Escape from Tarkov, a popular multiplayer extraction shooter created by Russia’s Battlestate Games, is set for release on Steam, the world’s largest PC gaming platform. The launch comes despite glaring evidence that the studio’s leadership, including head developer Nikita Buyanov, has maintained ties to Russia’s arms industry and associates who joined Moscow-backed forces in eastern Ukraine during Russia’s invasion in 2014.
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Before the full-scale war, Buyanov and his team collaborated repeatedly with Kalashnikov, Russia’s weapons giant, recording promotional videos. He appeared alongside Dmitry “Goblin” Puchkov, a Kremlin-aligned blogger who called for the genocide of all Ukrainians. Other members of Battlestate’s circle openly fundraise for Russian troops and post invasion symbols on their pages.
Battlestate also maintained close ties with the 715 Team, a Kaliningrad-based crew of gun enthusiasts and “tactical trainers” with a massive YouTube following, where Buyanov was a frequent guest. The group built its brand through weapons tests and collaborations with Kalashnikov, but after the full-scale invasion, its leader, Roman “Khors” Chernov, began appearing in occupied Donetsk, declaring support for Russia’s war. At minimum, the crew provided material support in the form of fundraisers for Russian troops, blurring the line between hobbyist content and active participation in the invasion.
Their presence bled into Tarkov itself: players on Reddit—among them Georgian YouTuber Gattsu—noted pro-Kremlin graffiti and 715 references inside the game, along with official merchandise tied to the group. For a time, one playable character type in Tarkov was even labeled “hohol,” a derogatory Russian slur for Ukrainians. The overlap between Battlestate’s in-game world and its real-world circle of collaborators shows how deeply entwined the studio became with figures who went from gaming culture to fighting in Russia’s war.
[Note: here War Thunder is mentioned for filming with Russian bloggers and Russian weapons. This argument seems weak, as War Thunder is about all kinds of weapons and can hardly work without using Russian ones]
Squad 22: ZOV
The most brazen example is Squad 22: ZOV, released on Steam in May 2025 and openly endorsed by Russia’s Defense Ministry. Developed by SPN Studio, the game reframes the invasion of Ukraine as a “liberation” and packages war crimes as playable missions: the first free campaign is the “liberation of Mariupol,” where more than 10,000 civilians were killed, with further missions available for purchase to reenact Russia’s 2014 invasion of Donbas and Crimea. On Steam, the title is advertised as “recommended by the Russian military” for cadet training, and its ZOV branding deliberately echoes the extremist symbols painted on Russian tanks and missiles.
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Behind the project is Alexander Tolkach, a former Russian diplomat with a background in behavioral “influence games” and suspected intelligence ties. His work is backed by RVKO, a Kremlin-linked foundation that supports Russian soldiers, raising fears that in-game purchases could funnel directly into the war effort
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Steam continues to operate in Russia despite sanctions, allowing Russian players to access and pay for games through workarounds. At the same time, Steam has complied with Russian censorship demands—removing titles or restricting access when ordered by state agencies.
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Russia’s war in Ukraine has already forced major publishers to act. Ubisoft, EA, and Rockstar pulled sales from Russia and Belarus. Steam, Epic, and GOG stopped accepting ruble payments. But Russian developers remain adept at evading scrutiny—registering companies in Cyprus, Hungary, or the UK while continuing to sell to Western audiences. Western platforms, eager for content, rarely ask questions.
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Gamers don’t need to be told what to play—but they deserve to know where their money goes.
JS Asuka, a one-of-its-kind dedicated experimental vessel with a 6,200-ton-displacement belonging to the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF), was first spotted with the railgun in a turret installed on its stern flight deck in April, as TWZ reported on at the time. Additional views of the ship in this configuration emerged afterward.
A picture ATLA released yesterday of the turreted railgun installed on JS Asuka‘s flight deck earlier this year. ATLAA picture of JS Asuka from around the time of the railgun testing that ATLA also released yesterday. White shipping containers associated with the weapon mounted on the ship’s stern flight deck are visible. ATLAAn earlier picture offering a clearer view of the railgun turret installed on JS Asuka’s stern flight deck. @HNlEHupY4Nr6hRM
“ATLA conducted the Ship-board Railgun Shooting Test from June to early July this year with the support of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force,” according to a post yesterday on the agency’s official Instagram page. “It’s the first time that a ship-mounted railgun was successfully fired at a real ship.”
One of the pictures accompanying ATLA’s Instagram post, seen at the top of this story, which was also shared on the agency’s other social media accounts, shows the railgun being fired. What looks to be a radar array and an electro-optical and/or infrared camera system are also seen in the image on a separate turret.
A close-up of what looks to be a turret with a radar array and an electro-optical and/or infrared camera system seen in the new picture of the railgun being test fired. ATLA
Another, seen below, shows a tug-like ship in the crosshairs of a targeting system. Additional pictures of the tug have now also emerged clearly showing target boards on the port and starboard sides of its funnel, as well as one facing the stern.
ATLA
So far, ATLA has not released any imagery of target vessels actually being struck by projectiles fired from the railgun mounted on Asuka. The agency says more details will be provided at its upcoming Defense Technology Symposium in November.
Back in 2023, ATLA said it had conducted the first-ever successful firing of a railgun from any ship. The agency did not name the vessel used in those tests.
Repeated drone incursions into Polish airspace show that Russia and Belarus are testing NATO and EU defenses. These incidents are not isolated but part of a wider hybrid warfare strategy that combines military pressure, information operations, and electronic warfare. The challenge for the Alliance is how to respond effectively without escalating into open conflict.
In recent nights, Polish airspace has been violated twice by unmanned aerial vehicles. Small, cheap, and difficult to detect, drones are ideal tools for hybrid warfare. Moscow and Minsk use them not to strike directly but to probe reactions, overload defense systems, and accustom societies to constant pressure. Each new violation risks becoming „the new normal” on NATO’s eastern border.
These incursions are not random. They are often synchronized with Russian missile barrages against Ukraine, creating a double layer of military and psychological impact. By observing how quickly Poland and NATO allies respond, and how coherent the communication between government and armed forces is, Moscow draws conclusions about the Alliance’s readiness. If the reaction is slow or chaotic, the pressure seems to work. If NATO fighters, such as Dutch F-35s currently stationed in Poland, are deployed, the costs of escalation for Russia increase.
The technical challenge is formidable. Small, low-flying drones evade traditional radars and are too cheap to be countered with expensive missiles like Patriot or CAMM-ER. A saturation scenario—dozens of drones attacking simultaneously—could overload command systems and force difficult prioritization between protecting critical infrastructure and intercepting minor threats. This is why layered defense, from Pilica+ and Piorun to Patriot, must be complemented with cheaper effectors such as programmable ammunition for AG-35 cannons and expanded radar coverage in the east.
Anything that crosses over the border should be intercepted, warned via radio and then shot down. The only language Putin understands is force, as he has shown with his opportunistic invasions time and again.
The U.K. Royal Air Force F-35B stealth fighter that was forced to make an emergency diversion to Japan last week is still there, the U.K. Ministry of Defense has told TWZ.
The F-35B in question, from the Royal Navy carrier HMS Prince of Wales, landed at Kagoshima Airport, in Kirishima City, southwest Japan, at around 11:30 a.m. local time on Aug. 10, following an in-flight malfunction. No injuries to the pilot were reported, and although six flights in and out of Kagoshima were said to be delayed, the airport was soon operating normally again. In the meantime, the F-35B was moved from the runway to a taxiway. Its exact location at the airfield is not currently known.
While the U.K. Ministry of Defense offered no further detail to TWZ about the nature of the technical issues affecting the aircraft now in Japan, it did say that it was completely unrelated to the fault encountered earlier in the cruise, which required a different F-35B to divert to an airfield in India, where it was left stranded for over a month.
The U.K. Ministry of Defense also confirmed that the aircraft in Japan has been assessed by Royal Navy and Royal Air Force engineers; it is now awaiting spares, after which it will be repaired. In the past, the global supply chain of F-35 parts has been questioned, although both the U.S. Marine Corps and Japan itself have F-35Bs based locally.
The two F-35B diversions come during what is one of the highest-profile cruises for the type in British service.
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The two F-35B diversions during Highmast are, in themselves, nothing extraordinary. Such incidents are part and parcel of carrier-based aircraft operations. When not executing blue-water operations, a precautionary emergency landing is often the safest option, bearing in mind the many technical, human-factor, and ship-operational issues that make recovering on the carrier a higher risk. This can include low fuel states.
However, given the turbulent history of the F-35 program and persistent questions about the future of the procurement of this aircraft in the United Kingdom, they are subject to additional scrutiny.
The United Kingdom also lost an F-35B in a well-publicized accident during a previous cruise, when an example crashed in the Mediterranean after an aborted takeoff attempt from the carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth in November 2021
And recently the UK has announced that they will be purchasing the A variant, exposing them to much larger logistics chains difficulties. And as TR03 is still not problem free (after several years), they won’t be able to fly it operationally for the foreseeable future either. The US must have some serious boot on the neck of the UK for them to keep using these lemons.
Israel has allegedly been recording and storing millions of phone calls made by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank as part of a large surveillance effort dating back to 2022, according to reporting by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call. The report suggests that the country has been shuttling these recordings to Microsoft Azure cloud servers.
Company CEO Satya Nadella allegedly okayed the effort personally after meeting with a commander from Israel’s military surveillance agency, Unit 8200. He reportedly gave the country a customized and segregated area within the Azure platform to store millions of phone calls made each day without knowledge or consent from Palestinians.
According to sources within Unit 8200, these recordings have assisted in the preparation of deadly airstrikes and helped shape military operations throughout the region. Israel has long been intercepting calls in the occupied territories, as it basically controls the entire Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure.
This new method, however, reportedly captures the conversations of a large pool of regular civilians. The mantra when building out the project was to record “a million calls an hour.” Leaked Microsoft files suggest that the lion’s share of this data is being stored in Azure facilities in the Netherlands and Ireland.
Microsoft has been facing increased scrutiny regarding its role in Israel’s 22-month offensive in Gaza. CEO Nadella was interrupted by an employee at a keynote speech in May, with the worker pleading for the executive to “show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure.”
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Microsoft isn’t the only company that has been accused of assisting Israel in what many are calling a genocide in Gaza. A report recently found that Google employees have repeatedly worked with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israel’s Defense Ministry (IDM) to expand the government’s access to AI tools.
The F-35 stealth fighter is not meeting its potential in British service because of availability issues, a shortage of support personnel, and delays in integrating key weapons that are limiting the aircraft’s effectiveness.
The various problems are highlighted in a reality check from the UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) that offers a contrast to the typically measured tone of official government communications when it comes to the state of the country’s armed forces.
Its report calls on the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to address these problems in the F-35 fleet: firstly to increase the effectiveness of the aircraft but also to demonstrate the program is delivering value for the huge cost it represents to the taxpaying public.
Britain currently has 37 of the F-35B variant of the aircraft, which is designed for short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) operations like the Harrier it effectively replaces in Royal Air Force (RAF) and Royal Navy service.
The NAO, a public sector spending watchdog, starts by noting that the F-35 offers capabilities “significantly superior to any previous UK aircraft,” not just because of its low radar observability, but due to its advanced sensor suite including an electro-optical targeting system and long-range infrared target sensors, which are combined to provide the pilot with an integrated picture of the space surrounding them.
However, the report finds the MoD has not been able to deliver on its own targets for aircraft availability – the proportion of time each aircraft is ready to fly – despite these targets being lower than those for the global program.
It claims that last year, the UK F-35 fleet had a mission-capable rate (the ability of an aircraft to perform at least one of its seven defined missions) about half of the MoD’s target. The full mission capable rate (the ability of an F-35 to perform all required missions) was only about one third of the MoD’s target and significantly lower than for F-35B aircraft operated by other nations.
Some reasons behind this poor performance are cited as a shortage of engineers able to work on the F-35 in Britain’s forces, plus a global shortage of F-35 spare parts.
In fact, the UK Lightning Force faces “major personnel shortages across a range of roles,” which the NAO says are not likely to be resolved for several years, although it notes the MoD is recruiting to fill some of these gaps.
According to the report, the MoD has previously underestimated the number of engineers and other staff required to support F-35 aircraft during operations.
This was highlighted during Operation Fortis, the UK-led carrier strike group deployment to the Pacific in 2021, when an aircraft was lost after a protective engine blank was erroneously left in one of the air intake ducts. This led to the aircraft not being able to generate enough thrust for take-off and ditching in the sea immediately after leaving the flight deck of HMS Queen Elizabeth.
As reported by Navy Lookout, the US Marines F-35 squadron that was onboard the carrier at the same time had 25 personnel for each jet, while the British squadron had only 14.
Just as worrying are the ongoing delays in getting key weapons integrated with the F-35 so that they can be used in operations. The report states that the original support date for the Spear 3 air-to-surface cruise missile and the Meteor medium range air-to-air missile was December last year, but the F-35 is not expected to get these until the early 2030s.
These delays have been caused by “poor supplier performance,” the NAO says, referring to the US defense firm responsible for the F-35, Lockheed Martin. However, it also criticizes Britain’s MoD for “negotiating commercial arrangements that failed to prioritize delivery” and the low priority given to Meteor by the global program.
This means that UK F-35s are currently only capable of operating with the Paveway IV laser-guided bomb and US-made missiles such as the AIM-120D.
Part of the problem is that support for many of the key weapons British forces wish to use was planned for the Block 4 upgrades to the aircraft’s systems software, and these have been massively delayed. Much of the blame for this lies with Lockheed Martin and the Joint Program Office (JPO), the agency within the US Department of Defense (DoD) responsible for overseeing the F-35 program.
It was originally expected that this would be fully delivered by 2022, but the NAO says that in 2023 the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that it would not be delivered until 2029, and now the JPO doesn’t expect Block 4 to be completely delivered before 2033.
There has been a certain suspicion that the US doesn’t see supporting European-made weapons as a priority, especially when F-35 operators are then forced to buy American kit instead.
Small wonder, perhaps, that Britain is pushing ahead with a program for its planned next-generation fighter – currently codenamed Tempest – that does not involve any US defense companies but partners with Japan and Italy instead.
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The UK government has, however, recently disclosed that it intends to procure a new tranche of F-35 aircraft which will comprise a dozen of the F-35A version, which operates from an airfield, along with another 15 F-35B, although delivery of these is not expected until the end of the decade.
Adding another variant of the F-35 is unlikely to help with the engineer shortage, since there are significant differences between the two versions.
Meanwhile, the MoD is also behind in delivering the Aircraft Signature Assessment Facility, which is needed to check that the F-35’s much-vaunted stealth technology is doing its job and has not been degraded by the harsh conditions of operating at sea.
After years of speculation, the United Kingdom has finally announced it will buy conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) F-35A stealth fighters to operate alongside the short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) F-35B models it already uses. The F-35A offers a number of advantages over the F-35B, but the U.K. Ministry of Defense specifically highlights its ability to join the NATO nuclear mission, which would see the jets armed with U.S.-owned B61-12 nuclear gravity bombs. However, the British will initially only buy a dozen F-35As, and the Royal Air Force notes that these will be assigned to a training unit and will primarily be used in that role.
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Earlier this month, a Strategic Defense Review, published by the U.K. Ministry of Defense, had suggested that the future Lightning Force could comprise a mix of F-35As and F-35Bs. The F-35A, of course, is unable to operate from aircraft carriers, but such a mix could be adopted “according to military requirements to provide greater value for money.”
Now, nuclear strike is one of those official “military requirements.”
Currently, the United Kingdom relies exclusively on a submarine-based nuclear deterrent, based around Trident II D5 missiles.
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The new F-35As will be based at RAF Marham, in eastern England, a base that was previously used for the nuclear strike role by Tornados armed with WE.177.
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“Day-to-day, the F-35As will be used in a training role on 207 Squadron, the Operational Conversion Unit (OCU),” the Royal Air Force says. “As the F-35A carries more fuel than the F-35B variant, it can stay airborne for longer, extending the available training time in each sortie for student pilots. As F-35As also require fewer maintenance hours, there will be increased aircraft availability on the OCU. These factors combined will improve pilot training and reduce the amount of time for pilots to reach the frontline squadrons.”
Of course, a pilot can’t use the F-35A to train for STOVL missions, but the tradeoff should be more F-35Bs available to deploy aboard the two Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers.
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In the meantime, the United Kingdom faces a growing problem of supporting U.S.-origin military aircraft — E-7 Wedgetail, P-8 Poseidon, RC-135W Rivet Joint, and now the F-35A — with a fleet of Voyager tankers that don’t have refueling booms.
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As it stands, a fleet of just 12 jets adds another type with some different maintenance and infrastructure requirements, and a relatively low availability rate, at least historically. At the same time, the training that it offers is not 1:1 for the STOVL F-35B, and it is questionable whether it will save money in the long run.
A great choice (not) considering the US can kill F-35 operations pretty quickly by stopping supply lines, which they may do if they decide they don’t like the UK doing certain things (eg helping the Ukraine vs Russia). And then there is the fact that the TR3 built F-35s (all of them built in the last 1.5 years) can only be used in a training role due to deeply rooted problems – so not operationally (which is probably why these things will only be used in the training role). With the US being a fickle ally and the need for Europe to re-arm this smacks of US blackmailing in order to get the UK to buy a shitty and hugely expensive weapons system, that will come at a cost to the EU / UK defence industry and sovereign abilities.
The U.S. military recently announced that four executives from some of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley have joined the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers. The move is part of a push to speed up the adoption of technology in the military, but as the news outlet Task & Purpose points out, it’s pretty unusual.
The Army said in a press release that the four executives are Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, CTO at Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.
The four men are being commissioned at the high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a program called Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. As Task & Purpose notes, the men will get to skip the usual process of taking a Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, and they won’t need to complete the Army Fitness Test.
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The new reservists will serve for about 120 hours a year, according to the Wall Street Journal, and will have a lot of flexibility to work remotely. They’ll work on helping the Army acquire more commercial tech, though it’s not clear how conflict-of-interest issues will be enforced, given the fact that the people all work for companies that would conceivably be selling their wares to the military. In theory, they won’t be sharing information with their companies or “participating in projects that could provide them or their companies with financial gain,” according to the Journal.
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Some people may think that’s a good thing, and at the very least, it might be a wise business decision for some firm like Palantir to hope for war. But OpenAI and Meta have a lot of products that depend on buy-in from the general public. And we’ve seen guys like Elon Musk take huge hits to their bottom lines after attaching themselves to Trumpism. And with Trump at the helm, any association with the Army is bound to be perilous in a time of war. We all saw the viral videos of Trump’s parade, right?
This is a hugely disrespectful move to all the career officers who have had to work hard to get promoted to colonel – this is not a small rank, but a hugely powerful one.
Not only that, it smacks of the fascism of the Nazi reich where civilians were put into uniform to look more impressive. It also ensured that people with no military competence were put in charge of the decisions which turned out to be poor and ended up being catastrophic for the military campaigns being run.
And how about conflict of interest? I know that in the Trump administration, buying from your buddies, pork barrel rolling and cronyism is the norm, but in the military, wouldn’t you at least want some competent products being used?
KOGE MARINA, Denmark (AP) — From a distance they look almost like ordinary sailboats, their sails emblazoned with the red-and-white flag of Denmark.
But these 10-meter (30-foot) -long vessels carry no crew and are designed for surveillance.
Four uncrewed robotic sailboats, known as “Voyagers,” have been put into service by Denmark’s armed forces for a three-month operational trial.
Built by Alameda, California-based company Saildrone, the vessels will patrol Danish and NATO waters in the Baltic and North Seas, where maritime tensions and suspected sabotage have escalated sharply since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
Two of the Voyagers launched Monday from Koge Marina, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the Danish capital, Copenhagen. Powered by wind and solar energy, these sea drones can operate autonomously for months at sea. Saildrone says the vessels carry advanced sensor suites — radar, infrared and optical cameras, sonar and acoustic monitoring.
Their launch comes after two others already joined a NATO patrol on June 6.
Saildrone founder and CEO Richard Jenkins compared the vessels to a “truck” that carries sensors and uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to give a “full picture of what’s above and below the surface” to about 20 to 30 miles (30 to 50 kilometers) in the open ocean.
Saildrone, he said, is “going to places … where we previously didn’t have eyes and ears.”
The Danish Defense Ministry says the trial is aimed at boosting surveillance capacity in under-monitored waters, especially around critical undersea infrastructure such as fiber-optic cables and power lines.
The Golden Dome missile defense system will cost about $175 billion and be operational “in less than three years” with “a success rate close to 100%,” President Donald Trump declared Tuesday afternoon as he shared new details about his ambitious, very expensive, and controversial missile defense shield for the U.S. homeland. It follows one of the president’s first official acts of his second term, ordering the U.S. military to move forward with plans for a massively enlarged architecture for defeating high-end missile threats.
“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they are launched from space, and we will have the best system ever built,” Trump stated. His price tag stands in stark contrast to projections of more than half a trillion dollars and raises concerns about the weaponization of space and nuclear proliferation, which you can read more about later in this piece.
The system will be designed to “protect the homeland” from “cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, drones, whether they’re conventional or nuclear,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained during the White House briefing.
The first tranche of funding, $25 billion, will be contained in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a wide-ranging bill to enact his taxation and immigration priorities, Trump noted.
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There were scant details during the briefing about how Golden Dome will actually work.
“We’re the only ones that have this – we call it super technology,” Trump posited. “Golden Dome will integrate with our existing defense capabilities and should be fully operational before the end of my term.”
In our earlier reporting about Golden Dome, we pointed out that this effort will take place in orbital space, at least in part, with the goal of shooting down incoming threats before they reach the homeland, and preferably while still in the boost phase not far from their launch point.
“It’s not just that we want space-based interceptors, we want them in [the] boost phase,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said in March during an interview broadcast online as part of Defense One‘s State of Defense 2025: Air Force and Space Force virtual conference.
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Golden Dome is not the U.S. military’s first effort to develop and field space-based anti-missile capabilities. However, multiple previous attempts have been abandoned due to technical complexities and high costs. Space-based weapons were a particularly key element of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), infamously dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics, and which never came close to achieving its ambitious goals.
An artist’s conception of a space-based particle beam missile defense system from the Star Wars era., Los Alamos National Laboratory via Aerospace Projects Review
Saltzman in March acknowledged those challenges, but also made clear that he felt they were surmountable.
“I think there’s a lot of technical challenges,” he said. “I am so impressed by the innovative spirit of the American space industry. I’m pretty convinced that we will be able to technically solve those challenges.”
Saltzman recently suggested that Golden Dome could cost in excess of half a trillion dollars.
“I’m 34 years in this business; I’ve never seen an early estimate that was too high,” Saltzman replied. “My gut tells me there’s going to be some additional funding that’s necessary.”
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The price to develop, procure, and field Golden Dome will be just one part of the larger financial picture. Once deployed, the system will need to be maintained, staffed, and constantly evolved as technology moves forward along with the threats it is meant to confront. This is coming at a time when there are competing priorities that the U.S. military does not have the money to pay for, even though they are considered critical, without sacrificing other important programs. Nuclear modernization is among the largest costs the services are struggling to pay for today. So even with an injection of cash to jump-start Golden Dome — which should come in the form of a whopping $25 billion in the 2026 Fiscal Year — and pay for other competing programs, sustaining that funding over many years after a transient ‘sugar high’ is questionable, especially in an era of soaring deficits.
UK-made, invisible radio wave weapon knocks out drone swarms for the first time.
Weapon has potential to help protect against drone threats as nature of warfare changes.
The project supports more than 135 highly skilled jobs across the UK.
The trial was completed at a weapons range in West Wales and was the largest counter-drone swarm exercise the British Army have conducted to date.
The weapon system demonstrator is a type of Radiofrequency Directed Energy Weapon (RF DEW) and has proven capable of neutralising multiple targets simultaneously with near-instant effect.
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At an estimated cost of 10p per shot fired, if developed into operational service it could provide a cost-effective complement to traditional missile-based air defence systems.
RF DEW systems can defeat airborne targets at ranges of up to 1km and are effective against threats which cannot be jammed using electronic warfare.
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Successful experiments included the Army taking down two swarms of drones in a single engagement, and the project saw more than 100 drones being tracked, engaged and defeated using the weapon across all trials.
Turkey has begun using tablet computers in the cockpits of its F-16 fighters to help with the rapid integration of new locally-developed weapons. This has interesting parallels with Ukraine’s use of such devices to allow its Soviet-era jets to employ Western air-to-ground weapons — something you can read more about here.
The tablet can be seen in the cockpit of an F-16 in a recent video showing a test launch of the domestically developed SOM-J standoff missile. The tablet is mounted on the Input Control Panel (ICP), which is located on the center console beneath the head-up display. The ICP is used to select weapons, navigation settings, and radio communications, among other functions. At the same time, the pilot has another tablet on their knee, something that has become increasingly common, augmenting the information available via the aircraft’s mission systems and helping eliminate cumbersome paper books in the cockpit.
In this context, the tablet is part of the UBAS, also known in English as the Aircraft Independent Firing System. Using Turkish-designed software, the UBAS provides a weapons interface for the use of Turkish-made stores, like the SOM-J.
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Tablet-based workarounds to integrate new weapons on existing aircraft platforms are now something of a growth area.
In the case of Ukraine, which we have explored in depth in the past, its Soviet-era fighters lack the kinds of data bus interfaces that would ensure seamless compatibility with Western-made weapons.
Cockpit of a Ukrainian Su-27 Flanker fitted with a tablet device. via X
Last year, U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Dr. William LaPlante explained:
“There’s also a series of … we call it ‘air-to-ground,’ it’s what we call it euphemistically … think about the aircraft that the Ukrainians have, and not even the F-16, but they have a lot of the Russian and Soviet-era aircraft. Working with the Ukrainians, we’ve been able to take many Western weapons and get them to work on their aircraft, where it’s basically controlled by an iPad by the pilot. And they’re flying it in conflict like a week after we get it to him.”
As well as tablets in the cockpit, Ukrainian aircraft are also using specialized pylons on which the Western-made weapons are carried. You can read more about those here.
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For Turkey, the situation is essentially reversed, with the problem being how to integrate new Turkish-made weapons onto older U.S.-made F-16s.
Turkey has a fairly unusual position regarding the kind of upgrades it can make to its F-16 fleet, a result of the sometimes-strained relations between Ankara and Washington.
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Now, thanks to UBAS, these aircraft can also carry a range of Turkish-made ordnance and this can be added without having to modify the F-16’s software, which features proprietary updates released in the form of ‘tapes.’ Even without access to the software, Turkey can add new weapons to the jets using UBAS.
While the system has been shown to be used for employment of the SOM-J, it likely provides a similar interface with other locally developed stores.
[…]
As well as appearing in the cockpits of Turkish F-16s, UBAS has been installed in Soviet-era Su-25 Frogfoot attack jets operated by Azerbaijan, as part of a Turkish upgrade.
In the first part of this upgrade, known as Merhale-1, the Su-25 adds the UBAS system that allows it to employ Turkish-made KGK-82/83 and TEBER-82 precision-guided bombs, as well as SOM-B1 standoff missiles.
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The Azerbaijan example underscores the unique position Turkey has, thanks to its rapidly exploding defense aerospace sector, especially in terms of munitions and drones — this was not nearly the case in the past. Were UBAS to open up a gateway for integration of multiple weapons on U.S.-made fighters, this would be a huge deal on multiple levels. For export, especially, it could be very significant, allowing foreign operators a quick and rapid way of integrating Turkish weapons, for example, on their U.S.-made aircraft.
The Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) contract for NGAD is expected to be worth approximately $20 billion, although, across the life of the program, the company is in line to receive hundreds of billions of dollars in orders. Each copy of the jet, once series production commences, has been estimated in the past to cost upwards of $300 million. That is if the original concept for the aircraft has not changed.
A Lockheed Martin rendering of a notional sixth-generation combat jet. Lockheed Martin
The NGAD combat jet program evolved from plans for what was originally referred to as a Penetrating Counter-Air (PCA) platform, which emerged publicly in the mid-2010s. The PCA concept was an outgrowth of previous work the Air Force had done in cooperation with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). That includes the Aerospace Innovation Initiative, which was publicly announced in 2015 and produced at least one classified flying demonstrator design.
In contrast to previous fighter competitions, NGAD has been cloaked in secrecy from the outset. Indeed, for a long time, the Air Force didn’t even disclose which companies were in the running for NGAD.
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Boeing has recently suffered some notable setbacks in both its commercial and defense businesses. Trump had previously slammed the company over its contract to build two new Air Force One planes, which are running behind schedule. In the context of NGAD, however, the company’s entire future as a fighter-builder could be at stake. Notably, the company announced back in 2023 that it was going to shutter the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet line and indicated it would refocus in part on advanced combat jet efforts. The firm has made significant investments in its St. Louis, Missouri, facility to prepare it for sixth-generation fighter production. Boeing — alongside Northrop Grumman — is still in the running for the Navy’s F/A-XX. As for tactical jet production, Boeing is currently building F-15 Advanced Eagles and the Air Force’s T-7 jet trainer and will be for foreseeable future.
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Trump’s Air Force NGAD announcement comes at a time at which the president has been seeking to cut costs throughout the U.S. government, including slashing tens of billions of dollars from existing defense programs. NGAD has been a significant source of uncertainty over the past year, having been put on pause in May 2024 as the service reviewed its requirements amid concerns about the affordability of the aircraft, capability needs, and shifting priorities.
Ultimately, it seems the service’s need for a sixth-generation fighter in a potential Indo-Pacific conflict secured the future of the program.
“We tried a whole bunch of different options, and there was no more viable option than NGAD to achieve air superiority in this highly contested environment,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, director of Force Design, Integration, and Wargaming within the office of the deputy chief of staff for Air Force Futures, said earlier this month.
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According to Trump, an experimental version of the F-47 “has secretly been flying for almost five years.” This is in line with the announcement of September 2020, from Dr. Will Roper, then Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, that a previously undisclosed NGAD demonstrator had begun flight testing. Since then, it’s been reported that at least three NGAD-related demonstrators have flown.
The president also announced an aspiration to have the F-47 enter series production before the end of his term in office, which ends in January 2029.
[..]
Perhaps most surprisingly, Trump said that U.S. allies “are calling constantly” with a view to obtaining an export version of the NGAD fighter. He said that the United States would be selling them to “certain allies … perhaps toned-down versions. We’d like to tone them down about 10 percent which probably makes sense, because someday, maybe they’re not our allies, right?”
[…] Claims that the Joint Strike Fighter has a remote disabling feature are not new, but have resurfaced following the U.S. government’s abrupt decision to cut off military aid and intelligence assistance to Ukraine and new questions about America’s support for NATO under President Donald Trump. Outlets across Europe, including in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and the United Kingdom, have published stories touching at least in part on the possibility of an F-35 ‘kill switch’ in the past week or so. This, in turn, has prompted several official responses.
“We have no indication that this is possible,” Belgian Chief of Defence Gen. Frederik Vansina told that country’s newspaper La Dernière Heure on March 5. “The F-35 is not a remote-controlled aircraft. The program relies on worldwide logistical support, with spare parts circulating between user countries.”
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To reiterate, there is no evidence to date that F-35s in service anywhere feature some kind of dedicated capability that can be used to fully disable the jets at the literal or figurative touch of a button. What is true is that Joint Strike Fighters are subject to particularly significant U.S. export and other governmental controls. Virtually all F-35s in service worldwide are dependent in critical ways on proprietary support from the U.S. government and contractors in the United States.
“You don’t need a ‘kill switch’ to severely hamper the utility of an exported weapons system, you just stop providing support for it and it will wither away, some systems very quickly,” TWZ‘s own Tyler Rogoway wrote on X yesterday. “The more advanced the faster the degradation.”
[…]
by retaining key data rights, Lockheed Martin, and to a lesser extent Pratt & Whitney, which supplies the F135 engines that power all Joint Strike Fighter variants, exercise substantial control on almost all aspects of sustaining the F-35. This includes imposing limits on what maintenance work can be done outside of contractor-operated facilities in the United States and other select countries. Many individual components on the jets, especially its ‘black boxes’ that contain critical electronics, are sealed for export control reasons and have to be sent back to designated facilities for maintenance. There is no knowledge base whatsoever to do so in the user’s country.
Even functioning as intended under peacetime conditions, the F-35 sustainment chains that exist now have had significant trouble keeping F-35s, including those in service with the U.S. military, operational.
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ALIS/ODIN is a cloud-based network that is responsible for much more than just managing F-35 logistics, although that too is a critical part of keeping the aircraft flying as it talks directly to the supply and servicing networks discussed above. The system also serves as the port through which data packages containing highly sensitive mission planning information, including details about enemy air defenses and other intelligence, are developed and loaded onto Joint Strike Fighters before sorties as Mission Data Files (MDFs).
It’s this mission planning data package that is a major factor to the F-35’s survivability.
[….]
The MDFs themselves are processed through ALIS/ODIN and rely on work done in facilities located in the United States that are governed by U.S. policy.
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The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), rightly seeing the pitfalls of these critical and heavily intertwined dependencies, is the only F-35 operator to date have negotiated a deal that allows it to operate its jets outside of the ALIS/ODIN network, to install domestically-developed software suites onto the aircraft, and to conduct entirely independent depot-level maintenance. As such, the Israeli F-35I, a subvariant of the F-35A model, is unlike any other Joint Strike Fighter in service elsewhere in the world. The Israelis do still need to source spare parts externally, although they appear to have supplemental access to these resources.
[…]
For a number of America’s NATO allies, continued participation in the alliance’s nuclear weapon sharing agreements is also directly tied to the F-35. The nuclear mission played a particularly key role in Germany’s decision to acquire Joint Strike Fighters. However, this is not really relevant in the context of a country losing access to the F-35 program since the nuclear bombs in question would only ever be released from U.S. custody right before their approved use.
Lockheed Martin says the stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter now has a firmly demonstrated ability to act as an in-flight ‘quarterback’ for advanced drones like the U.S. Air Force’s future Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) with the help of artificial intelligence-enabled systems. The company states that its testing has also shown a touchscreen tablet-like device is a workable interface for controlling multiple uncrewed aircraft simultaneously from the cockpit of the F-35, as well as the F-22 Raptor. For the U.S. Air Force, how pilots in crewed aircraft will actually manage CCAs during operations has emerged as an increasingly important question.
Details about F-35 and F-22 related crewed-uncrewed teaming developments were included in a press release that Lockheed Martin put out late yesterday, wrapping up various achievements for the company in 2024.
Lockheed Martin
The F-35 “has the capability to control drones, including the U.S. Air Force’s future fleet of Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Recently, Lockheed Martin and industry partners demonstrated end-to-end connectivity including the seamless integration of AI technologies to control a drone in flight utilizing the same hardware and software architectures built for future F-35 flight testing,” the press release states. “These AI-enabled architectures allow Lockheed Martin to not only prove out piloted-drone teaming capabilities, but also incrementally improve them, bringing the U.S. Air Force’s family of systems vision to life.”
“Lockheed Martin has demonstrated its piloted-drone teaming interface, which can control multiple drones from the cockpit of an F-35 or F-22,” the release adds. “This technology allows a pilot to direct multiple drones to engage enemies using a touchscreen tablet in the cockpit of their 5th Gen aircraft.”
A US Air Force image depicting an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter flying together with a Boeing MQ-28 Ghost Bat drone. USAF A US Air Force image depicting an MQ-28 Ghost Bat flying together with an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. USAF
The press release also highlights prior crewed-uncrewed teaming work that Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works advanced projects division has done with the University of Iowa’s Operator Performance Laboratory (OPL) using surrogate platforms. OPL has also been working with other companies, including Shield AI, as well as the U.S. military, to support advanced autonomy and drone development efforts in recent years.
In November 2024, Lockheed Martin notably announced it had conducted tests with OPL that saw a human controller in an L-39 Albatros jet use a touchscreen interface to order two L-29 Delfin jets, equipped with AI-enabled flight technology acting as surrogate drones, to engage simulated enemy fighters. This sounds very similar to the kind of control architecture the company says it has now demonstrated on the F-35.
A view of the “battle manager” at work in the back seat of the L-39 jet during issuing commands to the L-29s acting as surrogate drones. Lockheed Martin
[…]
The Air Force is also still very much in the process of developing new concepts of operations and tactics, techniques, and procedures for employing CCA drones operationally. How the drones will fit into the service’s force structure and be utilized in routine training and other day-to-day peacetime activities, along with what the maintenance and logistical demands will be, also remains to be seen. Questions about in-flight command and control have emerged as particularly important ones to answer in the near term.
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As Lockheed Martin’s new touting of its work on tablet-based control interfaces highlights, there is a significant debate now just about how pilots will physically issue orders and otherwise manage drones from their cockpits.
A picture of a drone control system using a tablet-like device that General Atomics has previously released. GA-ASI
“There’s a lot of opinions amongst the Air Force about the right way to go [about controlling drones from other aircraft],” John Clark, then head of Skunk Works, also told The War Zone and others at the AFA gathering in September 2024. “The universal thought, though, is that this [a tablet or other touch-based interface] may be the fastest way to begin experimentation. It may not be the end state.”
“We’re working through a spectrum of options that are the minimum invasive opportunities, as well as something that’s more organically equipped, where there’s not even a tablet,” Clark added.
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In addition, there are still many questions about the secure communications architectures that will be needed to support operations involving CCAs and similar drones, as well as for F-35s and F-22s to operate effectively in the airborne controller role. The F-35 could use the popular omnidirectional Link 16 network for this purpose, but doing so would make it easier for opponents to detect the fighter jet and the drone. The F-22, which has long only had the ability to transmit and not receive data via Link 16, faces similar issues.
It’s also worth noting here that the U.S. military has been publicly demonstrating the ability of tactical jets to actively control drones in mid-air for nearly a decade now, at least. In 2015, a U.S. Marine Corps AV-8B Harrier jump jet flew notably together with a Kratos Unmanned Tactical Aerial Platform-22 (UTAP-22) drone in testing that included “command and control through the tactical data link.” Other experimentation is known to have occurred across the U.S. military since then, and this doesn’t account for additional work in the classified domain.
British soldiers have successfully trialled for the first time a game-changing weapon that can take down a swarm of drones using radio waves for less than the cost of a pack of mince pies.
The Radio Frequency Directed Energy Weapon (RFDEW) development system can detect, track and engage a range of threats across land, air and sea.
RFDEWs are capable of neutralising targets up to 1km away with near instant effect and at an estimated cost of 10p per shot fired, providing a cost-effective complement to traditional missile-base air defence systems.
The RFDEW is different from Laser Directed Energy Weapons – such as DragonFire – because it uses a radio frequency to disrupt hostile threats, rather than a laser beam of light energy.
The weapon uses high frequency waves to disrupt or damage critical electronic components inside devices such as drones, causing them to be immobilised or fall out of the sky. It can also be used against threats on land and at sea.
The British Army successfully trialed a demonstrator version of the RFDEW. The development system has been produced by a consortium led by Thales UK and including sub-contractors QinetiQ, Teledyne e2v and Horiba Mira and supports up to 135 high-skilled jobs in the UK.
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Its high level of automation means the system can be operated by a single person and could be mounted onto a military vehicle, such as a MAN SV, to provide mobility.
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A live firing trial was recently completed by the Army’s Royal Artillery Trials and Development Unit and 7 Air Defence Group at a range in West Wales, where they successfully targeted and engaged Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS), in a first for the British Armed Forces.
“Right now we’re at a point as generation AI is coming along and it’s a really exciting time. We’re experimenting with ways to use new tools across the entire test process, from test planning to test execution, from test analysis to test reporting. With investments from the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office [CDAO] we have approved under Control Unclassified Information [CUI] a large language model that resides in the cloud, on a government system, where we can input a test description for an item under test and it will provide us with a Test Hazard Analysis [THA]. It will initially provide 10 points, and we can request another 10, and another 10, etc, in the format that we already use. It’s not a finished product, but it’s about 90% there.”
“When we do our initial test brainstorming, it’s typically a very creative process, but that can take humans a long time to achieve. It’s often about coming up with things that people hadn’t considered. Now, instead of engineers spending hours working on this and creating the administrative forms, the AI program creates all of the points in the correct format, freeing up the engineers to do what humans are really good at – thinking critically about what it all means.”
“So we have an AI tool for THA, and now we’ve expanded it to generate test cards from our test plans that we use in the cockpit and in the mission control rooms. It uses the same large language model but trained on the test card format. So we input the detailed test plan, which includes the method of the test, measures of effectiveness, and we can ask it to generate test cards. Rather than spending a week generating these cards, it takes about two minutes!”
The X-62A takes off from Edwards AFB. Jamie Hunter
Wickert says the Air Force Test Center is also blending its AI tooling into test reporting to enable rapid analysis and “quick look” reports. For example, audio recordings of debriefs are now able to be turned into written reports. “That’s old school debriefs being coupled with the AI tooling to produce a report that includes everything that we talked about in the audio and it produces it in a format that we use,” explained Wickert.
“There’s also the AI that’s under test, when the system under test is the AI, such as the X-62A VISTA [Variable-stability In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft]. VISTA is a sandbox for testing out different AI agents, in fact I just flew it and we did a BVR [Beyond Visual Range] simulated cruise missile intercept under the AI control, it was amazing. We were 20 miles away from the target and I simply pushed a button to engage the AI agent and then we continued hands off and it flew the entire intercept and saddled up behind the target. That’s an example of AI under test and we use our normal test procedures, safety planning, and risk management all apply to that.”
“There’s also AI assistance to test. In our flight-test control rooms, if we’re doing envelope expansion, flutter, or loads, or handling qualities – in fact we’re about to start high angle-of-attack testing on the Boeing T-7, for example – we have engineers sitting there watching and monitoring from the control room. The broad task in this case is to compare the actual handling against predictions from the models to determine if the model is accurate. We do this as incremental step ups in envelope expansion, and when the reality and the model start to diverge, that’s when we hit pause because we don’t understand the system itself or the model is wrong. An AI assistant in the control room could really help with real-time monitoring of tests and we are looking at this right now. It has a huge impact with respect to digital engineering and digital material management.”
“I was the project test pilot on the Greek Peace Xenia F-16 program. One example of that work was that we had to test a configuration with 600-gallon wing tanks and conformal tanks, which equated to 22,000 pounds of gas on a 20,000-pound airplane, so a highly overloaded F-16. We were diving at 1.2 mach, and we spent four hours trying to hit a specific test point. We never actually managed to hit it. That’s incredibly low test efficiency, but you’re doing it in a very traditional way – here’s a test point, go out and fly the test point, with very tight tolerances. Then you get the results and compare them to the model. Sometimes we do that real time, linked up with the control room, and it can typically take five or 10 minutes for each one. So, there’s typically a long time between test points before the engineer can say that the predictions are still good, you’re cleared to the next test point.”
A heavily-instrumented F-16D returns to Edwards AFB after a mission. Jamie Hunter
“AI in the control room can now do comparison work in real time, with predictive analysis and digital modeling. Instead of having a test card that says you need to fly at six Gs plus or minus 1/10th of a G, at 20,000 feet plus or minus 400 feet pressure altitude, at 0.8 mach plus or minus 0.05, now you can just fly a representative maneuver somewhere around 20,000 feet and make sure you get through 0.8 mach and just do some rollercoaster stuff and a turn. In real time in the control room you’re projecting the continuous data that you’re getting via the aircraft’s telemetry onto a reduced order model, and that’s the product.”
“When Dr Will Roper started trumpeting digital engineering, he was very clear that in the old days we graduated from a model to test. In the new era of digital engineering, we graduate from tests to a validated model. That’s with AI as an assistant, being smarter about how we do tests, with the whole purpose of being able to accelerate because the warfighter is urgently asking for the capability that we are developing.”
Developed in partnership with Northrop Grumman, the Integrated Battle Command System, or IBCS, is the beating heart of the U.S. Army’s future air and missile defense architecture.
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This system networks with current and future sensors and weapons platforms – regardless of source, service, or domain – to create an integrated fire control network that identifies and engages air and missile threats. Its modular, open and scalable architecture allows users a sensor-fused, highly accurate, rapidly actionable ‘picture’ of the full battlespace.
IBCS tackles evolving air and missile threats, from incoming drone swarms to hypersonic weapons, while creating a ‘any sensor, best shooter’ strategy. This enables operators to select the optimal effector for the situation.
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The challenge lies in detecting and optimally engaging these diverse threats with all available defense systems.
Over the years, the U.S. Army has made significant investments in systems like Patriot, which is a medium-range air defense system, and THAAD, which is a system for intercepting short, medium, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. These systems were traditionally designed to be tightly coupled between the command-and-control [C2], the sensors, and the effectors, making interoperability with other systems very difficult.
IBCS’s big idea is a network-enabled, Modular Open System Approach [MOSA]-designed command-and-control architecture, which essentially componentizes systems like Patriot. Meaning you remove the command and control – and then adapt the sensor [the Patriot radar] and adapt the launcher effector onto an integrated fire-control network.
The IBCS architecture integrates various sensors and effectors into a unified network. It is capable of collecting data from across the domains of ground, air, maritime, and space, to create a single integrated air picture that identifies all inbound threats.
An IBCS Engagement Operations Center is unloaded from a C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft. U.S. Army
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There are essentially three major equipment items in IBCS. There’s the Engagement Operations Center [EOC], which you can think of as a shelter that mounts on the back of a five-ton truck and it’s got an antenna mast and has the communications onboard. The EOC is where the soldiers plan and fight the battle. This remotes into something that we call the Integrative Collaborative Environment [ICE], which is essentially a standard Army AirBeam tent. The ICE is where soldiers plan and fight the air battle. IBCS provides for remoting up to 10 operator workstations into the ICE. Within the EOC, you have two operator workstations which affords the capability for operators to employ and fight the system while the ICE is being established.
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Today, with a standard U.S. Army Patriot, if you lose the Engagement Control Station at the battery level, then that battery is out of action. So culturally, this is a big change. Patriot was designed in the 1970s and was fielded in the 1980s, so employment thinking is still dominated by experience with Patriot. IBCS genuinely changes the paradigm for deploying whole battalions through its network architecture design that enables tailoring to enable employment of air and missile defense task forces. This means that rather than deploying a complete Patriot battalion, a commander could deploy a task force encompassing multiple types of sensors and effectors tailored for a specific mission. This provides commanders with a high degree of operational flexibility.
It’s also worth underlining the power of this open systems architecture. Traditionally, to perform a PAC-3 missile engagement, the uplink to the missile has to be performed through the radar. That’s very limiting because it means you have to deploy launchers in a position where they’re in proximity to the radar to be able to affect that uplink. This means you’re effectively constraining the range of the missile and the battlespace for performing engagements.
The Army has developed a capability called Remote Interceptor Guidance 360, or RIG-360, which is essentially an antenna uplink device that can be positioned at various locations on the battlefield. It removed the need to physically tether launchers and effectors to the location of the radar, so it’s an additional decoupling and dependency from a sensor.
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IBCS is designed to communicate with other platforms and command-and control systems across a number of data links to include Link 16 datalink and MADL [Multifunction Advanced Data Link]. In flight testing, IBCS has demonstrated the capability to integrate with F-35. In addition, one of the engineering initiatives the Army has pursued with the Missile Defense Agency, and which we have supported, is a bridging technology known as the Joint Track Management Capability, or JTMC bridge.
The U.S. Navy has a very similar kind of system like IBCS called Cooperative Engagement Capability [CEC]. CEC takes data from multiple platforms, such as SPY-6 radar on AEGIS-class ships, E-2D Hawkeye, U.S. Marine Corps’ G/ATOR radar [AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar], and and integrates the data to create a high-fidelity quality track that is distributed across the network. The bridge enables the passing of data back and forth between the two networks to create a single integrated air picture.
TWZ: How does IBCS physically connect to the distributed systems at long ranges, and how might it plug into JADC2 in the future?
Lamb: IBCS is capable of being connected over long distances via fiber optics and satellite communications. We’ve demonstrated its ability to link with airborne platforms and sensors across various domains, with data displayed in command centers thousands of miles away.
[…]
over the last year or so we’ve been integrating the Army’s Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, known as LTAMDS. The Army also has plans to integrate the latest Sentinel A4 radar, and it announced plans to integrate THAAD [Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense]. There’s also a budget for deeper integration of the F-35 fighter as well as with passive sensors.
TL;DR – this system takes all sensors into a central network and allows the what is detected to be fed to any weapons system, develop a firing solution and then engage. This means that if a hugely expensive patriot detects a tiny drone, you don’t need to engage the drone with that but can easily hand off the target to a cheaper weapons system and engage with that instead.
Warfare is changing at a pace unseen in almost a century, as fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East shows. For military commanders, tackling that upheaval demands fast and constant adaptation.
Increasingly, that entails playing games.
Wargames—long the realm of top brass and classified plans—let strategists test varying scenarios, using different tactics and equipment. Now they are filtering down the ranks and out among analysts. Digitization, boosted by artificial intelligence, helps yield practical lessons in greater safety and at lower cost than staging military maneuvers would. Wargames can also explore hypotheticals that no exercise could address, such as nuclear warfare.
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The game has become a surprise hit, for users of all stripes. The Air Force recently approved Command PE to run on its secure networks. Britain’s Strategic Command just signed up to use it in training, education and analysis, calling it a tool “to test ideas.” And Taiwanese defense analysts tap Command PE to analyze responses to hostility from mainland China.
Command’s British publisher, Slitherine Software, stumbled into popularity. The family business got started around 2000 selling retail CD-ROM games like Legion, involving ancient Roman military campaigns.
When Defense Department officials in 2016 first contacted Slitherine, which is based in an old house in a leafy London suburb, its father-and-son managers were so stunned they thought the call might be a prank.
“Are you taking the piss?” J.D. McNeil, the father, recalled asking near the end of the conversation.
What drew Pentagon attention was the software’s vast, precise database of planes, ships, missiles and other military equipment from around the world, which allows exceptionally accurate modeling.
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It was a simple battle simulation that Navy Lt. Larry Bond wanted to create in 1980, after using the service’s complex training game, Navtag, onboard his destroyer.
Bond created Harpoon, published as a paper-and-dice game that drew a big following thanks to its extensive technical data on military systems. One fan was insurance-agent-turned-author Tom Clancy.
Clancy tapped Harpoon as a source for his first novel, “The Hunt for Red October,” and used it so extensively in writing his 1986 follow-up, “Red Storm Rising,” that he called himself and Bond “co-authors.”
A home-computer version of Harpoon flourished and then faded early this century. Frustrated fan Dimitris Dranidis sought to replace it. The result, Command: Modern Operations, released in 2013, took off as users—many in the military—added and corrected its open-source database.
The database now includes tens of thousands of items, from bullets to bombers, covering almost every front-line piece of equipment used by all the world’s militaries since 1946. Users keep parameters like fuel capacity and operating range accurate.
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In the military world, most acquisitions undergo more rigorous testing than consumer products for battle-readiness, but Command flips that paradigm thanks to its evolution. With roughly one million commercial users, Command “gets beat up by the community to a degree that the defense industry just can’t do,” said Barrick, the Marines instructor.
Command focuses on battles and engagements, not campaigns or wars. “It’s really useful if you want a very close look—almost through a soda straw,” said Wasser at CNAS, who sees it as an excellent tool for training and education.
Education was one of the top uses cited at a conference of Command military users in Rome hosted by the Italian Air Force last year, attended by civilian and uniformed defense professionals from the U.S., the U.K., Taiwan and beyond.
So the professional edition is very pricey indeed. The consumer version (modern operations) while not cheap is affordable and still under very active development.
Ukraine has developed a balloon-carried electronic surveillance system designed to detect enemy drone operators, which can then be targeted, offering a more comprehensive solution than tackling individual drones. While the current status of the system, known as Aero Azimuth, is unclear, its unveiling points to a resurgence in interest in elevated sensors mounted on aerostats.
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While the Azimuth system already existed in ground-based form, this seems to the the first airborne application, which makes use of an aerostat from another Ukrainian company, Aerobavovna. Also included in the Aero Azmiuth system are a trailer with a winch for launching and recovering the balloon, a gas cylinder system to inflate the envelope, plus tools for repair and maintenance.
The basic Azimuth uses passive signals intelligence (SIGINT) equipment to detect and then locate the radio-frequency signals emitted by enemy (Russian) drone operators. These signals include communication channels, telemetry, and data exchange. The information gathered by Azimuth is then related to troops, who can directly target the drone operators in question.
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By elevating the Azimuth system on an aerostat, that detection range can reportedly be extended to 37 miles, while the same targets can be triangulated at a distance of 15-19 miles, according to Kvertus spokespeople. These figures are when the balloon is operating at “average flight altitude,” with the optimum altitude meanwhile reported as being around 1,000-2,300 feet.
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested Saturday night by French authorities on allegations that his social media platform was being used for child pornography, drug trafficking and organized crime. The move sparked debate over free speech worldwide from prominent anti-censorship figures including Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy. Jr. and Edward Snowden. However, “the immediate freakout came from Russia,” reports Politico. “That’s because Telegram is widely used by the Russian military for battlefield communications thanks to problems with rolling out its own secure comms system. It’s also the primary vehicle for pro-war military bloggers and media — as well as millions of ordinary Russians.” From the report: “They practically detained the head of communication of the Russian army,” Russian military blogger channel Povernutie na Z Voine said in a Telegram statement. The blog site Dva Mayora said that Russian specialists are working on an alternative to Telegram, but that the Russian army’s Main Communications Directorate has “not shown any real interest” in getting such a system to Russian troops. The site said Durov’s arrest may actually speed up the development of an independent comms system. Alarmed Russian policymakers are calling for Durov’s release.
“[Durov’s] arrest may have political grounds and be a tool for gaining access to the personal information of Telegram users,” the Deputy Speaker of the Russian Duma Vladislav Davankov said in a Telegram statement. “This cannot be allowed. If the French authorities refuse to release Pavel Durov from custody, I propose making every effort to move him to the UAE or the Russian Federation. With his consent, of course.” Their worry is that Durov may hand over encryption keys to the French authorities, allowing access to the platform and any communications that users thought was encrypted.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that the arrest of Durov was “in no way a political decision.” The Russian embassy has demanded that it get access to Durov, but the Kremlin has so far not issued a statement on the arrest. “Before saying anything, we should wait for the situation to become clearer,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. However, officials and law enforcement agencies were instructed to clear all their communication from Telegram, the pro-Kremlin channel Baza reported. “Everyone who is used to using the platform for sensitive conversations/conversations should delete those conversations right now and not do it again,” Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan said in a Telegram post. “Durov has been shut down to get the keys. And he’s going to give them.”
The U.S. Space Force is testing a new ground-based satellite jamming weapon to help keep U.S. military personnel safe from potential “space-enabled” attacks.
The tests were conducted by Space Training and Readiness Command, or STARCOM, which is responsible for educating and training U.S. Space Force personnel. The satellite jammer is known as the Remote Modular Terminal (RMT) and, like other jammers, is designed to deny, degrade, or disrupt communications with satellites overhead, typically through overloading specific portions of the electromagnetic spectrum with interference.
The RMT is “small form-factor system designed to be fielded in large numbers at low-cost and operated remotely” according to Space Force statement. Specifically, the RMT will “unlock the scale to provide counterspace electronic warfare capability to all of the new Space Force components globally,” Lt. Col. Gerrit Dalman said in the statement, meaning it can be used from virtually anywhere to deny adversaries the use of satellites orbiting overhead.
Details about the test are scarce, but Space Force’s statement explains that two RMT units were installed at separate locations and controlled by a third. The jammer was evaluated according to metrics such as “system latency” and “target engagement accuracy,” as well as for how secure its communications were.
Guardians and an Airman during a test of the Space Force’s Remote Modular Terminal (RMT) in Colorado Springs, Colo., April 4, 2024. (Image credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Capt. Charles Rivezzo)
The need for new space-based and counterspace technologies has been stressed by Space Force leadership in recent months.
[…]
According to a slide deck the Space Rapid Capabilities Office presented to industry in October 2023, these jammers are “small transportable systems that can be emplaced in both garrison and austere environments,” meaning they can be used whether infrastructure is present or not.
For the first time scientists and engineers have successfully fired a high powered laser energy weapon from a British Army combat vehicle.
This ground-breaking test, conducted at Dstl’s range in Porton Down, saw the laser weapon neutralise targets at distances in excess of 1km.
The high-energy laser weapon mounted on to a British Army Wolfhound armoured vehicle, represents a major leap forward in the UK Ministry of Defence’s Land Laser Directed Energy Weapon (LDEW) Demonstrator programme, providing increased operational advantage on the battlefield.
The lightweight portable high energy laser system is the first laser weapon integrated on a land vehicle to be fired in the UK.
[…]
Matt Cork, Dstl Programme Lead, said:
The joint working between Dstl, DE&S and industry has enabled rapid evolution of this laser demonstrator. The successful testing of this high-powered laser weapon marks a pivotal moment in our ongoing efforts to enhance the future operational capabilities of the British Army. This technology offers a precise, powerful and cost effective means to defeat aerial threats, ensuring greater protection for our forces.
[…]
The system operates with a command and control system and can be integrated with wider battle management radar and surveillance systems. The weapon can be mounted on various platforms to meet different operational needs.
A fix of a kind has been found for problems with the F-35’s vital Tech Refresh 3 software, or TR-3, which had seen production deliveries suspended for around a year. Deliveries of the stealth fighters will resume “in the near future,” clearing a backlog of jets sitting in storage, although the TR-3 is only installed in what’s described as a “truncated” form, raising questions about when the F-35 will actually be able to make full use of the long-awaited Block 4 improvements that this software underpins.
The F-35 Joint Program Office announced yesterday that Lt. Gen. Michael J. Schmidt, the F-35 program executive officer, approved the use of the “truncated” TR-3 software on July 3. This means that more than 90 (perhaps as many as 120) F-35s that had been manufactured but then put into storage at Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth, Texas, plant can be delivered. These jets are destined for both U.S. and foreign customers.
In the meantime, the TR-3 software remains in flight testing, with the aim of achieving a long-term fix.
As of December 2023, it was reported that the development of TR-3 would be completed sometime between April and June of 2024 — after this, the same TR-3 enhancements would have to be incorporated into the existing jets.
By January of this year, Lockheed Martin was saying it didn’t expect F-35 deliveries to resume until late this summer, but it also confirmed that thought was being given to accepting jets before then, without the fully validated TR-3 hardware and software. This is the workaround that Schmidt signed off earlier this month.
In March, when the F-35 was finally been cleared for full-rate production, 17 years after the aircraft first took to the air, customers were still not accepting new aircraft.
[…]
TR-3 has been described as the F-35’s new ‘computer backbone,’ since it promises to provide 25 times more computing power than the existing TR-2 computing system.
Some of the unclassified upgrades are expected to be part of Block 4. The exact configuration is not publicly disclosed just yet. U.S. Department of Defense
The yearlong delivery hiatus has had a major knock-on effect on the program, both for U.S. and foreign customers.
Lockheed says it will be able to deliver F-35s at a rate of one aircraft per day, but even if it meets that target, it will take more than a year to catch up on deliveries of the stored jets. At the same time, new F-35s continue to come off the production line, making it even harder to address the backlog.
With deliveries on hold, plans to establish new squadrons, train new crews, and accelerate the replacement of older aircraft types have been impacted across the F-35 user community.
An example of these problems came to light late last month, when Denmark announced that the six F-35As it uses for training at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, will be relocated to Denmark, to help make up for the delivery shortfall of new production aircraft.
[…]
To try and keep things moving, the Joint Program Office and the U.S. military have come up with two separate TR-3 software releases.
“The first release (40P01) is a truncation of the TR-3 software at a point when the code is stable, capable, and maintainable to deliver TR-3 configured aircraft for use in combat training, but it is not until the second software release (40P02) that full combat capability is realized.”
Isn’t it wonderful as a NATO country to be forced to buy American, especially when the vendors know that you are being strong armed into buying their stuff and sell you absolute lemons. See also US / EU NATO Expenditure – is the balance really so lopsided?
The visualisation of US vs EU spending on NATO going the rounds is pretty suspect: The Blue area contains not just the USA, but also Canada. The US defence budget is incorrect. It fails to take into account that the US is a global player with ambitions and commitments beyond NATO. It doesn’t show that EU defence spending is larger than that of Russia and China. There is no mention of the pressure the USA exerts on it’s NATO allies to Buy American – and the staggering amount the US shop window filled with pretty poor products (such as the F-35) is valued at. There is no mention of the years of fragmentation inflicted on the EU by the US to insure that the EU was never able to create economies of scale, or even a common security and defence policy. Finally, the scale of US defence spending comes at a cost. Social and welfare spending is much much lower in the US than in the EU, which helps explain the low levels of education, happiness, social mobility, etc in the US. A sacrifice the EU does not seem to want to make.
[…] the moral high ground on which the United States stands to shame allies on defense spending is partly an illusion. There is no question Washington spends significant resources on defense, but likening total US defense expenditures to those of its allies is not an appropriate comparison. Unlike most other NATO nations, the United States is a global actor with commitments extending to the Middle East and IndoPacific as well as Europe. Most European defense capabilities are expended in theater or in direct support of NATO missions like in Afghanistan, whereas only a portion of the US defense budget is dedicated to transatlantic security.[…] the common pretense in US policy circles that the entirety of US defense spending is counted toward European security is logically unsound.
[…] In addition, continental US territory falls under NATO’s collective-defence commitment, so US forces devoted to US continental defence also in effect amount to a NATO commitment to defend the Alliance’s largest member. The same goes particularly for Canada’s commitment to North American defence. But that commitment is Alliance-wide, and – as has been often remarked – the one activation of NATO’s Article 5 collective-defence undertaking was in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the US, when the rest of the Alliance quickly supplemented US air defences with Alliance-operated AWACS airborne early-warning aircraft.
However, America is spending its defence dollars principally for its own security needs, as well as to support a range of interests and allies in other regions around the world, not exclusively Europe. As one can see, the balance sheet is complicated to say the least – those assets and resources are developed first and foremost for national interests and therefore have a dual US/external-security use. […]
This focus on US security needs is particularly visible when you look at the amount of troops the US commits to United Nations peacekeeping operations.
The U.S. [….] currently has only 27 personnel in the peacekeepers, as of November 2023. Of them, 21 are staff officers, four are “experts on mission,” and two are police; none are troops.
Other countries that have zero “boots on the ground” include: Canada, Japan, and Australia.
US Spending is about equal to Asian spending, and only slightly higher than the largest EU contributors
This lack of actual boots on the ground but amount of expenditure points to what the United States is really supporting: it’s defence industry.
US Business interests winning – Coercion by the US to buy US products
The US uses strong arm tactics to sell their products to countries that have an indigenous arms industry – usually composed of better and cheaper to operate products. The US, however, won’t take no for an answer – and US companies profit massively. How massively? See below.
[…] NATO creates a market for defence sales. Over the last two years, NATO Allies have agreed to purchase 120 billion dollars’ worth of weapons from U.S. defence companies. Including thousands of missiles to the U.K, Finland and Lithuania, Hundreds of Abrams tanks to Poland and Romania, And hundreds of F-35 aircraft across many European Allied nations – a total of 600 by 2030. From Arizona to Virginia, Florida to Washington state, American jobs depend on American sales to defence markets in Europe and Canada. What you produce keeps people safe. What Allies buy keeps American businesses strong. So NATO is a good deal for the United States. […]
The U.S. alone represents a quarter of the world economy. But together, with NATO Allies, we represent half of the world’s economic might. And half of the world’s military might. Together, we have world-class militaries, vast intelligence networks, more defence spending, and unique diplomatic leverage.[…]
A total of 23 per cent of US arms exports went to states in Europe in 2018–22, up from 11 per cent in 2013–17. Three of the USA’s North Atlantic 4 sipri fact sheet Treaty Organization (NATO) partners in the region were among the 10 largest importers of US arms in 2018–22: the UK accounted for 4.6 per cent of US arms exports, the Netherlands for 4.4 per cent and Norway for 4.2 per cent.
[…]
Arms imports by European states were 47 per higher in 2018–22 than in 2013–17. The biggest European arms importer in 2018–22 was the UK, which was the 13th largest arms importer in the world, followed by Ukraine (see box 2) and Norway, ranking 14th and 15th respectively. The USA accounted for 56 per of the region’s arms imports in 2018–22, Russia for 5.8 per (mainly to Belarus) and Germany for 5.1 per cent.
European NATO states Largely in response to the deteriorating security environment in the region, NATO states in Europe increased their arms imports by 65 per cent between 2013–17 and 2018–22. The USA accounted for 65 per cent of total arms imports by European NATO states and the NATO organization itself (see table 2) in 2018–22. The next biggest suppliers were France (8.6 per cent) and South Korea (4.9 per cent). The arms imports of European NATO states are expected to continue to rise in the coming years, based on existing programmes for arms imports. These include orders placed before the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and several large orders announced afterwards. Some of the orders placed in 2022 were the result of accelerated procurement processes implemented in response to the war in Ukraine. For example, in the first four years of the period (2018–21), Poland’s most notable arms import orders included 32 combat aircraft and 4 missile and air defence systems from the USA; however, in 2022 Poland announced new orders for 394 tanks, 96 combat helicopters and 12 missile and air defence systems from the USA; 48 combat aircraft, 1000 tanks, 672 self-propelled guns and 288 multiple rocket launchers from South Korea; and 3 frigates from the UK. After an accelerated procurement process, Germany ordered 35 combat aircraft from the USA in late 2022. These are specifically for carrying nuclear weapons owned by the USA and will replace existing aircraft that have this task.
And if you don’t buy US equipment, or don’t want to? You are leant on before you buy and after you buy. The following show rare but explicitly how the US conducts ‘business’
The U.S. government expressed disappointment with the Czech Republic and Hungary for their December moves toward acquiring non-American-made fighter jets. The rare public criticism of U.S. NATO allies comes as Poland also considers purchasing new fighter jets for its air force.
Speaking December 18, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said that the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland—all of which joined NATO in 1999—should not jeopardize more urgent military needs and reforms necessary for the three countries to work more effectively with NATO’s other 16 members by purchasing advanced fighter jets, which can cost up to tens of millions of dollars apiece.
But Boucher continued by saying, “If you’re going to buy [combat aircraft], buy American.” Adding that “we think we make the best,” he said that Secretary of State Colin Powell “has raised the interest of American companies in selling airplanes” during meetings with officials from the three countries. […]
The Pentagon estimated in June that a sale of 60 U.S. F-16 fighters to Poland would cost $4.3 billion. This price tag includes missiles and bombs to arm the aircraft as well as U.S. training.
MR. BOUCHER: The Secretary has been a staunch supporter of American aircraft sales, and in his meetings from the very beginning of the Administration, he has raised the fortunes of American companies and the fact that we make the best airplanes in the world. He has pressed that in a variety of meetings. So we are disappointed that the Czech Republic and Hungary recently took steps forward in procuring advanced supersonic fighter aircraft […] The Secretary has raised these issues about the cost, the spending, the implication for other programs. But in the end, he has always said if you’re going to buy airplanes, you ought to buy American ones
QUESTION: So do you think that their purchase of these jets and using them could affect badly — adversely affect NATO in some way?
MR. BOUCHER: We have — I think we have tried to make clear all along that, as nations address these force requirements and these purchases, they needed to consider the overall impact on military reform programs and abilities to meet their broader global force obligations to NATO. And those are important questions that we think need to be considered.
[…]
MR. BOUCHER: Yes. If you’re going to buy, buy American. But consider carefully how you can meet your overall obligations.
QUESTION: Richard, you seem to be saying — let me get this straight. Do you think it was unwise of these two governments to decide to buy planes instead of doing something else with the money?
MR. BOUCHER: I don’t think I would use your language. I think I will stick to my language, thanks.
QUESTION: What was your language — you think it was what, then? You think —
MR. BOUCHER: As I said, we think that they should avoid major defense procurements, which could jeopardize other urgently needed military reforms.
QUESTION: But if they are going to make them, they should buy from the States and not from —
MR. BOUCHER: Yes
[…]
QUESTION: I don’t understand the interoperability thing that you just brought up with Barry. Because, I mean, are you saying that, say, French aircraft or British aircraft are not interoperable within the NATO scheme of things? I mean, these countries fly their own planes. Why can’t — why do the Czechs have to buy your planes, and why can’t they buy from someone — I mean, I can understand if they were buying from China, or from — (laughter) — what’s the deal?
[…]
MR. BOUCHER: Nobody said they can’t buy some other airplane. We haven’t argued that these other airplanes cannot be interoperable with NATO — with American airplanes or NATO airplanes or other airplanes that NATO maintains in its inventory. Our view has been that when it comes to airplanes, first of all, we make the best ones. And second of all, we make airplanes that have been deployed throughout the world, that have been proven in combat, that have been proven in lots of different situations. And they have a demonstrated record of interoperability, as well as performance. And we think we make the best. So we make that clear to other countries when we talk to them.
QUESTION: But can’t you let, you know, Boeing and Lockheed Martin make their own sales pitch for them?
MR. BOUCHER: We like to support American workers, American companies.
QUESTION: All right.
QUESTION: Sort of related to that. Can you just expand on how the Secretary has raised the fortunes of American aircraft companies? I’m just — that was what you said originally —
MR. BOUCHER: Perhaps it’s not the best phrase. He has raised the interests of American aircraft companies in selling airplanes.
QUESTION: But he didn’t — I just want to —
MR. BOUCHER: I didn’t say he — that he — I didn’t mean to say that he brought more money their way. No.
QUESTION: Okay. I just —
MR. BOUCHER: That was a bad — perhaps a bad choice of words. But that was not the implication. He has raised the interest of American companies in selling airplanes.
The following excerpts show the US way of thinking re common EU defence policy. The US has spent decades strong arming the EU into not working together. They used scare tactics and nonsense texts in order to assure US supremacy within NATO as well as globally. Of course, there is a lot to be said that the EU allowed themselves to be bossed around, and the weak spines of the EU politicians (and of course their wallets, as they were still paying back the Marshall Plan to uncertain terms) can be shown. At the same time, their military advisors were playing in terms of self interest – they wanted to keep playing with US toys and at US facilities and at the scale the US exercises were held and didn’t see that if they had a single EU defence policy, they would be able to play at that scale – but with toys and capabilities they got to design themselves, instead of riding on US coat tails.
From a military standpoint, the European Union’s Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) defies logic. Why would the European allies seek to create a competing military force outside NATO when worried about American isolationism and when unable and unwilling to dedicate the necessary resources? This article suggests an alternative motive behind the European Union’s establishment of a defense program—the development and enhancement of a “European identity.” In short, the ESDP is designed in no small part to further the project of nation-building in a broadening European Union. This article proposes a social-constructivist framework for analyzing this development.
The level of Europe’s defense spending and the size of its collective forces in uniform should make it a global power with one of the strongest militaries in the world. But Europe does not act as one on defense, even though it formed a political union almost 30 years ago. Europe’s military strength today is far weaker than the sum of its parts. This is not just a European failure; it is also fundamentally a failure of America’s post-Cold War strategy toward Europe—a strategy that remains virtually unchanged since the 1990s.
Europe’s dependence on the United States for its security means that the United States possesses a de facto veto on the direction of European defense. Since the 1990s, the United States has typically used its effective veto power to block the defense ambitions of the European Union. This has frequently resulted in an absurd situation where Washington loudly insists that Europe do more on defense but then strongly objects when Europe’s political union—the European Union—tries to answer the call. This policy approach has been a grand strategic error—one that has weakened NATO militarily, strained the trans-Atlantic alliance, and contributed to the relative decline in Europe’s global clout. As a result, one of America’s closest partners and allies of first resort is not nearly as powerful as it could be.
[…]
U.S. policy has consistently opposed EU defense efforts since the late 1990s, arguing that EU defense efforts would undermine NATO. State Department officials’ oft-repeated claim, virtually unchanged over the past three decades, is that an EU defense structure would “duplicate” NATO, making the treaty organization obsolete. Democratic and Republican administrations have repeated the mantra “no duplication” so often that it has become U.S. policy doctrine.5 But rarely, if ever, is the concern about possible duplication actually unpacked and assessed.
[…]
The limited nature of current EU defense efforts is no doubt the fault of the EU. But the immense agency the United States has on European defense questions is also undeniable. Since the 1990s, the United States has wielded its influence, often by mobilizing EU members that are most dependent on U.S. security guarantees to block or constrain EU efforts.
Thus, for nearly 25 years, the United States has opposed the federalization of European foreign and defense policy at the EU level.
[…]
in December 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright struck a different tone than her predecessor 45 years earlier.13 In just a few short sentences, she laid out Washington’s concerns. She explained that the effort to create a European Security and Defense Identity (ESDI) must avoid “de-linking ESDI from NATO, avoid duplicating existing efforts, and avoid discriminating against non-EU members.” Secretary Albright’s address became known as the “three Ds”—no duplicating, discriminating, or delinking.
Secretary Albright’s speech was prompted by what seemed, at the time, like a stunning European breakthrough on defense. Just four days prior, a remarkable agreement was signed by U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac in St. Malo, France. There, the two largest European military powers agreed to support the formation of a 60,000 strong European force.
[…]
Secretary Albright’s “three Ds,” if rigidly interpreted, left little room for the EU to expand into defense. The speech became a de facto doctrine that has been rigidly adhered to ever since, even if that was not the original intent. The subsequent two decades have shown that any EU effort could be accused of being duplicative or discriminating against non-EU states.
[…]
U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen warned in his final NATO summit in 2000—in what The Washington Post described as an “unusually passionate speech” at a NATO Defense Ministerial—that “there will be no EU caucus in NATO” and that NATO could become “a relic of the past” should the EU move forward with its proposal to set up a rapid reaction force.16
[…]
Indeed, when the Bush administration took office in 2001, it pushed NATO to create an alternative to the EU’s rapid reaction force proposal, the NATO Response Force.
[…]
In a letter that caught Brussels completely off guard, the State Department’s Under Secretary of State Andrea Thompson and Under Secretary of Defense Ellen Lord warned the EU of retribution if it did not include the United States or third parties to participate in PESCO projects.33 Returning to the concerns that Secretary Albright had voiced 20 years prior, they argued that there was a risk of “EU capabilities developing in a manner that produces duplication, non-interoperable military systems, diversion of scarce defense resources, and unnecessary competition between NATO and the EU.”34 Yet the inclusion that the Trump administration demanded is not reciprocal, as the United States would not allow European defense companies similar access to the U.S. defense procurements.35 The U.S. Congress wants American taxpayer dollars to go to American companies, and yet the United States expects the EU to operate differently.
The Trump administration maintained U.S. opposition to EU defense, less to preserve NATO equities and more for petty, parochial purposes: the interests of U.S. defense companies. As Nick Witney of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) points out, the United States “aggressively lobbied against Europeans’ efforts to develop their defence industrial and technological base.”36 This exposes the contradictory nature of U.S. policy: The United States expects Europe to get its act together on defense but to not spend its taxpayer euros on European companies. Indeed, it is hard to see Europeans spending robustly on defense if that spending does not support European jobs and innovation.
[…]
The problem with the current state of European defense is not fundamentally about spending. Collectively, European defense spending levels should actually be enough to put forth a fighting force roughly on par with other global powers. While it is difficult to compare in absolute numbers given the differences in purchasing power, when taken together, the EU spends more on defense than either Russia or China, at nearly $200 billion per year.38
RAND is enormously respected and see the fear instigated in each of their possible scenarios for a common EU defence policy – they apparently lead to greater conflict in the world and otherwise NATO suffers.
This study explored three possible futures of European strategic autonomy in defence to understand their policy implications
[….] Experts varied in their views of which scenario was most plausible, with European interviewees tending to lean towards Scenario 1, which envisages development of a strong European pillar of NATO, on the basis of current trends; and US interviewees expressing some scepticism of this being plausible in the short term (next five years or so). As a result, several US interviewees noted that elements of Scenario 2, which envisage a faltering EU defence integration and transatlantic fragmentation, might be more plausible. A strong Europe that does not rely on NATO for access to military capabilities and structures, as envisaged in Scenario 3, was generally perceived as implausible in the short (five year) term considered by this study
A militarily stronger EU has clear benefits for NATO and the U.S., but the path towards it is not without risks – particularly if it diverges from NATO
A strong European pillar within NATO was largely seen by experts as advantageous for all actors considered: bringing greater military strength to NATO, while creating a militarily stronger partner to the U.S. in a time of intense global competition. Conversely, a capable EU that duplicates or disregards NATO was seen as a threat to transatlantic relations. A number of US interviewees also perceived a risk that the U.S. would lose influence in Europe and would risk divergence of foreign and security policy. This was seen as particularly concerning vis-à-vis other countries the U.S. perceives as competitors and adversaries (e.g. China, Russia) but which some in the EU may not perceive in the same way. The risks accompanying such divergence due to a militarily independent EU were seen as not too dissimilar to those of the opposite extreme of a fragmented Europe.vi A militarily fragmented EU, then, could weaken NATO in terms of defence capabilities but could also mean a further relative increase in US influence within NATO, potentially driving greater coherence of the Alliance. Overall, however, NATO’s credibility – tightly knit with the strength, effectiveness and coordination of military capabilities of the 30 allies – would likely suffer in this scenario. This is because most EU member states are also NATO members and the forces and capabilities they have are the same – whether used for EU CSDP missions or operations through NATO. US foreign and security policy ambitions could also suffer if one of its crucial allies were to become fragmented and militarily weak
As you can tell, the EU seems to care a lot more for it’s citizens.
The EU also believes in prevention. Delivering Official development assistance (ODA) is a way to prevent conflicts globally. The EU spends around EUR 50 billion per year on ODA, the US requested $10.5 billion in bolstering humanitarian assistance 2023. The EU is also set to spend around EUR 578 billion on climate spending in the period between 2021 – 2027, around 82.5 billion per year. The US around $2.3 billion in 2023. Climate change affects refugee streams, changing ecosystems and their economic attractiveness. It also makes working conditions harder for people in the defence industry:
The security threats of climate change
With the alarming acceleration of global warming and weather extremes across the globe, environmental issues have become more severe and climate change has become a defining issue of our time. Climate change causes complications for fresh water management and water scarcity, as well as health issues, biodiversity loss and demographic challenges. Other consequences like famine, drought and marine environmental degradation lead to loss of land and livelihood, and have a disproportionate impact on women and girls, and poor and vulnerable populations.
Climate change is also a threat multiplier that affects NATO security, operations and missions both in the Euro-Atlantic area and in the Alliance’s broader neighbourhood. It makes it harder for militaries to carry out their tasks. It also shapes the geopolitical environment, leading to instability and geostrategic competition and creating conditions that can be exploited by state and non-state actors that threaten or challenge the Alliance. Increasing surface temperatures, thawing permafrost, desertification, loss of sea ice and glaciers, and the opening up of shipping lanes may cause volatility in the security environment. As such, the High North is one of the epicentres of climate change.
Climate change affects the current and future operating environment, and the military will need to ensure its operational effectiveness in increasingly harsh conditions. Greater temperature extremes, sea level rise, significant changes in precipitation patterns and extreme weather events test the resilience of militaries and infrastructure. For example, increases in ambient temperatures coupled with changing air density (pressure altitude) can have a detrimental impact on fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft performance and air transport capability. Similarly, preventing the overheating of military aircraft, especially the sensitive electronic and airbase installations, requires an increased logistical effort and higher energy consumption. Many transport routes are located on coastal roads, which are particularly vulnerable to weather extremes. These are not only challenges to engineering and technology development, but must also be factored into operational planning scenarios.
The US does indeed spend more than the EU on its’ armed forces, but the amount ‘spent on NATO’ is not a true reflection. The US budget also includes homeland forces as well as the expeditionary ambitions of the USA. It also turns out that the USA thwarts attempts by Europe to form a common security and defence policy, both through their vocal stance against “duplication” by the EU of NATO forces and their strong arm tactics that force the EU to buy American to the detriment of the EU arms industry.
The US budget props up an arms based economy, to the detriment of the US population. US citizens notably less happy than EU citizens, most likely due to the relatively tiny amount that the US spends on social protections, relative to the EU countries.
