It’s been 19 years since the Air Force last convened the biennial air-to-air weapons meet, which began in the early days of the Cold War in 1954.

The competition is named for the legend of William Tell, a 14th-century Swiss farmer who — as the tale goes — had to fire an arrow so accurately that it would knock an apple from his son’s head, lest they both be killed for insulting the Austrian Habsburg empire.

For decades, the shootout provided a stage for ambitious fighter pilots to show off their skills for bragging rights, a trophy and the title of “Top Gun.”

The Air Force has held just one William Tell competition in the 27 years since it paused the regular meets in 1996. The event reconvened for its 50th anniversary in 2004, before the War on Terror spurred a 19-year hiatus.

Now with U.S. forces out of Afghanistan and a substantially smaller footprint in Iraq and Syria, the Air Force is turning its attention to a faster-paced, more complex kind of air war.

This year’s William Tell, slated for Sept. 11-15 at Savannah Air National Guard Base in Georgia, will reflect military competition in the Indo-Pacific — namely, the U.S.-China rivalry — posed by savvier enemy pilots, high-tech jets and advanced anti-aircraft artillery.

F-35 Lightning II, F-22 Raptor and F-15 Eagle units will go head-to-head in a gauntlet of simulated air combat scenarios, weapons loading, maintenance and weapons director competitions.

Fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft will act as the adversarial “red team,” Air Combat Command spokesperson Mike Reeves told Air Force Times. It’s unclear whether William Tell will bring in the Air Force’s red air contractors like Top Aces and Textron subsidiary ATAC, which fly the F-16 Fighting Falcon and Mirage F1 jets, or turn to drone targets like the remote-controlled QF-16s.

Pilots will be tested on their offensive and defensive prowess against simulated enemy air forces, and on how well they maneuver when an adversary aircraft is in sight.

“There will be a heritage event with live air-to-air gun employment against a towed banner,” Reeves said. “There will also be … weapons loading, command and control, and intelligence competitions.”

Wings across Air Combat Command and Pacific Air Forces are allowed to send teams of 10 to 14 airmen, depending on the type of aircraft. Each team needs one captain, an aircrew of up to eight people, two intelligence airmen and three weapons loaders. Command-and-control wings can also send three members apiece to participate.

Participants will compete for individual and team awards. The group that best thinks outside the box in collaborating with other jets will be crowned the top “fighter integration team,” to show that the aircraft are “most lethal when used as a cohesive fighting force,” Reeves said.

Planners hope the resurgence of William Tell will help prepare airmen for real-life combat operations in the Indo-Pacific, where they could face off against Chinese jets like the J-16 fighter that buzzed an American RC-135 Rivet Joint reconnaissance plane on May 26.

The U.S. considers China its top strategic threat and has pledged to protect Taiwan, the autonomous island nation that Beijing claims as its own territory, if China were to invade.

“Our unwavering commitment to air dominance remains steadfast,” Air Combat Command boss Gen. Mark Kelly said in a release. “We reiterate our steadfast dedication to maintaining control of the skies in support of our joint force and multinational partners.”

The Air Defender 23 exercise starting next week will see 10,000 participants and 250 aircraft from 25 nations respond to a simulated attack on a NATO member country. The United States alone is sending 2,000 U.S. Air National Guard personnel and about 100 aircraft to take part in the June 12-23 training maneuvers.

“This is an exercise that would be absolutely impressive to anybody who’s watching, and we don’t make anybody watch it,” U.S. Ambassador to Germany Amy Gutmann said.

“It will demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt the agility and the swiftness of our allied force in NATO as a first responder,” she told reporters in Berlin.

“I would be pretty surprised if any world leader was not taking note of what this shows in terms of the spirit of this alliance, which means the strength of this alliance,” Gutmann said.

“And that includes Mr. Putin,” she added, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

While the drill was planned for several years, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 ear has jolted NATO into preparing in earnest for the possibility of an attack on its territory. Sweden, which is hoping to join the alliance, and Japan are also taking part in the exercise.

“We are showing that NATO territory is our red line, that we are prepared to defend every centimeter of this territory,” said Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz of the German air force, which is coordinating the exercise. “But we won’t, for example, conduct any flights toward Kalinigrad. So this is intended to be defensive.”

Kalinigrad is a Russian exclave located on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh, director of the U.S. Air National Guard, said the exercise goes beyond deterrence.

“It’s about the readiness of our force. It’s about coordination, not just within NATO, but with our other allies and partners outside of NATO,” he said.

Loh said the exercise would be an opportunity for younger U.S. airmen, many of whom have mainly gotten experience serving in the Middle East, to build relationships with allies in Europe and prepare for a different military scenario.

“So this is about now establishing what it means to go against a great power, in a great power competition,” he said.

Authorities have said the drill will cause some disruption to civilian flights in Europe during the period.

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.

Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek said in a June 2 statement no such testing took place, adding that the service member’s comments were likely “taken out of context and were meant to be anecdotal.”

“The Department of the Air Force has not conducted any such AI-drone simulations and remains committed to ethical and responsible use of AI technology,” Stefanek said. “This was a hypothetical thought experiment, not a simulation.”

The killer-drone-gone-rogue episode was initially attributed to Col. Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton, the chief of AI testing and operations, in a recap from the Royal Aeronautical Society’s FCAS23 Summit in May. The summary was later updated to include additional comments from Hamilton, who said he misspoke at the conference.

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“We’ve never run that experiment, nor would we need to in order to realize that this is a plausible outcome,” Hamilton was quoted as saying in the Royal Aeronautical Society’s update. “Despite this being a hypothetical example, this illustrates the real-world challenges posed by AI-powered capability and is why the Air Force is committed to the ethical development of AI.”

Hamilton’s assessment of the plausibility of rogue-drone scenarios, however theoretical, coincides with stark warnings in recent days by leading tech executives and engineers, who wrote in an open letter that the technology has the potential to wipe out humanity if left unchecked.

Hamilton is also commander of the 96th Operations Group at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, which falls under the purview of the 96th Test Wing. Defense News on Thursday reached out to the test wing to speak to Hamilton, but was told he was unavailable for comment.

In the original post, the Royal Aeronautical Society said Hamilton described a simulation in which a drone fueled by AI was given a mission to find and destroy enemy air defenses. A human was supposed to give the drone its final authorization to strike or not, Hamilton reportedly said.

But the drone algorithms were told that destroying the surface-to-air missile site was its preferred option. So the AI decided that the human controller’s instructions not to strike were getting in the way of its mission, and then attacked the operator and the infrastructure used to relay instructions.

“It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” Hamilton was quoted as saying. “We trained the system, ‘Hey don’t kill the operator, that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that.’ So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”

The Defense Department has for years embraced AI as a breakthrough technology advantage for the U.S. military, investing billions of dollars and creating the the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office in late 2021, now led by Craig Martell.

More than 685 AI-related projects are underway at the department, including several tied to major weapon systems, according to the Government Accountability Office, a federal auditor of agencies and programs. The Pentagon’s fiscal 2024 budget blueprint includes $1.8 billion for artificial intelligence.

The Air and Space forces are responsible for at least 80 AI endeavors, according to the GAO. Air Force Chief Information Officer Lauren Knausenberger has advocated for greater automation in order to remain dominant in a world where militaries make speedy decisions and increasingly employ advanced computing.

The service is ramping up efforts to field autonomous or semiautonomous drones, which it refers to as collaborative combat aircraft, to fly alongside F-35 jets and a future fighter it calls Next Generation Air Dominance.

The service envisions a fleet of those drone wingmen that would accompany crewed aircraft into combat and carry out a variety of missions. Some collaborative combat aircraft would conduct reconnaissance missions and gather intelligence, others could strike targets with their own missiles, and others could jam enemy signals or serve as decoys to lure enemy fire away from the fighters with human pilots inside.

The Air Force’s proposed budget for FY24 includes new spending to help it prepare for a future with drone wingmen, including a program called Project Venom to help the service experiment with its autonomous flying software in F-16 fighters.

Under Project Venom, which stands for Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model, the Air Force will load autonomous code into six F-16s. Human pilots will take off in those F-16s and fly them to the testing area, at which point the software will take over and conduct the flying experiments.

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The Royal Aeronautical Society’s post on the summit said Hamilton “is now involved in cutting-edge flight test of autonomous systems, including robot F-16s that are able to dogfight.”

The Air Force plans to spend roughly $120 million on Project Venom over the next five years, including a nearly $50 million budget request for FY24 to kick off the program. The Air Force told Defense News in March it hadn’t decided which base and organization will host Project Venom, but the budget request asked for 118 staff positions to support the program at Eglin Air Force Base.

In early 2022, as public discussions about the Air Force’s plans for autonomous drone wingmen gathered steam, former Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James told Defense News that the service must be cautious and consider ethical questions as it moves toward conducting warfare with autonomous systems.

James said that while the AI systems in such drones would be designed to learn and act on their own, such as taking evasive maneuvers if it were in danger, she doubted the Air Force would allow an autonomous system to shift from one target to another on its own if that would result in human deaths.

Lt. Gen. Maria Gervais on May 21 told attendees of the GEOINT Symposium in St. Louis that the Army, the military’s largest branch, must “leverage immersive-type environments to expand awareness of the numerous opportunities available when you serve,” especially in a recruiting environment that is “the toughest it has ever been since the inception of the all-volunteer force 50 years ago.”

The service missed its fiscal 2022 recruiting goal by roughly 15,000 new soldiers, leaving it shorthanded. Another shortfall is expected for 2023.

Among the most promising new technologies that could help reverse the trend, Gervais said, is the metaverse: a heady subject that is different things to different people, but boils down to the meshing of in-hand peripherals with immersive digital spaces, social interaction from wherever and an online presence foreign to older crowds.

“We already do some things, but our reach is extremely limited. And we need to do better connecting with our younger generations,” Gervais said. “The metaverse could be a way to extend our reach, improve our brand awareness through advertisement placement, and creating an experience, which could pique the interest and expand the awareness of serving in the military for our youth.”

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Searches for “metaverse” peaked in late 2021 and early 2022, according to Google Trends, and has since tapered off.

A virtual experience could more easily draw in Generation Z and its successor, Generation Alpha, according to Gervais, who previously led the Synthetic Training Environment Cross-Functional Team, tasked with polishing the latest in highly accurate military mapping and simulation. The Army earlier this year extended its deal with Maxar Technologies, geospatial intelligence specialists, to work on One World Terrain, a critical piece of the Synthetic Training Environment.

Whereas previous generations were targeted with ads in print and on television — such as the revived “Be all you can be” campaign — and through community outreach, the youngest cohorts require new finesse, Gervais said. The service’s own first-person shooter video game, America’s Army, was shut down in 2022 after more than a decade of sustainment. The series, decried by some as propaganda, showed players the ins and outs of combat as well as soldier life.

“Recruiting the next generation of soldiers and leaders will take the Army investing in modernizing the way it operates,” Gervais said. “They interact differently, and they desire to be engaged differently. And we must transition from our Industrial Age accessions processes and policies and move towards a digital-informed accessions and training process.”

The service’s 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron in April completed initial ground and flight testing of an MQ-9A Reaper outfitted with the Angry Kitten ALQ-167 Electronic Countermeasures Pod, a cluster of components contained in a vaguely cat-shaped tube.

The successful trials at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, focused on providing electronic attack from the Reaper, a General Atomics Aeronautical Systems product typically used to collect intelligence or conduct reconnaissance. The pod is derived from technology developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute, which in 2013 described the project as using commercial electronics, custom hardware and novel machine-learning for flexibility.

“The goal is to expand the mission sets the MQ-9 can accomplish,” Maj. Aaron Aguilar, the 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron assistant director of operations, said in a statement May 13. “The proliferation and persistence of MQ-9s in theater allows us to fill traditional platform capability gaps that may be present.”

Electronic warfare, or EW, is an invisible fight for control of the electromagnetic spectrum, used to communicate with friendly forces, to identify and suppress opponents, and to guide weapons. Dominance of the spectrum will be critical in a fight with China or Russia, the two most significant national security threats, according to U.S. defense officials.

The Air Force is trying to reinvigorate its EW capabilities after years of neglect; the service in September announced a “sprint” to dig up deficiencies, seek needed resources and identify next steps.

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Lt. Col. Michael Chmielewski, the 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron commander, in a statement said electronic attack aboard a Reaper is “compelling.” The Air Force previously used Angry Kitten in training, outfitting aggressor squadrons with the gear to harass trainees and simulate dizzying electronic barrages.

“Fifteen hours of persistent noise integrated with a large force package will affect an adversary, require them to take some form of scalable action to honor it, and gets at the heart of strategic deterrence,” Chmielewski said.

Angry Kitten’s name is a brew of inside joke and design goals, according to a 2013 Newsweek report. It is also a departure from the typical terror-inducing military moniker: Hellfire missile, Predator drone, Stryker combat vehicle.

Roger Dickerson, a senior research engineer with the Sensor and Electromagnetic Applications Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, in 2015 told C4ISRNET that although the pod has “an admittedly slightly silly name,” it represents “very serious technology.”

“We’ve been working hard to improve the capabilities and the readiness of the war fighters in our sponsor organizations: the Army, the Navy and especially the U.S. Air Force air combat community,” Dickerson said at the time.

The deal, valued at €20 million (U.S. $21.8 million), is the latest between the two countries. In 2019 the first government-to-government deal was signed for $35 million in which Elbit Systems provided remote control weapons stations to the Balkan country.

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The agreement between Montenegro and Israel is one of several recent contracts for Elbit in Europe, including multiple contracts in Romania. The sale was approved by the Director General of the Israel Ministry of Defense, Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir.

“This marks the third agreement with our partners in Montenegro since bolstering our defense relations in 2019 and is a great expression of confidence in the Israeli defense industry,” said Gen. Yair Kulas, head of the International Defense Cooperation Directorate at Israel’s Ministry of Defense, in a statement. “Montenegro is a partner and ally of Israel and faces complex security challenges like other European countries.

The contract, signed in Tel Aviv, will include Elbit Systems 120mm mortar munition system that are mounted on vehicles. Photos show it being mounted and fired from the back of a lightly armored vehicle.

The previous 2019 contract included the supply of Remote Controlled Weapon Stations for what were at the time new Oshkosh Defense 4X4 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles . In May 2022, Oshkosh Defense said that along with Elbit Land Systems it had successfully demonstrated a live fire of Spear 120mm low recoil mortar on a JLTV Mortar variant during a multinational demonstration hosted in Israel.

Sunak linked the training program to efforts by the U.K. and others to equip the Ukrainian Air Force with Lockheed Martin-made F-16 aircraft, which he called “Ukraine’s fighter jets of choice.”

During the meeting, which took place at the prime minister’s Chequers country retreat just outside of London, the British government announced it would step up the supply of air defense missiles and 200-kilometer-range (124-mile-range) attack drones as part of a steadily growing arms package supplied by the U.K. to Ukraine.

Last week, Britain became the first Western nation to supply long-range cruise missiles to Ukrainian forces when the Defence Ministry announced it was already delivering MBDA-built Storm Shadow weapons to equip Kyiv’s Soviet-era combat jets with a potent strike capability.

Earlier this year, Britain led the way with the supply of Western main battle tanks to Ukraine, which is fighting off a Russian invasion.

The British Royal Air Force doesn’t operate F-16s, but Sunak announced in February the country’s intention to provide pilot training at a time when arguments over whether the West will accede to Kyiv’s request for modern F-16 fighters were heating up.

Debates within NATO nations over providing Ukraine with combat jets continues unabated. But as the supply of Storm Shadow cruise missiles illustrates, capability that was once off the table can become acceptable to donate.

Ukraine’s president told reporters after the talks at Chequers that the issue was a “very important topic for us because we can’t control the sky. ... I think you will hear important decisions in the closest time, but we have to work a bit more.”

The British government has pledged to “adapt the program used by U.K. pilots to provide Ukrainians with piloting skills they can apply to different kinds of aircraft.”

The training could begin later this summer.

British military training, including that for elementary and basic flights, is largely provided by the Lockheed Martin-led Ascent joint venture, which also includes Babcock International.

Zelenskyy’s talks in the U.K. follow visits to Italy, France and Germany over the last few days.

Italian officials pledged open-ended military and financial support as well as stronger backing for Ukraine’s cherished aim to join the European Union.

Premier Giorgia Meloni, who staunchly supports military aid for Ukraine, said Italy would back the country “360 degrees for all the time necessary and beyond.” Since the war began, Italy has contributed about €1 billion (U.S. $1.1 billion) in military and financial aid, as well as humanitarian assistance.

France promised to supply dozens of light tanks, armored vehicles and more air defense systems “in the weeks ahead,” without giving specific numbers. About 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers would also receive training in France this year and nearly 4,000 others in Poland as part of a wider European effort, according to the office of the French president.

Germany dedicated its largest military support package for Ukraine to date, including arms deliveries worth €2.7 billion.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

While raising the debt limit is an urgent task, Congress is also discussing the readiness and safety of American forces as it prepares annual defense authorization and appropriations measures to fulfill its fundamental duty.

Maintaining and sustaining equipment and facilities, and persistently training in joint and coalition exercises, may not be as exciting as buying shiny new ships, planes, tanks and missiles, but it is crucial to a combat-credible operational fighting force and to the safety of those who populate that force.

According to the Defense Department’s fiscal 2024 budget overview: “Strategic readiness is the ability to build, maintain, and balance warfighting capabilities and competitive advantages that ensure the DoD can achieve strategic objectives across threats and time horizons.” The strategic framework used to develop the budget “expands the Department’s view of how it thinks about readiness” and “leverages tools and assessments to inform a broader understanding of the cumulative and cascading impact of decisions on readiness.”

The department is right: Useful data for decision-making is important. But while readiness can be a difficult thing to measure — particularly in understanding and balancing risk to force, to mission and to strategy — money is important, too.

Yet budgets for the operations and maintenance accounts that fund training and readiness have declined by close to 17% over the last 12 years. The cut is 50% for the Army. While some of this decrease can be attributed to a reduction in contingency funding for combat operations, the trend remains troubling and is further evidenced by the submission of $3 billion in unfunded priorities for these accounts. The Army’s unfunded list is notable in that it lacks a request for readiness and training funds, despite the fact it recently halted flight operations due to the accidents noted above.

Further emphasizing the damage of continued underinvestment in readiness efforts, the General Accountability Office recently reported that the Navy’s ship maintenance backlog has grown to nearly $1.8 billion, while maintenance and supply issues limit the availability of aging aircraft.

Shortfalls in funding for sustainment and modernization of facilities also directly contributes to readiness challenges. The military departments and combatant commands have reported a combined $3.4 billion infrastructure gap, and GAO reports continued backlogs in deferred facility maintenance of at least $137 billion.

In addition to the overall downward trend in funding, the operations and maintenance accounts are negatively affected by the impacts of continuing resolutions, which have been used by Congress to extend funding and priorities into the new fiscal year in all but three of the last 47 years.

The use of continuing resolutions, or CR, to keep the government running when annual appropriations are not passed on time results in lost time and billons in lost buying power each year. In the last 13 years, military competitiveness and readiness have been delayed for 1,600 days. Lost time can’t be recovered.

During testimony on the current readiness of the joint force before the House and Senate Armed Services committees this year, senior leaders of the military services all noted the importance of on-time budgets. Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin summed it up well, saying that “this Congress can make the most positive impact on our readiness through a timely budget appropriation. ... A CR will essentially rob us of something both critical and irreversible as we face growing threats to our nation. And that is time.”

Marine Corps Assistant Commandant Gen. Eric Smith added: “During any CR we are unable to improve as we otherwise would have done. Our adversaries don’t have that problem.”

While the DoD has also emphasized the importance of on-time budgets to enable the military services to properly plan training events and exercises, the current budget request does not adequately fund these activities.

The safety and readiness of the force is too important to get lost in clever language about decision frameworks, assessment tools, and balancing current and future needs.

Time is short: Only 37 joint legislative days are currently planned between May 12 and the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1, 2023. As congressional defense committees prepare to complete drafts of the FY24 authorization and appropriations bills in the coming weeks, it is crucial that they apply their knowledge and influence to support the current force by reversing the trend of declining operations and facilities funding, and that they provide these funds on time.

Elaine McCusker is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. She is a former acting undersecretary of defense (comptroller).

The return of the Global Information Dominance Experiments, or GIDE, under the direction of the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, or CDAO, comes after a months-long hiatus and amid an explosion of public interest in AI and its potential to augment humans, military or otherwise.

CDAO boss Craig Martell on May 3 said his team took the reins of the experiments to “understand what’s the right way to get after JADC2.” The office was previously charged with crafting a so-called data integration layer, which would help collect information from disparate sources and present them in a unified manner.

“We are not sitting down and writing up requirements that will get built five years from now, and then nobody will want to use it,” Martell said at the AFCEA TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore. “Every experiment we do, it’s not just: ‘Hey, folks, did it work? Thumbs up, thumbs down.’ We’re actually building out metrics to ask, ‘Is this faster? Did we do that right? Has this number increased?’”

The multibillion-dollar JADC2 endeavor aims to link forces far afield — across land, air, sea, space and cyber — and support speedy battlefield decision-making. Such an approach is necessary, defense officials say, to deal with the military advancements of China and Russia, premier national security threats.

The first of the relaunched tests, the fifth overall, known as GIDE V, was held at the beginning of the year and featured Pentagon officials and multiple combatant commands and installations around the world.

Three more iterations, GIDE VI through GIDE VIII, are expected in 2023. Martell said he and his colleagues work “with the combatant commands on a pretty regular cadence,” aiming to dissolve barriers between regions.

“If you think about the Indo-Pacific fight, Africa Command might have some information that’s necessary. Central Command might know something about what’s going on in their domain that could be necessary,” Martell said. “So we think about this as global … and we’re asking these dataflow questions, these workflow questions.”

The initial GIDEs were spearheaded by Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command. The two entities are led by Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck.

GIDE I in December 2020 tied together Strategic Command, Transportation Command, Southern Command and Indo-Pacific Command. It also involved the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security. GIDE II in March 2021 expanded participation and welcomed the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, one of four entities the CDAO subsumed.

Later versions pulled in Project Maven, designed to process imagery and full-motion video from drones and other surveillance assets and to detect potential threats, and manpower from the Department of the Air Force’s Chief Architect Office.

VanHerck in 2021 said GIDE embodies a “fundamental change in how we use information and data” to maintain an upper hand.

“Right now, the threats we face and the pace of change in the geostrategic environment continues to advance at really alarming rates,” he said at the time. “We’ve entered an era of new and renewed strategic competition, and this time, we’re facing two peer competitors, both nuclear-armed, that are competing against us on a daily basis.”

The closing of the now-coed 4th Recruit Training Battalion was characterized by the Corps as an administrative decision that will help standardize training across its two recruit depots of San Diego and Parris Island, South Carolina.

The Marine Corps has lagged behind the other military service branches in gender-integrating recruit training. Its the only military service that still operates gender-separated training at the platoon level ― saying it is crucial for how it breaks down recruits and turns them into high-performing Marines.

Congress had directed that the Corps integrate women into recruit training at San Diego — which was open only to men until 2021.

And now, some personnel from the already coed 4th Recruit Training Battalion will be shuffled over to the West Coast.

The Corps aims to have its population of female recruits split equally between the two boot camps by October, according to the news release.

First male Marine Corps recruits graduate from previously all-female boot camp battalion

That means Parris Island, South Carolina, will require only 13 training companies instead of the current 15, Marine spokesman Maj. Philip Kulczewski said in a statement to Marine Corps Times. So 4th Battalion’s two companies, Oscar and Papa, will be cut.

Beginning in 1986, the Parris Island, South Carolina, based 4th Recruit Training Battalion was the sole training unit for female recruits, according to the press release. Starting in 2019, other battalions began integrating by gender.

And in 2021, for the first time, male recruits graduated from the 4th Recruit Training Battalion. The same year, female recruits for the first time graduated from Recruit Depot San Diego, after completing the hilly “Crucible” hike at nearby Camp Pendleton, California.

Now, all recruit training battalions — the larger organizational units that contain companies and their subsidiary platoons — are gender-integrated, according to Kulczewski.

Recruit training platoons remain single-gender, with drill instructors who match the recruits’ gender.

That’s in part because recruits sleep in the same squad bay, a kind of barracks with several bunk beds in the same big room, as their platoons, Kulczewski said. The separate housing for male and female recruits is dictated by law, the spokesman noted.

Marine boot camp study calls for mixed-gender drill instructor teams

Throughout boot camp, female and male recruits train together at various levels, from small fire squads to larger companies, Kulczewski said.

Less than a fifth of surveyed Marine recruits want recruit training platoons to go coed, Marine Corps Times reported in 2022.

Still, some Marine veterans interviewed by University of Pittsburgh researchers said they worried that gender segregation at recruit training fails to prepare Marines for life beyond boot camp.

Platoons at subsequent training schools and in the fleet are gender-integrated, as Marine Corps Times previously reported, though only 9% of active duty Marines are women, according to Pentagon data.

The Corps plans to close down 4th Recruit Training Battalion on June 15, “in a deactivation ceremony that concludes her glorious tenure, closing the final chapter of integrating recruit training,” Brig. Gen. Walker M. Field, commanding general of Parris Island, South Carolina, and the eastern recruiting region, said in the news release.

“I think that it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve heard in weeks,” retired Lt. Col. Kate Germano said of the deactivation of the battalion, which she commanded from 2014–2015.

For Germano, the then-all-women battalion, geographically separated from the other battalions, represented what was wrong with how the Marine Corps trained women.

Germano had been relieved from her position leading the battalion after a command investigation said she created a hostile environment.

She and her supporters say she was penalized for pushing her female recruits to perform at the same level as male recruits.

Germano has since published a book about what she sees as the problems with how the Marine Corps trains female recruits.

“For me, this is sort of the culmination of a lot of years of trying to speak truth to the system and actually seeing it come to fruition,” she said.

For years, the Defence Force has experienced retention and recruitment problems, and within the last few years it was tasked with supervising COVID-19 quarantine and isolation activities.

The two-week drill in Fiji — dubbed Operation Mahi Tahi — took place in March and April to ensure the New Zealand Defence Force can respond to disasters throughout the Pacific.

“We haven’t practiced this type of amphibious landing for a while,” said Lt. Callum Wilkie, the amphibious beach team commander with the Army’s 5th Movements Company. “[This] is about making sure that we are ready to assist in the Pacific if we need to respond to a [humanitarian assistance and disaster relief] situation.”

The head of the joint task group that oversaw the exercise said responding to disasters across the Pacific region is a key role for the military. “We need to train as often as we can in order to deliver this critical capability when it’s needed,” Col. Mel Childs said.

What took place?

The operation involved the 430-foot military sealift vessel HMNZS Canterbury, and nearly 300 personnel attended the event for air, sea and amphibious training scenarios.

“[We] deployed four vehicles across the beach in two [movements], exercised laying the beach mat and also exercised in pushing a ‘stuck’ [Landing Craft Medium] off the beach,” Cmdr. Bronwyn Heslop, the commanding officer of the Canterbury, told Defense News. “There wasn’t anything that didn’t go as planned.”

“The pinnacle for the [amphibious beach team] for this trip was a real-time extraction of personnel and relocation, albeit ‘giving them a lift’ back to [the Fijian city] Suva, rather than evacuating them from a stricken island,” she added.

The Canterbury had carried 107 soldiers of the 3rd Battalion Fiji Infantry Regiment from Kadavu Island to Suva.

And at Lomolomo Beach on the Fijian island Viti Levu, one of the ship’s two 75-foot landing craft unloaded a beach preparation extraction vehicle, or BPEV. The vehicle is used to clear, construct and maintain beach lanes. This involves removing debris, such as logs and boulders; filling holes and eliminating berms; preparing the beach for laying beach matting; and pushing beached landing craft back into the sea.

The vehicle can also recover immobilized equipment by using its rear winch, said Wilkie.

A converted 20-ton Caterpillar 938K loader also operated from the landing craft. The platform can roll out a temporary trackway over soft sand to allow light vehicles — like the Pinzgauer truck or non-four-wheel drive vehicles — to get ashore.

“Having this opportunity to deploy on the Canterbury to Fiji has been a great chance for us to build up experience within the team and test the capability,” Wilkie said, “and this is the first time we’ve used both the BPEV and Cat 938K overseas, so it’s really great to see it deployed here at Lomolomo Beach.”

The Canterbury can also accommodate tractor and bridge layer vehicles, and has hangar space for up to four helicopters, including the A109 and NH90.

The Canterbury entered service in June 2007. It is New Zealand’s first purpose-built strategic sealift ship and has often deployed to the South Pacific for training as well as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions. For example, in 2016 it deployed in response to the tropical cyclone Winston, but in recent years deployments have slowed.

“The next steps are to continue building on this capability — Canterbury working with the [amphibious beach team] more — and for it to become business as usual again,” Heslop said.

Playing catchup

Independent defense consultant Gordon Crane told Defense News the operation was essential for the military, should it need to conduct amphibious operations.

“Being tasked to supervise New Zealand’s COVID quarantine and isolation in recent years has not only increased attrition but reduced morale and prevented the military from maintaining its operational proficiency, which means the Defence Force now has to exercise as often as possible, both domestically and overseas,” Crane said.

The value of Operation Mahi Tahi cannot be overstated, he added. “Such activities both motivate people to join the armed services, and improve the skill and experience of serving personnel.”

Figures released by the military show that, during 2021-2022, the regular force lost nearly 30% of its uniformed, trained and experienced staff. Last year, the Army sought to recruit 539 people, but attracted only 212.

As of June 30, 2022, the Defence Force included 9,215 uniformed personnel, with the Army accounting for 4,519, followed by 2,477 in the Air Force and 2,219 in the Navy. There are also 3,000 reserve personnel and a similar number of civilians serving in the force.

This year’s attrition rate for the Army is close to 17%.

But the problems aren’t new: Attrition soared in 2011 when the country introduced the so-called civilianization project — a money-saving effort that saw more than 900 Defence Force personnel resign or declared redundant. Its name stemmed from the military’s attempt to convert some military positions into civilian jobs.

By June 2012, the cumulative attrition rate for all three regular armed forces — the Air Force, Army and Navy — exceeded 20%. It reached about 23% for the Army.

Now, the Defence Force has started paying bonuses to personnel at up to NZ$10,000 (U.S. $6,203) each to keep them in their jobs.

The chief of the Defence Force, Air Marshal Kevin Short, named plumbers, electricians, carpenters, special forces personnel, Navy propulsion experts and middle managers as some of the most critical trades within the military. While he expressed hope recent cash payments might persuade people to stay, Short said it could take up to four years to train people to replace those key roles, and almost a decade to get those same skill levels back.

The New Zealand government was to release in March 2023 a defense policy and strategy statement, but has not yet done so. However, in January this year, the vice chief of the Defence Force, Air Vice-Marshal Tony Davies, invited New Zealanders to take part in an online survey regarding the country’s future defense policy and strategy. Submissions closed on April 4.

Two weeks later, on April 18, the New Zealand Army announced a bilateral service cooperation plan with the Australian Army, called Plan Anzac. The chief of New Zealand’s Army, Maj. Gen. John Boswell, described the agreement as a significant step forward for the trans-Tasman strategic partnership.

The plan focuses on improving interoperability, maintaining bilateral cooperation in strategic areas, and addressing capability, training, readiness and common personnel issues.

“We have a much larger coalition presence,” Maj. Gen. Wally Rugen, the Army’s Future Vertical Lift Cross-Functional Team lead, told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Army Aviation Association of America’s summit in Tennessee.

Australia, Canada, France and the United Kingdom — all of which observed the exercise last year — are now participating, Rugen said. Those nations will join the Netherlands, Italy and Germany, which participated in the exercise in 2022 at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah.

“I don’t want to oversell it, but we have seven that are bringing technology, two that are observers, and we have actually others who have sent in some late requests, so that number may grow by the time May happens. It may be up to 10 with us,” he added. “We are working through the paperwork and foreign disclosure stuff, but that coalition piece is really good.”

With the addition of more partners, the Army will continue to work on its secret enclave that connects countries on the battlefield at a classified level not previously achieved. The coalition force plans to go through hundreds if not thousands of iterations of a machine-to-machine call for fire, while also testing message traffic, Rugen explained.

If the force at the Experimental Demonstration Gateway Exercise — otherwise known as Edge — can solve such a challenge “I’ll be very, very excited,” he said at a press briefing during the AAAA summit.

Edge will take place at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, in May, where events will challenge the U.S. Army and its growing number of partners as the service experiment with concepts and capabilities meant to enhance mission performance in the aerial tier.

The campaign applies space, aviation and network capabilities to show how the Army and the joint force would fight in various theaters. The 2021 iterance focused on the Indo-Pacific region.

The experimentation exercise is meant to feed into Project Convergence, a larger campaign of learning that examines and tests how the Army plans to fight against advanced adversaries across all domains of warfare using capability slated for fielding about 2030 and beyond. The next Project Convergence capstone event will take place in the spring of 2024.

Last year, Edge focused on the European theater and centered around a wet-gap crossing. The U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and other allied units were tasked with defeating an enemy’s integrated air defense systems. That led to a second phase, introducing maneuver forces through air assaults to seize two different pieces of terrain.

This year, the exercise will focus on the Indo-Pacific theater and will test capability across a vast expanse of territory by tying the Yuma-based exercise to Northern Edge, a joint military training event at Fort Wainwright, Alaska, down to Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. Two of the Army’s three established multidomain task force units will participate in the exercise. The other task force is European-based.

Participants will use more than 120 technologies at the exercise, an increase over previous years, Rugen said.

The Army will continue to experiment with what it calls “deep sensing” capabilities using aircraft, air-launched effects, unmanned aircraft, sensors, and command-and-control capabilities to see farther, communicate faster and penetrate enemy territory while keeping piloted aircraft out of the range of threats.

To achieve deep sensing on the battlefield, Rugen said, the Army is working to integrate technology developed in the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Task Force and within Army Cyber Command.

Edge will also help the Army develop and refine its Ariel Tier Network. The Army Requirements Oversight Council will make a decision on the way forward for the capability this calendar year, Rugen noted.

Contested logistics will have a stronger focus in the exercise as well, Rugen said, given its increasing priority as the Army modernizes and prepares to operate in environments under constant surveillance or threat from fort to port.

With the introduction of new partners, some new capability in development with allies will also undergo testing. For instance, Rugen said, Canada is bringing an uncrewed rotorcraft to continue working on related concepts, and the Netherlands is bringing a fifth-generation fighter jet.

The exercises starting Friday in the Southeast Asian city state come amid China’s growing presence in the South China Sea, which it claims sovereignty over virtually in its entirety.

Concerns are especially pronounced in the U.S., which on Wednesday joined with forces from the Philippines in major exercises in Philippine waters facing the South China Sea that are likely to anger China. Beijing’s more assertive stance comes as its relations with the U.S. and its allies have hit historic lows.

State television’s military channel identified the ships being sent as the guided missile frigate Yulin and the minesweeper hunter Chibi. They will also be present for the May 3-5 IMDEX Asia National Defense and Maritime Security Show, which will feature 25 warships and attendees from 62 countries.

Amid China’s efforts to make inroads with countries that have traditionally leaned toward the U.S., Singapore has sought a balance between rivals Washington and Beijing, but remains officially unallied amid a struggle for military and economic influence.

China also formally eschews military alliances, but has held an increasing number of drills with Russia, its chief partner in challenging Western dominance of international affairs.

In February, the navies from China, Russia and South Africa came together for drills on the southern tip of the African continent.

While those exercises were underway, Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted China’s most senior foreign policy official at the Kremlin, underscoring Russia’s strengthening relationship with China and raising concerns in the West that Beijing might be ready to offer Moscow stronger support for its war in Ukraine.

Chinese President Xi Jinping also visited Putin in Moscow last month, but China’s Foreign Minister said this month that China would not sell weapons to either side in the Ukraine war.

Congress, the White House, the media and the Pentagon itself are repeatedly preoccupied with the question of whether the United States needs a 355-ship, 372-ship or even a 500-ship Navy.

The shipbuilding plan is the most comprehensive official, unclassified statement on the Navy’s plans and goals for both the near and far term. As such, it tends to drive the public debate around the size and shape of the Navy. While procurement numbers and fleet size are important, they are not a proxy for assessing warfighting prowess. The focus needs to shift to metrics that are more relevant to actual capabilities.

As an example, take three naval incidents from the past decade:

• Oct. 1, 2016: The United Arab Emirates’ HSV-2 Swift, a ship formerly operated by the U.S. Navy, was reportedly seriously damaged by a decades-old missile launched by untrained Houthi rebels. The ship, which had no self-defense system, had to be towed back to port.
• April 21, 2021: The Indonesian submarine Nanggala was lost at sea. While the exact cause remains unknown, maintenance issues appear to be the primary suspect.
• April 13, 2022: The Russian guided-missile cruiser Moskva, reportedly struck by two Ukrainian cruise missiles, sank in the Black Sea despite having significant air defense capabilities. Public reports suggest maintenance or training deficits contributed to the sinking.

All three of these ships would be counted as a single ship in public discourse around fleet size, but none of them could have been “counted” upon to generate naval power. Unfortunately, in public shipbuilding debates here in the U.S., we often fall prey to the same misconception.

For example, a $250 million, 1,500-ton expeditionary fast transport with limited warfighting capability “counts” just as much as a $3 billion, 10,000-ton attack submarine — the Navy’s most survivable and lethal platform. They are each one ship. A strategy of ramping up expeditionary fast transport buys would do wonders for the Navy’s ship count, but it is highly unlikely to turn the tide of power in a conflict with a near-peer competitor.

Even a more nuanced approach that explores the inventory of each ship class leaves much to be desired, as the ships themselves are a single part of the equation. Ships need to be outfitted with the right equipment, have trained crews and be properly maintained. If not, they add little to the Navy’s ability to project power, and they risk suffering a fate similar to that of the Swift, Nanggala or Moskva — a serious casualty in the face of a limited threat, or no threat at all.

The U.S. Navy is the most capable and well-trained maritime force on Earth, and a far more useful debate would focus on a wider variety of metrics that account for these capabilities, based on mission effectiveness. Such metrics could include the number of vertical launching system cells (surface and undersea); torpedo capacity; munitions inventories; sortie generation; lift; fleet distribution; communications capacities; intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting; and force flows into theaters of interest.

Why does this matter? The shipbuilding plan is the only unclassified, public statement on the Navy’s stated needs and plan for fleet size and mix. It features prominently in public discussions — and congressional funding decisions — on Navy size, shape and capability. A myopic focus on fleet size at the expense of effectiveness will chart an incorrect course, suggesting victory could be at hand by buying more vessels.

Ships themselves, without the key enabling capabilities, training, maintenance and munitions, unfortunately come to dominate public debate. They become empty numbers in an op-ed, speech or talking point.

A comprehensive shipbuilding plan is not an easy thing to produce. It requires robustly funded enabling capabilities, and must wrestle with the unpredictability of the challenges the Navy may face 10, 20 or 30 years from now. As former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said: “When it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right.” The future is uncertain, with wide potential variance in the scale and scope of potential conflicts; the geopolitical operating environment; and both U.S. and potential adversary capabilities, capacities and concepts of operations.

It is precisely this opacity that drives the need to explore a vast trade space of platforms, capabilities and the concept of operations when debating the future Navy. Doing so requires insight, discussion and analysis around far more than ship count.

These broader discussions on fleet effectiveness informed by a more robust set of metrics are critical for improving budgetary trade-off discussions. As Congress and others debate how many and which ships to buy, it can’t simply be a calculus of “more is better.” The debate should explore where the next marginal shipbuilding dollar should go: To surface ships that have more vertical launch cells but also more survivability challenges? To submarines with less vertical launch but added survivability? To amphibious ships that provide entirely different capabilities?

The debate must also balance shipbuilding versus other investments, like steaming days, flight hours, manpower and weapons. While these discussions occur in the bowels of the Pentagon, in fleet-concentration areas, and in the text of the shipbuilding plan itself, they are largely absent from the public discourse. That discussion needs to begin.

Do we need a larger Navy? The answer is almost certainly yes, but that can’t come at the expense of making the fleet we have today and in the future as lethal and effective as possible. Only with the correct capabilities, training and maintenance will the ships that the Navy is counting be ships the Navy can count upon. It is time to move beyond ship counts.

Andrew Mara is the executive vice president of the Center for Naval Analyses and a former deputy director of the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office at the U.S. Defense Department. Gordon Jaquith is vice president of the Systems, Tactics and Force Development Division at CNA and a former director of the naval forces division at CAPE. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Defense Department nor the U.S. government.

It was a war game, but one with a serious purpose and high-profile players: members of the House select committee on China. The conflict unfolded on Risk board game-style tabletop maps and markers under a giant gold chandelier in the House Ways and Means Committee room.

The exercise explored American diplomatic, economic and military options if the United States and China were to reach the brink of war over Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own. The exercise played out one night last week and was observed by The Associated Press. It was part of the committee’s in-depth review of U.S. policies toward China as lawmakers, especially in the Republican-led House, focus on tensions with President Xi Jinping’s government.

In the war game, Beijing’s missiles and rockets cascade down on Taiwan and on U.S. forces as far away as Japan and Guam. Initial casualties include hundreds, possibly thousands, of U.S. troops. Taiwan’s and China’s losses are even higher.

Discouragingly for Washington, alarmed and alienated allies in the war game leave Americans to fight almost entirely alone in support of Taiwan.

And forget about a U.S. hotline call to Xi or one of his top generals to calm things down — not happening, at least not under this role-playing scenario.

The war game wasn’t about planning a war, lawmakers said. It was about figuring out how to strengthen U.S. deterrence, to keep a war involving the U.S., China and Taiwan from ever starting.

Ideally, the members of Congress would walk out of the war game with two convictions, the committee chairman, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., told colleagues at the outset: “One is a sense of urgency.”

The second: “A sense ... that there are meaningful things we can do in this Congress through legislative action to improve the prospect of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” Gallagher said.

In reality, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the committee’s top Democrat, told lawmakers, “we cannot have a situation where we are faced with what we are going to be facing tonight.”

The “only way to do that is to deter aggression and to prevent a conflict from arising,” said Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill.

The U.S. doesn’t formally recognize the Taiwan government but is Taipei’s most vital provider of weapons and other security assistance. Xi has directed his military to be ready to reclaim Taiwan in 2027, by force if necessary.

Asked about lawmakers’ war game, Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy, said China wants peaceful reunification with Taiwan but reserves “the option of taking all necessary measures.”

“The U.S. side’s so-called ‘war game’ is meant to support and embolden ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists and further fuel tensions in the Taiwan Strait, which we firmly oppose,” Liu said.

In the war game, lawmakers played the blue team, in the role of National Security Council advisers. Their directive from their (imaginary) president: Deter a Chinese takeover of Taiwan if possible, defeat it if not.

Experts for the Center for a New American Security think tank, whose research includes war-gaming possible conflicts using realistic scenarios and unclassified information, played the red team.

In the exercise, it all kicks off with opposition lawmakers in Taiwan talking about independence.

With the think tank’s defense program director Stacie Pettyjohn narrating, angry Chinese officials respond by heaping unacceptable demands on Taiwan. Meanwhile, China’s military moves invasion-capable forces into position. Steps such as bringing in blood supplies for treating troops suggest this is no ordinary military exercise.

Ultimately, China imposes a de facto blockade on Taiwan, intolerable for an island that produces more than 60 percent of the world’s semiconductors, as well as other high-tech gear.

While the U.S. military readies for a possible fight, U.S. presidential advisers — House committee members who are surrounding and studying the wooden tables with the map and troop markers spread out — assemble.

They lob questions at a retired general, Mike Holmes, playing the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, before deciding courses of action.

What are the economic consequences if the U.S. goes maximalist on financial punishments, one lawmaker asks.

“Catastrophic” is the response, for both the United States and China. China will hit back at the U.S. economy as well.

“Who’s going to tell the president that he has to say to the American people, ‘Say goodbye to your iPhones?”’ Rep. Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa, asks.

Do American leaders have any way to communicate with their Chinese counterparts, lawmakers ask. No, China’s leaders have a history of shunning U.S. hotline calls, and that’s a problem, the exercise leaders tell them.

In think tank’s Taiwan war game, US beats China at high cost

In the war game, U.S. officials are left trying to pass messages to their Chinese counterparts through China-based American business leaders, whose Dell, Apple, HP and other product operations China all subsequently seizes as one of its first moves in the attack.

Are potential military targets in China “near major metropolitan areas that are going to include millions and millions of people?” asks Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J.

Has Taiwan done all it can to try to calm the situation? All it can and will, lawmakers are told.

“It’s not clear to me we’ve exhausted all our diplomatic options,” Gallagher notes.

Then, on paper, U.S. and Chinese satellites, space weapons, drones, submarines, ground forces, warships, fighter squadrons, cyber warriors, communications experts, bankers, Treasury officials and diplomats all go to war.

At the end, before the lessons-learned part, the war-game operators reveal the toll of the first wave of fighting. Lawmakers study the tabletop map, wincing as they hear of particularly hard setbacks among U.S. successes.

U.S. stockpiles of very long-range missiles? Gone.

Global financial markets? Shaking.

U.S. allies? As it turns out, China’s diplomats did their advance work to keep American allies on the sidelines. And anyway, it seems the all-out U.S. economic measures against China’s economy have put allies off. They’re sitting this one out.

In the “hot-wash” debrief at the end, lawmakers point to a few key military weaknesses that the war game highlighted.

“Running out of long-missiles is bad,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D.

But the most glaring shortfalls appeared in diplomacy and in nonmilitary planning.

Becca Wasser, a think tank senior fellow who role-played a convincingly menacing Chinese official, pointed to lawmakers’ recurring frustration in the war game at the lack of direct, immediate leader-to-leader crisis communication. It’s something Beijing and Washington in the real world have never managed to consistently make happen.

“In peacetime, we should have those lines of communication,” Wasser said.

The exercise also underscored the risks of neglecting to put together a package of well-thought out economic penalties, and of failing to build consensus among allies, lawmakers said.

“As we get closer to 2027, they’re going to be trying to isolate us,” Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., said of Xi’s government.

Holmes, in the role of Joint Chiefs chairman, reassured lawmakers, after the first three days of fighting.

“We survived,” he said.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is expected to formally announce the delivery here at today’s 11th meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, an international coalition of around 50 countries supporting Ukraine in its 14-month war with Russia.

Western officials hope the fleet of advanced battle tanks will be pivotal in efforts to reclaim Russian-occupied territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, though the contribution is unlikely to arrive early enough to make a difference in the country’s anticipated spring counteroffensive.

Thirty-one Abrams training tanks will arrive at U.S. Army Garrison Bavaria Grafenwoehr in eastern Germany in the next few weeks, the defense official said. Meanwhile, a separate shipment of 31 M1A1s, refurbished to meet Ukrainian specifications, are expected to reach Ukrainian battlefields by the end of the year.

Once the training assets arrive, around 250 Ukrainian troops will take part in a 10-week course to learn how to operate and repair the tanks, the official told reporters. That’s slated to begin by mid-June. After the 10 weeks end, Ukrainian forces could opt to tack on additional training in advanced combat maneuvers.

Instruction will come from American soldiers with the 7th Army Training Command, the official said. It’s unclear whether tank training will require the Army to bring additional instructors to Grafenwoehr.

The Biden administration initially argued the vehicles would be too difficult for Ukrainian troops to maintain in good condition but reversed course in January. Kyiv had repeatedly pushed for the Abrams, which features a 120mm main gun, advanced targeting and armor-piercing abilities while running at a top speed of around 42 miles per hour.

The decision has spurred a growing list of nations to pony up similar systems. Most recently, the Netherlands and Denmark announced Thursday they would jointly donate 14 restored Leopard 2 tanks in early 2024.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said on Twitter during the meeting he had signed a letter of intent to create a maintenance center in Poland to service Leopard 2 tanks.

Coalition members have delivered more than 230 tanks and more than 1,550 armored vehicles so far, the defense official said.

Speaking to reporters ahead of the talks Friday morning, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg hailed the arrival of state-of-the-art tanks but cautioned that the coalition must reliably provide the ammunition, fuel and other support Ukraine needs to use that heavy equipment well into the future.

The contact group, which periodically gathers in person and virtually to hash out new avenues of support for Ukraine, has collectively provided more than $55 billion in military aid to the embattled country — growing tenfold since the first meeting one year ago, Austin said.

“Just in the past few months, we’ve provided the equipment and training to support an additional nine armored brigades for Ukraine,” he said in his opening remarks ahead of the day’s marathon series of meetings. “That has already strengthened Ukraine’s position on the battlefield.”

More than 11,000 Ukrainian soldiers are currently in infantry training or have finished courses hosted by U.S. forces in Germany. Around 2,250 soldiers, or four motorized infantry battalions, are now participating in combined arms lessons at the Grafenwoehr and Hohenfels training areas, said Col. Martin O’Donnell, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army in Europe and Africa.

Another 250 or so are currently learning to use other U.S.-supplied weapons as well as leadership training, he said. An additional motorized infantry battalion has arrived in Germany and will begin combined arms training soon, O’Donnell said. That includes instruction on “basic soldier tasks like marksmanship, along with medical training, squad, platoon and company training, and a battalion force-on-force exercise,” he said.

Around 8,800 Ukrainians — or seven battalions — have completed training and returned home.

Shoring up Ukraine’s air defenses to prevent enemy missile strikes, pouring in millions of rounds of ammunition and bolstering logistics and maintenance support remained the contact group’s top priorities at this week’s meeting.

U.S.-made Patriot surface-to-air defensive missiles have arrived in Ukraine, Reznikov announced Wednesday. Patriot weapons can hit aircraft, cruise missiles and short-range ballistic missiles like those Russia has used to destroy residential areas and critical infrastructure.

“Our top priority is to quickly build a multi-level air defense/anti-missile defense system,” he added on Twitter Thursday. “Patriots, IRIS-T, NASAMS, and MiG-29 are the most recent, but not the final, steps towards this goal.”

He is now trying to leverage the win to secure promises that Ukraine’s partners will relent on other currently out-of-reach equipment — namely, fighter jets.

Ahead of Friday’s meeting, Reznikov acknowledged foreign officials have gradually come around to providing Western weapons previously deemed a poor fit for the small Eastern European nation.

“We need NATO-style fighter jets,” he tweeted Thursday, citing the need to counter “barbaric tactics” used by Russian-backed forces.

Our top priority is to quickly build a multi-level air defense/anti-missile defense system.
Patriots, IRIS-T, NASAMS, and MiG-29 are the most recent, but not the final, steps towards this goal. Given the kremlin's barbaric tactics, we need NATO-style fighter jets.
We've heard…

— Oleksii Reznikov (@oleksiireznikov) April 20, 2023

Though Poland and Slovakia have donated Soviet-style MiG-29 fighter jets, and the United Kingdom and Poland have offered to train Ukrainian pilots, the idea of supplying F-16 Fighting Falcon jets or A-10C “Warthog” attack planes remains a bridge too far for the Biden administration.

Stoltenberg told reporters discussions on whether and how to offer different airframes are still underway.

Earlier this year, two Ukrainian pilots visited a military base in Tucson — likely with the Arizona Air National Guard’s 162nd Wing, which flies F-16s — to help the U.S. determine how long it might take to teach them to fly advanced Western aircraft, NBC News first reported in March. The Pentagon has not released any further information on their time in the simulators.

But Reznikov isn’t giving up hope.

“We’ve heard ‘no, it’s impossible’ a lot,” he wrote. “But I have seen firsthand how the impossible can become possible.”

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry claimed Friday its troops have killed more than 185,000 enemy forces since the Russian invasion began Feb. 24, 2022. U.S. and European defense officials have pegged that number around 200,000 troops, plus another 100,000 or so Ukrainian forces.

The Air Force said in an email to Defense News that it now expects to make a decision on producing the T-7A in February 2025, and for the aircraft’s manufacturer Boeing to start delivering them in December that year. The schedule shift means the aircraft will now arrive at least two years later than the service originally intended.

It is the latest slide in the T-7′s schedule, after a December acknowledgement that problems with the aircraft’s design and testing caused the plane’s production to slip into 2024.

The delay was first reported by Air and Space Forces Magazine.

A Boeing spokesperson confirmed the re-baselining of the T-7′s schedule in an email to Defense News. “Our goal remains to get this new critical training capability in the hands of pilots,” the company said.

The Air Force plans to buy 351 T-7s to replace the T-38 Talon jet trainer, which the Air Force has flown since the early 1960s and is rapidly showing its age. The Air Force in 2018 awarded Boeing a $9.2 billion contract to build the new trainer.

Boeing touted the T-7′s digital design process and advanced manufacturing techniques as a potential model for designing and building aircraft faster and with fewer risks and defects. But problems, including concerns over the aircraft’s ejection seats and other emergency egress systems, have slowed progress.

The T-7 was designed to accommodate pilots with a wider range of body types and heights, as well as both male and female pilots. For years, Air Force aircraft and their cockpits were designed with fitting only men in mind, and women frequently found it difficult to receive clearance to fly.

But tests showed the T-7′s emergency escape system could be dangerous for some pilots. The Air Force said last December that 2021 tests found some ejecting pilots could be at a high risk of concussions, unsafe acceleration when parachutes open, or losing their visor at high speeds.

The escape system, as well as glitches with the T-7′s flight control software, led to the schedule slip announced last year. Boeing said in December that a fix to the flight control software problems was expected to head into testing in early 2023.

The Air Force said this month that it and Boeing began to re-baseline the T-7′s schedule in June 2022 to take into account delays caused by problems, including testing and hardware qualification challenges, aerodynamic instabilities such as a now-resolved “wing rock” problem, critical parts shortages caused in part by the pandemic, the escape system problems, and Boeing’s “inability to rapidly correct deficiencies.”

Wing rock refers to a problem in which the T-7′s wings could have dangerously rocked back and forth along the roll axis.

The risk assessment led the T-7 program office to recommend the Milestone C decision change to February 2025, which means the service now expects the first production aircraft to be delivered in December 2025.

Because a decision on production isn’t expected to occur until 2025, the Air Force said it opted to strike procurement funding for the program’s low-rate initial production in the fiscal 2024 budget request. The service originally expected to spend $322 million on procurement of the T-7 next year, according to documents accompanying the FY23 budget request.

The Air Force said it and Boeing are now confident the T-7′s escape system will be safe and effective, after making improvements to the system and testing. Minor adjustments to the seat have increased safety and reduced the risk to pilots, the Air Force said. The service said it and Boeing will also keep studying the ejection seat’s performance through the rest of this year to find other ways to improve the technology.

The Air Force said Boeing’s first two production-relevant T-7s are undergoing test flights at Boeing’s facility in St. Louis, Missouri.

Boeing is finishing construction of five engineering and manufacturing development T-7s, the Air Force said.

Boeing said those aircraft are expected to start their flight tests this summer in St. Louis. The Air Force said the first three are then scheduled to move to Edwards Air Force Base in California, where they will undergo flight testing in September.

At least three amphibious combat vehicles have flipped in the surf in training mishaps that left no reported injuries but prompted temporary restrictions on vehicle operations during rough wave conditions.

Gen. David Berger, the Marine commandant, told senators in March that vehicle operators required updated training for the “new and more sophisticated vehicle,” which replaced the aging amphibious assault vehicle.

Top Marine acknowledges mechanical issues with new amphibious vehicles

A new transition training unit within the school that mints amphibious vehicle operators has been tasked with revamping training, the Marine Corps announced via a news release Wednesday.

“The transition training unit is comprised of Marines of various (military occupational specialties), to include aviators, light armored vehicle crewmen, AAV crewmen and others, to ensure that our new amphibious combat vehicle Marines receive the best possible targeted training for their new vehicle,” Gen. Eric Smith, the assistant commandant, told Marine Corps Times on Wednesday.

The amphibious combat vehicle, made by BAE Systems, was designed to replace the amphibious assault vehicle, which had been in service since the 1970s.

Like its predecessor, the amphibious combat vehicle is a ship-to-shore connector that can carry Marines across water and move them around on land. Unlike its predecessor, the new, heavier vehicle is wheeled rather than tracked and has a V-shaped hull to insulate crew members from underbody blasts.

The two vehicles also have different internal steering and propeller systems, according to Marine spokesman Capt. Ryan Bruce. Because of the many design differences, “the vehicles behave differently in the surf zone,” he said in an emailed statement to Marine Corps Times.

“The AAV and ACV are fundamentally dissimilar from one another,” Bruce said.

“As with the fielding of any new system, it’s going to take time to build experience and expertise with the platform,” he said. “Amphibious operations are inherently complex, and as we operate and train with the platform we are always learning and refining best practices and procedures.”

The transition training unit, made up of Marines with amphibious combat vehicle experience as well as subject-matter experts, is developing a program that will make sure Marines who work with the vehicle are properly trained to do so, according to the news release. The unit will be platoon-sized, according to Bruce, meaning it will have around a few dozen Marines.

Once the program is approved, Marines who already have been certified to operate and maintain the amphibious combat vehicle will have to get certified again under the new standards, according to the release.

Berger told Congress that BAE Systems and safety investigations determined the rollovers “were caused by a lever effect generated when the vehicle becomes parallel to the surf-line and is struck by a large wave.”

“The shape of the ACV is such that the operator has to be very aware of the orientation of the vehicle relative to the onsetting waves,” Retired Marine Lt. Col. Dakota Wood, a defense expert at the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, told Marine Corps Times on Wednesday.

When the long edge of the “big steel box,” as Wood put it, is perpendicular to the waves, flips can ensue.

In general, Wood said, it takes troops a while to learn how to handle new platforms, and the amphibious combat vehicle is no exception.

“The ACV is just a different vehicle, so it’s going to handle differently,” Wood said.

Smith said, “What you should never assume is that the replacement for one aircraft or vehicle is the same as the previous vehicle.”

“Even though the operators of that previous aircraft or vehicle are highly skilled, motivated Marines, they do not necessarily have the exact skills to train those entering into a new vehicle or a new aircraft.”

Vehicle concerns

Leadership at the Assault Amphibian School, which houses the new unit, came under scrutiny earlier in 2023 following the incidents where vehicles flipped in the surf.

In January, Brig. Gen. Farrell Sullivan, commander of the Corps’ Training Command, relieved Col. John Medeiros of command of the school “after receiving information obtained during the course of the ongoing investigation” into an October 2022 rollover.

Marine spokesman Capt. Phil Parker told Marine Corps Times at the time that Medeiros wasn’t accused of misconduct or criminal negligence.

In his March testimony, Berger also disclosed mechanical issues with the vehicle’s shock absorbers and central tire inflation system, as well as “issues related to possible water incursion into the power train,” the system of internal components that includes the engine.

The Marine Corps is working with BAE Systems to resolve those issues, Berger said.

Safety concerns also surrounded the amphibious assault vehicle, especially after July 2020, when an amphibious assault vehicle sank off the coast of California, killing eight Marines and one sailor. A command investigation later attributed the tragedy in large part to leadership failures.

In December 2021, the Corps permanently halted deploying the amphibious assault vehicle.

The Marine Corps has fielded 139 of the amphibious combat vehicles, mostly to the Assault Amphibian School and I Marine Expeditionary Force in California, Bruce said in a statement to reporters, but also some to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

Following the most recent reported mishap, the rollover in the surf in October 2022, the Marine Corps banned use of the amphibious combat vehicle for moving to or from surf zones, except for testing purposes. The surf zone is the area where waves break as they move toward the shore.

For now, Marines are authorized to use the vehicle for operations in protected waters like the Del Mar Boat Basin at Camp Pendleton, California, or on land, according to Bruce.

“The Marine Corps is taking a deliberate and phased approach to authorizing the ACV to transit the surf zone,” Bruce stated, adding that the plan will likely begin this summer.

First, staff from the new training unit will be authorized to use the vehicle in the surf zone as they firm up the new certification program, according to Bruce. Then operators participating in the certification can move into the surf zone.

Only after that will the Marine Corps allow the amphibious combat vehicle into the surf zone with Marines embarked on it, according to Bruce. At the moment, the vehicle isn’t scheduled for deployments.

“It’s important for us to get the training right before we speculate on future deployments,” he stated.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force and Navy on Wednesday morning conducted a test launch of an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile in California using an airborne control center.

The weapon, which contained a test reentry vehicle, was controlled from an Airborne Launch Control System in a Navy E-6B Mercury aircraft, the Air Force said in a statement.

Airmen from the 625th Strategic Operations Squadron from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska and Navy aircrew were aboard the E-6. Airmen from the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana also served on the task force supporting the test launch, which took place at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

“Strategic deterrence is the most critical mission in our Air Force and the cornerstone of America’s defense,” Air Force Global Strike Command head Gen. Thomas Bussiere said in the statement. “This test launch reinforces what our allies and partners already know: We’re always ready to defend the United States with combat-ready nuclear forces anytime, anywhere, on order, to conduct global strike.”

The Air Force said the Minuteman’s reentry vehicle traveled about 4,200 miles to the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

This was the first Minuteman test since Feb. 9, and the first time a test involved the use of the airborne control center since Aug. 16. The Air Force regularly conducts unarmed ICBM tests to ensure the missiles are functioning properly, and the service said this test was not in response to current world events.

The Air Force said Wednesday’s test verified the ICBM’s accuracy and reliability, and produced data that the Defense Department, Energy Department and U.S. Strategic Command will use to ensure the military’s nuclear missile enterprise is safe and secure.

Col. Chris Cruise, commander of the 377th Test Evaluation Group, said the test of the Airborne Launch Control System validates the military’s ability to strike targets anywhere and at any time, if the president deems it necessary. The test also ensures the military has redundancy in its ability to control ICBMs and shows the Air Force’s ability to work together with the Navy, he added.

The Navy now has 16 E-6s that carry out the Navy’s TACAMO, or Take Charge and Move Out, mission, which allows top U.S. leaders, including the president, to control nuclear forces such as nuclear-armed submarines.

But the E-6 fleet is aging, and the Navy says it must replace the aircraft with a new type. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, and Raytheon Intelligence and Space are among the companies working together to bid on the E-6 replacement, now referred to as E-XX.

Northrop Grumman officials told reporters at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference on April 3 that the Navy wants the E-XX to be a modified C-130J-30 Super Hercules, which has an extra 15 feet in its fuselage.

The Air Force and Northrop Grumman are also developing a successor to the Minuteman III, the LGM-35A Sentinel, which is expected to reach initial operational capability in 2029. The Air Force said it will keep operating the Minuteman III until the Sentinel reaches full capability in the mid-2030s.

MOSCOW — Belarusian Air Force crews have completed their training for using tactical nuclear weapons as part of Russia’s plan to deploy the weapons to its ally amid fighting in neighboring Ukraine, the Russian Defence Ministry said Friday.

The ministry released a video in which a Belarusian pilot said that the training course in Russia had given the crews of the Belarusian Air Force’s Su-25 ground attack jets the necessary skills for using the weapons.

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared last month that Moscow planned to put some of its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. It was another attempt by the Kremlin leader to dangle the nuclear threat to discourage the West from supporting Ukraine.

Russia has a union agreement with Belarus that envisions close political, economic and military ties. Russian troops used Belarusian territory to roll into Ukraine from the north in February 2022 and have maintained a presence in Belarus.

The deployment of Russian tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus would put them closer to potential targets in Ukraine and NATO members in Eastern and Central Europe. Belarus shares a 1,250-kilometer (777-mile) border with NATO members Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

Such weapons are intended to destroy enemy troops on the battlefield. They have a relatively short range and much less power compared with nuclear warheads fitted to long-range strategic missiles, which are capable of obliterating whole cities.

Putin said that construction of storage facilities for tactical nuclear weapons would be completed in Belarus by July 1. Russia also has helped modernize Belarusian combat aircraft to adapt them for carrying nuclear weapons. Russia also provided Belarus with Iskander short-range missiles that could be fitted with a nuclear warhead.

Putin has emphasized that Russia would retain control over any nuclear weapons deployed to Belarus, just as the U.S. controls its tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of its NATO allies.

The authoritarian president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has suggested that some of Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons might also be deployed to Belarus along with part of Moscow’s tactical nuclear arsenal.

Belarusian Defence Minister Viktor Khrenin again mentioned the possibility Friday, saying “it could be the next step” if the West continued what he described as its hostile course.

“We will respond to force only with force. Otherwise, they don’t get it in the West,” Khrenin said. “We are already preparing the sites that we have.”

Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine had Soviet nuclear weapons stationed in their territory but handed them over to Russia after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Orion integrates about 20 events that the services typically conduct separately, and involve multiple allies, including the United States. French Defense Chief of Staff Gen. Thierry Burkhard ordered the development of this exercise several years ago, Col. Pierre Gaudillière, spokesman for the French Chief of Defence Staff, said during an April 13 virtual press conference.

Based on a NATO-derived scenario, the exercise centers around a fictitious narrative to restore security in the state of “Arnland,” and it involves four distinct phases. Phase 1, held over the course of 2021 and 2022, was the planning phase, Gaudillière explained.

Macron sends $438 billion military budget plan to French parliament

Phase 2, which ran from February to March 2023, involved a quick response deployment of 7,000 troops, led by France and reinforced with allies, which included capabilities and assets spanning all domains: land, sea, air, space, cyber, electromagnetic, and informational. This mission reflected a “first entry operation in a contested domain,” in which France’s aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle was used to help set up an amphibious operation, alongside an air campaign involving all air assets, Gaudillière said.

Phase 3, which took place last month, consisted of an interagency tabletop exercise to reflect a “politico-military crisis management” scenario. Finally, Phase 4, which will begin next week and run through mid-May, will include simulated French and international units, up to division level, combined with units in the field, to represent a coalition deployment under UN and NATO mandate.

Orion’s final phase will involve 12,000 troops on the ground, including 1,700 troops from 14 allied nations, Gaudillière said. About 2,600 tactical vehicles, including 400 combat vehicles will be used, along with 60 aircraft – 50 of which are fighter jets – and 30 ships, including France’s aircraft carrier and two amphibious helicopter carriers. About 100 unmanned aerial systems of all sizes will also be involved, including two MQ-9 Reaper UAVs, and 20 space-borne sensors, per the ministry.

The exercise planners also built up a “dedicated universe” involving simulated networks, press rooms, and interactions with journalists, to ensure the exercise’s participants are in contact with the sort of stimuli they would typically get in such a conflict, but without “interference from the real world,” he noted.

While the general exercise scenario was not modified in the wake of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, planners included “stimuli” inspired by what France has observed on the Ukrainian battlefields and the conflict writ large, per Gaudillière.

Phase 4 will take place entirely on French national territory, in various counties and regions in the northeast and west of the country. Allied nations participating in Orion ‘23 include Belgium, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Greece, and Spain, with some nations participating at the command level and others providing capabilities including helicopters and fighter jets, Gaudillière said.

French officials expect Orion to become a triennial exercise, with the next iteration to take place in 2026, following two years of planning, he added.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said the goal of the war games was to test the capability of Russia’s armed forces to mount a response to aggression.

Along with the missile launches, the drills will also involve nuclear-capable strategic bombers and other warplanes besides the naval aviation of the Pacific Fleet, Shoigu said.

The Russian military has concentrated the bulk of its forces on the front lines in Ukraine, but also continued conducting regular drills across Russia to train its forces and demonstrate their readiness.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the war games as part of regular training intended to “maintain the necessary level of the armed forces’ readiness.”

Shoigu noted that the maneuvers’ scenario envisages a response to an adversary’s attempt to make a landing on Sakhalin Island and the southern Kuril Islands.

Japan asserts territorial rights to the Kuril Islands, which it calls the Northern Territories. The Soviet Union took them in the final days of World War II, and the dispute has kept the countries from signing a peace treaty formally ending their hostilities.

Last year, Russia announced it had suspended peace talks with Japan to protest Tokyo’s sanctions against Moscow over its action in Ukraine.

Russia has built up its military presence on the islands in recent years, deploying advanced fighter jets, anti-ship missiles and air defense systems there.

The Pacific Fleet drills started days before a planned trip to Moscow by Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Li Shangfu. The Russian Defense Ministry said Shoigu and Li would discuss “prospects of bilateral defense cooperation and acute issues of global and regional security.”

A three-day visit to Moscow by Chinese President Xi Jinping last month demonstrated the two nations’ partnership in the face of Western efforts to isolate Russia over Ukraine and gave a political lift to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Both Moscow and Beijing have accused Washington of trying to isolate them and to hold back their development as they challenge the U.S. for regional and global leadership.

Putin and Xi said they would increase contacts between their militaries and stage more joint sea and air patrols and drills, but there was no hint that China would help Russia with weapons, as the U.S. and other Western allies feared.

North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency issued the report a day after the country’s neighbors detected a launch of a long-range missile from near Pyongyang, which extended a run of weapons displays involving more than 100 missiles fired into sea since the start of 2022.

KCNA said the launch was supervised on site by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who described the missile — named Hwasong-18 — as the most powerful weapon of his nuclear forces that would enhance its counterattack abilities in the face of external threats created by the military activities of the United States and its regional allies.

Kim pledged to further expand his nuclear arsenal so that his rivals “suffer from extreme anxiety and fear while facing an insurmountable threat, and be plunged into regrets and despair over their decisions.”

North Korea has justified its weapons demonstrations as a response to the expanding military exercises between the United States and South Korea, which the North condemns as invasion rehearsals while using them as a pretext to push further its own weapons development.

“Respected comrade Kim Jong Un said speeding up the development of evolving and more advanced and powerful weapons systems is our party and government’s consistent policy to respond to military threats and worsening security situation on the Korean Peninsula,” KCNA said.

It cited Kim as saying that the Hwasong-18 would rapidly advance North Korea’s nuclear response posture and further support an aggressive military strategy that vows to maintain “nuke for nuke and an all-out confrontation for an all-out confrontation” against its rivals.

North Korea has tested various intercontinental missiles since 2017 that demonstrated the potential range to reach the U.S. mainland, but the others use liquid fuel that must be added relatively close to the launch and they cannot remain fueled for prolonged periods.

An ICBM with built-in solid propellants would be easier to move and hide and could be fired faster, reducing the opportunities for opponents to detect and counter the launch. It’s not immediately clear how close the North is to having a functional solid-fuel ICBM capable of striking the U.S. mainland.

South Korea’s Defense Ministry maintains North Korea’s technological advancements haven’t reached the point where it can protect its ICMB warheads from the harsh conditions of atmospheric reentry. Last month, South Korean Defense Minister Lee Jong-Sup also told lawmakers that North Korea likely hasn’t yet mastered the technology to place nuclear warheads on its most advanced short-range missiles targeting South Korea, though he acknowledged the country was making considerable progress on it.

“This is a significant breakthrough for the North Koreans, but not an unexpected one,” said Ankit Panda, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“The primary significance of solid-fuel ICBMs is in terms of what they’ll do for the survivability of North Korea’s overall ICBM force,” he said.

“Because these missiles are fueled at the time of manufacture and are thus ready to use as needed, they will be much more rapidly useable in a crisis or conflict, depriving South Korea and the United States of valuable time that could be useful to preemptively hunt and destroy such missiles.”

North Korean state media published photos of the missile blasting off from a launch vehicle at a test site inside a forest as Kim watched from an observation post along with military officials and his daughter.

KCNA described the Hwasong-18 as a three-stage missile with the first stage tested at a standard ballistic trajectory and the others programmed to fly at higher angles after separation to avoid North Korea’s neighbors. It wasn’t immediately clear how the third stage was tested, where the warhead would theoretically be placed.

The agency said the test didn’t threaten the security of other countries as the first and second stages fell into waters off the country’s eastern coast. It provided no details about what happened to the third stage, although the official Rodong Sinmun newspaper published an aerial photo of an object it described as the third stage following separation.

Kim Dong-yub, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said North Korea for the test likely designed the third stage as an empty device and simply let it fall after separation.

Solid-fuel ICBMs highlighted an extensive wish list Kim announced under a five-year arms development plan in 2021, which also included tactical nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles, nuclear-powered submarines and spy satellites.

The North has fired around 30 missiles this year alone over 12 different launch events as both the pace of its weapons development and the U.S.-South Korean military exercises increase in a cycle of tit-for-tat. The U.S. and South Korean militaries conducted their biggest field exercises in years last month and separately held joint naval and air force drills involving a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group and nuclear-capable U.S. bombers.

North Korea claimed the drills simulated an all-out war against North Korea and communicated threats against it. The United States and South Korea have said their exercises are defensive in nature and expanding them was necessary to cope with the North’s evolving threats.