketdyne partner completed the preliminary design review for its NGI in September 2023 and a Northrop and RTX team passed through the same design review at the end of January.

But nearly a year prior to a deadline for two competing teams to reach a critical design review phase, MDA chose Lockheed Martin in April to move forward rather than continue with both teams into the next phase of technology development.

According to the GAO report, both NGI contractors “made progress developing critical technologies” and MDA plans to assess NGI’s critical technology maturation status prior to a product development decision expected in the third quarter of FY24.

NGI’s schedule has flight tests beginning roughly six years after MDA awarded the development contracts. GAO noted that a 2019 study by a federally funded research and development center found “kill vehicles, satellites and strategic systems” take roughly seven years from contract award to first flight.

Flight test schedules will have an impact, the GAO said, and MDA has not been able to stay on track even for GMD testing. NGI production, the GAO notes, is contingent on completing three intercept flight tests within two years.

“GMD program has never successfully executed more than two intercept flight tests within a span of 2 years since the program started testing operationally configured GMD interceptors in 2006,” the report states.

“NGI might face similar challenges, in part, because DOD plans for NGI flight testing to increase in difficulty with each successive test,” it adds.

On budget

The GAO found the NGI program’s development cost has already increased in its “early stages.” The Pentagon has anticipated the program cost to be “a few billion dollars higher” than MDA’s early estimates, which is in line with the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office’s independent cost assessment in 2021.

“NGI’s costs remain within the program’s current funding level, but the cost growth accumulated in the first 3 years of the program has reduced the government’s funding margin as a result of accelerated schedules,” GAO states. Moreover, GAO said typically the most significant cost growth happens later in development and production.

The rising cost, according to the office, is mostly due to contractors taking steps to mitigate schedule risk as well as growing material costs “which directly related to supply chain issues and were further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

While MDA has traded cost for schedule in the first phases of the program, the agency did acknowledge that will not be “sustainable going forward,” the GAO notes.

Technical risk

In 2022, the Pentagon’s research and engineering branch found technical risk in the NGI program. MDA “disagreed” with a large portion of that assessment and GAO said the agency has “taken limited steps to address the identified risks.”

GAO reported MDA has completed all required survivability testing on component-level parts, but the agency “is not fully addressing risks associated with NGI’s threat requirements.”

And MDA is not “fully developing” models and simulation that it needs to verify technology maturity and performance, the report states.

GAO found other DOD components like GMD’s Technical Direction Agent, U.S. Northern Command, MDS Operational Test Agency and the DoD’s director of operational test and evaluation were concerned about the lack of modeling and simulation capabilities for the program and the agency’s ability to get the needed capabilities developed in time for ground testing expected in FY26.

“CAPE officials told us in February 2024 that foregoing adequate simulation capabilities directly amplifies risks to the program because MDA will be relying on these same models and simulations for verification activities in lieu of more extensive flight testing,” the report states. “CAPE officials added that insufficient modeling and simulation would potentially leave some of the most critical questions regarding NGI’s performance unanswered.”

But MDA told GAO that it would ensure “NGI-specific requirements for the MDS-level modeling and simulation framework are identified, planned for, and implemented,” according to the report. This includes aligning development of an all-digital MDS-level simulator with the program.

“DOT&E officials told us this new digital simulator will be essential for conducting NGI operational assessments because it will provide significantly greater simulations capabilities, once developed,” the GAO states.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby announced the reshuffle in a briefing today, calling it “difficult but necessary.” In the short-term, he said, Patriot and NASAM interceptors that had been slated for other countries will now go to Ukraine.

“As a result, deliveries for these missiles to other countries that are currently in the queue will have to be delayed,” Kirby said.

The White House expects Ukraine will receive these air defense weapons by the end of the summer. Kirby said the number will be in the hundreds, and that the decision should give Ukraine what it needs for the next 16 months. At that point, the countries who currently have air defense missiles on order can expect to start seeing theirs delivered.

“To be clear, those countries will still receive the missiles they have ordered,” Kirby said. “It’s just that the delivery will take a little longer.”

He did not say which countries would be affected by the delays, but noted that the decision will not impact Taiwan or Israel.

Lockheed Martin is fully funded by the U.S. Army to build 550 PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) missiles a year at its Camden, Arkansas, production line and hit a rate of 500 per year in December 2023.

While the Army has yet to fund another missile production increase, Lockheed has invested internally to build 650 interceptors a year.

In 2023, Lockheed signed six letters of approval with international customers.

There are 19 countries with the Raytheon-made Patriot and that customer base is growing. Switzerland purchased five batteries and 75 missiles in November 2022 and Romania plans to buy additional fire units. At least two other European countries are close to announcing plans to buy Patriot, according to Raytheon this spring.

Slovakia has recently expressed interest in purchasing Patriot, and Germany has said it intends to grow its Patriot force.

The decision is one of the most extraordinary measures America has taken to protect Ukraine since the full-scale war with Russia began two years ago. For months, Pentagon leaders have said that air defense is at the top of the agenda for the countries supporting Kyiv. And they’ve taken recent steps to prove it.

“Air defense has been at the top of my agenda for a long time,” said U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at a June press conference.

Austin spoke at NATO headquarters in Brussels, shortly after a meeting of countries that gather each month to coordinate support for Ukraine. Just before the summit, multiple outlets reported that the U.S. was sending another Patriot system to Ukraine — though neither Austin nor Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. CQ Brown would confirm the news.

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy said in June his country needs seven Patriot systems, one of the most advanced air defense systems in the world. Germany announced earlier this year that it would send one to Ukraine. The Netherlands similarly committed to assembling and sending another system.

Other countries have committed different air defense systems altogether, such as NASAMS.

“It’s not just Patriots,” Austin said at the June presser, listing out other systems. “It’s a number of capabilities that Ukraine needs, and they need the interceptors to complement the platforms.”

Short supply

Despite their importance, both air defense batteries and the interceptors they fire are in short supply. The U.S. and its allies have spent much of the war sourcing whatever extra weapons are available — especially as Ukraine faced drone and missile barrages on its cities and critical infrastructure. The decision this week reflects how tight the supply chain for these systems is. Rather than expanding capacity, the U.S. has reordered it.

“It’s a reminder of the importance of expanding inventory,” said Tom Karako, an expert on air defense at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, of the decision.

Karako said that the money meant to expand that capacity included in the April national security supplemental — a massive refresh of security aid to Ukraine and other countries — hasn’t been spent yet. Though there is around $48 billion for military aid to Ukraine in the package, the amount marked for air defense isn’t specified, he said.

“You don’t just turn on a dime and start spitting out Patriots like a Xerox machine,” Karako said.

The White House didn’t specify what countries will be affected by the reshuffle, though Karako said that the likely candidates will be in Europe and the Middle East.

Kirby said that Washington would do what it could to shorten any delays.

Still, he said, “each country is going to have a different set of circumstances that apply to that based on what they’ve ordered and what their own self-defense needs are.”

Air Force Lt. Gen. Heath Collins, the agency’s director, said March 7 at the McAleese & Associates conference that the agency was told by the Pentagon it would not conduct its usual briefing as part of Monday’s formal rollout. He referred questions to the Defense Department.

Collins noted he’s working with his staff on finding another forum to detail its budget request, adding that the agency would “still make sure” to “get the appropriate information out.”

Several reporters and analysts recalled MDA budget briefings took place as long ago as the early 2000s.

When asked about the decision, Pentagon spokesman Chris Sherwood declined to confirm it.

“We will not preview content or briefers before the president’s budget release,” he said. “The undersecretary of defense (comptroller)/chief financial officer will decide which departments and agencies brief their respective budgets during the DoD budget rollout press conference.”

This year marks the first budget cycle in which Collins is leading MDA. President Joe Biden tapped Collins to be MDA director in May 2023; he succeeded Vice Adm. Jon Hill, who had served as the agency’s leader since 2019.

Collins did not officially take command of the agency until Congress confirmed him in December, after Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., released a lengthy blanket hold on military officer confirmations.

Last year, MDA sought a budget of $10.9 billion, prioritizing regional and homeland missile defense with a major focus on building an air and missile defense architecture in Guam.

The agency is in the midst of major modernization efforts to keep up with the pace of emerging, complex threats. This includes developing a Next Generation Interceptor to replace Ground-Based Interceptors that make up the roughly 20-year-old Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System. That system protects the homeland from potential intercontinental ballistic missile attacks from countries like North Korea and Iran.

The agency is also working on a Glide Phase Interceptor to defeat hypersonic missile threats farther from intended targets.

Noah Robertson contributed to this story.

The U.S. military may run out of personnel funds before the end of the year, be forced to scale back operations and see ongoing modernization efforts harmed if Congress fails to pass a defense spending bill by the end of next week, service leaders warned Tuesday.

The undersecretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force said they’d have billions of dollars in “misaligned” funds — money that exists but not in the right budget lines to support their current spending needs — if they’re stuck with a full-year continuing resolution that keeps fiscal 2023 spending levels through the rest of 2024.

They agree that they’d have to prioritize current operations first, then people and then acquisition and modernization in a CR.

“You see sailors and Marines across the globe today, performing important missions: the Red Sea is an excellent example of how current operations take precedence,” Navy Under Secretary Erik Raven told reporters at the Pentagon.

Without sufficient funds, he said, “we have to make tough choices. But between the ability to fight tonight and be ready for all the threats, versus preparing for the future and modernizing our forces — it is a tough decision, but we have to lay our chips somewhere, and that’s on the ability to perform our missions today.”

Raven said the Navy’s ability to make that prioritization, though, would require Congress to grant the services some “unprecedented flexibilities” in the form of massive reprogrammings, or moving money from one line item into another.

The Navy, for example, would have $26 billion in the wrong places, and would need Congress to approve $13 billion in formal reprogrammings — more than twice the money Congress approves for the entire Defense Department in a typical year, he said.

But the reprogramming frenzy would be vital to mitigate the risk the services would take in their modernization efforts and industry would face if contracts are delayed or nixed altogether.

The Army is facing a similar misalignment in funds, to the tune of $6 billion.

“These are production rate increases, new starts — both in programs for acquisition as well as military construction projects that we cannot start,” Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo said.

The Air Force’s misalignment in funds equates to over $13 billion and “impacts are particularly challenging in the Space Force, who has seen their budgets rising over the last couple of years,” Air Force Under Secretary Jones said.

‘Burning hotter’

Further complicating funding this fiscal year is the fact that Congress has yet to pass a sweeping supplemental request, which the Pentagon hoped would supply weapons to Ukraine and Israel in support of ongoing wars for both countries and would also fund the Southwest border mission. The lack of supplemental funding compounds the impact of a long-term CR, Camarillo said.

The Army is spending $500 million out of its base budget for operations costs in the European theater, another $100 million in the U.S. Central Command area of operations and another $500 million for the operations along the U.S. Southwest border.

“At one point in time, there was a thought that all of this could be funded through a supplemental, and it is now currently, today, in FY24, being funded 100% out of the Army’s base budget,” Camarillo said.

“We are just burning hotter than we normally would across all of our appropriations accounts,” he said. “[U.S. Army Europe and Africa] in Germany has explained that … they will run out of money this summer in the absence of extraordinary relief, aka a reprogramming.”

This will be a problem across the board, he added, to include running out of funds in the Army’s military personnel account.

Industry impacts

The services planned to ramp up munitions spending in FY24, to bolster their own stockpiles as a hedge against a future fight and to replenish allies’ and partners’ stocks.

A year-long CR puts that industry ramp-up in peril.

Camarillo said he was “particularly concerned” the CR would not allow the services to “send that strong signal to give industry the incentive to be able to facilitize, invest in a workforce and be able to do those extra shifts that we know that we need in order to restore our munitions.”

Camarillo said the Army intended to kick off a multiyear procurement effort for the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (PAC-3 MSE) interceptors in FY24. Under a full-year CR, it would be $1.2 billion short to reach the production rates needed to achieve the economic order quantities and savings associated with the multiyear procurement deal.

Lockheed Martin has invested significantly in the PAC-3 MSE line to grow production from 550 missiles per year to 650. The Army requested in its FY24 budget $775 million to ramp up that production. The company intends to grow production beyond 650 in the following year, as demand increases due to the war in Ukraine and conflict in the Middle East.

Camarillo added the Army could not begin to field its Mid Range Capability missile to the first unit, which is important to its Pacific deterrence, due to new programs not being allowed to start under continuing resolutions. Nor could it increase production levels for the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, Javelin missile, and 155mm munitions.

“I will just say that we have always said our goal was to get on 155 artillery 100,000 per month rounds by the end of calendar year ‘25. We cannot get there unless we get both the appropriation and we get the supplemental,” Camarillo said.

“It’s very challenging, because we’re asking industry to lean as far forward as they possibly can and to make investments both in additional personnel, unique tooling and machining that’s required to ramp up production capacity,” Camarillo said.

And the Army planned to buy 225 Coyote counter-unmanned aerial system interceptors – a spending need that hits home, he said, due to the recent deaths of three soldiers in Jordan who were killed by a drone strike from Iran-backed militants — but those, too, could not be purchased in a year-long CR.

For the Navy, Raven said the sea service wanted to double its Standard Missile 6 spending — something particularly timely, as Navy ships are expending the older SM-2 missiles almost daily in the Red Sea, shooting down Houthi missiles and drones — but that cannot happen under the full-year CR.

After the Navy just last week awarded a maintenance contract to HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding to overhaul the attack submarine Boise – which has languished at the pier since 2015 and has been unable to undergo repairs at either a public or private repair yard – Raven said a full-year CR would render the Navy unable to actually fund and execute that contract this year due to a $600 million shortfall in the submarine maintenance funds.

It would also see a $800 million shortfall in amphibious ship spending that could put at risk America-class amphibious assault ship construction, a $2 billion shortfall in submarine construction spending that would threaten the Virginia-class attack sub program, and more.

For the Air Force, Kristyn Jones, who is performing the duties of the under secretary of the Air Force, said the service has five contractors onboard for its collaborative combat aircraft effort, but that wouldn’t be able to move forward.

The full-year CR would also hamper production increases on the Joint Strike Missile and the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter, both of which the Air Force says it needs for a high-end fight, as well as spending on the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile for facilitization to support future production increases.

“We hear over and over: the industry wants that solid demand signal so they know how to invest, they can support the facilitization — and by having this uncertainty, it really has negative impacts across the defense industrial base,” Jones said.

The service had already spent at least $2 billion on the program and had requested another $5 billion for the next five years, according to budget documents.

The helicopter program arrived in 2018 with lofty expectations. Army leaders hoped it would serve as a model for new acquisition approaches for its most complex and most expensive weapon systems. Prototypes from Bell Textron and Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky were expected to fly later this year. And, perhaps most importantly, the aircraft was slated to provide a long-needed armed scout solution after decades of starts and stops.

But Thursday, the Army’s top acquisition officials described a new vision and major aviation overhaul. In addition to ending FARA, the Army plans to get rid of its entire Shadow and Raven unmanned aircraft fleets, said Doug Bush, the service’s acquisition chief.

It will also stop fielding its new replacement for UH-60 Lima-model Black Hawk utility helicopter — the Victor-model — to the Army National Guard and instead field UH-60 Mike-models, the latest variant used in the active force, Bush said.

Finally, the service will delay procurement of its next-generation helicopter engine, which was set to be used in all UH-60s, AH-64 Apache attack helicopters as well as to power FARA.

Instead, Bush said the Army will spend the newly available money on Black Hawks, the latest variant of the CH-47F Block II Chinook cargo helicopter, the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft and research and development efforts to accelerate its unmanned aerial reconnaissance capability.

Gen. James Rainey, an acquisition leader overseeing the program, said he doesn’t view the cancellation “as a failure” for Army Futures Command, the Austin, Texas-based office heading the service’s modernization efforts.

“We are making great progress, we have momentum, the overwhelming majority of our signature modernization efforts are either on time or ahead of schedule and are starting to translate into capabilities,” he told reporters Thursday.

Top priority

The Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, or FARA, was meant to fill Army aviation’s No. 1 mission gap: armed reconnaissance. For the last 10 years, following the retirement of the Vietnam-era OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter, which long performed that mission, the service has relied on the more expensive AH-64E Apache attack helicopter paired with the Shadow unmanned aircraft system.

The Army has already twice canceled potential replacement efforts for the armed scout. In 2004, it terminated the Comanche program after spending $9 billion to produce two prototypes.

Four years later, it canceled the Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter.

In the last attempt before FARA, the service asked industry to bring commercial off-the-shelf aircraft to a “fly-off” to fill the armed scout mission, but the Army walked away from the effort in 2013, finding nothing that met all of its requirements.

Five years ago, the service unveiled Army Futures Command, a new command meant to improve the service’s modernization program track record. FARA quickly became a signature effort of the command, which was tasked with outfitting a fully modernized force by 2030.

At the same time, the Army has been advancing a second helicopter program, the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft. Bell Textron won the contract to provide its V-280 tiltrotor aircraft for the program at the end of 2022.

Skeptics have wondered if the Army can successfully procure two aircraft simultaneously, but service leaders have said they have no choice.

Asked which program he’d choose if future budgets didn’t allow for both, Maj. Gen. Wally Rugen, then director of AFC’s Future Vertical Lift cross-functional team, said the efforts are “not a ‘want to have,’ it’s an imperative.”

“Modernization is an imperative, so as long as that remains the Army priority, which I believe it will, then we’re going to continue to find ways to execute these programs,” he told Defense News in 2021. “I don’t see it as a choice.”

In a statement Thursday evening, Sikorsky said its prototype, the X2, offers “speed, range and agility that no other helicopter in the world can match.”

“We remain confident in X2 aircraft for U.S. and international mission needs now and in the future,” the statement read. “We are disappointed in this decision and will await a U.S. Army debrief to better understand its choice.”

Vision for vertical lift

Army officials said the service still needs armed reconnaissance — but the technology has changed. The service will no longer rely on a manned helicopter to execute the majority of armed scout missions and will instead look to unmanned aircraft and sensors to conduct those missions.

“The future is going to be about who can properly integrate humans and machines effectively, how do you optimize those two things,” Rainey said.

In a statement, Army Chief of Staff Randy George said the service was influenced by the battlefield in Ukraine. It has seen there “that aerial reconnaissance has fundamentally changed.”

“Sensors and weapons mounted on a variety of unmanned systems and in space are more ubiquitous, further reaching, and more inexpensive than ever before,” he added.

The service plans to conclude FARA prototyping activities at the end of fiscal 2024, which will give the service and industry a chance to finish up technology development transferable to other programs.

While Bush would not specify exactly how much money would be available to spend on other efforts to strengthen the Army’s aerial tier, he said the Army plans to spend more on reconnaissance UAS that are more capable of surviving high-end fights, including the Future Tactical UAS and launched effects.

The Army’s inventory of small, runway independent UAS includes more than 575 Shadows and 19,000 Ravens.

The service had long planned to retire a portion of its Shadow fleet, grown during the counterinsurgency years. Raven, a small unmanned aircraft, is also an aging platform and the service considers it no longer effective in multidomain operations against near-peer adversaries.

The Army has sought to replace Shadow with a Future Tactical UAS. In 2022, after a roughly four-year competition, the Army awarded AeroVironment an $8 million contract to provide its Jump 20 system as an interim FTUAS capability for a single brigade.

To buy more, the Army held a second competition and, about a year ago, chose five companies to advance. It quickly eliminated incumbent AeroVironment. By September 2023, the Army whittled the group to just two companies — Shadow manufacturer Textron and Griffon Aerospace. Both are still building prototypes in hopes of winning an FTUAS production contract.

According to Brig. Gen. David Phillips, program executive officer for Army aviation, the Army is planning to get FTUAS prototypes into operational users’ hands by FY25.

And the Army is pushing to award a contract for a short-range launched effect in early 2025, he said. The service has plans to acquire short, medium and long-range launched effects as part of its modernization push.

The FLRAA program will continue as planned, Bush said, and the Army will work to stay on track to field the first operational unit by FY30.

Making adjustments

With the absence of a second future vertical lift platform as part of the Army’s modernization plans, the service will commit more money to modernizing its current fleet.

The service wants a new multiyear contract to procure UH-60Ms beginning in FY26, when the current multiyear comes to an end, according to Bush.

After planning not to buy CH-47F Block II Chinooks for the active force to free up funding for FVL efforts in 2018, the Army is now reversing that decision and plans to formally enter production leading to future full-rate production, Bush said.

Meanwhile, the Army says it will curb its Victor-model Black Hawk utility helicopters, which feature digital cockpits and were intended to replace older Lima-model aircraft for the Army National Guard. Bush said the program experienced “significant cost growth.”

The Army has said it considered the V-model technology a stepping stone in its pursuit of a digital backbone for its FVL fleet, which will allow mission systems to seamlessly plug into the architecture of the aircraft.

Redstone Defense Systems won a contract in spring 2014 to take a Northrop Grumman-designed cockpit and integrate the technology into V-model prototypes. The Army then partnered with Corpus Christi Army Depot, Texas, to convert Lima-models into Victor-models at the rate of 48 aircraft per year, which some called too slow, as it would take roughly 15 years for the service to produce all 760 V-model aircraft to replace the L-models in the Guard.

Phillips said the Army has delivered 60 V-models to the Guard and plans to continue fielding through fiscal 2024. The service will provide the Guard Mike-model Black Hawks to fill out the fleet requirements instead.

The V-model experienced software reliability issues in its initial operational test and evaluation in 2019, which partly delayed the program. The program was further delayed when the Army was unable to reschedule a new operational test and receive certification to fly in national airspace during the early part of the coronavirus pandemic. The Army wrapped up its second initial operational test and evaluation of the V-model in summer 2022.

Bush said the Army still intends to buy its next-generation engine, but will delay production for an indefinite period. The effort, known as the Improved Turbine Engine Program, has already been running years behind schedule.

According to Phillips, there are six ITEP engines in tests, two with the FARA competitors and two more that will go into the first UH-60s in May for testing.

The teams competing to replace the Ground Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) interceptors with a Next-Generation Interceptor, or NGI, have been working on staggered schedules. The Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne team completed its PDR at the end of September 2023.

Northrop and its Raytheon partner passed through the same gauntlet on Jan. 26, Lisa Brown, who is in charge of the company’s NGI program, told Defense News in a Jan. 30 interview.

The teams are now one year ahead of the original contract date for PDR completion and Brown said its PDR wrapped up successfully one month ahead of an established accelerated plan.

Critical Design Review is now expected to take roughly a year. Brown said the team is expecting to reach that milestone in the spring of 2025 and is looking for ways to accelerate the schedule.

Because the program has completed milestones earlier than originally planned and due to an emphasis on digital design methods, both teams remain hopeful they can deliver an interceptor that could make it into underground silos by fiscal 2027, a year faster than the Missile Defense Agency is projecting.

There are 44 GBIs in the ground with the majority in silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, and the rest at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The current interceptors aren’t equipped to counter a missile that could contain multiple kill vehicles or decoys that make the defeat process more complicated, defense officials have said.

NGI is the result of the Pentagon canceling in August 2019 its Redesigned Kill Vehicle program – which would have upgraded the GBI to be able to pursue more complex threats. That program struggled with insurmountable technical issues resulting in delayed schedules and cost increases. Raytheon, as a subcontractor for Boeing, was the developer for the RKV program.

Roughly eight months after the cancellation of the RKV program, MDA launched the new interceptor push.

The companies are designing the new interceptor using digital methods meant to speed up the design process. As a result, Northrop’s engineers were able to build hardware earlier and begin testing sooner.

“In my 30 years at the company, I would say this is probably the most mature PDR level design I’ve ever seen. Frankly, a lot of the components are already at or past the CDR level,” Brown said in the Jan. 30 interview.

As part of the PDR process, Northrop held a “science fair” where attendees could cycle through a large conference room and look at hardware and see actual models running or waveforms being generated, Brown described. This way “they could get a good understanding, hands-on, of a lot of the technology that we employ in the interceptor,” she said. The company showed its working NGI digital twin.

Northrop even used virtual reality to evaluate how a maintainer might access certain parts of the interceptor with a wrench to ensure good ergonomics and optimal access for repairs and maintenance, Brown added.

“We want to demonstrate to MDA that we are a low-risk approach,” Brown said.

Northrop is also in the midst of static fire testing its rocket motors. The stage three rocket motor arrived at MDA testing facilities in December and its stage one and two motors should complete static fire testing by the end of the first quarter this year, Brown said.

“It’s fumes,” said Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante, speaking with reporters at the Reagan National Defense Forum over the weekend.

The dwindling aid presents a messaging challenge for White House and Pentagon officials. On one hand, they don’t want to portray Ukraine’s self-defense as fragile, liable to sputter without American support. On the other, they want to communicate a sense of urgency that could help free a $105 billion supplemental funding bill, of which more than half would go to Ukraine, from the slough of congressional negotiations.

Last night, the Senate voted down a version of that supplemental 49-51, along party lines. A small group of senators is negotiating a deal on U.S. border policy, which Republicans see as a political pay-for.

Meanwhile, of the two buckets of America’s military support for Ukraine, one is already empty and the second is dwindling. The administration has $4.8 billion left in authority to donate weapons to Ukraine, but only $1 billion left to replenish those stocks.

Doug Bush, the Army’s acquisition chief, said during a Defense One conference in Washington Thursday the service will soon send Congress a request to spend the remaining $1 billion. Congress has 15 days to approve or deny the request; none have been denied so far.

Assuming Congress approves the request, Bush said, “that would put us at a couple of weeks [until] that account is literally zero.”

Without further U.S. aid, Kyiv’s operations next year will be limited somewhat, a senior American military official, speaking on background to discuss sensitive topics, told Defense News. Last year at this time, some of the kit Ukraine needed for its counteroffensive was already arriving.

“We don’t want to wait until the spring,” the official said.

The counteroffensive is nearing its close, after Ukraine’s armed forces failed to take back anywhere near the territory it hoped for earlier in the summer. The lack of operational success combined with a slower trickle of aid may force Kyiv to reconsider its plans for the coming year — perhaps needing to concentrate its efforts on the 600-mile front line or revise its strategy to match fewer resources.

“What’s your plan B?” the official asked.

European countries such as the Netherlands and Germany have recently announced new commitments to support Ukraine, but American assistance has been about half of all the $100 billion in aid sent by Western countries thus far.

This week, representatives from Ukraine’s government and defense industry traveled to Washington for a three-day conference with American and European officials on building Kyiv’s wartime industrial base.

“It’s not as if there’s going to be an immediate drying up of support,” said a senior NATO official, speaking with reporters on the condition of anonymity in Washington.

As to the effect of the effect of stalled U.S. aid on the battlefield, the NATO official said it’s too early to tell.

Still, the Pentagon and administration continue to say U.S. aid is critical to keeping together the coalition of countries supporting Kyiv — and that they’re expecting the supplemental to pass.

“It’s going to put Ukraine in an increasingly vulnerable position just to hold the ground they have,” said Adam Smith (D-Wash), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, in an interview with Defense News. “We’re past time on this.”

The Iron Beam technology is “intriguing,” Doug Bush told reporters last week. “If [the Israelis] are successful, that certainly could be something the Army could think about leveraging.”

Congress has yet to pass the supplemental funding aimed to support U.S. and allies’ defense needs, including Ukraine and Israel. A growing number of House Republicans oppose additional Ukraine aid and have instead pushed for a stand-alone $14 billion Israel supplemental.

Bush said he’d seen the first prototype of the directed-energy technology meant to augment the Iron Dome air defense system capability in Israel on his last trip to the country, adding that he was “pleased” to see the supplemental include the U.S. investment in developing Iron Beam.

The Army is working on its own high-energy laser as part of the Indirect Fire Protection Capability, or IFPC, to defend against rockets, artillery, mortars, cruise missiles and drones. Despite supply chain issues causing delays, the Army is in the process of receiving the first prototypes from its Leidos subsidiary Dynetics.

Army’s laser weapon pursuit

The laser weapon portion of the IFPC system is under development by the American firm Lockheed Martin. The Army awarded a contract to Lockheed in October to deliver two 300-kilowatt-class laser weapon systems for the IFPC prototypes program, with an option for two additional units.

“The Israeli system is a slightly different approach technologically,” Bush said, “so it’s actually a nice complement because we’re kind of going down one path; they’ve gone down a slightly different one. [I]f theirs works well, it could be something we could think about leveraging for our needs in that space. So that’s really a benefit of that funding is … we can explore multiple paths here and see what works.”

While Bush said he could not go into specifics about the technology, the differences have to do with “how the laser beam is formed and aimed,” and each uses different power levels.

“They have a very specific problem they’re trying to solve with rockets and things like that, where the Army system goes a little broader — cruise missiles perhaps, things like that,” he added.

Israel’s laser development

Mark Montgomery, a defense analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank in Washington, said he hopes that if Congress passes the supplemental funding then the U.S. can make a deal with the Israeli government in which intellectual property is owned by both American and Israeli companies involved. That would presumably be U.S.-based RTX and Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, which worked together to co-develop Iron Dome.

Those companies should be able to “immediately turn it around and build stuff for us because this is a serious investment in laser and non-kinetic directed-energy weapons,” Montgomery told Defense News in a recent interview.

Then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced in early 2022 the country’s plan to create a “laser wall” to shift from spending money a large quantity of interceptors to using less costly lasers. He had said the system would be operational by next year. But later that year, the Israeli government said it could likely deploy the system in two years.

While the system is not yet operational, Israel announced in April 2022 it had successfully intercepted mortars, rockets and anti-tank missiles in recent tests in the Negev Desert the month prior. And Iron Beam was on display in February 2023 at the IDEX defense exhibition in the United Arab Emirates.

Experts have highlighted the technological challenge lasers have in handling large salvos of rockets because lasers take time to heat up a target to destroy it. A laser might need to hit a target steadily for two to three seconds to destroy a rocket, for instance.

The Israel-Hamas war has shown, according to reports from both sides, that the militant group potentially doubled its rocket rate of fire compared to the war they fought in May 2021.

In 2021, Hamas could fire roughly 125 rockets in salvos over several minutes. In Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the group reportedly fired 3,000 to 5,000 rockets into the country over a 20-minute time period.

DSCA notified Congress, which must approve the sale, today.

Romania wants to buy 54 of the General Dynamics Land Systems-manufactured M1A2 SEPv3 Abrams tanks, 54 M1A1 structures, four M88A2 Hercules Combat Recovery Vehicles, four M1110 Joint Assault Bridges, four M1150 Assault Breacher Vehicles and four Heavy Assault Scissor Bridges.

The order would also include 54 M240C 7.62mm machine guns, 5,940 120mm M1147 High Explosive, Multipurpose, Tracer (HEMP-T) cartridges, 4,230 120mm M1002 Target Practice Multipurpose, Tracer (TPMP-T) cartridges and a variety of other support equipment.

Romanian lawmakers approved the National Defence Ministry’s request to buy 54 used M1A2 Abrams tanks from the United States in May 2023. At the time the cost was estimated to be worth 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion).

The Romanian government is accelerating work on a number of procurements, including plans to buy new armored vehicles, missiles systems, warships, 155mm howitzers and the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet in the aftermath of Russia’s attack against Ukraine.

Romania could become the second operator of the Abrams tank after the Polish government signed a deal worth nearly $5 billion to acquire 250 of the tanks in 2022 and placed a second order in January 2023 for another 116 Abrams worth $1.4 billion.

The U.S. is sending its two Iron Dome batteries to Israel to bolster the 10 it already has as Israel continues to fight Hamas. Air defense is critical as the terrorist group has launched the most massive and deadly coordinated attack in 50 years. Hamas continues to fire rockets from the Gaza Strip.

“It’s a lease for a relatively small amount of money for 11 months,” Bush said of the transaction now underway. “It could become a case where they decide to just keep the systems and pay for them. Or we could come up with some other arrangement at the end of this initial 11-month period depending on factors on the ground.”

The U.S. Army bought the two Iron Dome systems — manufactured by Israeli defense company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and co-developed by RTX — at the request of Congress several years ago. The purchase was meant to fill a gap in cruise missile defense while the Army developed a longer-term countermeasure for various air and missile threats. But the service doesn’t plan to purchase more Iron Domes or to integrate the system into its air defense architecture, Army officials have told Defense News

The service has scarcely used the two batteries at all. Army personnel trained with the Iron Dome systems at Fort Bliss, Texas, before one system deployed to Guam at the end of 2021 for a two-week exercise. Otherwise, the systems have sat with a unit at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state.

Bush said the U.S. government used a lease mechanism to move as quickly as possible in getting the Iron Dome systems to Israel. The equipment is now “in transit,” he added, and most of the interceptors have already reached the country.