You need to fix alarming mission-capability rates and rising sustainment costs for the Air Force’s F-35A fighter jet, senators told the service’s chief-of-staff nominee on Thursday. “The F-35 remains the most advanced fighter in the world, but too many of them are sitting idle on ramps. The readiness rates of our aircraft continue to fall short of Pentagon goals. This is known on this side of the ocean and around the world,” Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, said during Thursday’s hearing. “The Air Force cannot protect power if its most advanced fighter cannot get off the ground.” The warning was directed at Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, the former head of Air Combat Command and Pacific Air Forces, who was nominated last month to serve as the service’s top uniformed leader.

The current Air Force chief of staff, Gen. David Allvin, unexpectedly announced in August that he would retire, effective in November, after his ties to a massive reorganization effort focused on China seemingly broke with the Pentagon’s renewed homeland focus. Wilsbach was not questioned by lawmakers about Allvin’s sudden departure and was not heavily grilled on the Trump administration’s domestic deployment of the National Guard or ongoing military actions against alleged drug-runners. Senators mainly focused on technical problems facing the Air Force—and in particular, the F-35’s parts and maintenance problems. F-35 maker Lockheed Martin has regularly delivered the jets late and without necessary upgrades, according to a Government Accountability Office report released last month. Between 2019 and 2023, mission-capable rates for the fifth-generation fighter have floated between 71 and 51 percent while sustainment costs ballooned, another GAO report found last year. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the SASC’s ranking member, told Wilsbach that idle F-35s need to get flying because pilots sitting “around in a simulator all day” will harm aviator retention. Wilsbach agreed and told the lawmakers that his service’s weapons-sustainment accounts need more money to fix the problem.

“We definitely have to invest in those accounts so that the parts are on the shelves when the aircraft flies,” the general said. “The problem with the F-35 is now they have to wait for the part to be shipped…All that time where it’s sitting waiting for that part is downtime where we can’t use the aircraft to train.” The 2026 defense budget working through the cogs of Congress would allow for the purchase of 47 F-35s, including two dozen A-models for the Air Force. The massive defense-focused reconciliation spending bill passed this summer included no additional funding for the F-35. Discretion for implementing those funds ultimately falls to the Defense Department. When asked by Wicker if Wilsbach would “carry out congressional intent” with reconciliation funds, the general declined to explicitly answer and said he “will carry out the funding in accordance with the law” and “will strive to do my best.”

One of the major efforts led by Allvin and former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall was a sweeping organizational shift for great power competition, an influx of increased strategy and spending focused on countering China. Wilsbach did not commit to continuing these reoptimization efforts. He did acknowledge during questioning by Sens. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, and Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., that China was a threat to national security and worth further investment from the committee. Mirroring comments made by Air Force Secretary Troy Meink last month, Wilsbach stated in submitted written answers to lawmakers’ policy questions that both the homeland and the Pacific would be prioritized. “Homeland Defense is our top priority. At the same time, our Service needs to be able to project power into critical regions to prevent wars when possible, or to win them if and when we must,” Wilsbach wrote in the document. “The Air Force must deliberately preserve our high-end readiness for the nation’s most consequential challenges, such as that posed by China in the Western Pacific.”

When asked outside of his hearing Thursday morning if he planned to support those past reoptimization efforts, Wilsbach said, “That’s outside of my lane,” and added that it is Meink’s decision to make. “I’ve had some private conversations,” the general said, and said he wouldn’t be sharing details of those talks with reporters.

Much has been made of how “the tank is dead,” Matthew Dooley, defense strategic initiatives lead at autonomy company Forterra, said during a presentation at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Future Force Capabilities Conference and Exhibition. However, “until we come up with some other technical solution that’s able to destroy the enemy by means of maneuver, firepower and shock effect in a protected fashion and retain terrain,” you will continue to see tanks on the battlefield, said Dooley, a former armored cavalry officer in the Army.

Attacking tanks with armed aerial drones is one approach, but whether it’s their armor, an active protection system or other counter-UAS capabilities, there are a number of ways to make it “hard for a UAV to do what it needs to do, regardless of the size of the payload it’s carrying,” he said. Currently, it takes between 10 to 22 first-person view drones to take out one tank, he added. A tank is weakest if you can get something in close enough proximity “where it can’t see something on the ground,” Dooley said — not a large ground robot, but “something in the size of a professional RC car.” Companies are already exploring such a solution, he said. For example, something the size of Swarmbotics AI’s approximately 70-pound FireAnt unmanned ground vehicle would be “big enough to get over terrain but small enough to get underneath the suppressive fire capability of either the coaxial machine gun in the turret or the commander’s machine gun up top.” Operating small armed ground robots in concert with aerial drones “creates multiple dilemmas” for an adversary, Dooley said.

“The only thing I feared as a tanker is the idea of a [Family of Scatterable Mines] minefield: something suddenly deployed in front of me from a family of deployable … munitions where there wasn’t a minefield before,” he said. “The only thing I think scarier than that is the idea of a mobile minefield.” A group of ground robots “that has the capability to destroy me like a mine from underneath where I’m most vulnerable, but it moves to where I am. And if I don’t go that way, it can relocate again and relocate again, deny terrain and deny me the flexibility of being able to be dismissive about a minefield, because that suite of solutions coming at me has the ability to follow me and compensate for tactical decisions I make — that’s the idea,” he said.

The Army is currently developing a requirement for a family of consumable combat robots that have a range of 120 kilometers, can reach a top speed of 60 kilometers per hour and a large variant of which that can carry up to 50 kilograms of explosives, according to Dooley. “Whether or not that’s technologically achievable or not remains for us to determine, but clearly the U.S. military is looking at what’s happened in Ukraine,” where “the Russians have lost anywhere between 4,000 to 12,000 tanks, and probably five times that number of other armored fighting vehicles and wheeled vehicles,” he said. The one challenge with the “mobile minefield” concept is that such small ground robots lack the ability to get to the battlefield themselves, Dooley said. “UAVs can fly; UGVs have to be moved into a position where they can strike.”

One solution is to have larger unmanned ground vehicles carry the small robots into position, like an aircraft carrier carrying airplanes, he said. Forterra is working on autonomy solutions for larger platforms, Dooley noted — most recently collaborating with BAE Systems to prototype an autonomous Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle.

we’re gonna get vulture bikes too?!

If you can get the smaller robots to the frontlines, they offer a reconfigurable solution that can do not only anti-tank but also anti-vehicle and anti-personnel missions, and one that “gives you the ability to scale cheaply,” he said. “These things, even if they’re made in the United States from parts made in Taiwan configured together, are no more than about $500 to $800 depending on the size and the capability,” he said. “Strip off all the toy mechanisms, and you’ve got a fairly robust chassis that has a global supply chain, achievable scale, and we’ve already got … the availability of commercial-produced, military-grade explosives that at scale and reasonable cost could be used as a payload for this solution,” he said.

José Jerí, a 39-year-old lawyer, was sworn in early this morning as Peru’s new president, replacing the ousted Dina Boluarte, and will serve for less than nine months.

Upon taking the oath of office as transitional president, Jerí promised an administration “of empathy and broad-based national reconciliation” in a situation he described as “one of constant political crisis, governments that do not finish their terms, weakened institutions, and a weary citizenry.”

He announced immediate action against “the evil that afflicts us,” public insecurity, and identified criminal organizations as enemies that must be defeated.

Jerí stated that the country can count on the National Police and the Armed Forces for this war, and that the commitment of all state institutions is needed to win the fight against crime.

He also saluted the young people of the Generation Z movement, who are holding anti-government marches demanding change “with just cause.”

Jerí did not immediately assume the presidency because Congressman Quito requested that the board of directors he presided over be censured in order to change its members and elect a new one by consensus, as the majority parties need their demands to be addressed.

The right-wing majority that decided Jerí’s election as head of Congress rejected Quito’s motion, after which the new leader was able to be sworn into office.

The current transitional president entered Congress in the 2021 general elections as a substitute for former president Martín Vizcarra, whose seat he assumed after Vizcarra’s election was annulled due to corruption charges.

On the other hand, the outgoing president delivered a message to the country on state television, expressing her disagreement with her removal from office, which she said did not comply with due process. Given that she was no longer president, the broadcast was cut off.