The wing said the deployment, in support of the Air Force Weapons Instructor Course, produced “a historical milestone, dropping live bombs from operational F-15EXs for the first time.”

The images show jets on the ramp and in the air on Aug. 27, some carrying a live 500-pound Mk-82 on the centerline station and others carrying an AN/AAQ-33 Sniper targeting pod. The Air Force has not said how many bombs were dropped.

The unit first dropped inert bombs in May at Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho. The wing announced in July it dropped 24 BDU-50s in the 500-pound class and 12 BDU-56s in the 2,000-pound class, all concrete-filled practice bombs, across 10 missions.

The Mountain Home drops were the first of any kind by an operational F-15EX unit.

The 142nd flew the F-15C, an air-superiority fighter, before receiving the Air Force’s first operational F-15EX in June 2024. Three of the unit’s pilots already had air-to-ground experience and built a compressed syllabus for the rest of the wing’s pilots.

A small group of loaders with prior bomb-loading experience became certified to load bombs on F-15Es at Nellis earlier this year, then trained the loaders who went to Mountain Home.

The wing’s July statement said live-bombing at Nellis would follow as the next step toward the unit becoming air-to-ground mission capable.

“It’s about building a dynamic and versatile organization, and we are just getting started,” Col. Joshua Hovanas, commander of the 142nd Operations Group, said in a statement.

The Eagle II is rated for a 29,500-pound payload and can carry up to a dozen air-to-air missiles. The jets photographed at Nellis flew without conformal fuel tanks, which carry additional weapons stations.

The planned F-15EX fleet has grown since a fiscal 2023 budget request proposed capping the buy at 80 aircraft. In April, the service said it now plans a fleet of 267.

Lt. Gen. Christopher Niemi, the Air Force’s chief modernization officer, told reporters at the Pentagon that a follow-on was already under discussion as the MQ-9 aged out.

“Although we have plenty of MQ-9As today, we are going through them at a rate that is concerning to us,” he said, according to Breaking Defense, which covered the briefing.

Defense Daily reported that Air Force Secretary Troy Meink directed the acceleration, and that the fiscal 2031 target of 20 mission-ready aircraft could be pulled forward by about two years.

In May, Lt. Gen. David Tabor told the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Airland the fleet was down to about 135 aircraft, roughly 54 below the service’s 189-aircraft floor. Niemi did not update the inventory.

Backfilling the fleet is difficult. General Atomics shut down MQ-9A production in 2025, and Tabor said the service was pursuing a short-term buy of existing MQ-9A airframes in fiscal 2026. Niemi said Sept. 3 that budget constraints make buying a large number of upgraded MQ-9B SkyGuardians unrealistic. It is a misconception, he said, that the Air Force could write a check and take delivery of 100 aircraft.

A Congressional Research Service Insight updated May 13 cited an April 9 news report of 24 Reapers lost since military operations against Iran began in February, and said it was unclear whether the Pentagon had given Congress an accounting. The Washington Post reported Aug. 13, citing three U.S. officials, that at least 45 had been lost, roughly 25% of the fleet.

Niemi signed requirements in May for a cheaper, modular, mass-producible aircraft.

That program, Massed Modular Aircraft, or MMA, opened as a Defense Innovation Unit competition July 7 with the Air Force as partner. The solicitation, which closed July 23, asked for a drone that could fly Reaper-class strike, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, electronic warfare and communications-relay missions cheaply enough to absorb losses. It called for at least 2,800 pounds of payload and an 8,000-nautical-mile one-way ferry range.

That is the aircraft Niemi now prices against Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA. He put CCA air vehicles near $20 million and MMA at about half that, Defense Daily reported.

An Air Force spokesperson said those figures are for the air vehicle only, not a fully missionized aircraft, according to Breaking Defense. In May, Niemi told senators a Reaper with a full sensor package can cost up to $50 million. At the Sept. 3 briefing, he said the Air Force will probably field at least 180 MMA drones.

Niemi argued the Reaper’s value is not the airframe.

“What makes the MQ-9 special has nothing to do with the aircraft itself,” he said, calling its speed, altitude and range decades-old technology.

Initial MMA versions, he said, will rely on proven technology rather than new systems to hit the price. He described a long-aspect-wing turboprop in the “4,000 miles-type class,” farther and heavier than a CCA but slower. Officials did not say how that class relates to the 8,000-nautical-mile ferry range in the July notice.

General Atomics is bidding a design it calls Wildfire, first reported by Aviation Week in August. Spokesman C. Mark Brinkley told Air & Space Forces Magazine it “meets every wish on the [MMA] list and exceeds most of them,” but declined to give capabilities or cost. The company has not released images.

Brinkley told The War Zone in August that treating MMA as a Reaper replacement misses the immediate need for a backfill. Wildfire does not depend on winning the competition, he said, and “we can deliver Wildfires years earlier than the current schedule.”

He framed the design targets as considerations rather than specs, among them a 10,000-nautical-mile ferry range, four Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles and 100 aircraft under semi-autonomous control.

Col. Todd Dye, senior materiel leader in the Air Force’s medium-altitude intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance division, said awards for MMA concept refinement were expected in the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Breaking Defense reported.

Officials did not announce a new date at the Sept. 3 briefing.

The study, “Breaking Glass, Missing Hands,” asks how quickly the country could replace satellites and supporting systems lost early in a protracted conflict. It sets the benchmark for reconstitution, the term for restoring lost capability, at 12 to 24 months, a pace much more demanding than the decade or so the report says it typically takes to replace an aging satellite.

The study examines whether the space defense industrial base could meet that timeline between 2027 and 2032. The authors argue that existing workforce gaps could take years to close, putting a 12-to-24-month timeline out of reach.

Gen. Michael Guetlein, now the Golden Dome director, sponsored the study while serving as vice chief of space operations. RAND Project AIR FORCE conducted it as part of a fiscal 2024 project titled “In Emergency, Break Glass,” with Alexandra Gerber as lead author.

Researchers analyzed federal labor and education statistics from October 2024 through March 2025, and interviewed industry representatives and education administrators from May through July 2025.

The report divides the space-supporting workforce into three categories.

The first is engineers who design and test space systems. Nearly 3 million Americans work as engineers in jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher, but only about 3% of them work in industries RAND counted as supporting space: satellite communications, semiconductors and nonmetallic mineral product manufacturing that produces optical glass. RAND calls that grouping a subset of the space industrial base. Aerospace manufacturing was not included.

RAND estimates that those three counted industries account for only about 7,000 of 208,000 annual engineering job openings, noting that the space sector has little leverage against employers in the artificial intelligence, software and data analytics sectors that pay more and offer more flexible work environments.

The second category is “skilled touch labor,” the technicians and assemblers who physically build spacecraft. Using 2023 Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, researchers estimated about 30,000 annual openings for technicians, while only about 11,000 people earn the necessary qualifications each year.

For assemblers, including cleanroom technicians, they found about 244,000 annual openings with just 13,000 credentialed workers each year, a gap of 19 to 1. The space industry accounts for a small share of that demand, but it competes for the same pool as semiconductor manufacturers.

The third category takes the longest to build: specialists who advance infrared and electro-optical detection, and engineers who design systems to survive natural and man-made radiation. Qualified candidates hold master’s or doctoral degrees, and the expertise can take 15 years or more to develop.

Few schools offer advanced degrees in laser and optical engineering, and most specialists come up through electrical or computer engineering programs instead. Of recent doctorates in those fields, 70% went to foreign nationals, the report says, shrinking the pool eligible for classified work.

Security clearances slow hiring even further. In fiscal 2024, initial Secret investigations averaged more than 87 days while Top Secret cases took nearly six months, according to a Trusted Workforce 2.0 progress report RAND cites.

Separately, interviewees said even fully credentialed workers can take up to a year to become productive, and the report notes that cleanrooms and secure work areas cap how fast plants can absorb new hires.

Those interviewed described the central problem as “surging from zero.” Without steady production between contracts, specialized skills atrophy and experienced workers leave, taking with them the institutional knowledge needed to scale. RAND says writing surge-planning requirements into future contracts would help companies prepare to expand before a crisis.

Researchers found no consensus that emergency mobilization would work. Defense Production Act authorities could pull workers from other industries, but interviewees questioned whether that is feasible given security clearances, certifications and domain expertise.

RAND recommends roughly $5 million a year for scholarships, internships and academic outreach, plus an $800,000 study on whether workers from other fields could be retrained for surge production.

The report also suggests advocating for the expansion of the National Imperative for Industrial Skills program and evaluating the Navy’s Talent Pipeline Program as a model for the trades.

Another proposal would let Reserve Officers’ Training Corps graduates satisfy service obligations by working at qualifying space firms, and would extend the same option to SMART scholarship recipients now committed to civilian Defense Department jobs.

RAND assigns the policy lead to the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, arguing workforce capacity is a supply-chain and production risk, not an internal Space Force staffing issue.

Interviewees pointed to hiring pipelines and faster clearances, rarely mentioning robotics, process automation or AI as a way to cut the labor hours per satellite. RAND did not independently assess whether automation is feasible, but flags that absence as a gap in reconstitution planning.

Most space producers run at volumes too low to justify the investment in automation, though RAND argues a reconstitution surge could change that math.

Designated F-15 Eagle Crest, the Aug. 24 award lets the Air Force place orders over time rather than buying a fixed number of aircraft at signing. Orders may run through Aug. 24, 2031, with an option to extend to 2036. The framework rolls new production, upgrades, retrofits, sustainment and depot support into a single contract for the Air Force, the Air National Guard and foreign buyers.

The contract also covers work to stand up organic depot maintenance, so Air Force depots can perform their own heavy overhauls instead of relying solely on Boeing. Boeing will perform the work in St. Louis. The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, is the contracting activity.

The award does not commit the government to spend the entire $131.23 billion; it caps what the Air Force may order over the life of the contract. Only $343,740 in fiscal 2026 for research, development, test and evaluation funds was obligated at award.

The notice does not include an order for any jets. For comparison, when the same office awarded Lockheed Martin a 10-year, $62 billion contract for new F-16 exports in August 2020, it issued a $4.94 billion order for 90 jets the same day.

The Aug. 24 notice says the contract involves foreign military sales to Japan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia and Poland. Indonesia and Poland do not currently fly the F-15.

Israel is already buying F-15s from the same St. Louis line. The F-15EX Modernized Selected Acquisition Report issued with the fiscal 2027 budget says a Dec. 29, 2025, agreement covers 25 F-15IA aircraft, with an option for 25 more, at $8.58 billion. The report says that the buy “stabilizes the lower-tier supply chain and extends the active manufacturing life of the F-15EX production line.”

The same report raises the U.S. F-15EX buy to 268 aircraft through fiscal 2031, up from a baseline of 98, and says the larger buy will force a refresh of the radar, mission computer, electronic warfare suite and engines.

The report also says the program will miss its July 2027 full operational capability date, or FOC, after a 15-week strike at Boeing’s St. Louis plant from Aug. 4 to Nov. 17, 2025, “compounded by the prime contractor’s subsequent failure to meet production recovery goals.”

The mitigation steps include “a re-evaluation of the FOC definition,” meaning the service is weighing a change to how it measures the milestone it is about to miss.

The U.S. payload rode a Japanese H3 rocket from Tanegashima Space Center. It is the second and final sensor in the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System-Hosted Payload program, the first national security space partnership of its kind between the United States and Japan, according to a recent release.

The new payload will deliver near-real-time data to the Space Surveillance Network, improving the U.S. Space Force’s understanding of activities within geosynchronous orbit above the Indo-Pacific. Geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000 miles up, is where a satellite matches Earth’s rotation and remains over the same spot.

Combat Forces Command’s Mission Delta 2 will operate the sensor to identify and track objects in orbit and help operators understand potential threats or opportunities.

The Japanese QZS-7, built by Mitsubishi Electric in Kamakura, Japan, is part of a constellation that primarily augments GPS signals over Japan and the surrounding region.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory designed and built both U.S. payloads for the program. Space Force and laboratory teams worked with Japanese partners for two years to integrate and test the second sensor with its host satellite.

“The successful launch of QZS-7 is a powerful testament to the enduring strength and rapid modernization of the U.S.-Japan alliance,” Col. Bryon McClain, Space Force portfolio acquisition executive for Space Combat Power, said in the release.

“By continuing to merge our capabilities in space modernization and satellite communications, we are maintaining security in a contested space domain and fortifying our shared deterrence capabilities across the Indo-Pacific region,” he continued.

Col. Gina Peterson, deputy commander of Mission Delta 2, said the program helps the Space Force meet threats from peer adversaries and build “resilient capabilities to detect, understand, and maintain custody of objects in deep space.”

The first sensor launched in February 2025 on QZS-6. Mission Delta 2 runs both payloads through the Multi-Mission Space Operations Center/Enterprise Command and Control-Schriever enclave in Colorado.

The U.S.-Japan partnership on this program began with a December 2020 agreement between the Space Force and Japan’s National Space Policy Secretariat.

Brig. Gen. Brian Denaro, commander of U.S. Space Forces Pacific, called the alliance one of the nation’s greatest strategic advantages in the Pacific and said the program demonstrates how the two countries enhance security across the region through collaboration from design through launch.

Installed in the nose of a missile or bomb, the seeker locates the target and guides the weapon toward it. Seekers are among the most expensive parts of a guided weapon, and Boeing’s argument is that their cost is what limits how many the military can buy.

Boeing’s Ultra Low-Cost Seeker, or ULCS, is an active seeker, meaning it emits its own radar signal rather than relying on one from an aircraft or a ground station. Boeing built it largely from commercial parts adapted for military use, and it is still in development.

The company said it is looking at using the ULCS in its air and missile defense interceptors, its guided bombs and its cruise missiles, because its design allows for reuse across all three rather than requiring a different seeker for each weapon.

Boeing said the seeker is designed for strikes from the air, land or at sea, in any weather and against moving targets. The company ran several tests on the ULCS earlier this summer.

Engineers checked the sensor design in an anechoic chamber, which absorbs stray signal reflections. The seeker also flew aboard a Beechcraft 1900 over land and water, where Boeing said it found and tracked targets as expected.

At Spaceport America in New Mexico, the seeker tracked a passing drone from a fixed position on the ground. Boeing then mounted it on a rocket standing in for a missile and launched it at a second drone carrying a reflector, which bounced radar back as a full-size target would. Boeing said the seeker survived the acceleration and vibration of every test, and detected and tracked its targets each time.

Reuse across weapons is the major selling point, according to Boeing.

“We are developing ULCS with the goal of sharing a common sensor architecture across several of our programs,” said Bob Ciesla, vice president of Boeing Precision Engagement Systems. He said the seeker is modular and built to an open standard so Boeing can fit it to different weapons and change it later without redesigning it.

Boeing already builds seekers for other weapons, some of them for competitors. The company makes the active radar seeker for the Lockheed Martin PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptor and said it drew on that work for ULCS while aiming to build something cheaper for use against less sophisticated threats.

Steve Wright, Boeing’s senior manager for weapon sensors and advanced guidance, said work remains to be done.

“We still have more work to do, but the rapid testing our teams have completed prove[s] that this capability is real and will fundamentally change how we look at seeker affordability across our programs,” he said.

Boeing said its teams are studying the test data and using the results to shape the next round of work, including several flight tests in 2027 that will attempt to more closely replicate real-world scenarios.

Boeing is not alone in its attempts to exploit modularity. On Aug. 10, Lockheed Martin announced Strigo, a line of radio-frequency sensors, missile datalinks and seeker technologies built around the same modular premise, designed to serve a variety of weapons.

Boeing did not say whether its ULCS is being funded internally or attached to any existing funded weapons program. Nor did it say just how ultra-low the cost of its new seeker will be.

The airlifter, tail number 01-0194, assigned to the 445th Airlift Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was parked overnight at Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport in Texas on March 4, 2025, when severe storms and microbursts of up to 80 mph sent two private Bombardier Challenger jets careening into it.

Video shot that morning showed one of the business jets come to rest beneath the C-17’s wing. The same storm system damaged numerous aircraft at airports across the metroplex.

The collision damaged the C-17’s left-side door, fuselage and nose. The crew flew it home with a Boeing-qualified and Air Force-approved temporary nose panel and landing gear down.

Back in Ohio, maintainers repaired the door and fuselage but determined the left nose panel had to be replaced, which is where the job stalled.

Boeing was unable to find a vendor willing to build tooling for a single nose panel, according to the Air Force. After an unsuccessful repair attempt, the jet was looking at a year in storage followed by another year of repair work, sidelining one of only nine C-17s the wing counts as mission-essential.

The wing turned to the Air Force Rapid Sustainment Office (RSO), a Life Cycle Management Center division at Wright-Patterson that hunts for ways to fabricate parts the supply chain can’t deliver.

Engineers there deemed the panel a good candidate for incremental sheet forming, or ISF, in which a robot presses a flat metal sheet into shape a little at a time. Because the machine follows a digital path rather than a mold, tooling is unnecessary.

Working with the University of Dayton Research Institute, the team began production in January 2026. Boeing, along with maintainers from the wing, installed the finished panel in July, and 01-0194 took to the skies again July 30, nearly 17 months after the storm.

“This is a tremendous win for our maintenance group,” Col. Karen Gharst, the 445th Maintenance Group commander, said in a statement. “Using the ISF technology to rapidly produce an otherwise unobtainable part allowed us to avoid a prolonged work stoppage.”

The event marks the first incrementally formed part to fly on an Air Force aircraft.

Boeing closed the C-17 line in 2015, and the Air Force expects to fly the fleet into the 2070s, meaning this may not be the last time the service has to hunt for parts nobody makes anymore.

The RSO is currently working on parts for a KC-135 and an F-15.

Boeing’s BSU-111/B Payload Delivery Unit is a wing-and-turbojet engine kit that converts a 500-pound Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) into a long-range JDAM (JDAM LR) dubbed the GBU-75. The result is a gravity bomb with the reach of a cruise missile.

Boeing said it has spent nearly $100 million of its own money on the program.

“Scaling production of the GBU-75 will provide the fleet with an affordable, sustainable solution designed to eliminate long-range land and sea-based threats to U.S. and international forces,” said Bob Ciesla, vice president of Boeing Precision Engagement Systems.

The BSU-111/B wing-and-engine kit is the latest modification to the JDAM family, which has previously seen the gravity bomb receive a tail kit that steered it roughly 15 nautical miles and a wing kit that further stretched that distance to 40.

The Kratos-designed TDI-J85 engine pushes that past 300.

The JDAM LR’s capabilities go beyond land strikes. The QuickStrike Long Range mining variant pairs it with a bomb carrying a ship-tracking sensor. Boeing has shown concepts loading large numbers onto Air Force bombers, though no Air Force buy has been announced.

The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, buys JDAM for both the Air Force and U.S. Navy. The first GBU-75s are bound for the Navy.

The Navy demonstrated the weapon back in April, when Super Hornets released two JDAM LRs over the Point Mugu Sea Range off California.

The April 1 round separated cleanly, fired up its engine and flew 34 minutes before landing within meters of its target. The April 3 round added altitude changes and maneuvering. Each covered roughly 200 nautical miles.

When announcing those tests in April, Capt. Sarah Abbott, the Navy’s Precision Strike Weapons program manager, emphasized the need to give the fleet’s JDAMs greater standoff range.

“As Naval Air Forces in theater continue to rely heavily on JDAM systems, the program recognizes a critical need to provide the fleet with greater standoff range,” she said. “This new capability allows pilots to engage targets from significantly safer distances, maintaining a tactical advantage in contested environments.”

Reusing existing infrastructure is a key aspect of the program’s appeal.

Navy budget documents describe JDAM LR as a modification to the baseline program, built on the existing production line and guidance hardware. Any jet that can drop a conventional JDAM can carry the new variant without modification, according to Boeing’s release.

The award, which had not appeared in the Pentagon’s daily contract announcements as of Aug. 5, is an undefinitized action, meaning Boeing began work before the two sides agreed on a price. The Government Accountability Office has long called these contracts risky because contractors are reimbursed for allowable costs, regardless.

Boeing’s release did not say how many GBU-75s the contract buys, how much they cost or when deliveries begin.

Crews loaded concrete-filled 500-pound BDU-50s and 2,000-pound BDU-56s, built to the size and weight of the real thing, onto the Eagle II’s hardpoints. Over 10 missions, the wing dropped 36 practice bombs, twenty-four 500-pounders and twelve 2,000-pounders, achieving satisfactory scores with zero safety incidents.

Test crews at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, previously dropped bombs from an F-15EX under the 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron, but this is the first time an operational squadron has done so.

The training comes as the 142nd prepares to swap its F-15C Eagles, designed strictly for air-to-air combat, for the multi-role F-15EX. The wing received the Air Force’s first combat-ready Eagle II in June 2024, and is slated to receive 17 more.

Three of the wing’s pilots had prior air-to-ground experience, and all three had been through a nine-month course on the science of dropping bombs and associated tactics. They constructed a condensed version of that course focusing on the basics of bombing and began training the rest of the wing’s pilots.

“The team as a whole outperformed any expectations that we held and went above and beyond, and I think the results ended up speaking for themselves,” said Maj. Jesse Loya, one of the three pilots who developed the training program.

Earlier this year, members of the bomb load crew went to Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, to become certified on bomb loading using F-15E Strike Eagles. Once certified, they returned home and trained the loaders who went to Idaho.

The Air Force has said its growing F-15EX fleet will eventually replace aging F-15E Strike Eagles.

“The speed at which this wing established a completely new capability is a testament to our airmen,” said Col. Joshua Hovanas, commander of the 142nd Operations Group. “This is the first milestone on our path to becoming a premier multi-role fighter squadron.”

The wing returns to Nellis at the end of August to train with live bombs.

Introduced Monday as H.R. 9780 by Rep. Abe Hamadeh, R-Ariz., the BRRRRT Act (Bolstering Recognition, Resurgence, Retention, and Remembrance of the Thunderbolt) gets its name from the bone-rattling “BRRRRT!” sound the jet’s 30mm Gatling gun makes when fired.

Rep. Don Davis, D-N.C., is co-leading the bill. He and Hamadeh both sit on the Armed Services subcommittee that writes fighter force-structure policy, with Davis as the committee’s vice ranking member. Four Republicans also signed on as original cosponsors, including members from Georgia and Missouri, home to the last two A-10 bases.

The bill comes as the Air Force has ramped up A-10 divestment yet has not identified the aircraft that can, and will, take on the close air support and combat search and rescue missions the Warthog has assumed for decades. The service says those roles will be filled by some combination of platforms like the F-35A, F-15E and F-16.

“The A-10 has repeatedly proven itself on the battlefield, saving American lives and delivering unmatched close air support when our troops need it most,” Hamadeh said in a statement announcing the bill. “The BRRRRT Act ensures we do not retire a proven weapons system before a certified replacement exists.”

This bill is the latest move in a lengthy tug-of-war between the Air Force and lawmakers.

The Air Force began fiscal 2026 with 162 Warthogs and tried to retire them all. Congress refused, setting a floor of 103.

Following heavy A-10 involvement in Iran, including the recovery of downed F-15E aircrew, the service announced it would keep squadrons flying at Moody Air Force Base, Georgia, and Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, into 2029 and 2030, roughly 54 jets across three squadrons.

Reaching 126 aircraft would mean halting retirements already scheduled and towing aircraft back out of the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona.

The bill gives the Air Force 90 days after enactment to explain how it will restore depot work, training, sustainment and flight testing, programs that were all cut in anticipation of retiring the fleet.

The depot line at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, closed in February. The last class of new Warthog pilots graduated in April, and the Weapons School course at Nellis is winding down.

Under the bill, retiring more A-10s would become harder, as well. The defense secretary would first have to certify that a replacement is fielded and fully operational, and get that in writing from the Army secretary, the Marine Corps commandant and the head of U.S. Special Operations Command. A mission does not count as replaced, the bill says, if another aircraft picks it up as a secondary tasking.

Should the bill fail to pass, the terms could find their way into the annual defense authorization act instead, which is how the 103-jet floor came to be. Hamadeh took that route in June, placing two A-10 provisions in the House bill that reappear in the BRRRRT Act.

Editor’s note: At the time of publication, the text of H.R. 9780 had not been made public. Details of the bill are based on the July 13 Legislative Counsel draft, provided to Defense News.