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The event took place as part of the Defense Department’s Technology Readiness Experimentation, or T-REX, a semiannual showcase and evaluation staged at Camp Atterbury in Indiana. The event aims to validate prototypes built to fill urgent capability gaps across the military services and combatant commands. Lt. Col. Matt Limeberry, commander of the Pentagon’s Rapid Assessment or Prototype Technology Task Force, told Defense News in an interview Monday that DOD plans to host at least two Top Drone schools each year. The goal, he said, is to provide a chance for service members, industry and academia to prove out tactics, operational procedures and drone capabilities on a test course that mimics the kinds of terrain and adversary effects an operator might see in the field. It also allows the department to validate and refine its own counter-uncrewed aircraft system sensors.

“It’s a dual effect of data collect but also benefits the warfighter and industry flying through this threat-represented and emulated environment,” Limeberry said. For the inaugural, four-day event, the task force set up a training course at the Muscatatuck Training Center just south of Camp Atterbury, designing it to imitate an urban setting and focusing on maneuverability, endurance and reconnaissance. Two companies, Vector and Code 19, flew drones alongside two service partners — the Army’s Combat Lethality Task Force and its Aviation Center of Excellence. The drones were a mix of untethered first-person view systems and fiber-optic-connected drones. The department also staged a trial at a separate test range at Camp Atterbury that was supporting T-REX where the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team conducted live fire demonstrations. Limeberry said he was impressed with how well service members participating in Top Drone performed, navigating and identifying targets. For future events, he hopes to expand the trials over multiple weeks to allow operators to “refine” their tactics against more complex obstacles.

The department is also building a secondary Top Drone course at Camp Atterbury to emulate a more dense, wooded environment. “As we continue to scale the complexity, it will be an a la carte menu of [electronic warfare] jamming and providing a real-world, adversarial threat-informed environment that we need to fly with and through to make sure that we’re staying competitive,” Limeberry said. Senior leaders in the Pentagon in recent months have ramped up their drive for what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called “drone dominance.” The intent is for the military services to not only field more drones to operators, but also develop the organizational and training infrastructure to support broader adoption by 2027.

BY 2027?!

Top Drone supports that push as did much of last month’s T-REX event, which focused on low-cost, attritable attack drones as well as counter-uncrewed aircraft system technologies like interceptors and sensors. Over the course of the two-week showcase, the department assessed 58 technologies, some of which were sponsored by a military service or combatant command and others brought by firms that had never engaged with the Defense Department but had technology with the potential to address a critical capability gap. Of those technologies, some number will progress into joint, rapid experimentation and others will require further development and iteration or experimentation. Limeberry noted that DOD has a number of innovation pathways aimed at further maturing technology and T-REX is a good way to identify which route makes the most sense for a particular capability. “The goal of T-REX is to come out and you find your best transition partner, an innovation pathway that fits the need of your company or fits the need of the government, depending on where the gap and critical need is,” he said.

Decisions about which technologies will transition into the rapid experimentation phase are pending, Limeberry said. He expects the team will brief Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael in the coming weeks and have a determination before the end of September. Along with the technology demonstrations, T-REX also featured static displays from another 50 companies whose capabilities are in an early stage of development. Those capabilities may be considered for participation in future T-REX assessments. “They were showcasing emergent and urgent capabilities but didn’t have the capacity yet to fully assess and put their prototypes into the environment, so we put them on a prototype technology display,” Limeberry said.

The service had previously expected the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile to reach the end of its service in 2036, the Government Accountability Office said in its report, “ICBM Modernization: Air Force Actions Needed to Expeditiously Address Critical Risks to Sentinel Transition.” But in the four years since that assessment was made, the LGM-35A Sentinel program has run into a series of developmental snags and severe projected cost overruns. Minuteman III currently makes up the land-based portion of the nation’s nuclear triad, with 400 missiles deployed across roughly 450 silos in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska. Those missiles are now at least half a century old and their time is running out, prompting the Air Force to contract with Northrop Grumman in 2020 to build the Sentinel successor. That program was originally expected to cost $77.7 billion.

say the line, military-industrial complex!

my program has run into some cost overruns...

That estimate proved to be wildly optimistic, and projected future costs of Sentinel began to spiral. GAO said that the Pentagon concluded an unrealistic delivery schedule, ineffective systems engineering, incomplete basic system design and an atrophied ICBM industrial base all caused the cost overruns. In January 2024, Sentinel’s cost overruns led the government to declare a Nunn-McCurdy breach and a restructuring of the program. The Pentagon said in July 2024 that Sentinel was on a path to costing $160 billion. But even a restructured program will still cost at least $140 billion — roughly 81% higher than the original cost estimate. Sentinel was originally expected to reach initial operational capability in 2029, but is now slipping years behind schedule as problems emerge. Earlier this spring, for example, the Air Force confirmed it will have to dig entirely new silos for the Sentinel missiles, because the existing Minuteman III silos are not in good enough shape to reuse.

No rest for Minuteman III

In the face of those delays, GAO said, the Air Force’s Minuteman III program office took another look at the program and concluded it is feasible to keep it running for 25 more years. But doing so will not be easy. Minuteman IIIs were first deployed at hundreds of Air Force silos across the Plains region in the early 1970s, and at the time, they were expected to be operational for about a decade. If they stay in operation until about 2050, they will have a service life of at least 75 years. That will present multiple sustainment challenges, as obsolete spare parts dwindle and components such as diodes, resisters and capacitors deteriorate, GAO said. And as spare parts supplies diminish, the report said, it will be harder to conduct Minuteman III’s flight tests.

The Air Force regularly conducts test flights of unarmed Minuteman III missiles several times a year to ensure they stay reliable and accurate, as well as demonstrating the United States’ nuclear deterrent to nations around the world. The Air Force was already considering extending Minuteman III test launches past 2030, GAO said. However, with the ICBMs possibly staying online until 2050, those flight tests could continue through 2045. To conserve spare parts for flight tests, GAO said, the Air Force has received permission to conduct fewer tests annually.

ah, skipping testing the nukes since each test brings them closer to falling apart without there being a ready replacement, that sounds perfect! once again, everything Westerners say about how Russian nukes probably don't work is projection, every fucking time

Minuteman IIIs also could be converted to a multiple-warhead configuration to help alleviate the problems from Sentinel’s delays in the meantime, the report said. Today’s ICBMs now hold one nuclear warhead each. But under a MIRV, or Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle, configuration, the missiles could carry up to three nuclear warheads. This would allow a single Minuteman III to strike more targets and maintain the program’s deterrent effect, even if the overall number of missiles goes down. GAO said Air Force Global Strike Command, which oversees the nation’s ICBM force, would be able to switch Minuteman IIIs to MIRV configuration. But it would require a policy change from the government, Global Strike told GAO, and the command’s leadership prefers to have as much lead time as possible to carry out such a logistically complex project. GAO advised the Air Force to prepare a report on the risks associated with transitioning from Minuteman III to Sentinel, outlining how it will address the sustainment risks of operating the older ICBMs for years longer than expected. The Air Force should also consider the personnel and materiel implications of switching Minuteman III ICBMs to a MIRV configuration, if that choice is made, GAO said. The Air Force agreed with GAO’s recommendations.

Warsaw has been allocated €43.7bn in loans by Brussels for arms purchases under the EU SAFE program, the bloc’s Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius said. Set up in March, the Security Action For Europe (SAFE) plan involved an offer of €150bn in low-cost loans to EU member states and allies to quickly beef up defense capabilities in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and growing reluctance by the U.S. to shore up Europe’s defense. On Tuesday Kubilius said that all the €150bn of loans had been subscribed to by 19 member states, and called the plan “a European success story.” Behind Poland, Romania has been granted €16.7bn in loans while France and Hungary each took €16.2bn and Italy signed up for €14.9bn, he said. Belgium will receive €8.3 billion, Lithuania €6.4 billion, Portugal €5.8 billion and Latvia €5.7 billion, while other loan cash recipients are Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Slovakia and Spain.

As well as low interest payments, the loans also come with a ten-year grace period for repayment. “I would like also to remind that when SAFE was announced early in spring, here was a lot of skepticism about possible low interest to take the loans. The contrary is true. The interest from the member states have been a resounding success,” he said. Loans would also be available to Ukraine, to EU candidate countries and countries with security deals with the EU. “Bilateral technical agreements with Great Britain and Canada on their participation in SAFE Programme will be negotiated very soon,” he said. Loans will be approved for spending which supports the European defense industry and promotes joint procurement between states, with a focus on “air/missile defense, ground combat, space, strategic capabilities, cyber and space capabilities,” Kubilius said.

“When I visited Washington D.C. before summer, one well known U.S. expert told me that right now, worldwide, SAFE is the biggest financial package to be invested into defense with such a speed. It is also important that we are sending a strong message of support to the frontier countries, when the US is announcing that they will reduce their support,” he said. Member states must now submit an investment plan for their loan cash by Nov. 30, with loan agreements due to be signed in the first quarter of 2026 if approved.