US defense against ballistic missiles is psychological. To make the enemy believe that their missiles will be intercepted and that their attacks will not be effective. So part of the doctrine is to over report intercepts and under report damage to make the enemy believe their missiles are not effective.

BMD systems create an environment where threats are deterred from use of ballistic missiles by eliminating their confidence in the effectiveness of an attack.

General deterrence targets the behavior of threat actors by focusing on the credibility of defensive actions to defeat a ballistic missile attack. BMD can undermine a threat’s confidence in their ability to achieve their intended political or military objectives through missile threats or attacks. … By shaping a threat’s decisions in this way, effective defense diminishes the perceived value of ballistic missiles as tools of coercion and aggression, thus contributing to deterrence.

Some actual quotes from various documents:

https://www.glostat.com/documents-countries/united-states-strategy-for-operations-in-information-environment-soie-2023/

This strategy also describes the investments that the Department should make to improve its ability to shape the perceptions of our rivals and adversaries, which helps us influence their decisions and behaviors.

https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/display-news/Article/3992620/us-navy-operations-in-the-information-environment-oie-defined/

Navy OIE is now formally defined as “The ability to create cognitive effects to achieve deterrent and warfighting advantages by shaping adversary attitudes, beliefs. and behaviors through influence activities and public messaging paired with Navy, Joint , and combined operations and activities.”

(couldn’t find from which one this came)

Additionally, in armed conflict, we directly target the enemy’s will to fight by using aggressive disinformation and propaganda to manipulate their perceptions of self, trust in their leaders, one another, and their ability to endure the hardships of battle.

In 2025, American defense giant Lockheed Martin delivered 191 fifth-generation F-35 fighter jets to customers, an all-time record and 51 more than the 142 aircraft produced in 2021. Such production rates are truly impressive. As Lockheed Martin noted, these rates are five times higher than the production rates of any other allied fighter jet. However, Lockheed Martin does not have many competitors among other Western countries. The closest competitor is France’s Dassault Aviation, which also set a record in 2025 by producing 26 Rafale aircraft, exceeding its target by one.

At the same time, the company did not mention the main reason behind these record results. It was able to achieve them only because of a specific problem. Back in 2023, Lockheed Martin faced a problem with the Technology Refresh 3 update, and two years ago there were discussions about a potential halt in fighter jet production, which ultimately did not happen. Moreover, since the main issue was software-related, the company continued assembling aircraft, resuming deliveries only in July 2024, with the clarification that the fighters would not be combat-ready until 2025.

Thanks to this backlog, Lockheed Martin was able to deliver a record number of aircraft in 2025. The 2025 deliveries are nearly double those of 2024, when 110 aircraft were delivered despite the challenges, already up from 98 in 2023. Deliveries in 2022 and 2021 were nearly identical, at 141 and 142 F-35s, respectively.

So there were basically around 40 and 30 aircraft missing from 2023 & 2024 respectively (compared to the ≈140 yearly rate from earlier). The actual average rate hasn’t really changed with the extra 2025 deliveries…

Lockheed Martin also noted that in 2025 it expanded its export portfolio with additional orders from Italy for 25 fighter jets and from Denmark for 16 aircraft. In September last year, an agreement was reached with the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) to produce batches 18 and 19, comprising up to 296 fighter jets, for $24 billion. However, this price of only $81 million per one aircraft does not include the engine, weapons, ancillary equipment, spare parts, and services. As a result, the export price of the F-35 is significantly higher—$208 million in the case of the Czech order.

The Army’s new acquisition strategy—buy fast, in small quantities, then maybe buy a lot more—is causing headaches for at least one of the vendors working on the service’s new medium-range reconnaissance drone. Anduril is one of two firms working to produce drones that can give Army maneuver companies at least six miles of visibility for up to 30 minutes at a time, but the service’s Continuous Transformation strategy is making it tough to plan ahead for production—which may prevent the company from delivering if the Army decides to start buying the drones by the thousands. “The way the Army is approaching this now…they want flexibility and they want routine competition, because they know that we’re going to keep investing and keep improving the systems,” Jason Dickinson, general manager for the Ghost-X drone program at Anduril, told Defense One. “But because it’s a little opaque for us right now, it’s very hard to right-size your production capacity.”

The piecemeal buying strategy could also be in conflict with a recent Defense Department memo calling for the military services to treat small drones like munitions rather than aircraft, along with a call to start acquiring new technology as if the country is at war. Dickinson’s team is investing in Ghost-X production capacity based on how confident he is in where his platform stands with the Army, he said, knowing that he has one co-vendor now, but expecting that there could eventually be three or four. In 2025, that meant deploying 200 Ghost-X systems with the Army, with the expectation that another 200 would be needed this year to keep outfitted the Transformation-in-Contact brigades testing them. But beyond that, it’s a bit of a question mark. “How do I think about growing responsibly so that I can meet the needs of the Army, and also sell into other allied nations, sister services and those kinds of things?” Dickinson said.

Particularly painful, he said, is trying to figure out how to meet the Army’s sustainment needs for Ghost-X, because there’s no process in place to start procuring replacement components. In a traditional program of record, repairs and maintenance would be factored in, with a guaranteed number of years and an expected payment to give the vendor an idea of how much money to sink into a production line. “But again, for us, it’s ‘When does that start?’” Dickinson said. “We don’t know. How many are they going to buy? I don’t know.”

‘More competitive and responsive’

Army officials have stressed recently that they expect contractors to make the initial investments into developing new technology. At the same time, the Pentagon is pushing the services to turn up the volume on procurement. That’s creating tension that the government is likely going to have to solve, said Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “I mean, I know we’ve got to make numbers and live in the budget, but the government has to take the lead, I think, in a lot of cases,” Eaglen told Defense One during the State of Defense Business Acquisition Summit in November. The Army declined to make an official available to Defense One to discuss this tension. The office that oversees Army aviation acquisition provided a written statement, which said that while they are committed to “a more competitive and responsive procurement environment,” they believe their increased spending on small drones in general should reassure vendors. “The current UAS procurement strategy has obligated all appropriated funds from previous years, and the Army is prepared to accelerate the procurement of UAS when Congress appropriates FY26 funds, further establishing a consistent demand signal to industry,” said the spokesperson, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

In its 2026 budget request, the Army asked for just under $804 million to sink into its small UAS programs. Changing the budget to a capability bucket instead of line items for individual platforms is a win for more agile acquisitions, but it does leave vendors having to guess what their slice of that pie will look like. The Army’s response did not address specific questions about ramping up production capacity and supply chains to respond to sudden increased demand, or whether the service is looking into making some of these investments itself. It takes about three months to increase production capacity, Dickinson said, and twice that long to get the supply chain to meet it. “And so I have to sit here and weigh, do I invest a couple million dollars in high-tech production capabilities without knowing what the actual demand is? Am I going to get the return on that?” he said.

And once there’s floor space and technicians hired, the supply chain has to surge. “If I’m asking them to produce tens to hundreds right now, and I’m like, ‘Hey, now I need you to go to a thousand’—that’s a major step change,” he said. “And we find some suppliers, they can’t cut it, right?” So for now, it’s a guessing game. “I am leaning forward on the production and the supply chain, because I know that that boat is so long to turn,” Dickinson said. “And so I know the Army has a requirement—they have a gaping wound right now of no UAS in many, many brigades.”

A critical data source for US military suicide prevention efforts is late. The annual suicide report, which the Department of Defense typically publishes each fall, provides suicide statistics from the previous calendar year that inform Congress, researchers, and senior leaders across the services on efforts to combat military suicide, a persistent problem. The defense department is also delayed in releasing its quarterly suicide data for 2025, with the third-quarter figures still unpublished, months later than usual. Business Insider queried the Pentagon in mid-December about the anticipated release date of the annual report. “The Department has nothing to announce at this time,” a department spokesperson replied in an email. “We will follow up if anything changes.” When asked again this week why the report is delayed and when it might be published, the Pentagon did not respond. Business Insider sent a separate email query to the Defense Suicide Prevention Office, which releases the report. The office did not respond.

It is unclear whether the delay is tied to the government shutdown. Though the data is beneficial, the monthslong delay is unlikely to significantly affect research or prevention efforts, said Ron Kessler, a principal investigator on a long-term Army suicide study and a professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School. He said researchers depend more frequently on detailed data that reveals patterns and circumstances around deaths. The bigger issue is tied to accountability, public transparency, and oversight, he said. “Publishing is letting the outside world know what’s going on,” Kessler said. “And that’s useful for holding organizations accountable.” The Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs have each tried to improve suicide prevention efforts, Kessler said, highlighting a project he’s involved in that’s testing whether artificial intelligence can effectively identify people at risk of suicide. The annual reports reveal the level of progress and show where further work is needed. “It’s important for the data to be out there,” Kessler added, “not to ever be to a point where we say what’s not being shown anymore. It’s good for the public to be able to say, ‘Is the military doing a good job? What’s going on?’”

Suicide deaths among service members rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the most recent publicly available data — from calendar year 2023 — showed a small increase over the year prior. According to the Defense Suicide Prevention Office, military suicide deaths have increased gradually since 2011. The 2023 report showed that young enlisted men accounted for the largest share of suicide deaths in the US military. That mirrors broader national trends. American men are nearly four times more likely to die by suicide than women, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Firearms were involved in roughly half of all US suicide deaths in 2023, and previous military reports have repeatedly identified access to firearms as a risk factor, particularly for younger enlisted personnel. Some military leaders recently emphasized suicide prevention needs during the holiday season. In November, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll directed supervisors across the Army to conduct daily check-ins with their subordinates through mid-January. Though the initiative was initially lauded, some supervisors and troops online have described the mandatory directive as unintentionally burdensome.

The broader Pentagon reporting delays coincide with certain organizational changes inside the Army. A September Army memo highlighted plans to disband its directorate responsible for overseeing soldier quality-of-life issues, known as a G-9, citing “administrative convenience.” The responsibilities of that office have since been folded into the service’s human resources directorate. Army spokeswoman Heather J. Hagan confirmed the change to Business Insider on Thursday, adding that the service remains committed to troop and family quality of life. It is unclear how the change may affect oversight of soldier well-being or how suicide prevention priorities are being evaluated, as the Pentagon’s annual suicide data remains unpublished.