DefenseNews

Buffalo chicken, Thai and Cuban food coming to the MRE lineup in 2026

New options are coming to troops’ rations, and some less popular items will disappear from the menu. The next iteration of Meals Ready-to-Eat is MRE 46, set to release in 2026. Among the options — all of which are required to have shelf lives of six months in 100 degrees Fahrenheit and three years at 80 degrees Fahrenheit — troops will no longer see beef taco filling, a pork sausage patty…
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DefenseNews

Printing with sand: How Rock Island Arsenal keeps Army gear humming

ROCK ISLAND ARSENAL, Ill. — In the forge at Rock Island Arsenal, workers in silver heat suits and darkened face shields shovel fire unfazed as flames lick their feet and legs. Their work is older than the nation’s railroads, melting and molding metal the way it’s been done for centuries. Sparks cascade as they raise a cauldron of molten metal from the flames along the ceiling to a set of…
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DefenseNews

Early drops of new Army command software delight artillerists in drill

Never mind the mere beta status of the Army’s new app for operating howitzers, soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado, were itching to find out whether four decades of the existing, error-prone system were finally coming to an end. So they hooked up their M777 to the novel Artillery Execution Suite during an exercise last month and pulled the lanyard. Users of the legacy…
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DefenseNews

Inside the US Army’s new modernization mega-command

AUSTIN, Texas — Austin has long attracted high-tech startups and innovators, bringing the U.S. Army to the Texas capital seven years ago with the promise of a community that would carry the service’s ambitious modernization push. The Army created a new four-star outfit – Futures Command – in the late summer of 2018, right in the city center, empowered with a mandate to quickly develop new…
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