Defense Business Brief: A different Reagan Forum crowd | AI for shipyards | New CCA, who dis?

SIMI VALLEY, California—This year’s Reagan National Defense Forum had a slightly different mix: fewer uniforms, more Silicon Valley and finance types. 

The former likely reflected the Pentagon’s new restrictions on public engagements; the latter, a new willingness by financiers to invest in the defense industry. That trend was seemingly epitomized by JPMorgan Chase’s October announcement that it would invest up to $10 billion, as part of a much larger pledge, in “industries critical to national economic security and resiliency.” 

“I'm happy this is taking place. I'm happy a lot of this venture capital money is going into things we really need, not things like social media, for example,” Dimon said on stage Saturday. “It's been obvious for a while. When Ukraine got invaded by the Russian armies four years ago, it should have shattered any illusion that people have that we're safe.”

“Somehow, we missed a lot” of vulnerabilities, from the Pentagon’s dependence on foreign supplies of crucial materials to America’s broader reliance on imported pharmaceuticals, he said.

JPMorgan’s investment is meant to galvanize others’, and ultimately boost and reshore small and medium suppliers for major primes, like RTX, whose CEO, Chris Calio, shared the stage with Dimon. Such investments might finance “vendor supply chains that someone like Chris might have, where if he wants to double, triple production of his missiles, he's got to get some of them to double triple their production. They may not have the money, or they may need a little bit of advice or help, or build a new plant.” 

Dimon said the money might also boost research, help tackle complicated problems like shipbuilding, and even affect policy. 

“What can we do to [be] faster, better, quicker? As you all know, you've heard it many times: There's not that much time, and so, we better get our act together,” he said. 

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AI for shipyards. The Navy wants its shipbuilders to use AI to improve production, so it’s spending $448 million to link their data to a new tool—Palantir’s ShipOS—to simplify scheduling, increase capacity, and reduce costs, Navy Secretary John Phelan announced Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

The move is part of Phelan’s promise to cut costs and put more hulls in the water faster using emerging technologies. 

This “isn't a concept, it's not a pilot program. It's not a study. It's real. This is funded. This is happening,” Phelan said during the service’s first industry day for its new Rapid Capabilities Office. “Every shipbuilder who partners with us will have AI-powered tools that optimize their work in real time. Every supplier in the network will be connected through intelligent logistics. Every program manager will have unprecedented visibility into schedule, cost and risk. We're not just building ships faster. We're rebuilding American maritime industrial capacity for the AI age.” 

What’s interesting about this deal is that the onus is on Palantir to prove its usefulness to suppliers once the tech is implemented. Oh, and part of that $448 million is being funded by budget reconciliation. 

The goal is to “automate manual processes” such as paper drawings, and have a handful of public and private shipyards and 100 suppliers “delivering sooner and not being delayed in getting their items to the shipyards,” Jason Potter, the Navy’s current acquisitions head told a select group of reporters. “That's what success looks like.”

During pilot deployments, a Navy press release said, General Dynamics Electric Boat did 160 manual hours’ worth of submarine schedule planning in less than 10 minutes, while Portsmouth Naval Shipyard “cut material review times from weeks to under one hour.”

New frigate. Just days earlier, Phelan had announced plans to design and build a new frigate just days after canceling the Constellation-class program. The “big, beautiful ship,” as he called it, will be an American design and part of the White House’s proposed “Golden Fleet.” But it won’t displace other shipbuilding efforts. 

The service is also retooling the Landing Ship Medium, Phelan announced over the weekend. The “14-knot, lightly armed, and unprotected” LSM, which had drawn criticism from former Marine Corps commandants, had seen an earlier acquisition effort aborted.

ICYMI 

The Pentagon wants AI everywhere too. The Defense Department rolled out AI tools Tuesday—Google Gemini for Government.

Golden Dome gets a $151 billion contract vehicle. The Pentagon picked 1,000 companies to vie for pieces of the White House’s domestic missile defense system via SHIELD, perhaps the department’s biggest-ever contract vehicle.

“I don't know if it's the largest ever, but it's certainly near the top in terms of overall contract ceiling,” Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert with the American Enterprise Institute, told Defense One’s Thomas Novelly. “The number of awards suggests that they're just trying to get nearly everyone on contract so they have easy options to award actual funding later on.”

New CCA, who dis? Defense One got a sneak peak of Northrop Grumman’s Project Talon—an autonomous aircraft borne out of the defense company’s original, losing bid for the Air Force program. The sleek multi-mission roboplane, which was unveiled under soft lighting at the company’s facilities in Mojave, California, will use the Prism autonomy package that also flies Northrop’s optionally manned Beacon aircraft. 

A little more: Northrop Grumman said it increased the range of its Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar. The company wouldn’t give numbers, but said software upgrades boosted “high-fidelity surveillance,” such as threat detection, tracking, and targeting. 

Keyword: collaboration. The Pentagon has called on defense companies to come up with new tech the military can use before it asks for it in a program of record. To address that, two segments of General Dynamics are trying something different: creating spaces, including a new lab, where companies can work shoulder-to-shoulder with competitors. Get the story here.

On my radar 

• Army taps C3.AI for brigade command and control to improve logistics and supply distribution.  
• More maritime drones. Venture-backed Vatn Systems secured $60 million in a series A funding round for its underwater autonomous vessel. 
• Workforce + implementing acquisition reform. The latest version of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act removes a House-passed provision that would have protected collective bargaining rights for the Defense Department’s civilian workers. 
• White House-directed workforce cuts have hit DOD across organizations, but especially with respect to contracting officers. That could affect the Pentagon’s move to systemically change how it buys weapons and other technology as part of broad acquisition reform—and how contracts are executed amid top-down directive to move fast. For example, the U.S. The Space Force is already feeling the impact of those cuts to contracting workers.