Seeing Through the Forward Blind Spot

An Efficient Space-Time Forward-Looking Imaging Method for Multichannel Radar via Doppler-Based Dimensionality and Rank Reduction

IEEE Spectrum  ·  Aerospace  ·  Signal Processing  ·  April 2026

Radar Imaging

For seventy years, the region straight ahead of a moving aircraft has been radar's worst neighborhood. A new class of space-time super-resolution algorithms — now fast enough for real-time flight — is finally changing that.

By Stephen L Pendergast, Senior Life Member, IEEE ·  23 April 2026

BLUF 

A team at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics has published a method that cuts the computational cost of multichannel forward-looking radar super-resolution by roughly three orders of magnitude, from O(M³N³) down to O(r³), without giving up resolution. The approach — Doppler-domain dimensionality reduction combined with covariance-matrix rank reduction — closes one of the last practical barriers to fielding super-resolution imaging on aircraft, missiles, rotorcraft, and, eventually, automobiles. Measured X-band airborne data shows a better than 3× speedup over the baseline space-time algorithm and roughly 20× over conventional full-dimensional processing, while image entropy and contrast hold within a few percent of the unaccelerated reference. The result has implications well beyond the laboratory: brownout landing aids, missile terminal seekers, autonomous-vehicle imaging radar, and the "blind landing" problem that has plagued military rotorcraft for two decades all share the same underlying mathematics.

The airspace directly in front of a moving radar platform is a cursed place. It is also the one place a pilot most wants to see. When an airliner descends through fog toward a runway, when an attack helicopter flares into a dust cloud of its own making, when a missile commits to its final mile, or when an autonomous truck enters a blizzard — the sensor must interrogate the sector straight ahead. And that is precisely the geometry in which radar performs worst.

The reason is geometric and unforgiving. Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR), the workhorse of high-resolution imaging, gets its remarkable cross-range resolution from the Doppler spread that accumulates as the platform flies past a target. Look sideways and the Doppler signature varies richly across the scene; look forward and the variation collapses toward zero. Worse, targets that are mirror-symmetric about the flight axis produce identical Doppler returns, so the radar cannot tell left from right by spectrum alone. Doppler beam sharpening, the simpler cousin of SAR that powered the first terrain-following attack radars in the 1960s, fails for the same reason.

So forward-looking radar has traditionally settled for what the antenna can give it. A real-aperture radar with a one-meter dish at X-band produces an azimuth beam roughly two degrees wide. At 70 km — a typical standoff for an airborne surveillance sortie — that beam smears the ground into a lateral blur more than two kilometers across. No amount of averaging fixes that; the information is never collected.

The super-resolution detour

The response from the signal-processing community, building over the last quarter century, has been to extract resolution from mathematics rather than aperture. The field of array signal processing offered a starting toolkit — MUSIC, ESPRIT, the Iterative Adaptive Approach (IAA), Sparse Iterative Covariance-based Estimation (SPICE), Sparse Asymptotic Minimum Variance (SAMV), and Sparse Bayesian Learning (SBL), among others — originally developed for direction-of-arrival estimation in passive sonar and radio astronomy.^3,4 Applied to forward-looking radar, these estimators can resolve targets separated by a fraction of the physical beamwidth, provided the measurement model is clean and the signal-to-noise ratio is high.

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) demonstrated one of the earliest hardware incarnations in the late 1990s with SIREV — the Sector Imaging Radar for Enhanced Vision — a helicopter-mounted forward-looking system using a linear receive array and an extended chirp-scaling processor.^5,6 SIREV established the basic architecture that most modern work still follows: a multichannel receiver oriented perpendicular to the flight axis, coherent processing that combines the spatial degrees of freedom of the array with whatever limited Doppler information is available, and image reconstruction that does not wait for the aircraft to fly past its target.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory pursued a parallel thread with the Synchronous Impulse Reconstruction (SIRE) forward-looking ground-penetrating radar, aimed at buried-explosive detection.⁷ And in rotorcraft, the Army's Degraded Visual Environment Mitigation (DVE-M) program — later called BORES — folded 94-GHz millimeter-wave radar into fused sensor suites designed to guide helicopters onto landing zones obscured by dust and snow.^8,9 The Army attributes roughly three-quarters of its rotorcraft accidents in Iraq and Afghanistan to brownout, and DVE-induced spatial disorientation remains a leading cause of fatal civilian helicopter crashes.^9,10

But all of these efforts ran into the same computational wall. Super-resolution algorithms work by repeatedly forming, inverting, and updating a covariance matrix whose size grows as the product of the number of spatial channels M and the number of coherent pulses N′. A modern multichannel system with eight channels and a few hundred pulses per dwell produces covariance matrices with tens of thousands of rows. Inverting them naïvely costs O(M³N′³) floating-point operations per iteration. The math works. The silicon does not — at least not at video rates on an airframe.

An end-run around the matrix

Lingyun Ren, Di Wu, Daiyin Zhu, and colleagues at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Key Laboratory of Radar Imaging and Microwave Photonics laid out a candidate space-time framework — Space-Time Reiterative Super-Resolution, or ST-SR — in 2024.¹¹ It used a robust iterative super-resolution engine to exploit spatial and slow-time degrees of freedom jointly, and it did produce dramatically sharper forward-looking imagery than spatial-only processing. It was also, the authors concede, too slow to fly.

Their April 2026 paper in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing is the sequel that fixes the speed problem.¹ The core observation is unromantic but powerful: in forward-looking geometry, the Doppler spectrum is nearly empty. The high Doppler centroid and compressed bandwidth that make forward-looking imaging hard in the first place also guarantee that the scene energy occupies only a small fraction of the available Doppler bins. Everything else is redundancy.

"The computational complexity is reduced from O(M³N³) to O(r³), where r is much smaller than MN — while maintaining imaging fidelity."

The Nanjing team exploits that redundancy in two cascaded steps. First, after compensating for the range-varying Doppler centroid, they transform the received data cube to the Doppler domain and keep only those bins that hold roughly 90 to 100 percent of the total signal energy. For a typical scene this knocks the working dimension from hundreds of pulses down to a handful of dozens. Second, they perform a partial singular-value decomposition of the resulting space-time covariance matrix and retain only the first r eigenvectors — the dominant signal subspace. The noise subspace, which contributes nothing useful to azimuth estimation, is discarded.

The effect on the inner loop is dramatic. In their published benchmarks, surface-scene imaging that took 400 seconds under conventional ST-SR completes in about 20 seconds after dimensionality and rank reduction — a better than 20× speedup on an Intel Xeon Platinum 8168. Image entropy and contrast move by less than three percent. Measured X-band airborne data processed at r = 6 yielded a 3× speedup over baseline ST-SR, while showing visibly cleaner clutter suppression than the full-dimension algorithm.¹

How the acceleration works
A multichannel radar collects an L × N′ × M data cube (range gates × pulses × channels). The conventional space-time super-resolution method forms a covariance matrix of size N′M × N′M and inverts it every iteration. The new method first projects the data onto the K′ most energetic Doppler bins (with K′ ≪ N′), then keeps only the r largest eigenvectors of the reduced covariance (with r ≪ K′M). The matrix that actually gets inverted is r × r — often as small as 6 × 6 or 8 × 8. That is where the three-orders-of-magnitude speedup lives.

The navigation problem

A second contribution in the paper is less headline-grabbing but arguably more consequential for operational deployment: the algorithm no longer depends on the inertial navigation system (INS) to tell it how fast the aircraft is moving or at what elevation angle each range cell is observed. Instead, it pulls those parameters directly out of the range-Doppler image itself, by tracking the sharp spectral edge that marks the baseband Doppler centroid of the forward-looking region.

This matters because INS errors are the silent killer of coherent super-resolution. A velocity estimate off by one percent, or a heading drift of half a degree, is enough to smear a super-resolution image into an ordinary real-beam one. Pulling motion parameters from the radar echoes themselves — what DLR's SIREV team called "extracting motion errors from the range-compressed raw data"⁶ — is a standard technique in SAR autofocus, but in forward-looking multichannel work it has been rare. The Nanjing method does it cheaply: the Doppler edge is robust down to roughly a –5-dB signal-to-clutter ratio in the authors' Sea State 6 simulations, which is encouraging for operation in heavy sea clutter or over vegetated terrain.

Why this is not just a Chinese radar-imaging paper

The algorithm was developed for airborne surveillance radar. Its implications sprawl much wider.

In helicopter brownout mitigation, the U.S. Army's DVE-M program has spent more than a decade fusing lidar, long-wave infrared, and millimeter-wave radar into synthetic-vision helmets for UH-60 and CH-47 crews.^9,10 Lidar fails in fog; IR struggles in heavy dust. Millimeter-wave radar penetrates both, but the short aperture mounted on a helicopter nose delivers poor azimuth resolution without super-resolution processing. Forward-looking SAR concepts proposed at the Army Research Laboratory have pursued exactly this path — a linear receive array plus signal processing to extract the third dimension from small pitch variations during approach.¹² A computationally tractable space-time algorithm is precisely what such a system would need.

In missile terminal guidance, the trend across active radar homing (ARH) seekers — from Lockheed Martin's LRASM to the ESSM Block 2 to the SM-2 Block IIICU — is toward richer onboard imagery for target discrimination against decoys and clutter in dense electromagnetic environments.^13,14 The engagement geometry is pure forward-looking: the seeker is racing toward the target. Every gain in azimuth resolution is a gain in the probability of picking the right ship out of a convoy, or the right vehicle out of a column. A O(r³) super-resolution kernel is the kind of workload that can plausibly run on a rad-hardened embedded processor inside a missile.

In automotive imaging radar, the 4D MIMO boom — Continental's ARS540, Arbe Robotics' Phoenix with 1,728 virtual channels, Uhnder's S81 using digital code modulation — is pushing angular resolution toward LiDAR-like performance while keeping radar's all-weather penetration.^15,16,17 Market research firms project the 4D imaging radar segment growing from roughly USD 2 billion in 2024 to USD 10 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate near 38 percent.¹⁵ Every one of those chips faces the forward-looking geometry (a car mostly cares about what is in front of it) and every one of them has to run super-resolution at frame rates on a few watts. The Nanjing team's Doppler-sparsity exploitation and rank-reduction tricks are directly relevant to that embedded-automotive problem, even if the paper's authors do not say so.

In autonomous-vehicle and robotic platforms, a similar forward-looking MIMO-SAR concept has been explored by Belgian and European researchers who explicitly cite DLR's SIREV work as inspiration, combining forward-looking SAR with MIMO diversity to sharpen angular resolution for ground robots.¹⁸ Here, too, the computational envelope is the binding constraint.

What is still missing

The Nanjing work leaves several questions open. The measured-data validation uses an X-band airborne system with four receive channels and a 500-Hz pulse-repetition frequency — a relatively benign configuration compared with the hundreds of virtual channels in modern automotive chips or the Ku- and Ka-band seekers in many missile terminals. The authors' complexity analysis scales favorably, but real silicon implementations will stress memory bandwidth at least as much as raw FLOP count.

The algorithm also assumes a well-behaved sample covariance. In scenarios with strong discrete scatterers — ships on open water, powerlines against flat terrain, or vehicles in a parking lot — the eigenvalue spectrum may not fall off as cleanly as in the measured data the authors show. Truncating to too small an r would then bleed strong targets into the noise floor. The paper's Sea State 6 K-distribution simulations address this in part; broader clutter benchmarks will have to come from independent groups.

And the whole family of covariance-based super-resolution methods still carries a philosophical vulnerability: they resolve targets the model predicts. Off-grid targets, scatterers with motion independent of the platform, and adversarial jammers designed to exploit the sparsity assumption can all produce artifacts that look like real objects. This is not a flaw unique to the Nanjing work — it afflicts IAA, MUSIC, SBL, and every other member of the family — but operational deployment will require calibration, validation, and honest documentation of failure modes that academic papers rarely provide.

A seventy-year-old problem, nearly solved

Radar engineers have been trying to see straight ahead since the Normandy invasion, when H2S sets aboard RAF Pathfinders mapped coastlines from abeam but went blind toward the aircraft's nose. The intervening decades produced a tower of clever partial solutions: monopulse for accurate single-target tracking, DBS for off-axis mapping, bistatic SAR for forward-looking synthetic aperture at the cost of doubled hardware. None of them gave a moving platform a genuinely sharp picture of what lay directly in its path.

Combining the space-time model with aggressive, geometry-aware dimensionality reduction may finally tip that balance. If the performance numbers from the Nanjing group hold up in independent benchmarks — and if embedded implementations match them on airframe-grade hardware — the forward blind spot that has shaped radar doctrine since the Second World War will become just another region of the sky, no harder to image than any other. That would be a quiet revolution. Those are usually the consequential kind.

References

1. L. Ren, D. Wu, X. Jiang, B. Yang, Z. Li, G. Jin, and D. Zhu, "An Efficient Space-Time Forward-Looking Imaging Method for Multichannel Radar via Doppler-Based Dimensionality and Rank Reduction," IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 64, Art. no. 5102015, 2026. doi:10.1109/TGRS.2026.3681125. IEEE Xplore
2. A. Moreira, P. Prats-Iraola, M. Younis, G. Krieger, I. Hajnsek, and K. P. Papathanassiou, "A Tutorial on Synthetic Aperture Radar," IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 6–43, March 2013. doi:10.1109/MGRS.2013.2248301.
3. T. Yardibi, J. Li, P. Stoica, M. Xue, and A. B. Baggeroer, "Source Localization and Sensing: A Nonparametric Iterative Adaptive Approach Based on Weighted Least Squares," IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 425–443, Jan. 2010. doi:10.1109/TAES.2010.5417172.
4. H. Abeida, Q. Zhang, J. Li, and N. Merabtine, "Iterative Sparse Asymptotic Minimum Variance Based Approaches for Array Processing," IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 933–944, Feb. 2013. doi:10.1109/TSP.2012.2231676.
5. F. Witte, T. Sutor, and R. Scheunemann, "New sector imaging radar for enhanced vision: SIREV," Proc. SPIE 3364, Enhanced and Synthetic Vision 1998, 30 July 1998. doi:10.1117/12.317494. SPIE
6. J. Mittermayer, M. Wendler, G. Krieger, T. Sutor, A. Moreira, and S. Buckreuss, "Sector imaging radar for enhanced vision (SIREV): simulation and processing techniques," Proc. SPIE 4023, Enhanced and Synthetic Vision 2000, 23 June 2000. doi:10.1117/12.389353. SPIE
7. M. Ressler, L. Nguyen, F. Koenig, D. Wong, and G. Smith, "The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Synchronous Impulse Reconstruction (SIRE) Forward-Looking Radar," Proc. SPIE 6561, Unmanned Systems Technology IX, April 2007. doi:10.1117/12.723688.
8. U.S. Army, "Owning the environment: Flying aircraft in 'brownout' conditions," Yuma Proving Ground public affairs, 18 Oct. 2016. army.mil/article/176854
9. D. Weese, "The Degraded Visual Environment (DVE)," Army Aviation Magazine, Aviation Systems Project Office, PEO Aviation, Redstone Arsenal, AL. armyaviationmagazine.com
10. Military Embedded Systems, "Operating in degraded visual environments," Oct. 2023. militaryembedded.com
11. L. Ren, D. Wu, and D. Zhu, "Resolution Enhancement for Forward-Looking Imaging of Airborne Multichannel Radar via Space-Time Reiterative Superresolution," IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, vol. 17, pp. 15288–15300, 2024.
12. Mobility Engineering Technology (US Army Research Laboratory), "Synthetic Aperture Radar for Helicopter Landing in Degraded Visual Environments," 2021. mobilityengineeringtech.com
13. J. Keller, "Lockheed Martin to upgrade guidance sensors of JASSM, LRASM, JAGM, and Hellfire air-launched missiles," Military & Aerospace Electronics, 2024. militaryaerospace.com
14. J. Keller, "Anti-air radar-guided missile with upgraded guidance and semi-active homing," Military & Aerospace Electronics, 5 Sept. 2025. militaryaerospace.com
15. Research and Markets, "4D Imaging Radar in Autonomous Vehicles Research and Competition Analysis Report 2025," Aug. 2025. globenewswire.com
16. S. Sun and Y. D. Zhang, "4D Automotive Radar Sensing for Autonomous Vehicles: A Sparsity-Oriented Approach," IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 879–891, 2021. doi:10.1109/JSTSP.2021.3079626.
17. L. Wang et al., "A review of recent advancements and applications of 4D millimeter-wave radar in smart highways," Urban Lifeline, Springer, 18 Aug. 2025. link.springer.com
18. A. Albaba, A. Sakhnini, H. Sahli, and A. Bourdoux, "Forward-Looking MIMO-SAR for Enhanced Angular Resolution," 2022 IEEE Radar Conference (RadarConf22), New York, NY, USA, pp. 1–6. doi:10.1109/RadarConf2248738.2022.9764217. ResearchGate
19. J. Tang, L. Ran, Z. Liu, R. Xie, Y. Liu, and G. Han, "Multichannel Radar Forward-Looking Super-Resolution Imaging Method Based on Structured Sparsity," IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 63, Art. no. 5104714, 2025. IEEE Xplore
20. Y. Sheng, Y. Hu, H. Wang, J. Zhu, and H. Liu, "Airborne Multi-Channel Forward-Looking Radar Super-Resolution Imaging Using Improved Fast Iterative Interpolated Beamforming Algorithm," Remote Sensing, vol. 16, no. 22, Art. 4121, Nov. 2024. doi:10.3390/rs16224121. mdpi.com
21. W. Li et al., "Modified SBL-Based Multichannel Radar Forward-Looking Superresolution Imaging of Block-Sparse Targets," IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, vol. 18, pp. 21156–21166, 2025. IEEE Xplore
22. J. Luo et al., "Angular Super-Resolution of Forward-Looking Scanning Radar via Grid-Updating Split SPICE-TV," Remote Sensing, vol. 17, no. 14, Art. 2533, 21 July 2025. doi:10.3390/rs17142533. mdpi.com

 

Opinion: Zumwalt Is Turning Over

 

Unserious: A Navy Without a Compass

The Secretary of the Navy was fired by social-media post while his ships were enforcing a blockade. The replacement for the destroyer we couldn't build is now a battleship we can't afford. And the carrier we have is being reviewed by the administration that owns it. Admiral Zumwalt would not recognize this Navy — and he would not be kind to those who built it.

By Pseudo Publius · Contributor

Bottom Line Up Front 

On 22 April 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan by public announcement from the Pentagon's chief spokesman while Phelan was on Capitol Hill briefing Congress on the Navy's budget. The firing came one day after Phelan, at the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space symposium, publicly defended the proposed Trump-class Guided Missile Battleship (BBG[X]) — a three-ship program with a lead-ship cost of $17.47 billion and a program-of-record cost of $43.5 billion — and announced that the Navy is reviewing the Ford-class carriers CVN-82 and CVN-83 for possible redesign or cancellation. The acting Secretary, Under Secretary Hung Cao, was sworn into his number-two position only six months ago and has no prior shipbuilding portfolio. The precipitating dispute was not policy; it was that Phelan could not deliver the President's 2028 battleship keel-laying on a schedule the industrial base cannot physically meet — the published plan slips delivery to August 2036 — and that Phelan's direct texting relationship with the President had come to irritate the Secretary of Defense. Meanwhile, the Fiscal Year 2027 budget request asks for $65.8 billion for Navy shipbuilding while the Navy simultaneously reviews whether to cancel two aircraft carriers that would sustain the statutory 11-CVN floor. The Zumwalt class — three hulls, roughly $25 billion sunk — remains in search of a mission. Gerald R. Ford is on day 296 of deployment with fire-damaged berthing and a sewage system that fails daily. This is not a coherent maritime strategy. It is improvisation at the top of a Navy that has a war on, and the Sailors are absorbing the consequences.

On the morning of Wednesday, 22 April 2026, the Secretary of the Navy was on Capitol Hill discussing the service's budget proposal with members of Congress. That afternoon, without warning to him, the Pentagon's chief spokesman posted on X that Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan was "departing the administration, effective immediately." Phelan, according to multiple accounts, learned of his own firing from the post. He went to the White House in person looking for the President. He could not find him. He walked the grounds of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building asking anyone he recognized whether the President actually knew. Eventually the President telephoned him to confirm it. The next day, on Truth Social, the President called Phelan "a long time friend, and very successful businessman" and said he hoped to have him back in the administration someday. The Secretary of War thanked him for his service and wished him well.

This happened while the United States Navy was enforcing a blockade of Iranian ports. It happened during the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space symposium — the service's single largest annual professional gathering — at which Phelan had been the keynote speaker twenty-four hours earlier. It happened two weeks after Hegseth removed the Army Chief of Staff, the head of Army Transformation and Training Command, and the Army's Chief of Chaplains. It is the first firing of a service secretary during this administration, and the first firing of a sitting Secretary of the Navy in wartime in living memory.

The firing was not, at bottom, about policy. Multiple accounts from the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, Axios, and NBC News converge on a set of proximate causes: Hegseth believed Phelan was moving too slowly on shipbuilding reform; Hegseth and Deputy Secretary of War Stephen Feinberg wanted shipbuilding authority moved from the Navy Secretariat to the Office of the Secretary of War; Phelan had a direct texting relationship with the President, whose Mar-a-Lago residence is near Phelan's own Palm Beach mansion, and the two reportedly exchanged late-night messages about "rusty ships." Hegseth considered this an end-run around the chain of command. In a White House meeting on shipbuilding Wednesday morning, the President grew frustrated with slow progress and told Hegseth to "take care of it." Hegseth did. The New York Times reported that Phelan had originally sold the President on the battleship program by showing him oil paintings of the Iowa-class in action. He then spent thirteen months discovering that the U.S. shipbuilding industrial base physically cannot deliver a forty-thousand-ton capital ship on campaign-promise timelines. That discovery cost him his job.

The Battleship That Cannot Be Built on Time

The specific shipbuilding program at the center of this dispute is the Trump-class Guided Missile Battleship, designated BBG(X). Announced by the President at Mar-a-Lago in December 2025 as the centerpiece of a new "Golden Fleet," the class is envisioned as three large surface combatants, 840–880 feet long and 35,000–41,000 tons displacement, carrying deep vertical-launch magazines, Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles, directed-energy weapons, and a revived naval-gunfire capability of unspecified caliber. The lead ship is notionally named Defiant.

The program's cost and schedule, as published by the Navy on the eve of Phelan's firing, are as follows:

• BBG(X) Trump-class — FY 2027 Budget Submission
• FY27 advance procurement funding$1.00 B
• FY28 procurement (BBG-1 Defiant, net)$16.47 B
• BBG-1 gross weapon-system cost$17.47 B
• BBG-2 procurement (FY30, projected)$13.00 B
• BBG-3 procurement (FY31, projected)$11.50 B
• Program total across FYDP$43.50 B
• Lead-ship award April 2028
• Construction start August 2028
• BBG-1 delivery August 2036

Several features of this table deserve attention. The first is that $17.47 billion for a single surface combatant exceeds the projected procurement cost of a follow-on Ford-class aircraft carrier, which the Congressional Research Service places between $13 and $15 billion. The Navy is proposing to pay more for one battleship than for one nuclear-powered supercarrier. The second is that the delivery date — August 2036 — is eight years after the President's original public timeline. The third is that as of the FY27 budget submission, the Navy had engaged exactly two vendors in concept conversations. No design had been selected. No contract had been awarded. The acquisition strategy, in Phelan's own Sea-Air-Space remarks, was still being worked out. On those facts, the probability of laying Defiant's keel in 2028, as the President demanded, is not low. It is zero.

Phelan, to his credit, seems to have understood this. In his Tuesday roundtable he acknowledged that the $17 billion figure "is the early initial estimate" and said "we'll see where we really settle down as we get through that and start to rationalize some of the costs." This was the careful language of a financier who had run the numbers and did not like what he saw. In the same session he defended the ship against critics — "I've heard the critiques, too vulnerable, too expensive, too big. We've heard that before about carriers and about submarines" — but his defense was performative. The arithmetic had already defeated him. He was fired twenty-eight hours later.

On those facts, the probability of laying Defiant's keel in 2028 is not low. It is zero.

The battleship's operational concept, as described in the FY27 budget justification and Phelan's own remarks, is worth reading carefully. It is supposed to "deliver high-volume, long-range offensive fires," serve as "a robust, survivable forward command and control platform," host an embarked fleet staff, mount high-energy lasers and electromagnetic railguns (neither currently fielded), reduce reliance on expensive single-use munitions, and perform strike, air defense, anti-submarine, and anti-surface warfare at the highest level. It is, in other words, a battleship, a strike cruiser, a missile cruiser, a command ship, a directed-energy testbed, and — if the railgun ever works — a naval-gunfire platform, combined in one $17 billion hull. This is the program management profile of the original Zumwalt class at conception. The reader is invited to recall how that turned out.

The Carrier That Is Under Review by the Administration That Owns It

On the same day Phelan rolled out the battleship budget, he also disclosed that the Navy is conducting a formal review of the Ford-class aircraft carriers CVN-82 (William J. Clinton) and CVN-83 (George W. Bush), neither yet under contract. The stated purpose of the review is to "review the costs, the designs, the systems, to make sure they make sense, and they have all the systems and requirements that we want going forward." The review is due to complete at the end of May 2026. Inside Defense reported that senior Navy leadership has not ruled out cancellation of future Ford-class hulls or a transition to a new design.

Phelan was notably candid about the specific subject of the review. The Navy will evaluate, he said, "is the sortie rate generation that much greater? And then, what are the cost implications of this electric catapult? And did it really generate the savings? You know, the Navy would like to say, 'we've saved five billion dollars in terms of savings in number of men and maintenance.' I just need to check that back up." That language — "I just need to check that back up" — is not the language of a service secretary endorsing his own platform. It is the language of a man conducting due diligence on a purchase someone else made.

The background here matters. The President has repeatedly and publicly disparaged the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, insisted the Navy should return to steam catapults, and described EMALS as complicated nonsense. The Director of Operational Test and Evaluation's FY2024 annual report — the most recent unclassified edition — states that "the reliability and maintainability of CVN 78's EMALS and AAG continue to adversely affect sortie generation and flight operations, which remains the greatest risk to demonstrating operational effectiveness and suitability" in Initial Operational Test and Evaluation. Nearly nine years after commissioning, Gerald R. Ford's sortie-generation-rate testing has not been completed. The core performance claim of the class is unvalidated.

Whether a full redesign, an improved-Nimitz fallback, or a CVN-X clean-sheet successor would serve the Navy better is a legitimate question worth asking. It is not, however, a question one asks for the first time while simultaneously asking Congress to fund a $43.5 billion battleship program. A Navy that cannot decide whether it wants more Ford-class carriers should not be ordering new classes of capital ships.

An Acting Secretary, a Blockade, and No Plan

Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao brings a genuine Navy résumé that his predecessor lacked. Born in Saigon, arriving in the United States as a four-year-old refugee in 1975, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in the inaugural graduating class, Naval Academy class of 1996 in ocean engineering, Naval Postgraduate School for applied physics, a thirty-two-year career as a surface warfare officer, explosive-ordnance-disposal officer, and deep-sea diver, with combat deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, retiring as a captain in 2021. He led the recovery of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s aircraft off Martha's Vineyard in 1999. He commanded the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City. He later joined CACI International — the same defense contractor that employed this writer for a portion of his career — before two unsuccessful Republican runs for federal office in Virginia.

Cao was confirmed as Under Secretary six months ago, on 3 October 2025, by a 52–45 Senate vote on party lines. Multiple accounts describe his relationship with Phelan as strained. He has no shipbuilding portfolio, no history as a carrier community advocate, no prior engagement with the Ford-class review, and no established relationship with either the Secretary of War or the President. He inherits, as of 22 April, a Navy conducting a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, a carrier on its 296th day at sea, a Ford-class design review due in four weeks, a $43.5 billion battleship program his predecessor could not defend at the speed the White House demands, a December 2025 Government Accountability Office report on shipyard fire-safety oversight with six unimplemented recommendations, and a fleet that has just suffered three non-combat fires in six weeks. He also inherits whatever institutional memory his predecessor took out the door with him.

The question not being asked in Washington this week is the one that matters. It is not whether Hung Cao is qualified. It is whether the civilian oversight architecture of the United States Navy — Service Secretary, Under Secretary, five-star combatant commander relationships, the testimony-before-Congress rhythm, the annual budget cycle — can function when the Service Secretary is fired by social-media post for failing to deliver a campaign promise that was physically impossible to begin with. The answer, on present evidence, is no. It cannot.

What Admiral Zumwalt Would See

Elmo Russell Zumwalt, Jr., took the oath as the nineteenth Chief of Naval Operations on 1 July 1970, at age forty-nine, the youngest in the Navy's history. He inherited a service in crisis. Re-enlistment rates after first hitch had collapsed to 9.5 percent against a target of 35. The fleet was worn out by Vietnam. Race riots had erupted aboard Kitty Hawk and Constellation. Morale was, in his own phrase, abysmal. Fourteen days into the job, he sent a message to the entire fleet: "No other problem concerns me as deeply as reversing the downward trend of Navy retention rates and I am committing myself to improving the quality of Navy life in all respects and restoring the fun and zest of going to sea." Over the next four years he issued one hundred twenty-one Z-grams. Eighty-seven were subsequently absorbed into the standing Navy directives system. He integrated the Navy — "there is no black Navy, no white Navy; just one Navy, the United States Navy" — appointed the first African-American admiral, opened ships to women, eliminated what he called "Mickey Mouse" regulations, authorized beards and civilian clothes aboard ship, mandated thirty days' leave after deployment for at least half the crew, and ordered that no Sailor should ever wait in line more than fifteen minutes for anything. He diverted, by back-room arrangement, $40 million from the equipment budget to servicemen's housing.

He did this during an active war. He did it with a smaller defense budget than today's Navy enjoys in real terms. He did it because he understood — as a destroyer skipper who had served in Robinson at Leyte Gulf, as a brown-water commander in Vietnam, as a man whose own son he watched die of cancer contracted from Agent Orange sprayed under his own command — that the Navy's people are the Navy. Everything else is hardware that floats.

"The Navy must instill at all levels an attitude which clearly recognizes the dignity and worth of each individual."
— Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., Z-gram 66, 17 December 1970

Set that record next to today's. A carrier crew improvising sleeping quarters on mess-deck tables after their laundry caught fire. Sailors working nineteen-hour watch cycles fishing T-shirts out of undersized sewage pipes a contractor refused to redesign and the Navy declined to insist on. A Sailor's mother photographing raw sewage overflowing onto a berthing deck and contacting a public-radio reporter because she could get no answer from the Navy. A Chief of Naval Operations telling a Washington think tank that his Sailors "signed up for this." A Secretary of the Navy pitching oil paintings of Iowa-class battleships to a President whose attention span is measured in news cycles, then being fired by X post because he could not deliver a $17 billion ship in two years. An acting Secretary sworn in during a blockade with no confirmed successor on the Senate calendar. A $43.5 billion battleship program that no one outside the White House appears to believe in. A Ford-class review that reads, on its face, like the opening move of buyer's remorse.

Admiral Zumwalt did not agree with every decision his Navy made. He was relieved and dismayed, in retirement, by what he regarded as the erosion of material readiness and the drift of the surface force. He would recognize some things about the 2026 Navy immediately: the strain of extended deployments, the tension between the demands of combatant commanders and the finite supply of hulls, the difficulty of retention in a tight labor market. He would recognize those as old problems.

He would not recognize the rest. He would not recognize a Navy that permits a Sailor's mother to be the person who breaks the news of a habitability crisis. He would not recognize a civilian leadership that fires its own Secretary by public announcement during wartime because he could not deliver an impossible schedule fast enough. He would not recognize an acquisition system that greenlights a $43.5 billion battleship program built around directed-energy weapons and railguns that do not yet work, while the lead ship of the class named for him sits at Ingalls undergoing its third attempt at finding a mission. He would not recognize a Navy in which the Secretary of the Navy, the Under Secretary, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the President disagree in public about whether the most expensive warship in the fleet actually works, while that ship is deployed in combat operations against Iran.

He would call this, and he would be right, unserious.

Three Questions for the Acting Secretary

Acting Secretary Cao inherits a mess that is not of his making. He also inherits, for as long as the administration leaves him in place, the one job in the American defense establishment whose statutory purpose is to act as the civilian conscience of the United States Navy. Three questions are worth his early attention:

First: what is the maritime strategy the Golden Fleet is supposed to execute? The BBG(X) budget documents assert that the battleship will "anchor the high end of the Golden Fleet high-low mix" and operate as part of "Battleship Strike Groups." No published document articulates what a Battleship Strike Group is for that a Carrier Strike Group or a Surface Action Group is not already for. Before Congress is asked to appropriate $17 billion for Defiant, the service owes the country a strategy paper. Project SIXTY, Admiral Zumwalt's September 1970 strategic assessment, was drafted in seventy-two days. The Golden Fleet, sixteen months after its announcement, still lacks one.

Second: if the Ford-class review concludes that CVN-82 and CVN-83 should not be ordered as currently configured, what does the Navy propose instead? An improved Nimitz-class hull is feasible; the basic design is proven, Newport News Shipbuilding retains the tooling, and the EMALS/AAG retrofit risk disappears. A CVN-X clean-sheet design is also feasible but adds a decade. Under no circumstance should the Navy allow a gap to develop between Doris Miller's delivery and the next carrier order. The statutory 11-CVN floor is not an aspirational goal. It is U.S. Code.

Third: what is the acting Secretary's plan to address the conditions reported aboard Gerald R. Ford? Not in the abstract. Specifically: the Vacuum Collection, Holding and Transfer system redesign for CVN-79 before delivery in 2027; the laundry-space fire suppression and berthing-ventilation isolation retrofit for the deployed fleet; the implementation timeline for all six GAO-26-107716 contractor-oversight recommendations; and the independent habitability review this writer called for three days ago in these pages. The Sailors did not fail the Navy. The Navy, at the top, is failing them.

❦ ❦ ❦

A correspondent known to this writer, a retired senior engineer and Navy veteran who served as an Engineering Duty Officer during Admiral Zumwalt's tenure, put the matter plainly when these events were described to him: "I don't think he would be proud of today's Navy." He is not wrong. But Admiral Zumwalt's last, best lesson was not that institutions inevitably decline. It was that they can be turned around. He did it once, in a worse environment than this one, with fewer tools and a larger problem. What he did required three things: a clear strategy, an unflinching honesty about institutional failure, and an absolute, non-negotiable commitment to the dignity and welfare of the Sailors who do the actual work. The United States Navy in April 2026 is short of all three. The Sailors are still there, doing their job. They deserve, at minimum, civilian leadership willing to do the same.

Sources

All URLs verified as of 23 April 2026. Sources are listed in order of first reference.

1. Lawrence, Drew F. "Navy planning to spend more than $17B on first Trump-class battleship." DefenseScoop, 21 April 2026. https://defensescoop.com/2026/04/21/navy-battleship-bbgx-cost-capabilities-phelan-golden-fleet/
2. Shelbourne, Mallory. "Navy Wants to Buy $17B Trump-class Battleship in FY 2028." USNI News, 21 April 2026. https://news.usni.org/2026/04/21/navy-wants-to-buy-trump-class-battleship-in-fy-2028
3. Trevithick, Joseph. "Everything New We Just Learned About The Trump Class Battleship Program." The War Zone, 22 April 2026. https://www.twz.com/sea/everything-new-we-just-learned-about-the-trump-class-battleship-program
4. Jaffe, Greg, Maggie Haberman, and Adam Entous. "Trump's Dreams for a Battleship Led to His Navy Secretary's Ouster." The New York Times, 23 April 2026.
5. Lubold, Gordon, et al. "Navy Secretary John Phelan fired from administration amid Iran war." NBC News, 22 April 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/navy-secretary-phelan-exits-administration-rcna341532
6. Liebermann, Oren, et al. "US Navy Secretary Phelan fired as naval blockade of Iran continues." CNN Politics, 22 April 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/22/politics/john-phelan-navy-secretary-leaving
7. Demarest, Colin, and Zachary Basu. "John Phelan out as US Navy secretary after Pete Hegseth fires him." Axios, 22 April 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/04/22/navy-secretary-john-phelan-hung-cao
8. Horton, Alex. "John Phelan out as Navy secretary after 13 months, Pentagon says." The Washington Post, 23 April 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/04/22/john-phelan-navy-hegseth/
9. Al Jazeera Staff. "Who is John Phelan, the US Navy Secretary fired by Pete Hegseth?" Al Jazeera, 23 April 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/23/who-is-john-phelan-the-us-navy-secretary-fired-by-pete-hegseth
10. Shelbourne, Mallory. "Navy Reviewing Ford-class Carrier Design Ahead of Future Contract Awards." USNI News, 21 April 2026. https://news.usni.org/2026/04/21/navy-reviewing-ford-class-carrier-design-ahead-of-future-contract-awards
11. Trevithick, Joseph. "Ford Class Review Puts Navy's Future Carrier Plans Into Question." The War Zone, 22 April 2026. https://www.twz.com/sea/ford-class-review-puts-navys-future-carrier-plans-into-question
12. Losey, Stephen. "US Navy is reviewing cost of future Ford-class carriers to ensure they 'make sense.'" Military Times, 23 April 2026. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-navy/2026/04/23/us-navy-is-reviewing-cost-of-future-ford-class-carriers-to-ensure-they-make-sense/
13. Department of Defense, Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation. FY2024 Annual Report — CVN 78 Gerald R. Ford-Class Nuclear Aircraft Carrier. February 2025. https://www.dote.osd.mil/Portals/97/pub/reports/FY2024/navy/2024cvn78.pdf
14. Congressional Research Service. Navy Ford (CVN-78) Class Aircraft Carrier Program: Background and Issues for Congress. RS20643, June 2025. https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/RS/PDF/RS20643/RS20643.300.pdf
15. Washington Times Staff. "Who is Hung Cao, the new acting Navy secretary?" The Washington Times, 23 April 2026. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/apr/23/hung-cao-new-acting-navy-secretary/
16. U.S. Naval Institute News Staff. "Navy Secretary John Phelan Leaving Trump Administration; Hung Cao Serving as Acting Secretary." USNI News, 22 April 2026. https://news.usni.org/2026/04/22/navy-secretary-john-phelan-leaving-trump-administration-hung-cao-serving-as-acting-secretary
17. Holwitt, Joel Ira. "Regaining the Undisputed Supremacy at Sea: Lessons from Admiral Elmo Zumwalt's Priorities and Errors." Naval History and Heritage Command, 2020 CNO Essay Contest Winner. https://www.history.navy.mil/get-involved/essay-contest/2020-winners/holwitt-cno-essay.html
18. Marolda, Edward J. "A Study in Contrast: Admirals Zumwalt and Holloway at the Helm of the U.S. Navy." Naval History, December 2024, Vol. 38, No. 6, U.S. Naval Institute. https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2024/december/study-contrast-admirals-zumwalt-and-holloway-helm-us-navy
19. Naval History and Heritage Command. "List of Z-grams." https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/z/list-z-grams.html
20. Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. "Z-Grams, 1–70, Summarized." Proceedings, May 1971, Vol. 97/5/819. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1971/may/z-grams-1-70-summarized
21. Goldstein, Richard. "Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., Admiral Who Modernized the Navy, Is Dead at 79." The New York Times, 3 January 2000.
22. U.S. Government Accountability Office. Navy Ship Maintenance: Fire Prevention Improvements Hinge on Stronger Contractor Oversight. GAO-26-107716, 17 December 2025. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107716
23. Bath, Alison. "Record-setting aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford moves into Red Sea." Stars and Stripes, 20 April 2026. https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2026-04-20/ford-red-sea-navy-middle-east-21430955.html
24. ANI Staff. "Trump-class battleship anchor US Navy's expansive USD 377.5B 'Golden Fleet' budget request to counter PLAN's rise." The Tribune, 23 April 2026. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/aircraft-procurement/trump-class-battleship-anchor-us-navys-expansive-usd-377-5b-golden-fleet-budget-request-to-counter-plans-rise
25. Interesting Engineering Staff. "US Navy soon to build 34 warships, 40,000-ton Trump-class battleship." Interesting Engineering, 23 April 2026. https://interestingengineering.com/military/us-trump-class-battleship-massive-budget
26. Defense Daily Staff. "Ford-Class Carrier Review By Navy Leadership To Last Through May." Defense Daily, 22 April 2026. https://www.defensedaily.com/ford-class-carrier-review-by-navy-leadership-to-last-through-may/navy-usmc/

Pseudo Publius · For Comment & Discussion · April 2026 · No. II

Fires, Floods, and Failures: US Navy Has Problems

The Fleet's New Ships Are Telling Us Something

In the span of six weeks, fires struck three U.S. Navy capital ships and displaced hundreds of Sailors. The pattern is not bad luck. It is the predictable cost of a decade of concurrency, deferred testing, and eroded oversight — and the Sailors are paying for it.

By Pseudo Publius · Contributor

Bottom Line Up Front 

Between 12 March and 19 April 2026, three U.S. Navy combatants suffered non-combat fires: the carrier Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) in the Red Sea, the carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) in Norfolk Naval Shipyard, and the destroyer Zumwalt (DDG-1000) at Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula. The Ford fire alone displaced more than 600 Sailors, burned for over 30 hours, destroyed more than 100 berths, and forced the Navy to strip 1,000 mattresses from the not-yet-commissioned John F. Kennedy (CVN-79). These events do not stand in isolation. They sit atop a documented record of Vacuum Collection, Holding and Transfer (VCHT) sanitation failures on Ford; unresolved reliability shortfalls in the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG); a Zumwalt-class program that consumed roughly $25 billion to field three ships now undergoing a second identity change; and a December 2025 Government Accountability Office finding (GAO-26-107716) that the Navy's shipyard fire-safety regime is undermined by chronic staffing shortages and a contractor-oversight framework with no meaningful monetary teeth. The Sailors reporting unsanitary berthing, 19-hour repair shifts, and improvised sleeping on mess-deck tables are not whining. They are telling the Navy — and the taxpayer — what happens when immature technology is pushed to sea ahead of its testing, and when habitability is treated as an afterthought.

The photograph released by U.S. 6th Fleet on 23 March 2026 showed a Super Hornet on Gerald R. Ford's flight deck, stabilizers gleaming in Mediterranean sun. It was a reassuring picture. It was also, in a narrow sense, a lie of omission. Eleven days earlier, a fire in the carrier's aft main laundry space had erupted in the ventilation and dryer-vent system. It burned for more than thirty hours. Smoke migrated through the ship's overhead cableways into seven adjacent berthing compartments. More than one hundred racks were destroyed outright. Roughly six hundred Sailors were displaced from their sleeping areas. Some slept on mess-deck tables. Some slept on the deck. Over two hundred were assessed for smoke inhalation. And the Navy's initial 12 March statement said only that the carrier "remained fully operational" and that two Sailors had non-life-threatening injuries.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle later acknowledged, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, that Ford did not resume fixed-wing sorties for two days. The carrier eventually limped to Naval Support Activity Souda Bay on Crete on 23 March, where she remained pierside for more than a week of structural repairs, then took a scheduled port visit in Split, Croatia, before re-entering the Red Sea in late April in support of Operation Epic Fury against Iran. To replace burned and smoke-contaminated bedding, the Navy stripped 1,000 mattresses from the pre-commissioning John F. Kennedy at Newport News. Hull technicians procured roughly 2,000 sweatsuits and other garments because most of the ship's laundry plant — the very plant where the fire originated — was out of service, and the crew could not wash what they were wearing. This is not an indictment of the damage-control party. The Sailors did their job. It is an indictment of what the Navy asked them to do it in.

A Pattern, Not a Coincidence

On 14 April, a fire aboard Dwight D. Eisenhower during her Planned Incremental Availability at Norfolk Naval Shipyard injured — by the Navy's own revised count — eight Sailors, not the three first reported. On 19 April, a fire aboard Zumwalt at Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula injured three more. Three ships. Three fires. Fourteen injured Sailors. Six weeks. All three ships were either in a maintenance availability or conducting extended operations under strain. None of the causes has yet been publicly disclosed.

To understand why this pattern matters, one must read the Government Accountability Office's December 2025 report, Navy Ship Maintenance: Fire Prevention Improvements Hinge on Stronger Contractor Oversight (GAO-26-107716). The report catalogs thirteen fires on Navy ships undergoing maintenance since 2008, the worst being the July 2020 loss of the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard at Naval Base San Diego — a $3-billion-plus write-off. GAO credits the Navy with real post-2020 improvements in fire-safety culture. But it then delivers the hammer: all three Navy organizations responsible for fire-safety oversight during ship maintenance reported staffing shortfalls as of March 2025. The Navy's primary contractor-compliance tool, the Corrective Action Request, carries no monetary penalty. Quality Assurance Surveillance Plans at the six ships GAO reviewed did not assess penalties for contractor violations of safety standards. In plain English: the bureaucratic mechanisms the Navy relies on to make contractors take fire safety seriously do not impose costs on contractors who do not. GAO made six recommendations. The Navy concurred with all six. Eight weeks later, Eisenhower caught fire at Norfolk Naval Shipyard.

"Staffing shortages across key organizations mean more reliance on sailors, who have other duties, to prevent fires. The Navy also uses contract oversight tools to ensure ship maintenance contractors follow safety standards. But these tools do not effectively enforce penalties for safety violations." — GAO-26-107716, 17 December 2025

The Ford's Plumbing Problem Is a Design Problem

Long before the laundry fire, Gerald R. Ford was already struggling to keep her crew in sanitary conditions. In July 2025, the mother of a Ford Sailor provided photographs to Virginia public radio station WHRO showing sewage overflowing onto berthing-compartment decks. Documents obtained by National Public Radio under the Freedom of Information Act tell the rest of the story. The carrier's Vacuum Collection, Holding and Transfer system — a vacuum-based sewage plant adapted in part from the cruise-ship industry to reduce freshwater use — has failed continuously since the ship's first deployment in 2023. An undated Navy document provided to NPR states bluntly that "every day that the entire crew is present on the ship, a trouble call has been made for ship's force personnel to repair or unclog a portion of the VCHT system, since June 2023."

The system divides roughly 650 toilets ("heads" in Navy parlance) into ten independent zones. When a single valve fails at the back of a single head, it can pull an entire zone's worth of heads offline for half an hour to two hours. A March 2025 engineering-department e-mail reviewed by NPR referenced 205 breakdowns in four days. Hull maintenance technicians worked nineteen-hour shifts. Acid flushes to clear calcium buildup in the undersized pipes cost roughly $400,000 apiece. The ship called for off-ship technical assistance forty-two times between 2023 and early 2026; thirty-two of those calls came in 2025. The Government Accountability Office flagged the VCHT design as undersized and poorly specified in 2020. The Navy had no plans then to redesign it for the follow-on John F. Kennedy (CVN-79). It still does not.

There is an institutional habit at work here. The 2020 GAO review is a piece with the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) findings on Ford's flight-deck systems. The FY2024 DOT&E annual report — the most recent unclassified edition — documents 8,725 EMALS shots and 9,266 arrested landings during Ford's May 2023 to January 2024 deployment. It then states, in language unusually pointed for an OSD test document, that "the reliability and maintainability of CVN 78's EMALS and AAG continue to adversely affect sortie generation and flight operations, which remains the greatest risk to demonstrating operational effectiveness and suitability" in Initial Operational Test and Evaluation. The crew, DOT&E noted, remains reliant on off-ship technical support to correct EMALS, AAG, and Advanced Weapons Elevator failures. Sortie-generation-rate testing — the core measurement of what a carrier is for — has been deferred to FY2025 and now beyond. This after eight years in commission.

The Zumwalt: $25 Billion in Search of a Mission

If Ford is a cautionary tale about concurrency, Zumwalt is a cautionary tale about the whole acquisition enterprise. The Congressional Research Service and multiple GAO reviews put the program's total life-cycle investment at roughly $25 billion for three ships — a figure that works out to something in the vicinity of $8 billion per hull when research, development, and acquisition are rolled together. The class was born as a twenty-first-century land-attack destroyer built around twin 155-mm Advanced Gun Systems firing the Long Range Land Attack Projectile. When the LRLAP's per-round cost exceeded that of a Tomahawk cruise missile, the round was cancelled; the guns became, functionally, ballast. In August 2023 Zumwalt entered Ingalls Shipbuilding for a fundamental identity transplant: the forward AGS mounts are being removed and replaced with four Advanced Payload Module canisters capable of carrying up to twelve Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles. She emerged from drydock in December 2024 and completed builder's sea trials in January 2026. Then, on the night of 19 April 2026, she caught fire pierside.

The Navy has not disclosed the cause. What is known is that the ship is at an especially sensitive moment in the integration of her CPS components, that CPS live-fire testing from Zumwalt was projected for 2027 or 2028, and that any meaningful damage to partially installed, extraordinarily sensitive hypersonic-weapons integration hardware could slip that date further. Three Sailors were injured. The crew extinguished the fire without external assistance. That is a credit to the damage-control organization. It does not answer the larger question: what is a three-ship class — one of which has never participated in combat operations — contributing to a fleet that the Chief of Naval Operations has publicly acknowledged is running short of ordnance after the Iran campaign, and short of carriers as Nimitz retires and Kennedy's delivery slips to March 2027?

What the Sailors Are Telling Us

The through-line across these stories is not any single technical failure. It is that the burden of absorbing the consequences of those failures falls — every time — on the most junior members of the crew. On Ford, the average Sailor's age is similar to that of a college sophomore. Many are on their first extended time away from home. They are standing nineteen-hour watches fishing T-shirts and mop-heads out of narrow VCHT pipework because the system was specified too small by a shipbuilder to whom the Navy did not assign monetary penalties for the deficiency. They are sleeping on mess-deck tables after a laundry fire because habitability redundancy was not a design driver. They are missing the birth of their first child during an eight-month-stretched-to-eleven-month Caribbean and Middle East deployment in which they cannot reliably use a toilet. Some have told NPR they plan to separate after this cruise. The Navy's recruiting environment cannot absorb that signal indefinitely.

The institutional response to these problems has, so far, been to praise the resilience of the Sailors. Admiral Caudle's remarks at CSIS were characteristic: "Sailors that are doing this, this is what they signed up for." With respect to the CNO, they did not. They signed up to fight the nation's wars at sea. They did not sign up to spend their early twenties as a human buffer absorbing the cost of a twenty-year acquisition failure.

Recommendations

Three actions are warranted, none of them novel:

First, the Navy must implement all six recommendations of GAO-26-107716 on a published timeline, with milestones reported quarterly to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. The Corrective Action Request process must be amended to include monetary penalties for persistent contractor safety violations. Quality Assurance Surveillance Plans must explicitly assess penalties for noncompliance. The staffing shortfalls in the Regional Maintenance Centers and Naval Surface Group fire-safety oversight billets must be closed with dedicated billets, not by double-hatting Sailors whose primary duties lie elsewhere.

Second, the Navy should commission an independent habitability review of Ford and Kennedy, scoped to the VCHT system, berthing ventilation isolation, and laundry-space fire suppression, with a plan of action and milestones for retrofit. Kennedy is scheduled for delivery in March 2027. The same VCHT architecture that is failing on Ford is installed in Kennedy. The 2020 GAO warning was ignored. The 2026 consequence is 600 Sailors displaced and 1,000 mattresses pulled off the next carrier. There is time, still, to fix this on CVN-79 before she sails. There will not be time later.

Third, Initial Operational Test and Evaluation on Gerald R. Ford must be completed before additional Ford-class block-buy authorities are exercised. Ten years into commissioning, DOT&E has still not been able to evaluate sortie-generation rate or complete the Total Ship Survivability Trial. The fleet is being asked to absorb a warship class whose core performance claim has not been operationally validated. Concurrency was the original sin of the Ford program. Doubling down on it in the FY2027 budget cycle would be the Navy's choice — not an inherited condition.

❦ ❦ ❦

Admiral Elmo Zumwalt — the officer for whom DDG-1000 is named — devoted the latter part of his career to a simple proposition: that enlisted Sailors deserve to live, work, and serve under conditions that honor what the nation asks of them. He issued Z-grams. He integrated the Navy. He dragged a fleet reluctantly toward treating its people as people. The ship that bears his name is now a $4 billion testbed awaiting its third reason for existence, with three Sailors recently injured in a pierside fire of undetermined cause. The carrier that is the Navy's flagship is returning to combat operations with sewage problems its manufacturer refuses to redesign and fire-damaged berthing still being repaired. This is not the fleet Admiral Zumwalt fought for. It is a fleet that is asking its Sailors, once again, to pay in person for choices made years earlier, in rooms they will never enter, by people whose names they will never know. Proceedings owes them better. So does the Navy.

Sources

All URLs verified as of 23 April 2026. Sources are listed in order of first reference.

1. Bath, Alison. "Fire aboard USS Zumwalt injures 3 in Mississippi." Stars and Stripes, 23 April 2026. https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2026-04-23/fire-zumwalt-injures-three-sailors-21460028.html
2. U.S. Naval Institute News Staff. "3 Sailors Injured in Fire Aboard USS Zumwalt." USNI News, 22 April 2026. https://news.usni.org/2026/04/22/3-sailors-injured-in-fire-aboard-destroyer-uss-zumwalt
3. Shelbourne, Mallory, and Sam LaGrone. "USS Gerald R. Ford Headed to Souda Bay for Repairs After Fire." USNI News, 17 March 2026. https://news.usni.org/2026/03/17/uss-gerald-r-ford-headed-to-souda-bay-for-repairs-after-fire
4. Liebermann, Oren, et al. "USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier moves away from Iran war for repairs after fire." CNN Politics, 18 March 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/18/politics/us-ford-carrier-fire-iran-war
5. Bath, Alison. "Record-setting aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford moves into Red Sea." Stars and Stripes, 20 April 2026. https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2026-04-20/ford-red-sea-navy-middle-east-21430955.html
6. "USS Gerald R. Ford Arrives at Crete's Souda Bay After Major Laundry Fire During Operation Epic Fury." Greek City Times, 24 March 2026. https://greekcitytimes.com/2026/03/24/uss-gerald-r-ford-arrives-souda-bay-crete-after-laundry-ventilation-fire-2026/
7. Liebermann, Oren. "Navy's top admiral indicates carrier Ford fire stopped sorties for two days." CNN, 2 April 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/02/middleeast/top-admiral-caudle-aircraft-carrier-ford-fire-intl-hnk-ml
8. Walsh, Tom. "Major plumbing headache haunts $13 billion U.S. carrier off the coast of Venezuela." NPR, 17 January 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/17/nx-s1-5680167/major-plumbing-headache-haunts-13-billion-u-s-carrier-off-the-coast-of-venezuela
9. Walsh, Tom. "The USS Ford crew is struggling with sewage problems on board the Navy's new carrier." NPR All Things Considered, 15 January 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/15/nx-s1-5676229/the-uss-ford-crew-is-struggling-with-sewage-problems-on-board-the-navys-new-carrier
10. Walsh, Steve. "Overflowing toilets are hampering USS Ford's recent deployment." WHRO Public Media, 17 July 2025. https://www.whro.org/military-veterans/2025-07-17/overflowing-toilets-are-hampering-uss-fords-recent-deployment
11. Schogol, Jeff, and Drew F. Lawrence. "The toilets on the Navy's largest aircraft carrier keep failing." Task & Purpose, 17 January 2026. https://taskandpurpose.com/news/navy-carrier-ford-toilets-clogged/
12. U.S. Government Accountability Office. Navy Ship Maintenance: Fire Prevention Improvements Hinge on Stronger Contractor Oversight. GAO-26-107716. Washington: GAO, 17 December 2025. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107716 (full PDF: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-26-107716.pdf)
13. Department of Defense, Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation. FY2024 Annual Report — CVN 78 Gerald R. Ford-Class Nuclear Aircraft Carrier. February 2025. https://www.dote.osd.mil/Portals/97/pub/reports/FY2024/navy/2024cvn78.pdf
14. Congressional Research Service. Navy Ford (CVN-78) Class Aircraft Carrier Program: Background and Issues for Congress. RS20643, June 2025. https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/RS/PDF/RS20643/RS20643.300.pdf
15. U.S. Naval Institute News Staff. "Carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Suffers Fire at Norfolk Naval Shipyard." USNI News, 16 April 2026. https://news.usni.org/2026/04/16/carrier-uss-dwight-d-eisenhower-suffers-fire-at-norfolk-naval-shipyard
16. WAVY-TV 10 News Staff. "8 sailors hurt in USS Eisenhower fire." WAVY.com, 15 April 2026. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/3-sailors-hurt-uss-eisenhower-181140030.html
17. Rogoway, Tyler. "USS Gerald R. Ford Was Still Struggling With Its Dual Band Radar Prior To Deployment." The War Zone, 5 February 2025. https://www.twz.com/sea/uss-gerald-r-ford-was-still-struggling-with-its-dual-band-radar-prior-to-deployment
18. Congressional Budget Office. Maintenance Delays for Conventional Navy Ships. December 2025. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61940
19. Suciu, Peter. "The U.S. Navy's Zumwalt-Class Destroyer Nightmare Had to End." The National Interest, 25 November 2024. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/us-navys-zumwalt-class-destroyer-nightmare-had-end-208794
20. Episkopos, Mark. "Next-gen U.S. carriers Ford-class push forward amid reliability and budget pressures." Army Recognition, 10 October 2025. https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/navy-news/2025/next-gen-u-s-carriers-ford-class-push-forward-amid-reliability-and-budget-pressures
21. Kazianis, Harry J. "The Ford-Class Aircraft Carrier: The U.S. Navy's Problem Child." National Security Journal, 6 October 2025. https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/the-ford-class-aircraft-carrier-the-u-s-navys-problem-child/
22. U.S. Naval Institute News Staff. "GAO Report on Fire Prevention Improvements During Navy Ship Maintenance." USNI News, 23 December 2025. https://news.usni.org/2025/12/23/gao-report-on-fire-prevention-improvements-during-navy-ship-maintenance
23. Buckby, Jack. "Broken Toilets, Laundry Fire, and Now Crete: Aircraft Carrier USS Gerald R. Ford Is Limping Out of the Iran War After 9 Months at Sea." 19FortyFive, 20 March 2026. https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/03/broken-toilets-laundry-fire-and-now-crete-aircraft-carrier-uss-gerald-r-ford-is-limping-out-of-the-iran-war-after-9-months-at-sea/
24. Marine Insight Staff. "World's Largest US Aircraft Carrier USS Gerald R. Ford Battles Massive Toilet Failure Amid Iran Tensions." Marine Insight, 25 February 2026. https://www.marineinsight.com/shipping-news/worlds-largest-us-aircraft-carrier-uss-gerald-r-ford-battles-massive-toilet-failure-amid-iran-tensions/

Pseudo Publius · For Comment & Discussion · April 2026

Evolving the Reaper for HBTSS:

How MQ-9B Fights Tomorrow's War

The turboprop that won the counterterrorism era is not the airframe that will win the next one — unless it is modernized around the six mission threads the Pacific demands: assured PNT, laser C2, boost-phase ISR, launched-effects teaming, long-range standoff strike, and manned-unmanned coordination. All six are demonstrated. None are integrated. The window to do it is now.

Palmdale · Yuma · Kadena · Vandenberg

Bottom Line Up Front 

Tomorrow's war is not Afghanistan. It is a distributed, electromagnetically contested, sensor-rich, missile-saturated Pacific campaign fought across thousands of miles of water, with China fielding 4,000 hypersonic weapons by 2035 and Russian EW assets driving thousand-flight-per-day GPS interference across NATO's eastern flank. The MQ-9B has the endurance, payload, open architecture and production base to matter in that fight — but only if it evolves along six convergent axes already demonstrated in isolation: (1) assured PNT via M-code EGI plus quantum magnetic navigation — with an MQ-9B composite airframe whose paramagnetic aluminum-mesh LSP Faraday cage (selected by GA-ASI for weight reasons against copper or nickel alternatives) sits on the favorable side of the Tolles-Lawson permanent-magnetization problem that dominates MagNav noise on metallic platforms like the F-16 and the Cessna of the USAF/MIT MagNav Challenge, while shifting residual noise into an eddy-current and EMI term that AI-augmented online calibration is specifically engineered to handle; (2) optical C2 via GA-ASI's LAC-12 pod into SDA's Tranche 1 Transport Layer, where the first space-to-air laser link to an aircraft-mounted terminal was closed on 1 July 2025; (3) forward boost-phase ISR cueing HBTSS via improved Lynx radar and MTS-B (which tracked ballistic missiles in a June 2016 USAF demonstration); (4) launched-effects teaming through the PELE semi-autonomous air vehicle (GA-ASI, June 2025) and future Increment 2 CCA variants; (5) long-range standoff strike with JASSM, LRASM and JSM integration now underway (GA-ASI, February 2026); and (6) human-on-the-loop teaming with F-22/MQ-20, F-35/CCA, and P-8/SeaGuardian, all demonstrated in the last eighteen months. The MQ-9 production line is hot through 2026. The decision before the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps is whether the aircraft is a legacy platform winding down, or a distributed-operations node being actively evolved. This is the case for the latter.

The War We Are Actually Preparing For

The temptation after Operation Epic Fury is to declare the medium-altitude long-endurance turboprop obsolete. The data is seductive: roughly 24 MQ-9 airframes lost to Iranian air defenses in six weeks, at a replacement cost of about $720 million — 8% of the Air Force's 300-aircraft Reaper fleet attrited while flying a mission the airframe was never designed for. The International Institute for Strategic Studies noted last November that the Houthis' patchwork SAM network alone has chewed through at least 15 MQ-9s since late 2023. Against S-400, Bavar-373, or anything China would field in a Taiwan Strait scenario, the Reaper's 230-mph cruise and non-stealthy profile are exactly as survivable as critics say they are.

But the war for which the MQ-9B needs to evolve is not the penetration fight. The Air Force is building the YFQ-42A Dark Merlin and YFQ-44A Fury for that. The B-21 is being built for that. Tomorrow's fight, for the airframe already in inventory, is the distributed Pacific problem — persistent maritime ISR, anti-submarine warfare, electromagnetic sensing, targeting cueing for long-range fires, and data transport across an Agile Combat Employment archipelago where crewed assets cannot loiter indefinitely and where the tyranny of distance makes endurance the scarcest commodity in the theater. The MQ-9B has, in its MQ-9B SeaGuardian/SkyGuardian configuration, 30-to-40 hours of endurance depending on payload, a 50,000-ft ceiling, and proven performance above the 78th parallel — where satellite coverage is thinnest and where the Arctic is becoming a major theater of PLA submarine activity.

In February 2026, Asia Times and the South China Morning Post reported that the U.S. was expanding a network of MQ-9s across the Indo-Pacific, knitting Japan (doubling Coast Guard MQ-9Bs to 10, ordering 23 SeaGuardians by 2032), Taiwan (four on order, two delivered March 2026), Australia, Belgium, India (31 more ordered), and others into a shared ISR architecture that CSBA has called "deterrence by detection." That concept is not premised on airframe survivability in a shooting war. It is premised on persistent, multinational, attributable surveillance creating escalation costs in peacetime and fire-control quality targeting data in wartime. The MQ-9B is the platform of record for that mission. The question is not whether to retire it. The question is how to evolve it.

The MQ-9B's future is not as a hunter-killer or as a penetrator. It is as a persistent, distributed, laser-linked, launched-effects-carrying node in an allied sensor-and-shooter architecture stretching from the Arctic to the South China Sea. Every element needed is demonstrated. None are integrated. Integration is the program.

Six Axes of Evolution

I. Assured PNT

Russian jamming forced a USAFE Reaper to make an emergency landing near Mirosławiec, Poland, in March 2024. U.S. officials attributed a portion of the Epic Fury losses to Iranian high-power GPS spoofing and jamming of satellite command links. The MQ-9's current Honeywell H-764 EGI was SAASM-qualified before M-code receivers were available for the fleet, and its command-link architecture was built around a single commercial Ku-band geostationary pipe. Neither holds up under peer or near-peer electronic attack.

The fixes exist. On 20 November 2025, Honeywell received MSO-c145b authorization from the Precise Position Equipment Certification Office for its small-form-factor FALCN-M M-code embedded GPS/INS, completing the M-code qualification for Honeywell's full EGI line. The MQ-9 M2DO (Multi-Domain Operations) configuration, first flown in November 2022 and under retrofit through FY26 via the System Lifecycle Agile Modernization (SLAM) program, specifies anti-jam GPS, Link 16, IP-based mission architecture and enhanced C2 resiliency. Backing this up, Q-CTRL's Ironstone Opal quantum magnetic-anomaly navigation system, flown in February 2025 near Griffith, Australia, delivered positioning accuracy up to 111× better than a strategic-grade INS in GPS-denied conditions — using only publicly-available magnetic anomaly maps and fusing a quantum scalar magnetometer with a classical vector fluxgate and an INS through an AI-driven denoising algorithm. DARPA's Robust Quantum Sensors (RoQS) program is funding the ruggedization. Lockheed Martin and Q-CTRL hold a March 2025 DoD Defense Innovation Unit contract for a quantum-enabled inertial navigation prototype.

The MQ-9B airframe presents a more nuanced advantage for MagNav than first appears, and it is worth getting the physics right. The airframe is built to NATO STANAG 4671 standards primarily from advanced graphite-epoxy and related composite materials, with metallic primary structure confined to hardpoints, engine mount, landing gear and the immediate vicinity of high-load joints. Compared to the predominantly aluminum airframes on which virtually all published MagNav research has been conducted — the Cessna Grand Caravan of the USAF/MIT Signal Enhancement for Magnetic Navigation Challenge, the F-16 of the AFIT online-calibration thesis work, and the Cessna Citation 560 used for the Northrop EGI-M validation flights — the carbon-epoxy structure presents a significantly lower ferromagnetic noise floor. There is less steel, less iron in the primary structure, so less permanent magnetization and a weaker induced-magnetization response to the Earth field as the aircraft maneuvers. Q-CTRL's own public characterization of the metallic-platform problem is blunt: "the fact that the airplane is made of metal, with all this wiring… usually there's 100 to 1,000 times more noise than signal."

The catch, which anyone who has walked the Poway manufacturing floor will recognize from the smell of epoxy curing, is that STANAG 4671 certification requires lightning strike protection — and GA-ASI's implementation, consistent with the weight-driven choice Cirrus made for the SR-20/22 and the broader MALE industry practice, is an expanded aluminum mesh embedded in the outer laminate ply and electrically bonded to internal metallic ground planes to form a continuous Faraday cage distributed across the full skin. The weight penalty for aluminum is roughly half that of copper per unit area of equivalent lightning-current capability, which on a fuel-fraction-driven long-endurance airframe is not a negotiable tradeoff.

Aluminum's magnetic properties are almost ideal for a MagNav platform. Its relative permeability is μᵣ ≈ 1.000022 — paramagnetic to within 22 parts per million of vacuum — which is to say it contributes essentially zero to the Tolles-Lawson permanent-magnetization and induced-magnetization terms that dominate noise on a carbon-steel or nickel-bearing structure. Compare that to 316L austenitic stainless at μᵣ ≈ 1.003-1.007, or to nickel-plated carbon fiber LSP alternatives where μᵣ is in the hundreds. On those permanent and induced terms, the MQ-9B sits on the cleanest end of the spectrum available to any certificated aircraft configuration.

The aluminum mesh does carry eddy currents. Every aircraft attitude change induces currents in the continuous skin, and those currents generate their own time-varying magnetic fields — the third Tolles-Lawson term, which the calibration model exists to compensate. Aluminum's electrical conductivity at roughly 60% IACS (against copper's 100%) means those currents are proportionally weaker than they would be in a copper mesh of equivalent geometry. The LSP system is also tied to the internal avionics ground plane, which means motor commutation, power-converter switching, and digital clock harmonics have a low-impedance conductive path onto a distributed skin antenna that sits physically close to any magnetometer not mounted on a tail stinger — and a MALE mission profile will not tolerate carrying a stinger.

The net effect shifts which noise component dominates, rather than eliminating noise entirely. On an aluminum F-16 or a Cessna Caravan, permanent and induced ferromagnetic magnetization dominate and produce Q-CTRL's cited 100-to-1,000× noise-over-signal ratio. On a composite MQ-9B with paramagnetic aluminum LSP mesh, eddy-current and skin-return EMI terms dominate, but the ferromagnetic floor is fundamentally lower. That shift is favorable for two reasons. First, the eddy-current response of a fixed, known-geometry aluminum mesh is linear in aircraft rate, spatially structured, and repeatable flight-to-flight in a way that randomly-distributed ferromagnetic inclusions are not. Second, the machine-learning online-calibration architectures that have matured between 2023 and 2026 — the Physical Review Applied reservoir-computing work, the arXiv Liquid Time-Constant Network approach published January 2024, and the March 2026 neural-network-augmented EKF with cold-start capability — are designed specifically to handle platform-specific EMI and eddy-current signatures that conventional Tolles-Lawson cannot characterize. Q-CTRL's Ironstone Opal architecture is one instantiation of this; it explicitly pairs a quantum scalar magnetometer with AI-driven denoising to strip out platform noise. An MQ-9B makes this tractable because the LSP mesh geometry is fixed and known by design, the mesh is paramagnetic aluminum, and the 30-hour endurance gives the online-calibration filter the operational dwell time it needs to converge.

An MQ-9B with M-code EGI, quantum MagNav calibrated for its specific aluminum-LSP signature, and a terrain-referenced-navigation vision backup has four independent position references. Today's Reaper has one. And the airframe on which the MagNav solution runs lands on the physics-favorable side of the permanent-magnetization problem — the hard one — in a way no metallic fixed-wing platform on which the technique has been flight-tested to date can match.

Why Aluminum LSP Mesh Is the Right MagNav Compromise

The MQ-9B's STANAG 4671 certification for European civil airspace required an engineered lightning strike protection system. GA-ASI's weight-driven choice of expanded aluminum mesh — embedded in the outermost laminate ply under the surface film, in electrical contact with internal metallic ground planes (engine, conduit, avionics chassis, fasteners) to form a continuous low-impedance path for 200,000-amp lightning current — is the same choice Cirrus made on the SR-20/22 and that much of the CFRP aircraft industry has converged on. Copper mesh is denser and introduces galvanic corrosion issues against carbon fiber that require an isolation ply adding still more weight. Aluminum was chosen for weight. That decision happened to optimize for MagNav as well.

The physics consequences separate cleanly. Aluminum is paramagnetic at μᵣ ≈ 1.000022 — twenty-two parts per million of vacuum — meaning it contributes essentially zero to the permanent and induced magnetization terms that dominate MagNav noise on metallic aircraft. The MQ-9B's total ferromagnetic signature is carried almost entirely by the engine, landing gear, wiring harnesses, and hardpoint metal, with the LSP skin contributing nothing to the static-field problem. The ferromagnetic noise floor is fundamentally lower than on any aluminum-airframe aircraft on which MagNav has been flight-tested. The eddy-current term is real but bounded: aluminum's 60% IACS conductivity produces proportionally weaker induced currents than copper mesh of equivalent geometry would, and the mesh is a fixed, known-by-design conductive sheet rather than randomly-distributed ferromagnetic inclusions.

Three things make the residual eddy-current and EMI coupling tractable. First, the LSP geometry is structured and repeatable — precisely what modern online-calibration filters are built for. Second, AI-augmented calibration stacks (the Liquid Time-Constant network published January 2024, the neural-network-augmented EKF with cold-start capability published March 2026, Q-CTRL's Ironstone Opal) have demonstrated 58-64% compensation error reductions over classical Tolles-Lawson on metallic-airframe MagNav Challenge datasets; those gains should be larger on a paramagnetic-skin platform. Third, the MQ-9B's 30-hour endurance gives the filter the convergence time it needs under operational profiles. The aluminum mesh is a compensation problem. It is not a deal-breaker. Combined with the composite primary structure, it makes the MQ-9B the best candidate in the Western inventory to be the reference platform for operational airborne MagNav.

II. Optical C2 and the Tranche 1 Handshake

The single most important development for the MQ-9B's future does not involve the airframe at all. On 1 July 2025, the Space Development Agency closed the first-ever space-to-air optical communications link — between a General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems OCT mounted on an aircraft and a Kepler Communications satellite at roughly 500 km LEO. SDA's Nathan Getz, director of the agency's Data Transport Cell, told reporters in September that the link was ready to be folded into operational tranches. By that point, Tranche 1 was already flying: 21 York-built Transport Layer satellites launched 10 September 2025, another 21 Lockheed-built on 15 October 2025, on the way to a full constellation of 126 Transport and 35 Tracking satellites across ten Falcon 9 missions. On 20 January 2026, SDA declared the laser mesh operationally — a proliferated LEO backbone treating optical inter-satellite links as the primary data-transport layer, not RF.

GA-ASI's optical pedigree maps directly onto that architecture. The company's Airborne Laser Communication System (ALCoS), developed under internal funding over five years, closed an air-to-space link from Tenerife to TESAT's LCT 135 terminal on the Alphasat GEO satellite in February 2020 — the first demonstration of an air-to-space lasercom system with SWaP compatible with a MALE RPA. In June 2021, SDA contracted GA-EMS to integrate its LINCS laser terminal pair with an MQ-9 for a space-to-air experiment. On 26 September 2022, GA-ASI flew a 1.0 Gbps air-to-air optical link near Yuma, exchanging real-time navigation, video, and voice data. On 1 December 2022, the company demonstrated a fully-networked multi-terminal lasercom mesh. The LAC-12 Laser Airborne Communication Terminal is now a marketed, podded, open-architecture product offering 300× the data capacity of RF SATCOM, explicitly sold as integrable on MQ-1 and MQ-9.

A LAC-12-equipped MQ-9B plugged into Tranche 1's SIS-002-compatible optical mesh is a different animal from a Ku-band Reaper. It is a sub-second-latency, multi-Gbps, LPI/LPD-linked node in the same network that L3Harris's HBTSS demonstrator uses to deliver fire-control-quality data to Aegis and the future Glide Phase Interceptor. It is also immune to the Iranian jamming that produced a "total link failure" scenario reportedly responsible for at least some Epic Fury losses.

III. Forward Boost-Phase ISR

The Defense Intelligence Agency's May 2025 "Golden Dome for America" assessment warned that China may already have deployed a hypersonic glide vehicle capable of striking Alaska, and projected a stockpile of 4,000 hypersonic weapons by 2035. MDA Director Lt. Gen. Heath Collins has publicly acknowledged that the Glide Phase Interceptor program is running roughly three years behind schedule, with delivery pushed toward 2035 under current funding. Near-term Guam and Pacific defense leans on SM-6 and THAAD terminal engagement, augmented by HBTSS tracking from LEO. The gap in this layered architecture is the airborne sensor layer — persistent, forward-deployed surveillance close enough to probable launch regions to catch transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) movement and confirm space-based detections.

The MQ-9B fills exactly that gap, using sensors already in the airframe. The Lynx multi-mode radar — in its AN/APY-8A Block 20A and AN/DPY-1 Block 30 configurations, derived from Sandia's original architecture — operates in Ku-band with spotlight SAR resolution to four inches, stripmap mosaic modes, Coherent Change Detection (CCD) for pixel-level scene differencing between passes, Amplitude Change Detection, Automated Man-Made Object Detection, Ground and Dismount Moving Target Indicator capable of flagging 1-mph personnel movement, and the DARPA Dual-Beam Space Time Adaptive Processing upgrade developed with BAE Systems that cancels main-beam GMTI clutter to detect slow movers at tactically significant ranges. GMTI scans 270 degrees. MWAS correlates AIS with radar returns for maritime targets.

Paired with the MTS-B Multispectral Targeting System — EO/IR, shortwave infrared, image-intensified TV, laser designator/illuminator, fused video — the Lynx/MTS-B combination provides oblique optical and radar angles from the edge of adversary airspace that HBTSS cannot achieve from LEO. Two MQ-9s demonstrated ballistic-missile tracking using the MTS-B turret during a USAF exercise in late June 2016 — a capability MDA has expressed interest in exploiting since 2011 for firing-quality data on early intercept of ballistic launches. What was missing was the low-latency link to a fire-control system. Tranche 1 provides it. An improved Lynx with tightened CCD processing, wider-bandwidth Dual-Beam STAP, and tighter cross-cue timing to MTS-B SWIR — running CCD on 3-hour intervals over known TEL hide sites, slewing MTS-B to SWIR plume detection the moment ignition occurs, compressing and pushing the track through LAC-12 into the optical mesh — is a boost-phase sensor node in everything but name.

IV. Launched-Effects Teaming

The survivability objection — that a Reaper at 200 nm standoff still can't see close enough to matter — is answered by launched effects. In June 2025, GA-ASI unveiled PELE (Precision Exportable Launched Effect), an 11-ft-wingspan, 16-hp, propeller-driven, semi-autonomous air vehicle with an EO/IR full-motion video sensor and internal modular payloads, range exceeding 500 nm, designed specifically to be launched from MQ-9B SkyGuardian/SeaGuardian. GA-ASI President David Alexander's articulated concept of operations is explicit: "An air force could launch MQ-9Bs for long-endurance ISR patrols one day and deploy the same aircraft the next day with several PELEs that take on the highest-risk roles, preserving the mothership." A SkyGuardian approaches a contested ADIZ from international waters, releases multiple PELEs, and those vehicles penetrate the threat envelope to detect and geo-locate radar emitters, confirm adversary composition, or deliver effects — while the host aircraft remains outside the SAM ring.

This is the architectural escape from the Epic Fury attrition curve. The MQ-9B becomes a persistent launch base and data-fusion hub for attritable, distributed sub-elements that do the risky work. The same principle applies to the X-68A (Dark Merlin/LongShot) uncrewed air-superiority vehicle designated by the Air Force in February 2026. CCA Increment 2 and beyond will push this further — the MQ-9B is one generation of airframe that can act as a standoff mothership for the next generation of autonomous combatants.

V. Long-Range Standoff Strike

On 23 February 2026, GA-ASI announced that engineering work was underway to integrate AGM-158 JASSM, AGM-158C LRASM, and Kongsberg/Raytheon JSM on the MQ-9B airframe. The notional concept of operations, articulated in the company's own words, is the Western Pacific standoff case: "MQ-9Bs could launch from a number of friendly bases in the Western or Southern Pacific, fly to a hold point and loiter there outside a hostile power's weapons engagement zone. If the order came to release the weapons, the aircraft could launch them in coordination with other U.S. or allied operations." First-round captive-carry flight tests are targeted for 2026. This changes the arithmetic. A persistent MALE airframe loitering 500 nm from a Chinese coast, launching JASSM-ER (~600 nm range) or LRASM against surface action groups on organic or cross-cued targeting, is not the Reaper of Afghanistan. It is a distributed missile truck with a 30-hour persistence that crewed strike platforms cannot match.

Paired with the improved Lynx MWAS mode and SeaGuardian's AIS correlation, the MQ-9B becomes the sensor-shooter pair for anti-surface warfare in the littoral Pacific. Ultra Maritime's compact sonobuoys and receivers, successfully flight-tested on SeaGuardian in January 2025, extend the same architecture to anti-submarine warfare — including in GPS-denied environments where GA-ASI's own press release specifies the sonobuoy receivers must function. Airborne early warning capability is slated for demonstration on MQ-9B in summer 2026.

VI. Manned-Unmanned Teaming

The sixth axis is the one that integrates all the others. In 2025, GA-ASI flew an internally-funded Avenger demonstration that featured both its own TacACE autonomy software and Shield AI's Hivemind software on the same flight, with the MQ-20 switching between AI pilots in mid-air. Later in the year, a separate demonstration with Lockheed Martin and L3Harris connected an MQ-20 with an F-22 Raptor — allowing the human fighter pilot to command the unmanned aircraft as a CCA surrogate via tablet from the cockpit. In January 2026 GA-ASI flew an MQ-20 mission autonomy demonstration in which the aircraft independently ranged, tracked, and simulated a weapons engagement against a live piloted aggressor. In March 2026, GA-ASI and the Air Force conducted an autonomous mission at Edwards using infrared-based passive target localization and autonomous coordination between manned fighters and unmanned jets. The Navy's Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division completed an F-35/CCA teaming demonstration in January 2026 at Point Mugu using F-35 pilots controlling autonomous BQM-177As via touchscreen tablet.

At Sea-Air-Space 2026, GA-ASI outlined P-8 Poseidon/SeaGuardian teaming as a specific operational pairing — crewed maritime patrol aircraft for persistence-limited high-intensity ASW work, SeaGuardian for long-dwell sonobuoy deployment and monitoring. The architecture is generalizable: F-22 or F-35 commands a Reaper-class platform at standoff; the Reaper commands a PELE swarm or a CCA Increment 2 formation; the CCA swarm penetrates. The Reaper is the middle layer. That is the layer the service most needs and currently least has.

The Evolved MQ-9B Architecture

Navigation

Honeywell FALCN-M M-code EGI (MSO-c145b certified Nov 2025); Q-CTRL Ironstone Opal quantum magnetic-anomaly navigation (DARPA RoQS) with AI-augmented online calibration characterized for the MQ-9B's specific STANAG 4671 paramagnetic aluminum-mesh LSP signature; vision-based terrain-referenced navigation backup; seabird-inspired multi-cue fusion arbiter running on mission computer.

C2 & Data

GA-ASI LAC-12 Laser Airborne Communication pod into SDA Tranche 1 Transport Layer optical mesh; Starlink/Starshield LEO SATCOM backup; Ka-band O3b/Inmarsat; HF BLOS via FlexRadio FLEX-6600 SDR through conformal tail antennas (8,000 nm); legacy Ku-band GEO as fallback.

Sensors

Improved Lynx Block 30+ (CCD, ACD, AMMOD, DMTI/GMTI, MWAS, Dual-Beam STAP); MTS-B EO/IR/SWIR/laser designator with boost-phase cross-cue; sonobuoy dispensing system for ASW; electronic support measures pod for ELINT.

Weapons

AGM-158 JASSM-ER, AGM-158C LRASM, Kongsberg/Raytheon JSM (integration underway, 2026 captive-carry); Hellfire and laser-guided bombs for legacy missions; AIM-9X for self-defense if integration continues.

Launched Effects

PELE semi-autonomous air vehicles (11-ft wingspan, >500 nm range, EO/IR FMV), multiple per sortie for ADIZ penetration and ELINT; Altius 600 loitering munitions; future X-68A LongShot integration.

Autonomy

GA-ASI Quadratix ground environment; TacACE and Hivemind-class autonomy for lost-link mission continuation, multi-aircraft control by single operator, and manned-unmanned teaming under F-22/F-35/P-8 command via tablet.

What the Composite Airframe Costs and What It Buys

The structural properties that make the MQ-9B's composite airframe favorable for laser-link pointing, MagNav signature management, and sensor-to-antenna registration also impose the same manufacturing and sustainment discipline that has defined composite airliner production since the 787 entered service. Unlike aluminum, which accommodates assembly error through elastic compliance — a quarter-inch misalignment gets pulled into place with rivet tension, and the skin deforms to match the frame — cured graphite-epoxy will not permanently deform to absorb fit-up mismatch. Aviation Week put it directly in its 2022 coverage of the 787 program: "composite structures are very stiff, unlike conventional aluminum airframes, which are flexible. Any issues that potentially interfere with the load transfer between sections — such as gaps, improperly installed shims or inner skin surfaces that are not smooth — can form a focus for stress buildup." Boeing's own published join-surface flatness tolerance on the 787 is 0.005 inch — "about the thickness of a human hair."

The industry's solution is a two-part manufacturing discipline that the MQ-9B program inherits. Precision surface preparation: on the F-35, every composite joining surface is CNC-machined after autoclave cure to guarantee outer-mold-line tolerance. Predictive shimming: on the 787, robotically-placed laser scanners map each mating surface, software generates required shim geometry, and resin-bonded composite shims fill gaps per Boeing Process Specification BAC5430. The 47/48 aft fuselage join alone carries over 2,000 fasteners and required through-hole inspection with angled feeler gauges when predictive shimming failed in 2019-2022. A March 2026 FAA proposed Airworthiness Directive mandates recurring inspection of 787 splice plates, spar terminal fittings and chords for fatigue cracks traceable to out-of-tolerance shim gaps. These are not niche issues — they are the central ongoing quality story in composite airliner production, and they apply, in smaller scale but identical physics, to every MQ-9B coming off the Poway and El Mirage lines.

For the MQ-9B's evolution, this cuts four ways. The first is structural: once cured and assembled, the composite airframe is dimensionally stable under flight loads in a way aluminum is not. Aluminum wings flex continuously in flight, which is why they fatigue on a cycle-count basis and why skin-mounted sensors on aluminum platforms require active pointing compensation for structural breathing. A LAC-12 optical terminal trying to close an air-to-space laser link with microradian pointing tolerance, or an improved-Lynx antenna cross-cueing MTS-B to SWIR plume detection, or a magnetometer sensing at the nanoTesla level — none of those want to be mounted to a structure that oil-cans and torsions under every turbulence encounter. Boeing's own 787 full-scale fatigue test logged "zero findings in fatigue in our composite structure" over 165,000 simulated flights, even on an article that — as was later discovered — contained the same production nonconformances that affected the first 980 delivered aircraft. That is a remarkable robustness statement about cured composite primary structure when the as-built geometry is held. The composite airframe's stiffness is what makes the laser-link and boost-phase ISR axes of this evolution architecturally plausible in the first place.

The second is battle-damage repair. A combat-damaged aluminum Reaper could in principle be field-patched at a forward operating location with hand tools and a rivet gun. A combat-damaged MQ-9B with skin damage is a depot-level repair — the damaged area must be ground out, a pre-cured scarf patch fabricated to the exact local geometry and fiber orientation, and the assembly vacuum-bag hot-bonded (or autoclave-cured) under controlled conditions. Field kits for minor composite damage exist; structural battle-damage repair does not transition to expeditionary bases cleanly. This is a real constraint on the Agile Combat Employment dispersal concept and one that argues for theater-level composite depot capacity at Kadena, Andersen, or an allied MRO partner.

The third is retrofit modification. Cutting new access panels, adding hardpoints for new payloads, integrating a different antenna array — every one of these requires local laminate characterization, engineered stress analysis for the cutout, and often a cure cycle to embed doublers. The six-axis evolution this article argues for is not rivet-and-fly work; it means coordinated engineering changes at El Mirage and Poway flowed into a block-upgrade configuration with engineered retrofit kits executed at depot. GA-ASI's completion of full-scale MQ-9B fatigue testing in November 2025 provides the structural certification baseline — the MQ-9B equivalent of the 787's 165,000-cycle validation — that makes those modifications qualifiable against validated as-built properties. The January 2026 El Mirage expansion for MQ-9B production and testing points to the same industrial-scale infrastructure build-out that Boeing Charleston and Spirit Wichita required for the 787 program. A block upgrade rather than an evolutionary in-service modification path is the correct programmatic model.

The fourth is allied interoperability. The growing multinational MQ-9B fleet — Japan (10 MQ-9Bs plus 23 SeaGuardians by 2032), Taiwan (four on order, two delivered March 2026), India (31 more ordered), Australia, Belgium, and others — cannot all retrofit through Poway. The programmatic answer is qualified allied composite depots: established MRO partners in Australia and the UK, and the 20 January 2026 GA-ASI/Calidus MOU for co-production of MQ-9B and Gambit in the UAE. Any block-upgrade kit design must be manufacturable and installable at multiple authorized facilities, not just at Poway, and each facility must be qualified to the same BAC5430-equivalent shimming and surface-preparation discipline that Boeing imposes on 787 suppliers.

The headline tradeoff: composite construction imposes tight manufacturing and sustainment tolerances as the price of operational precision. The 787's shim-gap saga is the industry's long education in what that costs when quality discipline slips. For an aircraft whose future mission is persistent sub-microradian laser pointing to LEO, nanoTesla-level MagNav sensing, and millimeter-level antenna-to-turret sensor registration, the stiffness that makes retrofit difficult is the same stiffness that makes the evolution mission architecturally possible. But the programmatic model has to acknowledge it: the six-axis MQ-9B is not an aluminum-airframe modernization effort. It is a block-upgrade configuration baseline with depot-level retrofit flowed through a qualified multinational supply base, executed under the same composite manufacturing discipline the 787 program learned at significant cost. Nothing about that is impossible. Everything about it requires treating the airframe's manufacturing properties as a first-order constraint on the program plan.

The Third-Party Structural Spares Problem

There is a second-order programmatic consequence of the composite airframe that has not received the attention it deserves in the MQ-9B sustainment discussion, and it is cleaner to state directly: the traditional third-party Parts Manufacturer Approval (PMA) ecosystem — the distributed aftermarket that has supplied the Western fleet with aluminum structural spares since the DC-3 era — is not entering composite primary structure. Conversations with established PMA houses active in aluminum structural work reveal that these companies are explicitly choosing not to pursue PMAs for composite structural components on the new generation of airframes. That choice has concrete economic drivers that the services need to confront.

The aluminum-era PMA business model rests on pillars that do not transfer to composite primary structure. An aluminum skin panel can be reverse-engineered from dimensional inspection of the OEM part, tested for tensile and fatigue properties in standard coupon work, and demonstrated to FAA satisfaction through identicality or comparative analysis in months under 14 CFR Part 21 Subpart K. A composite structural part cannot be reverse-engineered from the finished article alone — the ply sequence, ply orientation, fiber/resin chemistry, cure cycle, void content, and as-cured dimensional tolerances are not externally observable, and each is an independent engineering variable that affects certified strength. A PMA applicant would need the OEM's proprietary design allowables database, layup drawings, and process specifications to match the OEM part, and OEMs do not share those. FAA Order 8110.48A, "Composite Aircraft Parts Approvals," codifies the substantiation framework but does not reduce its cost.

The cost itself is the second barrier. CompositesWorld noted in 2015 that "the certification of aerospace composite products for human flight is still driven by exhaustive experimental testing" and that major aircraft OEMs "spend millions of dollars and allocate thousands of man-hours annually to test and retest designs for certification." A PMA shop operating on a few percent of OEM list price cannot amortize a building-block test campaign — coupon, element, subcomponent, full-scale component — across an expected aftermarket volume that is, for a 300-airframe military fleet, inherently small. The third pillar is capital intensity: composite primary-structure fabrication requires autoclaves, automated fiber placement equipment, controlled-environment clean rooms, engineered matched tooling, and at minimum ultrasonic C-scan non-destructive inspection capability that legacy PMA houses do not operate and cannot justify building without an OEM license or a large captive repair market. The fourth is liability: a reverse-engineered aluminum bracket that fails produces contained damage; a reverse-engineered composite wing skin that delaminates in service under load is a potential hull-loss event, and the insurance and legal exposure reflects that.

The industry response has been concentration rather than distribution. Composite primary-structure work gets done by a small number of vertically-integrated specialty houses — Comtek (a Latécoère subsidiary, operating as both Approved Maintenance Organization and Design Approval Organization), HAECO Composite Services, Evans Composites, DAS Aviation with its dual onsite autoclaves, and a handful of others — generally as repair organizations with in-house DERs, rather than through the diffuse PMA ecosystem that sustained aluminum-era fleets. The Commercial Aircraft Composite Repair Committee, founded in 1991 by consolidating A4A, IATA, and SAE repair task forces, standardized composite repair practice but explicitly did not create a replacement-parts manufacturing pathway. These are repair shops. They are not structural-spares suppliers. The market segment that would sell you a third-party MQ-9B wing skin essentially does not exist in the composite era, and — as your industry contacts are confirming — the companies that could in principle enter it are deliberately staying out.

The military sustainment consequences are significant. Since Desert Storm, the Air Force has relied on a healthy aftermarket PMA ecosystem to handle surge demand during combat attrition. When MQ-9A losses over Iraq and Afghanistan drove up replacement demand, third-party PMA shops absorbed a meaningful fraction of the aluminum-structure spares load. When Epic Fury attrition is backfilled with composite MQ-9Bs, that surge capacity vanishes unless GA-ASI Poway/El Mirage, or a licensed allied co-producer under an arrangement like the January 2026 GA-ASI/Calidus MOU, builds it. A sustained high-tempo campaign with significant composite-airframe attrition would bottleneck on OEM production capacity in a way that aluminum-era operations did not. This is a fundamentally different sustainment posture from anything the services have operated under before.

The historical analogy worth drawing is the B-52 sustainment model, which has kept Boeing's 1950s-era heavy bomber flyable for seven decades and is projected to carry it through 2050 under the current Commercial Engine Replacement Program. Kelly Air Force Base — now Port San Antonio — has been the B-52 sustainment hub for most of that period, and the work includes cases where Boeing's original engineering drawings for specific components were lost or never fully preserved (Boeing's own B-52 program materials acknowledge that the aircraft was "designed with pencils and paper in the 1950s"). For aluminum structural spares in that situation, the solution was straightforward: engineering services contractors based at or near Kelly — including CACI's San Antonio operation — reverse-engineered replacement parts from surviving articles using dimensional inspection, metallurgical analysis, and coupon testing, substantiated them under PMA or equivalent government procurement pathways, and kept the fleet in the air. That business existed because the underlying aluminum parts could be reverse-engineered at all. Composite primary structure on an MQ-9B retained through 2050 would offer no comparable pathway if GA-ASI's original engineering data for a given production lot is ever lost — through corporate restructuring, archive obsolescence, proprietary format decay, or any of the mundane ways engineering records disappear over decades. You cannot rebuild a composite wing skin from dimensional inspection of the surviving article. The ply sequence, orientation, fiber/resin chemistry, and cure history are internal to the part and invisible to external measurement. The B-52's aluminum structure has been the single cleanest case study in long-horizon Western military aircraft sustainment precisely because aluminum forgives the loss of the engineering data package in a way composite primary structure does not. A closer recent precedent is the F-117 program, which operated under exactly this constraint for a different reason — specialty coatings and stealth geometry requirements meant only Lockheed Skunk Works could produce structural replacements, and wartime attrition was expensive in consequence. The 787 and A350 created that same concentrated-supply dynamic across the widebody commercial fleet. The MQ-9B brings it into the MALE unmanned sustainment model. Fleet planners across the allied MQ-9B operators — the US Air Force, US Marines, UK RAF, Japan (with its planned 33-aircraft fleet), Australia, Belgium, Taiwan, India — will have to confront that the composite-airframe choice that enables the six-axis evolution also binds them to a narrower, OEM-concentrated supply base than any Western tactical aircraft program that relied on a healthy third-party aftermarket. No amount of FAA rule-making will conjure a PMA market the economics do not support. The policy answer, if there is one, lies in deliberately standing up licensed allied composite-structure production through arrangements like Calidus, funded OEM capacity expansion through DPA Title III investments, mandated long-term archival of as-built engineering data packages against future sustainment needs, and forward-deployed theater depot composite capability with enough captive autoclave and AFP equipment to handle surge loads in the Indo-Pacific. None of this is in any published MQ-9B program plan the open literature has made visible. The composite-spares constraint is real, it is going to bite, and the time to address it is before the next Epic Fury rather than after.

Programmatics: A Block Upgrade, Not a Hope

Most of this is already funded somewhere in the defense enterprise. M-code EGI is certified and available. Quantum MagNav is under DARPA and DIU contract. LAC-12 is a marketed product; the Tranche 1 mesh is on orbit. JASSM/LRASM/JSM integration is GA-ASI-funded and underway. PELE is flying. Autonomy software is mature across TacACE, Hivemind, and Collins Aerospace's Sidekick (which flew the YFQ-42A's first semi-autonomous mission on 13 February 2026 under the Autonomy Government Reference Architecture). On 20 April 2026, GA-ASI was selected by NAVAIR PMA-281 for the Collaborative Autonomy Mission Planning and Debrief (CAMP) project targeting a 2026 Fleet exercise demonstration.

What is missing is the integrating authority — a single Air Force Life Cycle Management Center program that pulls the six axes into a coherent MQ-9B Block upgrade with a named configuration baseline, a flight-test schedule, and a fleet retrofit timeline. Retired Brig. Gen. Houston Cantwell and Douglas Birkey argued in Air & Space Forces Magazine on 20 April 2026 that the Air Force should backfill Epic Fury's combat losses with advanced MQ-9Bs rather than continue drawdown to 140 aircraft by 2035 — "the MQ-9B production line is hot, so the time to buy is now." The correct version of that argument is sharper: buying more of the same MQ-9A Block 5 configuration re-runs the Iran attrition curve. Buying MQ-9B airframes with the six-axis evolution baseline makes the Reaper the platform the Pacific campaign actually requires.

A Hypothetical 2028 Pacific Mission

Three MQ-9B SkyGuardians launch from dispersed Agile Combat Employment sites in the First Island Chain under single-operator control, autonomous takeoff and land. LAC-12 pods come online at altitude, linking through Tranche 1 to Mission Delta 9 at Vandenberg. Quantum MagNav holds position against pervasive PLA GPS spoofing inside the A2/AD bubble. SkyGuardian A transits to a 200-nm hold point east of the Strait, Lynx running CCD on coastal TEL hide sites at 3-hour intervals; SWIR cross-cues the moment a plume is detected. Track data pushes through the optical mesh to an SM-6-equipped destroyer in the Philippine Sea and to HBTSS for handoff to Glide Phase Interceptor fire-control. SkyGuardian B releases four PELEs at the ADIZ boundary to geolocate emitters; PELE returns compressed ELINT over LAC-12. SkyGuardian C, SeaGuardian variant, dispenses sonobuoys over a known PLA submarine transit lane; data is processed onboard and passed to a P-8 on combat air patrol 400 nm south via Link 16. At hour 28, all three aircraft are relieved by the next wave, continuing unbroken coverage. No crewed asset was exposed to a SAM ring. No GPS-jammed Reaper lost lock. The kill chain closed at the speed of light.

The Choice

Every mid-life platform faces this decision. The F-16 chose to evolve through a half-dozen block upgrades and is still the most-produced Western fighter in service. The B-52 chose to evolve through a series of engine and avionics programs and will fly into the 2050s. The P-3 chose not to, and was replaced. The MQ-9 is at that decision point now. It can be allowed to decline into an increasingly specialized counterterrorism asset, drawn down to 140 airframes and quietly retired behind the CCA curtain by the mid-2030s. Or it can be evolved — rigorously, on a program of record, across the six axes this article describes — into the distributed sensor-and-shooter node the Pacific campaign actually requires.

The argument for the latter is that every element is demonstrated. The ALCoS and LINCS air-to-space laser links are closed. The SDA Tranche 1 mesh is operational. The quantum MagNav is flying. The M-code EGI is certified. The PELE is announced. The JASSM/LRASM/JSM integration is active engineering. The F-22/MQ-20, F-35/CCA, and P-8/SeaGuardian teaming demonstrations are in the books. The MQ-9B production line is hot. The Indo-Pacific sensor web is expanding month by month across allies.

Epic Fury, read closely, is not the epitaph of the MQ-9. It is the calibration trial — the brutal field test that identified which architectural assumptions no longer hold. The ones that held — endurance, modularity, open architecture, production maturity, allied interoperability, the specific SWaP envelope that made ALCoS possible and that LAC-12 now exploits — are precisely the ones that matter for tomorrow. Evolution, not retirement, is the defensible programmatic path. The aircraft designed around Honeywell triple redundancy and a Ku-band pipe to fight the last war can be evolved into the aircraft designed around laser links, quantum sensors, launched effects, and standoff missiles to fight the next one. The window to decide is measured in the budget cycles between now and 2028. The aircraft to evolve are on the ramp.

"Seabirds achieve unbelievably efficient navigation, even from places they have not previously visited, and do so without the help of satellites."
— Dr. Ollie Padget, University of Liverpool, 23 March 2026

The seabird project at York and Liverpool is the deeper frame. Evolution worked not by building one exquisite compass but by weighting many ordinary cues. The Pacific campaign that is coming will be won by the same principle — distributed sensors, layered links, redundant navigation references, human commanders routing authority through autonomous sub-elements, and an architecture that degrades gracefully under attack rather than collapsing. The MQ-9B, evolved, is one of those cues. Not the center of the architecture. One node in it. That is a defensible, funded, achievable future. It is also the only one on offer that does not require waiting for the next airframe to fix a problem the services have today.

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57. CompositesWorld. "Boeing conducts inspections of 787 composite inner fuselage skin" (Toray T800S/3900-series prepreg; AFP; Boeing Process Specification BAC5430 for resin-bonded laminated shims), Jan 2021. https://www.compositesworld.com/news/boeing-conducts-inspections-of-787-composite-inner-fuselage-skin
58. The Air Current. "Boeing yanks eight 787s from service over structural issue" (predictive shimming / laser-scan-to-robotic-fabrication methodology), Aug 2020. https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/boeing-pulls-eight-787s-from-service-over-structural-issue/
59. PPRuNe Forums. "Tech Deep Dive: Boeing 787 fuselage shimming issues" — compilation of Aviation Week coverage including Steve Chisholm 165,000-cycle composite fatigue quote and BAC5430 reference. https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/658885-tech-deep-dive-boeing-787-fuselage-shimming-issues.html
60. Federal Aviation Administration. "Parts Manufacturer Approval (PMA)" — 14 CFR Part 21 Subpart K framework; FAA Order 8110.48A "Composite Aircraft Parts Approvals." https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/design_approvals/pma
61. FAA Order 8110.42B. "Parts Manufacturer Approval Procedures" — design and production approval requirements for aftermarket aircraft parts. https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Order/Order_8110.42B.pdf
62. CompositesWorld. "Accelerating the certification process for aerospace composites" — OEM-level certification cost barriers; exhaustive-testing-driven certification costs millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours per design. https://www.compositesworld.com/columns/accelerating-the-certification-process-for-aerospace-composites
63. "A Multi-Industry Perspective to Composite Repairs." Applied Composite Materials, Jun 2025 — Commercial Aircraft Composite Repair Committee (CACRC, founded 1991); bonded repair size limits on 787 primary structure; NDT limitations for adhesive bond strength. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10443-025-10351-3
64. Aviation Maintenance Magazine. "Aviation Composite Repair: An Essential Core Competency" (Evans Composites, HAECO Composite Services, Vallair — industry concentration into vertically-integrated specialty houses), Oct 2025. https://avm-mag.com/aviation-composite-repair-an-essential-core-competency
65. Comtek Advanced Structures. Corporate capability description (Latécoère subsidiary, AMO and DAO credentials, composite primary and secondary structure repair beyond SRM limits). https://www.comtekadvanced.com/
66. FAA. "Boeing 787-8 Design, Certification, and Manufacturing Systems Review" — Critical Systems Review Team report, 2014 (composite primary structure novelty assessment; manufacturing challenges in business model). https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/plans_reports/787_Report_Final.pdf
67. San Antonio Report. "San Antonio's Boeing facility gets boost from upgrading B-52s" — Port San Antonio (formerly Kelly AFB) B-52 radar modernization; Boeing's acknowledgment that the B-52 "was first designed with pencils and paper in the 1950s"; $2.8 billion modernization program. https://sanantonioreport.org/b52s-boeing-port-san-antonio-upgrade-air-force/
68. KSAT. "Port San Antonio among work sites for Boeing's $2B contract for B-52 engine program," 31 Dec 2025 — Commercial Engine Replacement Program sustainment work. https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2025/12/31/port-san-antonio-among-work-sites-for-boeings-2b-contract-for-b-52-engine-program/

Future Force Design · Reframed analysis replacing prior "Breaking Point" and "Second Life" treatments