“We know how to manufacture things. There’s not a problem with that, but UAS, they are different,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Mohan, acting commander of Materiel Command, told Defense News in a recent interview. “We can do the wiring harnesses. We could do some of the microelectronics, but either we don’t have the capability, such as the brushless motors, and we have to buy the machinery to do that.”

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

Ukraine and Russia are churning them out.

Catching up

The United States, by contrast, has struggled to scale production, relying on commercial suppliers and small pilot runs. Officials say that gap underscores the need for a domestic, high-volume industrial network capable of rapidly fielding thousands of drones.

This is a challenge the Army’s SkyFoundry is designed to tackle, even as the service confronts technical, bureaucratic and funding hurdles. The effort is turning depots and arsenals that once built tank parts and artillery shells into a distributed network of drone factories.

The goal is to mass-produce small, expendable, unmanned aircraft — the kind flooding battlefields in Ukraine — at a rate of 10,000 systems per month.

The industrial base has struggled to build capability to mass produce drones. Unlike in Ukraine, “We don’t have that existential crisis,” Col. Eloy Martinez, the commander of Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois, told Defense News on a recent visit.

“We have a lot of laws that we have to abide by … it’s the bureaucratic stuff that’s always downhill,” he said. “How do we break these barriers? How do we reduce that time?”

What’s imperative is that the Army figure out how to move as fast as possible now, according to Brig. Gen. Beth Behn, commander of Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command, told Defense News at Rock Island.

The general had spent six months with Security Assistance Group-Ukraine in the summer and fall of 2023.

“So I had a front row seat to the conflict, and I came back with my hair on fire,” she said. “We have got to adapt.”

Behn returned from the experience to realize how little the dramatically evolving drone threat had penetrated the thinking within the Army.

“We’re almost two years later, and so now we’ve got drone operator courses and we are doing production, and we’ve fielded capabilities to our [Transformation in Contact] formations, so we are moving with speed,” Behn said. “I do think we’re on the cusp.”

SkyFoundry takes shape

Rock Island is primed to 3D print drones, having invested significantly in building a high-tech advanced manufacturing facility on post. One building is filled with various printers capable of producing a wide array of parts and components in various materials, such as metals and composites.

The arsenal is already producing drone bodies and frames using additive manufacturing, and a variety of different 3D-printed options sat on a display table just outside of a massive room dedicated to printing parts.

Rock Island is eagerly awaiting the arrival of a 3D-printing capability from Impossible Objects that will allow it to print 120,000 drone bodies per year.

“We should be installing that or closing the deal on the contract,” Martinez said. “We’ll have that early part of the spring, late winter time frame.”

Once operational, the printer could produce up to 60 small drones per hour at costs falling below $100 a drone, allowing the Army to create systems that can be expendable in combat.

Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania is focusing on wiring harnesses, microelectronics and brushless motors, while Red River Army Depot in Texas will handle battery production and final assembly.

“Rock Island will continue to print bodies. They will continue to print propellers and frames,” Mohan said. “Tobyhanna will do the brushless motors. They will do the wiring harnesses and the microelectronics. Those systems will be shipped to Red River … for final assembly, testing, as well as manufacturing the batteries.”

Mohan emphasized that Skyfoundry is “not a specific location. It’s more of a concept.”

The networked approach is designed to allow each site to specialize in a segment of the manufacturing process while sharing data, digital designs and software updates through a centralized repository.

“We’ve got to have this digital repository,” Mohan said, “so that we can trade not only the electronic files for printing parts, but we have to own the tech data.”

Bluegrass Army Depot in Richmond, Kentucky, is going to serve as the UAS innovation center, he said.

“We already have, we do a lot of really neat stuff with UAS at Bluegrass already, and artificial intelligence enabled security, as well as some stuff for the Special Operations community, and we are gonna merge all of that there,” Mohan added.

The Army is still refining its requirements, Martinez said.

“They want a noun, which is the drone, but they can’t tell us what drone, what type, what their capabilities are,” he said. “So we’re trying to flesh that out.”

The Rock Island team expects to produce drone bodies for the Army’s goal of 1,000 UAS by the end of this fiscal year, with production scaling sharply by 2026, according to Greg Lupton, Rock Island deputy commander.

The initial push to reach production of 10,000 drones per month carries a price tag of roughly $197 million, Mohan said, with $75 million of that going toward brushless motors and wiring capabilities.

“As soon as we get a budget, we will order that machinery,” he said. “It’s about an eight-month lead time.”

The Army plans to spend another $150 million per year over the next three years to sustain and expand the effort.

The modernization push also ties into broader initiatives to reduce reliance on overseas suppliers.

“Ninety percent of UAS parts are coming out of China and Taiwan,” Mohan said. “The systems we’re building, we don’t have Chinese parts in them.”

The drone initiative fits into a broader effort to become less dependent on materials coming from China. AMC is trying to identify where it can set up rare earth mineral processing and lithium production within Army installations and bring manufacturers and mining companies onto those installations.

Red River Army Depot, Mohan noted, sits on top of a large lithium deposit.

“There’s a synergy that we’re trying to aim at there,” he said.

The Army will also need to figure out how to issue and account for the drones, Mohan said.

“The focus right now is to get them at scale to our training centers, so we’ll ship to the National Training Center, JRTC, Joint Readiness Training Center, as well as to those units who have not had the ability to use UAS because they haven’t had the money,” he said.

The first 50 systems will go to I Corps at Joint Base Lewis McChord, Mohan said.

“We are on the cusp of an accelerated sprint on UAS production,” Lupton said. “Once it’s operational, its capacity is significant.”

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

The Washington state-based unit was supposed to get the missiles in fall 2023 but several aborted test events forced the Army to push back its fielding plans.

The first three missiles were distributed to the unit earlier this year, with the last of the munitions arriving in July. The fourth round is currently going through acceptance checkouts at Lockheed Martin’s facility in Cortland, Alabama, Lozano said. The final eight are expected to be delivered “by the end of December,” Lozano said.

The Army is also aiming to conduct a hypersonic missile test around the same time.

“That will complete the basic load for battery one, up at JBLM,” he added. “Then … we’ll start working on Battery Two.”

The fielding of the munitions follows a lengthy delay in the testing process. Several tests of the round were aborted in 2023 due to challenges at the range and the hiccups in the process of firing up the missile for launch.

Testing the all-up round was considered critical to ensure the system was safe, effective and ready for fielding.

The U.S. is presently in a race to field the capability and develop systems to defend against hypersonic weapons, which China and Russia are actively developing and testing.

The Army conducted an end-to-end successful flight test of its hypersonic missile at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii in May 2024, which put the initial fielding to the first unit closer on the horizon.

While the process of equipping the Army with the weapon has taken nearly two years longer than planned, service officials have been quick to point out that missile development programs typically take about 10 years. The LRHW program, meanwhile, is only just beyond the five-year mark.

The Army has worked with Leidos’ Dynetics for years to build the industrial base for the Common-Hypersonic Glide Body that will be used by both the ground service and the Navy, as the domestic private sector has never built a hypersonic weapon.

The service also separately produced launchers, trucks, trailers and the battle operations center necessary to put together the first weapon battery.

Lockheed Martin is the weapon system integrator for the Army’s hypersonic capability that will be launched from a mobile truck.

In preparation for receiving the all-up rounds, the Army completed its delivery of the first hypersonic weapon capability — minus the rounds — to the Multi-Domain Task Force unit at JBLM two days ahead of its end-of-fiscal 2021 fielding deadline. The unit has been training on the system since the delivery.

The next phase of production will ramp up quickly once delivery to the first battery is complete.

“The second tranche of production is both Battery Two and the Battery One reload,” Lozano said. “That’s a very complex missile system. Although we’ve gotten through the testing of the system and we’re confident that it works, we’re still working through how to take a prototype system that’s complex and transition it into production, where you have a very repeatable process that drives out quality defects.

“We’re in the middle of that process right now,” Lozano added. “Things that we’re wrestling with every day is we’ll build up part of the missile and we’ll take the boost phase rocket motor and mate it to the missile midsection and then the inspector will come by and we’ll find some defects that we will have to work and address. … We’re learning as we build these missiles.”

Speed, of course, brings added challenges, Lozano acknowledged.

“Just the nature of having gone so fast — if you were doing a typical 10- or 15-year missile program, you drive all this risk out of the program and you’d be delivering on time. You’d just be delivering 10 years from now.”

Yet, “the good news is that we’re making progress now,” he said. “We just have to keep our foot on the gas pedal and continue to push forward and make more progress.”

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

“How can you get the capabilities that are available now, get them into the hands of soldiers, to [get a] proof-of-concept and then scope and scale it so we can get what we need.”

The idea for a Eastern Flank Deterrence Line, or EFDL, which was first announced in July at the Association of the U.S. Army’s LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, is to focus on enhancing ground-based capabilities and drive military-industrial interoperability across the alliance, Donahue explained there.

As part of the plan to counter Russian threats and enable scalable, global deterrence, the Army and its NATO allies are urgently developing standardized, data-driven systems, common launchers and cloud-based coordination, according to Gen. Donahue.

That is taking shape in the form of amassing counter-drone systems in countries along the Eastern Flank, tying together air defense and defensive fires and sharing data that enables NATO to work together, according to Costanza.

The Army’s V Corps is currently participating in a NATO exercise — called Avenger Triad — that involves five different corps from across the alliance, including Poland. This, Costanza said, will bringing to EFDL closer to reality.

“To help us fight and actually realize the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line — we’ve got a new organization called an Operational Fires Command,” he said, “which will integrate all of our lethal and non-lethal capabilities into one organization to streamline that.”

Avenger Triad is incorporating specific capabilities like Spike Non-Line-of-Sight missiles fired from AH-64 Apache helicopters, which are relatively new assets for Poland.

Also part of the effort, the Army and NATO partners are incorporating Palantir’s Maven Smart System “to use the AI capability to streamline how we use data,” Costanza said.

One of the bigger elements unfolding as part of the EFDL is how the U.S. Army and NATO forces are fielding unmanned systems to take out enemy drones along the Eastern Flank.

The chosen system — the U.S.-based startup Project Eagle’s Merod — is already being proven successful in Ukraine.

“We’re training our Polish partners how to use them,” Costanza said. “Same thing with [our] Romanian partners. We’re now expanding it to Denmark with a view of expanding this capability up and down the Eastern Flank of Europe.”

These developments come at a time when the number of incursions over Eastern Europe airspace is surging.

Taking note, the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command is prioritizing contributions to the EFDL concept, and while cruise and ballistic missiles are still a concern, focus is on the sort of one-way attack drones proliferating on Ukraine’s battlefields, according to its commander Brig. Gen. Curtis King.

The counter-drone platform helps address the cost conundrum of using expensive missiles against cheap drones, King noted.

“We’re training on that to understand how to employ capabilities that allow us to, at a lower cost, build capacity that we would need to defeat the amount of one-way attack drones we’ve seen Russia be very successful at launching on a continual basis,” he added.

Another plus is that the Army’s drones can be produced much faster than a traditional missile. Rapidly fielding systems at scale is therefore more feasible, according to King.

“We’re moving as fast as we can,” he said. “We’ve been told to get this to move out as quickly as possible.”

King added that he expects to see each country feature a similar capability within this calendar year, “if not sooner than that.”

The Army is currently assessing drone-on-drone intercept platforms produced by several different companies, to include government organizations, he noted.

The command is also looking at “passive sensors and active sensors [to see how] we enhance sensor coverage to ensure that we have the right detection capability to facilitate detecting those threats and then defeating them,” King said.

Additionally, the command is working on the data integration of all of the sensors through cloud architecture.

This approach helps “to ensure that we can get the data — not just to the normal air defense participants that we would need, but to get this data over to the intelligence organizations and to the fires organizations,” King said, “so that they can [take] action on this data and improve that.”

Focusing on these particular capabilities don’t just address the deterrence line in Europe, but extend to enabling a global deterrent, King acknowledged.

“Those capabilities are many of the same capabilities that our leaders have told us to look to develop for the Golden Dome of America,” he said, “for homeland defense activity as well.”

“There are going to be changes to the [Army Prepositioned Stock] program,” Mohan said in an interview just ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington.

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

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

“All that is being worked with the [combatant commands] right now and will be validated back through the Joint Staff, and the [secretary of defense] will approve, just like they approved some of the recent decisions on APS,” Mohan explained.

The Army has taken “a very hard look with our strategic partners like the Defense Logistics Agency and said, ‘Hey, if we all acknowledge that the tyranny of distance doesn’t get any easier from the continental United States into the Pacific theater, well, maybe we need to stock more forward across the [area of operations] north to south, east to west, so that you give flexibility and options for sustainment,’” Maj. Gen. Gavin Gardner, the Army’s 8th Theater Sustainment Command commander, told Defense News in a recent interview.

The Army is also working to increase the amount of “days of supply” across the theater, he added, “so that you’re not instantly going to be out of fuel because we didn’t plan. … We are rapidly increasing the posture across the theater to make sure that we give options to the commander.”

The Army also decided, for example, to move away from its use of prepositioned stocks on ships — called APS afloat — calculating that the vessels might not be operationally effective or sufficient for the service and the joint force’s needs in the Pacific.

Officials have moved one such equipment package to key land locations in the Pacific area, like South Korea, the Philippines and Australia, Gardner said.

“That really covers our northern, central and southern corridors,” Gardner added. “That allows us to now just bring in troops versus having to bring in equipment, which actually allows us to respond much faster to anything from a humanitarian disaster and relief … to any other crisis.”

The service is also going through an assessment of what it calls Total Army Power Projection Equipment Sets, and is considering, for instance, leaving in place some equipment belonging to units located west of the International Date Line.

“That way you’re able to respond more rapidly,” Gardner explained. “We save a little bit on transportation costs, and it allows us to have a much better persistent presence forward, which we think assists with the deterrence that we’ve been asked to do.”

The upcoming National Defense Strategy will shape those decisions, Mohan added. APS plans will align with the strategy when it is officially released, particularly the concept of land-basing in the Info-Pacific, he noted.

Positioning Army stocks in the Indo-Pacific, however, is not as straightforward as in Europe.

“Of course, I have my thoughts of where I want to put things, but it’s mainly from a distribution standpoint and an ability to move it,” Mohan said. “But, but we’ve got to work through a lot of that because INDOPACOM, it’s bilateral relationships. There’s not the alliance like you have with NATO. So that one’s going to be a little bit harder to work through.”

In Europe, NATO has invested heavily in APS infrastructure to support deterrence against Russia and to strengthen readiness across the alliance. Mohan pointed to Poland as the most advanced example.

“The most up-to-date facility we have for APS is in Poland, built by NATO to our specifications,” he said. “And it’s a beautiful facility.”

The effort to reimagine APS in the complex Indo-Pacific region, where nation-by-nation diplomacy substitutes for a NATO-like architecture, has proven to be a tough nut to crack for several presidential administrations.

“We’ve got to get to a sustainable path forward and it’s something we’re challenged with right now,” Mohan said.

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

Seven years later, Austin’s vibes have grown even more future-forward. Cowboy-booted pedestrians side-step robots lumbering along sidewalks delivering takeout food while driverless taxis blend into regular traffic and robotic-armed baristas serve up lattes at the airport.

And as Austin’s high-tech evolution continues, so does the Army’s.

The service announced earlier this year that it would combine the new Army Futures Command with the 52-year-old Training and Doctrine Command, effectively doing away with two four-star-led organizations to create a brand new one.

The decision came as a surprise. After all, AFC hadn’t even made it a whole decade.

The last time a four-star command had been deactivated – the Continental Army Command – was 52 years ago, which triggered the creation of TRADOC and U.S. Army Forces Command.

On Oct. 2, on the second day into a government shutdown, the Army cased the colors of TRADOC and of AFC, with its anvil insignia meant to signify its mission to forge the future, and unfurled the colors of the Transformation and Training Command, or T2COM, to a sparser crowd than expected.

Army leaders have chosen a sword as the insignia for T2COM, with command personnel already sporting the new shoulder patch at the activation ceremony.

“Just for the record, T2COM is a good decision. This is a good decision for the Army,” Gen. James Rainey, the outgoing AFC commander who will retire on Oct. 31, said at the event.

“There is no organization more responsible for the Army of Desert Storm, the Army of [Operation Iraqi Freedom], the Army we now have, than Training and Doctrine Command,” he said.

As for Futures Command, Rainey described its creation as “one of the boldest and best decisions” the Army ever made.

“You’d think it’s the most un-Army thing ever to stand up a four-star headquarters in a tech hub, but AFC has proven that you can be flat, fast, disruptive and you can punch way above your weight,” he added. “So the chief’s decision, the secretary’s decision, to take those two organizations and put them together, it’s not about efficiencies as much as opportunities.”

The seven-year itch

AFC was established during President Donald Trump’s first administration under then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, whom President Trump has since sought to disgrace.

Milley proposed the four-star command he dubbed Army Futures Command as a new way forward, breaking free of the bureaucracy and organizational silos that had hampered the service’s previous major modernization efforts.

Working with other top service officials, Milley shifted billions of dollars into modernization programs including the top priority — long-range, precision fires — and based the new command in Austin, Texas, an area known for its innovative, technology-focused workforce.

AFC was formed to focus on requirements development within the modernization process. Prior to its formation, the requirements development process played out within TRADOC, where it competed for attention alongside training, recruitment and professional military education.

The more focused organization was built to enable the Army to move faster.

The command received attention and gained traction as it opened its headquarters in a University of Texas building downtown. Across the street, it opened the Army Applications Laboratory based at the Capital Factory, a hub that helps entrepreneurs meet investors and has since connected startups with Army decision makers.

Over a two-year period, it pushed more successful programs into reality than the Army had done in the previous four years, Milley told Defense News in an interview in 2022.

Although some of those efforts were already in development, the command has touted it was able to push programs through development and into soldiers’ hands faster than previously planned.

The command also created Project Convergence, an enormous experimentation effort that continues year-round with culminating events to tie new capabilities together across mission sets.

AFC also established the Software Factory, which has been developing software-based applications for the force internally, giving soldiers the opportunity to become coders, helping to solve operational problems.

But other large and ambitious programs were canceled over the course of seven years, including plans to build a Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft and an Extended-Range Artillery Cannon.

During the first Trump Administration, AFC was given unprecedented authority to move forward with programs, but when Christine Wormuth became Army secretary in May 2021, she quickly identified some ambiguity in the direction given to the command and the service’s acquisition office about their roles and responsibilities.

Wormuth also moved to centralize investment authority at Army headquarters. Some critics said the move basically gutted the entire intention of AFC.

At the same time, the Army struggled to find a commander to replace AFC’s first leader, Gen. Mike Murray, who retired in 2021. With no one in the top job, Lt. Gen. James Richardson, Murray’s deputy, served as an acting commander for nearly a year.

The personnel optics of a stand-in boss seemed to cast doubt on the future of AFC itself.

Rainey took over in the fall of 2022, and while remaining focused on the many modernization priorities already in development, he said he was looking deeper into the future. He emphasized the work the Army would need to do to figure out how humans and machines would fight together on the battlefield now and in the future.

Rainey famously coined the quote-du-jour to describe the role robots would play: “We will never again trade blood for first contact.”

Working with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, who took the service’s helm in the fall 2023, the command centered its focus around developing an entirely new command-and-control architecture leveraging the tech industry.

The command helped the Army take leaps in fielding advanced technology by putting new capabilities into operational formations, bypassing the usual cumbersome development, testing and acquisition processes.

The chief dubbed this effort “transformation in contact.”

“In seven years, this team helped our Army gain ground in next-generation combat vehicles, long-range precision fires, future vertical lift, soldier lethality, air-and-missile defense, and our number one priority, the network,” George said in a speech broadcast from the Pentagon during the ceremony here.

“You helped our Army drive rapid change through our transformation in contact rotations. You helped build capacity in our formations across every warfighting function and you pushed the entire enterprise to field next-generation command-and-control to a division in record time and I know that is going to transform the Army,” George added.

From ‘vision to victory’

The newly established T2COM, whose new motto is “From Vision to Victory” is now the largest command in the Army.

“The world isn’t slowing down and neither will we,” George said. T2COM “will help our Army change how we operate. As we all know, transformation is not just about product innovation, it’s about process innovation. By reducing headquarters and streamlining authorities and responsibilities, T2COM will help us cut out redundancy, reverse stagnation and push talent and leaders into our fighting formations.”

The new command will help ensure “our training and education is modern and world class, whether at our combat training centers, centers of excellence, Army university or home station training and T2COM will help us get state-of-the-art tech into soldiers’ hands quickly, putting tacticians with technicians, so that we are making interactive, substantive and continuous change,” George added.

Its first commander is Gen. David Hodne, who has held a variety of roles at both TRADOC and AFC in his career, most recently serving as the leader of AFC’s Futures and Concepts Center.

AFC placed a bet on proximity to innovation when it set up shop among startups and venture capitalists instead of within a traditional base. Now, T2COM is charged with doubling down on that idea, fusing its future-looking modernization effort with the institution that trains every soldier who will use those technologies.

T2COM’s headquarters will remain in Austin and the Army is looking at how it will bring more personnel into the locations in the area it now has.

“I think we’ll get more people into the footprint, but we have, definitely, the capacity to do it,” T2COM chief of staff, Maj. Gen. John Cushing, said. In addition to the downtown location, AFC has also established space in Round Rock, Texas.

Three subordinate three-star commands are also established as part of T2COM.

AFC’s Futures and Concepts Center based at Fort Eustis, Virginia, will become Futures and Concepts Command. TRADOC’s Combined Arms Center, which sets doctrine, the intellectual building blocks for the service’s flavor of combat, will become the Combined Arms Command, remaining at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Army Recruiting Command will remain at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

AFC creations like the Army Applications Laboratory and the Software Factory are here to stay. The lab will remain in its home at the Capital Factory in Austin, and the Army is working through where it will make the most sense to locate the Software Factory, according to Cushing.

The new command should not be seen as the closure of two commands and the creation of a new one, or an organizational shuffle, Hodne emphasized at its activation ceremony.

“It’s a reset,” he said. “It’s the deliberate blending of two proud traditions into something new, purpose-built for the challenges that we as an Army face today.”

The Army has, for the first time, “unified the functions of force design, force development and force generation,” Hodne said.

“Technology alone never transformed war. The tank, the airplane, the drone – none changed battlefields by themselves. They required new tactics, new concepts and new organizations to integrate them into coherent warfighting systems. Where militaries failed to align these elements, they failed on the battlefield,” he added.

Hodne stressed the need to move rapidly, pointing to the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East that pose evolving challenges like one-way attack drones, remote maritime systems and advanced battlefield networks.

“The question is whether our institutions can adapt fast enough to keep pace with these changes. T2COM is the Army’s answer,” he said.

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

The Army continues to experience catastrophic aviation accidents as it launches a major overhaul of how it trains new pilots. This includes rethinking the type of aircraft used for training, along with a likely shift to a contractor-owned, contractor-operated, or COCO, schoolhouse.

In 2020, the Army commissioned a study through Boston Consulting Group that determined the service could save “hundreds of millions of dollars” by transitioning to a single-engine trainer.

An additional study with a College of William & Mary MBA fellowship program determined that a COCO model would be preferable to the current government-owned, government-operated method.

The Army wants to move fast and has already issued a draft request for proposals. Its plan is to issue a final request for proposals soon and then evaluate proposals in 2026, according to Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, commander of Army Aviation Center of Excellence Command at Fort Rucker, Alabama.

The service would like to move out on a solution in early fiscal 2027, Gill said earlier this year.

Boeing has a long history in Army aviation. The company supplies both the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter and the CH-47 Chinook cargo helicopter to the service.

The companies believe that the combination of Boeing’s experience and Leonardo’s AW119T training helicopter presents a strong solution for a complete training package.

“We are bringing together two industry leaders to offer the Army a turnkey, innovative approach to rotary-wing training with an integrated, long-term training solution that increases aviator proficiency, operational and sustainment efficiencies and will deliver measurable value throughout the life of the program,” John Chicoli, senior director for U.S. Army, Marines & Special Operations/Missions at Boeing Global Services, said in a statement.

Boeing already offers AH-64 Apache fleet training around the world that includes live, virtual and constructive simulation, cockpit procedure trainers and instructor development programs, according to the statement. Boeing said its program management and systems integration expertise also give it a solid foundation for leading complex, long-duration training efforts like Flight School Next.

Leonardo’s single-engine trainer has logged more than 100,000 flight hours, including over 16,000 hours under instrument flight rules, and 40,000 touchdown autorotations, according to the statement. The company currently supports 130 AW119Ts flown by the U.S. Navy near Fort Rucker.

The team’s proposal goes beyond aircraft delivery. Boeing and Leonardo plan to offer “a multi-faceted service offering to increase flight training hours, skill proficiency and deliver a flexible, scalable training model over the life of the contract,” the statement reads.

The resistance Driscoll has encountered in his first eight months in the job is part of a longstanding tension between the Pentagon and Congress over the trust and oversight of taxpayer dollars.

Unstable leadership cycles and inconsistent funding have pushed contractors into cost-plus arrangements, Driscoll explained, while congressional skepticism has only grown in the wake of failed modernization programs.

“We have 1,400 [to] 1,500 line items of make and model of things we need to buy,” he told a group of reporters last week. “Specifically we have asked to consolidate down in electronic warfare, drone and counter-drone. … This is 1% of our budget and we are in like a holy war over whether we’re going to have the authority for 1% of our budget to have the flexibility to buy different makes and models.”

The Army first announced it wanted flexible funding in these areas in 2024 during the previous administration in order to keep pace with technology developments that are moving so quickly the service’s traditional acquisition paths would continuously lead to the delivery of outdated equipment.

New electronic warfare capability seen on the battlefield in Ukraine outpaces old technology in a matter of weeks rather than years, for example.

Driscoll acknowledged that the Army has frequently under-delivered or not delivered when it comes to using taxpayer dollars and said he understands Congress wanting extra oversight.

Even so, “the problem is we are requesting more trust from them and more ability move on our own and I think that they are cautious and hesitant to give us that until we start to deliver wins at scale, but we can’t deliver wins at scale until we get this flexibility. So it’s a little bit of a chicken and the egg setup,” Driscoll told Defense News.

“I’m cautiously optimistic that the more people that hear about this, the more people that weight the actual risk of a drone with a munition showing up at a stadium, our border, at a port in our own nation, the more that that starts to outweigh all the other things,” Driscoll said.”I think we’re empowering our decision makers to do what they, deep down, know what’s right.”

The stakes are high, Driscoll said, as the National Defense Authorization Act debate heats up. “We just cannot get after the EW, counter-UAS and UAS threats without this flexibility. We must have it. And so we have made this a hill that we are willing to die on.”

Overland AI, Forterra and Scout AI will “rapidly integrate and deliver commercial autonomous mobility into Army formations,” an Army statement published last week states. The companies are required to build prototypes as part of the “Unmanned Systems (UxS) Autonomy” program and get them to soldiers for demonstration and evaluation in May 2026.

“We are looking forward to seeing how our industry partner’s autonomy solutions perform on vehicles while performing relevant military missions,” Col. Ken Bernier, project manager for Future Battle Platforms within Program Executive Office Ground Combat Systems, said in the statement. “We remain committed to bringing the best technologies to our warfighters and shaping the future of autonomous mobility for our Army at an unprecedented speed.”

The Army has struggled to clear the hurdle to achieve fully-autonomous vehicles because of the inherent challenges on a modern battlefield not found on predictable roadways.

Following an off-road autonomy software assessment last year, Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, who was in charge of PEO GCS at the time, told Defense News, “The good news is we are moving forward in that area. The bad news is industry is nowhere near where people think in terms of off-road autonomy. There’s a lot of development to do.”

Three companies — Forterra, Kodiak Robotics and Overland AI — were working with Army Futures Command’s cross-functional team focused on next-generation combat vehicles and PEO GCS on developing autonomy capability.

By that point, the evaluations for autonomous behavior hadn’t been truly off-road, Dean said.

“We’re talking trails and unimproved road conditions,” he said.0 “Building an autonomy algorithm that can identify the entire range of things it might encounter is challenging because you have a pretty big data set.”

The service last year was focused on choosing a platform, and then integrating a wide variety of capabilities into the system including autonomy. However, as part of the Army’s new push to transform itself, it canceled its plans to purchase robotic combat vehicles and is pivoting to focus more deeply on achieving autonomous capabilities that could work on a wide variety of platforms.

The choice to integrate autonomy on the ISV comes at a time when the service is also planning to dramatically scale up its buys of the GM Defense-built vehicle, which it sees as a more flexible platform for more mobile combat units.

The Army is shifting away from buying Humvees and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle in order to grow the ISV fleet.

The Army’s autonomy push mirrors the Pentagon’s larger effort to harness commercial startups, with ground vehicles serving as one of the most immediate test beds for adapting civilian self-driving advances to military operations.

Even so, some of the work feeding into the program is born out of efforts made internally to the Defense Department.

Overland AI, for example, is applying its work spun out of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s RACER program focused on high-speed, off-road autonomy. The effort came in response to the lack of attention being given to technology development outside of the commercial on-road, self-driving world, Stephanie Bonk, the company’s co-founder and president, told Defense News.

“There was really the time before the DARPA RACER program and then the time after,” Bonk said. “Prior to that, there really was no focus on navigating through unstructured terrain. Now we’re tackling environments where you can’t rely on GPS, you can’t rely on maps, and you can’t rely on good comms. These were things we had to solve as part of the problem.”

The program, according to Bonk, is not about just fielding “a reliable and robust” autonomy capability, but “really is about delivering a real operational capability. A major focus of this program is integrating with soldiers and I think that’s something we’re incredibly excited about.”

The directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the formation of the Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF 401) to “better align authorities and resources to rapidly deliver [joint counter-small unmanned aircraft system] capabilities to America’s warfighters, defeat adversary threats and promote sovereignty over national airspace,” the memo states.

Hegseth also directed the Army secretary to disestablish the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, or JCO, which was created in 2019 and led by the Army. It will cease to exist once JTIAF 401 is established, the memo notes.

The unit that blends operational, acquisition and interagency roles under a single command will be empowered with procurement authority, flexible funding and streamlined personnel authorities, operating under the oversight of the deputy secretary of defense.

The move comes as U.S. forces in the Middle East and Eastern Europe face increasingly sophisticated drone swarms from state and non-state actors. Cheap, disposable quadcopters and fixed-wing models have been used to knock out armored vehicles, overwhelm air defense and harass bases at a fraction of the cost of defending against them.

Ukraine’s daring drone attacks against Russian warplanes on Russian soil in Operation Spiderweb earlier this summer served as a wake-up call in modern warfighting.

The JCO made some headway by narrowing the Pentagon’s crowded field of more than three dozen drone defense prototypes to a handful of approved systems, running joint demonstrations at Yuma Proving Ground— which helped several companies gain traction in the military — and establishing common training and testing protocols.

But critics say the office lacked the teeth to buy and deploy gear quickly and was hamstrung by the Pentagon’s budget cycle.

The new task force aims to fix that. JIATF 401 will be able to direct procurement decisions, allocate up to $50 million per initiative and hire outside the normal federal process to pull in technical experts.

It will also consolidate work on drone forensics, exploitation and replication programs and tie into the Defense Innovation Unit’s Replicator 2 initiative on mass-produced autonomous systems, according to the directive.

Additionally, the task force will have 30 days after initiation to make recommendations on establishing a dedicated C-sUAS test and training range.

The reorganization is designed to compress timelines from years to months.

“We’re moving fast — cutting through bureaucracy, consolidating resources, and empowering this task force with the utmost authority to outpace our adversaries,” Hegseth said in a statement.

The new task force could help reshape a growing market projected to reach tens of billions of dollars over the next decade. Companies that won spots in JCO-sponsored demos, from directed-energy and high-power microwave startups to electronic-warfare specialists, will now face a more centralized buyer with discretionary funding that could keep competition high and fast-paced.

The task force will undergo a formal review after 36 months, giving Congress and the Pentagon a chance to assess whether the new organization delivers.

Through its 100th Missile Defense Brigade, the Army already manages command-and-control missions for the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system that is designed to defend the homeland from ICBMs from North Korea and Iran. The GMD system is made up of 44 interceptors buried in the ground at Fort Greeley, Alaska, and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The 100th Missile Defense Brigade is made up of largely National Guardsmen but also includes active-duty soldiers.

As the Defense Department continues to work on the architecture and elements of President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome homeland missile defense shield, the Army has been developing capabilities to counter cruise missiles and a wide variety of drones, including systems that can defeat entire swarms.

The service is also leading the acquisition of systems that will become a part of the air and missile defense architecture for Guam that’s currently taking shape. Those capabilities include the Patriot air-and-missile defense system, a new missile defense radar and the Indirect Fire Protection Capability system that can defend against cruise missiles, drones, rockets, artillery and mortars.

The Army, which currently serves as the space component for the GMD system under U.S. Northern Command, will expand into the role of service component command for all air-and-missile defense, Gainey told Defense News in an interview at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

“That aperture has been opened,” Gainey said. “No longer are we just focused on the GBIs [Ground-Based Interceptors] in Alaska defending the homeland from an ICBM attack. We’re now going to be in a role for [US NORTHCOM commander] Gen. [Gregory] Guillot for all of air and missile defense, and it’s appropriate that it’s going to reside with Space and Missile Defense Command.”

The change will also realign CONUS-based Army Air and Missile Defense Commands, or AAMDCs, under SMDC, giving them a higher headquarters with deep expertise in homeland defense operations.

Gainey said the shift will allow the commands to “synergize” their efforts, optimizing mission sets between the two AAMDCs and improving coordination.

Gainey, who also commands the Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Air and Missile Defense, or JFCC IAMD, said his team is preparing to support the homeland defense mission more directly. JFCC IAMD’s current responsibilities include assessing new missile capabilities, developing multinational missile defense effectiveness and executing joint and combined training.

Soon, Gainey said, it will “transform to assist SMDC in the homeland defense initiative.”

The broader role will be outlined in the upcoming Army Space and Missile Defense strategy, which Gainey said should be released within the next three months. The strategy reflects changes in the threat environment, including the rise of drone warfare, the need for artificial intelligence to manage operator workloads and the growing complexity of regional and “trans-regional” threats that can reach the U.S. homeland.

One key focus will be “missile defeat” — measures that go beyond traditional interceptor-based defense.

“The masses [of threats] introduce a whole new element into the calculus,” Gainey said. “We can no longer look at it the same of interceptor on interceptor.”

While details of the expanded mission are still taking shape, Gainey said the changes will position the Army to take a more holistic approach to homeland defense.

“We’re pretty excited about those opportunities of going from GMD to more holistic air and missile defense,” he said.