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Lawmakers aim to force the Army to detail its transformation plans

Meghann Myers — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:06:36 -0400

When the Army launched its “transformation initiative” a year ago, lawmakers immediately implored service leaders to show their work as they made plans to buy new things and get rid of old ones, including the cost tradeoffs and a timeline. They didn’t get those answers, so House lawmakers have inserted a requirement for an annual report and briefing into this year’s defense authorization bill.

On Thursday, the House Armed Services Committee completed its markup on the bill, adding detailed instructions for an annual update on the Army Transformation Initiative—and also the Army’s Transformation-in-Contact/Continuous Transformation efforts, requiring specifics on new capabilities and ones that have been phased out.

The goal of the Initiative “was to position the Army for future fights, streamline force structure, and eliminate wasteful spending,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said during a May 15 hearing of the HASC, which he chairs. “Congress shares those goals, but as questions arose, it became clear that the Army hadn't done all of its homework.”

The provision in the House’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act would require the Army to provide an annual report, on or by Feb. 15, “detailing the programmatic choices made to implement.”

By March 15, the service would also have to brief the committee on:

How any changes to the National Defense Strategy, or other DOD planning document, informed the Army’s choices.
An “inventory and assessment” of all exercises related to Army transformation since 2023.
An inventory of all capabilities or capacity phased out as part of Army transformation, with a timeline and assessment of how they have affected readiness.
An inventory of planned investments with an assessment of how they will contribute to the joint force.

The service did send experts for closed-door briefings to lawmakers over the past year, a U.S. official told Defense One, in an attempt to provide details and explain the rationale for its plans.

“We initially saw a ton of support from members of Congress, until it potentially impacted a parochial interest,” said the official, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record about the matter. “That's when they got all sticky about it.”

The Army’s helicopter purchases were of particular concern to House members both last year and this year, as the service’s budget request included funding to buy just one UH-60 Black Hawk and five MH-47 Chinooks. Army officials said it made sense to buy fewer older aircraft as the MV-75 Cheyenne II approaches.

In hearings, lawmakers expressed concern that reducing purchases would undermine the helicopters’ supply chains.

In May, the House’s first NDAA mark-up bumped up procurement to seven Black Hawks and 12 Chinooks.

“Nobody's saying we don't need Chinooks or Black Hawks or Apaches, we don't need to modernize, etc.,” the official said. “But we have so many more, based on the force-structure side, than we think is required to fight a conflict.”

The question went to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during his May 12 testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, where he announced that the Defense Department would be taking a second look at the initiative.

“There are some very good things in the Army Transformation Initiative, and there are some things that we needed to get another look at,” Hegseth said. “And so I think you'll see a review of some of those things, and we’ll get back to you.”

The Pentagon refused to provide any details on what that review looked like or whether Hegseth had his eye on other updates. A few days later, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll testified before HASC, apparently unaware of Hegseth’s concerns.

“I don't know all the depth of what was implied, but I absolutely agree that we will take a hard look with the Office of Secretary of War and make sure that we are synced with their strategy and their plans as they look across the joint force and balance their requirements and needs of the military as a whole,” he said.

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Blue Origin rocket explosion shows ‘fragility’ of national-security launch plans

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:30:54 -0400

Hours after a Blue Origin rocket blew up on a Florida launch pad last month, a SpaceX rocket lofted a military payload from a nearby site—neatly illustrating concerns about whether the commercial launch industry can actually add providers quickly enough to match the Pentagon’s accelerating demands.

The incident should be “a moment to step back and reassess the fragility of our space launch infrastructure” and how little competition exists for the nation’s military launch missions, said Todd Harrison, the American Enterprise Institute’s defense space expert.

Just two companies are certified to launch the nearly 100 National Security Space launch missions the Pentagon has budgeted for in the next five years: SpaceX and United Launch Alliance.

Several companies are working to introduce new heavy-lift rockets, which handle payloads between 22 and 55 tons. But the ill-fated Blue Origin test failed to move the New Glenn rocket closer to qualification and ULA’s Vulcan heavy rocket is still sidelined amid a probe into a solid rocket booster anomaly. That leaves Elon Musk’s SpaceX with a heavy-lift monopoly, at least for now.

That’s not where service leaders, who plan a steep increase in launches, want to be.

Just before Blue Origin’s May 28 mishap, service officials awarded a task order to the Jeff Bezos-owned company for a National Reconnaissance Office mission by late 2027 or early 2028. Soon afterward, they reiterated their plans to count on the company.

“The U.S. Space Force (USSF) and NRO remain committed partners with Blue Origin and will work with them on the New Glenn vehicle anomaly experienced during its integrated vehicle hot fire test yesterday evening,” Space Systems Command said in a May 29 press release.

AEI’s Harrison suggested the incident was a reminder not to count too heavily on plans.

“I think it hurts some of that optimism that the Space Force may have had about getting a third provider, but I think, in a practical sense, it's not as if there are near-term missions that we're depending on New Glenn,” he said. “I think it’s just taking some shine off the rosy projections for the future, that there are going to be more hiccups like this along the way.”

‘We are the primary launch provider’

Congress is also concerned about the lack of launch providers.

The House Armed Service Committee’s initial draft of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act asks the Air Force Secretary to brief lawmakers on how the Space Force is “investing in capability and capacity” to increase the service’s launch cadence. It also asks for ideas to “accelerate development and reduce barriers to participation by nontraditional defense contractors” to meet the growing mission demand. That report is due by March 2027.

“The committee has a continued interest in maintaining and growing competition across the space enterprise, to include launch,” one HASC staffer said.

In the meantime, SpaceX dominates the market.

“We are the primary launch provider for the U.S. government,” the private company wrote last month in its S-1 filing, part of the paperwork for its highly anticipated initial public offering.

SpaceX rockets launched 11 of last year’s 12 national-security launches, and holds the contracts for five of seven high-profile launch missions in the current fiscal year. SpaceX also launches its own satellites for the Starlink communications constellation, which has become crucial for military operations.

SpaceX has a huge lead against companies trying to take on future national security space missions, said Victoria Samson, the Secure World’s Foundation’s chief director of space security and stability.

“It does speak to how complicated these issues are, how far SpaceX is ahead of its competitors, and the, I would say, unlikelihood of any real competitor to SpaceX in the near future,” Samson said.

But SpaceX’s IPO filing also revealed weaknesses. Its launch business lost roughly $657 million last year. Despite a huge push to field orbital data centers in space, its AI segment lost $6.3 billion. The only profitable segment of the company was Starlink, with $4.4 billion in income.

And several national-security analysts noted that SpaceX is less than fully focused on military launches.

Byron Callan, a managing director at research firm Capital Alpha Partners, said in a note about SpaceX’s prospectus that “does not suggest that SpaceX is being positioned as a major defense contractor” and instead is more aligned with other technology sectors.

Harrison said that SpaceX’s other ambitions could pull focus away from its launch business.

“SpaceX today enjoys a near monopoly on military and national security space launch, and that's a vulnerability, because we're talking about a company that has evolved its focus over time from being a space launch company to being a SATCOM company to being an AI data center and space company,” he said. “Launch is an increasingly small part of the SpaceX portfolio.”

More missions, more launchpads

It’s unclear just how long it will take Blue Origin to recover from the explosion, which damaged its only launch pad.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said this week on X that the company plans to have another New Glenn rocket in the skies by “the end of this year.” But SpaceX needed more than a year to repair its own launch pad after a 2016 Falcon 9 explosion.

Kiko Donchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, didn’t comment on Blue Origin’s timeline, but described in a post on X how extensive the investigation and cleanup process is.“In the initial days and weeks, you’re using a scalpel, not a bulldozer,” Donchev said, “Cleanup has to be done with a sense of urgency, but extreme precision. It’s literally launch pad surgery.”

The company reportedly has plans to build a second launchpad at the Space Force base and another site is in the works at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, officials said in April.

Still, the mishap underscores how the paucity of launch pads is a bottleneck for the Space Force’s plans.This year, the service plans to launch more than 200 rockets from the Cape and Vandenberg. In the next decade, that could increase to more than 3,000 launches per year, according to the service’s ambitious “Objective Force 2040” document.

That same document also warns that increased reliance on those two bases “creates enduring vulnerability to natural hazards, operational disruption, and degraded performance during periods of peak demand.”

Last month, the Commercial Space Federation, an industry group, sounded an alarm about the increased tempo of launch missions on traditional sites.

“U.S. orbital launch demand has surpassed 180 launches per year, straining infrastructure that

must be developed years in advance of its need,” the report said, adding that the Defense Department, NASA, local governments, and private companies should “coordinate infrastructure upgrade investments” to improve launch facilities amid growing tempo.

Service leaders told Defense One in April that they’re looking at expanding launch capabilities to other sites and to more providers.

Harrison said the Blue Origin mishap also shows why the government can’t leave the expansion of launch infrastructure to for-profit companies.

“You need to invest in some excess capacity, so that you have it when you need it. It could be a rocket failure that takes out a pad, it could be a hurricane, it could be an earthquake, fire, a wildfire,” Harrison said. “But if you want to have a robust launch enterprise, then you've got to build in some redundancy and some resilience that the commercial sector, which is trying to maximize profits, would not necessarily do on its own.”

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GOP lawmakers axe provision to limit the use of JAGs in civilian roles

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:20:38 -0400

House Republicans axed a provision to the annual defense policy bill that would have ended the Trump administration’s practice of using the military’s uniformed lawyers from serving as immigration judges and special U.S. attorneys in Democrat-run cities.

Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo, proposed the amendment during the House Armed Service Committee's markup of the National Defense Authorization Act on Thursday afternoon. The provision would have amended U.S. law to clarify that the judge advocate generals corps could only be assigned to military-related duties. Republican lawmakers, including HASC Chairman Mike Rogers, ultimately batted down the provision in a 31-26 vote, according to the committee’s website. It’s not clear if a similar provision is being debated in the Senate.

“Our JAGs advise commanders in some of the most consequential decisions our military makes, from combat operations, to targeting authorities, to rules of engagement, military justice, personnel matters, and international law,” Crow said. “They are a limited and specialized resource. Their time should be focused on matters that directly affect military operations, unit cohesion, command authority, and mission effectiveness. Assigning them elsewhere takes them away from this critical military work, especially in a time as is as much conflict as we are seeing right now.”

Former uniformed attorneys told Defense One that the amendment would’ve relieved overworked military lawyers. Under the Trump administration, JAGs have been assigned to oversee immigration courts, appointed as special U.S. attorneys to investigate “fraud and abuse” in Minneapolis, and prosecuted violent crimes during domestic National Guard deployments. This year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has scrutinized the JAG corps with a series of wide-ranging reforms and has fired the military's top lawyers and trimmed the civilian legal staff.

Rogers, R-Ala., defended the administration’s unprecedented use of the military’s lawyers.

“This is a direct attack on the administration, which has used judge advocates in multiple ways to protect national security priorities for the president. Judge advocates have served as special assistants to U.S. attorneys for years,” he said. “That role has been expanded in the current administration to assist other agencies in defense of the homeland national security priority, and great experience and training for our uniformed officers. I trust that the Secretary of Defense, with the help of the Joint Staff, may deploy judge advocates across the United States and the world to ensure the rule of law is followed.”

Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, also criticized the provision, saying Hegseth “has determined that the homeland mission is essential” and that the extra lawyers are crucial to it.

“The National Security Strategy places a great deal of emphasis on homeland defense, and in order to meet these needs, an increase in attorneys has been needed to litigate in U.S. courts and aid in the administrative hearings across the Department of Justice and Homeland,” Fallon said. “Our uniformed attorneys have the ability to surge into positions when the country needs them.”

Military legal experts have previously told Defense One that there is precedent for uniformed lawyers to prosecute U.S. citizens, but the Trump administration’s wide-spread use of the JAGs has raised fears that it could violate the Posse Comitatus Act which forbids the military to be used for federal law enforcement.

Steve Lepper, a retired Air Force lawyer and a member of a group of former JAGs that has spoken out about the administration’s legal actions, said he wasn’t surprised that the amendment wasn’t passed by the committee.

“I think it's basically restoration of the limits that posse comitatus places on the military,” Lepper said. “When you come right down to it, using the military in a prosecutorial or judicial capacity for cases that have nothing to do with the military is basically a violation of posse comitatus.”

Aaron Brynildson, a University of Mississippi law professor and retired Air Force JAG, also said that uniformed lawyers should be focused on military-related missions when serving as special U.S. attorneys

“Having been previously appointed as a SAUSA while on active duty, the sole reason JAGs should be detailed to these positions is to prosecute civilians committing criminal offenses on military bases. JAGs should not be used to prosecute immigration crimes or as fill-ins for overburdened federal prosecutors.”

Brynildson and Lepper said that the wide-ranging use of the JAGs appears to be at odds with Hegseth’s complaint in March that “military lawyers are sometimes stuck doing civilian side work.”

“What Mr. Crow offered was basically a way to achieve what Hegseth said he wants, which is JAGs to do JAG jobs,” Lepper said. “In this case, I guess the majority in the House Armed Services Committee felt that JAGs should be used for things other than what they are in the military to do.”

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Putin allies wishcast nuclear war, America in crisis, and real-estate deals

Patrick Tucker — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:04:14 -0400

Allies of Russian leader Vladimir Putin are openly advocating nuclear war and wishcasting for a diminished United States even while boasting about better trade relations.

The venue was the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a Putin-backed conference that took place on Wednesday against a backdrop of billowing smoke from a Ukrainian drone attack at a nearby oil terminal. The forum, which featured presentations by Russian oligarchs and elites, also attracted high-ranking Russian officials, representatives of far-right European groups, and American internet influencers.

One notable presentation was given by two of Putin’s close allies: Konstantin Malofeev, a billionaire and founder of the Tsargrad TV channel; and Alexander Dugin, who is considered a key philosophical influence on the Russian leader. They suggested that Russia might reasonably use nuclear weapons in its war on Ukraine.

“Yes,” Malofeev said later on his Telegram channel. “The use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine is considered a good-case scenario in our analytical report.”

The pair argued in general that the United States is an existential threat to Russia that must be weakened. It’s a view previously articulated by Yevgeny Primakov, a former prime minister, and is believed to echo Putin’s own thinking.

The pair also outlined what they called a “good” scenario for Russia by 2036; it included a “crisis of American-centrism.” By 2050, they foresee the “demise of the imperialistic plans of Western countries.”

The Institute for the Study of War called Malofeev’s scenarios “unrealistic,” and suggested that the Kremlin may use them to portray its own and “other government officials’ rhetoric as moderate and reasonable in comparison to the extreme scenarios presented by a small cadre of ultranationalists.”

The pair are not the first prominent Russians to bandy tacit or explicit threats of nuclear war. In 2017, Russian parliamentarian Vyacheslav Alekseyevich Nikonov said that if NATO or U.S. forces were to go to Crimea, the Kremlin would be forced to use smaller nuclear weapons. But when long-range Ukrainian strikes devastated the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, the Kremlin responded with drone and missile strikes—but not nukes.

In May, Russia held drills for its nuclear forces in Belarus, which led NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte to say, "Well, [Russia] knows if that happens, the reaction is devastating."

Prospects for Russian advances on the field have dimmed since 2022. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “Russia will definitely not be able to achieve the objectives it set for itself on the first day of the war; and it will likely not even be able to enforce—by military means—the demands it is currently making in negotiations."

At the forum, Russian officials and elites admitted that no easy victory was in sight. The war will last “for decades,” said Andrey Bezrukov, a former spy whose double life in the United States inspired the television show “The Americans.” “Even now we understand that a drone using Starlink can fly into any region and hit a specific target. This is a serious problem for us. We were not prepared for it,” Bezrukov said.

There was even at least one U.S. official at the St. Petersburg forum, but the intense planning and coordination that would customarily precede a U.S. delegation’s visit to Russia appears to have been lacking. The official was Rodney Mims Cook Jr., who, as the chair of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, is in charge of the White House ballroom makeover.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he had no knowledge of any high-ranking officials attending the event.

At least one Russian leader at the forum touted “strong Russian economic cooperation” between the United States and Russia. Kirill Dmitriev, who runs a Russian sovereign-wealth fund, claimed that he had just spoken with White House envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. He seemed to suggest the governments would announce a Bering Strait tunnel project on Friday, but later tweeted that he was speaking only of an engineering contract award.

The White House has not responded to questions about the claim.

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Lawmakers demand answers about $620M Pentagon loan to firm tied to Trump Jr.

Robert Faturechi, ProPublica — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:35:47 -0400

A group of lawmakers demanded answers from the White House this week following a ProPublica investigation revealing that a top aide to the president intervened to secure a $620 million Pentagon loan to a startup linked to the president’s eldest son.

ProPublica’s reporting “reveals a staggering level of corruption and influence peddling that superseded this process, enriching the President’s son at the expense of U.S. national security and taxpayer dollars,” wrote the group of Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii as well as Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado and Mike Levin of California.

Last year, the Pentagon announced the loan to Vulcan Elements, a small North Carolina startup, about three months after Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm took a stake of undisclosed size in the rare-earth magnet company.

Interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to lend to the firm was made by Peter Navarro, who serves as the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing and is a friend of Trump Jr.’s.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly told ProPublica.

After defense officials got the White House request, they asked Pentagon staff to move at an unusually rapid pace, said another person who was involved in the deal at the Pentagon but not authorized to speak about it.

“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said.

In their letter, addressed to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the lawmakers asked a series of questions about Navarro’s involvement in the deal, including whether he intervened at someone else’s direction, if the president was aware or involved, and who Navarro communicated with at the Pentagon.

They also asked more broadly about whether White House officials have communicated with federal agency officials about other companies linked to the Trump family.

“The American public — and service members that are in harm’s way — expect that the DoD contracting process is fair, unbiased, and competitive to ensure that only the best companies, providing only the best products, receive taxpayer dollars,” the lawmakers wrote.

Navarro, who served as trade adviser in the president’s first term, and Trump Jr. have formed a close bond in recent years. The president’s son visited Navarro in prison while he served time for defying a subpoena from lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump Jr. was one of the small group of people Navarro dedicated his latest book to for having “my back when it was against the wall.” And a week before the Vulcan deal was announced, Trump Jr. hosted Navarro on his streaming show, encouraging his nearly 2 million subscribers to buy Navarro’s book. That interview was not long after word came down from Navarro to Pentagon staff to make the massive loan to Vulcan, one of the defense officials involved in the deal said.

Asked to respond to the lawmakers’ allegations and ProPublica’s reporting, Navarro in a text message wrote “Staggering level of hyperbole. More fake news” but did not elaborate. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Navarro did not respond to questions from ProPublica sent to him directly before the initial article was published. But in a post on X afterward, he called the story “fake news on steroids.”

Vulcan has not commented. A White House spokesperson had said in a statement that the administration is working “in the best interest of the American people,” adding, “The President’s entire team, including Senior Counselor Navarro and officials at the Department of War, is working together and with private industry to secure America’s critical mineral supply chain at Trump Speed.” Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said last week that the president’s son does not discuss companies he has invested in with federal government officials and did not speak to Navarro about Vulcan. He “has no knowledge about how this deal came together,” the spokesperson said. A spokesperson for 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Trump Jr. is a partner, said it also played no role in Vulcan getting the loan and did not learn about the deal before it was public.

“No company receives preferential treatment,” a Pentagon spokesperson said. “Outside affiliations, investors, or political connections play absolutely no role in the Department’s funding decisions.”

The loan was part of the Pentagon’s effort to fund companies that could help the U.S. reduce dependence on China’s critical mineral supply chains. It represented a big win for Vulcan and its investors. Estimates of the company’s valuation grew tenfold after the deal was announced.

The deal is one of many actions by the administration of President Donald Trump that have helped companies in which his family holds stakes. Government contracts and other benefits have gone to various Trump-linked companies. But ProPublica’s reporting on the Vulcan loan represented the first time the awarding of a contract from a federal agency was directly linked to White House intervention.

A number of other lawmakers also criticized the Vulcan deal following ProPublica’s investigation.

Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, called it “corruption to the highest degree,” alleging on X: “They are looting this country. Dismantling it, selling it for parts, and lining their own pockets.”

Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, called for a congressional investigation. “It’s just nonstop corruption from this White House, and Republicans in Congress are content to twiddle their thumbs and look right in the other direction,” she posted on X. “Congress should be investigating and putting a stop to this kind of crooked self-dealing—not enabling it.”

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

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Trump strips civil-service protections from thousands of feds

Erich Wagner — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:13:06 -0400

Some 8,000 career federal workers were stripped of civil-service protections on Wednesday by President Trump, who ordered their positions to be converted into at-will employment.

The edict marks the culmination of a years-long push to make it easier to fire federal employees in “policy-related” jobs by removing them from the federal government’s competitive service and placing them in a new job category, initially called Schedule F and now referred to as Schedule Policy/Career. Such employees lose their right to challenge adverse personnel actions before the Merit Systems Protection Board, while their whistleblower complaints will be investigated by their own agency, rather than the Office of Special Counsel.

The Trump administration had considered converting some 50,000 federal jobs, a senior administration official told reporters Wednesday. Instead, the president chose to focus on "the most senior-level career policy officials," an OPM spokesperson said.

About 97 percent of the affected workers are GS-15s or senior leaders, the official said. Among them are agency office and division heads; C-suite leaders such as chief information officers; regional officers and their deputies and chiefs of staff; program managers; people who help write federal regulations; attorneys who craft agency or internal policies; as well as advisors, senior HR officials, and grantmaking posts.

The White House's list of affected positions includes ones at the departments of Defense, State, and Homeland Security.

Trump first ordered such conversions in October 2020, but after he lost his re-election bid, his executive order was left unimplemented. President Biden rescinded the edict, and in 2024 the Office of Personnel Management issued new regulations to make it more difficult to revive the idea.

Soon after Trump took office for the second time, administration officials suggested he could simply “nullify” those regulations. But OPM ultimately followed the notice-and-comment process to propose new regulations to unwind the Biden-era protections and implement Schedule F ideas as Schedule Policy/Career. OPM’s final rule implementing the new job category took effect in March.

The policy remains the subject of multiple lawsuits by federal employee unions, who have accused the administration of violating the Constitution, the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act. Good-government groups have warned that at-will employment of public employees in state government has sometimes reduced productivity while increasing reports of political and personal favoritism in the workplace.

On Wednesday, OPM chief Scott Kupor and another official rejected warnings that the measure would give rise to a new spoils system in federal employment. They said the hiring process would remain unchanged, without political litmus tests.

They did not mention that OPM added politicized essay questions to the federal hiring process more than a year ago.

“In order to effect the president’s policy priorities, we need people in these senior positions willing and capable of carrying out those directives,” Kupor said. “All this does is basically say: it doesn’t matter what your political views are–and you can have any political views–but if you allow them to interfere in your willingness to carry out lawful orders and directives, this is a mechanism for you to be removed, effectively at-will...There are zero loyalty tests in this.”

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Defense Business Brief: Cyber force, outlined; Shipbuilding game; USMC’s JLTV plea

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400

The military could stand up a separate service branch to handle cyber operations by 2028— should Congress or the White House decide to do so this year, according to a new Center for Strategic and International Studies report released Wednesday.

“Regardless of institutional alignment, reaching initial operating capacity (IOC) would take between 12 and 18 months and proceed through several sequential phases: setting conditions; fielding the IOC; iterative growth over several years; and institutional refinement,” CSIS’s commission on Cyber Force Generation wrote. “Following a presidential decision or legislative action to establish a new Title 10 service, this force generation model would address longstanding structural challenges and build the Cyber Force the United States needs for this critical domain of warfare.”

The branch could have about 30,000 people, including around 20,000 active-duty troops and warrant officers from across the services, up to 5,000 National Guard members, and up to 6,000 civilians and contractors, states the report, which was co-written with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

The report arrives as lawmakers mull a proposal to order the creation of a cyber service, a topic that has been debated for the past decade.

Mark Montgomery, who leads FDD’s cyber center and previously led the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, said a new service is needed.

In “the last six to 12 years, I would say that the performance of the services has been an obstruction to success. And that's a tough thing to say because services don't want to be an obstruction…they want to do the right thing,” Montgomery told reporters. “But our ability to recruit, train, maintain, and retain a cyber force has struggled. Our recruiting has never focused on—none of the services' recruiting efforts focus on: ‘Can you code Python?’”

A separate service would allow cyber operators to have their own budget—and their own culture, said Lauryn Williams, deputy director of CSIS’ Strategic Technologies Program. And there’s a “similar need for a lot of deliberation and discussion around what a cyber force culture and doctrine should look like, not least because it would be drawing personnel from every other military service, so would be a mishmash of cultures, maybe, to start.”

Welcome

You’ve reached the Defense Business Brief, where we dig into what the Pentagon buys, who they’re buying from, and why. Send along your tips, feedback, and song recommendations to lwilliams@defenseone.com. Check out the Defense Business Brief archive here, and tell your friends to subscribe!

Subbuilding game. GDIT’s Emerge event Tuesday came with a virtual training tool for new submarine shipbuilders. The technology imports all the design elements of the Columbia and Virginia class and renders them into a navigable learning experience. But the demo version used an older boat, the USS Holland, from the turn of the 20th century. Using an Xbox controller, new hires can tour the submarine class they’ll be working on, and point and click on a part to learn more about what it does and where it goes.

The Holland has about 20,000 parts, while the Columbia class has millions. The tool "goes down to each nut, bolts, screw, washer. We have all that detail, because we control the design database, we make the design. So with the modern era, we can take those same models that are made to build the boat, and then create tools to help the guys figure out what they're doing,” said Eric Banach, a software engineer for General Dynamics Electric Boat.

Buildsubmarines.com is pulling in thousands of new shipbuilders. The Navy’s slick ad campaign to attract shipyard workers is still going strong, said Josh Sturgill, the workforce development coordinator for the Submarine Industrial Base Program Office, at the GDIT event. He said the site gets about 75,000 application clicks a month and “somewhere between 5.7 and 6 percent of those that click ‘apply’ are going to continue on to a job interview and offer inside the submarine industrial base. That's what, statistically, [I've been] seeing over the last five years.”

Background: The Navy-backed effort acts as a job portal across the shipbuilding industry and aims to attract new talent to an industry that has struggled in recent years with high turnover and green workers.
But things have improved, according to General Dynamics HR executives, who point to new initiatives in housing, wellness, and childcare as part of a broader plan to keep more workers.
“We broke ground this year on a housing project…housing in Maine is the single biggest barrier to growing this workforce in terms of attracting talent. So, we—General Dynamics and the Navy—we worked with a developer to put in 85 units of housing that are going to be focused on entry-level positions to have,” said Ray Steen, vice president of human resources at General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, noting that attrition was previously in the high 20 percent range is now around 5 percent. “That's a long play that didn't affect [attrition] three years ago, but it's going to help it going forward.”
Steen said this workforce-forward approach, which includes higher wages, is what helped the shipyard deliver USS Patrick Gallagher two months ahead of schedule.

MUSVs & more

The Marines want a new JLTV supplier. The Marine Corps released a request for information seeking a new supplier for the JLTV—which is more than a year behind schedule. The Army canceled its JLTV program last year but the Marines requested about $245 million to buy 341 units according to the 2027 budget proposal. Responses are due June 10.
General Dynamics is spending $200 million to “unwind a partnership with Turkish defense contractor Repkon in a bid to finally start producing 155mm artillery shells at a Texas plant that’s been beset by delays,” Tony Capaccio writes for Bloomberg. Repkon acquired the Garland, Texas plant that manufactures metal parts for munitions from General Dynamics last year. The move also raised concerns about potential foreign influence in domestic defense supply chains.
Seaborne showcase. The Navy picked seven vendors to demonstrate their medium unmanned surface vessels at sea from June through October. Successful demos will receive $15 million and would be eligible for a production contract. Selected contenders are Birdon, Galliano Marine Services, HII, Leidos, PacMar Technologies, Saronic Technologies, and Sea Machines.

One last tech thing: Join us June 16 at our annual Tech Summit at the Pentagon City Ritz Carlton. Listen to key leaders discuss AI adoption, autonomous operations, the future of military technology—and, my personal favorite, the “backers of the battlefield.” See you there!

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Trump's choice of acting intel chief threatens fragile surveillance-powers deal

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:55:00 -0400

President Donald Trump’s decision to name William Pulte as acting director of national intelligence is threatening a fragile Senate deal to extend a contentious surveillance authority.

On Tuesday, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., asked Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., to press the White House to reverse the appointment of Pulte, who has no national-security background but does have a record of targeting Trump’s political adversaries. Warner said the appointment could sink a deal to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Punchbowl News first reported Warner’s request to Thune.

Section 702, which allows the NSA and other spy agencies to collect communications of foreigners abroad without a warrant, has long been controversial because Americans’ communications are sometimes swept up in the process. Although the intelligence community insists that the program is key to national security, many lawmakers remain dubious. Efforts to reauthorize the program has produced only short-term renewals, the latest of which will expire on June 12.

Warner has been one of the key Democratic negotiators in FISA talks, and was involved in a recent arrangement with Thune and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that cleared the way for a 45-day short-term extension of the authority. That deal included a commitment to declassify a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion, a key demand of civil-liberties advocates.

But the status of that declassification process is unclear. Last month, Wyden said the Trump administration was ignoring the request.

GOP leaders are unlikely to pass an extension alone. Several Republican senators are expected to oppose any FISA deal, meaning Thune will need Democratic votes to move the bill through the Senate. The high chamber could hold an initial procedural vote on a Section 702 extension as soon as Thursday.

The emerging deal includes provisions meant to win over skeptical lawmakers, including a three-year ban on a central bank digital currency and language barring the FBI from using Section 702 information to prosecute U.S. persons. It stops short of including a full warrant requirement for queries of U.S. person data collected under the program, a measure long sought by the civil liberties community.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who previously served as the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told House lawmakers Wednesday that he had never heard Pulte’s name during his time on the panel.

Thune also appeared to acknowledge broader concern about the appointment, telling reporters Tuesday that “we don’t need a weaponized DNI.” If the White House tried to nominate Pulte permanently, Thune added, he would have “a lengthy road ahead of him” to win confirmation.

Thune then referred questions about Pulte to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who told reporters he had “no observations on the matter.”

Over the last several months, the FISA fight has intersected with broader anxieties about domestic surveillance, immigration enforcement and whether emerging artificial intelligence tools could give agencies more powerful ways to analyze large amounts of sensitive personal data.

Section 702, enacted in 2008, codified parts of the once-secret Stellarwind surveillance program created under the Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed documents detailing how the authority was used, fueling a global debate over privacy and mass surveillance.

The program is frequently used to track national-security threats, including hackers, terrorist groups and foreign intelligence operatives.

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New bill aims to regulate military uses of AI

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:15:42 -0400

A new bill would restrict the Pentagon’s use of AI in operations and heavily regulate its use on fully-autonomous weapons, for domestic surveillance, and with nuclear weapons.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., announced “The Secure and Accountable Military AI Act” on Tuesday. Other lawmakers have not joined the legislation, and her office confirmed she plans to offer elements of the bill as amendments to the Senate’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act.

“Right now, the Pentagon is moving toward deploying incredibly powerful AI technology without commonsense guardrails in place, which could have catastrophic consequences that make all of us less safe,” Gillibrand said in an emailed statement. “We must act now – not to stifle technological progress, but to establish clear rules of the road that keep humans in charge and keep AI’s use in warfare smart and safe.”

NOTUS reported Tuesday that Sen. Elise Slotkin, D-Mich., plans to tuck a similar AI-guardrails bill, introduced earlier this year, into the NDAA. The Senate Armed Service Committee is slated to mark up the annual defense policy bill next week.

Americans' distrust in AI remains high compared to other countries, which experts have said could have national-security implications. The bill follows the Defense Department quarrels with Anthropic earlier this year centered around the company’s objections to the potential use of its technology.

The same day Gillibrand proposed the safeguards, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for AI to be “deployed rapidly to confront any and all threats” to the United States.

“The United States continues to lead the world in Artificial Intelligence (AI) because of the enormous talent and innovation of our AI industry, and because we refuse to stifle this innovation with overly burdensome regulation,” Trump’s executive order said.

Gillibrand is asking Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to designate specific AI uses, such as nuclear missions, lethal targeting, domestic surveillance, and cyber as “high consequence,” which would require written approval from an undersecretary or the Joint Chiefs vice chairman, according to a summary of the bill. The senator is also requesting a 15-day notification to Congressional defense committees before using AI for those operations, or 48 hours after its deployment in certain circumstances.

The bill also asks the Pentagon to make it clear who the accountable human decision-maker is or what accountability chain exists for AI-guided technology use during high-consequence operations.

Gillibrand wants to hold frontier AI companies more accountable, too.

The bill asks for AI contractors to rapidly report certain incidents to the Pentagon “including theft of model weights or data poisoning,” according to a summary from the senator’s office. The Defense Department would need to be notified within three days for security breaches and seven days for concerning model behavior, if the provision becomes law.

Becca Wasser, the defense lead for Bloomberg Economics, said setting forth guidelines will help AI companies focus on the best use cases, and set clear standards for future operations.

“In some ways it's not novel, but it is codifying things in many respects that have been long-standing norms, and now, as technology is maturating, as some of these private AI companies are becoming more and more enmeshed with the Pentagon, it is putting down on paper some of the core use cases for AI, and putting some potential stop gap measures in place,” Wasser said. “I think it might be a check on the Pentagon's full embrace of AI and private companies to ensure that when AI is used in current military operations, it is used in a responsible and professional way.”

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Trump signs business-friendlier version of AI executive order

Alexandra Kelley and David DiMolfetta — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:02:00 -0400

Federal agencies must expand oversight of advanced AI systems under a cybersecurity-focused artificial intelligence executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Tuesday, the administration’s latest attempt to foster innovation while addressing fears of AI-enabled cyber attacks.

The directive orders less federal oversight of AI models than an proposed version that was scuttled two weeks ago after industry complaints of overregulation.

The order encourages companies developing cutting-edge AI systems to give the federal government 30 days of pre-public access to those models, and limited early access for certain critical infrastructure operators. An earlier outline of the order viewed by Nextgov/FCW asked for 90 days' pre-public access.

The new version of the order also forbids federal agencies to impose licensing or preclearance requirements on AI products.

Another section of the order directs agencies to secure Defense Department and other national-security networks within 30 days. Another includes a binding operational directive to secure federal civilian networks and facilitate access to frontier AI models across critical infrastructure sectors, including hospitals, banks, utilities and state and local governments, which must also be issued within 30 days.

It also calls for the Treasury Department — with support from the Office of the National Cyber Director, the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — to establish a voluntary coordination clearinghouse for the government, AI companies, and critical infrastructure operators.

Additional provisions direct the Office of Management and Budget to identify federal grant funding that could support AI vulnerability-detection efforts within 30 days.

It also tasks the Office of Personnel Management with increasing cyber hiring via the U.S. Tech Force within 60 days. The Tech Force, launched in December to recruit cyber talent, had onboarded just 10 employees as of late Mau.

The directive also aims to establish a government framework for overseeing advanced AI systems, including the creation of a classified benchmarking process to determine which models qualify as “covered frontier models.” The order gives the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, CISA, and others 60 days to establish the classified evaluation process.

The NSA, in consultation with those agencies, would then be tasked with formally determining which AI systems meet the threshold. The NSA’s involvement in these efforts was reported in May by Nextgov/FCW.

The Commerce secretary is tasked to help develop a classified AI benchmarking process that will inform the voluntary framework for AI developers. The order says the secretary will work “through the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology,” a caveat that wasn’t included in the initial draft, per a copy posted last month by Politico.

The administration’s approach to AI has shifted in recent months amid the emergence of Anthropic’s Mythos, a powerful cybersecurity-focused AI model that has driven government discussions about how advanced AI systems can rapidly uncover vulnerabilities across computer networks.

OpenAI’s recent release of GPT-5.5-Cyber, which has also demonstrated sophisticated cyber capabilities, has further heightened concerns in Washington over how quickly these systems are advancing and how they could reshape cyber defensive and offensive operations.

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Trump appoints housing official to be acting director of national intelligence

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:26:00 -0400

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he is appointing Federal Housing Finance Agency director William Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence, replacing outgoing director Tulsi Gabbard.

The choice is unusual for the nation’s top spy official, who would oversee the CIA, NSA, and 16 more intelligence agencies. Also unusual: Pulte will keep his job at FHFA and his chairmanship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Trump said in a Truth Social post.

Pulte, who led many of the administration’s mortgage-fraud efforts last year, has no experience working in the intelligence community. He used his position at the FHFA to launch investigations into the president’s political foes, including Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump said Pulte “has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America.”

The announcement sparked swift condemnation from former national security leads, who expressed disbelief over the pick for a paramount U.S. intelligence post that has seen major restructuring and downsizing over the past year.

“I would think at a time when we are facing exceptional conflict in the Middle East and tensions around the world, we would want someone with deep experience in intelligence matters to serve as the acting director of the agency responsible for coordinating all of America’s spy agencies,” said a former senior national security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.

“Moreover, it’s a full-time job, so I can’t see how someone could also serve in an important financial regulatory position at the same time. It makes you think this administration either doesn’t know or care — or both — about this office,” the former senior official added.

Nextgov/FCW has asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, FHFA and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for comment.

Citing her husband's recent cancer diagnosis, Gabbard announced last week that she intends to step down from her position effective at the end of June.

“Despite a law requiring the Director of National Intelligence to have ‘extensive’ national security experience, the president’s choice for Acting DNI, Bill Pulte, has quite literally no relevant experience with intelligence or national security,” said Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee.

“His brief career in public service has shown only that he is willing to abuse his office to attack Donald Trump’s political enemies,” added Himes. “That would be dangerous in any job, but in a position that requires sober, apolitical judgment based on intelligence, it is potentially catastrophic for national security.”

“This appointment speaks volumes about what this president expects from the nation's top intelligence official,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who serves in an equivalent role on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Rather than selecting a respected national security professional capable of delivering independent judgments, the president has chosen an official who has demonstrated not just willingness but eagerness to use the authorities of government to pursue political retribution.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated to add a reaction from Rep. Jim Himes D-Conn., and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.

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Desert e-bike race ‘the perfect’ place to test military-vehicle AI

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:29:59 -0400

Pilot Racing, a team in the upcoming Baja 1000 dirt-bike race will bring a special advantage: AI that prescribes when a rider should pit, long before the need becomes obvious.

The thousand-mile trek through California and Mexico is “the perfect” environment to test GDIT’s logistics-and-maintenance AI before it heads off to rough and disconnected battlefields, a company representative said.

GDIT is teaming with AWS on Project Celerity, an AI-enabled platform for managing energy. The Army’s Advanced Research Lab has been heavily investing in how to deploy small, tactical “microgrids”—essentially energy generation and storage systems for environments where power and connectivity are absent. Those microgrids aren’t intended to simply provide power for soldiers on base but also power batteries for a growing fleet of eclectic and robotic vehicles and weapons. So predicting when and how drones or ground robots might require new batteries is a part of the challenge.

Shannon Judd, the director of global defense partners at AWS, said in an email that the military applications for the project are many. These include helping “teams conducting patrols or surveillance in remote areas, special operations forces who need to make decisions quickly without guaranteed access to full communications, and disaster or humanitarian missions,” on top of managing power or other pieces of infrastructure.

Brandon Bean, GDIT’s vice president for artificial intelligence and machine learning, said, “This is a proxy for contested logistics… The Baja Desert provides us with adverse terrain topography and weather; it also provides us a dynamic [operational tempo] so we can't pre-predict or plan anything.”

It shows an evolution of GDIT’s Defense Operations Grid-Mesh Accelerator, or DOGMA, a tool that fuses sensor data and sends it back to an operator under difficult conditions, such as enemy jamming, broken communications links, etc.

Since introducing DOGMA last August in the Pentagon’s T-REX drone warfare experiment, the company has developed three versions of it: one for fusing data, one for running autonomy, and one called WorldView, which Bean described as a “cognitive layer that provides a common operating picture.”

The race team will use electrically powered bikes, similar to the ones that special operations forces use in some missions. They’re quieter than motorbikes and their large batteries can also power sensors and communications gear.

“All the telemetry that's coming from the rider and from the motorcycle” will go to AWS servers, Bean said. “Then we're going to provide predictive analytics on when and where the rider needs to pit and where we need to replace the batteries.”

Other telemetry tools may eventually be added, like a rider-health tool designed for no-communication environments where standard fitness trackers don’t work. The company unveiled it along with DOGMA WorldView at the recent SOF Week event in Tampa, Florida.

“What we did was we built a round-loop workflow where we collected all this telemetry data off of these devices, [and] we're able to work and pull this data into our DOGMA WorldView and be able to do pattern of life on these individuals," Bean said. "So we could tell, based on the telemetry data on the phone, whether they've [encountered] elevated terrain or whether they stopped for periods of time. The next step of that is to actually tap into the microphone and the camera on the phone, so that we can identify if there's hostile control [of the] device.”

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Thanks largely to robots, Ukraine is now talking about winning, not just surviving

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:20:56 -0400

PRAGUE, Czech Republic–A small but growing number of European officials and analysts are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn’t just surviving its grueling war with Russia, it is in some ways thriving and may even be on a path to victory.

This isn’t yet captured in headlines—for example, about last weekend’s barrage of Russian drones and missiles around Ukraine—but in the details, like how some 90 percent were intercepted.

Several long-term trends have shifted in Ukraine’s favor, and the core reason is its fierce focus on AI and robotics.

In the crucible of war, Ukraine has developed drones and ground robots that can hold territory—even take it back. Some are fully controlled by humans, like supply robots and medical-evacuation vehicles. But an increasing number are controlled in at least some aspects by dozens of AI products, from guidance packages on aerial drones to decision aids at the highest levels. Take the TFL-1 module, which can enable a one-way drone to function autonomously after a human has selected its target, reducing its susceptibility to jamming and other defenses. Its manufacturer, a Ukrainian company called The Fourth Law, says TFL-1 makes a drone four times more likely to hit its target.

Just as important as the tech are the new tactics. Given unusual latitude to experiment, Ukrainian fighters began to develop robot-forward infantry concepts, like combined-arms attacks by airborne and ground systems, “more than a year ago. Right now, we're massively starting to implement this,” said Davyd Aloian, deputy secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, the coordinating body on domestic and international security, in an interview.

Ukraine and its partners are also steaming ahead on new concepts for highly autonomous defenses against Russian drones, combining ISR sensors and AI to detect and identify enemy drones in less time and with more certainty.

“All of the systems are being linked with each other and with people” to create a distributed network with interceptor drones at various locations to be activated when needed, Aloian said. “One day we will have only like 10 guys who are just going to be responsible for approving interception. And it will automatically go direct to the target.”

The human operators will be dispersed as well. “Everything can be controlled from Kyiv, Lviv, from cities in other countries,” he said.

Ukraine’s advantages go beyond weapons and tactics. It is more willing than Russia—or even Kyiv’s Western backers—to rebuild its doctrine, acquisition, and resupply systems around autonomous warfare.

Countries that fail to follow suit risk disaster, one of Ukraine’s top dronemakers warned attendees at the GLOBSEC conference here.

“It's not what happened to Ukraine”—meaning Russia’s barrage of Shahed drones—that “should scare us in Europe,” said Swarmer CEO Serhii Kupriienko.

Instead, Kupriienko said, people should be scared by how quickly a middling military—in this case, Ukraine’s—developed the ability to inflict precise, devastating, and long-range damage.

“We are behind by literally 10 years or 20 years” in some defense-technology areas, such as satellite imagery, Kupriienko said, and yet his country has climbed a capability curve that just two years ago seemed insurmountable. So could others, he said.

“The answer is always AI solutions and integrating the AI into even the daily routine work within the bureaucracy,” he said.

Ukraine has also developed a defense industry that can keep up with the Russian threat. Its success is reflected not only on the battlefield, but in the growing number of foreign investors who see potential in defense products developed in and with Ukraine.

“We have evolved since 2022, the industry has and our defense has as well. Right now we are able to provide not only [large quantities of drone] assets but everything what is needed to build out the ecosystem,” including parts and production, training, modification, etc. Aloian said.

Strike drones FTW

Ukraine’s strike drones, more than any other factor, have helped counter a key Russian advantage: a large population of economically desperate young men and a comparative willingness to discount the cost of their deaths. Vladimir Putin has drawn hundreds of thousands into service with upfront bonuses and insurance benefits, which has provided numerical superiority on Ukrainian battlefields along with “considerable stimulus for the ailing Russian economy,” writes expatriate economist Vladislav Inozemtsev, who calls the system “deathonomics.”

But human waves are ineffective if drones kill soldiers faster than they can be replaced at the front—and that has become the case, analysts at the Institute for the Study of War wrote this week.

“Ukraine's successful mid-range and frontline drone strike campaigns are limiting Russia's ability to transport personnel to the frontline and to supply and sustain frontline positions,” they wrote.

Putin must now “convince an increasingly tired Russian populace not only to support a fifth year of war but also to accept involuntary mobilization for a war that has already cost Russia well over a million casualties.”

Ukraine’s deep-strike capabilities have changed the game in other ways as well. Oil infrastructure deep in Russian territory is no longer safe, giving Kyiv leverage over Moscow’s export revenues no matter what the White House does with sanctions relief. Even more humiliating, the drone threat forced Putin to hold his annual Victory Day parade this month without Soviet-esque ranks of tanks and missiles.

“Believe us. We were in the occupation of the Soviet Union for 50 years, and we know how important” the Victory Day parade is,” Estonian foreign minister Margus Tsahkna told the GLOBSEC audience. “For the first time, Putin was not able to wage this parade. This is the facade actually collapsing. And Putin is losing face among the Russian people, not only among us.”

“Putin thought that Ukraine was a question of five days. And, let's be frank, we, too, we said, ‘Five days, and then it's finished,’” said Xavier Bettel, Luxembourg's deputy prime minister. “In fact, the resilience of the Ukrainians was a big surprise for all of us.”

Changing fortunes

To understand how dramatically Ukraine’s prospects have changed, consider that in March, then-ODNI director Tulsi Gabbard, testified that the U.S. intelligence community believed that Russia had the “upper hand” in the conflict.

Now Ukrainian officials and other observers have begun to worry about a premature sense of victory among Ukraine’s foreign backers. Kyiv still depends on aid and imported weapons. Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the government continues to be “very persistent” in its efforts to secure advanced Patriot missiles from the United States. “I believe [the U.S.] must act quicker,” he told reporters during a visit to Sweden.

Some European governments, however, are ever more eager to forge deeper ties with their continent’s new defense leader—not just for Ukraine’s sake but for their own.

“It means enlargement processes for the European Union, for NATO in the future,” Estonia’s Tsahkna said. It means security guarantees not only to Ukraine and for Ukraine, but the other way around, because actually Ukraine is the largest military power in Europe at the moment, and increasing as well its industrial base.”

As for the Ukrainian government, declaring victory will require more than the cessation of hostilities. The invading country must be left “much weaker,” so that it can’t re-arm as it did after its 2014 invasion of Crimea, Aloian said.

“If there's going to be a ceasefire, there will be very harsh conditions and difficult negotiations for the taking off of the sanctions, and when it will be,” he said. Otherwise, Russia will “renew all of those processes [of military buildup] before the full-scale invasion.”

“Right now, they're aiming like about 30 percent of their economy for the defense industry,” which is too much, he said.

Even the downfall of Putin, who has led Russia since the end of the 20th century, would be insufficient.

“The change of the regime shouldn’t just be only external. It should be also internal,” he said.

If it happens, much of the credit will go to the makers and operators of Ukraine’s drones.

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Ready, fire, aim: Pentagon cut workforce with little analysis before or since

Meghann Myers — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:48:54 -0400

Pentagon leaders cut their department’s workforce by more than 10 percent with little regard for the effects—and still has no plans to assess them, according to a congressional watchdog report released on Friday.

The department shed 78,000 civilian employees in 2025 through a mix of voluntary resignations, involuntary layoffs, and a hiring freeze that resulted in nearly 60,000 fewer new hires than in recent years.

“But we found that DOD didn’t consistently analyze the impacts of these reductions, either in 2025 or in prior years,” according to the report by the Government Accountability Office. “DOD also doesn’t have a plan to assess lessons learned from its 2025 workforce reductions.”

In their response to the report, Defense officials agreed that they should “develop and implement a plan for collecting and sharing lessons learned from the Department's implementation of workforce reduction efforts.”

The officials did not indicate whether that would happen.

Soon after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took office, the Pentagon announced it would cut 5 to 8 percent of its civilian workforce. Within a year, the number swelled to about 110,000—about 14 percent of DOD civilians—including laid-off probationary employees, deferred resignations, and voluntary early retirements. Some 30,000 people were hired for a short list of jobs exempted from the hiring freeze, putting the net loss at just over 10 percent.

Of the 28 Defense agencies, offices, and other organizations targeted for workforce cuts by the Trump administration’s fiscal 2026 budget request, at least three did not give the required explanation to Congress about why and how the cuts would be made, GAO found.

Those were the Joint Staff, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the Defense Contract Audit Agency, according to the report.

“According to component officials, DOD had not provided guidance for when and how to conduct and document this analysis,” the GAO found.

And further, the GAO found, the Pentagon didn’t plan to assess how the cuts affected productivity.

In March, the Partnership for Public Service published a survey that found morale among DOD employees has tanked during the current administration.

Only 9 percent of Army Department employees agreed that “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s political leadership team generates high levels of motivation in the workforce,” the survey found, the most satisfied of any of the large government agencies surveyed.

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The Navy wants next-generation munitions, so it’s spending millions on innovation hubs

Lauren C. Williams — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:41:19 -0400

Updated: June 2.

Replenishing munitions stockpiles doesn’t end with simply producing more of them. There are persistent challenges with mixing, manufacturing, integrating and discovering new energetic materials—the chemical compounds that make up explosives, propellants, and munitions. On Thursday, the Navy broke ground on a new facility to help.

The Maryland Energetics Innovation Hub is meant to furnish lab space where companies can test new tech, such as high-performance computers to run simulations. It is under construction an hour or so from the Pentagon by the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, Md., and the American Center for Manufacturing & Innovation, or ACMI.

“This initiative ensures that NSWC Indian Head Division remains at the forefront of energetics innovation, scale-up, and production,” Capt. Stephen Duba, the warfare center’s commanding officer, said in a statement. “By bringing together government and industry partners in a collaborative environment, we can accelerate the development and fielding of critical capabilities that strengthen the Navy’s arsenal and the larger munitions industrial base.”

The Navy awarded ACMI $50 million to bring companies working in munitions and energetics closer to the service’s technical expertise. The group aims to raise another $200 million for the project.

The MEIH will focus on eight technical areas: developing new energetics materials, high-performance computing; non-destructive test and evaluation; integration with drones or unmanned systems; automating energetic processing and assembly; creating new manufacturing processes for propulsion systems and warheads; analyzing energetics obsolescence, and producing high-precision, high-throughput non-energetic components.

The plan is to finish the first two buildings of the larger facility within nine months, John Burer, ACMI’s founder, told Defense One.

The White House and Pentagon have made production of munitions—both exquisite and expendable—a clear priority for the near future. Earlier this year, the Pentagon stood up the Congressionally-mandated Joint Energetics Transition Office, which is charged with developing strategies for investment in and implementation of new and legacy materials needed for weapons and propulsion systems.

Defense tech hubs have already sprouted around the country, in Austin, Texas; Rhode Island’s Unity Park and Quonset Point; and the Louisiana coastline. MxD, a Pentagon manufacturing partner, has a 22,000-square-foot hub in Chicago.

The Maryland hub is the second facility the Navy and ACMI have embarked on. The first was the National Security Industrial Hub near NSWC’s installation in Crane, Indiana, which is focused on munitions and energetics. The Pentagon is spending $75 million to help erect the Indiana campus, which broke ground earlier this year.

The Maryland and Indiana facilities both are using private capital for “industrial facility build outs,” Burer said.

“The objective of the Maryland Energetics Innovation Hub is around process development and technology development around energetics, which would be developed there, but then scale and be relevant in many other places across the United States—qualifying new second sources of supply, which is a special thing that they have the ability to do at the nation's only government-owned, government-operated arsenal for the Navy, at Indian Head,” he said.

That munitions campus in Indiana is around 1,100 acres, while the Maryland hub would be a fraction of that.

“What makes this campus special is the ability to facilitate private-public partnerships between the tenants and Indian Head to make use of specialist capabilities that they have behind the fence,” such as mixing energetic materials, Burer said. “To build a solid rocket motor campus, for example, which is one of the specialties behind the gate at Indian Head, you need many, many hundreds of acres…That's what scaled production needs. But refining the processes at a pilot scale. It's smart to do that in a smaller footprint campus, in a collaborative way, which is what they're aiming to do here.”

The southern Maryland-based hub builds on an ecosystem of energetics companies working in the region, but could foster new growth and partnerships for companies designing military technology, said William Durant, CEO and president of the not-for-profit Energetics Technology Center, which will have space at the MEIH and help connect companies looking to work with the Navy.

“We want to see and help enable the companies that are coming in—that are best suited to meet any of those eight technical capability areas—[be] successful,” Durant said.

Over the next year, they plan to have a set of companies and a roadmap to execute solutions in those research and development areas.

“We want to see, in 16 to 18 months, who are the performers, what that's going to look like to meet the needs of the Navy…and then there are specific products and things that they're going to want that are needed today in the warfighter,” Durant said.

While there’s no fixed number, the aim is to have about ten companies join the hub, whether they take up long-term residence or cycle in and out, he said.

“Whatever is most important in supporting warfighter success. If that means a company comes in for six months, great! If that means that a company now needs to take up residency for five years, great! And now, does that mean we need to build another facility?”

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect the new funding goal ACMI officials set after they spoke with Defense One.

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Q&A with SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Frank Donovan

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:07:55 -0400

Until recently, Gen. Frank Donovan ran the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, the white-hot center of the Pentagon’s drive for affordable mass and battlefield robots. Now he’s in charge of U.S. Southern Command, which is working hard to put the DAWG’s products to use. Defense One sat down with Donovan during SOF Week in Tampa. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: You’re an expert in autonomous warfare, as a former leader of the DAWG—for which a nearly unimaginable $50 billion has been requested in the next fiscal year. How do you want to develop and use it at SOUTHCOM?

A: It's embarrassing to think that I'm an expert on autonomous warfare, because there are folks here that know so much more about the tech and the science and how it all works. I don't know all those things. I've learned a lot about it, but I've really focused on how you actually synchronize those things and bring it to bear, because I think my concern is right now, what I'm sensing—and you know, three years as vice commander of SOCOM, I got to be in the building watching three [program objective memorandum] cycles build. I come up here as a Marine infantry officer, reconnaissance, special operations, but I'm going to talk about what matters. It's budget and resource, and applying those resources to what we actually really need.

And so, what I started seeing is that even though Ukraine is going on, we're learning some lessons—and that's a whole side topic, which lessons we're learning from Ukraine—but we're seeing things in the South Red Sea, we're seeing things in the operational SOF environment, things I've faced, and I'm like, there's something different here, but how does it compete in the [Pentagon] with the services that hold most of the strengths? They hold the relationship with the defense industrial base, they hold a relationship with Congress. That's just how our government works, and it's healthy, and it's good, but are we going to be able to embrace autonomy? And they then embrace autonomy, not autonomy platforms, because I think we get caught in this a little bit, you know. I don't really care about platforms, I care about autonomous warfare, and are we really willing to take a step forward and embrace autonomous warfare. I think there's definitions, and so three years as vice commander at SOCOM, I saw this tension between what the joint force needs out front— and I'm going to say the joint force, not what our Army, Navy, Air Force components need out front, it's what the joint force needs to fight—and how those autonomous needs actually enter back into the Pentagon, and then get built into a service to actually come out and end up back with the war fighters. That's a misconnect.

I call it the two Olympic rings. Those two Olympic rings don't touch. When we had it as a very short window, nine months with the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, I worked for Gen. [Bryan] Fenton [and] Adm. [Frank] Bradley was my boss for SOCOM, but I was working for [Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen] Feinberg. He held the resources. And that's what gets everyone's attention in the Pentagon: who holds the resources? So we could take the needs that came out of Replicator tranche one and two, and then quickly turn and say, ‘What can we bring to bear quickly with what's out there?’

And so we started to see if you match the actual true joint autonomous requirements, your actual needs, with service acquisition, there's something there, there's another ring in the Olympic rings that could be added there, and so what we saw in the DAWG formulating, we then said, well, if we come into SOUTHCOM, how do we actually create the SOUTHCOM Autonomous Warfare Command to address that gap, to address that need, and drive those requirements back up into the DAWG? So that's where we're planning on, and that's the journey we're on with SOCOM.

Q: You’ve talked about how battlefield networks will enable autonomous-warfare concepts like distributed swarming. And when I talk to Ukrainians, they wish they had such networks. But, of course, Russian electronic-warfare forces work hard to prevent that. How are you approaching this problem?

A: I think the operational data enterprise—operational data environment, whatever term we want to use—that we have to kind of encapsulate, and that's—the Marine colonel we're bringing in for the SOUTHCOM Autonomous Warfare Command, we talk about this. We don't talk about robots, we talk about the data environment with the different data layers that we need at the very forward edge, so our SOF and our conventional force teammates with an ATAK or a cell phone, that they can actually plug into that data network, and whatever robot shows up with the capability, they can leverage it instantaneously. It doesn't come with a priority stack or a company that we vendor-locked on. It is truly a fully capable system that we can use in selecting the needs, whether it's kinetic, when it's non-kinetic.

I think for us in SOUTHCOM, most of the systems we're looking at primarily are domain awareness systems. And for us it just magnifies—because if our partners, who have the access and placement where they live, where they operate, the environments that they have to work in, in the rough terrain, the jungle, over the horizon, thousands of miles at sea— we're working with our partners, going after these [Designated Terrorist Organizations], we have to enhance their domain awareness, but they have to also be able to plug into this environment in a cheap, easy, and very fluid way. And I think if we think about the data layers, the data environment, that's the first thing that we are focused on right now, is setting the environment. Because we can match the robots to the environment, I mean, whether it swims, it flies, it has feet, whatever it does, we have to make it do what we want it to do when we want it to do it without someone telling us, ‘Yeah, it's great only if you use it this way, only if you use my service stack, and only if you connect it to that.’ Unacceptable across the board.

Q: Are vendors still bringing proprietary systems, or has the open-architecture push actually taken hold?

A: I think we're starting to see improvements in that. And I would say two years ago, not at all. Everything was solely focused. And the concern is that you get a vendor with well-meaning folks, and a lot of them are retired folks, they got out, they moved on, they want to pitch a piece of kit to a commander, and they get all excited about it. And the problem is: it's great for a specific event or an exercise, but it doesn't have a path forward.

The more we, as military leaders, demand open architecture, we have to make sure our demand is clean: “Hey, this is what I need this thing to do for me.” And that's not always clear either, because I think part of it is: folks my age, we're not sure how to embrace autonomy and what this means, and to really give freedom down to the lower edge, that tactical edge, all the way up to lethal effects, without, you know, always a human in, on, next to the loop, but we'll always have that, because there's nothing truly autonomous, there's always someone involved. But we have to think about delegation and empowering ways that autonomy makes people nervous. I mean, if you have a one-way attack, lethal one-way attack system, it's not that we're going to—that's why I'm little concerned that we get over infatuated with FPV.

Actually, I'd like to move away from FPV entirely, but every time we do, we have someone saying, “Well, what about collateral damage, what about the final go, no-go?” We’ve got to start thinking very differently. The approval to launch the system, or even put it in place, is lethal.

What happens often is that we don't come with a clear signal to our tech industry and our vendor partners with what we really want. We just compound it and ask for different things, and all of a sudden, “explosive boat” turns into an ISR platform turns into something else, and we kind of lost track of what we asked industry to do for us. So, I think it's, we both have to learn here for open architecture, but a very clean demand also.

Q: Commanders don’t like to delegate lethal authority to a robot they can’t court-martial. How do you build trust in autonomous systems?

A: I think that starts at my level. We have to create environments to develop that trust, and there's some habits we have to break from the last 25, almost 30 years now.

Because we had such clarity and the never-blinking eye, and we had ISR everywhere. We could hang over the target without any threat at all, we could just dominate the environment. We could control every factor, minus weather. If the weather is bad, we just wait and go tomorrow. That's a whole different environment. So, we as leaders cannot set conditions in our training and our mindset and our educational process to set that up again, as that's how it's going to be.

I think what we owe is to really understand how to delegate and maximize autonomy. How do you empower those digital natives at the lowest levels in set conditions? We don't have training ranges right now that allow us to use these systems to any level of their capability. I think of a certain base, I know that there's a civilian road in between, and anytime we want to fly like a drone across the civilian road to the other training area, that’s like, shut traffic down. We’ve got to get special approval. We're just struggling with that, especially when we want to train in that comms-denied environment, electronic attack. We want to do all those things. So I think part of this is changing the mindset that leaders who grew up at my level, and kind of probably down to the one-star and O-6 level that grew up in a time where we could control all the features and factors, and I didn't have to delegate, because I could see. I could be in the ear of the lead squad and say, ‘What are you doing, move faster, you know, get back on the road.’

Now think about a comms-denied environment where we're not going to be able to talk to them. So are we training the leaders the right way to think? And I come back to being a U.S. Marine, heart and soul of what I've done for 38 years, the delegation down to that NCO level, that non-commissioned officer level at the forward edge, and really let them run in training, make mistakes, and then when it's time, delegate it and just let it go, and that's it, that's something that is different.

Q: How can the Pentagon help small, innovative companies increase production to useful levels?

A: It's a great question, and I think my time with Deputy Secretary of Defense Feinberg, and watching him bring a bit of a business-model approach to this process connected to the DAWG, and the scaling is what we talk about all the time. “Great product, looks great. Can you scale?” But it's not a fair question to ask, because the company is like, “Well, I can, but what's the order?” And we're like, “Well, we're not sure yet, you know, it depends if you scale.”

One of the best practices we had [at the DAWG] is we took over the Replicator portfolio. The downselects we did, where we went out and visited the operators, the forward commanders. What do you need? Tell us what you need. Brought that knowledge back, brought the companies in, brought the acquisition executives in, and slimmed down the list almost by a third—these folks can't scale, or they can't be open architecture. But once we kind of found the big bets, then we went out to that company, some were small companies. “OK, we're going to help you scale, because we believe your product’s what we're looking for.” It's our job to match and really accelerate you to scale, to meet us on the X with these numbers, and that is what the DepSecWar is pushing us to kind of think through. So I think your DAWG mechanism, and right now there's a discussion, which direction it's going to go, what it'll become, but that's what we want to plug into. So a best of breed. I want to get less away from a piece of tech or a vendor, go to the DAWG and say I'm looking for this capability, let them work in speed. We had sprint development centers where we had operators right next to vendors, right next to tech dev, and right next to the acquisition experts spinning fast, knocking people off the pedestal, putting new people on, and then once we found the bet, we're ready to come with the cash to help them scale.

So it has to be a very collaborative way forward, I think, if we want to get some of these incredible companies coming up now to really be able to accelerate to scale. But the question of scale is, “We're going to buy X number and then we're moving on.” This is where, I don't think everyone's fully grasping, I think while the defense industrial base kind of struggles with this. I think they struggle with one-way attack systems, because my favorite words are “one way; it ain't coming back.” OK, so if it's not coming back, guess what: it's not coming back to the airfield. You get 20 more years of contract services on this and make lots of money. So, I think that's not good for our current defense industrial base model. We want to use two or three years. If that platform's still viable, upgrade its brains and continue to dev, or get rid of it and go new, and I think that's a scaling discussion that's different than we're used to in the past.

Q: Are defense companies getting the message that they have to play more like a startup?

A: Well, it's so complex, because to build a nuclear submarine that shoots a nuclear missile...that is a certain amount of talent and capability, industrial baseline that cannot—we have to increase that, right? I think that some of the smaller things we're seeing, the smaller classes of one-way attack system or drones, they're still paving the way for heavy conventional systems to break through and get the target, so I think there's room for both.

Q: Yeah, but you still have a lot of big programs of record that it sounds like we can get rid of.

A: I think you could. I mean, if you think high-wing ISR: do we want to keep making MQ-9-type approaches, or do we want really proliferated, and then you get up into space, P-LEO stuff, but then right below it. How can we do ISR differently? There is a lot of growth there, I think, great opportunity, too. And I think we should really be pushing to set the conditions to have those engagements. That's why I go back to why I think the DAWG is important. It can operate at that DepSecWar level, work with the service acquisition authority, set conditions for those kind of competitions and drawdowns that accelerate once we find the folks that fit in this time window and be able to move on quickly.

Q: What is your biggest concern?

A: I'll give you an answer you probably aren't expecting. What keeps me up at night is attracting quality young Americans to come join the military, because we have to have these young folks replenished in our ranks. Less than 1% serve. We know that. That's good. That's how democracy should be. But are you attracting the right folks for the right reasons? Because they're the ones that are coming in with a lot of those digital-native skills that we need. And then that grit we need also, because in any conflict we're ever going to come into, that is truly the American advantage. It’s the young Americans that have solved so many hard problems on the battlefield in the past, and that's how our nation will survive.

Q: Are there policies we could change to boost recruiting and retention?

A: I would look at our pay scale for our E-7s to E-8s and E-9s and quadruple it right now.

For those folks that stick around or a senior list of leaders, we put so much weight on their shoulders, and you’ve got to think of the sergeant major of the Marine Corps with almost 30 years’ experience, gets paid as much as a senior major or lieutenant colonel. I think that's the talent we cannot afford to bleed off at the apex of their career paths.

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Cyber Force? Senator pushes to create service branch under the Army

Thomas Novelly — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:19:58 -0400

A new cyber-focused military service branch would sit under the Army if one senator’s proposal comes to fruition.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is spearheading a markup amendment to the Senate’s 2027 National Defense Authorization Act that would create a “Cyber Force” as the next armed service branch. The senator’s office confirmed that the amendment proposes to establish the branch under the Army, just as the Space Force and Marine Corps sit under the Air Force and Navy.

Similar provisions are reportedly being floated in the House, according to two people familiar with policy discussions. Earlier this year, Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, told the Center For Strategic and International Studies that a “Cyber Force is inevitable” and “we’re going to get this done.” A Fallon spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Friday asking about a potential amendment.

“New and escalating cyber threats on the battlefield demand a change to our current approach. The status quo and years of incremental changes are not meeting the current threat and are insufficient as that threat grows,” Gillibrand told Defense One in an emailed statement. “I believe, and many experts agree, that the creation of a dedicated Cyber Force will ensure the United States is ready to fight and win on the modern battlefield and protect our national security.”

The proposed amendment marks the latest push in a years-long effort. Gillibrand and House lawmakers have backed the idea before. In the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, lawmakers commissioned the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to study “alternative organizational models for the cyber forces of the Armed Forces.” Those findings have not been released. Details from the amendments showing what a Cyber Force might look like are not yet public, but think tanks and national security experts have already been pitching their own force designs.

A 2024 Foundation for Defense of Democracies report concluded that a Cyber Force could sit under the Army, muster about 10,000 personnel, and need a budget of around $16.5 billion. In August 2025, the FDD and the Center for Strategic and International Studies announced a commission on Cyber Force Generation. A report from those think tanks is scheduled to be released next month.

One former military official said there would be strengths to a cyber-focused service, but putting it under the Army is a bad idea. They argued that cyber would remain a secondary priority amid the branch’s many missions.

“The Army is the largest service by far,” the former official said. “Manpower-wise, it's like half the department, and it's like, ‘we'll put it under because it'll be easy for the Army to just put in another force.’ It's already hard enough to run the Army as it is.”

Mark Montgomery, a retired Navy rear admiral and an FDD senior fellow who advocates for a Cyber Force, argued that this year is an ideal time to create a new service.

“Timing-wise, you need to do this in the beginning or middle of an administration, not at the end of an administration,” Montgomery said.

The proposed amendment would need to survive multiple Senate and House edits to make the final compromise NDAA.

It’s not clear if the Trump administration would support the latest bipartisan push. Last year, the Pentagon rolled out CYBERCOM 2.0, a series of policy changes aimed at beefing up the recruiting, training, and missions of the existing U.S. Cyber Command.

Katie Sutton, the assistant defense secretary for cyber policy and principal cyber advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, defended the Cyber Command reforms during a January Senate hearing, and said a renewed command and a new service could co-exist.

“I think this is a really important debate for us all to be having about the future of the cyber warfighting domain,” Sutton told the Senate Armed Services Committee in January. “I do think one of the most common misconceptions about Cyber Command is that it is a debate between Cyber Command 2.0 and a cyber force, and they are actually separate debates that I believe both need to be had, and we need to look closely at the pros and cons of both.”

Advocates for a separate and independent cyber-focused service branch say it aligns with the Trump administration’s calls for “offensive cyber operations against those planning to kill Americans,” the White House’s new counterterrorism strategy said. It also comes as President Donald Trump and Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, acknowledged the growing role of cyber effects in U.S. military operations in Iran and Venezuela, Defense One and sister publication NextGov/FCW have previously reported.

“The president says, ‘We've got to be more offensive’ but then you got to better generate forces to be offensive, and we don't generate enough forces to do both offensive cyber and defensive cyber operations,” Montgomery said. “A cyber force is clearly necessary.”

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Software patches from Army hackathon going straight to troops in CENTCOM

Meghann Myers — Fri, 29 May 2026 14:22:06 -0400

Engineers from top defense contractors have spent days behind their laptops at Fort Carson, Colo., coding up ways to enable weapons, sensors, and command-and-control systems developed independently to share information.

Dubbed Project Jailbreak, the effort is part of the Army’s first hackathon to integrate its many proprietary software programs. Some of the fixes have already been pushed to deployed troops, according to the Army’s chief technology officer.

“A couple of the software patches have gone forward, luckily…we're still in a lull of action. There hasn't been a ton of incoming, so we haven't used them in an offensive capacity,” Alex Miller said. “Our goal is to push the rest of that forward in the next 30 days.”

Representatives from Anduril, Boeing, General Dynamics, L3Harris, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, Perennial Autonomy, and RTX are working on integrating dozens of their products, in a push to cut down on the number of screens it takes to look at the battlefield and either launch missions or respond to threats.

“So if you've been into any joint operation center or tactical operation center, there's screens everywhere, and that is because we, over time, have tried to give as much information visually as possible,” Miller said. “What that has unintentionally done over time is forced our people to be the integration point, which is really rough if you're cold, tired, wet, and hungry. So, if you've been fighting and, you know, 20-hour days and you're getting a little bit of sleep, it just doesn't scale very well.”

The Army is working to eliminate this issue with its next-generation command-and-control platform, which is still in testing and development. But in the meantime, it has endless existing technology that needs to be linked up now.

To do that, service leaders invited major contractors to Fort Carson for a series of hackathon events. The first push was to integrate existing counter-unmanned and air-missile defense systems, tightening defenses against the types of weapons that have targeted U.S. troops in the Middle East during the war in Iran.

“At the end of 30 days, hopefully we've given them more decision space, more space to be able to decide what system, what effector, how they're going to defeat the threats that they're facing every day, based on all of the different capabilities over the years,” said Brent Ingraham, the Army’s assistant secretary for acquisitions, logistics, and technology.

It actually wasn’t that difficult to convince defense industry giants to send engineers to the hackathon on their own dime, officials said, nor to convince them that opening up their proprietary systems to each other is a necessary step in the way the Army is doing development and acquisitions now.

“My perception of this is there had been a first-mover problem…where none of them could take the first step without being certain the others would come,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said. “And so once they were certain that the United States Army, as the convener, was requiring everybody—or strongly recommending everybody—to show up, everybody came quickly, and it has unlocked massive momentum.”

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Data brokers are helping enemies target US troops. The Pentagon must step up, lawmakers say

Edward Graham — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:10:00 -0400

Adversaries have used commercially available location data to target U.S. servicemembers in war zones, a bipartisan group of lawmakers revealed Thursday.

In a letter to Pentagon CIO Kirsten Davies, 14 members of Congress — led by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C. — warned that the department “has not taken basic steps to protect U.S. military personnel from the serious counterintelligence and force protection threat posed by the collection and sale of personal information, including cell phone location data, by data brokers.”

Reuters first reported the news.

Last month, U.S. Central Command revealed to lawmakers that it “has received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater.” The letter includes CENTCOM's answers to questions on the subject.

This type of data can be acquired from legitimate data brokers for a nominal fee and then used to track a person's location, particularly ones who follow set routines or are based in remote areas.

“That foreign adversaries are still able to buy location data collected from the phones of U.S. personnel serving in military hotspots is a direct result of DOD leadership’s failure to prioritize this threat and implement common sense cyber defenses recommended by federal cybersecurity experts,” the lawmakers wrote.

The Pentagon has been aware for some time now of the security vulnerabilities posed by publicly available location data from smartphones or other wearable electronic devices.

When mobile fitness app Strava released a Global Heat Map of its users’ activities in late 2017, it inadvertently gave away the locations of some U.S. military sites in the Middle East and provided precise details on the routes personnel took when they jogged. Similar location data from running app Polar also revealed the locations of military personnel, and could be used in some cases to track them to their homes.

DOD subsequently issued a directive in August 2018 that banned uses of apps and devices that share geolocation data “while in locations designated as operational areas.”

In their letter, however, the lawmakers said CENTCOM shared that it “only rolled out the capability to administratively disable location sharing on smartphones” this month. The combatant command also revealed that the Pentagon has not yet taken steps to deactivate the tracking numbers on smartphones that are used by advertisers and data brokers.

“Both iOS and Android also include an opt-in privacy setting to disable this unique advertising ID, which the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommend,” the letter said. “Unfortunately, USCENTCOM confirmed that the advertising ID is still not disabled on government-issued smartphones, but stated that the Defense Information Systems Agency is currently testing a capability to do so.”

The lawmakers urged DOD to disable the advertising ID on all agency-issued smartphones and to issue guidance requiring personnel to do the same on their personal devices brought overseas or onto military facilities. They also called for the agency to remove web browsers “designed to facilitate data collection by Google and other advertising companies” from Pentagon-issued devices.

“Instead, DoD should pre-install on DoD devices and require the use by DoD personnel of privacy-focused web browsers that protect users with anti-tracking cyber defenses, such as ad blocking and the Global Privacy Control (GPC), which is already enforced by law in 12 states,” the letter said.

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Army’s data-merging cell needs a few years to untangle the mess

Meghann Myers — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:20:53 -0400

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Maryland—Much has been made of the new systems the Army is bringing online as part of its Continuous Transformation efforts, but getting old systems into shape is also part of the effort. In a small office space at Combat Capabilities Development Command, a group of 25 soldiers and civilian engineers, on loan from local units, is fielding requests from across the service to make its many data systems talk to each other.

The pilot Army Data Operations Center, launched on April 3, is to run until the end of September, when the Army will decide whether and how it will continue. To date, the team has fielded 68 tickets—from next-generation command-and-control testing, to radios for a deploying unit, to behavioral health data for soldiers and families at home.

Maj. Becky Boorbach, a data officer with the 25th Infantry Division, vouched for the ADOC’s work. Part of her job includes prepping for Exercise Balikatan in the Philippines by pulling Air Force-compiled international weather data into soldiers’ C2 screens.

“We made a similar connection last year, predating the ADOC. That connection took us three months to make,” Boorbach told reporters Wednesday.

It went much more smoothly at this year’s Balikatan, she said: “So being able to do this during the exercise and having that connection come online was really critical to be able to work with our joint partners and complete that exercise.”

Fulfilling some requests takes just a few hours, according to ADOC’s dashboard, while the average is about two to three weeks. Most of those delays are caused by waiting on managers to sign off on the administrative permissions to send the data through new channels, the ADOC boss said.

“We do know some of these are long-term Army challenges that we're tackling now, that will take weeks,” said Brig. Gen. Mike Kaloostian, whose main job is leading the Command and Control Future Capability Directorate at Army Transformation and Training Command.

More urgent requests are fielded through a 24-hour Warrior Engagement Cell, like a request for organizing 82nd Airborne Division radio data as they prepared to deploy for Operation Epic Fury.

So far, ADOC hasn’t had any tickets from troops in combat, Kaloostian said, but they are prepared to field them.

The ADOC is one of several ways the service is trying to open all of its information silos. Right now at Fort Carson, Colo., engineers from a range of defense contractors are in the midst of a “hackathon sprint” to enable data-sharing among their varying systems.

Kaloostian’s team is thinking longer-term.

“I think we can get to that point in our Army's future, or in the joint force’s future, where you don't need an organization that's really doing this, because you're going to have the automation…that's going to be doing these connections for us and helping solve, and we won't need as much human interaction,” he said.

Eventually there may be AI applications that can grant permissions and deconflict data channels, but for now, it requires human beings to straighten out.

“We're not going to get to that level in the next two to three years,” he said. “So I think this capability is absolutely necessary…and we'll see—maybe beyond two, three years—where we are at that point.”

Ultimately, ADOC’s goal is to put itself out of business, while NGC2 comes online integrating data to begin with. In the meantime, they’re looking for the funding and permanent staffing to keep the mission going.

“Come 30 September, that's the last day—then the Army needs to make a decision whether they're going to pay for the people side of this,” Kaloostian said.

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Iran war needs an inspector general, senator notes

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:01:00 -0400

A Democratic senator on Thursday requested that an inspector general oversight body designate one of the agency watchdogs to spearhead reviews of the ongoing war in Iran, citing a requirement in federal statute.

In her letter, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., pointed to a provision in the U.S. Code mandating that the chair of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency tap an IG to head oversight of a military “overseas contingency operation that exceeds 60 days.”

The U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes against Iran on Feb. 28.

“IG quarterly reporting, audits, inspections and investigations related to OCOs have promoted valuable transparency and accountability across presidential administrations and enable federal agencies to be better stewards of taxpayer dollars,” Duckworth wrote. “The need for you to appoint a lead IG to advance these aims and conduct joint, comprehensive and independent oversight of contingency operations against Iran has never been greater, as the Trump administration’s explanations of the president’s purported mission, lines of effort and desired end states with respect to Iran are constantly shifting, and often contradict themselves.”

Defense Department officials have testified that the war has cost an estimated $29 billion.

The CIGIE chair is limited to selecting the IG for the Defense Department, State Department or U.S. Agency for International Development. While the Trump administration folded USAID into State in 2025, the USAID IG office is still active.

The designated IG would be responsible for developing a strategy for oversight of the military operation, reviewing the accuracy of associated spending information provided by federal agencies and resolving any jurisdictional crossovers. They also would be required to issue regular public reports on their activities.

In her letter, Duckworth argued that the war in Iran meets the definition of an OCO because Operation Epic Fury is identified as one in the DOD’s casualty database and because members of the National Guard have been deployed to the region. Under federal statute, if a military action includes ordering a member of the National Guard to active duty, that qualifies it as a “contingency operation.”

Duckworth requested that CIGIE Chair Cheryl Mason provide her selection for the IG by June 5. Mason also is the IG for the Veterans Affairs Department.

Andrew Cannarsa, CIGIE's executive director, said in a statement to Government Executive that the council has "received the letter from Senator Duckworth and is working to address the senator’s inquiry."

The senator has criticized Mason’s confirmation as VA IG and election to CIGIE chair because she previously served as a senior adviser to VA Secretary Doug Collins. As such, Duckworth and good government groups have contended that Mason cannot provide independent oversight.

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The Navy used drones to sink a retired warship

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:03:11 -0400

A U.S. warship used aerial and maritime drones to help sink a decommissioned frigate last fall, Fourth Fleet officials have confirmed, adding that the experience is now shaping how the Navy will go into future battles.

On or about Sept. 28, somewhere in the Fourth Fleet’s slice of the Atlantic Ocean, the littoral combat ship Cooperstown launched four unmanned aerial vehicles and one unmanned surface vessel against the former USS Simpson, a Perry-class guided missile frigate that was until recently the last modern U.S. Navy vessel to have sunk an enemy warship.

The robot formation executed three kinetic strikes against the Simpson as part of live-fire attacks that put the hull on the bottom and capped the weekslong, multinational UNITAS 2026 exercise.

Neither the drones’ participation in the SINKEX nor the identity of the warship that went to its watery grave appear to have been previously confirmed.

The drone attack was largely coordinated by personnel ashore, not aboard the relatively lightly crewed Cooperstown, a Fourth Fleet spokesperson said.

“The exercise was primarily commanded from the Maritime Operations Center, MOC, ashore, with some senior staff elements afloat. The Robotics Operations Coordinator was part of the element ashore at the MOC, monitoring the status of each [automated unmanned system] and event serials in which they participated,” the spokesperson said via email. “We also conducted coordinated anti-submarine warfare against a diesel submarine using long-dwell USVs with acoustic capability.”

The Navy is refining its approach to assessing and buying unmanned surface vessels as it works to integrate drones across domains into its fighting structure.

Could data centers at sea set drones free?

Situational awareness experiments were also conducted aboard Cooperstown, such as using flying drones to collect targeting data. These were underpinned by a “deployable data center” transported from Mayport, Florida, set up in Norfolk, Virginia, and ultimately put aboard the littoral combat ship. The data center, provided by Armada, was equipped with AI and machine-learning tech, including computer vision and tested maritime domain awareness technologies. It was the first time the company’s product was tested at sea.

Logistics delays, including a hurricane, kept the devices from processing much of the exercise data, but nevertheless provided “an excellent proof of concept,” the Navy spokesperson said. “The team engineered electrical and data connectivity in record time, and the ship transported the DDC on the next leg of its deployment, providing edge computing power at sea.”

Lawmakers have proposed to spend $10 million for “deployable data centers that deliver remote and resilient edge computing” under Navy experiments and demonstrations in a draft 2027 defense policy bill.

During the exercise, the Cooperstown launched four aerial drones, including a medium-sized Group 3 UAV whose collection could be used to train AI targeting models in a crowded maritime environment.

“The UAV launched from the [robotic and autonomous systems] mothership and captured imagery of [more than 20] naval vessels during the multinational exercise,” the Fourth Fleet spokesperson said. “With very few global opportunities to capture data on dozens of different classes of ship in close formation, the traffic density helped train and improve the AI model significantly more quickly than multiple individual flights in less complex environments.”

Each aerial drone flew at least once and flights were planned around known and weather-related limitations—an incoming hurricane shortened the exercise. But the hope is to increase that in the future.

“There were limitations on when UAVs could fly in order to maintain safety of flight. Exercise event schedules, ship maneuvering, manned aircraft flights, gunnery exercises, and competing demands for flight deck space all impacted planned UAV operations,” the spokesperson said, noting that some flights were cut short for safety reasons revolving around drones operating near manned aircraft.

“The commander prioritized safety and successful exercise execution and temporarily paused most UAV flights for a few days, pending engineering analysis of a particular suspected communications interference issue.”

Overall, the Navy said, the robot mothership was a success, particularly with the pre-planning for how the systems would be used and the infrastructure, such as battery power and hangar space.

But there’s always room for improvement, including more ship connectivity and someone to lead the robots. There wasn’t an onboard robotics specialist during the exercise—something that could change.

“For future mothership deployments, a dedicated robotics officer in charge or liaison could be beneficial,” the spokesperson said. “Although each team knew their individual [tasks], we will mandate more comprehensive mission briefs with the ship’s operations staff.”

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How the Pentagon plans to spend $50 billion on drone warfare

Patrick Tucker — Thu, 28 May 2026 04:44:09 -0400

CAMP ATTERBURY, Indiana—A countdown began as a gaggle of defense officials, soldiers, drone makers, and reporters watched screens in a windowless operations center. Suddenly, a LUCAS drone appeared, moving at rocket speed and showing off a new low-level capability before it crashed through a cement structure on the test range. It was a vivid demonstration of just how quickly the FLM-136 drone is evolving—and of how swiftly Pentagon leaders want to spend the $50 billion they have requested this year for drone development and production.

The path to spend that money quickly and well is paved with steps that Pentagon leaders have already taken. They have expanded the list of drones that unit commanders can easily buy, Emil Michael, defense undersecretary for research and engineering, said at the SOF Week event in Tampa last week.

“What was happening is we had this highly distributed drone sort of purchasing that all happened in small blocks, all in about the department, which has some goodness to that, because units can experiment on their own. But they had to buy from this small Blue List that never grew. Very hard for a vendor to get on that blue list,” he said.

That will enable larger purchases of existing drones, Michael’s deputy James Mazol told reporters at Camp Atterbury as he described the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group’s plans to spend the $50 billion—more than 200 times its 2026 budget and more than the GDP of many nations.

“Some of it is actually buying platforms en masse. Now there's a lot of actual platforms that can be part of that, that exist and just need to be scaled up”—meaning produced in larger quantities, Mazol said.

But the money will also go to bring in new companies, help them develop their systems, and bulk up their production.

Autonomous surface vessel maker Saronic is a “good example of that,” said Mazol. “They have an unmanned surface vessel that has gone through…all this experimentation. They've built this body of evidence. And, you know, they're helping the Navy procure that in large quantities.”

Meanwhile, defense officials are looking to Ukraine to foster new technology.

In March, when the Pentagon held “Gauntlet 1” of its Drone Dominance trials, the top performers included Ukrainian Defense Drones and a partnership of Ukraine’s SkyFall and a UK company—both examples of the sort of defense startup that can move quickly from launching to actually filling Pentagon orders.

The technology readiness experiment, or T-REX, was one of a series of rapid joint-service prototyping events begun in 2023. It also debuted a number of small startups like SplashOne Robotics, who are looking to partner with Ukraine. SplashOne showed off a fixed-wing drone that shoots at other unmanned aerial vehicles using autonomous targeting software called SMAEGOL (SMall AEronautical Gun, Optics, and LASER) that can detect and aim at threats faster than a human can see them. Founder Jeff Wright said they “have game” against a variety of Russian one-way-attackers–the SuperCam 350, Orlan10, Molynia and even hard-to-hit Geran-2 drones.

And more Pentagon commands are building up their ability to experiment with and procure drones. U.S. Southern Command has established an autonomous-warfare unit whose initial focus is building a data network to enable more effective use of drones.

“We don't talk about robots at SAWC,” or SOUTHCOM Autonomous Warfare Command, said Gen. Frank Donovan, who leads SOUTHCOM. “We talk about the data environment, the different data layers that we need at the very forward edge so our [special operations forces] and our conventional force teammates…can actually plug into that data network. Whatever robot shows up with the capability, they can leverage it instantaneously.”

Donovan emphasized that he isn’t looking to a single company to create that environment, but instead wants open architectures that can connect many companies’ tools and products.

“We can match the robots to the environment. Whether it swims, it flies, it has feet, whatever it does, we have to make it do what we want it to do when we want to do it,” he said at the SOF Week.

Donovan’s message to vendors was blunt: it doesn’t matter how impressive your drone or counter-drone capability is if you put too many restrictions on how it connects, or the data it gives away.

“If it’s great only if you use it this way, only if you use my service stack, and only if you connect it to this or that, it’s unacceptable across the board.”

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Defense Business Brief: Defense cyber champs?; HASC mark; Navy IW

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:29:10 -0400

Cyber threats are an increasingly persistent national security concern supercharged by AI—and so is the industry built to help hospitals, financial institutions, and the Pentagon secure their networks. But unlike the defense industrial base overall, there’s no clear prime. Could that change with venture capital?

Joe Lin, co-founder and CEO of the VC-backed cyber firm Twenty, said private capital isn’t pouring into cybersecurity at the same rate as other defense tech areas in part because it’s unclear whether “true winners” will emerge.

”This was an ecosystem [that was] very, very hard for outsiders to come in and join. So that barrier has gone down. That's the good news,” Lin said during Second Front’s Offset Symposium earlier this month. “I think the question is still out as to whether or not a company that is able to take a lot of money invested into private R&D is able to actually be successful in the space where, historically, there's been a lot of peanut-butter spreading in terms of awards—funding awards, contract awards—and whether or not there will actually be true winners that will come out of this.”

Make it work, make it malleable

The winners will make versatile technology that works as the customer needs, said Brian Carbaugh, ex-CIA turned co-founder and CEO of Andesite, a VC-backed defensive cyber data analytics startup.

“There is a tremendous amount of noise. There are a lot of marketing dollars being spent,” Carbaugh told Defense One. “From a customer, from a buyer standpoint, you can see some elements of fatigue because they're having to sift through just so many vendors and pitches that oftentimes don't materialize.”

Buyers’ expectations for cyber tools and services are extremely high, Carbaugh said, and companies must deliver products that can “do all the things, all the time. Because, I think, what most of us in this space thought would be sort of innovative in terms of features and functionality—increasingly it's becoming table stakes.”

That’s not a warning shot for nascent companies, it’s an opportunity, he said.

“The warning lights are blinking red in a lot of these [security] operations centers. The work that CISOs and their teams put in are, it's nothing short of heroic on a daily basis,” Carbaugh said. There’s technology now that can "optimize” and level up analysts “by wrapping this tech around them” and are auditable with a “very, very high security compliance.”

But as cyber threats and industry grow, the Pentagon may need a more tightly coupled relationship with the cyber industrial base.

“There's an assortment of different companies that provide tools or services that are the ones that build and operate the domain on which we fight. They build our battlefield. We need to start partnering together so that they don't build the battlefield and we operate on it in a very disjointed way,” said Katie Sutton, the Pentagon’s cyber policy chief, during the symposium.

That relationship must also leave room for tweaks and changes to cyber tools, said Maria Barrett, former commanding general of U.S. Army Cyber Command.

“It's also got to be about the vendor being willing to work with us, and right side the operator, or whoever the user is, to tweak it. Because, I think, that quality of adaptability by the industry partner and the willingness to be able to do that and deliver it quickly…that's the new normal,” she said on the panel.

Welcome

HASC’s NDAA mark. The House Armed Services Committee dropped its draft of the annual defense policy bill this week. Two things that caught my eye are related to supply chains:

One provision seeks to boost the solid rocket motor industrial base by creating a Pentagon working group that “would require that certain covered munitions have more than one solid rocket motor supplier.”
Lawmakers urge the defense secretary to “obligate and expend funding that has been appropriated by Congress for this explicit effort”
They also worry about the Pentagon’s use of direct equity investments in an established industry, such as solid rocket motors. “The committee also remains concerned with the sole use of equity investments with regards to expanding solid rocket motor industrial base when there are other tools that could be used in a more expeditious manner given the importance of increasing munition production," the draft said.

Another provision would require the Pentagon's industrial policy shop create a “Defense Supply Chain Risk and Response Program” to “develop a common framework across the Department of Defense and with contractors to enable a holistic and coordinated approach for identifying managing risks,” including cyber vulnerabilities, foreign investments, financial distress, and supply chain disruptions.

Around the horn

The Navy has created new leadership roles for information warfare: Jennifer Edgin has been appointed assistant deputy chief of naval operations for IW requirements and capabilities; and Rear Adm. Susan Bryer Joyner as IW director.
Deloitte landed a $249 million contract to support implementation of the Army’s organic industrial base modernization plan. It was the only bidder.
The Justice Department arrested two defense contractors for bribery and fraud related to Army Pacific Command’s innovation hub in Hawaii.
Someone robbed the SEC.
SpaceX just landed a more-than-$2 billion satellite communications contract.
One more cyber thing: The Pentagon is updating its three-year-old cybersecurity strategy and implementation plan, which cyber policy chief Sutton said will “set a very definitive vision of where we need to go” with “a very detailed action plan” for attacking persistent challenges, such as building a skilled workforce and making sure cyber operators have the most current tools.

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