Members of the union BJMF arrived before dawn after learning that Domus Ejendomsservice, black-listed by the labour movement for undercutting wages and refusing to sign a union contract, had been hired by project owner, the business lobby group Dansk Erhverv. The lobbyists, who own the landmark building, had previously denied BJMF access to make routine inspections of the construction site. The blockade lasted four hours and ended only when the lobby group conceded to every union demand: conflict-hit companies will be removed from the site, unions will be allowed to make routine site inspections and main contractors will accept financial responsibility if any subcontractor breaches Danish pay and safety standards.

Carsten Bansholm Hansen, who chairs the BJMF construction section, said the action was necessary to defend the “Danish model” of negotiated wages. “In Denmark, things are supposed to be in order, people must earn a living wage not be subjected to wage dumping. If that principle collapses on a large site like the Stock Exchange, how are we going to enforce it on the smaller ones?”

The 400-year-old Stock Exchange was heavily damaged by a fire in February 2024, in which its iconic dragon spire collapsed. It is now being reconstructed.

Source:

• removedligt aktive blokerer Børsen: “Et prestigebyggeri skal have ordentlige forhold”, Arbejderen, September 23rd 2025

In a keynote address at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air Space Cyber conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Meink highlighted the service’s lackluster aircraft readiness as one of its major challenges. “We have some of the best aircraft,” Meink said, citing the F-22 and F-35 fighters and the B-2 bomber as examples. The scope of the readiness challenge “surprised me a bit,” Meink said. “I knew there was a readiness challenge,” Meink said. “I didn’t appreciate how significant that readiness challenge was.”

The Air Force’s aircraft readiness rates have steadily trended down for several years, and last year hit a recent low. The fiscal 2024 fleet-wide mission-capable rate — which measures how many aircraft are able to carry out their missions on an average day — hit 62%, meaning nearly four in every 10 aircraft were unable to perform their job at any given time. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin raised alarms about the decline at AFA’s Air Warfare Symposium in March. During that speech, Allvin displayed a chart showing another statistic, aircraft availability, which had declined from 73% in 1994 to 54% in 2024. One major factor driving declining readiness rates, experts agree, is that the Air Force’s planes are decades old — and getting older all the time. Allvin’s chart in March showed that over the past three decades, the average aircraft age in the fleet almost doubled from 17 to nearly 32 years old.

Meink said Monday that the Air Force has “some of the best aircraft” of any military, and praised the F-22 Raptor, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the B-2 Spirit bomber. But he pointed to Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia, where F-22s are stationed, as an example of the problems the Air Force is facing. The F-22 is “a phenomenal platform,” Meink said. “But when I go out to Langley and there’s a number of aircraft, nonoperational, sitting around the ramp that aren’t even being worked on because we simply don’t have the parts to do that — that’s a problem, right? We have to fix that.” In an afternoon roundtable with reporters, Meink said maintenance and sustainment have been a major cost driver for the Air Force over the last roughly 15 years. Lawmakers, the administration and top Pentagon leadership are working to help increase the Air Force’s maintenance budget, he said. But with the Air Force’s resources stretched thin, Meink said, it must be efficient and focus maintainers on its top priorities — systems that will be able to survive in a future war’s highly contested airspace.

“If a system is not capable of operating in a contested environment, then we need to be second-guessing and/or thinking about how much money we’re dumping into readiness on those platforms,” Meink said. And as the Air Force retires older, outdated aircraft, Meink said, it will be able to shift skilled maintainers and other resources to planes that will be needed in a future conflict. Meink pointed to Ukraine’s success in using modified quadcopters worth a few thousand dollars to destroy multimillion-dollar Russian drones as an example of the new air warfare environment the U.S. will have to operate in. Meink said the Air Force also must hold its contractors accountable for the reliability of their systems.

the US government holding contractors accountable? lol. lmao

“When we’re getting a part that’s supposed to last 400 hours, and it lasts 100 hours, that’s unacceptable,” Meink said. “We need to work with the government and contractors to make the right investments to improve the serviceability and reliability of our weapon systems and the parts we’re putting in those weapon systems.” William Bailey, who is performing the duties of the assistant Air Force secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said the increasing modularity of new aircraft and other in-the-works systems will allow them to be more easily maintained and replaced. Bailey also said the acquisition community plans to conduct a deep dive into the service’s supply chains to identify where “pinch points” are holding up the delivery of vital spare parts. The Air Force must use also advanced data analytic techniques to better understand the state of its weapon systems, Meink said.

The plan to procure three LRMVs is outlined in the German Navy’s Kurs Marine document, which outlines the fleet that it wants to operate by 2035. While the LRMVs will serve as arsenal ships to supplement the new class of F127 frigates, the German Navy also wants to buy 18 smaller uncrewed surface vessels, known as Future Combat Surface Systems (FCSS), to supplement its corvettes, and at least 12 Large Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (LUUV) to support its submarines. The most striking development, however, concerns the LRMV, which is planned from the outset for uncrewed operations, although presumably they could also be used in an optionally crewed capacity.

It’s not exactly clear what kind of size the LRMVs will be. Presuming a diagram published in the Kurs Marine document is fairly accurate, they would be around half the length of the F127 frigate, which would make them around 260 feet long, roughly corvette-sized. However, according to the German defense and security website hartpunkt, citing naval insiders, the dimensions and displacement of the vessels hadn’t been determined, so not too much should be read into the diagram. Clearer is the role that the LRMVs will undertake, essentially as floating missile platforms that can bolster the magazine capacity of the planned six F127 frigates, in particular. The arsenal ships will be equipped with vertical launchers for different missiles, to support the F127’s air defense and maritime strike taskings. The number of launch containers is also not yet finalized, hartpunkt reports. Meanwhile, the F127 is expected to feature 64 cells, as part of the popular Mk 41 vertical launch system (VLS). The VLS cells in the LRMV will likely be loaded with the same weapons that arm the F127 frigate: Standard Missile 2 (SM-2) for general-area air defense and RIM-162 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles (ESSM) for short-/medium-range air defense. They could also possibly field SM-6 for long-range air and missile defense, as well as strike, and Tomahawk cruise missiles for longer range strike. SM-6 and Tomahawk would require longer “strike length” VLS cells. The preliminary artwork in the Kurs Marine document shows an array of vertical launchers mounted, at least partly, above the deck at the rear of the ship. However, this should be considered highly provisional. The German government is currently reviewing a plan to buy the Tomahawk, which would place it in an elite operators’ club. Other options could include the 3SM Tyrfing supersonic cruise naval missile currently being developed by Germany and Norway, and potentially even the new “deep precision strike” weapon, a missile with a range of over 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) that Germany and the United Kingdom are working on.

In its air defense role, the ‘parent’ frigate would be responsible for target detection and targeting, commanding missile launches from the smaller LRMV, which will effectively serve as additional floating magazine capacity. This also means the LRMV doesn’t need to accommodate its own expensive sensors. Alternatively, another surface vessel could provide the data, or it could be received from any other platform, with data relayed via satellite link. Reportedly, the LRMV would also carry some limited self-defense armament, which would presumably have to be controlled from another (crewed) platform. While seen as a ‘wingman’ to the F127 frigate, it could also complement the anti-submarine-warfare-optimized F126 class of frigates. As we have discussed before, these warships are comparatively lightly armed for their size, with a Mk 41 VLS for up to 64 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM) Block 2 missiles, and launchers for eight Kongsberg Naval Strike Missiles (NSM), but no current plans to arm them with Standard Missiles or Tomahawk.

The LRMV makes an interesting parallel with the two new support vessels planned for the Royal Netherlands Navy. These ships will be around 174 feet long and will displace around 600 tons, including containerized weapons and sensors for a variety of different missions, and a relatively tiny crew. Like the German design, the Dutch support vessels will bring additional air defense missiles to help existing Dutch frigates. As well as being entirely uncrewed, the LRMV is also intended to operate in very different conditions. While the Dutch support vessel is optimized for use in the North Sea and for patrol duties, the LRMV will be an ocean-going design that can serve in the Atlantic. The German ships will need to have much more robust seaworthiness and will likely need to be considerably larger. On the other hand, the operating concept for the LRMV foresees them loitering in a specific sea area for an extended period, so they won’t necessarily have to have the same level of performance as the F127 frigate, or an equivalent surface combatant.

While the shipbuilding phase for the LRMV is not necessarily a significant challenge, Germany will still need to develop resilient and reliable command and communications to ensure the ships can operate safely in a potentially highly contested environment. Experience with the Future Combat Surface System (FCSS) program, for a more modest arsenal ship, should help in this regard. Having a lower-cost supplement to the F127 class is also a key consideration, with the new frigates being the most expensive current German defense procurement, with a program cost of more than $30 billion for all six ships. Overall, Germany’s plans for the LRMV reflect a growing interest in support vessels with an arsenal ship role. These tend to be either uncrewed or with very small crews, and they are indicative of the current operational realities, in which conventional ships threaten to be overwhelmed by massed missile and drone attacks.

The need to boost naval air defense coverage, in particular, has been made clear by the campaign against Houthi missiles and drones targeting shipping in the Middle East in recent months, as well as Iran’s unprecedented, massed attack on Israel, using the same kinds of weapons. In particular, the limited stock of air defense missiles found on most warships has emerged as a concern, and one that the support vessels will help address. Developments elsewhere in the world, including in China, suggest that swarming drones as well as ever more capable missiles will be a feature of naval warfare from now on. These same concerns are seeing interest in the United States and other countries in large uncrewed surface vessels with modular weapons payloads, allowing them to be adapted for a range of missions as required. While it’s unclear what kind of modularity the LRMV might offer, having an uncrewed ship, even simply to increase the basic weapons magazine available to surface combatants, could be very useful for the German Navy and help pave the way toward more regular and extensive uncrewed operations at sea. At the same time, there are a lot of unknowns about actually operating an uncrewed ship equipped with heavy armament on operational patrols and over great distances. Command and control and networking architecture will be a huge factor in the success of any such concept. There are also security concerns, clearly. The idea that more naval capacity can be relatively inexpensively gained through uncrewed surface combatants of the larger variety is extremely attractive, but actually doing it reliably is still something that’s yet to be seen on a wide operational scale.