Like the Navy, the Air Force years ago chose to integrate its intelligence function — known as the 2 — and its communications and network function, known as the 6, into the A2/6, led by a three-star general. It also added cyber to that portfolio, resulting in an official title of deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and cyber effects operations.

This week the Air Force broke the 6 function away from the 2 on the Air Staff, creating the AF/A6 deputy chief of staff for warfighter communications and cyber systems, in what the service calls one of the most significant reorganizations in over 30 years.

The office will be led by Maj. Gen. Michelle Edmondson, who most recently was senior advisor to the undersecretary of the Air Force.

“Our mission is to ensure warfighters have the reliable, secure communications they need to succeed in a complex and contested environment,” she said. “We’re building an enterprise that connects people, systems and decisions at the speed required by today’s operational demands.” 

The new AF/A6 will serve as the functional authority and management for warfighter communications and cyber operations.

The move had been telegraphed for about a year, with officials explaining it was designed to elevate the role of operational communications and cyber needs within the force, providing a dedicated general officer, typically a three-star, to advise senior leaders.

The office will help the Air Force operate in and through cyberspace and compete against the growing threats presented by China and others, officials have stated in the past, given core missions are vitally dependent on secure and resilient communications, and require a deputy chief of staff singularly focused on that.

In future fights, U.S. communications networks are expected to be attacked and stressed by adversaries.

“We created the A6 to ensure communications and cyber systems are available, secure and aligned with warfighter priorities,” Gen. David Allvin, chief of staff of the Air Force, said. “This office will help us focus resources and oversight where it matters most — supporting the mission in contested environments.”

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Over 700 Space Force personnel stationed at multiple military bases are participating in the exercise, where guardians will test and train on space-based capabilities to conduct orbital warfare, electromagnetic warfare, cyber warfare and more. During the event, the service will present threat-informed scenarios simulating a fight with an adversary and allowing for troops to use operational military satellites — as well as commercial assets — to counter them.

“As the scenario increases in challenges and complexity, this gives our blue forces a thinking adversary to spar against,” Lt. Col. Shawn Green, commander of the Space Force’s 527th Space Aggressor Squadron, said Tuesday during a briefing with reporters. “Our goal is to create a relevant, realistic, informed threat replication for blue to fight through so that we can increase the probability of success in war.”

Resolute Space 2025 is part of the Department of the Air Force’s massive exercise known as Resolute Force Pacific (REFORPAC), intended to demonstrate the ability of both the Air and Space Forces to rapidly deploy against adversaries in the Indo-Pacific. It is a central piece of the DAF’s new Department Level Exercise (DLE) series that includes other major Air Force training events, such as Mobility Guardian and Bamboo Eagle, happening concurrently.

The Space Force’s exercise began July 8, and will feature guardians stationed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, as well as Peterson, Buckley and Shriever Space Force Bases, according to the service. Other personnel stationed throughout the Indo-Pacific will also participate in Resolute Space 2025, which is slated to wrap up in early August.

To simulate enemy capabilities and attacks, Green said the Space Force created a mission planning cell that will synchronize fires across space-based orbital, cyber and electromagnetic warfare — presenting various moves and countermoves that guardians will have to fight through.

Resolute Space 2025 will also integrate with elements of the REFORPAC exercise, which aims to ensure the Space Force can effectively fight alongside the Air Force in the future.

“We are working to fuse our different mission areas with the time-phased scheme of maneuver as part of the larger scenario,” Green said. “We’re doing that by providing space electromagnetic warfare, orbital warfare [and] cyber warfare. And we’re using those types of activities to fuse into this large, globally integrated exercise for live, virtual, synthetic scenarios so that our training is realistic, relevant and challenging.”

Col. Jay Steingold, Resolute Space director, told reporters that the exercise also spans across other key mission areas — including space domain awareness; satellite communication; positioning, navigation and timing (PNT); intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR); missile warning; command and control; and military-commercial integration.

Personnel will be able to use on-orbit space assets designed for training guardians, as well as satellites owned by commercial partners during the exercise, Steingold added.

“We have satellites that we are able to utilize to provide training for our U.S. Space Force guardians, whether that be an understanding of how they quote-unquote fly, or in terms of payload capacities and capabilities and general training on orbit,” he said. “We’re certainly leveraging our commercial partners and their capabilities — not only from their developmental standpoint, but also what they bring to bear in terms of cost savings.”

While the Space Force has held exercises in the past, those events were largely focused on individual mission areas and not at the scale of Resolute Space. Steingold said that while large-scale exercises are costly and time-consuming to plan and execute, participating in Resolute Space 2025 is imperative to improving the service’s capabilities, training and overall integration with the joint force and international allies.

“This is the opportunity to really dig in and find out if we have any weaknesses whatsoever, so we can fill them,” he said. “Whether it’s capabilities that our [Operational Test and Training Infrastructure] partners can bring from a training environments perspective, to actual warfighting capabilities that we need to take us further into the future to ensure the safety and security of the space domain.”

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Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton has been selected to receive his fourth star and become the next vice chief of space operations, according to a notice posted to Congress.gov. If confirmed, Bratton would take over the Space Force’s No. 2 spot from Gen. Michael Guetlein, who was recently tapped to lead the Defense Department’s sprawling Golden Dome missile defense effort.

Bratton has been serving as the Space Force’s deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs and requirements since 2023, where he has been responsible for the service’s overall warfighting strategies, system requirements and budget.

Prior to his current role, Bratton served as the first commander of the Space Force’s Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM), which oversees guardian training, capability testing and creating operational doctrine.

As the Space Force’s vice chief, Bratton would assist Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman in leading the Pentagon’s smallest service and advocating for more resources. In recent months, the Space Force has been given a number of new responsibilities — from critical capabilities moving to the space domain to development of Golden Dome.

Bratton’s nomination confirms that Guetlein will not serve in a dual-hatted position as both vice chief of space operations and direct reporting program manager for Golden Dome. Trump announced in May that Guetlein would lead the DOD-wide effort, which seeks to build a comprehensive missile defense architecture for the U.S. homeland leveraging terrestrial- and space-based systems.

Meanwhile, Gen. Thomas Bussiere has been picked to serve as the next vice chief of staff for the Air Force, a second notice on Congress.gov stated. Bussiere currently helms Air Force Global Strike Command, and previously held a number of leadership positions within the service’s strategic enterprise during his career.

The Air Force has been without a vice chief since February, when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth removed Gen. James Slife from the position. Slife was fired alongside former chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown and former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti.

If confirmed, Bussiere’s extensive experience with the Air Force’s strategic enterprise would be a welcome one as the service works to modernize all of its nuclear capabilities. While some efforts like the B-21 Raider stealth bomber are going relatively well, others like the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program have been troubled by growing cost estimates.

Both nominees must be confirmed by the Senate to become vice chiefs.

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The 30,000-pound GBU-57, also known as the MOP, played a key role in Operation Midnight Hammer last month. Air Force B-2 stealth bombers dropped 12 MOP bombs on two different ventilation shafts at Fordow. Another two were used against the Natanz site.

The technology is designed to be capable of attacking underground targets. It can reportedly hit locations hundreds of feet below ground level.

“MOP is a large, GPS-guided, penetrating weapon with the ability to attack deeply-buried and hardened bunkers and tunnels. The warhead case is made from a special high‑performance steel alloy and its design allows for a large explosive payload while maintaining the integrity of the penetrator case during impact,” according to an Air Force description of the system.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency was heavily involved in testing, modeling and simulation of the system for many years prior to Midnight Hammer, in partnership with the Air Force.

“What we do try to do is test [technologies] in what we call a ‘threat representative environment.’ And in this case, we built a test site to test the munitions against, in collaboration with the Air Force and DTRA’s test organization, to try to ascertain the effects that the MOP would have in certain environments. We’ve continued to do tests over time to then determine what those effects are, and then we use that information to support our modeling and simulation programs. Those models that we’ve built include the weapons effects that we saw during all of the testing events, and include a number of other factors that our experts have brought to bear. That model is also part of that targeting and weaponeering support that we talked about [with regard to Midnight Hammer]. So in addition to the threat representative testing that we did, where we were able to see how does the MOP act in certain situations and certain geographies and architectures, if you will, we also then use that information to support our further modeling and simulation to lead to our best targeting analysis to support those decision makers,” a senior defense official told reporters Thursday during a background call.

U.S. intelligence agencies are still working to complete a final battle damage assessment to better understand the impact of last month’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.

“We don’t conduct the BDA here, but we eagerly anticipate the intelligence community completing BDA on this so that we can assess the models vice what actually happened according to their analysis, and then take a look at how accurate the projections were, so we can use information there to improve our modeling output and our targeting decision support packages that we put together. We also will be able to assess whether or not the weapon performed as planned, according to the BDA,” the senior defense official said.

“Then that information may go into future iterations of the technology,” they added. “We will take this information and determine did things work the way that we wanted them to, in which case, how can we continue to improve upon it? Or did things not work exactly as planned, and how can we fix that so that in the future our next-generation capabilities work that much better? We don’t have that information yet, but we look forward to receiving it so that it can inform our next investments in this arena.”

Notably, MOP fuzes can be programmed.

The bomb is “comprised of steel, explosive and a fuze, programmed bespokely [for] each weapon to achieve a particular effect inside the target. Each weapon had a unique desired impact, angle, arrival, final heading and a fuze setting. The fuze is effectively what tells the bomb when to function. A longer delay in a fuze, the deeper the weapon will penetrate and drive into the target,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine told reporters last month during a press briefing about Midnight Hammer.

The Air Force is pursuing a MOP modification program to integrate a “smart fuze” capability into the weapon. The so-called Large Penetrator Smart Fuze is intended to provide “increased probability of kill” against hard and deeply buried targets “by mitigating the risk of target intelligence uncertainty,” according to a report from the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation.

On Thursday’s call, the senior defense official declined to say whether the MOPs used in Midnight Hammer were equipped with the smart fuze capability.

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Beauchamp began working for the department in 2015, and most recently served as the director of security, special program oversight and information protection within the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force. In that role, he oversaw the Air and Space Forces’ highly-classified special access programs (SAP) and worked on insider threat mitigation.

But Beauchamp’s 29-year career spans across multiple positions at the Department of the Air Force, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). By and large, he either led or was involved in several critical events within the national security space — so much so that someone once described him as “the Forrest Gump of the national security world.”

“He goes, ‘You were kind of there in all the big happenings of your time of your career. You were right in the middle of all these things that were the big developments. Sometimes you were there in the background of the scene, and sometimes you were there front and center doing the thing,’” Beauchamp told DefenseScoop in an interview on July 3, his last day at the Pentagon, recalling how a colleague described his tenure.

After graduating from Lehigh University in 1992, Beauchamp was hired as a systems engineer for General Electric Aerospace’s programs with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He would eventually move to the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) — the precursor to the NGA — after it was founded in 1996 as an operations analyst supporting work to collect imagery and targeting data in the Balkans during the Yugoslav Wars.

In 2000, Beauchamp became NIMA’s senior technical advisor for studies and analysis when he was 29 years old, making him the youngest person to be hired for a senior executive position within the agency since it was founded. Almost immediately, he was tasked with developing a congressionally mandated strategy that would convince the government to purchase imagery from commercial vendors.

At the time, the IC held a monopoly over space-based imagery and data, and the industry market was only just beginning to take hold. Beauchamp described the assignment as “trying to sell milk to people with their own cows.”

“Why would the NRO want to encourage the government to buy commercial imagery? They’re the judge to build and operate imagery satellites,” he said. “So I figured out what it would take in terms of investment to get industry to buy and build satellites sufficient to meet the government’s demands, because the national satellites were not meeting all of the government’s demand for mapping data.”

But after developing a business case for the strategy, Beauchamp said the government was largely opposed to implementing it. He decided to shelve the strategy after one final unsuccessful meeting held on Sept. 10th, 2001, he said.

“On the 11th of September, [Congress] called me up,” he said. “I’m in my office, we’re watching pictures of the [Twin Towers] smoking, and my phone rings and it’s the congressional staff saying, ‘You’ve got your money. Could you spend more?’”

Beauchamp’s $830 million plan was funded by one of Congress’ post-9/11 supplemental packages and created ClearView — the first program that allowed commercial companies to provide satellite imagery to the IC. Once U.S. forces had entered Afghanistan, Beauchamp also moved to purchase all of the overhead imagery of the country, he said.

“What we really wanted to do was make sure that this imagery that was being collected wasn’t being used by the Taliban to target our forces,” he said. “So I basically stitched a camouflage net made out of $100 bills over the country of Afghanistan in order to keep our forces safe.”

Today, commercially derived imagery is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Companies like Maxar, BlackSky and Planet Labs all have several lucrative contracts with the federal government to provide space-based data for national security, weather and other needs. 

“So this industry, would it exist? Maybe. But would it have blown up the way it did? Probably not, if we hadn’t done this,” Beauchamp said.

The next several years of Beauchamp’s career would be spent at the NGA in various roles focused on strategy and acquisition. In 2012, he began a joint duty assignment as the ODNI’s director of mission integration under then-Director of National Intelligence Gen. James Clapper — a job he noted was one of the highlights of his career. During his second day on the job, U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, were targeted by militant groups, leading to the death of four American citizens.

Once Beauchamp’s team finished the assessment of the attack, he was immediately thrust into the fallout of the classified document leaks by Edward Snowden in 2013. His oversight led to a massive reform of the IC’s compartmented access programs and yet another overhaul of the government’s policy on commercial imagery.

“All of a sudden, now I’m convening people on the analytics side [and the] collection side, trying to figure out how to make up for the losses and capability that Snowden revealed,” he said. “And part of that is doing a reform of the IC’s compartmented programs, because they had way too many of them in overlap.”

Toward the end of his three-year assignment, Beauchamp started working with former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work on a “side project” focused on standing up a new organization to pivot the Defense Department away from counterterrorism operations in the Middle East and towards great power competition, he said.

Beauchamp’s time in the intelligence community came to an end in 2015, when he was picked to be the Department of the Air Force’s deputy undersecretary for space and director of the principal DOD space advisor. There, he had two critical tasks, he noted.

“One, I’m working with all the international relationships with other countries who want to cooperate with us in space,” Beauchamp said. “At the same, I’m trying to convince the Americans to shift from space as a sanctuary from which you provide services, to space as a domain for warfighting.”

At the time, the Pentagon was reluctant to expand operations in space out of fear of being the first to weaponize the domain. But Beauchamp argued that the idea wasn’t about weaponization, and instead protection of critical space-based capabilities.

“It’s almost like before then, we were deliberately not protecting them so as you didn’t look like you wanted to start something,” he said. “And I was like, ‘This is not an option anymore.’ The Chinese had already demonstrated they could shoot down their own satellites, what’s to stop them from doing the same thing to us?”

Part of Beauchamp’s work was to develop a plan for how the Pentagon could make its space systems more resilient — many of which have become central to the Space Force’s operations, he noted. And when the first Trump administration decided to stand up the Space Force, Beauchamp was at the forefront of the effort to convince officials to approve the new military service.

Beauchamp would then transition to the Department of the Air Force’s office of the CIO, first as its director of enterprise IT in 2018 and later as the deputy CIO in 2020. His main focus was preparing the DAF for transitioning to telework operations as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, as well as consolidating the department’s enterprise licenses and creating a plan for modernizing base-level infrastructure, he noted.

“The overall trend line was eliminating the county option of uniqueness that was taking place at every base, and replacing it with a core set of enterprise services that were provided centrally,” Beauchamp said. “Big things like moving to zero trust — you can’t do those things if every base and every two-letter has their own architecture independent of everybody else’s.”

Today, the DAF has a strong path forward on modernizing its IT infrastructure, but Beauchamp said the true challenge will be convincing the department’s major programs to rely on enterprise services instead of building their own networks.

“It’s going to allow them to consolidate and collapse multiple redundant networks and really reduce the amount of money we’re spending on sustaining all this infrastructure,” he said. “When you modernize those networks, you also improve your cybersecurity, because the more deviation you have, the more gaps are created between the different baselines and different versions of software.”

Moving forward, Beauchamp said he will be taking time off but is open to other opportunities in the future.

“I’m excited for whatever the next challenge might be,” he said. “I’m interested in talking to folks who do exciting things, and to see who needs somebody like me to solve big problems.”

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The Air Force is requesting nearly $3.5 billion in FY’26 to continue work on the F-47, a sixth-generation fighter under development by prime contractor Boeing. According to budget documents released Thursday, the allocation includes $2.6 billion in discretionary funds and $900 million from the GOP-led reconciliation bill currently under debate in Congress.

In contrast, the Navy’s sixth-gen fighter program known as the F/A-XX, would receive just $74 million in R&D funds — 84 percent less than the $454 million the service received in fiscal 2025. The decision comes after the Navy already delayed around $1 billion for F/A-XX in FY’25 due to spending caps imposed by the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act.

“We did make a strategic decision to go all-in on F-47,” a senior defense official told reporters during a Pentagon briefing Thursday. The move was prompted “due to our belief that the industrial base can only handle going fast on one program at this time, and the presidential priority to go all-in on F-47 and get that program right, while maintaining the option for F/A-XX in the future,” they added.

President Donald Trump announced that Boeing had beat out Lockheed Martin for the F-47 contract in March, ending a months-long pause to the program’s selection process caused by budgetary and design concerns. The aircraft is envisioned as a long-range crewed fighter jet that will replace the Air Force’s fleet of F-22 Raptors and is expected to field sometime in the 2030s.

The F-47 platform is the centerpiece of the Air Force’s future Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems, which also includes robotic wingman drones called Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA). Budget documents indicate that the CCA program would receive a total of $807 million in FY’26, with a majority of those funds coming from $678 million added in the reconciliation bill.

Similarly, the carrier-based F/A-XX is expected to feature longer ranges, enhanced stealth capabilities and be more survivable than the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet it will eventually replace. After Lockheed Martin dropped out of the competition earlier this year, Boeing and Northrop Grumman are both vying to lead the program.

While budget documents at press time did not disclose the specific work planned for the F/A-XX in the next fiscal year, the funding would allow the Navy to “preserve the ability to leverage F-47 work” and prevent “over-subscription of qualified defense industrial base engineers,” the senior defense official said.

The details provided by budget documents end months of ambiguity over the sea service’s plans for the F/A-XX. After Trump’s dramatic rollout of the Air Force F-47 contract award in March, reports surfaced that the Navy would follow suit and name the prime contractor for its sixth-gen fighter the same month.

But that announcement never came, and subsequent reports from Reuters and Bloomberg indicated that funding disputes and industrial base concerns had delayed the program — potentially by three years.

The Navy’s decision to once again scale back funds to F/A-XX is likely to spark ire among lawmakers, many of whom have recently pressed service leadership to move the program forward.

“I’m concerned that any hesitancy on our part to proceed with the planned procurement of the sixth-gen fighters for the Navy will leave us dangerously outmatched in a China fight. We cannot wait,” Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., said in May during a House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense hearing with Navy leadership. “Further, we cannot expect to grow the industrial base by undermining aviation programs that rely on highly specialized supply chains and skilled labor that cannot be turned on and off like a switch.”

Ultimately, the final decision on the F/A-XX program’s fate is under discussion by Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Trump, a senior defense official told reporters Thursday. When asked whether the Pentagon was considering to create a joint Air Force-Navy program — repeating the F-35 Lightning II acquisition model — the official said “pretty much everything is under consideration to get the tactical air capability that our warfighters need as quickly as possible.”

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While available documents did not detail how many ARRW missiles the Air Force intends to buy, the request officially transitions the hypersonic weapon from its troubled development and testing phase and into formal procurement and production. The move comes after the Air Force considered cancelling the program last year after it completed its rapid prototyping effort in August 2024.

Made by prime contractor Lockheed Martin, ARRW is one of the two types of hypersonic weapons the Air Force’s is pursuing — the other being the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM), under development by RTX-subsidiary Raytheon.

ARRW is a boost-glide missile that can be launched from larger aircraft such as the B-52 Stratofortress bomber, and like all hypersonics can fly at speeds of Mach 5 or faster and maneuver during flight.

The fate of ARRW has been up in the air since March 2024 when the Air Force announced it didn’t include any funds to procure the missiles in its budget request for fiscal 2025. The decision was not a surprise, as the program faced a series of setbacks during its development phase — including at least one failed all-up-round flight test that occurred in 2023.

At the time, Air Force leadership said they would pause the ARRW program to analyze the data gathered during its flight test campaign, while also shifting focus to the development of HACM.

But news that ARRW was no longer on the chopping block was first hinted at by Gen. David Allvin, the service’s chief of staff, earlier this month during a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

“I will tell you that we are developing — and you’ll see in the budget submission, assuming it’s what we put forward — two different programs. One is a larger form factor that is more strategic [and] long range that we have already tested several times — it’s called ARRW. The other is HACM,” Allvin told lawmakers June 5.

The Air Force first awarded Lockheed Martin a contract worth up to $480 million to design and develop ARRW. Since then, the service has spent roughly $1.4 billion in research-and-development funds on the hypersonic weapon.

As for HACM, the Air Force is requesting $802.8 million in fiscal 2026 to continue the missile’s development, according to budget documents. The service received $466.7 million in FY’25 appropriations, and the increase in funds for this year are likely due to the program entering its flight test phase in the near future.

The Air Force intends to conduct five flight tests for HACM — two less than the service originally planned for — before the program begins rapid fielding efforts in fiscal 2027. The reduction in tests was caused by delays in nailing down the weapon’s hardware design, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office. 

Development of hypersonic missiles is considered a top priority for the Defense Department, especially as adversaries continue to advance their own weapons. Overall, the DOD is requesting over $3.9 billion in FY’26 across a number of programs at different stages of development, a defense official told reporters Thursday during a briefing at the Pentagon.

Along with the Air Force’s programs, those funds would also contribute to fielding the first operational battery of the Army’s Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) — also known as Dark Eagle — by the end of FY’25 and continued development of the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) system.

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The event marked the first-ever operational employment of the weapon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth confirmed Sunday during a press briefing at the Pentagon.

The 30,000-pound GBU-57 bomb, also known as the MOP, is designed to be capable of attacking underground targets. It can reportedly hit locations hundreds of feet below ground level.

“MOP is a large, GPS-guided, penetrating weapon with the ability to attack deeply-buried and hardened bunkers and tunnels. The warhead case is made from a special high‑performance steel alloy and its design allows for a large explosive payload while maintaining the integrity of the penetrator case during impact,” according to an Air Force description of the system.

Due to the bomb’s size and design, it can only be carried by the B-2 bomber. Each B-2 can carry two GBU-57s.

Early testing of the MOP began about 20 years ago under a technology demonstration effort led by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency before the technology was transitioned to an Air Force “quick reaction capability program,” according to a service fact sheet. Boeing was contracted in 2009 for MOP-aircraft integration efforts. In 2017, the MOP transitioned to an Air Force program of record, according to a report by the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation.

Notably, in fiscal 2024, the Air Force conducted two full-scale tests to “verify fixes to a B-2 integration issue,” according to a DOT&E annual report.

The Air Force has been pursuing a MOP modification program to integrate a “smart fuze” capability into the weapon. The so-called Large Penetrator Smart Fuze is intended to provide “increased probability of kill” against hard and deeply buried targets “by mitigating the risk of target intelligence uncertainty,” according to the DOT&E report. Defense officials on Sunday did not say whether the MOPs used in Midnight Hammer were equipped with the smart fuze capability.

Seven B-2s and a variety of other assets were involved in Midnight Hammer, which included U.S. attacks on Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan in Iran, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at Sunday’s press briefing.

Hegseth said the aim of the mission, which was ordered by President Donald Trump, was to “destroy or severely degrade” Iran’s nuclear program. Western officials were concerned that the Iranian regime could use the country’s nuclear materials and know-how to build weapons of mass destruction.

“At approximately 6:40 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 2:10 a.m. Iran time, the lead B-2 dropped two GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator weapons on the first of several aim points at Fordow,” Caine said. “The remaining bombers then hit their targets as well, with a total of 14 MOPs dropped against two nuclear target areas. All three Iranian nuclear infrastructure targets were struck between 6:40 p.m. and 7:05 p.m. Eastern time … with the Tomahawk missiles [launched from a submarine] being the last to strike at Esfahan to ensure we retain the element of surprise throughout the operation. Following weapons release, the Midnight Hammer strike package exited Iranian airspace, and the package began its return home.”

Fighter jets went in ahead of the bombers to guard against enemy fighter aircraft and surface-to-air missiles. The Defense Department is unaware of any shots being fired at the U.S. military aircraft on their way in or out of Iran, Caine noted.

About 75 precision guided weapons were employed during the operation, including the 14 MOPs, according to Caine.

Dozens of air refueling tankers were also involved in the mission, he noted, as well as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, and hundreds of maintenance and operational personnel.

On Sunday evening, Trump posted on Truth Social that the B-2 pilots who took part in Midnight Hammer had safely returned to their base in Missouri. The mission from Whiteman Air Force Base to Iran and back lasted about 36 hours, with the help of aerial refueling, according to U.S. Strategic Command.

Senior U.S. officials touted the operation as a success.

“The damage to the Nuclear sites in Iran is said to be ‘monumental.’ The hits were hard and accurate. Great skill was shown by our military,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

Hegseth described the mission as an “incredible and overwhelming success.”

Caine noted that a final battle damage assessment will take “some time” to complete. However, initial battle damage assessments “indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction,” he told reporters.

Officials in the Trump administration over the weekend said they now hope to have a negotiated settlement to the conflict. They were waiting to see how Iran would respond.

On Monday, Iran launched missile attacks at a U.S. military base in Qatar.

“I can confirm that al Udeid Air Base was attacked by short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles originating from Iran today. At this time, there are no reports of U.S. casualties. We are monitoring this situation closely and will provide more information as it becomes available,” a U.S. defense official said in a statement.

Updated on June 23, 2025, at 2 PM: This story was updated to include comment from a U.S. defense official about an Iranian missile attack on al Udeid Air Base on Monday.

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Air Force officials overseeing HACM told the Government Accountability Office that the program’s first design review was held in September 2024 — six months later than expected — because more time was needed to nail down the missile’s hardware design. As a result, the service will only have time to conduct five flight tests for HACM before it begins rapid fielding efforts in fiscal 2027.

“Program officials said that the delays will reduce the number of flight tests the program can conduct during the 5-year rapid prototyping effort from seven to five,” GAO said in its annual assessment of the Pentagon’s acquisition programs, published Wednesday. “These officials said that the program will still be able to establish sufficient confidence in the missile to declare it operational and to meet all the [middle tier of acquisition pathway’s] objectives with the reduced number of tests.”

Led by RTX subsidiary Raytheon, HACM is an air-breathing scramjet missile and one of the Air Force’s two main efforts to develop hypersonic weapons, which can fly at speeds of at least Mach 5 and are highly maneuverable mid-flight. Northrop Grumman is also on the program as a subcontractor that’s developing the scramjet engine.

Raytheon received a $985 million deal from the Air Force in 2022 to develop HACM under a middle tier of acquisition (MTA) contract, an alternative procurement pathway that requires systems to complete a rapid prototyping effort within five years. The company was later given a $407 million award in 2023 for additional work to enhance the HACM’s capabilities — bringing the contract’s total value to nearly $1.4 billion.

According to its budget request for fiscal 2025, the Air Force planned to mature HACM’s design and initiate flight test activities — including integration on the F-15E Strike Eagle and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, as well as all-up-round free flight testing of missile prototypes. The service intended to build 13 missiles during the rapid prototyping effort to use as “test assets, spares, and rounds for initial operational capability,” the GAO report noted.

Program officials told GAO that HACM’s first design review was delayed to allow for more time to finalize the missile’s hardware design and “validate an initial configuration of the system for use in the first flight test,” the report stated. Another review to certify the system’s “fully operational configuration for use in the final flight tests” was scheduled for sometime in 2025. 

An Air Force spokesperson declined to comment on the current status of HACM’s development, citing “enhanced program security measures.” Raytheon did not respond to DefenseScoop’s request for comment.

Furthermore, GAO said that Raytheon is now “projecting that it will significantly exceed its cost baseline” for HACM, although Air Force officials told the watchdog that removing two flight tests could offer some savings. The program’s development cost as of January 2025 was estimated at close to $2 billion — a two percent increase from the watchdog’s 2024 assessment of $1.9 billion, according to the new report.

HACM would not be the Air Force’s first hypersonic missile to face challenges during development. Its other program — the Lockheed Martin-developed AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) — had a rocky test campaign. At least one of the weapon’s flight tests was deemed unsuccessful, prompting the service to shift priority to HACM’s development.

Issues during ARRW’s testing led the service to axe the weapon’s procurement in FY’25 so the Air Force could reassess the program for future budget requests, casting doubt on ARRW’s future. However, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin recently revealed that the service has included funds to buy ARRW missiles in its upcoming fiscal 2026 budget request.

“I will tell you that we are developing — and you’ll see in the budget submission, assuming it’s what we put forward — two different programs. One is a larger form factor that is more strategic [and] long range that we have already tested several times — it’s called ARRW. The other is HACM,” Allvin said last week during a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

Although both ARRW and HACM are hypersonic weapons, they each have different propulsion systems that give them different characteristics. ARRW is a large boost-glide missile that uses a rocket motor to achieve hypersonic flight and is thus limited to being carried by bigger platforms, such as the B-52 Stratofortress bomber. On the other hand, HACM is a smaller cruise missile powered by an air-breathing jet engines, or scramjet, meaning it can be launched from more tactical aircraft like fighter jets.

Despite their differences, Air Force officials have previously stated that both ARRW and HACM are “complementary” to one another.

Moving forward, the Air Force is working with Raytheon to create a new schedule for HACM that still follows the five-year rapid prototyping timeframe mandated for MTA programs, GAO noted in the report. The government watchdog also said the Air Force has altered HACM’s transition strategy to support faster delivery of more missiles, while also improving the weapon’s design for large-scale manufacturing and expanding the industrial base’s capacity for production.

The service currently plans to use the rapid fielding effort in FY’27 to deliver missiles developed during HACM’s initial prototyping phase and then iterate on the weapon’s design. That work will inform a concurrent major capability acquisition pathway program the Air Force will start production for in fiscal 2029, according to GAO.

“The program office stated that based on global power competition and urgency to address threats, the Air Force changed the focus of the HACM program from a prototype demonstration to a program that would deliver operational capability in fiscal year 2027,” per the report. “The program stated that, with this shift, it is focused on meeting schedule as the priority and maintaining velocity toward fielding an operationally relevant capability — the minimum viable product that meets user-defined performance requirements — in fiscal year 2027.”

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The Trump administration announced in April that it awarded a contract to Boeing to build the F-47, a sixth-generation platform that’s part of the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance initiative. Officials haven’t publicly disclosed how much Boeing received for the award due to classification of the project.

The DOD hasn’t publicly released full documentation for its 2026 budget request yet. But at a House Appropriations Committee hearing Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other Pentagon leaders discussed some of the department’s plans for key programs.

The budget allocates $3.5 billion for the F-47, Hegseth told lawmakers.

The system is being built “to dominate the most capable adversaries and operate in the most perilous threat environments imaginable,” he said in written testimony to the committee.

The platform will have significantly longer range, more advanced stealth, be more sustainable and supportable, have higher availability, and take less manpower and infrastructure to deploy than the U.S. military’s fifth-gen fighters, he told lawmakers.

“The F-47 will significantly strengthen America’s air power and improves our global position. It will keep our skies secure — even as it ensures we are able to reach out adversaries wherever they may hide,” he said.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in written testimony to the committee that the jet is the world’s first sixth-generation fighter and will offer superior “adaptability” compared to platforms that are currently in the fleet. He asserted that it would ensure “continued U.S. air dominance for decades.”

A graphic shared last month by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin on the social media platform X, indicated that the F-47 will have a combat radius greater than 1,000 nautical miles and a top speed higher than Mach 2. In comparison, the fifth-gen F-22 and F-35A stealth fighters have combat radiuses of 590 nautical miles and 670 nautical miles, respectively. The F-22 has a top speed greater than Mach 2 and the F-35A has a top speed of Mach 1.6, according to the chart.

The service plans to buy upwards of 185 F-47s over the course of the program.

Hegseth also told lawmakers Tuesday that the 2026 budget will “fully fund” the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, which aims to field high-speed, next-generation drones that can fly with manned fighter jets like the F-47 and perform air superiority missions.

“We believe in the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, the loyal wingman concept, this idea that you project power more robustly through autonomous [and] semi-autonomous systems … that amplify our lethal effect,” he said.

Bryn Woollacott MacDonnell, who is performing the duties of Pentagon comptroller and chief financial officer, said the 2026 budget request includes $804 million for CCA.

The Air Force has given fighter designations to the CCA prototypes that General Atomics and Anduril are developing, referred to as YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A, respectively. Both companies have started ground testing of their systems, and senior defense officials on Tuesday said first flights are expected to take place before the end of this fiscal year.

According to the graphic shared by Allvin last month, CCAs will be stealthy and have a combat radius greater than 700 nautical miles. Their top speed is classified.

The Air Force plans to buy more than 1,000 of the next-gen drones in increments.

Last week, the service announced that an Experimental Operations Unit for CCA was elevated to a “fully operational squadron equivalent” during a June 5 ceremony at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada.

According to a press release, the unit will integrate into the Virtual Warfare Center and the Joint Integrated Test and Training Center Nellis to “conduct realistic simulations and refine non-materiel considerations of CCA employment concepts in a virtual environment.” It also plans to conduct “live-fly experiments to verify simulation results and optimize tactics, techniques and procedures.”

“Our experimental operations will ensure that CCA are immediately viable as a credible combat capability that increases Joint Force survivability and lethality,” Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen, EOU commander, said in a statement.

The Air Force aims for the F-47 and CCA drones to be operational before 2030.

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