Five members of the joint chiefs of staff — including Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman — are required statutorily to leave their posts within the coming months, starting in July. Meanwhile, most of the vice chiefs — many of whom are the nominees or favorites to replace the chiefs — are preparing to assume leadership of the services amid the Senate impasse.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., is doubling down on his blockade of military confirmations. He told Defense News that the looming vacancies will not prompt him to back down from his ongoing hold on hundreds of military promotions, including the joint chiefs.

“If they’re worried about readiness, they need to go back to their old policy and we’ll get it done,” Tuberville said on Wednesday. “But they’re more worried about social programs than they are about military readiness.”

The senator imposed his blockade in February to protest the Pentagon’s new policy that provides leave time for troops to travel to receive abortion services if they’re stationed in states where it’s now illegal.

The first service chief vacancy will occur when Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger steps down on July 10, commencing a steady stream of exits from the joint chiefs through October. Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville must step down next on August 8, followed by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday shortly after on August 21.

President Joe Biden nominated Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown as the next joint chiefs chairman, replacing Milley, who must depart by early October, and creating another opening at the top of the Air Force.

“There’s no playbook for this,” Arnold Punaro, a former staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview with Defense News. “This is really a time for regular order, and not the chaos and uncertainty that we see in the system right now.”

The tumult sends a terrible message about the seriousness with which the United States takes its military promotion process, he said.

“It sends a sign of weakness to the rest of the world, that we can’t get our work done on time, and that we’re involved in political chaos,” Punaro said. “This has nothing to do with the individuals involved. We want the young officers, and up-and-coming commanders to see that the military promotion system is based on merit and [who is] best qualified.”

The Senate typically confirms noncontroversial military nominees, including the joint chiefs, using expedited floor procedures via unanimous consent. But any individual senator can block a unanimous consent request, allowing Tuberville to force the Senate to move through numerous procedural votes on each individual nominee.

“All they’ve got to do is put it on the floor and vote for it,” Tuberville told Defense News. “I’ll vote for it.”

Tuberville’s hold would require several weeks of limited Senate floor time to confirm the five joint chiefs nominees alone. Tuberville’s blockade is also holding up more than 220 flag and general officer promotions, which would take an additional several months of scarce floor time if the Senate did nothing but confirm military nominees. The Senate expects to receive hundreds more military nominees in the coming months.

Democratic leaders appear reluctant to use valuable floor time to confirm otherwise noncontroversial nominees and worry that doing so will encourage other senators to block military promotions in order to extract policy concessions.

“The Senate cannot encourage this behavior by handing out rewards for holding up hundreds of nominees,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who chairs the military personnel panel, told Defense News.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., repeatedly declined to commit to scheduling floor votes for the joint chiefs nominees when pressed by reporters at a Wednesday press conference.

“What Sen. Tuberville has done is just awful,” Schumer told Defense News. “We believe that Republican senators, if they care about national security, should be putting pressure on him to release the holds.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said last month that he disagrees with Tuberville’s military holds.

And Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told Defense News he hoped the issue could be resolved with a vote on the Pentagon’s abortion policy in the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act– a suggestion that Tuberville shot down.

“I don’t want to put it in the NDAA and then hold it up because you’re going to have people that will be against it,” Tuberville told Defense News. “I’d rather have the Defense Department draw something up, send it over here and let’s vote on it, stand-alone.”

What happens next?

The fact that the same nominees tapped to lead the services will fill in for the vacancies in their capacity as the number two officer provides the Senate with little immediate incentive to resolve the impasse.

Punaro said vice chiefs would step in and perform those duties to keep the services running on a day-to-day basis. Similarly, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Christopher Grady would temporarily perform the duties of chairman if Brown is not confirmed by the beginning of October.

Delaying the start of new chiefs’ tenures hinders their ability to start making their desired changes to their services, he said.

Gen. Eric Smith, the Marines’ No. 2 officer and Biden’s nominee for commandant, is scheduled for a confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Given Smith’s current role as assistant commandant, the Marines are preparing for Smith to perform the commandant’s duties when Berger leaves on July 10 even if the Senate has not confirmed him by then.

The confirmation hearings for the other joint chiefs nominees, including Brown, are slated for July.

That includes Army vice chief Gen. Randy George to replace McConville. Biden has yet to nominate a new Chief of Naval Operations, but Navy vice chief Admiral Lisa Franchetti is widely considered the favorite for the position.

And of course, Biden will have to nominate a new Air Force chief of staff to replace Brown, with current Air Force vice chief Gen. David Allvin considered the frontrunner.

Senate Armed Services Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., told Defense News “It would be absolutely irresponsible” not to have a congressionally confirmed service chief.

Senators have held up votes on noncontroversial nominees more frequently in recent years. For instance, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., imposed a blanket hold on all Defense Department civilian nominations for more than a year.

They target military nominees less frequently. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., was the last senator to do so in 2020. Her hold lasted less than two weeks before she lifted it. By contrast, Tuberville’s hold has lasted more than three months with no end in sight.

“What goes around comes around,” Reed told Defense News. “If basically this succeeds, then the next two years from now someone who wants an assault weapons ban will say ‘gee, I’ll just hold up all the generals.”

Jen Judson contributed to this report.

The update comes as the service and the Pentagon grapple with what future warfare might require of American forces.

In its annual update on June 5 — part of the Corps’ ongoing Force Design 2030 modernization push — the service laid out two parallel efforts: a 21st Century Amphibious Operations concept the Corps is studying with the Navy; and an ARG/MEU Next concept, which refers to the amphibious ready group/Marine expeditionary unit pairing of ships and embarked forces.

The 21st Century Amphibious Operations concept would “articulate the future role of amphibious operations in support of maritime campaigns and will describe new operating methods that incorporate agile platforms to supplement traditional amphibious ships,” according to the Force Design update.

Examples given include long-range, unmanned systems that can infiltrate an enemy’s weapon-engagement zone, manned-unmanned fleets, and other “disruptive technologies.”

This concept looks into the 2040s and considers how Marines might conduct amphibious operations.

One new facet of amphibious operations could involve military vessels serving as motherships to unmanned systems that operate in several domains of warfare.

Col. Daniel Wittnam, the director of the service’s Integration Division, told Defense News in a recent interview that the commandant of the Marine Corps is interested in putting anything unmanned or autonomous onto amphibious ships for experimentation.

“The mothership concept is another opportunity for the Marine Corps to show flexibility and to be able to show resiliency by looking at manned and unmanned teaming and different platforms to utilize new and emerging technologies with our ARG/MEU teams,” Wittnam said.

He said the service already had funding to deploy the Shield AI-made V-BAT unmanned aerial vehicle on amphibious ships, and that the first Long-Range Unmanned Surface Vessel prototype would in the coming months move from Virginia to California to begin a user evaluation, which will include operations with a Marine expeditionary unit at sea.

This concept study will focus on how amphibious forces will fight, and not weigh in on how many ships the Corps needs the Navy to buy and maintain.

Still, even as the service takes a longer-term look at this piece of its portfolio, there is significant uncertainty hanging over its head about these operations today.

The Marine Corps, the Navy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense have differing views on the role of amphibious operations in today’s joint force, and therefore how much money to spend on upkeeping existing ships and building replacements.

Congress attempted to partly settle the dispute by putting a 31-ship-fleet minimum into law, but the current long-range shipbuilding plan of record falls short of that mandate. Furthermore, the Pentagon has shown no sign of support for additional shipbuilding spending that would be needed to sustain a 31-ship fleet.

Despite multiple studies in recent years on the required size of the amphibious fleet, yet another study is nearing its conclusion and will look at ships’ design, acquisition and construction processes, eyeing opportunities to decrease the cost of the fleet.

The Marine Corps has pushed back on this idea, with Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, the deputy commandant for combat development and integration, telling Defense News this year that rough drawings from the Pentagon would reduce the capability of the ships in a way the service finds unacceptable.

The study is due to the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office imminently. It is unclear what will happen once the office receives the Marine Corps’ and the Navy’s input, as leadership has only said the study will inform the fiscal 2025 budget process.

“I’m very pessimistic,” Heckl said during the recent interview about his near-term outlook on the amphibious fleet’s size and readiness. “Until amphibs genuinely become a priority, this will always be a struggle — to procure and then maintain. The fact that these vessels have been ridden hard and put away wet simply exemplifies how useable they are: They are in constant demand.”

He recommended the Defense Department reconsider how ships are funded. Currently, only the Navy can buy those vessels in its shipbuilding account, and only the Navy can maintain them within its operations and maintenance account, even though Marines are the primary beneficiaries of the ships.

Fleet combinations

As something of a hedge against the projected shortfall of amphibious ships, the Marines’ Force Design update also references a look at the ARG/MEU team’s composition.

As part of the ARG/MEU Next effort, the Corps is eyeing different ship configurations — including existing Navy expeditionary ships and potential “lower cost alternatives” to supplement amphibs — that could keep Marines afloat around the globe.

In the future, the Navy and Marine Corps could use a greater number of smaller and less expensive ships to “complicate the ability of our adversaries to find and target our sea-based expeditionary forces,” according to the Force Design update document.

Wittnam said that earlier in his career there were three ARG/MEU teams at sea routinely. But today, it’s difficult to keep two — or even one — at sea.

Marines need new ideas to address mobility, or their ability to move around independently of joint force assets, which Wittnam called a top concern heading into the next year of Force Design experimentation.

Despite Heckl’s concerns about today’s ARG/MEU team and the ability to strengthen the fleet in the coming years, the general did say Marines “are going to do what we’ve always done, what quite frankly we do really, really well: We’re going to fight for every damn penny we can get with Congress, and we don’t care who gets hurt along the way because we’re doing it to have what our nation needs.”

The memorandum of understanding, signed in Mumbai where Mazagon is based, happened as German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius made a stop there at the end of his weeklong visit of allied nations in the region.

His presence in official photos from the event suggests Germany’s candidacy for an eventual award of six new submarines, reported by Reuters to be worth $5.2 billion, is far along, according to analysts.

Wednesday’s agreement between the German and Indian businesses is said to cover activities worth €7 billion (U.S. $7.5 billion), according to German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

On the table is the “intended construction of conventional, air-independent propulsion submarines,” TKMS said in a statement.

Executives were keen to stress that the German vendor’s role would lie in providing engineering, design and consultant services, with manufacturing and delivery falling entirely to Mazagon. The approach is meant to comply with India’s policy of mandating that military goods be domestically produced.

The division of labor also befits TKMS, whose German-based shipyards are busy making submarines for the sea services of Germany, Norway, Israel and Singapore, said Johannes Peters, who heads the Center for Maritime Strategy and Security at the Institute for Security Policy of Kiel University.

A prospective multibillion-dollar deal for submarines in India makes the German shipbuilder more attractive for investors, as the ThyssenKrupp conglomerate seeks to sell the business in an effort to consolidate and focus on more predictable operations, Peters said. The shipbuilding business is famously fickle because of its intensive capital needs, financial guarantees and long lead times, he added.

Witnessed by journalists onboard a Philippine coast guard patrol boat, the BRP Cabra, the drills focused on a scenario involving the interdiction and boarding of a vessel suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction off the Bataan Peninsula, Philippine coast guard spokesperson Commodore Armand Balilo said.

Shots rang out as heavily armed coast guard personnel rapidly boarded the vessel from a speedboat and herded the crew members toward the stern. A helicopter hovered as U.S. and Japanese coast guard ships helped rescue crew members who jumped off the target vessel during the mock assault.

“We are not just all display,” Philippine coast guard deputy spokesperson John Ybanez said. “All these exercises that we do will help us help each other in possible scenarios in the future.”

The U.S. Coast Guard deployed one of its most advanced cutters, the 418-foot (127-meter) Stratton, in the June 1-7 exercises hosted by the Philippines, Washington’s oldest treaty ally in Asia. The Stratton has been conducting exercises in the region to share expertise in search and rescue and law enforcement, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

“This first trilateral engagement between the coast guards of these nations will provide invaluable opportunities to strengthen global maritime governance though professional exchanges and combined operations,” the Stratton’s commanding officer, Capt. Brian Krautler, said at the start of the exercises. “Together we’ll demonstrate professional, rules-based standards of maritime operations with our steadfast partners to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

Japan deployed a large coast guard ship, the Akitsushima, while four Philippine coast guard vessels joined the exercises.

The Biden administration has been strengthening an arc of military alliances in the Indo-Pacific to better counter China, including in the South China Sea and in any future confrontation over Taiwan, the self-governing island which Beijing regards as a Chinese province.

Washington lays no claims to the strategic South China Sea, where China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysian, Taiwan and Brunei have been locked in tense territorial stand-offs for decades. But the U.S. says freedom of navigation and overflight and the peaceful resolution of disputes in the busy waterway are in its national interest.

Philippine officials say such joint exercises with U.S. forces do not target any country. But China has warned that increased U.S. security deployments in Asia target Beijing’s interests and undermine regional stability.

The U.S. Pacific Command said over the weekend that a U.S. guided-missile destroyer and a Canadian frigate were intercepted by a Chinese warship in the Taiwan Strait. The Chinese vessel overtook the American ship and veered across its bow at a distance of 150 yards (about 140 meters) in an “unsafe manner,” it said.

Last month, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said a Chinese J-16 fighter aircraft flew directly in front of a U.S. Air Force RC-135 plane in an “an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” while the American reconnaissance plane “was conducting safe and routine operations over the South China Sea in international airspace, in accordance with international law.”

In April, Japan adopted a new five-year ocean policy that calls for stronger maritime security, including bolstering its coast guard’s capability and cooperation with the military. It cited a list of threats, including repeated intrusions by Chinese coast guard ships into Japanese territorial waters.

The Philippine coast guard, meanwhile, has intensified patrols in the South China Sea and taken extra efforts to document and publicize assertive Chinese behavior in the waterway following a Feb. 6 incident in which a Chinese coast guard ship aimed a military-grade laser that briefly blinded some crew members on a Philippine patrol boat off a disputed reef.

Associated Press writer Jim Gomez in Manila contributed to this report.

As the Corps continues on its Force Design 2030 modernization quest, it found a “requirement for littoral, multi-domain reconnaissance capabilities that our light armored reconnaissance (LAR) battalions do not currently provide,” reads a Force Design annual update document, released June 5.

The service has long struggled to find a replacement for the 1980s Light Armored Vehicles. In 2021 the Marine Corps awarded Textron and General Dynamics Land Systems contracts to build ARV prototypes, which were submitted in December for testing that began in January and will continue into the third quarter of the year.

The Corps is also testing a BAE Systems’ amphibious combat vehicle outfitted with similar mission equipment as the ARV prototypes: tethered and untethered unmanned aerial systems, electronic warfare systems, long-range weapons and a battle management system that allows vehicles to share information and control a wide battlespace.

Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, the deputy commandant for combat development and integration, told Defense News in a May 31 interview that the light armored reconnaissance community has been a focus of Force Design experimentation over the past year. The 2022 Force Design update placed great importance on reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance battles.

The service’s analyses show that “we do still have a requirement for some type of LAV thing,” Heckl said. “And it’s going to be ARV. Initially, there were thoughts that perhaps that wasn’t required; it is. When you think of, from an [U.S. Africa Command], a [U.S. Central Command], a [U.S. European Command] perspective, that piece of equipment is necessary.”

While he said the legacy LAVs have a 25mm Bushmaster cannon and drive fast, the ARV “is going to be a node, another part of that sensing ecosystem at the tactical edge that is going to connect other pieces of kill webs and command and control.”

Because that need is clear, Heckl said there would be no delay in evaluating the three ARV prototypes this year and making a decision about down-selecting to a single vendor — though the Marine Corps has not released a timeline for when that decision might occur.

But the new vehicle may not work everywhere.

That is because the Marines’ vision of small units operating dispersed over large areas in the Pacific places a premium on light equipment, said Heckl. Any large vehicle with significant sustainment needs “is probably going to be borderline more of a liability than an asset” in that scenario, he told Defense News.

Other solutions could include light and ultra-light tactical vehicles and small boats, as forces move around their operating area and increasingly rely on unmanned vehicles to spread out in all directions and help sense the area and pass targeting data to other Marine Corps or joint force units.

“A light reconnaissance entity in the Indo-Pacific is probably going to look dramatically different from one that would be roaming around in Northern Africa or in CENTCOM’s AOR,” he said.

According to the 2023 Force Design update document, the current proposal for new mobile reconnaissance battalions (MRBs) would include maritime reconnaissance (waterborne) companies, light mobile companies and light armored companies, “all with greater reach and lethality.”

To help accelerate the transition from the current LAR battalions to these MRBs, each of the three active-duty LAR battalions will experiment with designing one of the new MRB companies: 1st LAR in California will experiment with the maritime reconnaissance company design; 2nd LAR in North Carolina will experiment with the light mobile company design; and 3rd LAR in California will experiment with the light armored company design.

Scott Lacy, the deputy director at the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, said in the interview that this setup of concurrent experimentation, with each unit responsible for a distinct portfolio, will allow the Marines to answer its remaining questions “at the fastest possible pace.”

1st LAR and I Marine Expeditionary Force will experiment with small boats in support of the maritime reconnaissance company, something that that organization has already done and something the Marine Corps is familiar with from its old riverine squadrons.

The Marines will also pull from lessons learned by the Navy and special operations communities, as well as allies and partners that routinely conduct small boat operations, according to Marine Corps Warfighting Lab commander Brig Gen. Kyle Ellison. This existing body of research will help point the Marines in the right direction for their light reconnaissance platforms, he said.

This research and experimentation with small boats will also include the minimally manned Long-Range Unmanned Surface Vessel that will help provide multidomain reconnaissance, electronic warfare and deception, Col. Daniel Wittnam, the director of the Marine Corps Integration Division, told Defense News.

Heckl acknowledged the magnitude of change the reconnaissance community would see in the coming years, not only absorbing a new vehicle type but also rethinking the mission overall.

In preparing the latest annual Force Design update, he said, “I thought one of the most difficult things we were going to tackle was going to be this very subject, was going to be the MRBs, because it is so broad and I believe at this point the change is going to be so dramatic.”

Sgt. Maj. Carlos A. Ruiz will replace Sgt. Maj. Troy Black, who has been in that job since 2019, according to a Monday Marine Corps press release.

Ruiz’s role will be to advocate for enlisted Marines and serve as an adviser to the commandant ― the top Marine leader.

“My wife and I are truly humbled, honored, and grateful for the opportunity to serve as the next sergeant major of the Marine Corps,” Ruiz said in an emailed statement to Marine Corps Times on Wednesday. “Almost 30 years ago my recruiter cracked the door open for me to walk through and along the way Marines of all ranks and experiences took the time to teach and mentor me. I’m sure they are exhausted!”

Ruiz particularly thanked Black and his wife, retired 1st Sgt. Stacie Black, for their “incredible work, passion, and vision.”

Black told Marine Corps Times on Monday, “As sergeant major of the Marine Corps, he will lead our Marines to the next level. He’s a Marine who will provide leadership, guidance, care and advocacy for all Marines and their families.”

Biden’s pick to lead the Marine Corps helped design its new vision

On May 30, President Joe Biden nominated Gen. Eric Smith to become the next commandant beginning in July.

Smith’s confirmation may be held up by the blockage of senior military nominees by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, in protest of the Pentagon’s abortion policy.

A Phoenix native, Ruiz enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1993, according to the press release.

It took Ruiz multiple attempts to join the Marine Corps “because he could not speak English,” Lt. Gen. David Bellon, commander of Marine Forces Reserve and Marine Corps Forces South, noted on LinkedIn on Monday.

“He never quit,” Bellon wrote. “He has not quit since.”

After starting out as a warehouse clerk, Ruiz became an enlisted leader at units across the Corps, according to the release. He also has served as a recruiter and drill instructor, as well as a chief instructor of drill instructors.

He has deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, according to the release.

Ruiz’s awards include the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star Medal with combat distinguishing device, Meritorious Service Medal with gold star, Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with two gold stars, Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal with one gold star, and Combat Action Ribbon with one gold star, according to his official biography.

Ruiz was selected in December 2022 to be the senior enlisted leader of U.S. Space Command and had planned to start that role June 30, according to Marine spokesman Lt. Col. Craig Thomas. But then Ruiz got chosen as sergeant major of the Marine Corps, meaning that Space Command will now have to find a different senior enlisted leader.

In 2013, when Ruiz was taking over as the senior enlisted leader for 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, he said, “My plan for this battalion is the same as it has been for every battalion I’ve been with. I’m going to take care of my Marines and push them to maintain the standard set down for them, and uphold their high level of discipline.”

“While SgtMaj Ruiz loves being a Marine, he loves Marines even more,” Bellon wrote Monday on LinkedIn. “He is a warrior of the first order and has proved that many times over.”

Sergeants major of the Marine Corps typically serve four-year terms, at the pleasure of the commandant, according to the news release.

“I will be forever grateful to every Marine I have ever served with,” Ruiz said in his statement. “It’s in large part because of their sacrifice and effort that I find myself here today.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with additional comments about and by Sgt. Maj. Ruiz and more information about his planned move to U.S. Space Command.

SINGAPORE — The defense ministers of Germany and the United Kingdom have pledged to keep up their respective military presence in the Indo-Pacific region, while also outlining their plans for military deployments, at a regional security summit in Singapore.

Britain’s Ben Wallace and Germany’s Boris Pistorius were speaking at their respective plenaries during the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, an event organized by the International Institute of Strategic Studies that ran June 2-4.

Wallace said that the Royal Navy will deploy another aircraft carrier and an accompanying strike group to the region in 2025, following a deployment of the carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth to the region in 2021.

He also highlighted the permanent deployment of the offshore patrol vessels HMS Tamar and HMS Spey to the Indo-Pacific. Both vessels arrived in the region in 2021 and have since undertaken 16 port visits and 20 regional exercises.

The ships have also engaged in real-world missions such as sanctions monitoring in the East China Sea and disaster relief following a tsunami in Tonga.

Wallace also cited China’s “epoch-defining” rise as the biggest challenge for the region, warning that “none of our most fundamental global issues can be solved without engagement with China.”

“Be they climate change, energy and food security, economic stagnation, tech regulation, nuclear proliferation,” he said, “we must also speak plainly and acknowledge that there are also challenges from that ‘rise’ — illegal fishing, tensions in territorial waters, sovereignty disputes and debt diplomacy.”

For his part, Pistorius confirmed in his speech that Germany will send a frigate and a supply ship to the Indo-Pacific region in 2024. A German frigate made a similar deployment in 2021, while its Eurofighter multirole combat aircraft undertook a deployment to the region last year, taking part in a large-scale air combat exercise in Australia and visiting several other local countries.

He also urged respect of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and backed the principle of freedom of navigation, which “can and should be done via non-military means” to a large extent. As an example, he highlighted Germany’s participation in the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia, an international agreement dubbed ReCAAP.

“Germany also stands ready to support all efforts to promote bilateral or multilateral confidence-building measures such as pre-notification of exercises, mutual invitation to participate in exercises, mutual site visits, inspections of military installations or arms control agreements,” Pistorius said, welcoming the Biden administration’s offer to enter into negotiations with Russia and China on nuclear arms control without preconditions.

This move comes as part of the Corps’ ongoing Force Design 2030 modernization effort to prepare the service to deter or win a fight against China and other potential adversaries.

The Marine Corps on Monday released an annual status update on Force Design efforts, which included a nod to the service’s Long-Range Attack Munition effort supported by the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, “to rapidly develop and field a low-cost, air launched family of loitering, swarming munitions.”

In a June 2 call with reporters, Brig. Gen. Stephen Lightfoot, director of the Capabilities Development Directorate, noted that as an AH-1 pilot, he has firsthand experience with the Hellfire missile. Depending on the helicopter’s altitude, a pilot might get 8 kilometers (5 miles) of range from the weapon.

“That’s great in [Operation Iraqi Freedom], [Operation Enduring Freedom] and areas we’ve been fighting in for years. But when you move over to the Indo-Pacific and some of the distances we’re talking about, 8 kilometers doesn’t really do as much as you’d want,” Lightfoot said.

Noting that the last H-1 attack helicopters were delivered last year and that the Corps will operate them for several more decades, he said the service must now pursue both evolutionary and revolutionary ideas to keeping these aircraft relevant to the fight.

The service is already experimenting with these long-range, loitering, swarming munitions and expects to field them “within the next few years,” Lightfoot noted.

“That is a capability that brings hundreds of kilometers, and that allows us to be able to use a current platform to be able to do things that we never thought we’d be able to do,” Lightfoot said, calling this development effort “critical.”

These munitions would also be operable from ground launchers, he added.

While the helicopters’ own range and maneuverability would enhance the munitions’ capability, Lightfoot said, aircraft aren’t always in the air. To ensure Marines operating forward have round-the-clock access to long-range offensive weapons, he said the service would pursue a launcher for use by ground troops.

In a separate interview on the Force Design update, Scott Lacy, the deputy director of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, said the organization is working on this effort with the aviation community. The work includes studying munitions already on the market as well as other experimental capabilities.

The Force Design annual update noted “other projects include developing a common launcher for the family of ground launched loitering munitions and testing a low-cost, hypersonic booster in a form factor the Marine Corps can logistically support in a contested environment.”

Lacy did not elaborate much on the hypersonic booster, other than to say experimentation is ongoing at the lab.

In the same interview, Col. Daniel Wittnam, the director of the Marine Corps Integration Division, described another long-range offensive fires effort in which the service is involved, in conjunction with the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The office provided money for the Corps to experiment using the Maritime Strike Tomahawk — a derivative of the legacy Tomahawk land-attack missile that the office directed in fiscal 2017 — as a land-based weapon.

Marines will use the Naval Strike Missile as their first ground-based, anti-ship missile but have previously said they intend to pursue other longer-range weapons for the future.

Wittnam said the 11th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton, California, was standing up a battery to work with the Maritime Strike Tomahawk.

The question the Marines have as they consider this and other emerging capabilities is whether the technology is naval and expeditionary, given their focus on littoral operations in the Pacific, the colonel said.

He noted the current form factor is not, but he said the experimentation would continue. (The proof-of-concept system would mount the missile launcher on a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle chassis, a setup that already had a tip-over incident due to the center of gravity being off.)

Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, the deputy commandant for combat development and integration, told reporters during the June 2 roundtable that not all the ongoing experiments would be successesful, but the Corps would learn from all of them as it rapidly modernizes.

“I don’t have the luxury of, (A) test something, (B) get the feedback, (C) let’s make changes. You know, that takes years and years. We have to iterate and, if necessary, fail quickly and learn faster, and then iterate again,” he said.

In doing so, Heckl added, “we have made the fleet more capable. Period. Full stop.”

This will boost the size of the Royal Canadian Navy’s annual deployment to the Indo-Pacific from two to three ships, according to defense minister Anita Anand, who added that the deployment would grow Canada’s regional presence, particularly in the Indian Ocean.

Anand was speaking here at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies – Asia and taking place this weekend.

The frigate HCMS Montreal and support ship MV Asterix, which is a privately owned commercial support ship leased to the Canadian government, will be joined in the region later this summer when two frigates based on Canada’s Pacific coast will be deployed. Anand said the Canadian ships will sail in the South and East China Sea as well as the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law.

“This is a clear signal that of Canada’s commitment to working with allied and partner navies towards regional peace, stability and prosperity,” Anand said.

The new Canadian deployments fall under Operation Horizon and replace Operation Projection, which is Canada’s main Indo-Pacific military mission.

The Canadian military is also slated to step up interactions and cooperation with regional and allied nations, including growing its participation in bilateral and multilateral exercises as detailed in its recently released Indo-Pacific Strategy.

Canada will also continue participating in Operation Neon, its contribution to the monitoring of United Nations Security Council sanctions against North Korea. Canada has sent ships, personnel and regular deployments of CP-140 Aurora maritime patrol aircraft to Operation Neon.

Anand also criticized China, calling it a “disruptive global power that increasingly disregards international rules and norms.”

However, she still expressed openness toward dialogue with China, saying that while Canada will “challenge China where we ought to, we will cooperate with China to find solutions on global issues.”

Anand’s speech came as Canada announced the frigate Montreal transited through the Taiwan Strait together with the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Chung-Hoon. The frigate had sailed from Canada’s Atlantic coast in late March, entering the region from the west via the Strait of Gibraltar and Suez Canal.

Canada’s Global News subsequently reported a Chinese Navy ship cut across the path of the American destroyer during the Taiwan Strait transit, forcing the American ship to slow down and take evasive action with the Canadian ship’s commander quoted as calling the Chinese maneuver “not professional.”

The report notes that the negative trend “is more notable” due to changes in INSURV calculations that adhere more closely to Joint Fleet Maintenance Manual metrics.

INSURV also removed major system demonstration and administrative program scores from the INSURV Figure of Merit, or IFOM, calculations.

“The updated IFOM calculation generates a more focused measure of overall material condition,” the report states.

Go here to read the full INSURV report that was sent to Congress.

The board changed its ship inspection waiver policy in FY20, requiring vessels to be inspected every three years or be considered overdue.

At the end of FY22, roughly 44 percent of vessels were overdue for inspection, according to the report.

The report also warns that INSURV does not have enough people to inspect every ship every three years, and notes that it had to lean on Regional Maintenance Center technicians to serve as inspectors.

Surface ship readiness continues to struggle, US Navy inspections show

“INSURV does not possess sufficient funded billets to perform all inspection elements, especially the most specialized, specific technical requirements,” the report states.

The report found that the material condition of surface ships, submarines and aircraft carriers “all declined slightly from FY 2021,” but that the largest year-to-year drop occurred in the Military Sealift Command Fleet.

“Overall, several functional areas and subsystems remain degraded or show declining trends, indicative of areas where material readiness is stressed,” the report states.

INSURV conducted 80 material inspections of in-service vessels in FY22, a 72 percent increase in total inspections compared to the six-year average, the report states.

Inspectors also conducted 23 trials of new-construction ships, along with eight surveys.

Of those, the Virginia-class submarine, Independence-class littoral combat ship, Spearhead-class expeditionary fast transport, ship-to-shore connector, yard tug and barracks barge programs performed well on trials.

“The remaining programs experienced significant deviations from OPNAV trial requirements, missed key program milestones, or had declining trial performance during the fiscal year,” according to the report.

INSURV conducts a range of inspections of ships already in the fleet and those being introduced to the fleet in order to ensure they will be able to meet their mission, the report states. The office also conducts surveys on ships at the end of their service lives when required.

INSURV scores ships based on the “weighted average of the material condition of equipment in functional areas” that are generally aligned along roughly 156 systems and about 551 sub-systems.

The surface fleet showed “a slightly decreasing trend” in the average IFOM score, and the scores for FY22 were below the six-year average.

All told, INSURV evaluated 14 functional areas as degraded in the surface fleet ships it assessed.

The submarine community “showed a slight decline from FY 2021 and was just below the 6-year average,” according to the report. Two functional areas were evaluated as degraded in the FY22 assessment.

INSURV notes that carrier data “has been difficult to trend due to the small samples sizes that result when a population of ten to eleven CVNs was historically inspected an average of once every five to six years.”

To increase the sample size and make the trends more relevant, INSURV expanded the overall trend time period to 12 years and grouped the carriers into multi-year periods, according to the report.

The carrier scores “remained consistent with FY 2021 result and equaled the 6-year average,” the report states.

Eleven functional areas were evaluated as degraded.

The scoring averages for the Military Sealift Command fleet were lower in FY22 than the six-year average, according to the report.

“FY 2022 scores and trends indicate nearly all functional areas experience a decline over previous years,” the report states, noting a “precipitous drop” in IFOM scores for that fleet.

The 3rd MLR, a unit crafted as part of the ongoing Force Design 2030 modernization effort, is meant to carry out the new Stand-In Forces operating concept, which calls for small U.S. Marine Corps units to pair with allies in the first island chain, which stretches from Japan’s East China Sea islands through the Philippines. This would allow the units to operate there on a regular basis as well as provide sensing and shooting capabilities while remaining stealthy.

When the unit first attended the 2022 Balikatan exercise, it had recently been redesignated and did not have all its subordinate commands in place. Col. Tim Brady, the regiment’s commanding officer, said that year’s drill marked 3rd MLR’s first chance to leave its Hawaii home base with a skeleton crew of a couple hundred Marines and operate in the South China Sea.

“It was our inaugural deployment: beginning to get into the first island chain, develop our relationship with the Coastal Defense Regiment of the Philippine Marine Corps, and begin our development of our tactics, techniques and procedures,” he said in a May 22 interview.

This year, however, 1,300 Marines from a fully established 3rd MLR showed up at the exercise in April and sought to demonstrate their intended multidomain role in a joint and combined fight.

After an initial live-fire training phase, the littoral regiment conducted a series of air assaults in the Luzon Strait to take control of three islands — Fuga, Calayan and Basco — and then use them as expeditionary advanced bases for sensing and shooting.

During the coastal defense live-fire phase and then the littoral live-fire phase, during which forces sank an old Philippine amphibious ship, the regiment’s littoral anti-air defense battalion provided air defense and air domain awareness, working as an enabler for the rest of the force to find targets and synchronize fires.

Col. Darryl Ayers, the operations officer for 3rd Marine Division, which commanded the forces at Balikatan, said the exercise demonstrated the role 3rd MLR was meant to fulfill: operating inside China’s weapons engagement zone; conducting sea control and sea denial operations if conflict begins; and setting the conditions for larger, follow-on actions by the joint and coalition force.

The littoral anti-air defense battalion, he said, can provide sensing, air defense, and air command and control.

“You disperse them in northern Luzon, you identify what areas you can cover and where you need to focus your efforts with regards to identifying threats, identifying targets and then identifying what you need to take out those targets,” Ayers said in a May 17 interview.

The forces under the littoral combat team, which includes a medium missile battery, infantry forces and combat engineers, “provide security for the force, but they also provide a … fires capability with regard to the future of the ROGUE NMESIS,” an unmanned anti-ship missile launcher the Marine Corps began procuring this year.

He also said the littoral logistics battalion proved it can sustain the regiment for about 30 days during independent operations, depending on the specifics of the activities.

At Balikatan, Ayers said, the regiment was able to disperse these capabilities into small units fighting from multiple advanced bases across the theater, and then aggregate the full regiment when needed.

Enabling allies and joint forces

The 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment has grown in size since last year, and its subordinate units are fully redesignated, but Brady said the biggest change has come in the Corps’ understanding of how to leverage the MLR to support a higher headquarters, to enable joint forces, and to work with allies and partners.

Since last summer’s participation in the massive Rim of the Pacific exercise, Brady said the regiment signed up for four major events.

In the fall, the MLR participated in the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center’s rotational training event with the Army’s 25th Infantry Division. This event in Hawaii helped the regiment refine its tactics for working under a joint force land component commander, and allowed Marines to serve as a stand-in force while setting the conditions for incoming land forces.

Weeks later, in a Fleet Battle Problem event with U.S. Pacific Fleet, the regiment paired with a Marine expeditionary unit embarked on a Navy amphibious ready group for the first time, operating around the Hawaiian Islands as a stand-in force and managing a fictitious crisis until follow-on maritime forces could flow in. This allowed 3rd MLR to refine its tactics for working under a joint force maritime component commander.

In February and March, the unit attended a service-level training exercise in Twentynine Palms, California, which included the first-ever Marine littoral regiment training event. Brady said this allowed the regiment to work as part of a larger stand-in force under 3rd Marine Division as the intermediate headquarters, and hone its multidomain operations tactics. At one point, the regiment was operating from expeditionary advanced bases across the entire training area: San Clemente Island, Camp Pendleton, Twentynine Palms and Barstow in California, and Yuma, Arizona.

At the recent Balikatan exercise, 3rd MLR repeated that same type of operation — distributed groups operating from multiple advanced bases, all under the command of the higher headquarters at 3rd Marine Division — but applied it to a mission in the first island chain alongside allies and partners.

During all of these exercises, communication and connectivity have been key focus areas, Ayers and Brady said. For 3rd MLR to have the greatest effect on the battlefield, it must be at the heart of a joint and coalition web of sensors and weapons.

Brady said the series of exercises over the last year allowed 3rd MLR to work through this kill web first within Marine forces and then in the joint force. Brady said the unit is in the nascent stage of looping in allies and partners.

With the Philippines, for example, he said there are some remaining information-sharing agreements and cross-domain data-sharing solutions in the works.

As it relates to radars, sensors, radios, command-and-control tools, and more that 3rd MLR needs to send and receive data as part of this kill web — some of which exists in the Corps, and some of which is still in development and fielding under Force Design 2030 — Brady said: “We’re well on our way to having everything we need.”

Learning and executing

Though the regiment will continue to refine its tactics and bring in new gear, leaders say the unit is ready to take on real-world missions if called upon.

The unit is expected to reach initial operational capability by September, but Brady said he’s not focused on the formalities of initial operational capability and full operational capability.

“We are absolutely capable today, capable of fighting now today, which we just demonstrated in Balikatan 23. We have a task-organized unit, everybody is established, and we have the capability to move forward into the first island chain and execute expeditionary advanced base operations today,” Brady said.

Maj. Gen. Roger Turner, the Marine Corps’ operations division director, told Defense News this spring “they’re a viable force right now” regardless of the upcoming declaration of reaching an initial operational capability.

The 3rd MLR operating as a stand-in force “is viable against the pacing adversary, and we think it complicates their calculus, and we think it contributes to deterrence,” he said of China. After some “pretty significant changes to the Marine Corps,” Turner said the service is in the implementation phase of Stand-In Forces.

This comes as Turner says America’s Pacific allies and partners are growing increasingly concerned about China’s behavior in the region, with its maritime forces encroaching on other nations’ fishing waters, bullying their ships, and making other aggressive moves on the sea and in the air.

“That’s a massive undertaking to basically establish the stand-in force that stays with our partners and allies in the Western Pacific and builds their confidence, supports our alliances, builds partner capacity [at a time when] the aggressive behavior of the [People’s Republic of China] is driving people to us,” the general said.

The commanding officer said the regiment will adjust, and the Stand-In Forces concept will change, as would be the case for any new unit or concept. But by this time next year, the 3rd MLR will focus more on sustaining a near-permanent presence in the Philippines, as opposed to learning and experimenting.

The 3rd MLR will continue participating in two major annual exercises in the Philippines — Balikatan in the spring and Kamandag in the fall — but will also seek “other opportunities alongside the Philippine Marine Corps and inside the Philippines to get us to almost a 365-day a year presence at some level of capacity,” Brady said.

Ayers said some of the remaining learning relates to sustainment, the main area where the relationship between 3rd MLR and the Coastal Defense Regiment will come into play.

Ayers said the Marine Corps knew how to handle logistics in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it could build up an iron mountain in the desert and send out people and materiel as needed. Learning how to sustain distributed forces in the first island chain, where resupply routes are certain to be targeted by Chinese forces in a war, is still taking time.

“It takes a lot of working with the combined partners, the [Filipinos], the Japanese, the Koreans, to try and figure out how we do that,” Ayers said.

Though he praised the littoral logistics battalion’s work, he said 3rd Marine Division continues to look for shortfalls in 3rd MLR’s ability to sustain itself, and then to turn to Philippine forces for help solving those logistical challenges.

“That’s really the focus of the MLR, is getting them into the Philippines, getting them to have a persistent presence there — and not just for the security of the area, but also to continue to build upon the relationships that we’ve built over decades with the [Philippine joint forces] because it’s critical to the success of [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s] mission out here in protecting the first island chain.”

Turner highlighted lift — the platforms that help small teams from 3rd MLR get to and move around within the Philippine island chain — as another area that will continue to undergo maturation. The Marine Corps is experimenting with stern landing vessels ahead of procuing a Landing Ship Medium vessel in fiscal 2025.

In the meantime, Turner pointed to the F-35B fighter jet, the MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft and the CH-53K King Stallion heavy-lift helicopter as tools increasingly applicable for 3rd MLR.

“Those platforms were envisioned to support our [Marine expeditionary unit], but then they also are super essential in the stand-in force capability because of the [aircraft] ranges,” he said.

Turner also gave a nod to the Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar, which has changed since its original development to conduct air- and ground-search missions. Though G/ATOR was made for a traditional land campaign, “we’ve learned its applicability for the stand-in force. And what it can provide to the joint force is really special. We’ve made some changes to it.”

“Even though those programs and those requirements were written under a different conceptual way — because we were really focused on [amphibious ready group/Marine expeditionary unit operations], and we were really focused on joint forcible entry — a lot of that stuff was able to easily segue into the stand-in force.”

Collins will replace Vice Adm. Jon Hill, who has served as director since 2019.

The Air Force general is currently the MDA’s program executive officer for Ground-Based Weapons Systems at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. Within that $3.4 billion portfolio, Collins manages the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System, consisting of interceptors in the ground at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, designed to intercept potential intercontinental ballistic missiles from North Korea and Iran.

Also under his purview is the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, four Joint U.S. and Israeli programs and other classified programs.

Collins previously was the Air Force’s program executive officer for weapons and director of the armament directorate, where he worked on the Air Force’s $92 billion non-nuclear weapons, munitions and ammunition portfolio.

The general began his military career in 1993 as a missile analyst in the 83rd Fighter Weapons Squadron at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida.

As the services are moving to develop offensive hypersonic capability, Collins recently oversaw the ups and downs of the Air Force’s AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon development, or ARRW, which experienced a successful test last year. Amid a slew of failed test events before and after its successful one, the Air Force decided to drop the Lockheed Martin-developed program earlier this year.

Now, Collins will oversee an MDA program in its nascent phase of development — an interceptor capable of taking out hypersonic weapons in the glide phase of flight, a difficult technical challenge.

MDA has also spent the last four years working to upgrade the GMD system, which resides in Collins’ current portfolio. Two teams are competing to build a next-generation interceptor for the system as the current system undergoes a service life extension program.

Collins will also manage the MDA portion of a major new venture in Guam to develop a highly capable air and missile defense architecture to defend the island territory from continuously evolving and growing threats in the region. Some elements of that architecture include systems already in his purview.

The MDA’s $10.9 billion fiscal 2024 budget request continues to prioritize regional and homeland missile defense with a major focus on building the defensive architecture in Guam.

“The estimated date of receipt of the first NSM will coincide with the entry into service of the first F-110 frigate,” Capt. Alfonso Carrasco Santos, who works on then Spanish naval capabilities planning staff, told Defense News in an email. Local shipbuilder Navantia is expected to deliver the first ship in 2027.

Carrasco Santos added that the Harpoons will remain in service until the complete delivery of the NSM weapons. He did not disclose the exact number of missiles to be acquired, saying only that the amount “will be necessary to satisfy our strategic needs.”

The new missile type is designed to destroy sea and land targets at distances over 115 miles, which exceeds the Harpoon range by roughly one-third. It flies just above water level to evade defenses and relies on inertial, GPS and terrain-reference navigation as well as imaging infrared homing.

There has been little to no confirmed information regarding the value of contracts and the overall number of Harpoons Spain has bought over the years, making it difficult to shed light on how many will need to be replaced.

Industry sources have estimated that the country would have purchased at least around several dozen, more or less 36 Harpoons, each valued at over $1 million.

Harpoon missiles were first fitted on the F-30 series of Descubierta-class corvettes built for the Spanish Navy in the late 1970s. They also equip the F-100 Álvaro de Bazán-class frigates, which have two four-celled anti-ship missiles, and the F-80 Santa María-class frigates, which feature a single-armed Mk13 missile launcher able to hold eight Harpoon missiles.

The Harpoon missiles are also operated by the Spanish Air Force in their F-18 Hornets, in the AGM-84 variant for aircraft. In air-to-surface operations, once launched, the weapon flies towards the target area where it connects its own search sensor, locating and destroying the target without the launcher having to act again.

Last month, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov claimed that Madrid had provided Kyiv with an undisclosed number of Harpoon missiles.

Once delivered, Madrid will become the ninth operator of the Naval Strike Missile, which outside of Norway is also in use in Poland, Germany, Canada, Australia, the United States and Romania.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on June 1 to correct the range of the Naval Strike Missile.

And beginning in summer 2019, as the deputy commandant for combat development and integration, he started working with Commandant Gen. David Berger on a plan to transform the Marine Corps.

In that role, and then as the No. 2 Marine, he helped draft blueprints for a complete overhaul of the service ― known as Force Design 2030 ― with the goal of turning a Corps shaped by two decades of land wars into one able to compete against Chinese forces in particular.

Now, he could carry on the Corps’ transformational trajectory.

The White House nominated Smith to serve as the next commandant of the Marine Corps, ensuring stability for the force modernization vision that Smith himself helped craft.

The Biden administration sent its pick to Congress Tuesday, according to a congressional website.

Several of Smith’s former colleagues described the general as a personable, down-to-earth leader who cares deeply about the Marines under his command.

Maj. Gen. Benjamin Watson, the commanding general of 1st Marine Division, said, “Gen. Eric Smith is an extraordinarily positive and engaged leader, with an emotional IQ well above the average.”

“I found him to be one of the most supportive bosses I’ve ever had.”

From Texas to the Pentagon

Smith was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Plano, Texas, according to his official Marine Corps biography. Even now, he often makes reference to his Texas upbringing, and he is a fan of the Texas Rangers and country music.

He attended Texas A&M University — a public school with a strong emphasis on preparing military officers — on a Navy ROTC scholarship, following in the footsteps of his older brother.

In August 1984, in the first days of Smith’s sophomore year, a new member of the university’s Corps of Cadets, Bruce Goodrich, died after three juniors hazed him for an hour in the hot Texas weather. The tragedy stunned the campus.

While there’s no public record of Smith discussing Goodrich’s death, it’s an event that would have shaped his experience at the university and his formative years as a midshipman.

As a senior, Smith served as the commander of the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band, a precise marching band made up of the university’s Corps of Cadets, according to the university’s yearbook.

He met his wife, Trish, on a blind date at the football stadium, according to a profile on the Texas A&M fundraising foundation’s website.

After receiving his commission in 1987, Smith became an infantry officer — a path that most commandants have taken. He served in Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm before returning to his alma mater as an NROTC instructor, Marine Corps Times previously reported.

He has made several other deployments: to Liberia and Venezuela early in his career, to Iraq twice and to Afghanistan for a one-year deployment.

On his first deployment to Iraq, he was shot at least once, in the leg while moving from one base to another, he told NBC News in 2005.

But, as he prepared for a second deployment to Iraq, he told the interviewer he was more concerned about maintaining the Corps’ legacy than about getting shot at again.

“We have a saying that the Marine Corps is like a little glass Christmas ornament, if you will,” he said. “You can drop it, but only once. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

“And the people who built the legacy that we live on, this eagle, globe and anchor, from Iwo Jima, they’re gone,” he continued. “You can’t apologize to them for soiling the reputation of the Marine Corps.”

As a general officer, Smith went on to lead Marine Corps Forces Southern Command, in 2015; 1st Marine Division, from 2017–2018; and III Marine Expeditionary Force, from 2018–2019.

He also had stints as the senior military adviser to the defense secretary and as the assistant deputy commandant for plans, policies and operations.

Retired Marine Col. Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense who worked closely with Smith when the general served as Work’s senior military adviser nearly a decade ago, said, “Eric Smith is the consummate professional: Intelligent, knowledgeable, empathetic and civil.”

“He was unafraid to tell me when I was about to do something wrong or had done something wrong,” Work said.

Force Design 2030

As the commander of III Marine Expeditionary Force, headquartered in Okinawa, Japan, Smith got a first-hand look at the forces at the heart of the Corps’ Force Design modernization.

The Force Design 2030 overhaul started with a basic premise: China is the United States’ pacing threat and is making great strides in boosting its maritime forces.

If the Marine Corps, itself a maritime force, wanted to play a role in deterring China, the Corps needed to reshape itself.

Smith played an integral part in the plan’s development and early execution while serving as deputy commandant for combat development and integration.

Jeopardizing national security: What is happening to our Marine Corps?

As part of Force Design 2030, the Corps has made changes, such as shedding heavy gear like tanks, upgrading to longer-range weapons, building a web of sensors, empowering small unit leaders, investing in the lift and logistics to support distributed operations, and more.

Though Force Design 2030 generally has found acceptance at the top levels of the Defense Department and in Congress, it sparked an extraordinary — and public — backlash from retired Marine leaders.

Several retired generals penned opinion essays decrying Force Design and urging the Marine Corps and Congress to halt the overhaul, which they said would leave the service less prepared to confront a range of crises.

Despite the criticism, Berger repeatedly has said that classified intelligence supports the direction the force is moving in. The ascension of his No. 2, Smith, to the No. 1 job in the Corps would confirm the service will continue on that path.

Despite the inherent complexity of the Force Design effort, Smith often simplifies the message with his signature Texas anecdotes.

In a panel discussion at the Navy League’s Sea Air Space conference in April, Smith compared the lack of deployed Marine expeditionary units on amphibious ships to the lack of security at his hometown convenience store.

Smith spoke of the Mr. Ed food store that he and his brothers would visit, which had a sign in the window that read, “This establishment is protected by an armed security guard three nights a week. You guess which three.”

“Sounds like Texas bravado,” Smith said. “It sounded like deterrence — I didn’t know what deterrence was then, but the older I got, though, and in my current job, I realize that’s not deterrence, that’s an invitation, because that’s four nights a week” without protection.

Smith has spoken repeatedly about the need to maintain a fleet of at least 31 amphibious ships, and the fight over the future of that ship fleet would certainly follow Smith into the commandant’s seat.

During the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security May 9, Smith was asked to preview what else was upcoming for Force Design 2030 — items he himself would oversee if confirmed as the next commandant.

He spoke of standing up a second Marine littoral regiment, a new kind of unit that emphasizes Force Design principles, which will be based in Japan. He also mentioned increasing the number of Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System anti-ship missile batteries, and fielding loitering munitions, or suicide drones, to make distributed forces more lethal and survivable.

Asked if he was worried about the success of Force Design 2030 once its chief architect retires, Smith said no.

“It’s fact-based and threat-informed,” he said.

Watson noted Smith was “the quarterback behind the initial implementation of Force Design 2030″ but also “has also been the driver behind the wargaming, experimentation and analysis that has led the Corps to Force Design 2030 refinements over time.”

Smith’s ‘No. 1 priority’

Smith also has made a name for himself in the way he’s cared for Marines, his former senior enlisted advisers said.

Soon after Smith took command of III Marine Expeditionary Force, he tasked Sgt. Maj. Mario Marquez with improving the quality of life for troops and their families.

The changes to long-standing policies that Smith made as part of this effort boosted morale, said Marquez, who is now retired.

The general loosened restrictions on how late Marines could stay out after work, he made it easier for junior enlisted Marines to get authorization to drive, and he drove changes that made it cheaper for families to move to and from Okinawa, Japan.

“Taking care of people is his No. 1 priority and always has been,” Marquez said.

The retired sergeant major said he believed Smith, if confirmed, would bring that attitude and focus to the Corps’ top job.

Even as Smith made some rules more lax as the head of III Marine Expeditionary Force, he still cared deeply about discipline, according to Marquez.

“Customs, courtesies and iron-clad discipline is what keeps you alive on the battlefield,” Smith said on the BruteCast podcast in August 2022.

Smith himself previously has spoken about the importance of looking out for the men and women he leads.

In a November 2018 Marine article, a Marine asked the then-commanding general which superpower he’d want to have.

“I’d probably want to be able to read minds so I know what people are really thinking,” Smith said.

“It’s hard, the older you get and the more senior you are, people don’t want to tell you stuff. I ask them, ‘Hey, Marines, how’s it going? Everything’s fine? You’re getting all the repair parts you need?’ and they say, ‘Sir, everything’s fine. Yeah, we got everything,’ when it’s not good and they don’t.”

As the two-star in charge of 1st Marine Division in 2017, he led a crackdown on hazing that ended with nearly 30 Marines confined to the brig and at least 18 administratively separated. A Marine Corps Times investigation later confirmed the division had a serious hazing problem.

Judges from the United States Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals in February 2018 rebuked Smith for showing “personal interest” and bias in going after those accused of hazing.

The judges pointed in particular to Smith’s sharply worded emails to other leaders, including one in which he complained, “I’ve just been flipped the bird by lots of” lance corporals.

Despite the reproach Smith received from the appeals court, he soon pinned on a third star and served as the leader of some of the most prominent commands in the Corps.

Smith earned a reputation for being a skilled, hard-working Marine, in addition to being kind, according to retired Sgt. Maj. Tom Eggerling, who served as the top enlisted Marine for Combat Development Command while Smith was its commanding general.

Well before they met or worked together, Eggerling heard other Marines say of Smith, “He’s going to be the commandant one day.”

Now, that may finally happen. But all Defense Department nominees currently face a hurdle: Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama, is blocking a list of military nominees that will grow to include service chiefs for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and dozens of other flag and general officer positions for commands around the globe.

Tuberville is protesting a Pentagon policy related to abortion and has thus far not shown any signs of backing down and allowing the Senate’s vetting and confirmation process to continue.

Eggerling recalled walking through the barracks at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, with Smith when they came across a young Marine on duty who mentioned that he had just gotten promoted to corporal that day.

Smith asked the corporal, “Can you call your mom?”

Smith and Eggerling spoke with the young Marine’s mother on FaceTime, telling her how proud they were of him, Eggerling recalled.

“Eric Smith is as genuine as they come,” Eggerling said.

The government announced the move during the Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace Exhibition last week, signing its sixth supplementary contract with shipbuilder Boustead Naval Shipyard on May 26.

This latest contract will see Malaysia pay an additional $430 million for the ships, which are based on the Gowind-class frigate by France’s Naval Group. Malaysia will also reduce the number of ships it will receive under the revised contract from six to five, and accept an additional delay to the ships’ deliveries.

Under the new delivery schedule, Boustead Naval Shipyard will deliver the lead ship — KD Maharaja Lela — in 2026, seven years after the originally planned date. The company will deliver the final ship, KD Tok Janggut, in 2029, five years later than initially planned.

Malaysia’s Finance Ministry will take over the shipbuilder by setting up of a special-purpose vehicle to acquire Boustead Naval Shipyard from its parent company, Boustead Heavy Industries Corp.

Malaysia selected the Gowind design for its second-generation patrol vessel program in 2011, awarding a $1.96 billion contract to Boustead Heavy Industries for the six ships, with construction to take place in Lumut, Malaysia. The government subsequently renamed the effort as the Littoral Combat Ship program.

The lead ship, KD Maharaja Lela, launched in August 2017, but the program was soon plagued by construction delays and cost overruns. A parliamentary public accounts committee launched an investigation into the program, during which members visited the shipyard and interviewed a former defense minister, among other defense and company officials.

The committee revealed in August 2022 that work on the ships had completely halted by then. It also alleged that $300 million was misappropriated from the program, which led to fraud charges leveled against Boustead Heavy Industries’ former managing director, Ahmad Ramli Mohammad Nor.

The Maritime Accelerated Response Capability Cell will receive urgent taskings from the Defense Department and work across the Navy and Marine Corps — including their research labs, acquisition offices, fleet warfighters and resource sponsors who can offer funding — to rapidly find and field a solution.

“The MARCC will initially focus on Ukraine, Taiwan, and contingency support, and will have inherent flexibility to adapt to new conflicts or urgent DoD requirements and tasks,” according to the establishment memo, dated May 2 and obtained by Defense News on May 19.

A Navy source with knowledge of the MARCC standup, but not authorized to speak about the ongoing process, said the Navy already has access to a number of rapid acquisition and rapid fielding authorities that Congress has passed into law in recent years. However, those authorities and how to use them effectively aren’t always widely understood across the department.

The Navy has successfully leveraged these tools to support Ukraine since Russia invaded the country in February 2022, the source said, and the MARCC will codify the processes that worked well over the last 15 months. As the war in Ukraine continues, and as the Defense Department is increasingly focused on deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the source said the MARCC would ensure the Navy is positioned to continue rapidly getting tools to the battlefield.

As the Defense Department identifies urgent needs — to help U.S. allies or partners, or for use by American forces — MARCC would take in these needs, share them across the Navy to solicit creative solutions and then execute using existing rapid acquisition and rapid fielding authorities, the source said.

The rapid cell’s work will not be limited to any particular technology area, the source said, which is why the Navy chose to create a flexible team that can pull in expertise as needed instead of standing up an office with a larger permanent staff.

The establishment memo notes a permanent executive director will manage and execute all the cell’s activities and will serve as the Navy’s principal adviser on strategies and responses to urgent tasking.

That director will be supported by a cross-functional team that could include representatives from the Navy secretary’s office, the chief of naval operations’ staff, Marine Corps headquarters, systems commands, program executive offices, warfare centers, research laboratories and the fleet.

The source said the Navy is still working through decisions on additional permanent staff. The cost of the MARCC will be largely limited to its staff — the source made clear the MARCC would not have its own pot of money to fund its initiatives but rather would use money available through the Ukraine supplemental appropriations package and other funding lines.

“The MARCC and its supported efforts will be optimized for speed and accept reasonable risk with regard to cost, performance, and other … considerations to ensure successful, rapid fielding of critically needed capabilities,” the memo reads.

The Navy requires at least 10 of these submarines are available for operations at any given time. These ballistic missile submarines lurk in waters around the globe with nuclear missiles onboard, their sole mission being to remain hidden and ready if called upon in a doomsday scenario.

As a hedge against shortfalls in the 2030s as the Ohio class reaches the end of its life and the Columbia class enters service, the Navy has considered extending select Ohio boats by a few years. In November, submarine community leaders said a decision would be made by FY26 so work could start in FY29.

While speaking at a May 5 defense innovation roundtable in Newburgh, New York, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said the service has “now determined five where we can actually extend those service lives, and in the ’25 budget we’re [planning on] putting in money to make that investment so we can extend those lives.”

Del Toro told Defense News in a May 18 statement that this new timeline is his intention but remains subject to the 2025 budgeting process.

The Navy has already extended the life of the entire Ohio class, from 30 years to 42 years. In 2020, submarine community leaders acknowledged that while the Navy couldn’t extend the entire class again, it could look at each individual hull and determine if any were in good enough physical condition to continue operations for a few more years.

The replacements for the Ohio boast, the Columbia class of ballistic missile submarines, is on schedule; Navy leadership said it fell a few months behind a more aggressive goal but is still on track to meet its contractual construction schedule.

Prime contractor General Dynamics Electric Boat and its suppliers have been able to devote significant attention to the lead ship, bought in FY21, due to a three-year gap between the first and second boats. There’s a two-year gap between the second and third boats, and beginning in FY26 the Navy will buy the remaining 10 at a pace of one per year.

“There is still the mountain to climb: When we go to one Columbia a year, starting in 2026 for 10 straight years, there’s hiring that’s required” at Electric Boat and at its suppliers, the acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, Jay Stefany, told Defense News in September 2021 when discussing the potential life extensions.

“So if you were to ask me, I’d say Columbia No. 1, pretty high confidence. Columbia No. 2, yeah, pretty high as well. But when we start going three, four, five, six, seven, all in a row ... that’s the risk,” he said.

Navantia was contracted by Saudi Arabia in 2018 to build five corvettes based on the Avante 2200 design and adapted to specific requirements, including the ability to operate in extreme temperatures. The program, dubbed Alsarawat, called for the units to be delivered on a fast schedule, which meant the company eventually had to produce a ship every four months.

While the first three vessels were commissioned in Spain, the final two will be inaugurated in Saudi Arabia.

After delivery, the latest vessel will undergo further testing, Agustín Alvarez, naval construction director at Navantia told Defense News on the sidelines of the FEINDEF defense exhibition here. He added that additional non-European countries had shown interest in the ships.

Roughly 500 prospective crew members from the Royal Saudi Naval Force (RSNF) are now undergoing training at a Navantia facility in San Fernando, Spain.

In recent years, the Spanish manufacturer has increasingly looked to deepen its cooperation with Riyadh. It recently created a joint venture with Saudi Arabia Military Industries (SAMI) – now known as SAMINavantia – to position its platforms in the Arab market. The two organizations developed the first Saudi naval combat management system, the Hazem.

Last year, Navantia signed an Memorandum of Understanding with the Saudi Ministry of Defense to explore an opportunity to build a number of multi-mission combat ships. Alvarez confirmed that the country is eying five of these types of vessels, and that the company expects to receive a further detailed proposal for requirements by 2024.

Under the agreement, the Spanish firm would localize up to 100 percent of naval shipbuilding, integration of combat systems and ship maintenance to contribute to the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 objectives, the monarchy’s signature political agenda. Navantia officials are currently assessing which local shipbuilders and manufacturers would best fit into a program.

Gulf countries have often looked to European shipyards to meet their naval weaponry needs: France’s Naval Group has been the choice for the United Arab Emirates, Italy’s Fincantieri is Qatar’s go-to maritime partner, and Saudi Arabia has turned to Spain’s Navantia for its largest acquisition program in the naval sector.

Last year, the New Zealand Defence Force received about NZ$4.9 billion. Inflation to December 2022 was just over 7%, according to Statistics NZ.

New Zealand’s Army has the largest share of funding among the armed services, receiving NZ$1.1 billion. The Army received about NZ$1.1 billion last year.

The government is allocating about NZ$1 billion — compared to NZ$941 million last year — to the Royal New Zealand Air Force.

The Royal New Zealand Navy is set to get about NZ$714 million — an increase from last year’s NZ$667 million.

An additional NZ$574 million will go toward protecting New Zealand’s territorial sovereignty and contribute to regional and global security efforts. And more than NZ$30 million is meant to assist with “the employment of New Zealand’s Armed Forces overseas, and to enable the provision of military capabilities overseas.”

The Government Communications Security Bureau, which specializes in gathering intelligence from electronic communications, is to receive almost NZ$402 million — a 25% increase from last year.

The Defence Ministry is set to get about NZ$1.3 billion for the “procurement of major military capabilities.” This includes NZ$605 million for five new C-130J-30 Hercules airlifters to replace the existing C-130H fleet, which has been in service with the Air Force since 1965, and almost NZ$14 million for P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft. The third P-8A of four ordered is to arrive in New Zealand on May 19.

The budget also includes more pay for military personnel, with increases ranging from NZ$4,000 to NZ$15,000, beginning July 1 and costing NZ$419 million over four years. Defence Minister Andrew Little said the increase has led to the withdrawal of some resignation letters.

The budget for resource and border protection operations increases from NZ$610 million to NZ$634 million.

A domestic effort that partly supports public awareness of the proficiency and practice of the military will receive a modest increase from NZ$62.1 to NZ$64.2.

Budget documents noted that the funding increase this year follows obsolescence-driven serviceability issues that caused the unavailability of SH-2G(I) Seasprite helicopters, thus reducing naval aviation readiness, and the inability to service Boeing 757 engines, leading to a reduction in strategic air mobility readiness.

Three legislative proposals, submitted on May 2 and first posted online Tuesday, would greenlight the sale of two Virginia-class submarines to Australia, permit the training of Australian nationals for submarine work and allow Canberra to invest in the U.S. submarine industrial base.

Rep. Joe Courtney of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee’s sea power panel, praised the proposals in a statement to Defense News, saying “I look forward to working with all my colleagues in Congress to fulfill these goals.”

“The Department of Defense’s legislative proposals are the latest example of President [Joe] Biden’s commitment to fulfilling the AUKUS agreement,” said Courtney. “Importantly, the proposals spell out a clear path forward to facilitate the transfer of Virginia-class submarines to Australia while ensuring we have the necessary authorities to accept the Australian Government’s investments to enhance our submarine industrial base capacity and provide training for Australian personnel.”

AUKUS stipulates that Australia will buy at least three and as many as five Virginia-class submarines in the 2030s as part of phase two of the agreement, giving Congress more than a decade to authorize the sale. This year’s proposal, which the Pentagon hopes will become part of the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, asks that Congress approve just two of those submarines “without a deadline to consummate the transfers and without specifying the specific vessels to be transferred.”

The proposal argues that this “small amount of flexibility is necessary” since the transfers depend on Australian readiness to operate the submarines, which will involve developing Australia’s submarine industrial base through training and appropriate shipyard infrastructure.

To that end, a second legislative proposal would authorize U.S. defense service exports directly to Australia’s private sector in order to train its own submarine workers.

“This development must begin as soon as possible for Australia to become ready to own and safely operate these submarines in a manner that both maintains the highest non-proliferation standards and strengthens the global non-proliferation regime,” the Pentagon argues in the proposal.

Finally, the Pentagon is also asking Congress for permission to accept Australian payments to bolster the U.S. submarine industrial base. Australia has offered to make an undisclosed sum of investments in the U.S. submarine industrial base as part of AUKUS.

The Pentagon states in the legislative proposal that those funds would be used to “add a significant number of trade workers” that will help address “the significant overhaul backlog” for the Virginia-class submarine. Australian monies would also be used for “advance purchasing of components and materials that are known to be replacement items for submarine overhauls” and “outsourcing less complex sustainment work to local contractors.”

Congress is also making its own investments to expand the U.S. submarine industrial base as the Navy ultimately aims to build two Virginia-class and one Columbia-class submarines per year. Courtney helped secure $541 million in submarine supplier development and $207 million in workforce development initiatives as part of the FY 23 government funding bill.

Austal USA, the American subsidiary of Australia-based Austal, plans to open a new facility at its shipyard in Mobile, Alabama to begin construction on nuclear submarine modules for General Dynamics’ Electric Boat shipyard in Connecticut, which produces both Virginia and Columbia-class submarines. Austal expects it will need 1,000 new hires in Mobile to staff that facility.

At Electric Boat, the prime contractor for the Virginia- and Columbia-class submarine programs, the hiring need will be even greater. The company currently employs more than 19,000 people, after hiring 3,700 new workers in 2022, according to local newspaper The Day. But the company needs to hire 5,750 new workers this year, to manage attrition and to help grow the workforce to about 22,000 to handle the increased workload.

The legislative proposal notes that Australian funds “would be applied to recruitment, training, incentivizing, and retention of key skilled trades, engineering and planning personnel in both nuclear and non-nuclear disciplines that are required by the additional AUKUS workload.”

Aircraft developer Airbus and France’s military procurement office, Direction Générale de l’Armement, or DGA, jointly conducted the test this month, Airbus said in a May 15 press release.

Airbus demos in-flight autonomous guidance of target drone with tanker

The VSR700 UAS serves as a demonstrator for the French Navy’s “SDAM” future maritime drone program, the acronym standing for the French “Système de Drone Aérien pour la Marine.” Once operational, the SDAMs are expected to be deployed aboard France’s FREMM multi-mission frigates.

One key capability for the new system is vertical takeoff and landing, as well as autonomous takeoff and landing. Airbus said Monday that the aircraft performed 80 fully autonomous takeoffs and landings from a civil vessel outfitted with a helicopter deck, off France’s West Coast of Brittany.

The VSR700 prototype opened its flight envelope in winds above 40 knots, accumulated eight hours of testing in 14 flights, and made successful landings in several different sea states, said Nicolas Delmas, head of the VSR700 program at Airbus Helicopters in a press release.

The SDAM program aims to develop an vertical-takeoff-and-landing UAS capable of flying for eight hours, carry multiple payloads, and reach speeds of 185 kilometers/hour (115 mph). The company’s DeckFinder system is what enables autonomous launch and recovery of unmanned aerial systems, with Airbus claiming an accuracy of 10 to 20 centimeters (4 to 8 inches) during challenging operations in harsh environmental conditions, independently of GNSS/GPS and regardless of degraded visual conditions.

Prior to the May flight test campaign, Airbus and the DGA in 2022 tested the autonomous takeoff and landing capabilities aboard an optionally piloted vehicle, based on a modified Guimbal Cabri G2, but this latest test was the first time the VSR700 demonstrator was used, the company said. The VSR700 made its maiden flight in 2019.

Airbus and Naval Group were jointly awarded the SDAM risk reduction contract in 2017. Naval Group is developing the mission system for the UAS. The light military tactical vehicle is meant to be deployable aboard both frigates and destroyers, in support of intelligence, surveillance, targeting, and reconnaissance missions, along with anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, search-and-rescue and maritime security.

According to the proposed 2024-2030 military programming law currently being debated by France’s Congress, the Ministry of Defense wants three SDAM aircraft delivered by the end of 2023, eight by the end of 2030, and at least 15 delivered by around 2035.

The DGA procured a second VSR700 demonstrator in 2022. Airbus expects this second aircraft to perform its maiden flight during the second half of 2023, ahead of flight testing aboard a FREMM ship.

Three new 16,500-tonne vessels will replace smaller vessels and combine with Italy’s new Trieste Landing Helicopter Dock to improve Italy’s ability to get combat forces from ship to shore, officials said.

“This will give us the amphibious task force we need to combine with a carrier strike group, submarines and special forces to complete the so called ‘trident’ of expeditionary forces,” said Rear Adm. Marco Tomassetti, who heads the Navy general staff’s surface capability development department.

Italy’s amphibious forces, which are a team-up of the Navy’s San Marco brigade and the Army’s Venice-based Serenissima regiment, currently rely on three 8,500-tonne ships, the San Marco, San Giorgio and San Giusto, which are due for retirement.

Funding worth €1.2 billion($1.3 billion) has been allocated for the first two of three planned replacements, with an in-service date of 2028-30 for the first two, followed by the third in 2031.

Diesel-powered with a top speed of around 20 knots and 7,000 nautical mile autonomy, the new vessels will be around 160 meters long and 29 meters wide with room for 200 crew and a 300-strong landing force.

“They will be called ‘LXD’s with the X standing for ‘whatever’ because we don’t want to limit the role they fill,” said Tomassetti.

They will join the larger, 38,000-tonne Trieste LHD, which enters service next year and is the largest post-WWII vessel built by the Italian navy. All vessels are being built by Italian yard Fincantieri.

The new ships will collectively accommodate around 1,700 transported staff and troops.

“Together, all four vessels will carry two maneuver units drawn from the San Marco and Serenissima to create a national amphibious task group,” said Tomassetti.

Unlike the vessels they replace, which have a flight deck stretching almost the length of the ship, the new LXDs will only have a rear section of the top deck for hosting two helicopters, typically the NH-90 and EH-101.

The design, similar to the Dutch Rotterdam class, means less room on the flight deck for transporting material and vehicles, but more room below deck in the garage and dock for vehicles – up to around 70 tonnes in total – with space for around 480 meters of vehicles lined up, compared to around 200 meters on the old San Giorgio class.

“Keeping all the vehicles below decks means we avoid needing to use the flight deck simultaneously for flying and for carrying material and vehicles,” said Tomassetti.

Below decks, several load configurations are possible, including one which allows the embarkation of around 20 of the new wheeled, amphibious vehicles Italy signed to buy this year from local company Iveco.

Italy first issued a requirement for a new amphibious vehicle over a decade ago, leading to Iveco developing its SUPERAV 8X8, which in the meantime has become the basis for the U.S. Marines’ new Amphibious Combat Vehicles. Iveco retained design authority for the Marine Corps rides while BAE Systems took on the role of prime contractor.

The new Italian vessels will also accommodate in their floodable deck two LC-23 landing craft, built by Italy’s Vittoria, which can carry around 70 tons and 20 meters of vehicles lined up in each.

The new craft were initially designed for the Trieste, which will carry four.

The LXDs will host the same Kronos Power Shield L-Band radar installed on the Trieste, as well as a 30mm close-in defense gun. Tomassetti said the final price of the ships was yet to be set, commenting: “Recent international events caused an overall increase of prices, especially for raw material, thus making any forecast price prevision valid just for a very short time.”

The mission package includes four primary systems to find, identify and destroy sea mines: the Airborne Laser Mine Detection System and the Airborne Mine Neutralization System, both of which are operated from MH-60 helicopters; and the Unmanned Influence Sweep System and the AN/AQS-20C mine-hunting sonar, both of which are towed behind the Mine Countermeasures Unmanned Surface Vessel.

Each of these systems underwent individual testing and IOC declarations, and the Navy on May 2 conferred that readiness grade on the entire family of systems.

The Navy has also been developing the Knifefish unmanned underwater vehicle as part of the mission package. Rear Adm. Casey Moton, the program executive officer for unmanned and small combatants, told reporters Thursday that a “Block 0″ version of the UUV was used in the mission package operational tests to ensure it could be launched, recovered and operated alongside the other unmanned systems; but the Navy will pause acquisition of this UUV as the service pursues improvements, a change revealed in the fiscal 2024 budget request.

The sea service completed its operational test and evaluation in August 2022 aboard Independence-variant littoral combat ship Cincinnati. Moton said this testing included 230 hours of mine-hunting operations with the MCM USV across 33 separate missions; 12 airborne sorties; the first-ever dual-USV operations, with one MCM USV towing the minesweep and the other towing the sonar; and a command-and-control demonstration using two MCM USVs and one Knifefish.

In the nine months since, Moton said the Navy has been poring over the data, identifying any remaining performance or reliability problems in the equipment, and either fixing them or mapping out detailed plans to fix them before a first operational deployment.

Moton said the Navy planned to deploy the first LCS with the mine countermeasure package in fiscal 2025. Once the fleet has sufficient capacity, Navy and Defense Department leaders will certify that the LCS mission package is capable enough to handle all of the service’s mine countermeasures needs, and the Navy will begin to retire the aging Avenger-class MCM ships and MH-53 helicopters that today provide MCM capability to fleet commanders overseas.

During the exercise, which began May 1 off the coast of California and runs through Friday, a V-BAT drone made by Shield AI was launched from a Leidos Seahawk medium displacement unmanned surface vessel, according to Cmdr. Jerry Daley, the leader of Unmanned Surface Vessel Division One.

IBP 23.1 “gave operators more of a hands-on experience with a longer list and more-diverse list of unmanned systems at sea and in a combat environment,” Daley told reporters May 11. “It was predominantly, if not exclusively, all unmanned systems for this event, which is a little bit different, in contrast from IBP 21, where it was more manned and unmanned.”

The latest trials, he added, represent the “next step in the progression of integrating unmanned systems into fleet operations across the continuum, under the sea, on the surface and in the air.”

INDOPACOM’s Aquilino seeks more electromagnetic resources for Pacific

Competition between the U.S. and China is pushing the spotlight onto naval supremacy, especially in the Indo-Pacific. The vast region, home to more than half the world’s population and some of its largest ports, is considered by the Biden administration to be critical to U.S. interests.

The Navy is banking on uncrewed technologies to beef up its presence, whether that’s overall size and international distribution or with specific capabilities, such as surveillance, targeting and jamming. A recent update to the chief of naval operations’ Navigation Plan, a strategic-vision-style document, included an outline of a fleet comprising about 373 manned ships and 150 uncrewed vessels, Defense News reported.

Integrated Battle Problem, now in its second iteration, allows the Pacific Fleet to evaluate uncrewed machinery and discover their best applications, Daley said. Among other assets tested were the Sea Hunter medium displacement unmanned surface vessel and the RQ-20 Puma drone.

The first IBP exercise was held in 2021. At the time, the Navy said uncrewed developments were “game-changers” and were motivating a “rethink” of how the service and sailors execute their tasks.