Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo has officially been named as director of the Space Development Agency and the new portfolio acquisition executive for Space Force’s missile warning and tracking programs, the agency announced Tuesday.
Previously SDA’s deputy director, Sandhoo has been leading the agency as acting director since September 2025, when Derek Tournear stepped down from the role. In the last few months, Sandhoo has overseen SDA begin the highly anticipated launch campaign of its foundational program — the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA).
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“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” — Admiral James Stockdale, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his leadership after spending seven years as a POW in Vietnam.
The U.S. Navy’s new Trump-class BBG(X) nuclear-powered battleship will cost roughly $17 billion per hull and displace between 30,000 and 40,000 tons, making it the largest American surface combatant since World War II. The Navy plans 15 ships between fiscal years 2028 and 2055. Early concept material referenced approximately 128 vertical launch cells plus 12 Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic tubes.
Navy leadership’s recent decision to make the future Trump-class battleship nuclear-powered introduced a new twist in the saga of one of the service’s most controversial programs.
President Donald Trump unveiled his vision for the platform in December when officials shared their desires to arm the vessel with a variety of high-tech weapons such lasers, railguns, hypersonic missiles and nukes.
The Pentagon plans to spend more than $17 billion on the lead ship in the class, according to budget documents released last month.
Earlier this year, Chief of Naval Operations Adm.
On September 26, 1983, Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on the midnight shift at the Serpukhov-15 command center when his early warning satellite reported five American intercontinental ballistic missiles inbound. Protocol required him to relay the warning to Moscow, which would have launched a full Soviet ICBM retaliation. Petrov refused. He reasoned that a real American strike would involve hundreds of missiles, not five. He waited 23 minutes. Nothing hit. It was later determined the satellite had mistaken sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds for missile exhaust.
On June 7, 1981, Israel launched Operation Opera. Eight F-16s and six F-15s flew more than 1,000 kilometers at low altitude across Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq to reach the French-built Osirak nuclear reactor outside Baghdad. The aircraft dropped 16 bombs and destroyed the reactor in minutes. Ten Iraqis and one French engineer were killed. Every Israeli pilot came home. The raid established what became known as the Begin Doctrine — Israel would not allow a hostile regional power to acquire nuclear weapons.
The Pentagon plans to procure 10,000 low-cost cruise missiles and 12,000 hypersonic missiles between 2027 and 2029 — a wartime-style scaling effort driven by lessons from Operation Epic Fury, where U.S. stand-off weapon stockpiles drained faster than the industrial base could refill them. The new Low-Cost Containerized Munitions program will fire from shipping-container launchers modeled on the Navy’s Mk 70. Anduril’s Barracuda-500M, Leidos’s AGM-190A derivative, CoAspire’s RAACM, and Zone 5’s Rusty Dagger are all in the lineup.
China’s missile arsenal now reaches every U.S. base in the Pacific. The DF-26, dubbed the Guam-Killer by U.S. analysts, is a conventionally armed intermediate-range ballistic missile that can sink an aircraft carrier or strike Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. The DF-17 carries a hypersonic glide vehicle, has performed extreme evasive maneuvers in testing, and ranges 1,800 to 2,500 kilometers. The DF-27, which the Pentagon has been tracking since 2021, ranges 5,000 to 8,000 kilometers — far enough to hit Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. West Coast.
The Pentagon is dramatically expanding its missile procurement strategy as planners increasingly warn that future wars against countries like China could rapidly exhaust America’s existing stockpiles of precision weapons – a problem that was recently seen in the weeks-long operations against Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury.
The French Rubis-class submarine is the smallest nuclear-powered attack submarine ever built by any major navy — just 240 feet long, displacing 2,700 tons, with a crew of about 70 sailors. It also “sank” two U.S. Navy nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in NATO and U.S. Navy wargames. Once in 1998 against USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. Once in 2015 against USS Theodore Roosevelt. Both times, the French boat slipped inside the carrier strike group’s defensive screen undetected and registered torpedo kills before the Americans knew it was there.