It took 45 days to rush drone defenses to CENTCOM. That’s no longer good enough: Army vice chief

In the days after Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, U.S. troops in the Middle East began to endure near-daily drone attacks . It took six weeks to get upgraded counter-drone weapons to those far-flung outposts, the Army’s vice chief of staff said Tuesday—and the service’s procurement folks thought that was a win.

To make it happen, Gen. James Mingus said, the service had to reprogram funds destined for the Raytheon Coyote Block 2+ to the Block C variant because each of those variants was a different line of funding in the defense budget.

“It took 45 days, and everybody was patting themselves on the back…because normally that's a multi-month kind of process,” Mingus told an audience at the AUSA annual meeting in Washington, D.C. “If you're a kid at Tower 22 , you're looking a