Ukraine’s air-defense vulnerabilities are becoming critical, and a shortage of Patriot interceptors isn’t the only problem. F-16 fighter jets are the best way to counter Russia’s new jet-powered drones that are now pounding Ukrainian civilians night and often day. But Ukraine relies on Western help to maintain its fighter-jet fleet, and delays have left most of its F-16 fleet out of commission. So far this month Russia has launched about 2,000 jet-powered drones at Ukraine, compared to some 350 in June. These new drones fly up to 375 miles an hour—too fast for the interceptor drones Ukraine has used to counter earlier Shahed models. Ukraine intercepts 55% of Russia’s jet drones, compared to more than 90% of older Shaheds. Yet jet drones are the kind of target F-16s excel at taking down, and at a typical cost of $25,000 or less. Ukraine’s F-16 aces have shot down some 2,500 drones of all types and some 650 cruise missiles. But after 300 hours of flying time, F-16s require what’s known as “phase inspection” to keep the engine, avionics, hydraulics, fuel lines and other systems in working order.

The U.S. awarded Sabena Aerospace Engineering, a Belgian company, a contract of up to some $235.5 million for maintenance of Ukraine’s F-16s, though subcontractors perform some of the work. Phase inspection generally takes two to six weeks in the U.S., but it’s “taking as long as 40 weeks in Belgium,” says retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery. Another Western source tells us that more than half of Ukraine’s F-16s are currently in maintenance limbo, and at the current pace of use and maintenance Kyiv will exhaust the rest by the end of the year. A Ukrainian air force spokesman declined to comment. Sabena declined to respond to our specific questions, citing “operational security considerations and the sensitive nature of ongoing military support activities.” Fighter jets deployed in combat can require more upkeep than those flown in peacetime, and a shortage of specific components may also contribute to delays. But whatever the cause, this is “a sustainment failure that is becoming an air-defense crisis,” says retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula. President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday that Belgium would transfer three F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine by the end of 2026, and other Western partners could lend more. It’s worth looking at how Ukraine can do more maintenance in-country and whether facilities in Romania can shoulder some of the upkeep.

Ukraine is testing alternatives to intercept jet drones, but they will take months to implement at scale. Meantime, “unless Ukraine gets the ability to kill jet-powered drones and cruise missiles, its very limited remaining air defense missiles will be exhausted,” says Yuriy Sak, a former adviser to Ukraine’s Defense and Strategic Industries ministries. Cities and civilians are getting pummeled, and so is energy infrastructure ahead of winter. Ukraine’s defense-industrial base is also vulnerable. There’s a warning here for the U.S. The Government Accountability Office warned this spring of growing delays for maintenance for American military aircraft. Lt. Gen. Linda Hurry said this month that the U.S. Air Force has “a $14 billion hole in supply” for aircraft parts, according to Defense News. Ukraine’s air-defense emergency illustrates how maintenance capacity is combat power in a war.

well, good thing the US didn't just run a whole bunch of airframes ragged against Iran!

The U.S. Navy’s schedule for getting USS Connecticut, one of its prized Seawolf class nuclear attack submarines, back into service has slipped into next summer. The boat suffered severe damage, especially to its bow, in a collision with an underwater seamount in the South China Sea in 2021. The service had previously hoped that repairs would be finished before the end of this year, and planning is also now underway for the submarine’s retirement in 2031. This would mean it could serve for just four years before being pulled from service once and for all. “USS Connecticut (SSN 22) is currently undergoing a complex Extended Docking Selected Restricted Availability (EDSRA) at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard & Intermediate Maintenance Facility. Current work consists of structural and systems restoration and required lifecycle maintenance,” a Navy official told TWZ today. “The Navy’s target completion date for the availability is the summer of 2027. PSNS & IMF is dedicated to executing this work with the highest standards of safety, technical accuracy, and craftsmanship to ensure the ship returns to the fleet ready to take its place at the tip of the spear in defense of our nation’s interests.”

USS Connecticut is the second of just three Seawolf class submarines commissioned between 1997 and 2005, the others being USS Seawolf and USS Jimmy Carter. The Jimmy Carter, which came last, is a one-of-a-kind subvariant of the design that is optimized for underwater espionage missions. However, the Seawolf and Connecticut also feature advanced capabilities compared to other submarines in the Navy’s inventory today, and the service utilizes all three for a variety of specialized tasks, for which they are in very high demand. After USS Connecticut hit the seamount in October 2021, the submarine first limped to Guam, and then made its way to San Diego in southern California. From there, it headed north to the Puget Sound area, where it has been ever since. The Navy’s investigation into the incident put heavy emphasis on how a weak command environment and lax attitudes toward the performance of key tasks had put the submarine on a path to the accident, as you can read more about in detail here. The EDSRA formally began in February 2023. At that time, the Navy projected that the repairs would be completed in September 2025. By July 2023, the schedule had already shifted to early 2026, according to Naval News. In July 2025, the service confirmed to TWZ that the timeline had moved again to the right, to late 2026.

windows loading bar ass repair project

The exact reasons for the delays are unclear. TWZ has stressed the particular complexities of major repairs to any of the Navy’s trio of Seawolf class submarines in our past reporting on Connecticut. As we wrote in 2023 around the start of the EDSRA:

“As for the USS Connecticut, as the images show, her state remains relatively the same, at least in terms of what is visible, compared to when she arrived over a year and a half ago. Her sonar dome is still missing and, clearly, the boat has been idle for some time, with huge sections of its anechoic coating missing from its sail.”

“Major repairs to the submarine’s bow, sonar, and other underside structure components will be challenging as the Seawolf class is long out of production. On top of that, just three boats were ever built, with one being a heavily modified sub-type in its own right, the highly secretive USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23). In the past, similar damage has been fixed by leveraging spare parts and entire sections of decommissioned submarines of the same class. That simply is not an option in this case.”

The Navy’s 2025 Fiscal Year budget proposal highlighted exactly these broader issues in seeking funds for spare bow domes “for use in the event replacement is required,” separate from the incident with the USS Connecticut. The original sustainment strategy for the Seawolf class did not include these items, which have a “three plus year lead time” to produce. With the EDRSA, the Navy is also taking the opportunity to conduct a deep overhaul of USS Connecticut, which could include the integration of various upgrades. The Navy’s budget documents have long highlighted efforts to modernize key systems on all three Seawolf class submarines, some of which were first designed in the 1970s. How much the repairs and accompanying overhaul will cost is also not clear. In 2021, Congress approved $40 million for “emergency repairs” for Connecticut and an additional $10 million for a new bow dome, but the full price tag is expected to be far steeper. The Seawolf class submarines were extremely expensive to procure in the first place, costing approximately $3.1 billion apiece in 1983, or some $10.6 billion in 2026 dollars. This was due in large part to the truncated order, from 29 down to three, as a result of post-Cold War drawdowns. Depending on when repairs to the USS Connecticut are actually finished, the Navy could find itself for at least a time with just one Seawolf class submarine in active service. USS Seawolf is currently scheduled to start a routine maintenance availability next May, which will then run through February 2030, per Navy budget documents. As mentioned, the Navy is now also planning to inactivate USS Connecticut in 2031, making it the first Seawolf class submarine to be retired, per its most recent annual shipbuilding plan.

The service still has plans to acquire a new class of attack submarines, which has been discussed in the past as something closer to a true successor to the Seawolf class than the Virginia class boats being procured now. However, these new submarines, currently referred to as SSN(X), are not expected to arrive until the mid-2040s at the earliest. Between now and then, the Navy is set to acquire a one-of-a-kind seabed warfare version of the Virginia, which could well take over for the USS Jimmy Carter, as you can read more about here. In August, the service announced that stretched Block IV and V Virginia class submarines with Virginia Payload Modules (VPM) will now be categorized as guided-missile types (SSGN), as well. When it comes to USS Connecticut, the Navy remains committed to getting the highly capable submarine back to the fleet after being sidelined for nearly five years now. At the same time, the boat has now already entered the twilight of its career, with just four years of active service life left if the current repair schedule holds.

A Tucson, Ariz., factory run by defense giant RTX is working around the clock to increase production of Tomahawk and other missiles in short supply for U.S. operations against Iran. Lockheed Martin is adding hundreds of workers in Arkansas to triple its output of much-needed Patriot interceptors. Subcontractors including Boeing, L3Harris and Northrop Grumman have broken ground on new assembly lines to meet soaring demand for electronics, rocket motors and other components needed for the weapons. Defense contractors are spending billions to build factories and increase production to stock America’s nearly bare cupboard of highly engineered missiles. But those efforts haven’t translated into real gains yet, leaving the U.S. and allies with depleted stocks of important weapons while it fights Iran. Most of the new missiles will arrive too late for any conflict in the next couple of years. “Ministers of defense have fat wallets—they walk into the shops and there are empty shelves,” said retired Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, the top military officer at NATO until last year. “They are frustrated.”

A host of factors are driving the frustration—and raising national security concerns. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, government officials and weapons suppliers pledged to create a surge in production, but supply didn’t keep up with demand. Since then, Washington officials have been reluctant to place the big orders needed to justify investments in new production lines until recently. President Trump and European defense ministers have said that companies need to pick up the production pace. Capital expenditures as a percentage of revenue barely budged between last year and 2021 at Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and other large U.S. defense companies. Their 2026 spending forecasts are higher—but order backlogs are growing at a much faster rate. Between 1999 and 2025, missiles and munitions accounted for an annual average of 7.5% of the Pentagon’s procurement and research budget, according to Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank. That compares with 23% for aircraft and 10% for shipbuilding. That share for munitions is set to roughly double to an average of 14% between 2028 and 2031, Harrison calculated. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the department’s pending budget request to Congress is designed to aggressively increase munitions stockpiles. “Since Deputy Secretary [Steve] Feinberg arrived at the Department of War, strengthening our munitions capabilities and revolutionizing the antiquated acquisition process has been his top priority,” Parnell said. The Pentagon declined to comment on the AEI findings.

Quiet factory

In the wake of the Ukraine war, the Army Science Board—an advisory panel—conducted a study on the defense industry’s ability to increase munitions production. The board found an industrial base that had been hollowed out. “It’s a miracle that we have anything that blows up,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, a member of the panel coordinating the study. Despite being around since the 1980s, the Tomahawk remains the long-range cruise missile of choice for the U.S. and many of its allies. But Pentagon missile orders for the Tucson factory dipped so low in recent years that further cuts risked shutting down the Tomahawk line. Contracts to retrofit old missiles with new navigation systems helped keep the factory busy. The Navy in August issued a $23 billion order spanning seven years for new Tomahawk missiles. Even that request, after more than a year of negotiations, needs full congressional appropriations to turn into a final contract. An RTX spokesman said the contractor will continue investing to reach its long-term target of producing more than 1,000 Tomahawks annually. It is on track to make more than 400 this year, according to a person familiar with the matter. The U.S. fired more than 1,000 Tomahawk missiles in two months in its war with Iran, The Wall Street Journal has reported. American armed forces have used about one-third of their pre-Iran war Tomahawk inventory and roughly half of their high-end Patriot interceptors, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank.

New boom time

Thanks to long-term government contracts, it is now boom time across the roughly 1 square mile of factories, warehouses and offices that occupy a part of Tucson’s main airport. RTX said it has pumped about $900 million into the Tucson plant and two other factories over the past three years. And this year, the Pentagon has awarded billions of dollars worth of new contracts for the Tucson factory’s components and missiles that have all been in action in Ukraine and Iran. Surrounded by desert and a mountain range, no other RTX location is hiring more, with around 670 positions in Tucson advertised on its website. The listed roles include electrical engineers, explosive experts, chemists and software specialists. Critical positions have been hard to fill in Tucson, the company has said. RTX has also struggled with getting raw materials, saying in June that supply-chain disruptions have affected access to the rare earth elements, microelectronics and other critical components to missile production. Contractors are often limited by their own weapons designs. Sophisticated munitions like the Tomahawk hold thousands of parts, and move through factories that look more like small workshops than automated production lines.

military artisanal complex

New equipment aimed at jump-starting production is set to come on line. One robotic machine, the largest of its kind RTX says it has built, puts missile pieces through a battery of tests against heat, cold and other extreme conditions. The machine, which sits behind a chain-link enclosure around the length of a basketball court, should test missile parts 30% faster than manual methods, RTX said. The gap between munitions production and their battlefield use isn’t lost on U.S. officials as the conflict in Iran continues. “Across our weapons industrial base, this is absolutely a challenge,” Rear Admiral Ben Reynolds, the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for budget, said in April. “We need and expect Raytheon to invest very, very heavily now to be able to ramp up production,” he said, referring to the RTX division that makes the Tomahawk.

Brig. Gen. Timothy Helfrich, the portfolio acquisition executive for fighters and advanced aircraft, said the program is ready for production, but advancing to that next stage requires a new budget. “You can’t go do production without production funding,” he said during a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies appearance. “So that does provide limitations on what we can execute.” CCAs are the semi-autonomous drone fighters the Air Force believes can bolster its manned fighter force. The first two models—General Atomics Aeronautical Systems’ FQ-42A Vengeance and Anduril Systems’ FQ-44A Fury—are designed for air-to-air strike missions. The objective is for the compact uncrewed CCAs to cost less than $20 million apiece for the airframe, and to rapidly grow the force to include at least 500 in 2032, on its way to at least 1,000 later on.

Fiscal 2027 starts Oct. 1, but Congress failed to pass a budget before taking its recess, instead passing a funding measure that extends appropriations at 2026 levels until Dec. 11. Under such a continuing resolution, new programs, such as CCA production, are not authorized. If Congress fails to pass a budget the government could be forced to shut down. Congress could also vote to extend the CR for a month or more at that time. Helfrich’s comments echoed concerns raised by Anduril officials at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber conference in National Harbor, Md., Sept. 14. Erin Simpson, Anduril’s vice president of strategy execution for air dominance and strike, told reporters in a briefing that the company has worked to get a head start on procurement, including by building a new Arsenal-1 factory in Columbus, Ohio, buying parts in advance, and producing prototype Fury CCAs. “We will not have a cold start to [launch] production in ’27,” Simpson said. “We will have assets rolling through. That said, even a company like ours can only do so much without procurement dollars.” When asked about the CR’s potential effect on General Atomics’ production, a company spokesman pointed to a Sept. 21 release that said it is taking on risk by self-funding some of the first FQ-42s, to keep the program moving forward while the Pentagon’s funding is worked out. “Production of FQ-42 Vengeance is underway on company investment as government funding plans mature, with GA-ASI continuing its longstanding tradition of working at-risk with its own funds to support U.S. procurement planning and prevent delays in delivery,” General Atomics’ statement said. GA-ASI plans to build multiple fighters for its own company aircraft fleet, to invest in inventing new technologies that reduce risk and increase capabilities for its global customers.”

Helfrich said the Air Force’s upcoming Emerald Flag exercise in December at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., will be a significant demonstration of how far CCAs have come. And it will further the work done by the Air Force’s Experimental Operations Unit to figure out how best to use CCAs in operational environments, and how to operate it under the Agile Combat Employment construct of flying aircraft out of dispersed, small and rough airfields in a future conflict. “Setting up for Emerald Flag, it’s all hands on deck, but the EOU is central to making that happen,” Helfrich said. “They’re at the heart of taking a capability and making it into something that we can actually integrate into the Air Force.” Both initial CCA models will fly at Emerald Flag alongside different manned fighters, he said, possibly with multiple CCAs flying at once. The Air Force announced in July that Anduril’s Fury CCA had fired its first live missile in a test. General Atomics’ Vengeance will soon follow, Helfrich said. Helfrich indicated that test fire would likely happen before Emerald Flag. General Atomics spokesman C. Mark Brinkley declined to say exactly when the first FQ-42A live-fire test may take place, saying only that it would happen by the end of the year. Helfrich said the FQ-42A’s live-fire test will focus on more than just launching the missile, and will be a test run of the entire process for firing weapons with an autonomous system, while still keeping a human “on the loop.” “The human has to make the decision to use lethal force, and then go and engage on that target,” Helfrich said. “So we’re talking more like kill chain than we are about [a standard weapon firing] exercise.”

The Pentagon on Tuesday announced a $5.1 billion fixed-ceiling incentive contract with HII to complete the carrier’s mid-life overhaul at Virginia’s Newport News Shipbuilding. The refueling and complex overhaul, or RCOH, comprises approximately one-third of the maintenance and modernization a carrier will undergo during its service life, according to the announcement. The RCOH process on Truman will “include refueling the ship’s reactors, as well as extensive modernization work in thousands of compartments and tanks, as well as on most ship systems,” a HII release stated. “In addition, major upgrades will be made in the propulsion plant and combat systems.” Truman’s overhaul notice comes a little over a year after the carrier completed a 251-day deployment that saw the vessel fire over 1.1 million pounds of ordnance and unleash the largest carrier-launched airstrike in history.

Despite making combat history, the carrier’s deployment was also plagued by incidents that prompted an array of investigations. In February 2025, the ship collided with the merchant vessel Besiktas-M near Port Said, Egypt. The ship’s commanding officer Capt. Dave Snowden was subsequently relieved due to a loss of confidence in his ability to command. Truman also lost a trio of F/A-18 Super Hornets during the deployment. One was shot down by the guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg in a friendly-fire incident. Another experienced a failed arrested landing and went overboard. A third slipped off the hangar deck as a result of evasive maneuvers in response to an incoming ballistic missile and fell into the Red Sea. Homeported at Naval Station Norfolk, Truman will be the eighth Nimitz-class carrier to complete its mid-life RCOH in Newport News. “Our team has been diligently working to get ahead on this critical engineering and construction project that will prepare USS Harry S. Truman for the second half of her service life,” Bryan Caccavale, the Newport News Shipbuilding vice president of program management, said in a release. “When the ship arrives at NNS, we’ll apply that same diligence to working with our suppliers and Navy partners to ensure a successful recapitalization of CVN 75.” The announcement did not specify when work on the carrier would begin, but noted that the overhaul is expected to be completed by November 2031. The contract includes additional options that, if applied, could bump its total value to closer to $5.2 billion.

The study, “Snoozing While Cruising: Nap Frequency as a Fatigue-Management Indicator and Risk Marker in Naval Operations,” was published in late July in the Journal of Sleep Research. It uses survey data drawn from the 2021-2024 Navy Afloat Climate Assessment Survey and includes sailors from amphibious ships, cruisers, destroyers, littoral combat ships and mine countermeasure vessels. Aircraft carriers were not included, according to co-author Anne Germain, because of the logistics and timing of the study and availability of data. Across all demographics, sailors reported napping an average of about 1.5 days per week and rated burnout levels 2.66 out of five. They rated job stress an alarming 3.77 out of five. Most reported that fatigue impacted or distracted them from job duties (3.34 out of five), and while sailors rated general health relatively well (2.75 out of five), they reported an average of nearly nine poor physical health days and about 14 poor mental health days per month.

While baseline levels of exhaustion and stress appear to be the norm, some ships fare worse than others. Data show that littoral combat ships, with their small crews, report the highest level of burnout, rating an average of 2.7 out of five. Cruisers report the lowest burnout rates, averaging 2.62. Job stress is highest for MCM ships at 3.87 out of five, and lowest for amphibs, at 3.59. Nap frequency also varies. Chances of napping are best on cruisers, which reported 1.61 naps per week, and lowest on MCM ships, with 1.27 naps. LCS vessels had the second-lowest napping average, at 1.32. That matters, according to the study authors, because data indicate that napping could counteract the effects of otherwise poor sleep while underway. “Napping frequency was associated with lower odds of high job stress and impaired functioning, a pattern consistent with the broader experimental and operational literature suggesting that naps may support acute fatigue management when sleep opportunities are constrained,” the authors found. Naps may also, they found, be an indicator of burnout. Sailors who napped five or more days per week were more likely to report an above-average number of poor mental health days. In these cases, napping may be an indicator to leaders that they need to intervene to get sailors additional rest opportunities.

Germain, the study’s co-author and the founder and CEO of insomnia care center Noctem Health, told Military Times in an interview that napping may be an important stopgap for deployed sailors who don’t have the option of getting eight hours of sleep at a consistent time every night. “We’re not solving it forever; we’re not eliminating the problem, because in the context, that’s not realistic,” she said. “What is realistic is that we can have these micro-doses of sleep, micro-doses of very targeted intervention to give kind of a push for the next 12 hours, or the next six hours.” Across the survey population, sailors reported having 5.7 hours of sleep available per day while underway and being able to sleep about 5.4 hours. They reported needing an average of 7.7 hours to feel rested, meaning they incurred a nightly sleep debt of 2.3 hours on deployment. Among ship classes, sailors on amphibious ships report the largest average sleep debt, 2.4 hours, while those on MCM vessels reported the smallest average, 2 hours. Germain said she attributed the differences in burnout, stress and nap rates between ship classes to missions and requirements. She also noted that differences existed between job fields. Sailors in administrative jobs reported the most burnout, at 2.85 out of five, while engineers reported the most job stress, at 3.88 out of five. Deck sailors, who reported high burnout but relatively low job stress, got the most naps, reporting an average of 2.14 days per week.

Pay grade also makes a difference. Sailors in ranks E1-E3 reported the highest burnout levels, but the lowest job stress and the highest nap frequency, at more than two days per week. Officers and the top enlisted ranks reported the highest job stress and lowest nap frequency, but lower burnout levels. Germain said rest and sleep quality involve not only the amount of sleep available, but also what work stressors sailors “bring with them” when they try to rest and when their job allows them to sleep. This study, completed on behalf of the Navy by Germain and co-author Dale Russell, a former director of research for Naval Surface Forces, is part of a multi-year effort to understand how to optimize crew rest and minimize job impairment underway. Two separate deadly collisions involving Navy destroyers in 2017 revealed the life-and-death impact of crew fatigue and launched a push to standardize crew rest with attention to natural circadian rhythms. An ongoing effort supplies sailors with wearable devices to track their rest and other vital signs — and potentially allow leaders to see when greater intervention is needed. Germain said she hopes the Navy will be able to use the new survey data to advance understanding of rest and the value of naps as a helpful aid, rather than a replacement for solid nightly sleep, Naps are “not a treatment,” she said. “It’s like, here’s a behavior that you can try to optimize your sleep or optimize your alertness … at the sailors’ level, what you can tell is that those micro-interventions can have an impact on the moment, to mitigate some of the challenges that they’re facing.”

The Navy’s initiative to revamp its four public shipyards could come with a price tag nearly ten times higher than initially estimated and take decades longer to complete, according to a new government watchdog report. The Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program (SIOP) launched in 2018 and aims to upgrade the drydocks and standard equipment at the service’s current four shipyards in Virginia, Maine, Washington and Hawaii that oversee repairs for the Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and submarine fleet. Initially, the service predicted the effort would take roughly 20 years and cost approximately $21 billion, although Navy officials overseeing SIOP efforts told Breaking Defense last year that those estimates were outdated. A Government Accountability Office report released today, however, said that the project could take 50 years and cost $200 billion.

dawg I dunno if the US is going to exist in 50 years, let alone have its shipyards fixed

According to the report, the initial estimate “omitted key costs,” and that factors including commodity prices increases and seismic concerns at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard that require “needed retrofits and construction” are driving up costs and adding time to the SIOP initiative. “Developing the plans and cost estimates to rebuild the Navy’s four public shipyards has taken the Navy years longer — and will cost much more — than originally anticipated due to multiple challenges and changes involved in the program,” the report said. Additionally, the report said that more shipyard construction and repair projects have been added to the SIOP program since 2018, and that the Navy has implemented some design changes stemming from “lessons learned from projects already underway.” “For example, the costs for the dry-dock projects in Portsmouth and Pearl Harbor in total grew by more than $2.5 billion since funding was originally requested from Congress,” the report said.

The GAO also noted that the Navy isn’t mandated to submit a consolidated report to lawmakers on SIOP program costs and other “risks” associated with the effort, but rather, it shares updates on “various aspects” of the SIOP program instead. Ultimately, the GAO recommended that Congress require the Navy to share an annual and standardized report to lawmakers detailing the program’s cost and status. “Without a full picture of how much has been spent, what remains to be funded, and what risks may affect SIOP progress, Congress could make consequential decisions for SIOP based on incomplete information, thus risking billions in taxpayer dollars and a lack of program oversight for the decades to come,” the GAO report said.

this is democracy manifest!

Navy officials previously told Breaking Defense in 2025 that they predict a 10 percent improvement in aircraft carrier maintenance and a 15 percent improvement for submarine maintenance once the SIOP program is complete. Typically, a submarine maintenance availability lasts 25 to 36 months, but improvements stemming from the SIOP program would reduce that by approximately three months, officials previously said. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is pushing for a fifth public shipyard to bolster aircraft carrier and submarine readiness.

While US officials have warned of munitions shortfalls from the Iran conflict, the Navy’s top cyber official identified another key observation from recent military operations: the “cyber magazine” can be vulnerable to exhaustion as well. “Your cyber magazine of these exquisite fires is empty pretty damn quick,” Vice Adm. Heidi Berg, commander of Fleet Cyber Command/10th Fleet, said in response to a question regarding lessons from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and US operations in Venezuela, the Middle East and elsewhere. “How are you going to regenerate and continue to develop accesses and effects to be able to deliver over the course of what will almost always be against a peer competitor, a longer-term sustained conflict?” she added, speaking at HammerCon, hosted by the Military Cyber Professionals Association on Thursday. Berg did not go into details, but officials and experts for years have acknowledged that cyber capabilities and bespoke exploit tools are not limitless, necessarily reusable or easy to come by: once an adversary, or company, patches a flaw in a system, the tactic can become obsolete. They also can’t be replenished like traditional munitions with an infusion of money and production lines, given it requires time and skill to discover exploits and develop the tools to take advantage of them.

Beyond the current conflicts, exploits or hacking methods that were used in the Iran or Venezuela operations may now be burned for any future conflict. A former senior Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said China, for instance, is most likely watching how US cyber operators are performing and observing their tactics. While the debate about a shortfall in physical munitions has splashed across headlines, the status of America’s cyber munitions has remained largely out of the public eye, especially in the context of operations in Iran. Cyber has often been thought of as a persistent, daily contest below the threshold of armed conflict, but now the US has found itself in sustained combat operations in cyberspace since the launch of Operation Epic Fury (OEF). “From an OEF perspective, just to put in perspective, so 28 February, and it hasn’t stopped. Probably for the first time for the cyber force at large, it’s been this constant,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Eubank, commander of Army Cyber Command and the cyber official charged with running cyber operations in the Middle East, said during the same event.

After Epic Fury initially kicked off, experts told Breaking Defense that in one-off operations such as Absolute Resolve that captured Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro — which Berg described Thursday as “the largest and most complex cyber operation that had ever been executed” — perpetual access isn’t always as big a concern as sustaining a military campaign over time. But Jason Kikta, a former cyber operator with CYBERCOM, told Breaking Defense today that access was the “real asset” in cyber operations and agreed that it is “quickly expended and slow to replenish.” With sustained activity in Epic Fury, there will be many missions that will evolve and change parameters and priorities as the battlefield and cyberspace evolves, while American hackers will be working around the clock to find more accesses. But, there’s still always the question of what to do once accesses are gained: continue to gather intelligence, or to break something, which almost certainly eliminates the ability for cyber to impact that target again while also closing any intelligence value. As far as the price tag for developing ever-newer cyber capabilities, US Cyber Command, in an unfunded priorities list sent to Congress earlier this year, requested an additional $229 million for scaling cyber operational capacity and the development and deployment of cyber munitions, according to InsideDefense. Those funds would go toward limitations in CYBERCOM’s ability to generate and sustain cyber effects at speed and scale, the publication reported.

The Air Force has revealed that the service will achieve a years-long goal of producing 1,500 pilots annually, a target that officials say is critical to reduce a shortfall of over 2,000 aviators. But even if the Air Force can keep up that tempo for the foreseeable future, it will be “quite some time” until the service’s pilot shortage is resolved, the Air Force’s top training officer said Sept. 15. “I can’t erase that pilot deficit in a short period of time,” Lt. Gen. Clark Quinn, the head of Air Education and Training Command, said in a roundtable with reporters on the sidelines of the Air & Space Forces Association conference. Predicting how long it would take to make up the existing shortage is complicated by unpredictable retention rates driven in large part by fluctuating economic conditions, Quinn reasoned.

well, good thing the economy isn't going to fluctuate any further!

Additionally, most of the current pilot shortfall is in staff positions, held by people well into their careers. That means replenishing those positions will take a considerable amount of time. “It’s going to take 15 or 20 years to get those types of people. I can make them today, but those jobs won’t be filled for quite some time,” the general said. “I do know that if we don’t make 1,500, we’re never going to get that number down.” The Air Force says that a new pilot training model implemented in 2024 has been key to achieving the 1,500 annual production goal. Under a new framework called the Future of Undergraduate Pilot Training, the service has partnered with civilian-led training programs for early stages, where students earn a private pilot license and learn the basics of flying. Students then move on to a military-led phase of instruction flying the T-6A Texan II, and candidates picked for fighter and bomber slots will also get time with the T-38 Talon. “That new way of doing pilot training has allowed us to make the number of pilots that we need per year, which is the way that we intend to man those new platforms that are coming,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach said in a separate media roundtable Sept. 14, referring to training pilots for forthcoming aircraft like the F-47 fighter jet and B-21 Raider stealth bomber.

The introduction of autonomous platforms like Collaborative Combat Aircraft drone wingmen could also reduce the manpower needed for flying missions, Wilsbach reasoned. “We’re a few years off from having to reduce the number of pilots that we have, but in the meantime, we’re making 1,500 a year,” he said. In the long run, Air Force officials have floated the idea of consolidating flight training onto one platform: the T-7 Red Hawk. Quinn said he believes the aircraft — previously the focus of an investigation by Breaking Defense that found a series of unreported issues with the in-development trainer — will be “an outstanding airplane” that officials are “eager” to receive. Asked about consolidating all training on the Red Hawk, Quinn emphasized that no decisions have been made, adding that doing so would carry “pros and cons.” An upside, Quinn reasoned, would be reducing the footprint necessary to operate more than one aircraft, pointing to elements like logistics and manpower. But a downside, he said, is that “if something ever happens to that aircraft that would prevent it from flying for an extended period of time, I really don’t have a backup plan to that.” Quinn stated that the Air Force needs to give instructors more flying time in the aircraft to determine whether it might be suitable for all stages of pilot training. Up to now, T-7 flights have mostly been led by developmental test pilots, though instructor pilots are starting to get their time in the jet too. “Until I get the confidence that my instructors think that we can do this, that opens the door to then make that decision,” he said.