Breaking Into The SRM Supply Chain

Chemicals aren’t the only risk area for SRMs, industry executives said, with Govini noting that certain nozzles require seven to 10 months of lead time to source. And given the already constrained nature of the supply base, startups and new entrants into the SRM space are taking unusual steps to ensure that they will have the components they need for motor production. “With the significant increase in demand for SRMs, it’s clear that already there are some single point bottlenecks, and that if all of these existing suppliers and the new suppliers go to the same sub tiers, you’re going to run into more bottlenecks and constraints,” said Bret Perry, Anduril’s head of growth for rocket motor systems. For ignition safety devices, supply chain risks can be mitigated by managing schedules and planning for the lead times necessary, said Perry. For other components, like nozzles, insulation and motor cases, Anduril sees value in either adding new suppliers to the industrial base or convincing existing suppliers to expand horizontally into manufacturing other needed components, he said. For example, Perry noted that Anduril engineers taught one of its nozzle suppliers how to make motor cases after noticing that the company had the machinery onsite needed to wind composite materials into larger structures. “We were able to demonstrate that. We’ve fired motors with that case,” Perry said. “For some of the newer suppliers that are new to this, completely all together, those are items that are still in motion. … Those are longer term putts.”

Ursa Major, which will begin qualifying SRMs in 2026, is taking a slightly different approach. Instead of pinning its hopes solely on expanding the existing SRM supply chain, the Colorado-based startup is banking on vertical integration, said Bill Murray, its vice president of product and engineering for its solid missile systems business. “We’re actually buying powder and sintering it ourselves, and in Youngstown, Ohio, that becomes part of the metallic parts of the motor,” Murray said. “We’re really pushing hard on getting composite motors fielded across many different munitions, mostly because the steel motor case supply chain is so fundamentally difficult to solve.” At the same time, Murray added that there remain challenges like igniters, and while “there’s no one panacea to that,” Ursa’s current strategy is to manufacture and integrate its own ignition systems for most of its SRMs. Meanwhile, to address barriers with single-source chemical suppliers, Ursa intends to use fewer propellant ingredients across its family of SRMs, as well as seeking out new suppliers. “There are a good number of startups in the synthetic chemical industry that are entering the solid rocket motor market, the supply market, and we’re working with many of them that are coming up with new ways of synthesizing chemicals that are more resilient and more automated,” he said.

Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, which are working together to stand up GD as a maker of rocket motors for Lockheed’s GMLRS munition, see supply constraints in nozzles and insulators as a potential roadblock, said Jerry Brode, vice president of Lockheed’s solid rocket motor product center. To mitigate those concerns, Lockheed plans to stand up a production capability for nozzles, with those items able to support GMLRS production and potentially other munitions in the future, Brode told reporters in October. Current SRM primes are also making their own investments into the supply chain. L3Harris has put more than $250 million into long lead material advanced funding and advanced funding to cover obsolescence of raw materials to suppliers. It has also directly invested more than $30 million to help its supply base modernize and expand its workforce, said Scott Alexander, its president of missile solutions. The company is seeing some signs of recovery as a result. For example, after L3Harris made an investment in tooling for one of its suppliers of motor cases, that company increased its monthly output by 1,000 percent, while investments in tooling and fixtures to a supplier that makes insulated nozzles contributed to a 350 percent increase in capacity. “There’s no secret that there are some single sources and potentially some dual sources, and we’re continuing to look at that,” Alexander said. “But if you ask me, ‘What is the health of the supply base?’ It is improving along these lines.”

Meanwhile Northrop Grumman has invested “more than $1 billion” across its SRM facilities and plans to double its rocket motor output over the next four years, it said in a statement to Breaking Defense. The statement did not specify how much of that investment has gone toward its supply chain. “We directly support efforts to diversify the supply chain and to address supply chain resiliency, particularly for suppliers that feed into our supply chain or common source of supply with other companies,” the company stated. “Northrop Grumman also supports the U.S. Government’s initiatives to address supply chain resiliency more broadly, including working with our allies and partners to invest in expanding capabilities in their countries.” Despite the work being done to expand the supply chain, it’s possible that not all SRM makers vying to enter the market are going to make it. “I think the supply base is there for three to four, large suppliers,” Perry said. “If everyone today was to fully scale, that’s where you’d run into potential challenges. But not everyone is going to fully scale.”

‘You Have to Be Able to Produce It’

Both Congress and the Defense Department have been bullish on financial efforts meant to help solidify and diversify the SRM supply chain, but the exact extent of the Pentagon’s aid to industry — as well as its success in standing up new second- and third-tier suppliers — is still opaque. The reconciliation bill approved by lawmakers in 2025 included $200 million for the solid rocket motor industrial base, another $400 million specifically for emerging SRM makers and their supply chain, $42 million for second sources of large diameter solid rocket motors for hypersonic missiles and $100 million for development of a second solid rocket motor source for Navy air defense and anti-ship missiles. The Defense Department did not respond to detailed questions about its investments in the solid rocket motor supply chain, including how it plans on spending reconciliation dollars. However, some details of its previous investments have been announced in contract awards. Before the end of fiscal 2025, the Defense Department announced $73 million in contracts meant to help expand the SRM supply base, awarding money to five vendors. The projects included $25 million for prototype production of 3D-printed motor cases and more than $12 million to test whether rayon fabric could be converted into a material used for insulating rocket nozzles. In late December, the Pentagon announced almost another $33 million in SRM-related awards, with money to increase production of cases and nozzles. (All of the awards tapped funding from the Defense Production Act, which lapsed on Oct. 1 but was reauthorized by Congress in December through the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act.)

The department has also made investments in the new SRM makers themselves, providing $14 million to Anduril in January for improvements at its production facility in Mississippi and $14 billion for X-Bow Systems in 2025 to prototype and test a GMLRS rocket motor, among other awards. But for Sarnicki of Helicon Chemical, which is still waiting for the funding it needs to start ramping production, the Defense Department’s stated intent of moving faster and correcting vulnerabilities in the SRM supply base hasn’t matched the reality faced by small vendors like his own company. “We’re a small company way down the food chain, and we’re just trying to pay our bills and keep the thing moving forward,” Sarnicki said. “Way up on top, things may be going better. You’ll read the articles that Raytheon gets a huge contract [for weapons], or Northrop gets it. Everything seems great. But you have to be able to produce it.”

Helicon Chemical Company, based in Orlando, is a small business trying to become a second supplier for HTPB-45M, a binding component that goes into most solid rocket motors (SRMs). But just as Helicon was planning to stand up production in West Virginia, budgetary turmoil slammed the brakes on a promised and much-needed $15 million contract from the Pentagon. The situation is aggravated by the ongoing lapse in the Small Business Innovation Research program, funds from which make up about one-third of Helicon’s budget, and could become even worse if the government shuts down for a second time on Jan. 30, company CEO Jack Sarnicki told Breaking Defense. “Everything has come to a screeching halt,” Sarnicki said. “If we don’t get under contract [for the West Virginia facility], and another government shutdown occurs, we could have real issues with my company. We would probably have to think about laying off people.”

As demand for munitions like the Army’s Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System and the Navy’s Standard Missile family has skyrocketed in recent years, so too has demand for the solid rocket motors that power them, prompting new entrants to dive into the market and traditional standbys to rapidly expand. But that growth hasn’t yet been replicated across the fragile SRM supply chain, several senior industry officials told Breaking Defense, raising questions about whether the scale exists to support the sector. “We don’t really need a third solid rocket motor provider. What I’ve been saying to everyone is they’ll just go to the same supply chain,” said L3Harris CEO Chris Kubasik in September at the Jefferies Industrials conference. “We need more companies that make nozzles. We need more companies that make igniters. We need more companies that make cases,” he said. “A third or a fourth solid rocket motor provider, they’re going to call the same people that we already have locked up, for our supply chain, and they’ll just have to get to the back of the line.”

What else is needed, according to defense software firm Govini CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty, is more aggressive input, in dollars and attention, from the Pentagon. “The Department leadership has a real opportunity right now, because as the reconciliation money becomes available, they’re about to spend upwards of $10 billion on additional munitions,” she said. But, “as of right now, they’re going to do things the exact same way and somehow expect different results from a supply chain management perspective.”

The ‘Ripple Effect’ Problem

According to Govini, between 1995 and 2017 the US industrial base for solid rocket motor makers shrank from six companies to just two providers: Orbital ATK, which was acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2018, and Aerojet Rocketdyne, which was acquired by L3Harris in 2023. A third company, Norwegian-based Nammo, produces solid rocket motors for certain US-made weaponry in Norway. However, in the last four years, a number of firms have announced plans to grow the SRM market in hopes of tapping into what appears on paper to be a wealth of funding from DoD for new munitions. Among the new entrants are defense startups Anduril, Ursa Major and X-Bow as well as legacy defense firms like General Dynamics. And both Northrop and L3Harris have announced their intention to increase their production rates. The problem is that just as the SRM primes shrunk over time, so did the supply chain, with many materials and components available only from one or two companies, or with long lead times. And any impact to those companies could cause ripples throughout the SRM production line. Potential chokepoints include ignition safety devices, nozzles, cases and insulation, and the fix isn’t necessarily one-size fits all, according to executives. But perhaps the biggest concern lies in the supply chain for energetics, the materials and chemicals that cause the propulsive reaction needed by SRMs.

In 2025, officials from Nammo discovered that a chemical company that produces an ingredient for propellant used in one of its solid rocket motors was going out of business, with no alternative supplier. “It’s caused kind of a ripple effect of, what do we do?” said Andy Davis, Nammo’s vice president of engineering and strategy. (Davis declined to share the name of the program or supplier, citing sensitivities.)

He pointed out that in the world of propellants, smaller manufacturers of specialty chemicals may quietly go out of business without their defense clients realizing until it’s too late to put in final orders. That sets up rocket makers for a long, and expensive process to requalify a new vendor. “One of the challenges you have that people don’t understand is a propellant formulation is made up of, say, 10 to 12 ingredients. Those ingredients are finely balanced and tailored to meet mechanical properties, burn rate properties,” he said. “So if you take, say, aluminum powder, and you’ve qualified a formulation with one aluminum powder and that manufacturer no longer supplies that aluminum, it’s not as simple as ‘I’m just going to go get another aluminum powder and put it in.’” In those cases, companies essentially have to go through the formula development process for that propellant all over again, Davis said. “I then have to requalify the propellant,” he said. “I then have to requalify, potentially, the rocket motor, and I have to potentially requalify the missile.”

And for the smaller suppliers that provide chemicals, budgetary chaos can have a massive impact on lead times. Helicon isn’t relying solely on the Defense Department for money for its new facility, and intends to raise $15 million in private funds to match the government’s investment, Sarnicki said. But even once money starts flowing, it will take anywhere from 18 months to two years for Helicon to qualify production and start producing HTPB-45M for its customers, he added. That means that every month of missed funding means another month before a second supplier of that chemical is available to SRM makers. Energetic parts and propellants can take a year to source, per Govini. Meanwhile, American Pacific Corporation (AMPAC) is the only US-based source of ammonium perchlorate — a key ingredient used to make solid rocket motor propellant — creating a “single point of failure” in the missile supply chain, Govini states. AMPAC, which in June announced a $100 million investment to boost ammonium perchlorate production, did not respond to a request for comment. “Beyond AMPAC, the DoD lacks a deeper understanding of the shared industrial base critical for solid rocket motor production,” Govini states. “A high degree of interconnectedness and shared sub-tier supply base suggests that expanding production of solid rocket motors will be difficult without increasing the number of suppliers for key parts and material.”

Both domestic SRM suppliers — Northrop and L3Harris — “are tethered to a handful of shared suppliers for essential components” and a disruption of any of those companies “whether a production delay, a quality control issue, or a catastrophic event like a factory fire — would simultaneously cripple the production capacity of the entire solid rocket motor enterprise,” per Govini. One such catastrophe sadly occurred in October, when an explosion at Accurate Energetic Systems’s facility in Tennessee killed 16 people, injuring others and leveling one building. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives estimated that between 24,000 to 28,000 pounds of explosives detonated on the day of the incident, with the blast emanating from an area where the explosive chemicals were mixed and heated. According to an analysis done by Govini in October, Accurate Energetic Systems was a source of energetics for the solid rocket motor industry and was a sub-tier supplier to Aerojet Rocketdyne, Northrop and Nammo.

holy shit it’s literally the exact facility that the tweet I posted above was about

The incident should be a “wake up call” for the Pentagon to play a more proactive role in managing its supply chain, and ensure it has secondary, or even tertiary suppliers for critical materials, Govini’s Murphy Dougherty told Breaking Defense in an October interview. “We had actually seen this company pop in our data in terms of risk factors, and it related to the fact that there’s just a lack of redundancy for a lot of these components and parts in critical systems like solid rocket motors,” Murphy Dougherty said.

French aircraft engine manufacturer, including for Dassault Rafale fighters, Safran company, complains about supply chains turning into “weapons.” And this is not surprising, because 90% of its rare earth metal needs the country’s aviation industry covers with purchases from China.

Japanese prime minister Konoe complains about supply chains turning into “weapons”, and this is not surprising because 90% of its fuel needs the country covers with purchases from the US

As Reuters writes, Safran CEO and French aerospace association president Olivier Andries stated this. According to him, these critical resources are turning into a tool for creating dependency and gaining geopolitical advantage.

“turning”?! did this guy just sleep through, like, literally all of history?

Defense Express notes that actually it was always this way; one need only recall Russian energy carriers that all of Europe used. It’s just that in today’s unstable world conditions, the issue has risen to the public plane. Overall, before us is a good reminder that even France, which independently produces aviation and takes pride in its own autonomy in this matter, actually seriously depends at minimum on important resources. And this adds another leverage point for existing global suppliers, the largest of which is China. The issue of rare earth material import sources has been actively raised in recent years, because 99-100% of processing capacities belong to Chinese. So in the U.S. itself, active work is underway to correct this, especially for defense industry needs. Regarding the EU, they also purchase sensitive resources not only in China, but also in Russia, which raises many questions against the backdrop of sanctions. However, they are also searching for alternative sources, among which Ukraine is also being considered. For France, which is only increasing Rafale production, this issue is very important, considering the large order portfolio and even potential contract for Ukraine. So to maintain independent aircraft manufacturing, it may be necessary to invest even more funds and make additional compromises. Recall that Safran itself recently agreed to large-scale technology transfer to India and help in developing fifth-generation fighter. It’s quite likely that this is needed to support the company’s capabilities against the backdrop of collapse of the joint FCAS project with Germany and Spain.

In 2025, American defense giant Lockheed Martin delivered 191 fifth-generation F-35 fighter jets to customers, an all-time record and 51 more than the 142 aircraft produced in 2021. Such production rates are truly impressive. As Lockheed Martin noted, these rates are five times higher than the production rates of any other allied fighter jet. However, Lockheed Martin does not have many competitors among other Western countries. The closest competitor is France’s Dassault Aviation, which also set a record in 2025 by producing 26 Rafale aircraft, exceeding its target by one.

At the same time, the company did not mention the main reason behind these record results. It was able to achieve them only because of a specific problem. Back in 2023, Lockheed Martin faced a problem with the Technology Refresh 3 update, and two years ago there were discussions about a potential halt in fighter jet production, which ultimately did not happen. Moreover, since the main issue was software-related, the company continued assembling aircraft, resuming deliveries only in July 2024, with the clarification that the fighters would not be combat-ready until 2025.

Thanks to this backlog, Lockheed Martin was able to deliver a record number of aircraft in 2025. The 2025 deliveries are nearly double those of 2024, when 110 aircraft were delivered despite the challenges, already up from 98 in 2023. Deliveries in 2022 and 2021 were nearly identical, at 141 and 142 F-35s, respectively.

So there were basically around 40 and 30 aircraft missing from 2023 & 2024 respectively (compared to the ≈140 yearly rate from earlier). The actual average rate hasn’t really changed with the extra 2025 deliveries…

Lockheed Martin also noted that in 2025 it expanded its export portfolio with additional orders from Italy for 25 fighter jets and from Denmark for 16 aircraft. In September last year, an agreement was reached with the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) to produce batches 18 and 19, comprising up to 296 fighter jets, for $24 billion. However, this price of only $81 million per one aircraft does not include the engine, weapons, ancillary equipment, spare parts, and services. As a result, the export price of the F-35 is significantly higher—$208 million in the case of the Czech order.

US defense against ballistic missiles is psychological. To make the enemy believe that their missiles will be intercepted and that their attacks will not be effective. So part of the doctrine is to over report intercepts and under report damage to make the enemy believe their missiles are not effective.

BMD systems create an environment where threats are deterred from use of ballistic missiles by eliminating their confidence in the effectiveness of an attack.

General deterrence targets the behavior of threat actors by focusing on the credibility of defensive actions to defeat a ballistic missile attack. BMD can undermine a threat’s confidence in their ability to achieve their intended political or military objectives through missile threats or attacks. … By shaping a threat’s decisions in this way, effective defense diminishes the perceived value of ballistic missiles as tools of coercion and aggression, thus contributing to deterrence.

Some actual quotes from various documents:

https://www.glostat.com/documents-countries/united-states-strategy-for-operations-in-information-environment-soie-2023/

This strategy also describes the investments that the Department should make to improve its ability to shape the perceptions of our rivals and adversaries, which helps us influence their decisions and behaviors.

https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/display-news/Article/3992620/us-navy-operations-in-the-information-environment-oie-defined/

Navy OIE is now formally defined as “The ability to create cognitive effects to achieve deterrent and warfighting advantages by shaping adversary attitudes, beliefs. and behaviors through influence activities and public messaging paired with Navy, Joint , and combined operations and activities.”

(couldn’t find from which one this came)

Additionally, in armed conflict, we directly target the enemy’s will to fight by using aggressive disinformation and propaganda to manipulate their perceptions of self, trust in their leaders, one another, and their ability to endure the hardships of battle.

The Army’s new acquisition strategy—buy fast, in small quantities, then maybe buy a lot more—is causing headaches for at least one of the vendors working on the service’s new medium-range reconnaissance drone. Anduril is one of two firms working to produce drones that can give Army maneuver companies at least six miles of visibility for up to 30 minutes at a time, but the service’s Continuous Transformation strategy is making it tough to plan ahead for production—which may prevent the company from delivering if the Army decides to start buying the drones by the thousands. “The way the Army is approaching this now…they want flexibility and they want routine competition, because they know that we’re going to keep investing and keep improving the systems,” Jason Dickinson, general manager for the Ghost-X drone program at Anduril, told Defense One. “But because it’s a little opaque for us right now, it’s very hard to right-size your production capacity.”

The piecemeal buying strategy could also be in conflict with a recent Defense Department memo calling for the military services to treat small drones like munitions rather than aircraft, along with a call to start acquiring new technology as if the country is at war. Dickinson’s team is investing in Ghost-X production capacity based on how confident he is in where his platform stands with the Army, he said, knowing that he has one co-vendor now, but expecting that there could eventually be three or four. In 2025, that meant deploying 200 Ghost-X systems with the Army, with the expectation that another 200 would be needed this year to keep outfitted the Transformation-in-Contact brigades testing them. But beyond that, it’s a bit of a question mark. “How do I think about growing responsibly so that I can meet the needs of the Army, and also sell into other allied nations, sister services and those kinds of things?” Dickinson said.

Particularly painful, he said, is trying to figure out how to meet the Army’s sustainment needs for Ghost-X, because there’s no process in place to start procuring replacement components. In a traditional program of record, repairs and maintenance would be factored in, with a guaranteed number of years and an expected payment to give the vendor an idea of how much money to sink into a production line. “But again, for us, it’s ‘When does that start?’” Dickinson said. “We don’t know. How many are they going to buy? I don’t know.”

‘More competitive and responsive’

Army officials have stressed recently that they expect contractors to make the initial investments into developing new technology. At the same time, the Pentagon is pushing the services to turn up the volume on procurement. That’s creating tension that the government is likely going to have to solve, said Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “I mean, I know we’ve got to make numbers and live in the budget, but the government has to take the lead, I think, in a lot of cases,” Eaglen told Defense One during the State of Defense Business Acquisition Summit in November. The Army declined to make an official available to Defense One to discuss this tension. The office that oversees Army aviation acquisition provided a written statement, which said that while they are committed to “a more competitive and responsive procurement environment,” they believe their increased spending on small drones in general should reassure vendors. “The current UAS procurement strategy has obligated all appropriated funds from previous years, and the Army is prepared to accelerate the procurement of UAS when Congress appropriates FY26 funds, further establishing a consistent demand signal to industry,” said the spokesperson, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

In its 2026 budget request, the Army asked for just under $804 million to sink into its small UAS programs. Changing the budget to a capability bucket instead of line items for individual platforms is a win for more agile acquisitions, but it does leave vendors having to guess what their slice of that pie will look like. The Army’s response did not address specific questions about ramping up production capacity and supply chains to respond to sudden increased demand, or whether the service is looking into making some of these investments itself. It takes about three months to increase production capacity, Dickinson said, and twice that long to get the supply chain to meet it. “And so I have to sit here and weigh, do I invest a couple million dollars in high-tech production capabilities without knowing what the actual demand is? Am I going to get the return on that?” he said.

And once there’s floor space and technicians hired, the supply chain has to surge. “If I’m asking them to produce tens to hundreds right now, and I’m like, ‘Hey, now I need you to go to a thousand’—that’s a major step change,” he said. “And we find some suppliers, they can’t cut it, right?” So for now, it’s a guessing game. “I am leaning forward on the production and the supply chain, because I know that that boat is so long to turn,” Dickinson said. “And so I know the Army has a requirement—they have a gaping wound right now of no UAS in many, many brigades.”

A critical data source for US military suicide prevention efforts is late. The annual suicide report, which the Department of Defense typically publishes each fall, provides suicide statistics from the previous calendar year that inform Congress, researchers, and senior leaders across the services on efforts to combat military suicide, a persistent problem. The defense department is also delayed in releasing its quarterly suicide data for 2025, with the third-quarter figures still unpublished, months later than usual. Business Insider queried the Pentagon in mid-December about the anticipated release date of the annual report. “The Department has nothing to announce at this time,” a department spokesperson replied in an email. “We will follow up if anything changes.” When asked again this week why the report is delayed and when it might be published, the Pentagon did not respond. Business Insider sent a separate email query to the Defense Suicide Prevention Office, which releases the report. The office did not respond.

It is unclear whether the delay is tied to the government shutdown. Though the data is beneficial, the monthslong delay is unlikely to significantly affect research or prevention efforts, said Ron Kessler, a principal investigator on a long-term Army suicide study and a professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School. He said researchers depend more frequently on detailed data that reveals patterns and circumstances around deaths. The bigger issue is tied to accountability, public transparency, and oversight, he said. “Publishing is letting the outside world know what’s going on,” Kessler said. “And that’s useful for holding organizations accountable.” The Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs have each tried to improve suicide prevention efforts, Kessler said, highlighting a project he’s involved in that’s testing whether artificial intelligence can effectively identify people at risk of suicide. The annual reports reveal the level of progress and show where further work is needed. “It’s important for the data to be out there,” Kessler added, “not to ever be to a point where we say what’s not being shown anymore. It’s good for the public to be able to say, ‘Is the military doing a good job? What’s going on?’”

Suicide deaths among service members rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the most recent publicly available data — from calendar year 2023 — showed a small increase over the year prior. According to the Defense Suicide Prevention Office, military suicide deaths have increased gradually since 2011. The 2023 report showed that young enlisted men accounted for the largest share of suicide deaths in the US military. That mirrors broader national trends. American men are nearly four times more likely to die by suicide than women, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Firearms were involved in roughly half of all US suicide deaths in 2023, and previous military reports have repeatedly identified access to firearms as a risk factor, particularly for younger enlisted personnel. Some military leaders recently emphasized suicide prevention needs during the holiday season. In November, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll directed supervisors across the Army to conduct daily check-ins with their subordinates through mid-January. Though the initiative was initially lauded, some supervisors and troops online have described the mandatory directive as unintentionally burdensome.

The broader Pentagon reporting delays coincide with certain organizational changes inside the Army. A September Army memo highlighted plans to disband its directorate responsible for overseeing soldier quality-of-life issues, known as a G-9, citing “administrative convenience.” The responsibilities of that office have since been folded into the service’s human resources directorate. Army spokeswoman Heather J. Hagan confirmed the change to Business Insider on Thursday, adding that the service remains committed to troop and family quality of life. It is unclear how the change may affect oversight of soldier well-being or how suicide prevention priorities are being evaluated, as the Pentagon’s annual suicide data remains unpublished.

US oil companies want “serious guarantees” from Washington before they make splashy investments in Venezuela as President Donald Trump urges them to back his bid to reshape energy markets. American officials held crunch talks with top energy executives in Miami on Wednesday, just as Trump made a show of raw power over global crude markets, seizing control of Venezuela’s oil sector and ordering US special forces to capture a Russian tanker in the north Atlantic. Trump has also summoned executives from some of the country’s biggest energy groups to a meeting at the White House on Friday. The executives are expected to press the president on providing strong legal and financial guarantees before they agree to commit capital to Venezuela, according to people familiar with their plans.

Earlier this week Trump said the American oil companies could be “reimbursed by us, or through revenue” if they invested in Venezuela. But executives remained cautious, with some citing the erratic policymaking. “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country,” said one private equity investor who specialises in energy. The discussions in Miami on Wednesday came just hours after Trump said Venezuela would surrender millions of barrels of oil to US-chartered vessels that would sail the crude to the US, where Gulf refiners are gearing up to process it. The White House said Washington would control Venezuela’s oil “indefinitely”, seizing the lifeblood of one of the Opec cartel’s founding members. After bombing Iran and Nigeria, “Venezuela is the third OPEC oil producer to be attacked by the US in the last year,” said Bill Farren-Price at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “This is a global agenda that will increasingly refashion global energy trade to US terms and conditions,” he said.

But Trump’s plan to revive Venezuela’s oil sector has already met with scepticism among US executives, who say political and legal risks, coupled with low oil prices, are obstacles. US energy secretary Chris Wright met senior officials from Chevron and ConocoPhillips, delivering Trump’s message that America’s biggest oil groups must pour billions of dollars into Venezuela’s battered energy industry. The US also signalled on Wednesday that it would open the door to American oilfield services companies to work in Venezuela and begin rolling back some of the sanctions that have hobbled its economy. But Wright acknowledged in remarks at the Goldman Sachs conference in Miami that US oil giants were not going to “put billions of dollars building new infrastructure in Venezuela next week”. Major players in the energy sector and investors said the US would need to backstop big projects. “There would have to be some serious guarantees from the government to get the big boys back in Venezuela,” said a senior executive at a large US energy company. “It’s going to take a while to see real investment in the country and then longer to get production up.” Chevron finance chief Eimear Bonner sounded a cautious note in closed-door remarks to investors on Tuesday and gave no indication of plans for near-term expansion in the country, according to people present. Chevron is the only American company that holds a US licence to export Venezuelan crude, and is seeking to amend its agreement with the US Treasury department to sell more of the country’s oil.

Executives from the biggest US oil groups, including Chevron, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, are among those expected to meet Trump at the White House on Friday. Amos Hochstein, managing partner at investment group TWG Global and a former adviser to former president Joe Biden, said investing in Venezuela was fraught with legal, financial and political risk. American oil companies needed to know whether they would be shielded beyond Trump’s term in office, he said. “US companies need to know who their counterparties are. Are they signing deals with the Venezuelan government? Is the Venezuelan government legitimate?” Hochstein added: “For the next three years these companies will have to put money in and no revenue will come out until much later. And at that point Donald Trump will no longer be the president.” Neil McMahon, co-founder of energy investment group Kimmeridge, said US companies would need formal financial guarantees from the administration before committing money.

“Companies are all concerned about what legal framework these new contracts would take just given the fact they have been burnt so many times before.” One leading private equity investor said his firm was “ready to get down and start looking at stuff” but cautioned Venezuela was “as risky as it gets”. “This government’s basically going to have to guarantee it,” he added. “Short of something like that, no investor, no public company that has shareholders can put their capital to work in a country that doesn’t have real laws and takes profits and confiscates assets.”

Leopard 2 main battle tanks, although receiving new modernizations and iterations, are still designed during Cold War times. So they need to be replaced, as Spain plans, but a new generation is now not as easy to get as it seems. Spain’s Directorate General of Armament and Material has signed a contract for €45 million with Indra Systems for work within the Pamov project. And the latter provides for research in the direction of developing an Advanced Ground Combat System. And this concerns precisely searching for a new main battle tank to replace Leopard 2E, which are currently used. Moreover, procurement will be made regardless of whether old machines will be modernized to new standards. The project horizon is currently defined as the 2040s according to deadlines set for pan-European MGCS. However, Spain still hasn’t been included there despite all attempts, and other participants, Germany and France, are diverging in different directions with desires for interim solutions. So the question arises that a new tank needs to be sought either with newly formed directions that will be close to each country’s requirements, or in other places. And here there is a problem, because actually there are almost no alternatives.

Currently, European defense industry produces only Leopard 2A8, which is the latest iteration of a machine that was developed during Cold War times. Germany itself plans to replace them with potential Leopard 3, which could become an option for Spaniards, as was once the case with Leopard 2E localization. What France will do is unknown, considering that it actually lost full capabilities in tank building, which is why it cooperated with Germans. So such a choice doesn’t look reliable. There are also South Korean K2s, which are localized in Poland, as well as Turkish Altay, which only recently went into series. However, they ideologically differ little from older analogues, so they don’t quite fit the status of new generation. As a last resort, it remains to look at the new Abrams in the U.S, where they want to include a huge number of innovations. Its iterative development has only begun, but such an option is very doubtful, because Spaniards due to new geopolitical realities recently refused F-35s, which were critical for naval aviation.

So there remains quite limited choice for Leopard 2E successor, and creating something of one’s own is too complicated. However, if they determine requirements and find someone ready to cooperate, maybe everything will work out, even better than Spain’s own Dragon wheeled APC program.

Pentagon policies that forbid troops from repairing and modifying their weapons and gear are hindering efforts to accelerate U.S. operations with ground and air robots, special operators and defense experts warn. The problem stems from defense contracts that enable manufacturers to retain lucrative repair and data rights, Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said at a Carnegie event on Wednesday. Massicot noted that Ukrainian forces can’t repair much of the U.S. gear they have been given. “For some of the Western equipment, if it’s damaged to a certain point, they can’t necessarily maintain it, and they actually have to ship it back out and back in, which is terrible. So there is a drag there if you try to isolate this core function, especially if you’re in a high-intensity conflict,” she said. But the Ukrainians can modify domestically produced drones, and that has helped them adapt at the lightning-fast pace of modern warfare. Their efforts are of intense interest to the instructors who train U.S. special operators at the Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

The robotic-warfare concepts being taught at the Kennedy school depend on being able to repair and rapidly modify weapons in the field, said Army Col. Simon Powelson, who leads First Special Warfare Training Group at Bragg. “We’re all about open architecture,” Powelson said in a recent interview. “You have to have the ability to change them rapidly on the fly, and that’s also important.” Powelson believes that outpacing future adversaries will depend on being able to swiftly integrate air and ground robots with older weapons such as artillery and missiles using AI, in new ways, often during conflict. “When I think of robotics, I don’t think of just a drone doing one particular thing. I think drones are a system of systems, systems of systems that are also tied to legacy systems,” he said. ”There’s a lot of talk about: ‘Is tube artillery or cannon artillery dead? No, I could have an…operational objective where I have my reconnaissance drone, my [electronic warfare] drone… strike drone, my bombers, my mine-laying drones are all operating to impart that plan in conjunction with tube artillery.” In the past year, the Pentagon has urged its acquisition corps to favor open architecture systems that can be easily repaired and modified. But vast amounts of its weapons and gear were designed to proprietary standards.

In 2025, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and other senators attempted to insert a “Warrior Right to Repair” provision in the National Defense Authorization Act. The provision would have required weapons makers to provide “fair and reasonable access to all the repair materials, including parts, tools, and information, used by the manufacturer or provider or their authorized repair providers to diagnose, maintain, or repair the goods.”

“warrior right to repair” is such a funny phrase, goddamn imagine calling yourself a “warrior” and needing to beg your corporate overlords for permission to touch your equipment

After the provision failed to make it into the bill’s final version, Warren issued a Dec. 8 statement: “We support the Pentagon using the full extent of its existing authorities to insist on right to repair protections when it purchases equipment from contractors, and we will keep fighting for a common-sense, bipartisan law to address this unnecessary problem.” As the Pentagon advances efforts to bring more types of companies into the defense industrial base, it will have to contend with more problems related to intellectual property, William C. Greenwalt, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, warned at the Carnegie event. “This is not a cut-and-dried issue,” said Greenwalt, a former staffer for the Senate Armed Services Committee. “There are many, many things in the law that emanate from political sources that end up having to be massaged, and I think that’s where we are on this issue.” Massicot said that Russia has found a way to speed battlefront repairs and mods. “On the Russian side, they actually do repairs within their units. But they have to supplement with forward-deployed defense industry specialists to the front. So we would have to think about what that means for us moving forward. That’s one way to do it. You push it forward, and they’re doing it together.”

U.S. defense contractors have taken varied approaches to moving technicians closer to the battlefield. Some, like Palantir, Anduril, and Shield AI, are open about the work they do alongside Ukrainian operators. Larger and more established contractors have been less eager to take similar steps, resulting, for instance, in snafus that affected the use of Javelin missiles and other weapons. In late 2024, the Biden administration eased restrictions that had limited the ability of defense contractors to provide consulting and support to Ukrainian forces. Massicot said more armsmakers and other contractors should take advantage of the opportunity to observe and work with their products in the war zone. “Why do we still have policy restrictions on ourselves? It’s four years later, I think we can be pretty confident that the Russians are not going to escalate because we are starting to slip in observers, but that’s just my point of view,” she said. “There’s a closing window to get this done. There are some American companies that are testing in Ukraine. I just don’t think it’s as robust as it needs to be, given that it’s a laboratory for experimentation right now.”

In a Dec. 23 contract announcement, the Pentagon stated that the task order for the Commercial Engine Replacement Program, or CERP, requires Boeing to modify a pair of B-52s with new engines and associated subsystems — and then test the aircraft. This will be development and systems integration work intended to take place after the CERP program’s critical design review. The CERP program is a massive project to extend the lives of the Air Force’s 76 B-52s — already more than six decades old — into at least the 2050s, and perhaps to 2060. If the bombers reach that point, they will have been flying for about a century.

The Air Force eventually wants to have a two-bomber fleet made up of B-52s and at least 100 Northrop Grumman-made stealth B-21 Raiders, in the most sweeping revamp of its bomber force in at least a generation. The service plans to retire its B-2 Spirit stealth bombers and B-1 Lancers — which are becoming harder and more expensive to maintain — throughout the 2030s. The B-52 overhaul, expected to cost $48.6 billion in all, will be so extensive that the bombers will be redesignated the B-52J. Aside from receiving a new complement of Rolls-Royce-made F130 engines, the B-52 will receive, among others: a new modernized radar; improved avionics; communication upgrades; new wheels and brakes; and new digital displays to replace the original dashboard of analog dials. The first B-52 to receive an upgraded Active Electronically Scanned Array radar flew to Edwards Air Force Base in California in December. Boeing installed the new Raytheon-made AN/APQ-188 Bomber Modernized Radar System — which is expected to provide upgraded navigation and improved targeting capabilities, and work in a variety of weather conditions — at its San Antonio, Texas, facility before airmen flew it to Edwards. Boeing will conduct the work on these B-52s in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; San Antonio, Texas; Seattle, Washington; and Indianapolis, Indiana, the Pentagon said. The work is estimated to be done by the end of May 2033.

Donald Trump has no plan for what comes next in Venezuela, according to sources familiar with his thinking. After capturing Nicolás Maduro on Saturday, the US president is relying on his top aides to develop their Venezuela policy on the hoof. “There is no blueprint, no plan for what comes next,” said one source. “And anybody who tells you that it’s anything other than day-by-day is really not being forthright with you.” The former Venezuelan leader appeared in Manhattan’s federal court on Monday. He was arrested in an audacious raid by US special forces on Saturday morning to face charges of narco-terrorism. Delcy Rodríguez, Mr Maduro’s vice-president, has since been sworn in as the interim leader. At first, she struck a defiant tone, but later suggested that she was prepared to work with the US.

once again, Western media doing the whole “oh the Venezuelan government is totally willing to cooperate!” shit

At the same time, Mr Trump’s vision for what comes next appears at odds with the views of his top foreign policy official. The result is confusion about how Washington plans to oversee Venezuela’s transition to a democratic government and exactly how it will avoid the sort of quagmire that bogged down past interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. “We are going to run the country until we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” is how Mr Trump put it on Saturday, setting out a course to democratic elections, even as he played down the role of the country’s democratically elected opposition leaders. Marco Rubio, his secretary of state and one of the leading Venezuela hawks in his administration, described things differently. He told Sunday news shows that the US would exert influence on the Caracas government through its sanctions, preventing oil tankers from coming and going. “That remains in place, and that’s a tremendous amount of leverage that will continue to be in place until we see changes, not just to further the national interest of the United States, which is number one, but also that lead to a better future for the people of Venezuela,” he told CBS News.

A second source said their public words reflected private differences on how to view the remnants of Mr Maduro’s regime. For Mr Rubio, there is unease that so many officials connected to the drug trade remain in place.

oh fuck off

“There are dozens of people here,” said the source. “They’ve been indicted and implicated. So what about their future?” Mr Rubio cut an agitated figure during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago on Jan 3. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other while in front of him, Mr Trump laid out his view of the raid, saying that the US would run the country until a “safe, proper and judicious” transition could be achieved. A senior White House official said it was wrong to think there was confusion among Mr Trump and his top team. “This is false – president Trump and secretary Rubio have been consistent,” they said. “Both were speaking about exerting maximum leverage with the remaining elements in Venezuela and ensuring they co-operate with the United States by halting illegal migration, stopping drug flows, revitalising oil infrastructure, and doing what is right for the Venezuelan people.” The president said a working group of senior advisers were planning for Venezuela’s future, but he did not spell out their roles and responsibilities.

Regional experts have warned that the ambition and rhetoric have yet to be matched by a detailed plan. “The duration of the transition, its benchmarks, and its ultimate outcome all remain resoundingly unclear,” said Laurel Rapp, director of the US and North America programme at Chatham House, in a recent commentary. “Trump and Rubio’s imprecise language about who currently runs Venezuela hints at limited succession planning, if any.” Senior Trump figures see the approach as a strength, not a criticism. They say he makes huge demands on his staff to operate on “Trump time” by making rapid decisions and then setting tight deadlines for them to be enacted. “It is not a criticism. It is his style,” said the first source familiar with the president’s Venezuela thinking. “Pull the trigger and then figure out how it works.”

I’m not incompetent, it’s just my style!

In this case, he added, Mr Trump and his team were particularly incensed by the way Mr Maduro had responded to US demands by dancing in public. “At some point here, he did feel that sometimes he was being mocked,” he said, confirming previous reports by the New York Times. Mr Rubio and other top officials briefed leaders in Congress on Monday night amid mounting concerns that Mr Trump is operating without consulting representatives and does not have a clear vision for running the South American country. Republican leaders entered the closed-door session at the Capitol largely supportive of Trump’s decision to forcibly remove Mr Maduro from power. However, many Democrats emerged with more questions as Mr Trump maintains a fleet of naval vessels off the Venezuelan coast and urges US companies to reinvest in the country’s underperforming oil industry. A war powers resolution that would prohibit US military action in Venezuela without approval from Congress is heading for a vote this week in the Senate.

Mike Johnson, the house speaker, said: “We don’t expect troops on the ground.” Gregg Nunziata, a long-time Republican aide who is now the executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law, said competing justifications for action – to stem the supply of drugs reaching American soil or to get access to Venezuelan oil or to promote democracy, for example – muddied thinking about next steps. “I think observers are right to question whether the lack of a coherent explanation and whether the conflicting justifications from the administration are an indication of a deliberate strategy or real confusion within the senior ranks of the administration,” he told The Telegraph. A state department official said Monday that the Trump administration is making preliminary plans to reopen the US embassy in Venezuela. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said early preparations “to allow for a reopening” of the embassy in Caracas had begun in the event that Mr Trump decides to return American diplomats to the country.