As the force grapples with supply chain and maintenance issues as well as long aircraft service lives, sustainment funding is becoming increasingly necessary to bridge the gap, service officials said in a panel at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

“If I can throw a number out there right now, we have a $14 billion hole in supply,” Commander of Air Force Materiel Command Lt. Gen. Linda Hurry said during a panel titled “Flying and Fixing to Fight and Win.”

“Let that sink in for a minute,” she continued. “I know we’re not going to get it all at once, but when we get it, we’re going to have to execute. We’re going to have to execute smartly so we can move the needle.”

Hurry said that the service is managing the fleet more globally through partnerships, looking at parts with the Defense Logistics Agency and individual pieces that the force can get from the depot back in the field.

“From a supply perspective, our increase in the supply rate, or the number of aircraft that are down from a supply perspective, has increased 87% over the last seven years,” Hurry said.

On average, around 53% of the force’s fleet is over 30 years old, with 55% of the fleet over its “useful” service life, she said.

Hurry added that the force is working to receive additional funding for spare parts through advocating for the budget request to pass. In the fiscal year 2027 budget, the Department of the Air Force requested a record $338.8 billion, with $4.2 billion allotted for the Consolidated Sustainment Activity Group, or CSAG, that manages spare parts and maintenance backlogs, according to budget documents.

“But once we get even a penny, we have to be ready to execute it,” Hurry said.

Hurry also said that the service is striving to improve its “forecasting accuracy” to better understand where the needs are and where to position those assets globally by using artificial intelligence models and additive manufacturing.

On top of those measures, the service is putting long-term contracts in place that build stability in the collective supply chain and multiple sources of supply.

“Gone are the days of monopolies; we can’t just have one person producing the one critical part,” she said. “I need five [industry partners] producing them because if we get down to the crunch, we’re going to have to have a healthy shelf so that we can fight globally.”

The officials touted the North Star Readiness Campaign, which is meant to increase the number of mission-capable B-52 Stratofortress and B-1 Lancer aircraft by accelerating the delivery of parts, engineering support and depot maintenance.

The campaign has been the “number one driver” of improving readiness in the bomber fleet because of the supply increase the force has received, Gen. Stephen L. Davis, commander of the Air Force Global Strike Command, said during the panel.

Specifically, Davis said that the campaign has increased B-52 readiness by 40%.

“As a commander, you don’t want everything to be a money problem to solve it, but this I think is a money problem,” he said. “We need more money for parts. It’s absolutely the case.”

The decision to extend the B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit comes amid moves by the force to further develop the B-21 Raider, the service’s next-generation stealth bomber with accelerated production.

Both the bombers will be extended, Gen. Stephen L. Davis, commander of the Air Force Global Strike Command, said during a panel titled “Flying and Fixing to Fight and Win” at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

The commander said that the experienced pilots from the bombers will be some of the first B-21 pilots.

The Raiders are on track for a 2027 delivery to Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota. The service aims to replace the aging B-1 and B-2 fleets in the coming decades with at least 100 B-21s.

Davis highlighted the Air Force’s Bomber Supplemental Trainer for Aircrew Readiness, or BSTAR, program, which is meant to address gaps and flight-hour readiness for B-1 pilots. In the program, XSTAR Aviation provides the force with HondaJet Elite light business jets.

“We’re bringing in a HondaJet to actually help experience some pilots, and also as some of these airframes have issues with readiness, it gives those pilots a chance to fly and get them time in the seat, which we know is very important,” Davis said during the panel.

The commander didn’t say how long the bombers’ service lives would be extended for, but the service intends to modernize and invest in the B-1 and B-2s in the coming years despite both aircraft being slated for retirement in the next decade.

Recently, the service launched an operation readiness campaign, dubbed the North Star Readiness Campaign, to increase the number of mission-capable B-52 Stratofortress and B-1s by accelerating the delivery of parts, engineering support and depot maintenance.

During the campaign’s announcement, the force said that while the B-52 and B-1 are being upgraded to continue service, the B-2 will be maintained for combat effectiveness until the B-21 is fully operational.

The failure of troops to provide phone numbers for spouses in the Air Force Personnel Accountability and Assessment System, however, can carry dire consequences. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Douglas Scheiss recalled an incident in which he and his wife, Debbie, needed to reach a spouse whose husband had died in Syria.

But when they called the number on file, the phone simply rang and rang. It was the number for the airman’s cell phone.

“The number we were calling [was wrong] because he didn’t want his wife’s number to be on something,” Scheiss said during a forum on military families at the Air & Space Forces Association annual conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on Wednesday. “We are the most connected people in the world … but when the time is needed to contact people … don’t take away that ability for a spouse to be connected.”

The Air Force is launching an effort to improve the service’s ability to collect accurate contact information for spouses and provide it to units’ Key Support Program, the Air Force’s volunteer portion of a command’s family readiness efforts similar to Navy ombudsmen or Marine Corps family readiness volunteers.

Key Support Liaisons facilitate communications between commands and families — and often serve as the social foundation for military families when units are deployed.

Volunteers are required to keep phone numbers and other personal information confidential under the Privacy Act, but the unit phone trees they are provided are only as good as the information in AFPAAS, explained Cindy Wilsbach, wife of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach.

“We’ve asked them to do this and [Key Support Liaisons] have stood up and said they will, yet we haven’t equipped them by giving them the contact information for our families,” Cindy Wilsbach said.

“When this thing kicked off in February,” she said, referring to the Iran war, “I heard from people around the globe … ‘Cindy, their spouse is gone, and this spouse has heard from no one. No one has contacted her, no one has reached out to her.’ It wasn’t just one or two people. I heard it from a lot of people.”

The service has started distributing cards to unit leaders that explain how leaders — most likely unit first sergeants — can pull unit personnel lists from AFPAAS and provide a comprehensive recall roster to their Key Support Liaison.

The four-step effort involves identifying the need, collecting the contact information, maintaining a roster and providing it to the liaison on a regular basis.

The cards were created by Doniel Wolfe, a military family life counselor who holds a doctorate in counseling and is married to Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force David Wolfe.

Collecting and distributing accurate information on family contacts may sound simple, but it’s been a problem “for a very long time,” Cindy Wilsbach said.

“We’ve heard it at every single base we’ve visited … so we’re hoping, with Legal’s blessing, that this is the way forward, that we will arm KSLs with the power to actually do what we’ve asked them to do,” she said.

Connection with the command, as well as one another, is a cornerstone of readiness, Cindy Wilsbach added. She said the liaisons are a vital resource for making initial contact with new families, sustaining families when units are deployed and providing support in emergencies.

The senior leaders and their spouses urged personnel attending the conference to keep their spouses’ contact information updated in AFPAAS, with Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna saying it’s the responsibility of leadership to make sure that spouses feel included.

“How many spouses … are maybe just waiting for someone to reach out to them. The worst that could happen is you send a note or make a phone call, send a text or an email, and you don’t get an answer back … but this is where leadership comes in — you got in there, and you got to take care,” Bentivegna said.

The Navy championed the contract as one of the first successful examples of the Department of the Navy Rapid Capabilities Office and how it “has adapted its acquisition structure to more rapidly meet the needs of the warfighter. … By leveraging advanced commercial manufacturing methods and a vertically integrated production line, this landmark program introduces immediate ‘affordable mass’ to the fleet.”

Blackbeard is “an air-launched, hypersonic strike weapon that provides carrier-based strike fighters with a responsive, long-range, high-speed strike option against maritime and land targets, enhancing survivability against advanced air defenses while significantly increasing magazine depth,” the release notes.

The missile, according to Inside Defense, is intended to serve as a standoff weapon with a 200-nautical-mile range, arming aircraft including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the F/A-18/E/F Super Hornet.

The Navy has long sought an air-launched hypersonic anti-surface missile and, since 2021, has pursued an air-breathing hypersonic cruise missile through the program dubbed Hypersonic Air-Launched Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare, or HALO, according to earlier reporting from The War Zone.

In subsequent years, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin competed for the contract, with the Navy hoping to field HALO before 2030. However, the service scrapped the program in 2024, citing budgetary constraints.

Castelion is now offering the Navy a low-cost solution to its current gap in its weapons systems.

In February, the Navy awarded the defense startup nearly $50 million after it selected Blackbeard for its Multimission Affordable Capacity Effector (MACE) program. The Navy earmarked $156 million in its fiscal 2027 budget request to procure 353 MACE missiles. And in June, the Navy awarded the company $23.4 million for pre-production prototypes and 50 associated storage and shipping containers, according to Castelion.

The latest contract awarded to Castelion leverages the Small Business Innovation Development Act from the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act “to rapidly transition successful technology developed through private capital investment directly into production. This approach reduces millions of dollars in redundant, non-recurring engineering costs while introducing aggressive commercial competition into the munitions production ecosystem,” according to the release.

And with Castelion’s emphasis on low cost and producibility for Blackbeard, the Navy is seemingly positioning itself well in the post-HALO hypersonic missile world.

Berlin plans to dispatch four Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets, alongside a contingent of several dozen soldiers and technicians, to the Lielvārde air base in central Latvia. They will be there for a week in late September and early October, the German ministry of defense said in a statement.

Latvian authorities had requested support from allies to secure the skies over the country during the general election, Germany said. The Latvian parliamentary election is scheduled to take place Oct. 3.

The mission is billed as part of NATO’s enhanced air policing north, or eAPN, in the Baltic States, though the short, one-week timeline and narrower election focus set it apart from the alliance’s routine four-month rotations.

None of the three small Baltic States possess their own fighter aircraft. Unlike northern Estonia and southern Lithuania, Latvia is not usually home to permanently stationed NATO jets; instead, the allied aircraft stationed in the neighboring states also cover Latvian skies.

The Baltic states in particular have been calling for strong NATO commitments to secure the alliance’s eastern flank, as governments in the three small countries feel particularly threatened by Russia. This year, repeated unauthorized drone incursions have additionally put the countries on edge. Some of these have been identified as Ukrainian drones that strayed off course from their targets in Russia, while other instances remain unidentified.

Significantly, Italian NATO jets in neighboring Lithuania shot down a suspected Russian-made drone this week after it crossed the border from Belarus. It was the first time a drone was shot down in Lithuanian airspace.

Lielvārde air base, where the German Eurofighters will be stationed during their mission, has also seen rotating contingents of other NATO countries’ fighter jets. Just a few weeks ago, in late August, two Turkish F-16 fighter jets visited the base. In April, French Rafale jets based out of Šiauliai, Lithuania, visited the airfield. NATO has also used the base for its AWACS aircraft during missions along the Russian border.

Latvia and its two Baltic neighbors have been members of NATO since 2004, joining alongside fellow eastern flank countries Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, and Slovenia.

Japan paid roughly $163 million for Northrop Grumman to manufacture each of its three RQ-4B Block 30i Global Hawks nearly a decade ago.

The Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) on Sept. 16 revealed that it lost contact with the high-altitude drone at 12:55 p.m., before losing its radar signature three minutes later over international waters.

The JASDF’s 502nd Squadron operates its Global Hawks from Misawa Air Base in northern Japan. Before crashing, the drone had taken off at 10.20 a.m. on an unspecified mission, with JASDF Chief of Staff Gen. Takehiro Morita only divulging, “This particular flight was not a training exercise.”

One mission for Japanese Global Hawks, which can stay aloft for 32 hours at altitudes of up to 60,000 ft, is monitoring North Korean missile launch preparations. They are also useful for keeping an eye on Chinese military activities.

Morita said a Japan Coast Guard helicopter spotted debris in the water just 50 minutes after it had lost contact. Other assets spotted further wreckage and took photos, enabling precise identification of the aircraft.

No cause of the accident was revealed.

Japan received its first Global Hawk in March 2022, with the other two arriving later that year. Their integrated payload contains an electro-optic/infrared sensor, synthetic aperture radar and ground moving target indicator.

The Global Hawk purchase was controversial in Japan given their enormous cost and the fact that the U.S. retained tight control over the aircraft’s technology and the processing of gathered data.

Global Hawks possess the longest reach of any Japanese drone, so the loss of one among such a small fleet will be sorely missed.

However, as Japan increasingly prioritizes unmanned technologies, the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force is planning to induct the first of 23 MQ-9B SeaGuardians in 2027. Although these drones have a shorter endurance and range than the Global Hawk, Tokyo will use them for maritime domain awareness.

Japan’s draft 2027 defense budget requested US$1.88 billion for the first 17 SeaGuardians. These will take over some of the missions currently performed by P-1 and older P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft.

Incidentally, the U.S. Air Force currently has three RQ-4B Global Hawks stationed at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, after relocating them from Guam in May to avoid the typhoon season.

The United States planned to quickly retire all its Global Hawks, but it will now keep operating them until 2033. After that, there will be only three in South Korea and two in Japan still flying.

The Israeli company states that the integration work is being executed as a joint initiative between Rafael and Lockheed Martin, the aircraft’s manufacturer, at Lockheed’s facilities in the United States. Development and testing are expected to conclude within a few months, according to the firm.

Following completion, the munition will be formally cleared for operational employment by the Israeli Air Force’s F-35 fleet. At a later stage, the capability is set to become available to F-35 operators worldwide.

The SPICE 1000 technology converts general-purpose and penetration warheads of 1,000 lbs into precision-capable munitions that pilots can drop from 75 miles away thanks to gliding wings on the bomb’s body. It is part of the company’s SPICE family that includes additional weight classes: the SPICE 2000 and the SPICE 250.

Rafael notes that SPICE 1000 bombs have served as a primary munition of the Israeli Air Force on F-15s and F-16s for several years, including in the recent war against Iran.

Rafael said it has sold the SPICE 1000 to several countries, but didn’t specify which. One customer emerged in December 2025 when India’s Defense Acquisition Council (DAC) approved the procurement of SPICE 1000 systems.

The Israeli Air Force maintains an active fleet of approximately fifty F-35I (“Adir”) aircrafts, and upon completion of all approved procurement processes, including the purchase of 25 aircraft this past May, Israel is projected to hold a fleet of 100 stealth fighters in total.

The force needs to be “clear-eyed” about the environment ahead as future conflicts will be progressively contested and defy simpler solutions, Caine said in a Wednesday keynote at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

“We have to assume from now on that our formations will be hunted by autonomous systems, jammed across the spectrum and tracked in real time,” Caine said in his speech.

“We have to transition the joint force to be prepared to fight and win our future wars by generating and delivering lethality at scale with an agile, optimized, high-low mix of combat capabilities to give the young members of the 2.8 million-member all-volunteer joint force the tools that they need before they need them,” he continued.

While calling the American military and their families the country’s “ultimate insurance policy,” Caine asserted that the joint force needs to be ready for a fight before it begins.

Even as the country’s adversaries are geographically dispersed, they are connected through sharing technology, intelligence, weapons and economic support, he said. As the military branches study past and present American battlefields, they are looking for new ways to challenge the advantage, demonstrating the necessity for readiness and investment in a range of military capabilities before a crisis begins.

Recently, Russia and Iran have deepened their military partnership with a technological feedback loop amid the Ukraine war and the conflict in the Middle East. Moscow is sending Iran upgraded munitions, satellite imagery and targeting data that have been used against American forces in the Middle East.

Tehran first supplied Russia with Shahed attack drones for use in Ukraine in 2022 and has since arranged a license to build the Iranian-designed drones on Russian territory.

“The character of war is changing, and time is of the essence,” Caine said, emphasizing how the way and speed in which countries fight is altering on the modern battlefield as artificial intelligence, cyber capabilities and autonomous systems develop.

The chairman noted that the modern battlefield today operates from the seabed to the cislunar space, highlighting that the advantage will go to whoever can see, understand, decide and act first as a learning organization.

Caine highlighted the June rescue of two Army soldiers by way of a remotely piloted Navy unmanned surface as an example of how the military is adapting and utilizing AI and autonomous tools.

He also referenced how these tools are being used to change the threat in contested electromagnetic interference environments, such as in Ukraine, with first-person view drones.

“Take it together, these examples from the Strait of Hormuz to the front lines in Ukraine show how quickly technology is changing the character of war,” he said.

Caine spotlighted that it will be young service leaders who will be the ones in charge of the subsequent conflicts in these environments and will have to be adaptive and understanding of their environment with a plethora of information.

As technology, networks and software continue to change, the need for capable and lethal leaders will not, he said. The nation can bring autonomy and better networks to the force but none of it will matter without trusted leaders that can work under pressure.

“We must move together because the window to build the force that we need is closing,” Caine said. “We can buy almost anything in life, but we cannot buy time.”

COLOGNE, Germany — The defense leaders of Germany and the United States have signed an agreement positioning Germany as an additional production hub where workers can make scarce munitions for American weapons if stateside U.S. firms are overwhelmed by demand.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the pact on Tuesday during a visit by Pistorius to the Pentagon. It comes as German officials, in particular, are looking to secure practical touchpoints in the trans-Atlantic defense relationship, dinged by U.S. President Trump’s on-again, off-again disdain for NATO and Europe.

Hegseth portrayed the agreement as combining defense-acquisition reform initiatives in both nations.

“When we align the two, you expand opportunities for joint development, production, licensed manufacturing and expanded maintenance and sustainment capacities — exactly what allied countries should be doing,” he said.

Germany’s arm of pan-European missile maker MBDA is already making Patriot air-defense interceptors of the older PAC-2 generation. Production of an upgraded version, PAC-2 GEM-T, is set to begin at the company’s plant in Schrobenhausen later this year, Pistorius told reporters.

In addition, officials from both countries will consider which components of the Tomahawk cruise missile Germany could supply, he told reporters.

Berlin wants to buy the missiles, along with Typhon launchers, as part of Germany’s emerging “deep precision strike” complex. While there is agreement on a political level on selling the weapons, manufacturing them will take longer than defense leaders in Berlin want to wait.

Patriot interceptors and Tomahawk cruise missiles have become prime examples of scarce weaponry in recent years.

European nations have funneled much of their Patriot inventories to Ukraine to help Kyiv defend against barrages of Russian missiles and attack drones, and they are now scrambling to rebuild their own arsenals.

Meanwhile, U.S. forces have reportedly drawn down the Pentagon’s Tomahawk stock considerably during the war against Iran. That has made the cruise missiles, prized for their precision at a range of 1,000 miles, hard to obtain for European countries, like Germany, looking to build a long-range strike capability from scratch.

Berlin is keeping its options open for more readily available medium- and long-range weapons while developing an upgraded version of its own German-Swedish Taurus missile. For example, Germany is part of a European group of nations looking for a homegrown alternative, known as ELSA.

In addition, officials are eyeing the Anthem cruise missile by U.S.-based firm Covenant, as well as a cooperation with Ukraine, Pistorius said in Washington.

Germany’s new defense-industry overture with the U.S. may ruffle some feathers among European autonomy purists, especially in France.

Paris has already seen Berlin walk away from joint weapons development programs in recent years in favor of quicker purchases from the U.S. Those include P-8 maritime surveillance aircraft made by Boeing and F-35 fighter jets by Lockheed Martin.

The acquisitions were perceived by some French officials as sucking the air out of bilateral efforts to develop next-generation aircraft for each of the two mission types.

France has repeatedly criticized the use of European money to produce U.S. weapons under license, with then-Armed Forces Minister Sebastien Lecornu, the current prime minister, saying in February 2025 that doing so would be a “historic mistake.”

The French government has argued that EU funds should build up European defense-industrial capacity, rather than subsidizing systems whose design authority remains outside of Europe, citing German production of interceptors for the Patriot air-defense system rather than investing in the French-Italian SAMP/T.

During their public remarks at the Pentagon on Tuesday, Hegseth focused on the mechanics of the new defense-cooperation agreement, as Pistorius painted a geopolitical context for the pact.

“We need to realize once more … that we are currently experiencing what might be the greatest threat to the alliance, the West, and our way of life since the height of the Cold War,” Pistorius said. “Russia has been waging a brutal war against Ukraine for almost five years now. Russia is modernizing its nuclear arsenal, increasing its presence in the Arctic and militarizing space.”

“Russia will remain the biggest threat to Euro-Atlantic security in the foreseeable future,” he added.

The German defense minister was scheduled to meet with U.S. lawmakers and local defense company executives after meeting Hegseth in Washington, per the German Ministry of Defense.

His trip will be capped on Friday by a handover ceremony of the first German F-35 coming off the production line at Lockheed Martin’s plant in Fort Worth, Texas. Germany has ordered 35 of the planes so far, but defense officials in Berlin are eyeing more.

Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris and Linus Höller in Vienna contributed to this report.

Correction: An initial version of this story incorrectly quoted Pistorius as saying PAC-3 MSE interceptor production would begin in Germany. Pistorius instead said PAC-2 GEM-T production was set to begin there.