Podcast: Debriefing Defense In 2025

The F-47, low-cost missiles, space superiority and more—listen in as editors break down the key developments of 2025 in the defense world.

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Robert Wall (00:15): Welcome to Check 6. Today we look back on 2025 and debrief the year in defense, a year in which Israel and Iran were at war for 12 days and the U.S. got in on the action with Operation Midnight Hammer, the B-2 strike on Iran's nuclear infrastructure. Golden Dome shouldn't exist a year ago, is now a household name inspired by Israel's Iron Dome. Golden Dome has inspired its own copycat efforts. T Dome Steel Dome, Michelangelo Dome a second. Northrop Grumman B-21 joined the stealth bombers flight test program. Two new U.S. Air Force Collaborative Combat Aircraft took flight and CCAs in Turkey and Australia conducted air-to-air missile shots. There is clearly too much to talk about for one Check 6. So I've asked our senior defense editor, Steve Trimble, European defense editor, Tony Osborne and Pentagon editor Brian Stein, to join me and pick just one development each they thought was particularly meaningful. It's not necessarily what they think was the most important story, but one with import in a technology program or policy sense. I'm your host today, Robert Wall Aviation Week's executive editor for Defense and Space. So Steve, why don't you kick us off? What did you pick and why did you pick it?

Steve Trimble (01:31): Sure, thanks. It was a rough year overall. I mean, you talked about the wars. There's also all the program delays, cost overruns, cancellations, those are the things we typically write about. But I chose something that was not necessarily a failure, at least yet in the U.S. weapons acquisition development world that I think is really interesting. It also has been, in my opinion, under-reported even by ourselves, even though I've done what I could. It doesn't help that this organization prefers to be completely secret. And what I'm talking about is the weapons capacity task force that is based at Eglin Air Force Base as part of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center. They were stood up two years ago, very quietly, if not secretly, to solve a problem that has bedeviled the Air Force and all other acquisition organizations for decades. And that is how to produce a new portfolio actually of low-cost munitions that could enter service, not necessarily to replace the kinds of munitions like JASSM and LRASM, AMRAAM, JDAM, those kinds of things, million dollar plus type missiles, but to augment them and trading lower cost in the $200,000 to $300,000 to $400,000 per round level for significantly higher volume than you would get with AMRAAM or JASSM, certainly at the same cost.

(03:12): And to this point, they have succeeded in all their goals. Now, they eventually plan to apply this model with a new family of low-cost air-to-air missiles, mainly to weaponize the CCAs as well as other crewed aircraft. And even they're even looking at hypersonic missiles. But where they started was with low-cost cruise missiles, augmenting essentially JASSM in some cases weapons, like SRAW the Stand-in Attack Weapon or ARRW. And what they were able to do, just to kind of put it in perspective, it usually takes several years for a weapon like JASSM to go from here's the RFP to actually fielding it.

(03:59): And in the case of the weapons capacity task force, they went from sending out the RFP in June of 2024 to beginning field process in October of 2025, essentially 14-month turnaround. And along the way they did prototypes. They tested it on the ground, these weapons on the ground and in the air. Now they also ushered in a whole new category of companies into the munitions industrial base, companies like Zone 5 Technologies in California, COPI in Virginia, and of course Anduril, well actually all over the place, but in California and now in the next year, Ohio, to the point where Anduril has talked about publicly their plan to deliver 5,000 cruise missiles in 2026, which is a shocking figure. I mean nobody has ever produced missiles at that rate. And it's largely through the actions of the weapons capacity task force. Now, they were building on work that had started with the Defense Innovation Unit, with the Franken program and the ETV program.

(05:18): That's what created the initial concepts and got the initial prototypes in tests to get the ball rolling. And that has happened several times before in the weapons acquisition community with low-cost munitions. We've seen that process play out with AFRL and other types of projects, but then there was nothing to usher them into production, into programs of record. And this new organization, the weapons capacity task force managed at this point to address that. Now the transition from development to production has been fraught with risk and introduced complications for a lot of different programs over the years. And now that's what they're contending with. So I mean, they're not out of the woods, but they certainly have moved faster and delivered results at a pace we've never seen before with this type of munition. And it creates a template for what could happen in 2026 with other types of munitions, including those low-cost air-to-air missiles, potentially hypersonic missiles. And this comes even as the Army and the Navy are looking at similar ideas for how to do this with ballistic missiles, basically creating low-cost alternatives to the Precision Strike Missile, as well as a low-cost alternative to the hypersonic glide body that's used by the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon and the Conventional Prompt Strike program for the Navy.

Robert Wall (06:48): Steve, I mean, just a question actually for you. It's fascinating. I think it's a really good pick. How do they do it?

Steve Trimble (06:59): Well, part of it is I think one of the biggest things is they do not have competition necessarily for resources from the traditional programs of record. And that is not because Lockheed has looked the other way and decided not to challenge this. It's because the likes of Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed cannot build the missiles that they're building fast enough. They are fully subscribed, their production lines for JASSM AMRAAM, JDAM SRAW ARRW are. So this is not a zero-sum game anymore for them. So they're not fighting this or standing in the way of this. I think that really helps to be honest. Secondly, you start with this low-cost proposition where instead of trying to find to specify the technical requirements and going to the most advanced capabilities you need because you only get one shot at doing this, they start with a very basic set of requirements that don't necessarily result in the most survivable munition.

(08:12): I mean, nobody's going to claim that you can get the same results from one of these types of weapons versus JASSM, for example. But you, by using them in combination with JASSM, what you can do, as we've seen Russia do and we've seen Iran do, is attempt to overwhelm the enemy's capacity for air defense and missile defense. And so you don't necessarily need them to all get through, but you need to essentially exhaust the defender's ability to account for all of these missiles coming at them in addition to other drones and fighters and all these other things.

(08:53): So that's sort of the idea. And then that means that you can step down the requirements. You can make it easier for these small new companies to enter this space with not the same level of technology readiness and manufacturing readiness, but the ability to produce something at this level that is relevant. And then we've also heard Anduril talk about, well, you don't necessarily need a seeker on all of these, so maybe you fire three of them. One of them has a seeker and it has a data link to the other two, and then you have others you would launch even more and you have a mesh network. So if they shoot down one of the seeker-equipped missiles, there's still others that can get into this mesh network and communicate where the target is. So that's part of it too, and right, and also when you're talking about the kind of volumes you have that they're talking about here, that also has a preemptive, I guess, pressure on the price. I mean when you're talking about those volumes, you can bring the prices down based on the volume discounts. So all of that sort of factors in here, and it seems to have actually worked at this point.

Robert Wall (10:17): I mean, I think just to give people our audience a bit of sense of really the level of the change here in terms of price performance, I went back down a bit of a rabbit hole to try to figure out what the original price target was for JASSM, and we're talking mid-'90s now. I mean that was $400,000 a missile, so well above what, and if you inflated that now for current year dollars, we're talking about double that, maybe slightly more than that. Now JASSM, the current one is probably twice that price. Now, in all fairness, that's the JASSM-ER. It's not the baseline JASSM, but I mean, I think the point you were making, the requirements approach being so different, because JASSM was always was supposed to be what was called then a lightning bolt initiative, an acquisition reform effort, but it was still very much driven by the lethality performance and getting in on target. And that was basically non-tradable, which then drove obviously cost over the years.

Steve Trimble (11:17): Well, and JASSM had a really difficult development program. I mean, there was several years where the Air Force literally tried to cancel it and Congress refused to let them do it because of Lockheed's performance on it. And that came after they had to cancel the preceding program, TSSAM, just because they had also ran into that same well, and they were doing, I think it was $2 million or $3 million per unit cost in the mid-1990s, which is why it got canceled. So JASSM was more successful than that, but it was a difficult thing, and it has always been bizarre to me. To me it's like the easiest thing you could do in aerospace, right? This is not a reusable fighter or even a UAV, like a CCA or something like that. This is a one-shot turbojet powered, and the turbojet doesn't have to last for more than one flight because you're not recovering a cruise missile.

(12:17): And yet the barriers to entry seemed very low, but no new companies wanted to enter this space and it just remained the province of the prime manufacturers. And for whatever reason, they could just never get that cost structure low enough to give the Air Force truly what they wanted. Now, the Air Force does talk. They want the performance, they want a missile that they can count on that actually hits the target. And so I think JASSM gets them to that level, but also they want mass, and it's hard to do that with the same munition. So by bifurcating this demand or bifurcating the requirement, having a low-end and a high-end version, now you could have the mass, but you also still haven't given up the assurance that you'll be able to hit the target. And in fact, you're probably increasing it because of this effect that you're having with the mass that you're applying on the air defense network.

Tony Osborne (13:25): Just briefly though, Steve, I mean, how much does aircraft integration figure into all this? I mean, yeah, you might have a fixed cost for the weapon, but then the moment you want to start putting it on various platforms, presumably that pushes the weapon's price up. But presumably if you're building them at scale, then that's shared across all those missiles. Is that the principle here? I mean, do they want an air-launched weapon or is this launched from the ground at scale? What's the thinking around integration and so on?

Steve Trimble (13:53): And that is another issue that has bedeviled past programs is the integration requirement because now that you have to go through the SEVAL process, anytime that you're releasing something from an aircraft in many cases, including JASSM, you also had to go through the OFP, the operational flight program process. It's at least a two-year process. What they've figured out how to do in this case, it's a couple different programs that they have that are sort of lapping. So for the Family of Affordable Mass Munitions or FAM program, they're bypassing that SEVAL process as well as the OFP process by not integrating them on the aircraft at all. In fact, they're palletized launched from airlift aircraft like C-130s and C-17s. That does impose some requirements on the operational community to have targeters, which are normally restricted to the Air Combat Command type organizations and units.

(14:54): Now you have to embed those with the Air Mobility Command units or Air Mobility Command has to be able to train their own crews to do those long-range cruise missile flights. And that is not trivial. That's a lot of work to do whenever you're firing those cruise missiles, there's a lot of work that goes into planning those routes. So that has to be part of it. And on the other end, they have integrated a different version of it on fighters that's Zone 5 and COPI Aspire for example, they've integrated, we know on Ukrainian MiGs there are MiG-29s, but they can do that in a federated way where they're not integrating with the OFP on the fighter and they have a direct link from the cockpit to the munition in order to launch it. Presumably they can do something similar with say, F-16 and those things. I mean, it does give up some of your performance because you're not going to be able to use your own weapon systems onboard the aircraft to feed targeting information to the missile in flight, at least in the direct way that you would be able to with JASSM or Storm Shadow or something like that. But it still gets the job done and it creates again, this mass effect at a lower cost.

(16:22): So that is their answer for the integration challenge, but there are still some issues with doing that.

Robert Wall (16:32): Very good. Very good to get us started. Thanks, Steve. Tony, over to you.

Tony Osborne (16:36): Steve is actually much more succinct than my topic, which I guess essentially is ground-based air defense, which is killing aircraft from the ground. But here in Europe, we've seen this proliferate quite dramatically since the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Obviously, nations have emptied their warehouses of missiles, launchers, radars and so on to give to Ukraine. And so now Ukraine has this incredible array of Western weapons combined with Russian weapons and also a strange mix of so-called Franken SAMs where you've mixed Western weapons on top of Russian systems. But then of course the rest of Europe has seen basically a buying spree of these systems from Denmark to Slovenia and Austria and Switzerland. Everyone is getting into this game. Only a handful of nations haven't actually, you could actually list. There's fewer nations that have bought air, ground-based air defense systems. The UK, for example, has not bought one, for example.

(17:40): And when you look back the Cold War, every nation had some kind of air defense system to deal with those incoming Soviet hordes of fighters coming in and fighter bombers after the Cold War, the peace dividend, a lot of countries got rid of it. Only a handful of nations kept it. You can name those. Germany, France had a handful, France, Spain, Greece and so on. And then the Eastern European countries will still rely on those Soviet-era SAMs everything from SA-6s, SA-11s and so on. And now having seen those nations, seeing the Russian bombardment of cruise missiles one-way attack drones and ballistic missiles, the ground-based air defense has really come back into vogue. We're seeing huge sales of Patriots. Initiatives like the European Sky Shield Initiative are prompting the purchase of IRIS-T based service, surface launch system, that's the SLS and the SLM. And the SLX of course is still in development. So DIEHL are seeing basically IRIS-T systems going out the door. I think we've already seen another order from Denmark just this week, and that's in addition to numerous other countries, Denmark, Sweden, Denmark and Sweden. Also, it seems like,

(19:03): Well, was that an SLM? Because I think there was also SLS the week earlier as well. So Sweden has been massively busy in this area, obviously because they recognize that they're just across the Baltic from Russia and so on. And of course it's not just air defense against air-breathing threats, obviously we are now seeing drone protection. People saw the impact of Ukraine's spider's web mission and are now having to think how do we deal with drone swarms? Also having to think about passive radars. There's a very interesting initiative, for example, here in the UK where we are building wind farms off the British coastline and our radars can't see past them very well. So now we're having to think of ways to look at how we mix a combination of detection measures to work with radars and bypass those wind farms. And I think one of the options is a system, a bit like what they have spread across Ukraine, a passive radar network that can listen and perhaps look for incoming threats.

(20:08): So no, I think I'll keep it brief, but that has been an incredible change of this massive proliferation of air defense systems. Very quick, very rapid countries want these capabilities to be seen because obviously their populations are worried about these potential Russian missile threat. And then you have countries like the UK which won't go out and which will spend a billion pounds on ground-based air defense, but are not actually buying systems like Patriot or the DIEHL IRIS-T, for example, but instead are focusing their efforts on new radar sets, cooperation with other nations and so on. So there are different methods of doing it, but it I think is really interesting how the proliferation of ground-based air defense has really taken off here. And of course you see that also in the development of these domes as well. As Robert mentioned his introduction, Turkey has its Steel Dome, America has the Golden Dome, and I'd be really interested to see how that extends to the ground-based element rather than just a space-based element, which we've written a lot about already. I think Brian had a question,

Brian Everstine (21:19): Not as much a question as a comment, but as you were talking obviously from the Pentagon perspective and U.S.-only perspective, it made me think about is this a debate been going on that past year or two about ground-based air defense within the U.S. military? You have the former secretary, you have the current U.S. Air Force Chief General Ken Wilsbach have really prodded the Army for just not doing enough for the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army's air defense units are the most undermanned over deployed tasked unit in the Army. And so you're kind of getting the Air Force prodding, they're not getting enough protection, and Congress has piled on in some of the legislation that we've seen. They're ordering the Air Force to explore adopting their own Franken SAM systems for expeditionary air defense as you're looking at locations across the Pacific. So it's sparked a debate within the Pentagon, kind of a roles and mission sort of discussion. So I'm curious to see how that will play out with the Air Force leadership still continuing that push.

Tony Osborne (22:14): It's quite interesting because in many countries the ground-based air defense is still run by the Air Force because it's seen as part of that air defense of the nation, air defense of the sovereign airspace. So it's really interesting that the U.S. Air Force doesn't actually do that for itself. So in the UK we used to have a regiment that would look after air bases and it had a limited capability to do surface-to-air missiles. If you go to Saudi, air defense is run by the air and sorry, Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces, but that will be subsumed into the Air Force at some point in the near future. Things like SAMP/T in France are also operated by the Air Force. So that's quite an interesting point of view that the U.S. Air Force doesn't do its own ground-based air defense and is still reliant on the Army to do it

Brian Everstine (23:01): Well, they said they want to do it, just give them the money. I guess you can do whatever you want as long as you have enough money,

Robert Wall (23:07): Which they will re-roll into fighters, no doubt. Thief. Sorry.

Steve Trimble (23:12): Well, yeah, and Tony, I mean when you're talking about that, I remember I think a week ago the Ukrainian military reported out that Russia had fired over 2,900 Shaheds into Ukraine in November alone. So nearly 3,000 Shaheds, which is kind of the scale of the problem. Now, back in September I reported that the Ukraine's Dark Node unit, which is their sort of R&D unit to produce interceptors, had come up with an interceptor that they say it costs $5,000. That has already at that point shot down a thousand Shaheds over the last eight months. Obviously when they're launching 3,000 a month in, that's still just a fraction of what the defense needs. But then there was this thing called Octopus.

Tony Osborne (24:05): Yes.

Steve Trimble (24:07): Can you talk about that? I still haven't figured out what it is.

Tony Osborne (24:11): I wish I could tell you, but it's still very closely guarded and it's certainly so not something I've been able to really get teased into. But I mean, I'm hoping that it's going to be sort of working with some of the other Nordic nations where they are really making advancements in this area. And there's a company called Nordic Air Defense for example that's trying to build small electric power that could deal with a Shahed for a thousand dollars. And we've seen several other companies promising similar initiatives, but that we've not really seen very much as a result of Octopus so far. But that's quite an exciting concept. Breaking that cost barrier is going to be absolutely critical for achieving success in this war if Russia is still able to keep scaling up and scaling up Shahed production in the way that it has been.

Steve Trimble (25:00): But it was a Ukrainian design that the UK agreed to build in the UK. So I kind wondered if it was the Dark Node design.

Tony Osborne (25:09): Yeah, it's not something that we know about yet. Octopus is probably has numerous tentacles into UK industry and into the Ukrainian industry, but not one. I don't know if we even seen results from that just yet, but I think it's a matter of time. Actually, an Octopus is not the only initiative. There are various ones in the Baltic states that are exploring this, and I think there are several other European countries as well that are being funded. I think there's a multi-pronged effort to deliver something quite similar to this, and that's not to mention obviously low-cost methods of bringing down these, including self-propelled anti-aircraft guns and so on,

Robert Wall (25:50): Which are also again, after having fallen out of favor are very much back in vogue. So anyway, good one. Brian, it's your turn. What did you pick and why did you pick it?

Brian Everstine (26:02): Well, it's pretty obvious, but we have to talk about it. I mean, it's amazing. We made it this far in this podcast talking about this year in aerospace without talking about F-47, I mean it was just aerospace industry defining contract from earlier this year, and it's really set the stage for a lot of what's going to be going on in the next couple of years within the Pentagon. The Air Force has said they need to move fast. Former Chief of Staff General Allvin said the first test article is in manufacturing. You got first flight predicted for 2028. So I think that the award is obviously interesting, but what I've been really following has been the follow-on effects of the Air Force and the Pentagon really going all in on F-47. And we sparked a reshuffling of a lot of other programs. For example, the Next Generation Air-to-Air Refueling System, which the previous administration wanted to move up.

(26:56): It's now been put completely on the back burner. And this is something that was sparked kind of the review that paused NGAD for about a year or so. And picking F-47 as in turn led to a delay of the Navy's F/A-XX, which we understood to really be ready for a down select really about the same time. But in awarding F-47 to Boeing, making it a presidential priority, it has kind of sparked these concerns within the high levels of the Pentagon about the industrial base's ability to support two high-level fighters. We'll see how that plays out. I know that everyone's itching for that award. We're seeing about $4 billion in upcoming budget plans for F-47 and just pocket change for F/A-XX, I think it was $74 million. And the Pentagon has reshuffled its acquisition structure to prioritize F-47. We saw the nomination of General Dale White to take it on as what's called a direct reporting program manager, taking it out of the typical PEO process and making it a direct report. The highest levels of the Pentagon. I'd like to see, I'd be curious how this impacts other ongoing programs we have. I mean, F-47 was a penetrating counter air part of the Next Generation Air Dominance. It's a family of systems. So we have a collaborative combat aircraft. We have the increment one down select expected within the next year, seeing how they're going to progress on increment two

Robert Wall (28:18): I mean. What do you think? I mean, it seems to really also shaped industry, right? I mean the rack and stack we've been talking about, I was joking, probably overused this joke even on Check 6 for years. We asked Boeing, what's the future of your fighter program? Your franchise, frankly, and we're not asking that question anymore. In fact, now maybe we're maybe asking what's the future for a different manufacturer?

Brian Everstine (28:46): Yeah, what's the future for Lockheed? And they dropped out of F/A-XX, they lost NGAD, the F-40, F-35s kind of having a rough moment with procurement dropping. I made the modernization delays.

Steve Trimble (29:00): So

Brian Everstine (29:01): I mean it really validated Boeing's approach in their dominance programs for the past few years, investing billions of dollars in new infrastructure. They're flying a prototype for years ahead of this. So it led to a big, sparked a really big turnaround in Boeing this year.

Steve Trimble (29:16): Yeah, Steve. Well, I just wanted to add to that because I mean obviously the big thing was that F-47 got awarded and we can go, I mean the process of that actually happening, what was incredible, I mean just not expected at all and completely out of all norms that we've ever seen in acquisition before. But then the second most interesting thing that I think that happened this year was that disclosure that Brian talked about that they have started building the first aircraft within months of contract award. And the reason why I think that's interesting is because the way that process normally plays out is once they get to contract award, they award the contract to the winning company and then they spend the next nine months basically taking the integrated master schedule that the company submitted as part of their proposal and just throwing it out because the Air Force and the government just doesn't believe a word of it and then renegotiating what the actual master schedule will be, that is actually achievable.

(30:14): So that's the first nine months of any development program. They're not building anything. They're just trying to figure out when they're actually going to get it done. And then there's nine months to a year later, you get the preliminary design review and that's when you're sort of locking in parts, the basic configuration of the aircraft, the various subsystems and so forth. And then a year or two after that, you get to critical design review. So that's what we saw in the B-21 program contract award in October of 2015, CDR at the end of 2018. So three years later, and then that's when they were allowed to start building the first aircraft. They didn't start until then. So for something happened behind the scenes in this very secretive Next Generation Air Dominance program where they felt comfortable anyway, bypassing all these steps and going straight into production of the first aircraft, that may imply the CDR is already complete. That may imply, or that they're just bypassing CDR and building aircraft anyway. So I don't know what the real story is, but it is very significant and highly unusual for them to already be building the first aircraft, the details of which I hope we get filled in on as time goes by, but I don't sleep on that one detail. I think it was super important.

Robert Wall (31:33): Yeah, very good. Right. Well, mine is a bit more, well, it's felt like I should talk about mil space a bit because I do think this has been a big year for that. And I thought particularly interesting this year was just the extent to which the Air Forces are talking about space superiority as a concept and counter space. I mean, they've all been doing mil space stuff for a while. The big Air Forces, or I guess in the U.S. case now Space Force separately. But I really was struck how this year people were talking about the idea of having to be able to win a war in space about things like dogfights in space as China demonstrates capabilities there.

(32:19): I just feel like the tone has changed a lot when the made his first speech at AFA, he touched on it, the UK's, the Royal Air Force's new Chief of Staff touched on it in his first big speech. The Germans are talking about it. The French are launching a space plane program. It's just gone to a new level, I thought. And I think that's going to be a development that to me, 2025 in that respect was a bit of a tipping point. And before we go, I thought we'd maybe do a round of predictions, quick-fire things that we think will happen in 2026. So who wants to go first,

Brian Everstine (33:04): Brian? Sure. I'll hop in since I'm sure Tony and Steve will have some programs, but I wanted to kind of talk more policy. One of the interesting things we saw play out this year is kind of more creative budgeting from the Pentagon. We are across the line of trillion-dollar budgets, but that's with congressional support through what's called a reconciliation process. It's the one big beautiful bill which added $150 billion or so to the Pentagon coffers. And I mean, I think that we're going to see that as a new normal. Last weekend I was at the Reagan Defense Forum, and OMB director, Russ Vought kind of played through the administration's thinking where this is a ploy they use to fund top priority programs, nuclear modernization, Golden Dome, et cetera, outside of the appropriations process, which requires bipartisan support. So I think that that's going to be kind of the new norm going forward. It reminds me of years ago when they had the Pentagon set up the Overseas Contingency Operations fund, OCO, and then through creative budgeting, they started throwing in base programs. So it was OCO for base and everyone criticized that, but there was a way that the Pentagon got a lot of stuff done. So I think that we're going to start seeing reconciliation for base and we're going to stay above that trillion-dollar threshold using this kind of creative ploy for the foreseeable future.

Tony Osborne (34:19): Tony, I don't know. I was thinking about this earlier. I'm struggling to come up with a prediction. I just know that Trump is going to create even more disruption for European governments over the next Well, that's not a prediction. That's a reality. This making Europe great again. Yes, the most recent national security policy document was quite terrifying reading. Frankly, it'd be interesting, I think to see how European governments deal with this. I think Europe is going to end up even more alone on the world stage and dealing with Ukraine. That would be my prediction. I think it's inevitable. I just don't want to make any other predictions.

Robert Wall (35:02): You don't want to tell us who's going to be the next Red Arrows provider? Come on, Tony. I know you want to know.

Tony Osborne (35:09): No, I don't even want to go there either. At the moment. I don't think it'll be BAE Systems and Boeing put it like that. All

Robert Wall (35:15): Right,

Steve Trimble (35:16): There we go. We have a prediction. Steve, over to you. I'm going to go out on the limb here and venture a prediction on the winner of the F/A-XX contract award, assuming that actually happens, right? Because that's gone through severe turbulence over the last couple of years, and there's still possibly more in store, but assuming they actually get to a contract award, I'm going to give a prediction, but first I'm going to give you all the caveats of why this might not be correct. First of all, I have not seen the requirements which are highly classified. I have not seen the designs that Northrop or Boeing are proposing, so that makes it really hard to have an informed view of who will win. But what I do know is that Northrop is in a very good position at the moment, notwithstanding their issues on the Sentinel program.

(36:15): They have the Sentinel program and that's not going to go away for a long time. That's going to consume a lot of resources for them. They have the B-21 program, which is a huge deal for them and gives them a lot of money in the bank. Basically for the next decade at least. They have GLIDE Phase Interceptor program. We know that they have several classified programs, not least of which is the program we call the RQ-180. They are pretty well set. And on the other hand, Boeing now has the F-47 program, but they had premised this very enormous investment that they made upfront at risk in the Air Dominance program. They invested $2 billion in the infrastructure, the factories, the facilities, the tooling, all these things upfront before they won to claim both F-47 and F/A-XX. And that was a big risk the company took.

(37:15): It was a bet-the-company risk, it paid off on F-47 eventually through means it still is baffling, but they got the contract now. They still have to actually execute and that's a whole different story. But at this point, they got the contract F/A-XX is also available to them now they're still hungry for another win. They don't have the work on the classified side that we're aware of. So I think that they're willing to still be aggressive to win that F/A-XX contract award. Plus, when they get that, they also have some synergies that they can leverage between F-47 and F/A-XX to reduce the cost potentially of both assuming they get the execution, which as we know with Boeing's track record and for that matter, everybody else's track record in this business is always a bit problematic. So that's my prediction with all the caveats noted. So

Tony Osborne (38:15): Is Boeing's F/A-XX essentially an F-47 with a tail hook?

Steve Trimble (38:19): No, no. It is a very different aircraft design. I mean, I know the Navy requirement is different than the Air Force requirement. It's not requiring the same level of penetrating stealth, but beyond that, it's hard to know exactly what they're looking for. But I wouldn't say, the only thing I've heard is that while they're not necessarily the same aircraft, there is a DNA that you can detect in their designs that is common, even if the outer mold line is not at all similar.

Robert Wall (38:56): Well, mine is probably not as complicated. I'm just going to go with, I think Gripens. We'll show up in Ukraine in 2026 and well not predicting it'll change the course of events, but it'll be certainly something we've been waiting to see and let's hope it happens. Anyway, with that, I want to say thanks to Steve, Tony and Brian, appreciate your chatting us through all this stuff. It was a lot of fun. Thanks to Guy Ferneyhough for producing this Check 6, and of course, thanks as usual to our audience for your time and attention, and check back for next cross-domain predictions episode where we also reveal what we got right and what we got wrong in last year's predictions. Thank you very much.