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Sweden will send JAS 39 Gripen fighter jets back into NATO’s air defense mission over Poland from October, where they will help protect the hub in the country’s southeast that funnels military and civilian aid into Ukraine, Defense Minister Pål Jonson said on Sept. 30. Most of the aircraft will fly from bases in Sweden, […]View the full article

The U.S. Air Force is looking for a system that warns F-15EX Eagle II crews when a missile has been fired at them, and it wants one that is already proven on other military aircraft so it can be fitted to the new fighter quickly. The F-15 program office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, […]View the full article

M-Fly, a Kyiv-based company that builds stabilized cameras and laser guidance systems for military drones, has raised a new funding round led by MITS Capital to expand production as orders from Ukraine and NATO countries grow. Existing investors MITS Capital and Freedom Fund backed the round, joined by Norwegian defense-focused venture firm Gardar and a […]View the full article

Astroscale UK, the British arm of the Japanese company building spacecraft to clear junk from orbit, has earned an international information security certification as it prepares a planned debris removal mission and a defense program for the UK Ministry of Defence. The company said on Sept. 30 that it achieved ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification after an […]View the full article

The U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Lab has added $5 million to its work with REGENT Craft on the Seaglider, an electric craft that skims just above the water, bringing the total value of the partnership to $19.25 million, the Rhode Island company said on Sept. 30. The new money funds a fourth phase with six […]View the full article

The U.S. Army has picked five winners in a competition to test how commercial humanoid robots could be used by the military, including a two-legged robot called Alex that is built to take hits and carries ballistic protection. The Army announced the xTechHumanoid winners on Sept. 11, two days after nine finalists demonstrated their technology […]View the full article

I won’t lie, I really wanted the successor to the Grumman Iron Works, Northrop Grumman, to get the award…just to have that legacy back on the flight deck…but…I am not emperor. Boeing it is, …the Department of War announces a contract awarded by the U.S. Navy to Boeing for the Sixth-Generation F/A-XX Strike Fighter under the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. The contract is valued at more than $20B for the full-scale development phase. The contract procures multiple test aircraft for ground, airworthiness, systems, and weapons integration testing. Boeing already has the USAF’s F-47 contract…so I will assume there will be a fair bit of commonality. Perhaps a similar path to how the YF-17 became the F/A-18? We’ll see, won’t we? Based on the fuzzy image Boeing put out at the top of the post, it appears to be tailless…dare I say, a flying wing. I’m not as concerned with aesthetics as I am with robustness at sea and being designed for the requirements of a carrier-based fighter (…and yes, get rid of the F/A and just use F) Everyone here knows some of my baseline requirements for F/A-XX, in order of importance: Range: The Pacific’s vastness demands range from you, but that vastness also grants you more security. Range give you safety and flexiblity. Numbers: We have to build a lot of them and be able to scale if needed. That means the right compromise between cutting edge and practical production. The next Great Pacific War will not be measured in weeks or months, but years. We will have significant battlefield losses. Capacity: Carry a lot of fuel and a lot of weapons. In summary…and you know where this is going…it has to be a heavy fighter. I will make the assumption that the A-model will be single seat…but there are a whole host of missions (which we have a F/A-18E and F)—especially with the integration of collaborative combat drones—that make a two seat heavy fighter an additional tool in the airwing toolbag that you will need. This next line gives me a bit of hope. Following this contact award announcement, Boeing will deliver the platform to augment and eventually replace legacy F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers beginning in the 2030s, and operate alongside the F-35C. EA-XX should be a two seater…so the engineering will have to be done anyway. The aviation version of the transformationalists will enlist the accountants and the drone-autists to try to force an all single-seat fleet, but that would be a mistake. They might get support from those who read more military fiction than understand military practice, so there will be an ongoing argument that hopefully isn’t engineered into a fait accompli. Again, we’ll see. The important thing is we can now move forward to prototype testing and eventual production. Chop chop. History is impatient. Meanwhile…we still don’t know a lot…but we can guess. Over on YouTube, BingoFuel put this out three days ago. Nice overview of why the future is tailless. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Leave a comment Share View the full article

The U.S. Army has picked five companies to build competing prototypes of a new Precision Strike Missile that can be fired from a HIMARS truck and hit moving ships and relocatable land targets 1,000 km (620 miles) or more away. Anduril, Castelion, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, Mach Industries and RTX each received a […]View the full article

The Kremlin said on Sept. 30 that Russia’s official policy documents provide for a nuclear response if NATO countries try to blockade Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea wedged between Poland and Lithuania. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russian diplomats were reminding “hotheads in Europe” of those documents after what he described as […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy will buy 10 of Saronic’s Marauder autonomous ships, a 55-meter (180-foot) uncrewed vessel built in Louisiana, after the ship passed at-sea testing under the service’s new Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel program. Saronic announced the production award on Sept. 30, a day after the U.S. Navy said it had given production agreements for […]View the full article

Raytheon has won a $247.1 million contract to build, upgrade and overhaul Phalanx close-in weapon systems for the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army, covering the shipboard gun, its land-based counterpart and the missile-armed SeaRAM, the U.S. Department of War announced. Naval Air Systems Command awarded the firm-fixed-price contract to the RTX business without competition. It […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy has paid Boeing $16.7 million to plan the shutdown of the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler production lines, including a full inventory of the government-owned tools and equipment used to build the jets. The firm-fixed-price order, placed by Naval Air Systems Command against an existing Boeing ordering agreement, covers planning, analysis, […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy has ordered another $123.4 million worth of Lionfish small underwater drones from HII, exercising contract options for more vehicles, support equipment and related gear, the U.S. Department of War announced. Naval Sea Systems Command awarded the firm-fixed-price modification to HII’s Unmanned Systems business on Sept. 24. Nearly all of the work, 99%, […]View the full article

The U.S. Army has awarded 10 companies counter-drone contracts with a combined ceiling of $4.15 billion, lining up commercial radars, cameras, jammers and weapons to detect and defeat hostile drones, the U.S. Department of War announced. Seven companies received ceilings of $500 million each: Allen Control Systems of Austin, Texas; Digital Force Technologies of San […]View the full article

The U.S. Navy has picked Boeing to build F/A-XX, its first sixth-generation carrier-based strike fighter, choosing the company over Northrop Grumman and awarding a development contract valued at more than $20 billion. The U.S. Department of War announced the award on Sept. 29. The contract covers the full-scale development phase and buys multiple test aircraft […]View the full article

Mack Defense will display a hybrid-electric heavy tractor it built for the U.S. Army’s Common Tactical Truck program at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Oct. 12-14. The truck is Mack’s on-road entry for the program and is designed to replace older highway haulers such as the M915 Line […]View the full article

BAE Systems’ new identification friend or foe system for the F-16 has been certified by the U.S. Department of War, clearing it for use on U.S. Air Force fighters, the company said Sept. 29. The AN/APX-127(V)1 Combined Interrogator Transponder received AIMS certification, the approval that shows an identification system meets U.S. and NATO standards and […]View the full article

Argentina’s armed forces have formally taken on their first IWI ARAD 5 and ARAD 7 rifles from Israel, the start of a program to replace the FN FAL and M-16 rifles now carried by troops in all three services. Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Carlos Presti presided over the Sept. 29 ceremony after the Joint Staff […]View the full article

The Pentagon’s counter-drone task force has awarded Israeli company Smart Shooter a contract worth up to $150 million for its SMASH rifle sights, which help soldiers shoot down small drones with their regular service weapons. The U.S. Department of War’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401, known as JIATF-401, announced the three-year award on Sept. 29, […]View the full article

Ukraine’s F-16 pilots have shot down more than 3,150 Russian aerial targets, including 666 cruise missiles and about 2,500 drones, the commander of Ukraine’s Air Force said during a meeting with Lockheed Martin. Lt. Gen. Anatolii Kryvonozhko gave the figures when a Ukrainian Air Force delegation he led met with representatives of the U.S. company, […]View the full article

A Russian Tu-95MS strategic bomber crashed in the Amur region of Russia’s Far East on Sept. 29, killing six of the seven crew members on board. The bomber went down near the village of Krasnoyarovo after an engine failure during takeoff, according to sources in the Russian military. The sole survivor was taken to hospital. […]View the full article

I have an affection for all the ships I have been on, and the Big E is one of my girls. I like to keep an eye on her. She’s the ship that keeps on giving, in a lot of ways. I am quite sure that when the USS Enterprise (CVN 65) was laid down during the Eisenhower Administration just 13 years after the end of WWII, someone had to have thought, “How are they going to deal with all the radioactive bits when they decommission her in the next century?” I’d place a pretty good bet that in hushed tones, the general response was, “We’ll be dead by then. That will be someone else’s problem.” Maybe not. Back then they probably thought we’d do something responsible like, “Oh, they’ll just encase them in glass and then dump them at the bottom of the most isolated and stable part of the ocean floor, or deep in some cave in Nevada. Don’t worry, it isn’t like they’ll just put them in a metal box and stack them all together out in the open in CONUS. It will be fine.” Oops. We are just a few months shy of a decade removed from the Big E’s decommissioning, and her hulk is still haunting Pier 2 in Newport News. There she is, at the top of the post. So far, it appears that the lawyers have been doing the most work. Via Luis Reyes at AutoNotion, The fuel, at least, is long gone. More than 1,000 shipbuilders defueled all eight reactors in a job that ran from 2013 to late 2017, and what’s left behind is low-level radioactive structure. Even so, Navy documents say the hull could still hold more than 8,000 tons of hazardous or radioactive waste. The contract took two tries and a federal judgeHere’s where it gets messy. The Navy first handed NorthStar this job in May 2025, for $536.7 million. Then HII ShipCycle filed a protest. HII is the parent company of Newport News Shipbuilding, which means the outfit that built the Enterprise, defueled it, and has it tied up at its own pier also wanted the contract to destroy it. Frankly, you can’t blame them for trying to keep the whole life cycle in house. HII’s complaint said the government’s online bid portal glitched on deadline day and shut its offer out. In February 2026, Judge Philip Hadji of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims sided with HII, called the contracting officer’s handling of the situation “arbitrary and capricious,” and ordered the Navy to rerun the competition. The ruling pointed out that HII’s proposal came in roughly $100 million below NorthStar’s. NorthStar appealed, the Navy reopened the bidding anyway, and everyone got to submit fresh offers. The do-over changed the price. NorthStar won again on July 15, this time at $418.5 million, about $118 million less than its own first bid. It wasn’t free, though: the finish line moved from November 2029 to September 2030. For those doing the math, that is 13 years after her decommissioning in 2017. That really doesn’t tell the full story, as she was deactivated five years earlier, in 2012. They still have not announced when they are going to tow the old girl—18 years after she was of any real use to the fleet. Unlike our other CVN, which have only two, the one-off Enterprise had eight reactors and all the glowing bits that go with it. Navy documents say the hull could still hold more than 8,000 tons of hazardous or radioactive waste. I was going to make a snarky comment about all the asbestos I personally took with me when I left, mostly in my lungs and clothing, but a different topic for a different day. The glowing bits have a long journey to the eastern deserts of Washington. Here’s her glowy-bits’ new neighborhood. Trench 94, with all the other Navy nuclear waste we don’t have the institutional bravery and vision to find a more secure and permanent home for. This is what we consider the final resting place? Really? One day, just pile sand over it and hope for the best? I hope we get better and faster at this. USS Nimitz (CVN 68) is not that far behind. Leave a comment Share This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. View the full article

The U.S. Navy is paying Raytheon up to $30.2 million to line up additional suppliers for key parts of the AIM-9X Sidewinder air-to-air missile, including the cooling engine for its heat-seeking sensor and its warhead components. The undefinitized contract modification, announced by the U.S. Department of War, covers engineering work to qualify new manufacturing sources […]View the full article

The United States will supply the Philippine Coast Guard with three secondhand King Air 350 turboprop aircraft, two of them fitted with surveillance sensors, under a $39.6 million contract that finalizes a deal the two countries signed in February. The U.S. Department of War announced the firm-fixed-price award to Technology Service Corp., a small business […]View the full article

The Pentagon has ordered another $52.3 million worth of L3Harris proximity fuzes that turn laser-guided APKWS rockets into drone killers, more than doubling the value of a fuze contract signed just four months ago. The firm-fixed-price modification, announced by the U.S. Department of War, adds to a contract the Naval Surface Warfare Center Indian Head […]View the full article