The comments come days after General Electric Aerospace’s statement that the company would need more money to wrap up qualification testing for the Improved Turbine Engine Program (ITEP) in the next 12-18 months. “I’ll say this in general about programs out there, the Army wants to burden share with the developers, right? It shouldn’t be the Army always putting all the upfront money,” Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, program acquisition executive for Maneuver Air, told reporters Thursday following a question about General Electric’s comments. He added that Army leadership has been “pretty intent” on making sure companies are coming to the table with funding to “share the cost with us” for testing and development. “We don’t want to do all the development, we want to do the procurement. We want to buy it for the long term, so that that’s where we’re going back to the manufacturers and having negotiations about, how do we best position the development so that it’s not all on the government. But also… we understand that [the manufacturers] have to see that there is a production line so that they can make a profit in the future,” said Gill, who is dual-hatted as the commanding general of the Army Aviation Center of Excellence.

ITEP has faced several delays over the years as the Army has adjusted its priorities for its aviation fleet. The service reportedly came close to cancelling the program in line with the Army Transformation Initiative. Further, funding for the program was zeroed out in the Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 budget request. This happened in the FY26 budget request as well, but lawmakers ultimately pushed back, providing the service with $175 million in FY26 funding and $63 million in reconciliation money. With the previously allocated funding, the Army and General Electric have been able to make significant progress in completing qualification testing, Brig. Gen. David Phillips, deputy PAE of Maneuver Air, told Breaking Defense last month. Tom Champion, executive program director for T901 at General Electric, told reporters earlier this week that the company has delivered six flight test engines to the Army at this point and will continue to deliver more. He added that the company has invested around $500 million in the testing and development of the engine, and in the last two years, the company has invested over $600 million in its factory sites related to its defense engine business. When Breaking Defense inquired about Gill’s comments, a spokesperson from General Electric pointed to Champion’s previous comments on investment figures, but declined to comment on any plans for future investments.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week instructed department leaders to terminate most of the department’s collective-bargaining agreements, more than a year after President Trump signed an executive order banning federal employee unions from many agencies on national-security grounds. In an April 9 memo obtained by Government Executive, Hegseth gave his deputies 24 hours to take action to cancel most union contracts. “I hereby direct the termination of all collective bargaining agreements to which the department is a party, not subject to a court order enjoining implementation to which the department is a party, not subject to a court order enjoining implementation of Executive Order 14251, ‘Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs,’ within 24 hours of the date of this memorandum, except as applied to the population covered by the [April 2025] secretary of defense certification . . . and the local employing offices of any agency police officers, security guards or firefighters, pursuant to EO 14251,” the secretary wrote last week. “This action is required to align agency operations with national security requirements as outlined in EO 14251.”

A year ago, Hegseth exempted bargaining units of Federal Wage System workers at four installations: the Letterkenny Munition Center in Pennsylvania, the Air Force Test Center in California, the Air Force Sustainment Center in Oklahoma, and the Fleet Readiness Center Southeast in Florida. Spared from the new memo are the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the Federal Education Association, which last fall secured preliminary injunctions blocking implementation of the executive order. The order cites a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act as authority to strip two-thirds of the federal workforce of their collective-bargaining rights on national-security grounds. Not so for AFGE, the nation’s largest federal-employee union. In a statement Wednesday, National President Everett Kelley decried Hegseth’s decision as “cowardly.” “For 50 years, these employees have exercised their union rights; under several administrations, during a global pandemic and throughout peacetime and wartime, including our most recent conflict with Iran,” he said. “To rip up the union contracts of civilian employees after touting a successful ceasefire in the Middle East is not only a slap in the face to the employees who supported those efforts, but again proves that this action has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with silencing workers’ voices.”

The MQ-9 Reaper, a staple for the U.S. since the turn of the 21st century, has remained a go-to asset for the military, even as recently as the war with Iran. But over the last few years, the U.S. has lost at least 35 Reaper drones — at least 16 were downed over Iran, 7 were shot by the Houthis in Yemen in Spring 2025, and 12 from other aircraft accidents recorded by the Air Force. Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Houston Cantwell, who spent two years overseeing a unit of drone pilots out of Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, and two years training future drone pilots at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, said the impact on the Air Force’s Reaper fleet is “a big deal.” “That is a significant percentage of the fleet, and there is no other aircraft that is positioned and ready to assume the responsibilities that the MQ-9 has across multiple combatant commands,” Cantwell said. “And right now, there’s no plan to backfill all these aircraft being shot down.”

According to Air Force accident reports going back to 2021, 12 Reapers have been lost to non-combat accidents. Investigators have linked the causes of those accidents to mechanical failures — like one where an aircraft propeller came off mid-flight over the Mediterranean Sea in 2024 — and others to mistakes by pilots. General Atomics built 575 Reapers for the U.S. over the program’s lifetime, according to the company. The MQ-9A is flown by the Air Force, Marine Corps, Air National Guard, and the Department of Homeland Security. As of September 2024, the Air Force had 230 Reapers, the lion’s share of the U.S. military’s Reaper fleet. Air Force officials referred Task & Purpose questions about Reaper combat losses over Iran to U.S. Central Command, which declined to comment. “Each mission provides an opportunity to learn, and we incorporate that feedback continuously,” according to Mark Brinkley, a General Atomics spokesman. “All aircraft are vulnerable, such is the nature of flight, but Reaper opens up a series of options unlike anything else in the arsenal.” The dollar value of each Reaper is hard to pin down. A Congressional Research Service report estimated each aircraft at $28 million. An Air Force press release from 2020 announcing a contract with General Atomics estimated that each Reaper costs around $16 million, a price the company confirmed to Task & Purpose. Air Force accident reports cited Reaper losses costing between $13 million to $26 million, but many aircraft were valued at around $16 million. Based on those ranges, Reaper losses in recent combat have cost the U.S. anywhere from $300 million to just under $600 million.

Risking drones rather than manned aircraft

The MQ-9’s ability to fly continuously for over 24 hours and carry multiple payloads is unmatched by any other single system — two major capabilities that have kept the relatively large drones relevant amid the exploding market of small drones, Air Force reconnaissance experts told Task & Purpose. During operations against Iran, Reapers appeared to film U.S. strikes on Iranian aircraft, drones and missile launchers and may have even been tasked overhead during the recovery of a downed F-15E pilot. The Air Force has also signaled a continued interest in the platform, reactivating dedicated Reaper units in the U.S. and overseas. The U.S. still finds occasion to turn to the MQ-9s over human pilots because of the safety and cost considerations, said Cantwell, who noted that flying fighter jets costs between $5,000 to $40,000 an hour and is a “logistical nightmare” with air tankers and coordination. As the U.S. learned in early April after two F-15 fighter jets were shot down over Iran, rescue missions can also be incredibly risky and involve a lot of moving parts. President Donald Trump told reporters that the daring mission involved 68 fighters, 48 aerial tankers, 13 rescue aircraft, and four bombers. During the rescue operation, the U.S. lost two U.S. Special Operations MC-130J aircraft, each totaling over $100 million. The downed F-15E cost more than $31 million (based on 1998 prices). “Have these robot planes get shot down. I’d much rather have that than having, according to the president, 100 aircraft take off to go rescue one pilot. We can’t do that every day,” said Cantwell, now a senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “Send in the MQ-9s every day, twice on Sunday.”

Future of the fleet

The aircraft lost in combat and accidents in recent years come after the Air Force ended production of the MQ-9A in 2020. Air Force officials cited shifting priorities for combatting near-peer adversaries, like Russia and China, which took General Atomics officials by surprise. The company has since developed a new version, the MQ-9Bs, nicknamed “SkyGuardians,” which cost roughly $30 million apiece and have upgrades for flying in all types of weather, detection and avoidance capabilities, anti-collision warnings, and can carry bigger payloads. MQ-9Bs have been purchased by Air Force Special Operations Command and the Department of Homeland Security, but “no individual military service has announced any production contracts for MQ-9Bs,” General Atomics officials said. General Atomics sells self-protection pods for the MQ-9, which the company purports can mitigate against surface-to-air threats and infrared and radio frequency threats. Cantwell said these options include flares to decoy infrared missiles, chaff or pieces of aluminum that deflect radar tracking, and electronic emitters to jam and deceive enemy radars. “Until now, no one has ever felt that it was worth the investment, so we’ll see if that changes after this conflict,” Cantwell said.

The Trump administration is proposing a major overhaul of how the federal government decides which workers to lay off when eliminating jobs. For veterans, the new rule would prioritize performance reviews over both veteran status and years of service when agencies determine which workers to cut. The rule, according to one advocate for disabled veterans, could reduce protections for military veterans who hold federal jobs. ”In practice, the rule authorizes the displacement of a preference-eligible veteran with substantially greater tenure and length of service by a non-veteran based on minimal rating differentials, an outcome fundamentally at odds with the statutory scheme Congress enacted,” Scott Hope, national service director for Disabled American Veterans, wrote in a public comment submitted to the federal register on the rule Monday. Reducing the size of the federal workforce through layoffs and changes in hiring has been a central goal of the Trump administration, a goal that veteran advocates have worried would land hard on the shoulders of vets. More than 621,700 veterans were employed at federal agencies in 2024, making up about 27% of the workforce, according to the Office of Personnel and Management, or OPM. More than half are disabled veterans. In the March 5 proposed rule, published in the Federal Register, the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, which oversees nearly every civilian job in the federal government, said it planned to change the ranking system used during major layoffs. The new rule would not impact the initial hiring process for federal jobs.

Under current rules, when federal agencies cut large numbers of jobs, they retain employees based on several factors in the following order of importance: the administrative category of the job (known as the tenure group); veterans preference group (if an employee falls under one); total time an employee has worked in federal service (including time in the military); and then performance reviews. The proposed rule would reorder the weight of those criteria and make performance reviews “a more significant factor.” Both veteran status and length of service — which benefits many veterans due to military time — would be deprioritized. OPM officials argued in the notice that since current rules prioritize tenure over merit, “high-performing employees may be separated while lower-performing, but more senior employees, may be retained in a RIF.”

Veterans groups reviewing changes

Federal hiring preferences for veterans date back to 1865, for wounded veterans coming home after the Civil War. The 1944 Veterans Preference Act gave veterans an advantage in the federal hiring process and safeguards against reductions in force. There are some exceptions, however. It does not apply to federal job promotions, transfers, reassignments and reinstatements, nor does it apply to certain senior or executive branch positions. Officials with Disabled American Veterans, DAV, and Veterans of Foreign Wars, VFW, said they are concerned that the rule could remove “long-standing” veterans’ preference rules. VFW Executive Director Ryan Gallucci told Task & Purpose they are still reviewing the proposed rule and intend to comment and work with OPM “to ensure veterans continue to receive all the employment protections to which they are entitled to.” Officials with the American Legion said in a statement that they are “carefully reviewing” the proposed rule, adding that veterans bring “highly sought after skills” to the federal workforce. An OPM official told Task & Purpose that “the framing that the rule gives less weight to veterans preference is not true,” and that the proposed rule puts performance as a primary factor, “but veterans preference is a strong secondary factor.” The proposed rule comes after a year of mass federal layoffs and buyouts under the Trump administration. More than 348,200 workers quit, retired, were laid off, or otherwise left federal employment in 2025, a jump of more than 80% from 2024, according to Pew Research analysis. As the layoffs grew, OPM stopped providing information on gender, race, ethnicity or disability status of federal workers, although the office had those stats when Pew did its analysis in January 2025. Public comments on the Federal Register close on May 5.