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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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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Following a troubled flight testing campaign, the Air Force decided not to include any funding to procure ARRW in its budget request for fiscal 2025. At the time, officials said it would take time to fully analyze and understand data gathered during the test campaign before fully committing to putting more money toward the system’s development or fielding.

But comments made by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin on Thursday suggest the service has resolved to continue funding the ARRW program rather than end it.

“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,” Allvin said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

Developing hypersonic missiles has been a top priority for the entire Defense Department as U.S. adversaries continue to mature their own technology. The weapons are able to reach speeds of Mach 5 or higher and are highly maneuverable in-flight, making them difficult for air defense systems to intercept.

And while the Air Force, Army and Navy each have respective hypersonic missiles development programs, all of the weapons so far have yielded mixed results during flight test campaigns.

After a successful all-up-round test for ARRW in late 2022, the Air Force conducted three additional tests in 2023 and a final one in 2024 — but declined to share any results, casting doubt on whether all objectives were met during the campaign.

In 2023, then-Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall admitted to lawmakers that ARRW’s second test in March of that year was deemed unsuccessful. As a result, he said the service intended to reevaluate the program as it finished flight tests, but would shift focus to its other hypersonic missile program, known as the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM).

Furthermore, a 2024 report from the Pentagon’s weapons tester revealed that ARRW’s test campaign was also challenged by a lack of available infrastructure and insufficient means to collect critical flight data. 

Now, both ARRW and HACM are “continuing to develop and moving beyond [research, development, test and evaluation] and getting into the procurement range in the very near future,” Allvin told lawmakers Thursday.

Under development by Lockheed Martin since 2018, ARRW is a boost-glide missile that uses a rocket booster to reach hypersonic speeds, meaning the weapon is large and can only be launched via very big aircraft like the Air Force’s B-52 Stratofortress bomber.

On the other hand, HACM is a smaller, air-breathing scramjet hypersonic missile that is compatible with more aircraft, including fighter jets. RTX was tapped to develop a prototype design for HACM in 2022, and the service was expected to conduct at least 13 tests between October 2024 and March 2027 before production decisions are made, according to the Government Accountability Office’s annual Weapon System Assessment report released last year.

“The Air Force plans to transition HACM to the major capability acquisition pathway at either development start or production start in 2027, depending on what capabilities the Air Force is willing to accept and whether production facilities are ready,” the GAO report stated.

The Air Force declined to provide additional details regarding ARRW’s fate until the FY ’26 budget is approved.

Lockheed Martin deferred specific questions to the Air Force, but a spokesperson told DefenseScoop that the company “has full confidence in the maturity and production readiness of ARRW hypersonic-strike capabilities. We continue partnering with the U.S. Air Force to meet the urgent needs of our warfighters.”

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The GPS III SV-08 was launched via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It’s the eighth space vehicle for the GPS III constellation to go on orbit. The series of satellites, built by prime contractor Lockheed Martin, brings significant improvements over previous GPS constellations by offering greater accuracy and advanced anti-jamming capabilities for military users.

Notably, the Space Force was able to execute the mission just three months after the service notified both Lockheed Martin and SpaceX to prepare for liftoff — a much faster pace than traditional national security launches, which could take up to two years from the initial contract award, said Walt Lauderdale, mission director and chief of Falcon systems and operations at Space Systems Command.

“The volume of data for the Falcon launch system allows us to focus our attention on the most critical areas and confirm acceptable flight risk,” Lauderdale said earlier this week during a media roundtable ahead of Friday’s launch. “This experience over time allows us to leverage SpaceX’s commercial tempo, optimize our own review timelines and utilize previously flown hardware — as with our last GPS III launch.”

Friday’s mission marks the second GPS III launch executed under what the Space Force calls a “rapid-response” schedule, demonstrating the ability to prepare and deploy a satellite on a rushed deadline. In December 2024, the service conducted a secretive mission dubbed Rapid Response Trailblazer that saw the seventh GPS III satellite go into orbit onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 after five months of planning.

Work conducted during the Rapid Response Trailblazer mission and other previous GPS III launches allowed the Space Force to streamline Friday’s launch even more because most of the mission profile and analysis for launch was already completed, Lauderdale said.

“The ability to once again demonstrate a quick-turn launch of crucial capability helps us understand the key aspects that enable such a capability and further prepare for similar mission timelines in the future,” he said.

With adversary advancements in the space domain putting more demand on the Space Force, the service is exploring ways to increase the resiliency of its constellations. While one method has been proliferating large numbers of satellites on orbit to add redundancy, the Space Force also wants to reduce the time it takes to put new systems in space.

One such effort is SSC’s Victus mission series under the Tactically Responsive Space program, which focuses on launching small payloads on commercial rockets with only 24 hours notice. While the recent pair of rapid GPS III missions are separate from Tactically Responsive Space and are geared towards payloads in the National Security Space Launch-class, the efforts share a common goal of reducing overall launch cadence.

“We’re trying to prove that we can quickly respond to an on-orbit failure of a vehicle, but we’re also trying to show the best ways to be resilient,” Col. Andrew Menschner, Mission Delta 31 commander, told reporters Wednesday. “Now that we have the timelines of launch headed to much shorter durations, one form of resilience is having a completed vehicle in the factory and ready to go to respond. Said another way: We don’t always have to have a vehicle on orbit for it to be providing resilience in the constellation.”

The Space Force initially planned to launch the eighth GPS III satellite onboard one of United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Vulcan rockets later in 2025. However, the service announced in April that it would pivot to using a SpaceX Falcon 9 in order to get critical capabilities on GPS III — such as the jam-resistant M-code signal — on orbit faster, Lauderdale said.

“What we’re doing this time is, we’re trying to make sure that we address getting some M-code capability up, and it was an opportunity to work with SpaceX and ULA to make sure we are equipped among all the parties and make sure that we could balance making sure that we can get M-code up there while taking care of both of the companies,” he said.

Menschner noted that because the GPS III satellites are qualified for multiple launch vehicle providers, it provided additional flexibility to switch to the Falcon 9 — a lesson that Mission Delta 31 is passing to others across the Space Force and Pentagon.

Moving forward, Lauderdale said he expects that lessons from the GPS III missions will open doors for other NSSL launches on faster timelines. 

“So what we’re proving out with our GPS teammates shows the capability and capacity that we could do from the NSSL program. Multiple launch vehicles gives us assured access to space,” he said. “And so when we look the future, what we’re demonstrating here is that it is possible, with our current vehicle systems, that if there is a need to get something on orbit quickly, something that is unpredicted at the time we put it under contract, we have a capacity, and we know what it would take in order to make that happen.”

The remaining two satellites for the GPS III series are currently slated to launch onboard ULA’s Vulcan rockets before the end of 2025.

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Boeing beat out Lockheed Martin for the contract of the platform — which will be designated as the F-47, President Donald Trump announced during a press conference held in the Oval Office. Northrop Grumman was also in the running to develop the NGAD platform until 2023, when the company publicly announced it was exiting the competition.

The Air Force did not share how much Boeing received for the award due to classification of the program. The service is now on a path to field the NGAD platform sometime in the 2030s.

“The F-47 will be the most advanced, most capable, most lethal aircraft ever built,” Trump said. “An experimental version of the plane has secretly been flying for almost five years, and we’re confident that it massively overpowers the capabilities of any other nation.”

The NGAD contract is a critical win for Boeing and revitalizes its stealth aircraft business. The company has bet billions of dollars in standing up advanced manufacturing facilities at its fighter production hub in St. Louis, Missouri, where the legacy F/A-18 Super Hornet line is expected to end in 2027.

The award also gives Boeing a much-needed boost after its other defense programs — such as the KC-46 Pegasus aerial refueler and new Air Force One jets — have racked up billions in financial losses.

“We recognize the importance of designing, building and delivering a 6th-generation fighter capability for the United States Air Force. In preparation for this mission, we made the most significant investment in the history of our defense business, and we are ready to provide the most advanced and innovative NGAD aircraft needed to support the mission,” Steve Parker, interim president and CEO at Boeing Defense, Space and Security, said in a statement.

The sixth-generation fighter jet is intended to replace the F-22 Raptor and is envisioned as a long-range crewed aircraft equipped with advanced sensors and weapons payloads designed to operate in highly contested environments in the Indo-Pacific.

Lockheed Martin’s loss marks an end to the defense giant’s relative monopoly in the stealth fighter manufacturing business. According to a report from Breaking Defense, the company is no longer vying for the Navy’s sixth-generation fighter jet program known as the F/A-XX because its proposal did not meet the service’s criteria.

The F-47 platform is the centerpiece to the Air Force’s NGAD family of systems concept, which also includes the service’s future loyal wingman drones known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and other advanced command-and-control technologies. The aircraft will be powered by an engine being developed under the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) program — another ongoing competition between GE Aerospace and RTX subsidiary Pratt and Whitney. 

Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. David Allvin said Friday in a statement that over the last five years, the service has been flying X-planes for the F-47 aircraft to test future concepts and proving out its technology. He noted that the experimental work will allow the NGAD aircraft to fly sometime during Trump’s administration.

“With the F-47, we are not just building another fighter — we are shaping the future of warfare and putting our enemies on notice,” Allvin said. “This platform will be the most advanced, lethal, and adaptable fighter ever developed — designed to outpace, outmaneuver, and outmatch any adversary that dares to challenge our brave Airmen.”

The announcement comes after the Air Force decided to pause the selection process for the NGAD platform last summer to reevaluate the service’s design concept against predicted threat environments, as well as attempt to lower the platform’s cost. The service initially planned to award the NGAD contract before the end of last year, but ultimately decided in December to push the decision to the Trump administration.

During the pause, former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said the service was “taking a hard look” at the platform’s design to ensure the stealth fighter jet would be able to address new and emerging threats. China’s arsenal of advanced weapons and NGAD’s survivability on large airfields were some of the elements considered during the evaluation, he said.

In a statement, Allvin said “the F-47 has unprecedented maturity. While the F-22 is currently the finest air superiority fighter in the world, and its modernization will make it even better, the F-47 is a generational leap forward. The maturity of the aircraft at this phase in the program confirms its readiness to dominate the future fight.”

Budget constraints also influenced the service’s decision to pause NGAD’s selection process. Original estimates for the sixth-gen aircraft were predicted to be around $300 million per unit, but Kendall said last year his ideal price point would be similar to the F-35 Lightning II — about $100 million, depending on the variant.

Allvin said in a statement that the F-47 will have a lower price tag than an F-22 — which has a unit cost of around $143 million. The Air Force requested $2.7 billion for the platform in its budget request for fiscal 2025, indicating that it planned to spend $19.6 billion on the aircraft over the next five years. 

“Compared to the F-22, the F-47 will cost less and be more adaptable to future threats — and we will have more of the F-47s in our inventory,” Allvin said. “The F-47 will have significantly longer range, more advanced stealth, be more sustainable, supportable, and have higher availability than our 5th generation fighters.”

Updated March 21, 2025, at 2:35 PM: This story has been updated to include a statement from Steve Parker, interim president and CEO at Boeing Defense, Space and Security.

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SDA announced the delay for Tranche 1 of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) in a statement on Friday, citing continued supply chain woes as the main contributor to the decision to postpone launch. The agency plans to conduct around one launch per month until all 154 Tranche 1 sats are on orbit.

The news marks yet another setback for SDA, which in recent weeks has been grappling with leadership changes and questions regarding the agency’s semi-independent acquisition authorities. However, the launch delay appears to be caused by supply chain bottlenecks related to the sheer number of satellites the agency plans to put on orbit.

“SDA continues to aggressively work toward the first Tranche 1 launch; however, as we progress through a normal assembly, integration, and testing campaign, with the added challenge of late supplier deliveries, it has become clear additional time is required for system readiness to meet the Tranche 1 minimum viable capability,” the agency said in a statement.

The PWSA is a planned constellation comprising hundreds of satellites stationed in low-Earth orbit. The program is divided into two main mission areas — data relay and communications in the transport layer, and missile warning and tracking in the tracking layer. SDA initially pursued an aggressive acquisition and launch schedule known as “spiral development,” which sought to put new satellites in space every two years.

The agency originally planned to begin launching Tranche 1 — considered the first operational batch of PWSA sats that would provide regional coverage of the Earth — in September 2024. That date was then postponed and re-slated for spring 2025, largely due to supply chain bottlenecks that have been a persistent hurdle in the architecture’s development.

Tranche 1 will consist of 158 satellites, including 126 in the transport layer, 28 in the tracking layer and four “missile defense demonstration” satellites. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, York Space Systems and L3Harris are all prime contractors on the program.

The number of sats is a stark contrast to previous military space constellations, which historically only included a small quantity of large and exquisite space vehicles. As a result, both SDA and the space industrial base have been challenged to deliver critical parts — including optical communications terminals (OCT) and encryption devices — on time and at the scale needed to launch the PWSA.

“OCTs have experienced some scaling issues, encryption devices are limited and subject to approval outside SDA, propulsion systems were a challenge on [tranche 1] due to business issues as a supplier that several [tranche 1] prime vendors were using,” an SDA official told DefenseScoop on background.

The launch campaign for tranche 1 will begin with the transport layer, the official added. However, the agency has not yet determined which vendor will be the first to go on orbit in summer 2025, or how many space vehicles will be part of the inaugural tranche 1 launch, they said.

SDA emphasized that despite the latest delay in launching Tranche 1, the agency is committed to finishing on-orbit test and checkout of the satellites by mid-2026 and delivering “the entire initial warfighting capability” in early 2027.

“We are conducting enhanced integration checks and testing on the ground between now and the start of launch which helps build a higher degree of operational confidence,” the SDA official said. “It should also smooth out the test and checkout process on orbit to allow us to get to initial warfighting capabilities in 2027, as the warfighter is expecting.”

The official said subsequent launch campaigns for tranches 2 and 3 are still on track, noting that SDA began the acquisition process for tranche 3 earlier to allow for more time between award and launch. Because the supply chain issues impeding tranche 1 are related to scaling up production, the agency believes it will experience fewer delays once the industrial base catches up to SDA’s demand, they added.

“SDA’s top priority is to quickly deliver capabilities promised to the warfighter. Launch is a major milestone but one in a much larger path to delivering viable capabilities. Our goal remains to rapidly deliver functional capabilities with a high degree of operational confidence,” the agency said in a statement.

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“We do not have the industrial capacity built today to get after this,” Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said Dec. 7 during a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “We’re going to have to start getting comfortable with the lack of efficiency in the industrial base to start getting excess capacity so that we have something to go to in times of crisis and conflict.”

Resilience through proliferation

Historically, the Defense Department tended to develop a few very large and exquisite satellites to conduct critical military missions. But with the growing use of space as a warfighting domain by both the United States and its adversaries, the Pentagon is now focusing on different ways to build resilience in its space systems — such as by launching hundreds of smaller, inexpensive satellites for a single constellation.

At the forefront of the relatively novel approach is the Space Development Agency’s spiral acquisition strategy that is being used for the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA). Once it’s built out, the constellation is expected to comprise hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and include space vehicles carrying different communications, data relay, missile warning and missile tracking capabilities.

SDA plans to field systems in batches every two years, with each iteration carrying the latest technology available. Although the first operational satellites known as Tranche 1 were slated to launch in fall 2024, that deadline has since been delayed to March or April 2025 due to supply chain bottlenecks, according to SDA Director Derek Tournear.

“I will say that what we’re seeing in the supply chain in the small LEO market has caught up to what SDA’s needs are, but it took them about eight months longer than they anticipated to ramp up,” Tournear said during a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum. 

A total of 158 satellites are being developed for Tranche 1 of the PWSA: 126 data transport sats, 28 missile warning/missile tracking sats and four missile defense demonstration sats. The agency will also launch 12 tactical demonstration satellites under the Tranche 1 Demonstration and Experimentation System (T1DES) initiative to test new capabilities that can be leveraged in future PWSA tranches.

Across that order, four prime contractors are on the program — York Space Systems, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and L3Harris — and each of them is working with dozens of subcontractors.

Executives from various Tranche 1 primes who spoke to DefenseScoop acknowledged that they encountered supply chain bottlenecks in their work for the contract. Issues have now mostly been resolved and the vendors are on track to launch by the new deadline, they said.

However, companies are still using those lessons learned to mitigate setbacks for future tranches that go beyond just purchasing long-lead items.

“We’re seeing the results of that demand signal that SDA has been sending us on a very consistent basis through their spiral tranche acquisition. Is it perfect yet? No. We’ve got some places to go,” Rob Mitrevski, vice president and general manager of spectral solutions at L3Harris, said in an interview.

Tranche 1 isn’t the first time SDA has experienced delays. The agency was forced to push back the launch of Tranche 0 — a group of 27 satellites that served as a proof of concept for the entire PWSA — by about six months.

The holdup was attributed to supply chain bottlenecks that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic when many manufacturers were forced to slow or stop production lines. Specific microelectronic components such as resistors were particularly difficult to buy, Mitrevski noted.

The recent issues aren’t caused by COVID-19 conditions, but are instead reflective of the sheer volume of systems SDA is asking of its contractors and an industrial base that wasn’t quite ready to meet the increased demand.

“I think a lot of that has been just scaling — getting past designing tens of things to designing lots of things,” Louis Christen, senior director of proliferated systems at Northrop Grumman, said during a tour of the company’s Space Park facility in Redondo Beach, California, where it’s manufacturing Tranche 1 birds.

To alleviate potential risk, Northrop Grumman has been moving through production as much as possible and building multiple satellites in parallel, Christen said. Working very closely with its multiple subcontractors throughout the process has been another critical strategy.

“Although they’re commercial suppliers, we’re not just buying stuff from them. We’re a partner. We’re there on a daily basis and helping prop them up,” he said.

Dirk Wallinger, CEO and president of York Space Systems, said challenges the company had weren’t specific to its Tranche 1 contracts, but actually reflect a lack of diversity in the supply chain that is affecting the entire space industry. 

“One of the key bottlenecks results from [requests for proposals] with subsystem performance specifications that inadvertently narrow the qualified vendor pool to a single supplier,” Wallinger told DefenseScoop. “This limits the value tradeoffs of all of the prime contractors and by creating dependency on sole-source suppliers, exacerbates delays.”

Addressing the problem would require rethinking high-level performance requirements in a manner that would diversify the supplier base and enable more competition in industry, he added.

L3Harris is also trying to move away from single or sole-source suppliers by building strong relationships with the swath of subcontractors it has worked with on all three of its contracts for the PWSA, Mitrevski said.

“The supply chain works to create scale over time, and the scale is created through a diverse group of suppliers,” he said. “What you’ve seen in the way we’ve evolved from [Tranche 0] through now [Tranche 1] and [Tranche 2] is a continual improvement of the scale and diversity in that supply chain.”

Wallinger noted that they’ve found the most effective way to mitigate supply chain risks has been to buy satellite buses from providers ahead of receiving mission specifications. In the future, it’s crucial that the government secures these long-lead items as early as possible to effectively eliminate delays, he added.

“Schedule risk is mostly induced from bus component suppliers, not mission payload developers,” Wallinger said. “Commoditized satellite buses are the only ones being considered, and by definition can support a range of mission sets. They are the critical component to procure in advance.”

Mitigating future delays

While SDA has tried to ensure its system requirements can leverage readily available hardware, Tournear said there are some components that must be tailor-made for the Tranche 1 satellites. Mesh network encryption devices that are approved by the National Security Agency have been a significant headache because there’s only one manufacturer able to make them, he said.

The agency has adjusted its timeline expectations for future PWSA tranches to allow more time for vendors to build their platforms, adding several months to overall production time.

Mitrevski also noted that SDA’s overall strategy to fund development of capabilities that can be tested early on is beneficial. 

“They have a number of efforts where they’ve clearly acquired leading-edge capabilities with the intention of driving the maturity level of those leading-edge capabilities forward and then make use of them later on,” he said. 

York Space Systems has also discussed with SDA ways to mitigate risks outside of supply chain diversification, Wallinger said. One area of improvement could be ensuring long-lead items are aligned with current and future mission requirements, he noted.

“We have had several instances where the second- and third-tier suppliers had stock on hand, but that stock didn’t have the right interface protocols or didn’t have the right form factor, and couldn’t be used to meet the actual mission needs,” he said. “So you had those suppliers spending capital on things that simply had to be completely redone at a cost to the [U.S. government] and us.”

But with plans to only grow the number of military satellites on orbit — not just for the PWSA, but also other programs across the Defense Department — SDA’s work is likely going to create a ripple effect of both growth and demand within the industrial base. The supply chain woes are serving as a “canary in the coal mine” for the national security space community writ large, and will require the entire department’s effort to fix them, Guetlein said.

“Because of the quantities that he’s ordering, he’s now starting to uncover the challenges that we have with the industrial base,” Guetlein said, referring to Tournear. “And these challenges are significant, and we need to figure out how to get after them.”

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The bus will be launched into low-Earth orbit (LEO) onboard a Firefly Aerospace Alpha rocket in the first half of 2025, Jeff Schrader, Lockheed Martin Space’s vice president of strategy and business development, told reporters Wednesday. Although it will carry a communications payload, the intent for the self-funded mission is “to show that we’ve built a system, the [technology readiness level] has been burned down, how long we can actually plan to be able to build those in the future to offer to our customers,” Scharder said.

For decades, the Pentagon has used a small number of large, exquisite satellite buses for its space missions that have become increasingly more costly and time-consuming to build. As demand for space-based warfighting capabilities continues to grow, the department has shifted its strategy and is now focused on buying smaller, less expensive satellites in larger numbers — such as those acquired for the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA).

Schrader said Lockheed Martin developed the LM 400 over the last three years to serve as a “middle ground” between the two options, allowing customers to carry additional power and payloads than smaller satellites while still keeping price tags low.

“For our tracking layer bids, we’ve had to use certain class buses for smaller [electro-optical/infrared] sensors,” Schrader explained. “This allows us to actually maybe grow that a little bit to get more coverage for EO/IR type of missions for missile warning [and] missile tracking.”

The satellite bus is also customizable to support different missions — including remote sensing, communications, imagery and radar — as well as orbits and launch configurations, according to the company.

As a common bus, the LM 400 is “going to have a significant amount of componentry that is exactly alike, no matter who the customer is,” Schrader said. “That allows us to go out to our supply chain, be able to cut long-term agreements with them and be able to put something in a shorter amount of build time, as well as get after a more proliferated approach.”

Development of the LM 400 was driven by Ignite, Lockheed Martin’s self-funded innovation unit that conducts experiments both on- and off-orbit as a way to accelerate space technology for potential government customers. The company’s Pony Express 2 tactical satcom and TacSat space-based 5G missions were also conducted under Ignite.

But LM 400’s demonstration is also being done in partnership with Lockheed Martin’s business needs as the company looks to better position itself to use the bus in future bids on government programs. That includes the Space Force’s medium-Earth orbit (MEO) missile warning and tracking constellation, as well as other classified programs for the Defense Department, the intelligence community and international partners, Schrader said.

“This will be ready as soon as we can get contracts for fielding,” he said.

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The capability is part of the Joint Cyber Command and Control (JCC2) program, which is aimed at providing improved situational awareness, battle management, and information about cyber forces’ readiness levels for operations across the globe. According to budget documents, the program provides a “congressionally directed focal point to provide integrated C2 solutions to all echelons for execution of cyberspace operations to enable and accelerate planning/collaboration between Cyber Mission Forces (CMF) and Combatant Commands,” as well as integrating with joint, coalition and interagency command-and-control to enhance multi-domain operations, reduce planning time, improve decision quality and speed — resulting in shorter kill chains.

It is a component of the Joint Cyber Warfighting Architecture (JCWA), first envisioned in 2019 as a way of getting a better handle on the capabilities, platforms and programs the command is designing. It sought to set priorities for the Department of Defense and its industry partners that are building them. It’s thought of as the command’s warfighting platform and consists of a variety of components built by each of the services on behalf of the joint cyber mission force for big data analytics and ingestion, command and control, tools and platforms to launch operations off friendly networks, among others.

JCC2 is being run by the Air Force on behalf of the joint force and Cybercom.

For an effort dubbed JCC2 NextGen, the command has opened a new contract effort that encompasses four areas: threat awareness sharing, IT operations support, battle management development, and field operations and training support.

According to Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for the readiness effort, the company developed a system to manage cyber force readiness in support of full-spectrum cyber operations that provides commanders with visual dashboards and metrics that display in near-real time the capability and capacity of personnel, teams, equipment and infrastructure to conduct cyber ops.

That readiness application transitioned to the DOD application program management office in 2019 and is mandated for operational use per a task order in June 2023, the company said in responses to DefenseScoop.  

Sources indicated this capability, as envisioned, will be an important tool allowing an unprecedented level of information and fidelity into the status of teams and individual cyber warriors.

Important for the development of the JCC2 capability was not just the ability to command forces across the globe and have insight into their locations and missions, but also the need to track things like mission alignment, how the forces are being used, who is training, who is on mission and what the various skill sets of personnel are.

For example, this level of fidelity to track forces will give commanders the ability to find the right personnel needed for a given mission, something that was not possible previous, as much of that work was done manually on paper. As a hypothetical example, if a commander has a mission and requires a set number of experts for Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) against a particular target, they can find members that are certified for mission with ICS-SCADA expertise and analysts or linguists that pertain to the target, and assign them to that mission.

Without this data and ability to track forces, the commander has no way to make a strategic assessment of them and their availability, which is critical given recent congressional ire concerning readiness of the cyber mission force.

“When it comes to risk assessment, decision-makers need to see the whole picture,” Tish Rourke, vice president of the cyber and intelligence market segment within the Lockheed Martin Rotary and Missions Systems business area, said in a statement.

There were talks as far back as 2018 about tweaking the initial structure of the cyber mission force teams, which hadn’t been reevaluated since it was designed around 2012, in conjunction with all the teams reaching what’s known as full operational capability. Officials always said the answer was to task organize, something modeled after the Cyber National Mission Force, a sub-unified command under Cybercom made up of 39 joint teams and thought to have the DOD’s most talented cyber operators aligned in task forces organized against specific threat actors, with the core mission of defending the nation against digital threats.

In fact, Paul Nakasone, the most recent commander of Cybercom who was also a former CNMF commander, had often talked about his penchant for task forces. The current commander, Gen. Timothy Haugh, was also a former CNMF commander.

Some believe this task force structure will endure and become more widespread across other subordinate commands.

This ability for greater fidelity of readiness and team structure aims to make teams more effective given it provides commanders increased flexibility and responsiveness to the threat or requirements for a mission at any given time, according to sources.

“Delivering data in real time to Commanders enables them for the first time to be able to see themselves, count themselves, and know if the force is a more capable force,” Lockheed said. “One of the core objectives of readiness data is to inform and ensure proper and expedient mission planning in Commander’s [area of responsibility]. Mission effectiveness is significantly improved by ensuring you have the best athletes for the given mission parameters.”

Customizable dashboards are now available to commanders through the system and provide commanders and staff on a daily basis access to information needed for course-of-action development and decision-making, Lockheed said. The readiness application dashboards are utilized on a monthly and quarterly basis by service cyber component commanders to brief the Cybercom commander and deputy commander, Lockheed said.

Moreover, the company noted that commanders and their staff require data and information for joint operations decision-making. The development team demonstrated its ability to integrate with other applications within the DOD application program office, JCWA and other Defense Department components to make the readiness pictures available to commanders even more powerful.

“The Development Team and DOD application PMO have made it a priority to interconnect the Readiness application with other JCWA pillar programs to correlate various stoved piped datasets to create a common operational readiness picture. The application also has capabilities to share its comprehensive datasets to other systems,” Lockheed stated.

One such system is the Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE), an online client that allows access to Cybercom’s cyber mission force from anywhere in the world for individual or collective training and mission rehearsal. While all elements of JCWA must integrate given the concept envisions it as singular platform made up of the sum of its parts, much attention has been paid to the integration with PCTE to be able to track training, which relates to overall readiness.

This integration is “extremely critical,” Mike Hudson, the deputy for the command’s exercise and training directorate, or J7, said during the annual PCTE forum in May.

“From just where I sit in the front office of the J7, being able to track how we’re training, how effectively we’re training and how that reflects in how we conduct operations is a critical component of being able to assess the readiness of our force,” he said. “If we can’t find a way to link these things, we might be off the right path on how we’re training our highly skilled operators. If we have the ability to connect, track training, track operations, track how these folks are doing in the system, it actually gives us a better reflection of whether we need to adjust individual training, whether we need to adjust collective training or whether we need to adjust some other technology, maybe how we’re doing mission rehearsal. All of those things are related.”

A spokesperson for the PCTE program office stated that while JCWA-wide integration is a priority, the focus as of late is JCC2 integration. Functionality was recently introduced that pushes user training data over to the JCC2 readiness application for more accurate readiness reporting.

Cybercom requested $96.9 million dollars for the totality of the JCC2 program for fiscal 2025, according to budget documents.

The documents note that the program office has established a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline to facilitate the rapid development, integration and fielding of capabilities in order to remain responsive to evolving requirements, and that it will execute the agile development requirements provided by Cybercom, the services and stakeholders.

Lockheed noted that given the system is rooted in DevSecOps and CI/CD principles, it is “highly efficient” in delivering new software releases at the speed of need. New features and capabilities are delivered to the operational community weekly, the company said, noting that the development team engages daily with users for input and feedback.

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Valiant Shield, which occurred in mid-June, is a biennial exercise focused on integration between the services in a multi-domain environment in the Pacific region. This year’s exercise, the tenth such event, involved multinational partners for the first time. It allowed American forces and foreign militaries — including participation from U.S. Space Command and U.S. Transportation Command — to focus on real-world events while testing concepts such as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all the services and key international partners could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster.

“Valiant Shield gave us a great opportunity for us to work as a joint force to conduct command and control of joint forces and joint capabilities from multiple axes, across multiple domains and integrating in allies and partners down to the tactical level,” Rear Adm. Joaquin J. Martinez de Pinillos, vice commander of 7th Fleet, said in an interview. “We really had a great opportunity to really work things both at the operational level and all the way down to the tactical level and work through both the communications, command and control, how do we share information, how do we all see the same battlespace? All those things across the joint force, which are not easy to do, we were able to exercise with great success during Valiant Shield.”

Martinez de Pinillos was not able to offer many specifics on the exercise, such as what was tested or the scenarios due to classification and sensitivities, but did note that broadly, they sought for higher headquarters — specifically the joint task force commander — to pass instructions, coordinate and synchronize joint effects from their level down to tactical units across all domains.

The key challenge they sought to address was getting all units across the joint force to be able to have the same battlefield picture and synchronize effects in space and time faster than the adversary. In fact, they conducted a series of tactical engagements in simulated environments and a live fire to demonstrate that they were able to clearly understand what the joint task force commander had in mind and then show him on the field what it would look like and how they can bring all those capabilities together.

“The things I think that we have to do is if you take a look at Ukraine and you see some of the things that the Houthis [are doing in the Middle East] and all of that, I think what you’re seeing is a speed of warfare that is incredibly fast. I think the thing that we’re going to continue to work on is just our ability to just rapidly plan faster than the enemy can, faster than they can react to us, so that we’re always causing dilemmas for the enemy as we go forward,” he explained. “I think that speed that we’re going to get with these systems, because it gives us an ability to communicate so effectively across the joint force, we’re going to continue to work on that.”

Command and control

At the heart of being able to act faster than the adversary is the ability to conduct command and control: being able to sense the environment and deliver the necessary effects against a target in the right domain by the right system operated by the right military service or international partner.

This is challenging currently as each service operates its own siloed systems that don’t necessarily plug into or talk to other systems from other services — or in some cases, its own service — much less international partners.

In a future fight, a four-star combatant commander in charge of conducting warfare and coordinating effects over an entire region must be able to pick the right capabilities based on the target set. In order to do that effectively and at the speed of conflict, they must have the ability to see each service’s capabilities and coordinate them efficiently, which is at the heart of CJADC2.

“What we were working on the JFN and the CJADC2 is, we want to make sure that everybody has that same operational picture of the battlefield,” Martinez de Pinillos said, describing the Joint Fires Network, a prototyping effort serving as a battle management platform and displaying real-time, fused, actionable threat information to joint and partner forces.

Valiant Shield was the first test of the initial prototype, which will allow geographically dispersed commanders to simultaneously plan and execute with a shared common understanding of the battlespace based on sensors from any platform to provide targeting guidance to any weapon systems, according to Lockheed Martin.

“Everybody understands, when I say the words ‘track 1,2,3,’ that that is track 1,2,3 and that is the exact same thing that everybody understands the track 1,2,3,” he added. “Sounds like a very simple thing, but it is actually a very complicated thing to actually do in execution. That’s an example of something we were able to do.”

To help test these concepts for command and control and interoperability, several defense contractors participated in Valiant Shield bringing their capabilities to play in the exercise.

“For us, the Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the JADC2 objective is fundamentally to integrate stovepiped legacy systems into a digital environment that provides a mission engine that allows for a comprehensive understanding of command and control across any domain, any service, any network,” Tom Keane, senior vice president of engineering at Anduril, said in an interview.

He said they provided capabilities for the joint force to detect, locate, track and engage across domains in response to a variety of different missions geographically deployed across the Indo-Pacom region. They provided software and hardware to help warfighters ingest data at scale, do correlation of data, provide a common operating picture and then do machine-to-machine tasking.

Anduril brought its Lattice capability to the exercise, it’s software fabric that serves as a command-and-control platform ingesting data that can then automate C2 functions resulting in a scalable battle network. The company also brought its Menace family of systems, a command and control as well as compute and communications capability.

Keane noted that Menace provided communications to support denied, degraded, intermittent and limited connectivity (DDIL), which U.S. forces will face increasingly against sophisticated adversaries that will seek to deny friendly forces.

“As you think about any large operating area, especially Indo-Pacom, supporting understanding and being able to operate in denied and degraded connectivity scenarios, is incredibly valuable,” he said.

Software company Palantir also contributed to the exercise. And while it was limited in what it could say, the company noted it provided capabilities to track and engage with targets.

“Palantir software was deployed in part to help deliver the end-to-end joint force capability of detecting, locating, tracking, and engaging units across domains and mission areas. More specifically, Palantir’s software served as the digital foundation for a common data picture that enabled users from all echelons to communicate on the same basis,” Shannon Clark, head of defense growth at Palantir Technologies, said in a statement to DefenseScoop.

“The Indo-Pacific is a uniquely complex operational environment where the software systems that give America its deterrent and defensive edge must be deployed in extreme conditions. These denied, disrupted, and limited environments are precisely the conditions that industry providers build for, and it is why we actively participate in exercises like Valiant Shield — both to ensure the defense community is proficient in the advanced technologies at their disposal, and to ensure that our software solutions are tailored to meet real-world mission needs,” Clark added.

Coordinating and shifting fires

Once targets are identified, command-and-control capabilities must assist in coordinating what service or platform will actually fire upon the target, another key pillar of CJADC2.

During the exercise, planners experimented shifting fires to different commanders and services, Martinez de Pinillos said.

“Sometimes the fires would be led by the Army, and sometimes it’d be led by the Navy, and sometimes they would be led by the Marine Corps, and sometimes they’d be led by the Air Force,” he said. “We demonstrated resiliency and flexibility in our ability to shift command and control around as the problem evolved and as the conditions in the environment and the battlefield drove us that way.”

This was also demonstrated across multiple domains, synchronizing fires from subsurface, surface, into the air and space, he added.

“That allows us to do some very, very complex operations, which is something that we practice at very hard because we know as a joint force, that is the only way that we’re going to engage in combat,” he said. “Having everybody inside that JFN single network on their own systems that they’re used to working with, but then being able to link in to that Joint Fires Network so that we’re all kind of dealing with the same piece of paper, in a virtual sense, and we’re all working off at the same piece — I think was a big piece of that and really helped us coordinate and synchronize as a joint force.”

For its part, Lockheed Martin provided live theater-level operational planning for Valiant Shield, it said in a release.

“The exercise showcased the seamless integration of Lockheed Martin’s advanced command and control functions, employing Operational Planning to coordinate real-time decision-making across the theater of operations, with all the Services and operational domains. This approach enhanced the agility and responsiveness of joint operations, using live real-time data, and producing joint tasking orders in an operationally relevant environment,” the company said.

Martinez de Pinillos explained that Valiant Shield demonstrated the ability of the joint force to understand what each other’s capabilities were.

“I think all that information sharing that was going on and how we were able to rapidly communicate that through tools like JFN, through tools like Maven [Smart System], those things really helped bring and synchronize that together because everybody was working off the same sheet of paper and working together as a team and really able to maximize their contribution, because it was easy to understand what the capabilities and limitations were of whatever piece of the puzzle that they brought to it,” he said. “That allowed us to very rapidly and seamlessly bring those things together so that we were able to commensurate those effects very, very rapidly.”

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