The Air Force is resurrecting its boost-glide missile program, one of two hypersonic concepts the service is developing, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Thursday. It gets its name because it reaches near-space altitudes using a rocket booster, then glides back to Earth at speeds exceeding five times the speed of sound.
The missile is known as an AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon, or ARRW, and it’s an effort first launched to much fanfare in August 2018—only to see mixed results in testing and ultimately lose support from service leadership amid investment in alternative missiles.
So why is ARRW back? Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said both missile types have advantages, which is why China and Russia are developing them. Read more, here.
How budget talks could shape Marines’ amphibious fleet plans. The Marine Corps wants the Navy to build more amphibious ships to support the Corps’ goal of keeping three amphibious ready groups at sea at all times—but the service still needs to figure out how many it needs, and funding for 2026 remains in flux, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Thursday.
What’s going on: Defense spending is usually appropriated in a defense appropriations bill, but this year, one-time defense funding of approximately $150 billion is being considered in a megabill dubbed “The Big Beautiful Bill Act.” The House-passed version includes about $695 million for a multi-ship amphibious warship contract, $2.1 billion for the San Antonio-class, and $3.7 billion for the America-class. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the bill, released earlier this week, more than doubles the funding for a multi-ship contract—$1.47 billion—but omits funding for the San Antonio and America class ships.
Program-level details on the full 2026 budget are still unknown, but the Trump administration has stressed the need for faster, better shipbuilding capacity. The House reconciliation bill includes about $33.7 billion for shipbuilding, while the Senate’s version has a shipbuilding topline of about $29 billion, shifting about $4 billion in funding across other priorities like unmanned systems. Continue reading, here.
Coverage continues after the jump…
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1944, the largest seaborne invasion in history began with Operation Overlord on the beaches of Normandy.
Despite several appearances in Washington, Army leaders didn’t have a lot of answers on the service’s recently announced transformation initiative, which aims to shed unwanted programs, field new tech and cut uniformed and civilian positions, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported after a week of hearings on Capitol Hill.
Background: The Pentagon first announced the initiative on May 1, as the Defense Department submitted its budget request to the White House with ATI cuts and moves included, taking Congress by surprise when leaders told reporters the following day that programs like the Humvee and legacy Apache helicopter would be axed.
For his part, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told lawmakers that the transformation will be “iterative,” a favored buzz word for the Army’s top generals and the venture capital community, of which Driscoll and his prospective under secretary are veterans. “We will be hopefully doing what the best companies in America do, and learning as we go,” he said.
The Army’s first priority is expected to be a reorganization to shrink and consolidate headquarters, and general officer jobs as part of an initiative Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George began last year. Next, Driscoll told lawmakers, they will focus on eliminating programs that no longer suit the service, like the M-10 Booker light tank. But there’s no specific list of jobs or facilities to eliminate, nor a timeline. “And so there will be no one date where everything with our first batch of ATI will be completed,” he said.
“We need to see your homework,” Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said Wednesday during a House Armed Services Committee hearing.
“We all want to make sure that the Army is lethal, [and] is ready to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow,” Rep. Eric Sorenson, D-Ill., said. “However, you chose to give us a plan with few details, with no budgeting, and a failure to answer a lot of our questions, and now we’re hearing about how this plan will be implemented from my own constituents, not from leadership.” Read on, here.
The Air Force says it will cost only about $400 million to convert a luxury jet from Qatar into an Air Force One for President Trump. That estimate, delivered by service secretary Troy Meink to a House Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday, is far lower than other estimates, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports.
Context: The Pentagon recently accepted a Boeing 747 from the Qatari government to use as a presidential jet for President Trump, a proposition that current and former Air Force officials have said could cost more than $1 billion, since it needs to be stripped to check for bugs then loaded with encrypted communications, defensive capabilities, and other classified systems. But since the White House sets the requirements, it could omit some as well.
Meink told Congress he “believes” it will cost “less than $400 million to retrofit that aircraft,” though he noted exact cost and details are classified.
House Democrat Joe Courtney of Connecticut was skeptical, citing experience from Trump’s first term when he struck a $3.9 billion deal for Boeing to build two new VC-25Bs. “Based on the experience of the 2018 planes, we know that the contract for retrofit was $3.9 billion,” he explained during Thursday’s hearing. “Again, some of that was the purchase of the planes from Boeing, roughly about $800 million. But again, just do the math, it was about $3 billion for retrofit. There’s been cost overruns. They had to strip those planes that were built for another purpose down to the studs, and you said, there’s been issues. Just using that and extrapolating from that it’s clear that this new, third plane is going to cost well over a billion dollars.”
Meink disagreed, and said many of the costs associated with retrofitting the jet, like spare parts, would have been incurred eventually down the line. Continue reading, here.
By the way: The House Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat says accepting Qatar’s luxury jet could cost Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth millions of dollars in fines for allegedly violating the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act, which caps gifts to government officials at $480. The New York Times reports, “Those who violate the act can face a financial penalty that equals the amount of the gift, plus $5,000. Sold new, a Boeing 747-8 jet can cost in the range of $400 million, though industry executives have estimated the value of the Qatari plane at $200 million.”
“You may be on the hook for $400 million (plus $5,000) even for a jumbo jet that you accepted on behalf of the president but do not get to personally enjoy,” Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin conveyed to Hegseth in a letter Wednesday. More, here.
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth is visiting the Normandy American Cemetery today for ceremonies commemorating the 81st anniversary of the “D-Day” Normandy landings. Hegseth also posted another video of himself exercising with troops, this time on “Omaha Beach, Where so many made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedoms,” he wrote on social media Friday.
Additional reading:
Trump 2.0
ICE officers and deported migrants are stuck in Djibouti, living in a shipping container. Washington Post: “A federal judge in Boston interrupted an Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight taking immigrants from Cuba, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and Mexico to South Sudan more than two weeks ago. U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy said the flight violated his order prohibiting officials from sending immigrants to countries where they aren’t citizens without a chance to ask for humanitarian protection.” Trump administration officials could have brought them back to the United States, but instead sent them to the lone remaining U.S. military base in Africa: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, according to a federal court filing. Read on, here.
Related reading: “DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to ‘Munch’ VA Contracts,” ProPublica reports, adding, “We obtained records showing how a Department of Government Efficiency staffer with no medical experience used artificial intelligence to identify which VA contracts to kill. ‘AI is absolutely the wrong tool for this,’ one expert said.”
Ukraine
Several of Ukraine’s allies pledged more weapons to the embattled democracy during this week’s meeting of defense chiefs in Europe. The Dutch said they’re allocating more than $450 million in support, which includes “more than 100 vessels, including patrol boats, transport boats, interceptors, and special operations ships; more than 50 naval drones,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War wrote in its Thursday analysis.
Luxembourg pledged more; Belgium announced a long-term package valued at over a billion dollars; Norway is allocating $7 billion in aid this year, “including $700 million for drones, with a focus on supporting the Ukrainian defense industrial base,” ISW writes.
Canada says it’s setting aside $45 million for drones, electronic warfare equipment, Bison and Coyote armored personnel carriers, and more. And “Denmark, Sweden, Canada, Norway, and Iceland will initially contribute 428 million euros (roughly $489 million) to develop the ‘Danish model’ in which Ukraine’s partners buy Ukrainian-manufactured weapons for the Ukrainian military,” ISW reports from pledges during this week’s Ukraine Defense Contact Group.
Notable: U.S. officials do not appear to have announced any new efforts to assist Ukraine by the end of this latest iteration of the contact group.
Commentary: Ukraine’s daring drone raid exposes American vulnerabilities. Charles Hamilton, a retired general who last served as commander of U.S. Army Materiel Command, writes: “For decades, we have organized our defenses around predictable threats: missiles on ballistic trajectories, aircraft operating at altitude, and enemies announcing their presence through electromagnetic signatures. Ukraine’s operation shattered these assumptions by demonstrating how small commercial drones, deployed with sufficient creativity and operational security, can penetrate the most sophisticated air defenses.” Read on, here.
Etc.
Commentary: How Russia aims to ride the BRICS to AI victory. The bloc has “placed AI governance at the top of its agenda, establishing an AI Study Group to ‘develop AI governance frameworks and standards’,” write Ivana Stradner and Emily Hester of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “A recent analysis from Moscow-based consultants Yakov and Partners indicates this prioritization of AI innovation is yielding results: 100 of the largest companies in BRICS nations are shifting away from Western models like OpenAI, toward emerging Chinese, Russian, and Emirati models.” More, here.
Read the full article here