Tervell

Switzerland has decided to cut an order of 36 Lockheed Martin F-35A fifth-generation fighter jets due to a price increase of roughly $610 million enforced by the US government, and following a contract dispute between the two sides. In a statement today, the Swiss Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport said that “due to foreseeable additional costs, it is not financially viable to maintain the originally planned number” of aircraft, instead signaling that a “maximum” quantity of the stealth jets will be acquired in line with an approved 6 billion Swiss Franc (7.5 billion USD) budget. The statement did not reveal a revised aircraft figure to be acquired. “Talks held with the US in the summer revealed that Switzerland cannot enforce the contractually agreed fixed price for the F-35A fighter jet,” noted the Swiss statement. “The US cites increased costs due to inflation, rising raw material prices, and other factors.”

At the time the contract dispute initially emerged in August, a DoD official told Breaking Defense that “costs associated with the F-35 program, particularly for airframes and engines, have been trending higher than the initial estimates outlined in the F-35 Letter of Offer and Acceptance (LOA), originally offered to Switzerland.” The official went on to say that an “estimated $610” million price hike is the result of inflation, global raw material price increases and supply chain disruptions. Additionally, the DoD official added then that a specific note requested by Bern, labelled “Note 55” confirms that “the [Swiss] aircraft will be purchased using fixed-price contracts but clarifies that the price estimated in the LOA may differ from the actual contract price. Fixed-price contracts account for inflation and provide cost predictability but do not guarantee that the estimated LOA price will match the final contract price.” The Office of the Secretary of Defense deferred questions about the reduced buy to the Swiss government today.

As Breaking Defense reported, Switzerland previously argued that a fixed-price had been “abandon[ed]” despite “intensive discussions” between Swiss and American officials, leading to inflationary and tariff pressures that could drive up the cost of the order between anywhere from 650 million to 1.3 billion Swiss francs. Switzerland initially selected the F-35 in 2021, before agreeing a contract in 2022. Deliveries were originally slated to begin in 2027 and run through 2030. Lockheed Martin and the F-35 Joint Program Office did not respond to requests for comment at the time of publication.

The Marine Corps and Air Force’s Osprey fleets have had more “serious accidents” in the previous two fiscal years on average than compared to the past eight, according to newly published analysis by government auditors. “In fiscal years 2023 and 2024, 18 serious, non-combat accidents occurred involving death; permanent disability; extensive hospitalization; property damage of $600,000 or more; or a destroyed aircraft,” auditors wrote in a new Government Accountability Office report. “Rates of serious accidents were between 36 percent and 88 percent higher than each service’s average rate for the prior 8 fiscal years.” The report didn’t elaborate what caused accident rates to climb specifically in recent years, but GAO said program staffers attributed V-22’s higher rate relative to other aircraft as it being a first-generation tiltrotor aircraft and the plane’s “complex and expensive components, which, when damaged, result in higher accident classes by cost.”

GAO was prompted to produce the report at the behest of a House committee that sought auditors’ opinions on trends in Osprey incidents, the extent to which the program office and services have taken steps to identify and resolve issues and discuss how the services proliferate safety information. Variants of the V-22 Osprey are flown by the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force. The unique tiltrotor aircraft combines the capabilities of a helicopter and turboprop plane which the Pentagon uses largely for troop and cargo movements. A series of lethal accidents in recent years have raised intense scrutiny by both lawmakers and outside observers of the plane’s safety record, and resulted in the Pentagon revealing several defects in the aircraft itself. “Osprey program stakeholders have not fully identified, analyzed, or responded with procedural or materiel mitigations to all safety risks,” according to the GAO report. “For example, program stakeholders, which include the Osprey Joint Program Office and military services that operate the aircraft, had closed 45 risk assessments at the time of our review, but had not fully responded to 34 known system-related risks related to the potential failure of airframe and engine components.”

In its totality, the report gives only minor credit to the Pentagon for more recent initiatives to comprehensively address the aircraft’s problems, but states the Defense Department has not done enough to ensure the plane’s safety and airworthiness moving forward. Government auditors made a series of recommendations to the Pentagon concerning how the program identifies, analyzes and responds to safety risks, establishes an oversight structure to ensure timely resolution and how the services implement process to routinely share relevant safety data. In a letter contained in the report, Peter Belk, acting assistant secretary of defense for readiness, concurred with all of GAO’s recommendations. “As a Department, it is our duty to protect our military’s most valuable asset, our people,” Belk wrote in response to one recommendation. “The Secretary of Defense will ensure the Secretary of the Navy, and the Secretary of the Air Force continually underscore the importance of safety at every level to ensure an environment where safety and risk management are essential and integrated parts of our operations.”

Navy Says It Remains ‘Committed’

The GAO’s report was not the only V-22 report to be released today, as Naval Air Systems Command released findings of what it called a “comprehensive review” of the aircraft. That review, originally ordered in September 2023, “reaffirmed the airworthiness of the V-22 platform under established controls allowing the continued safe operations of this critical joint capability.” The review identified “32 actions” to “improve saftey and readiness,” and Naval Air Systems Command leader Vice Adm. John Dogherty said in a video posted online the NAVAIR and the V-22 program office have “initiated clear, enforceable action plans to drive these issues to closure.” “The V-22 delivers unmatched operational flexibility for the Department of Defense,” he said, adding that through its mitigation efforts, the Navy is “committed” to the program. Still, the Navy report warned, “If the V-22 enterprise fails to take immediate and decisive action on the findings in this report, the existing risk mitigation timelines will increase the likelihood of a risk materializing, potentially resulting in catastrophic outcomes, including both fatal and non-fatal consequences.”

New problems have emerged in developing Britain's new Challenger 3 tanks, complicating work again. So, the old hulls that will be used to produce them are too worn and also have various defects, which suggests the idea of producing them from scratch altogether. Britain's Ministry of Defence claims it is actively cooperating with industry to accelerate vehicle delivery. Work is also underway to ensure necessary materials and reduce possible risks. Recall that Challenger 3 received a completely new turret with a smoothbore 120mm gun, but old Challenger 2s will be used for hulls. The latter have been actively used by the military in recent decades, which led to certain wear and possible poor condition.

This is indeed an obstacle, but it can be overcome through major overhaul, although it will probably require more funds and time. There are plenty of examples of installing a new turret on even older vehicles, one can recall at minimum Leopard 1 with Cockerill 3105 or even the Skyranger 35 air defense systembeing supplied to Ukraine. So here its worth looking at the next stated problem - significant difference in sizes between hulls due to different production standards during Challenger 2 production times. This will create a need for additional adjustment of new equipment to each vehicle. Specifically, concerns relate to new TDSS (Turret Drive Servo System) turret drives, which are needed for the new turret. There are some suggestions that it will now be more rational to manufacture new hulls from scratch.

However, this would essentially mean producing tanks from scratch, which would require deploying new industrial capacities. That is, more work, even more costs, and additional delivery delays, which could extend for decades altogether. So such a way out is not very rational here, and if already moving in this direction, then take from available analogues on the world market. The Challenger 3 project itself is constantly questioned due to possible critical mass increase with the same running gear and very long readiness times. And this is in addition to other failed problems, such as with the Ajax IFV suspended from use.

western militaries will just straight up dissolve into dust in the next few decades

Britain is “no longer capable” of running a nuclear submarine programme after “catastrophic” failures pushed it to the brink, a former Navy chief has said. Rear Admiral Philip Mathias said the UK’s “silent service” was facing an “unprecedented” situation from which it was highly unlikely to recover without radical intervention. The former director of nuclear policy at the Ministry of Defence said delays in building new attack boats had reached record levels, while the duration of patrols for crews in nuclear-armed submarines had been driven up from 70 days during the Cold War to more than 200 days now. This had led to a “shockingly low availability” of submarines to “counter the Russian threat in the North Atlantic”, the retired submarine commander warned.

The admiral, who led the Trident value for money review in 2010, called for Britain to pull out of the multi-billion Aukus defence deal with America and Australia to build 12 new nuclear submarines. “The UK is no longer capable of managing a nuclear submarine programme,” he said. “Dreadnought is late, Astute class submarine delivery is getting later, there is a massive backlog in Astute class maintenance and refitting, which continues to get worse, and SSN-Aukus is a submarine which is not going to deliver what the UK or Australia needs in terms of capability or timescale.” “Performance across all aspects of the programme continues to get worse in every dimension. This is an unprecedented situation in the nuclear submarine age. It is a catastrophic failure of succession and leadership planning.” He added: “The public should be aware of the gross mismanagement of this hugely expensive and important programme. Our adversaries certainly will be, not least by counting our submarines alongside using satellite imagery and reading audit reports already in the public domain.”

The Navy’s fleet of Astute submarines is already facing significant problems, with many having been stuck in port for years. Out of the seven planned, six are in service. HMS Ambush is currently inactive, having spent 1,222 days – more than three years and four months – in port, according to defence analysts. Sister vessels Artful and Audacious are undergoing sluggish maintenance programmes, having both spent more than 950 days out of action. Astute and Anson are also in port. HMS Agamemnon, the sixth and penultimate vessel, entered service in September during a commissioning ceremony led by the King, with ministers hailing it a “truly remarkable manufacturing feat”. But Rear-Adml Mathias said: “The uncomfortable truth is that she took over 13 years to build – the longest-ever construction time for a submarine to be built for the Navy.”

Russia, meanwhile, continues to pressure the Navy, having ramped up its activity in UK waters by more than 30 per cent, John Healey, the Defence Secretary, has warned. Last week, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, said he was ready to go to war with Europe. The UK’s nuclear-armed submarine fleet is critical to defending the country and deterring Russia and other dangerous states from using weapons of mass destruction. The fleet of four Vanguard stealth boats carries Britain’s nuclear missiles, with one vessel always patrolling the seas at any time. Each of the submarines can carry up to 16 Trident 2 D5 60 ton ballistic missiles armed with up to eight individual warheads, the combined destructive power of which dwarfs the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in the Second World War and would wipe out millions of people. However, the boats have faced problems during launch tests issues in the past. In 2016, one of the 44ft Tridents fired from HMS Vengeance veered off course and reportedly self-destructed. Then at Port Canaveral, Florida, on Jan 30 last year, a missile launched from HMS Vanguard misfired and landed back in the sea.

In his critique, Rear-Adml Mathias said Britain’s next generation of nuclear weapon boats, the Dreadnought class, should be the “last class of nuclear-powered submarines that the UK builds”. He said the Aukus programme should be “cancelled now”, with the money instead spent on better “cost-effective” ways of delivering the same capability but with cheaper tech, like aerial drones or smaller unmanned submarines. The naval commander pointed towards historic cuts in defence spending, repeated changes to how nuclear submarine programmes are delivered and a “huge failure” to manage key personnel as contributing factors to the decline. But he also criticised the role of industry giants for delays to programmes and added that not a single one of the UK’s 23 decommissioned nuclear boats had been dismantled since the first, HMS Dreadnought, left service in 1980.

“This is an utter disgrace and brings into question whether Britain is responsible enough to own nuclear submarines,” he said, adding the details he raised were all publicly available and probably known by Russia. A defence source insisted the “right people were in the right place” to continue to oversee Britain’s nuclear programme. The Ministry of Defence said it was committed to delivering the next generation of nuclear submarines, and that the Dreadnought programme remained on track. It added that it was committed to the safe disposal of old boats and was a responsible nuclear operator, meeting the highest standards of safety, security and environmental protection for the current projects in Devonport and Rosyth and through planning for a future disposal capability in the UK. A spokesman added: “We are unwavering in our commitment to renewing and maintaining the nuclear deterrent underlined by the biggest sustained investment into defence spending since the end of the Cold War. “The Strategic Defence Review made clear the need for sustained investment across the Defence Nuclear Enterprise. This will see delivery of the most powerful attack submarines ever operated by the Royal Navy and the investment of £15bn this Parliament into our sovereign warhead programme.”

The killing in October underscores the complex political and security landscape as the United States begins working with interim Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa in the fight against remnants of IS. According to relatives, Khaled al-Masoud had been spying on IS for years on behalf of the insurgents led by al-Sharaa and then for al-Sharaa’s interim government, established after the fall of former President Bashar Assad a year ago. Al-Sharaa’s insurgents were mainly Islamists, some connected to al-Qaida, but enemies of IS who often clashed with it over the past decade. Neither U.S. nor Syrian government officials have commented on al-Masoud’s death, an indication that neither side wants the incident to derail improving ties. Weeks after the Oct. 19 raid, al-Sharaa visited Washington and announced Syria would join the global coalition against IS. Still, al-Masoud’s death could be “quite a setback” for efforts to combat IS, said Wassim Nasr, a senior research fellow with the Soufan Center, a New York-based think tank focused on security issues. Al-Masoud had been infiltrating IS in the southern deserts of Syria known as the Badiya, one of the places where remnants of the extremist group have remained active, Nasr said. The raid targeting him was a result of “the lack of coordination between the coalition and Damascus,” Nasr said. In the latest sign of the increasing cooperation, the U.S. Central Command said Sunday that American troops and forces from Syria’s Interior Ministry had located and destroyed 15 IS weapons caches in the south.

Confusion around the raid

The raid occurred in Dumayr, a town east of Damascus on the edge of the desert. At around 3 a.m., residents woke to the sound of heavy vehicles and planes. Residents said U.S. troops conducted the raid alongside the Syrian Free Army, a U.S.-trained opposition faction that had fought against Assad. The SFA now officially reports to the Syrian Defense Ministry. Al-Masoud’s cousin, Abdel Kareem Masoud, said he opened his door and saw Humvees with U.S. flags on them. “There was someone on top of one of them who spoke broken Arabic, who pointed a machine gun at us and a green laser light and told us to go back inside,” he said. Khaled al-Masoud’s mother, Sabah al-Sheikh al-Kilani, said the forces then surrounded her son’s house next door, where he was with his wife and five daughters, and banged on the door. Al-Masoud told them that he was with General Security, a force under Syria’s Interior Ministry, but they broke down the door and shot him, al-Kilani said. They took him away, wounded, al-Kilani said. Later, government security officials told the family he had been released but was in the hospital. The family was then called to pick up his body. It was unclear when he had died. “How did he die? We don’t know,” his mother said. “I want the people who took him from his children to be held accountable.”

Faulty intelligence

Al-Masoud’s family believes he was targeted based on faulty intelligence provided by members of the Syrian Free Army. Representatives of the SFA did not respond to requests for comment. Al-Masoud had worked with al-Sharaa’s insurgent group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, in its northwestern enclave of Idlib before Assad’s fall, his cousin said. Then he returned to Dumayr and worked with the security services of al-Sharaa’s government. Two Syrian security officials and one political official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly, confirmed that al-Masoud had been working with Syria’s interim government in a security role. Two of the officials said he had worked on combating IS. Initial media reports on the raid said it had captured an IS official. But U.S. Central Command, which typically issues statements when a U.S. operation kills or captures a member of the extremist group in Syria, made no announcement. A U.S. defense official, when asked for more information about the raid and its target and whether it had been coordinated with Syria’s government, said, “We are aware of these reports but do not have any information to provide.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a sensitive military operation. Representatives of Syria’s defense and interior ministries, and of U.S. envoy to Syria Tom Barrack, declined to comment.

Increased coordination could prevent mistakes

At its peak in 2015, IS controlled a swath of territory across Iraq and Syria half the size of the United Kingdom. It was notorious for its brutality against religious minorities as well as Muslims not adhering to the group’s extreme interpretation of Islam. After years of fighting, the U.S.-led coalition broke the group’s last hold on territory in late 2019. Since then, U.S. troops in Syria have been working to ensure IS does not regain a foothold. The U.S. estimates IS still has about 2,500 members in Syria and Iraq. U.S. Central Command last month said the number of IS attacks there had fallen to 375 for the year so far, compared to 1,038 last year. Fewer than 1,000 U.S. troops are believed to be operating in Syria, carrying out airstrikes and conducting raids against IS cells. They work mainly alongside the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeast and the Syrian Free Army in the south.

Now the U.S. has another partner: the security forces of the new Syrian government. Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor, has reported 52 incidents in which civilians were harmed or killed in coalition operations in Syria since 2020. The group classified al-Masoud as a civilian. Airwars director Emily Tripp said the group has seen “multiple instances of what the U.S. call ‘mistakes,’” including a 2023 case in which the U.S. military announced it had killed an al-Qaida leader in a drone strike. The target later turned out to be a civilian farmer. It was unclear if the Oct. 19 raid went wrong due to faulty intelligence or if someone deliberately fed the coalition false information. Nasr said that in the past, feuding groups have sometimes used the coalition to settle scores. “That’s the whole point of having a hotline with Damascus, in order to see who’s who on the ground,” he said.

At the lowest point of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln characterized the core factor between victory and defeat as finding a general who understood the “awful arithmetic” of war. War is a contest of blood and treasure; each can, and must, ultimately be counted and measured. It has been the same for every conflict before and after. Yet this arithmetic is constantly changing, and never faster than right now. If the United States cannot update its calculations to properly reflect our new era, our failure will not just cost us blood and treasure, but will drive us toward defeat. Cost imposition has long been a tenet of U.S. strategy. During the Cold War, the U.S. launched expensive programs such as stealth and Star Wars not just for their tactical value, but to send a strategic signal to the Kremlin: neither your economy nor your war machine can keep up. Gorbachev, persuaded, gave up the decades-long competition with the U.S. The very same concept of cost imposition was also elemental to the most celebrated operations of the past year. In Operation Spider’s Web, Ukraine used inexpensive drones, reportedly costing less than $500 each, to damage strategic bombers worth many millions of dollars, degrading Russia’s long-range strike capabilities for years to come. Similarly, in Operation Rising Lion, cheap Israeli drones took out Iranian surface-to-air missiles and radars, paving the way for the destruction of command and nuclear facilities worth tens of billions of dollars. In each, the tactical became the strategic through new operational concepts that leveraged the new math of new technologies.

Now contrast this with our own approaches, which overwhelmingly rely on sophisticated but costly overmatch. The most lauded U.S. operation of 2025 was Operation Midnight Hammer, our followup to Rising Lion. One estimate put its cost at $196 million, from combining B-2 bomber’s nearly $160,000 per flight hour and Tomahawk missiles' rough price of $1.87 million apiece. (It does not count the initial purchase of the seven B-2 Bombers that cost $2.1 billion each, nor the $4.3 billion submarine that launched the missiles.) Perhaps it was worth spending one-fifth of a billion dollars to damage Iranian nuclear facilities, but the numbers in Operation Rough Rider—the strikes against the Houthis last spring—illustrate the problem more starkly. The Pentagon spent roughly $5 billion on munitions and operating costs to stop attacks on Red Sea shipping, which simply started back up this month.

The same awful arithmetic haunts the current operations in the Caribbean against the Venezuela-based, government-connected Cartel de los Soles. The entity was recently designated by the Trump administration as a foreign terrorist organization, as part of its argument that US forces are engaged in an “armed conflict.” The cartel was declared by the Department of Justice to be the hub of a cocaine transport network, shipping a reported street value of between $6.25 billion and $8.75 billion in drugs (the cartel gets an unknown, but clearly lesser, percentage of that overall value in actual profit). To battle this foe, the United States has assembled a fleet that cost at least $40 billion to buy in total. The carrier Ford alone cost $4.7 billion to develop and $12.9 billion to build. The fleet is backed by at least 83 aircraft of assorted types, including 10 F-35Bs ($109 million apiece), seven Predator drones ($33 million each), three P-8 Poseidons ($145 million per), and at least one AC-130J gunship ($165 million). To be sure, all of these assets will continue to serve long after Operation Southern Spear is wound down, but this is how we are using the investment. But the current cost of operations and expendables hardly tells a better story. The Ford alone costs about $8 million a day to run. The F-35s and AC-130J cost about $40,000 per flight hour; the P-8s, about $30,000; the Reapers, about $3,500. Analysis of the strike videos on the 21 boats show that U.S. forces have fired AGM-176 Griffins ($127,333 apiece in 2019), Hellfires (running about $150,000 to $220,000) and potentially GBU-39B Small Diameter Bombs ($40,000). In some cases, they are reportedly firing four munitions per strike: “twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it.”

All this is arrayed to sink motorboats, 21 at last report. One of the boats was described by Pentagon officials as a 39-foot Flipper-type vessel with four 200-horsepower engines. New ones go for about $400,000 on Boats.com, but the old, open top motorbots in the videos are obviously well below that in cost. Their crews have been reported as making $500 per trip. Put in comparison, the cost of the US naval fleet deployed is at least five times what the cartel makes in smuggling. The air fleet deployed costs at least another two times more. It is roughly 5,000 times the cost of the suspected drug boats that have been destroyed. Indeed, just the cost of operating the Ford off Venezuela for a single day has still not yet equaled the maximum cost the cartel paid for the boats it has lost.

dang, almost as if drugs have absolutely nothing to do with any of this, and these forces are actually arrayed there to threaten Venezuela!

In the air, the U.S. military spent roughly 66,000 times more to buy each unmanned drone in the operation than the cartel paid each man that the unmanned drones killed. The US spent between 80 to 300 times more for each bomb or missile it has used than the cartel paid each man killed by those bombs or missiles.

The math is arguably even worse when we're on the defense. In September, a wave of 19 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace.. The Gerbera-type drones cost as little as $10,000—so cheap that they are often used as decoys to misdirect and overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. NATO countered with a half-billion-dollar response force of F-35s, F-16s, AWACS radar planes, and helicopters, which shot down four of the drones with $1.6-million AMRAAM missiles. This is a bargain compared to how challenging U.S. forces have found it to defend against Houthi forces using this same cheap tech. Our naval forces have fired a reported 120 SM-2, 80 SM-6, and 20 SM-3 missiles, costing about $2.1 million, $3.9 million, and over $9.6 million each. And this is to defend against a group operating out of the 187th-largest economy in the world, able to fire mere hundreds of drones and missiles. Our supposed pacing challenge, China, has an economy that will soon be the largest in the world and a combined national industrial and military acquisition plan to be able to fire munitions by the millions.

Even in America’s best-laid plans for future battlefields, there is a harsh reality that is too often ignored. The math of current battlefields remains literally orders of magnitude beyond what our budget plans to spend, our industry plans to build, our acquisitions system is able to contract, and thus what our military will deploy. As a point of comparison, Ukraine is on pace to build, buy, and use over four million drones this year. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, aims to acquire 50,000 drones next year—about 1.25 percent of the Ukrainian total. In its most optimistic plans, it hopes to be able to acquire 1 million drones “within the next two to three years.” ​​When you spend orders of magnitude more than your foe, you are in what is known as a “losing equation.” And if we don’t change this math, we will need an update to Norm Augustine’s infamous “law” of defense acquisitions. Back in 1979, Augustine calculated that if the Pentagon couldn’t curtail the cost curve of its purchasing, by 2054 we wouldn’t be able to afford a single plane. The 2025 version is that if we don't master the new math of the battlefield, we won’t be able to afford to win a single battle.