Tervell

Army officials “did not effectively manage FP module COSIS [Care of Supplies in Storage] maintenance and storage requirements,” concluded the heavily redacted report. In particular, auditors faulted the Integrated Logistics Support Center at the Army’s Tank-Automotive & Armaments Command, or TACOM ILSC, for not adequately managing or training contractors who were supposed to maintain the modules.

The issue appears to have begun in 2016,

when the Army awarded a $23.8 million contract to an unidentified company to maintain the Force Provider modules. In 2020, the Army transferred responsibility for maintaining the modules to another entity, but “did not specifically add maintenance requirements for FP modules until April 2024,” the DOD IG said. Troops in the field began complaining about broken equipment. For example, in 2022, units reported that they received Force Provider containers with ripped tents and inoperable generators, laundry equipment and showers, according to the report. “Had [name redacted] separately accounted for those items that require maintenance and required the contractor to perform maintenance at the appropriate intervals, the defective equipment would have been identified before issuance,” auditors said. One issue may have been confusion over requirements for inspecting equipment stored outdoors versus indoors. For example, during a training event in June 2024, TACOM’s Integrated Logistics Support Center “instructed [redacted] officials to protect FP modules and add-on kits from the open storage environmental elements by keeping the FP containers at least 6 to 8 inches above the desert ground,” the report said. However, the actual maintenance plan did not include “any requirements to protect FP modules from outdoor elements.”

TACOM also failed to ensure that contractors were adequately trained to maintain stockpiles. Containers need to be opened carefully to avoid degrading the equipment inside, yet the “FP maintenance training requirement is not documented to ensure storage site personnel are aware of the need for the required TACOM ILSC training” to properly preserve FP modules before opening the containers, the DOD IG found. Meanwhile, with a new contractor now becoming responsible for maintaining the modules, auditors worry that qualified personnel could be rotated out before new personnel are trained. Compounding the problem is that different types of equipment require different levels of maintenance. Yet the audit revealed that contractors did not separately account for items such as skid steers — which require regular maintenance — under requirements set by the Global Combat Support System-Army, or GCSS-A, logistics management system. Thus, “for more than four years, officials did not properly account for FP module components that require maintenance,” including generators and skid steers. The reason was that “TACOM ILSC officials instructed [redacted] to account for all components that comprise a FP module or add-on kit as one line item.” Failing to account for individual items in GCSS-A can have grave consequences when equipment is needed. For instance, the report notes, Army personnel needed fully mission-capable ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Army G-4 officials. Yet, the Army lacked visibility of its ventilator inventory because some were included in medical kits and “not accounted for separately in GCSS-Army,” according to the report.

The DOD IG audit recommended that TACOM’s Integrated Logistics Support Center update the 2011 Force Provider Care of Supplies in Storage plan, including “environmental storage and maintenance requirements specific to outdoor storage yards, providing definitive maintenance intervals and ensuring inclusion of all Force Provider module components and add-on kits.” In addition, the plan should also specify ILSC’s responsibilities to conduct training in Force Provider module maintenance.

Lockheed Martin is in “very active” conversations with the Pentagon about the concept of a fifth-generation-plus F-35 that would include some of the technologies the company has developed for its sixth-generation fighter concepts, Lockheed’s chief executive said today. “There’s a very active engagement at an extremely high level with the Department of Defense, and I expect it’ll be taken to the White House sometime soon, hopefully, to consider this kind of concept,” Jim Taiclet told investors at the Morgan Stanley conference. “We’ve gotten encouraging feedback. … There’s significant interest in the government about discussing aircraft modernization writ large, all the way up to the administration level, the White House level, and we’re in the middle of that with them, and we’re getting heard. We’re hearing back, and it’s pretty active.”

Taiclet first announced what he then called a “Ferrari” version of the F-35 in April, just weeks after Lockheed lost out on the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) contract that went to Boeing’s F-47. At the time, he said that the company could take tech developed for NGAD and incorporate it on the F-35, giving the stealth jet “80 percent of six-gen capability at half the price.” The Lockheed CEO repeated that talking point today, though he noted that there is no contract inked for this souped-up version of the F-35. And, even if one is eventually signed, it may not be apparent to investors, he warned. “The way to contract this will probably not be visible to folks, because it will have so much classified content that it may not be disclosable, but I’m really quite confident that this concept has great merit,” he said. “We can provide value at that level, at that scale, by integrating sixth-generation technology, digital and physical, into our aircraft we’re already building.”

Of the about 2,300 F-35s yet to be delivered to the jet’s customer base, Taiclet estimated that anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 aircraft could be delivered as the “fifth-gen plus” version, even if export restrictions prohibit international buyers from being able to purchase that configuration. Upgrades for those jets could include new weapons, an improved stealth coating and potentially a more advanced engine, he said. The White House, Defense Department and F-35 Joint Program Office did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

While no senior defense or F-35 JPO officials have commented publicly on Lockheed’s fifth-gen plus F-35 pitch, President Donald Trump in May shocked aviation geeks everywhere when he expressed interest in an upgraded, twin engine version of the F-35. “We’re going to do an F-55, and I think — if we get the right price, we have to get the right price — that’ll be two engines and a super upgrade on the F-35,” he said during a business roundtable in Doha. At the time, Lockheed thanked Trump for his support of the F-35 program and said it would “continue to work closely with the Administration to realize its vision for air dominance.” Neither Taiclet nor any Lockheed F-35 program official has ever referenced the F-55 in subsequent comments, and several aerospace experts told Breaking Defense that turning the F-35 into a twin engine strained credulity.

folks, you've heard of the F-35, great plane, amazing plane, but we're doing, we're doing now, the F-55, even better, even more plane - it used to be 35, now it's 55 - many people are saying it will the best plane in the history of planes

Meanwhile, the schedule for the F-35’s ongoing modernization effort, known as Block 4, continues to be beset with delays. The Defense Department now expects Block 4 modernization to be complete in 2031 — five years later than the original schedule — even as the scope of the upgrade effort is reduced to include fewer capabilities, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office released last week.

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.

• Chosun Ilbo (flagship conservative): Scathing language calling this a "merciless arrest operation" that represents something "that cannot happen between allies" and a "breach of trust." Notes Trump personally thanked Hyundai's chairman just months ago. Chosun calls the situation "bewildering" and emphasises the contradiction: Trump pressures Korean companies to invest while simultaneously arresting their workers. The editorial questions whether American investment promises survive across different administrations.
• Dong-A Ilbo (conservative): Delivers perhaps the most damning question in its headline: "How are we supposed to build factories?" while noting Korea was "specifically targeted" and describing this as "shocking" behaviour between allies. Dong-A asks "who would invest" under these conditions when Korean workers are treated like a "criminal group." Notes this threatens 17,000+ jobs already created by Korean companies in Georgia. "The Korean government must demand a pledge from the US to prevent recurrence."
• JoongAng Ilbo (conservative): Calls this an incident that "shook the values and trust of the ROK-US alliance" occurring at the very "site of economic alliance." Describes public being "appalled" at seeing Koreans dragged away in chains and cable ties. JoongAng characterises this as a "show-off style crackdown targeting an allied nation" and "an act that undermines the credibility of the alliance." Suggests this may have been Trump's political theatre ahead of midterm elections.
• Korea Economic Daily (business): Headlines this as an "absurd arrest of Koreans" incident. "It is hard to understand in terms of common sense why quotas for visas are given to Australia, Singapore and Chile, but not a single visa to Korea." KED notes that "this incident is a significant blow to the ROK-US economic alliance," warning that if this is used as "leverage" in trade negotiations, "it would be a behaviour of betraying the trust of the alliance."
• Maeil Business Newspaper: Uses headline: "When they told us to build factories, that was one thing... US arrests 300 Korean workers." Calls situation "shocking" and "absurd", notes you cannot supervise trillion-won investments without Korean personnel. Maeil states that it's "ridiculous that they would go after a company that has made a deliberate decision to invest in the US," ending with a simple but blunt message: "an alliance requires courtesy."
• Seoul Economic Daily (business): Calls this "shocking". "Our citizens' rights must never be violated again," describes the arrest footage as "horrifying". Uses particularly strong language, that the Korean workers were treated like "prisoners of war." "While we do not understand the political motivations of the far-right Republicans in the US in this reckless crackdown, it is also painful to see how our diplomacy failed to recognise a massive operation that had been planned for months."
• Hankook Ilbo (centrist-conservative): Korean companies "ended up looking like they got hit from behind," warns this threatens "trust between allies" and calls for fundamental visa system reform.
• Kyunghyang Shinmun (liberal): Calls this "what kind of bolt from the blue incident is this?" and "deeply regrettable" while criticising "treating them like criminals." Questions whether rational businesses would invest in a country behaving this way.
• Hankyoreh (progressive): Most direct in questioning alliance fundamentals with headline "Is this what you do to an ally?". Describes Koreans feeling "backstabbed" after the Lee-Trump meeting at the White House and accuses US of "duplicitous behaviour."

My 2 cents: In Korea, public humiliation isn't just personal embarrassment, it's an attack on dignity that reverberates through society. The fact that the workers were filmed being shackled and footage was deliberately released by ICE makes it worse. Korea has deep historical memory of being humiliated by foreign powers and the visuals of Koreans in chains being paraded by a foreign power triggers collective memories of subjugation that go beyond this just being "unfair". This is public humiliation of the nation itself.

https://xcancel.com/MarioNawfal/status/1965341910769307686

SOUTH KOREA DISPATCHES PLANE TO BRING BACK WORKERS SEIZED IN U.S. RAID

South Korea is sending a chartered Korean Air Boeing 747 from Incheon to Atlanta to repatriate hundreds of its nationals detained in the U.S. immigration raid on a $4.3 billion Hyundai–LG battery plant in Georgia. About 300 South Koreans were among the 475 arrested in what U.S. officials called the largest-ever single-site enforcement operation. Foreign Minister Cho Hyun is in Washington pressing for assurances that those workers will be allowed re-entry. The raid has rattled Seoul as it finalizes a trade deal with Washington.

https://xcancel.com/kimchipump/status/1965384315749249441

Korea has only ever dispatched flights to repatriate its citizens from failing states. This is the first time I’ve seen it happen in a developed nation...

https://xcancel.com/kimchipump/status/1965008542072492400

Due to U.S. immigration crackdowns at a Georgia battery plant, Korean companies are withdrawing their workers from the 22 construction sites across the country to avoid similar raids. The issue is compounded by the fact that the U.S. lacks a sufficient number of skilled workers with the capacity to handle these highly specialized jobs at the construction sites