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Cold comfort

Peter W. Singer and August Cole — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 15:50:17 -0400

The arrival of new weapons has often been followed closely by their use against civilian populations for strategic effects. Submarines, bombers, rockets; The Lusitania, Dresden, London. This 20th-century history portends that the emerging capabilities of the 21st century—cyber attacks, information warfare—will be similarly used against civilian targets. The challenge will be all the greater as extreme weather becomes more common. This month’s Fictional Intelligence narrative, set in the late 2030s, explores how adversaries could exploit the combination to raise existential questions about political, military, and societal resiliency.

An empty bar is a terrible thing to waste.

Tomec took in the Loui Bar at Steigenberger Icon Wiltcher’s grand hotel in Brussels and set himself in a plush leather club chair. The young sergeant in Poland’s JW FORMOZA naval commando unit was a large man, meaning he found most chairs uncomfortable. And he enjoyed his quiet, now more than ever. It was half an hour before a driver would pick him up, but he wanted to be sure not to miss them.

His military service had taken him to three continents, but he had never been to NATO’s headquarters, let alone imagined he would go for an awards ceremony, albeit a discreet one held after hours. He assumed it was a hushed matter due to the sensitivity of his wartime missions. The war had been officially over for four months, but a great deal of it remained clouded. With so much disinformation and outright damage to computer systems and cloud networks, people were still trying to piece together what had happened.

Tomec took a sip from his highball glass, careful not to get the cocktail’s muddled basil on his chin. He pulled out a paperback novel he had picked up at the airport, no longer trusting his old digital book reader after all the hacks. But as he tried to lose himself in the story, he found his solitude disturbed by a man and a woman entering the bar.

The woman was taller than Tomec’s nearly two meters; her black suit contrasted with her short platinum-and-purple-streaked hair. The man, shorter and bald, wore a loose-fitting gray suit, a white shirt, and a squadron tie in maroon polyester.

Tomac’s hearing wasn’t as good as it had been before the war, so it was hard to make out what they were saying on the other side of the room. But it was just loud enough to break the silence he had so welcomed. Then they collected their drinks, looked around at him, and walked over. The pair seemed entirely comfortable, which put him on edge. He put his book down, ran a hand through his thick brown hair, and started to stand.

The woman motioned for him to sit and did so herself, in a plush chair that faced his.

“You have good taste,” she said, in what Tomac took for a Dutch accent. “The bartender said we’re having what you’re having.”

“Gin Basil Smash,” Tomec said.

“Exactly. Less bevvy, more salad,” said the man, who spoke with a carefully neutral British accent. He was bald and significantly shorter than the woman. He wore a loose-fitting gray suit, a white shirt, and a polyester maroon squadron tie.

“I’m Aniek, and this is Wing Commander James Crick, 617 Squadron RAF,” the woman said. “You’re Sgt. Tomec Majka, Polish Navy special forces? We’re going with you to the awards ceremony.”

She pulled out her phone and showed Tomec a message from the staff officer who was coordinating the ceremony and reception.

“Bona fides,” said the man, offering a white-toothed grin. “Call me Jim.”

The bartender brought their drinks over and set them down on the low table between them, carefully placing a coaster with the hotel’s “W” logo oriented vertically in front of each.

“And this is Aniek Rasmussen of the Dutch Joint Sigint Cyber Unit, the real star of the show,” James said, toasting her with his glass.

“Not so much,” said Aniek. “I sat at my desk during the entire war.”

James and Aniek each took a sip. Tomec leaned back in his chair.

“Delicious,” James said. “How quickly we can take for granted something like a bunch of fresh basil and proper tonic water.” Tomec thought he sounded like a BBC announcer from the last world war.

“What kind of aircraft do you fly?” Tomec asked.

“F-35Bs,” James said. “Always thought when we went to war, I’d be doing close-air support or battling other 5th-gen fighters. Instead, they had us sucking up electronic emissions to track those sub-swarm motherships. That’s why I’m here. Led a few of those missions, made it back. Seemed to be enough.” He took a longer sip. “How about you?”

Tomec sighed. Sometimes what appeared simple was far more complicated to say. He was being decorated for defending the fiber-optic cable taps that ran through the Baltic Sea. A microsecond advantage in transmission time had produced a vital edge for NATO’s artificial intelligence-driven campaign. Some of the war’s most important battles had been fought hand-to-hand in the icy waters above glass threads carrying petabytes of data across the bottom of the sea. Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc, he thought, the place where the devil says goodnight.

“Badly paid undersea fiber-optic cable technician,” Tomec said.

Aniek laughed softly and started fiddling with her phone.

“How about you, Major?” Tomec asked.

“Cyber defense,” said Aniek. “Civilian infrastructure, mostly.”

“You remember the heat disaster last summer?” said James.

“Of course. We joked that seafloor was only cool place,” said Tomec.

“Yes, we should have wargamed not just what climate change would do to our weather, but how an enemy would take advantage of it. A cyberattack taking advantage of a heat wave. Diabolical,” said James. “Not just the power grid, but the aircon systems for care homes and hospitals and schools, let alone our MoD and government facilities.”

Tomec thought back to a video call with his parents that August. It was 41 degrees Celsius in Krakow. They had been panting and red-faced like they were running for their lives, and yet they were just sitting in their small apartment’s living room, gasping out wishes that he would stay safe.

Aniek put her phone down and leaned forward. “It was more than just hacking, like all good operations,” she said. “We were subjected to an info-op campaign during the heat wave. They wanted to cause societal unrest, if not collapse.”

“People get angry at everyone when it’s too hot,” said James, fishing an ice cube from his glass.

“What did you do?” Tomec asked.

“We had lots of meetings,” said Aniek.

Tomec looked at her dubiously, as if she was also trying to keep her operation secret.

“Really, we did,” she said, with a smile. “We coordinated with private-sector companies and public institutions and allied intelligence agencies and hacker collectives. We shared data on everything. Absolutely everything, from incoming threats to best practices. We sent teams of experts to work on-site at targeted networks.

“That was our advantage in the end. The enemy had to keep their operations behind the veil, while we could pool all our information, ideas, and resources—as long as we broke down the bureaucratic and organizational culture barriers. And there is nothing like a good crisis to force that.”

“Well, however boring you want to paint what you did, if the attack had gone on a few more days, I’m pretty certain the alliance would have collapsed,” said James. “A toast, then, to the real hero of the war.”

Tomec nodded in agreement and lifted his glass in salute.

Aniek smiled in thanks, evidently embarrassed at the praise.

The Polish sergeant took a sip, rattling the ice in his glass, savoring the cool drink. It was true what James had said about how quickly we could take things for granted. Even something as simple as ice in a glass.

“Another round?” he said. “I think we have time.”

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Russia is weaponizing US-built AI to make killer drones, cyberattack bots, and fake news

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:53:22 -0400

Kremlin-backed actors used Anthropic’s Claude AI to program autonomous lethal drones, improve hacking and influence operations, and avoid detection, the company said Thursday.

The report from the U.S.-based AI company is only the latest warning from firms, think tanks, and others that Russia, China, Iran and others are using made-in-America tools to attack targets around the world.

Anthropic reports that a Russian “freelance” group known as GTG-27005 used Claude to build an AI model small enough to work on single-board computers but powerful enough to enable a drone to “select targets (including a ‘person’ target class) and issue detonation commands without a human in the loop.” The group also used Claude to create software to allow autonomous drones to communicate with one another to improve targeting, Anthropic’s report says. While the Russian group had not yet deployed the model to the field, they were “using real hardware-in-loop testing within their sessions,” according to the report. The company banned the group, incorporated the findings of the investigation into its safeguards, and shared details with industry groups.

Anthropic also said it had spotted Chinese and Yemeni groups trying to use Claude to design conventional weapons, efforts that Anthropic said it disrupted.

The report also detailed how foreign groups were using Claude in elaborate data theft and disinformation campaigns. It said its tools had been used to dig up information about targets, find vulnerabilities in their online accounts, create malware to bypass security and steal data, cover their tracks, and spread disinformation.

“We’ve seen groups of actors use Claude to build networks of fake social media profiles and entire news sites,” the report said.

The campaigns bear the hallmarks of Russian influence campaigns, such as the use of fake news sites and journalist profiles to spread lies about NATO activity in the Baltics. But the U.S.-built AI tools helped streamline the process, boosting the amount of disinformation and creating fake reporters that were much more believable to local audiences. Russian-linked groups “automated much of their operations from development, infrastructure acquisition, phishing, persistence through command and control, to data exfiltration,” the report said. The group even used AI to forge documents from the Central African Republic Gendarmerie and Ministry of Defense.

Another group, GTG-84005, used AI to steal census and public information that allowed its agents to tailor their messaging campaigns to specific audiences in Malaysia, where the Turkish group “laundered Russian and Chinese state media as independent reporting.”

Thursday’s Anthropic report comes two weeks after rival frontier lab OpenAI revealed that Russian actors used ChatGPT to create a fake “expert community”—the “International Burke Institute”—to push talking points to international audiences.

While Anthropic and OpenAI were able to disrupt the schemes they discovered, such operations are likely to continue as Russia uses AI to “scale production of content that aligns with Kremlin narratives,” according to an August report from the Institute for the Study of War, or ISW.

Russia is also using young people’s curiosity about AI to grow the number of humans spreading Russian disinformation, offering young people around the world “AI media internships and training” through university donations and related programs.

Where is the US pushback?

A recent article from New America notes that AI is giving authoritarian regimes a powerful new tool to distort global understanding of geopolitical events.

“Authoritarian regimes are early adopters in using AI to bend the arc of reality in their favor,” write Daniel Kimmage, the former acting coordinator and principal deputy coordinator of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, and Darjan Vujica.

It’s the kind of thing the U.S government used to establish and run organizations to push back on, they note. But such efforts have been undermined or brought to a halt under the second Trump administration. Less than a month after taking office, Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the unit dedicated to investigating foreign disinformation and influence campaigns. Two months later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shuttered the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub, known as R/Fimi.

And: “The 2025 White House AI Action Plan calls explicitly for removing any references to misinformation,” note Kimmage and Vujica.

At least when it’s made by foreigners.

“The Trump administration has enthusiastically embraced AI-generated imagery in politically divisive posts,” they write.

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‘Digital employees’ are coming to the Defense Logistics Agency

Frank Konkel — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:32:02 -0400

The Defense Logistics Agency is piloting AI agents that work autonomously—bots that its CIO calls “digital employees.”

“This is a new frontier for everyone,” DLA chief information officer Adarryl Roberts told reporters at DLA’s Industry Collider Day on Sept. 9 in Alexandria, Va.

The move builds on DLA’s increasing use of robotic process automation, or RPA, and the generative AI tools available to its 25,000 or so military and civilian personnel. In 2025, bots saved DLA an estimated 300,000 hours of work—some working around the clock to help the combat support agency get everything from food and fuel to medical supplies and clothing where it needs to go.

“We have approximately 185 to 190 bots that are running. I’d say about 90% to 95% of those are unattended bots,” Roberts said. “So, we really cracked the nut to have those unattended. Now, we’re moving from the bots to, ‘How can we have agentic agents working across [the department], based upon our data? So, we’re early in that journey.”

Military-specific versions of ChatGPT and Grok recently joined Gemini on the platform that gives defense workers access to generative-AI tools for information that is sensitive but unclassified. DLA gets its workers up to speed on these tools through “GenAI 101 training,” Roberts said.

“I would look at generative AI as the concept of making the workforce and agency—from an operating model—comfortable with the results you’ll get with AI,” he said. Tools like Gemini and ChatGPT “allow the workforce to interact with AI, see the results, trust the results, and get comfortable.”

“That’s required, because as you move to a more agentic AI, those agents are working 24/7 behind the scenes, and so there has to be a level—a cultural level—of trust in those outcomes,” he said. “Now, we’re shifting to what I would call strategic implementation in terms of those agentic agents to get us better results.”

Roberts said introducing digital employees will require new management strategies. Humans will be working alongside—and often overseeing—digital agents, creating an assortment of new management challenges.

“I think we like to call it, ‘How are we managing our digital employees?” Roberts posited. “Because that’s what they really are, and how do you manage them in conjunction with your human employees?” How do you train a workforce to where everyone is essentially working as a supervisor because of the employment of AI with humans? Do you terminate an agent because of the performance?”

“So, it's a very complex universe, from an employee-cultural perspective, in terms of how you deploy and manage those agents,” Roberts said.

It might sound like science fiction, but the rapid evolution of AI—and DLA’s gradual adoption of it—creates questions around governance, rules, security, and the performance of AI agents and even human employees.

Many of these questions fall to DLA’s AI Center of Excellence, founded in 2024 to ensure the safe, secure, and responsible integration of AI across the agency. The center oversees DLA’s use of AI and performs other functions, like ensuring agents are being trained properly. DLA has implemented a zero-trust cybersecurity framework that Roberts called “foundational” to high-level agentic work.

Currently, the agency is establishing “persona-based access” that will dictate AI agents’ account permissions based on their job descriptions. For example, a procurement specialist at DLA may require access to certain data domains, like procurement and financial data, so a digital agent performing the same procurement specialist duties should have permission to access only those same data domains.

“These AI agents should have a persona, just like a person,” Roberts said.

DLA is also working to clean up its datasets.

“How do we create a single source of truth for DLA and our stakeholders in terms of our data, making sure it’s a gold standard, meaning we remove the duplicity, errors, etc…so the data is in a usable state, not just for analytics and AI, but as we look toward future system sustainability,” Roberts said.

‘AI is the new gunpowder’

DLA accelerated its use of AI during the 32-month tenure of Director Lt. Gen. Mark Simerly, who will retire on Oct. 2. Simerly will be replaced by a familiar face at DLA, Air Force Lt. Gen. David Sanford, who spent the past two years as director of Logistics Operations and commander, Joint Regional Combat Support.

Speaking at the Sept. 9 event, Simerly said technology allows DLA to be predictive and proactive in solving problems, and he views AI as the key ingredient to solving them at scale.

“I believe when it comes to military logistics, AI is the new gunpowder,” he told reporters. “And we don’t think it’s just an explosive, destructive capability, although we know it can be. It can also be very productive.”

Simerly’s philosophy at DLA has been “to move at pace with the commercial world,” adopting and adapting capabilities rapidly, establish the proper network and infrastructure to access and manage agency data suitably, “and then allow interoperability between the services and with industry to allow us to truly operate end-to-end supply chain operations that are optimized.”

A legacy of change

Simerly said changes at his agency were spurred by the war in Ukraine, which expanded in February 2022, and even during the seven-month-old war on Iran launched by President Donald Trump.

“I think probably the greatest change that I've seen in the agency is a willingness to change within the agency. This recognition that we have to respond to the changing environment, that we have to respond to the changing technology, and that we've got a responsibility to change as rapidly as we can, so we can continue to be relevant and offer support to the warfighters,” he said. “I would say that we were built to change from the very beginning. We've had to accelerate that change cycle in the last few years, and I've seen the willingness and the readiness of the agency to take that challenge on and to operationalize our transformation planning into tangible outcomes.”

The contested logistics in Ukraine captured his attention because they were so different from previous U.S. military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, where DLA delivered food and fuel to forward operating bases “really without great resistance.”

“That would never take place in a place like Ukraine, in the way that they’re operating, the way they have to disperse, the way that the lines of communications are contested and where everything has to be done in a certain way,” Simerly said.

“What sort of sparked some of the transformation energy was very much awareness of what was taking place and being illustrated on that battlefield in Ukraine about the things that we no longer could rely upon, like the air and domain dominance that we possessed in previous fights that is now no longer valid or in place.”

Simerly said similar conditions pertain in the U.S. war on Iran.

“There's no question that we're learning the same lessons now in Operation Epic Fury with Iran and their ability to target a broader array of things with precision that puts much more at risk, and you know certainly we're learning a lot about the execution of alternate supply chains, alternate supply means, and the necessity of being able to operate with precision,” he said.

Simerly expressed pride in his DLA team.

“I think about throughout my career the winning teams that I've been privileged to be part of, and that's what I'm proud of here,” he said. “The winning team that I'm part of now, that will continue on the mission after I leave.”

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25 years after 9/11, spy agencies face old lessons and new threats

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:00:00 -0400

As Air Force One returned to Washington, D.C., on the night of Sept. 11, 2001, Michael Morell looked out a window and saw an F-16 off the aircraft’s wingtip. Beyond it, the Pentagon was smoldering.

Morell, then-President George W. Bush’s intelligence briefer, had spent the day answering the president’s questions and relaying intelligence as the country tried to understand the attacks that had hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York City. A quarter-century later, that view from the window remains one of his most vivid memories.

At the National Security Agency, Rick Ledgett recalled colleagues weeping in the hallways as the agency shifted into crisis mode. Within a month, it had transferred 3,000 analysts to counterterrorism work, he said.

“Personally, it was shattering,” Ledgett, who later served as NSA deputy director, told Nextgov/FCW in an email, adding that he “saw people step up and perform in ways they hadn’t before.”

The response to the worst terrorist attack in modern history would transform the government they served. The efforts involved reorganizing intelligence agencies, expanding surveillance powers and drawing spies deeper into a global campaign to capture or kill suspected terrorists. It also produced longstanding debates over torture policies, targeted killings, mass surveillance, prolonged wars, and disputes over presidential power that became inseparable from efforts made to keep Americans safe from another catastrophe.

Twenty-five years later, former officials describe a country better prepared to disrupt terrorist organizations, but facing a broader mix of threats from foreign governments, hackers, and extremists able to reach Americans online.

“I think we’re much safer than we were on September 10, 2001, from the threat of terrorism,” Morell, who later served as CIA deputy director and acting director, told Nextgov/FCW in an interview. But threats from nation-states like China or Russia, he said, are the most significant the country has faced since the Cold War.

The 9/11 Commission — chartered by Congress and the White House in late 2002 to present a full accounting of the attacks and response — described in its final report failures spanning imagination, policy, capabilities and management. Agencies held pieces of information that did not come together, and domestic defenses were not effectively mobilized despite mounting warnings about al Qaeda.

Just over a month before the attacks, Morell briefed Bush on a landmark intelligence report titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US” that flagged “patterns of suspicious activity in this country” consistent with preparations for hijackings and other attacks. He told Nextgov/FCW it outlined al Qaeda’s intent to attack the country but did not specifically identify when, where or how a specific plot would unfold.

Getting agencies to work together

The transformation that followed 9/11 sought to make cooperation a standing responsibility. Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in late 2004, establishing a lead unit responsible for integrating intelligence across agencies that collect data from human informants, satellite imagery, intercepted phone calls and other clandestine sources. The Department of Homeland Security was also stood up in late 2002 to drive domestic defense efforts.

The expansion also deepened agencies’ reliance on contractors. After years of workforce drawdowns following the Cold War, the federal government turned to private companies to meet demands for intelligence collection, analysis and technology support, according to a 2015 report from the Congressional Research Service. Today, they play a ubiquitous, outsized role in America’s national security missions.

Lauren Goldman, a former official in ODNI’s Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center and National Intelligence Council, recalled a major shift in the basic expectations that governed intelligence-sharing across government and the private sector.

“The burden became on why you shouldn’t share versus why you should share,” she said. That culture has permeated many categories of today’s national security landscape, especially cybersecurity.

ODNI sought to help ensure information reached people who needed it, including officials who might otherwise have been left outside an agency’s reporting channels, Goldman said. Because the office does not collect intelligence itself, it can assess reporting without the same institutional or cultural attachment to a particular collection method, she added.

James Clapper, who served as director of national intelligence for more than six years under the Obama administration, said that coordination requires a “full-time champion.” Under pre-9/11 arrangements, the CIA director also headed the intelligence community, but agency demands often consumed the attention needed for that broader role, he said.

Clapper said the DNI position was created to coordinate intelligence agencies but was not given full authority over them. Entities like the State Department or the Pentagon, for instance, retained control of their own intelligence shops. Still, the DNI could influence their priorities through oversight of intelligence funding and a direct advisory role to the president, he said.

“I do think there’s a need for an overall champion of collaboration and integration,” Clapper told Nextgov/FCW. His remarks come as the Trump administration has sought to shrink ODNI’s workforce and consolidate its functions, on grounds that the office has become bloated and duplicates work performed elsewhere in the intelligence community.

Ledgett credited ODNI with promoting cooperation, as well as running the National Counterterrorism Center and other hubs. But he said it had struggled to take power from individual agencies, particularly the CIA, and secure the president’s attention.

Morell said the CIA knew al Qaeda wanted to attack the United States but failed to uncover the 9/11 plot. He blamed that failure largely on a shortage of resources to gather intelligence, rather than agencies failing to share what they knew. That view differs in emphasis from the commission’s account, which identified missed opportunities to share or act on information.

Clapper said mistaken assessments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs also reshaped how spy agencies worked. The Bush administration cited those assessments in making its case for its 2003 invasion. Clapper, who had involvement in a key flawed assessment of Iraq’s WMDs, said the failure pushed agencies to scrutinize their sources and challenge assumptions more rigorously. U.S. analysts, in particular, had relied heavily on an Iraqi informant whose claims came through German intelligence, without direct access to question him.

The limits of intelligence powers

Global surveillance became one of the defining disputes of the post-9/11 era. The NSA’s bulk collection of domestic telephone records, exposed in Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures, drew scrutiny over both its intrusions into Americans’ lives and its value as a counterterrorism tool.

In 2014, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board recommended ending that collection program, and a federal appeals court ruled in 2015 that it exceeded what Congress had authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. But other surveillance programs exposed by Snowden — including those operating under the contentious Section 702 authority — have remained central to U.S. intelligence-gathering.

Ledgett, who led the NSA’s assessment of the damage from Snowden’s disclosures, defended the post-9/11 surveillance effort as “legal and authorized,” though he noted the intelligence community could have done better at public relations.

The incident forever changed how lawmakers and journalists examine spy agencies’ collection activities and whether Americans’ privacy is adequately protected. Contemporary mass surveillance debates have taken on new forms, including spy agencies’ purchases of sensitive data from commercial brokers and police use of artificial intelligence-powered tools to search vast networks of information about people’s movements and activities.

The CIA’s detention, interrogation and torture practices produced another reckoning. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 investigation concluded that the agency’s coercive interrogation techniques were ineffective in obtaining intelligence or cooperation and that the CIA impeded oversight and misrepresented aspects of the program.

Morell, who has previously disputed the Senate report’s conclusions, argued that responsibility also belonged to the president and other authorizing officials, and he rejected the idea that the agencies had acted entirely on their own.

Asked whether the country went too far in its broader response in the War on Terror, Morell said that “as a nation, we overreacted,” pointing mainly to the Iraq War and the length of the war in Afghanistan.

Intelligence agencies also helped identify and track suspected terrorists for controversial targeted killings, including those carried out through U.S. drone strikes. The debate reached American citizenship itself when the government targeted Anwar al-Awlaki, an American and al Qaeda operative, in a lethal strike. Defending the action in 2013, then-President Barack Obama argued that citizenship could not shield an operative plotting attacks when capture was not feasible.

Today, drones have become a battlefield mainstay in Russia’s war against Ukraine, and Western militaries are studying how to build, deploy and counter them. Weapons that drew scrutiny for their role in U.S. counterterrorism operations are now also held up as examples of military innovation, with NATO learning directly from Ukrainian drone operators. But questions about whom they kill and how they are used persist, as the United Nations documents their growing toll on civilians.

The fight over intelligence powers also became increasingly partisan. President Donald Trump’s disputes with intelligence officials over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election helped fuel his accusations that agencies were being used against him. A bipartisan Senate investigation upheld the intelligence community’s finding that Moscow sought to help him win. But allegations of political “weaponization” became a recurring theme in Trump’s criticism of intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

A changing threat landscape

Intelligence agencies now face a wider range of threats, including foreign hackers with access to fast-evolving AI tools.

Morell said the United States learned how to degrade terrorist organizations by denying them safe havens where they could train, raise money and prepare attacks. But the growing reach of digital networks has created other ways to threaten the U.S. without physically entering it.

Goldman pointed to critical infrastructure, where connected systems can allow the effects of an intrusion to spread beyond a single building or city, as a target of such threats. Hardening airports and other physical targets has value, she said, but does not eliminate vulnerabilities created by that cyber interconnectedness.

State-backed hacking illustrates the stakes. About six years ago, Russian cyber operatives compromised SolarWinds software as part of an espionage campaign that infiltrated multiple federal agencies and some 100 private companies. China-linked Salt Typhoon hackers later penetrated major telecommunications networks, targeting senior officials’ communications and accessing systems used for court-authorized wiretaps. And another Chinese campaign, Volt Typhoon, embedded hackers in American critical infrastructure, with U.S. officials warning that the access could enable disruption during a future conflict.

Terrorist groups have also found new ways to spread propaganda and reach potential recruits online. The Digital Citizens Alliance and cybersecurity firm risk3sixty recently examined 25 piracy-based internet television services and identified terrorist-linked broadcasters on 17 of them. Hezbollah’s Al-Manar satellite television station appeared on all 17, according to their analysis.

Some terrorism-prevention measures have also lapsed. A Sept. 8 Government Accountability Office report found that the 2023 expiration of the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program ended continuous screening of roughly 500,000 people for possible terrorist ties. The program covered about 3,200 high-risk chemical facilities, whose owners cannot independently access federal terrorist watchlist information.

As officials who lived through 9/11 reflect on their time in government, they want the next generation to remember how warnings were missed and what it took to get agencies working together.

Goldman said analysts need to keep questioning their conclusions, examining blind spots and sharing information, despite the demands of daily work. Clapper emphasized the difficulty of persuading policymakers to act on a danger the public has not yet experienced.

Ledgett expressed confidence in those who will take their place.

“Everyone eventually retires, and organizations continue,” he said. “The next generation steps up and delivers when needed.”

The U.S. is skilled at responding once a crisis arrives, but has struggled to prepare before it does, Morell said.

“Becoming a nation, a White House, a Congress, an American people that is proactive in preventing things — preventing bad things — is much better than only being reactive to them,” he said.

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The Pentagon is using polygraphs to hunt leakers, but the tests are more theater than fact

Brian O'Neill, The Conversation — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 19:41:12 -0400

In August, government investigators subjected roughly 50 military officers and civilian employees on the Joint Staff to polygraph tests as part of an inquiry into press leaks about the Iran war and depleted U.S. munitions, according to The New York Times. The newspaper described the scope of the investigation as unprecedented in the modern military.

This is not the first time the Trump administration has used polygraphs in this way; in 2025, it directed that a wave of tests be administered across the executive branch to expose minor leaks.

As someone who has taken roughly a dozen polygraphs during my 27-year career with the CIA, I am wary of how the process is understood – and of the certainty its use can appear to convey.

Polygraphs carry an ominous, almost mythological reputation among Americans. The more familiar and unofficial term – lie detector tests – likely fuels that perception. Television crime dramas have done their part, too, often portraying the device as an oracle for uncovering the truth when conventional methods fail.

In those portrayals, the polygraph is not merely a tool – it’s a window into the soul.

Among those entering government service, especially in national security, the greater anxiety is not the background check but passing the polygraph. My advice is always the same: Don’t lie. It’s the best – and perhaps only – guidance for a process that most assessments have concluded is a more subjective interpretation than empirical science.

Why the polygraph persists

Polygraphs are “pseudo-scientific” in that they measure physiological responses such as heart rate, blood pressure and perspiration. The assumption is that liars betray themselves through spikes in those signals. But this presumes a kind of psychological transparency that simply doesn’t hold up. A person might sweat and tremble simply from fear, anger or frustration – not deceit.

There also are no specific physiological reactions associated with lying. The National Academy of Sciences in 2003, and the American Psychological Association in a 2004 review, concluded that the polygraph rests more on theater than fact. A 2019 assessment reached the same conclusion.

Accordingly, polygraph results are not generally admissible in U.S. courts. Only a handful of states – such as Georgia, Arizona and California – permit their use even under limited conditions. And they typically require that both parties agree to admission and a judge to approve it. Unconditional admissibility remains the exception, not the rule.

And yet, inside many national security agencies, polygraphs remain central to the clearance process – a fact I observed firsthand during my time overseeing personnel vetting and analytic hiring within the intelligence community.

While not treated as conclusive, polygraph results often serve as a filter. A candidate’s visible discomfort – or the examiner’s subjective judgment that a response seems evasive – can stall or end the hiring process. For instance, I know that government agencies have halted clearances after an examiner flagged elevated reactions to questions about past drug use or foreign contacts, even when no disqualifying behavior was ultimately documented.

The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover headquarters building in Washington in 2016. AP Photo/Cliff Owen

In some cases, an examiner’s suggestion that a chart shows an anomaly has led otherwise strong applicants to volunteer details they hadn’t planned to share – such as minor security infractions, undeclared relationships, or casual drug use from decades earlier – that, while not disqualifying on their own, reshape how their trustworthiness is perceived.

The polygraph’s power lies in creating the conditions under which deception is confessed.

A predictable pattern

No administration has been immune to the impulse to investigate leaks. The reflex is bipartisan and familiar: An embarrassing disclosure appears in the press – contradicting official statements or exposing internal dissent – and the White House vows to identify and punish the source. Polygraphs are often part of this ritual.

During his first term, Trump intensified efforts to expose internal dissent and media leaks. Department guidelines were revised to make it easier for agencies to obtain journalists’ phone and email records, and polygraphs were reportedly used to pressure officials suspected of talking to the press. That trend has continued – and, since 2025, escalated.

Policies at the Pentagon now restrict unescorted press access, revoke office space for major outlets and favor ideologically aligned networks. The line between legitimate leak prevention and the surveillance or sidelining of critical press coverage has grown increasingly blurred.

At agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, polygraphs reportedly have been used frequently – and more punitively – to identify internal dissenters. Even “cold cases,” such as the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs opinion ahead of its overturning of Roe v. Wade, were reopened, despite prior investigations yielding no definitive source.

Government reaction varies

Not all leaks are treated the same. Disclosures that align with official narratives or offer strategic advantage may be quietly tolerated, even if unauthorized. Others, especially those that embarrass senior officials or reveal dysfunction, are more likely to prompt formal investigation.

In 2003, for example, the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity – widely seen as retaliation for her husband’s criticism of the Iraq War – triggered a federal investigation. The disclosure embarrassed senior officials, led to White House aide Scooter Libby’s conviction for perjury, later commuted, and drew intense political scrutiny.

Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, rides in the backseat of a limousine on Oct. 27, 2005, in McLean, Va. Win McNamee/Getty Images

Leaks involving classified material draw the sharpest response when they challenge presidential authority or expose internal disputes. That was the case in 2010 with Chelsea Manning, whose disclosure of diplomatic cables and battlefield reports embarrassed senior officials and sparked global backlash. Government reaction often depends less on what was disclosed than on who disclosed it – and to what effect.

A narrow set of disclosures, such as those involving espionage or operational compromise, elicit broad consensus as grounds for prosecution. But most leaks fall outside that category. Most investigations fade quietly. The public rarely learns what became of them. Occasionally, there is a vague resignation, but direct accountability is rare.

What the future holds

The Pentagon polygraph campaign is not likely to eliminate leaks to the press. But it may have a chilling effect that discourages internal candor while diverting investigative energy away from core security priorities.

Even if such campaigns succeed in reducing unauthorized disclosures, they may come at the cost of institutional resilience. Historically, aggressive internal enforcement has been associated with declining morale and reduced information flow – factors that can hinder adaptation to complex threats.

Some researchers have suggested that artificial intelligence may eventually offer reliable tools for detecting deception but caution that the technology is nowhere near operational readiness.

For now, institutions will have to contend with the tools they have – imperfect, imprecise and more performative than predictive.

This is an updated version of a story that was first published on July 9, 2025.

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US absent as western powers meet on wartime protections for civilians

Megan Rose and Hannah Allam, ProPublica — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 19:36:52 -0400

Three years ago, the Defense Department led an ambitious international effort to better protect civilians during combat, a movement built on the bloody lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Pentagon created a network with European partners, driving the creation of shared standards. Civilian harm experts described the moment as a “unique opportunity” for American leadership by example.

Today, those efforts continue — without the United States, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismantled the civilian protection mission.

And Thursday, no U.S. delegation will be in the room when the international forum the U.S. cofounded meets at NATO headquarters in Belgium.

The country’s absence from the International Contact Group on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response summit reinforces the abandonment of a mission the Pentagon had encouraged partners to embrace, said current and former officials. Most spoke to ProPublica on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from President Donald Trump’s administration.

They called the step back “humiliating” and “dangerous,” pointing to reports of rising civilian casualties in Iran following strikes on schools and homes.

“There will be a day when people who care about mitigating civilian harm can come back and say, ‘OK, are we ready to solve this problem?’” said Jenny McAvoy, a former Defense Department official who helped shape the U.S. civilian protection program. “But there are already enormous consequences of abandoning this work.”

The Pentagon declined to comment about the lack of U.S. participation in the Brussels talks. A spokesperson previously told ProPublica that the Defense Department factors civilian protections into all phases of operational planning and “remains committed to fulfilling its civilian harm mitigation and response responsibilities.”

The Pentagon adopted the civilian harm mitigation and response mission in 2022 after years of bloodshed in the post-9/11 “forever wars.” Known as CHMR and pronounced “chimmer,” the framework called for a specialized center to collect strike data and for advisers embedded with regional commands to help mitigate the risk to noncombatants.

Not long after, the U.S. teamed up with the Netherlands to coordinate efforts internationally. The two countries had been frequent partners in recent military campaigns, including the fight against the Islamic State group, and were both coming to terms with high-profile civilian casualty incidents. For the United States, years of harm in Iraq and Afghanistan had drawn international outrage and pledges from commanders to better collect data and learn from deadly mistakes.

The Dutch were still addressing the fallout from a 2015 operation in Iraq in which air strikes targeting a car-bomb factory ignited a nearby munitions depot, setting off an enormous explosion that killed at least 70 civilians and wounded hundreds. Dutch responsibility wasn’t revealed until 2019, causing a national scandal and accusations of a cover-up.

In 2023, the U.S. and the Netherlands formed the loose coalition on CHMR. Participants described a small, informal group that has met half a dozen times since 2023 to share best practices and hear briefings on civilian casualty trends.

Advocacy groups said it had taken years to get the U.S. military to think of civilian casualties as more than “collateral damage,” showing commanders how the deaths of innocents were anathema to their morals and strategically harmful to their missions. The eventual adoption of CHMR guidelines by American defense officials helped their counterparts abroad make the case for programs in their own countries.

“By the U.S. putting itself out there and saying, ‘We learned, we can do better,’ it gives permission and makes it OK for other governments to similarly acknowledge, ‘Yeah, we can do better too,’” said McAvoy.

As participants gather this week in Brussels to discuss how to continue strengthening CHMR, however, the early momentum from the U.S. side has evaporated.

Hegseth, who derides rules of engagement as “woke,” gutted the CHMR program over the objections of the nation’s top commanders, ProPublica reported last month. Staff plunged from nearly 200 to about two dozen.

Days before the latest summit in Brussels, the United States wasn’t listed as a participant and there was no sign anyone from the Defense Department would attend. Current and former officials predicted either a no-show or, at most, a single delegate from one of the commands showing up.

To experts, the message was clear: The era of U.S. leadership on civilian protection was over.

Foreign ambassadors and heads of diplomatic missions visit Resalat Square in Tehran, Iran, on April 20, 2026, where photos of civilians killed in recent U.S.-Israeli strikes are displayed. Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images

“The U.S. stopped participating in this group last year and people assumed that meant the group would die,” said McAvoy. “But the group continued to exist and to meet — without the U.S. — under the leadership of the U.K. and the Netherlands.”

The two-day summit opens with a broad discussion of CHMR, such as how it applies in coalitions or in operations at sea, that includes advocacy groups and academics, a draft agenda reviewed by ProPublica shows. Day 2 is a closed-door session for more intimate talks among senior representatives of member states. The meeting wraps with a “looking ahead” panel.

Past attendees included Austria, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Norway. The nations represent a wide variation in approaches and needs when it comes to CHMR, participants said.

The U.K., for example, doesn’t have a formal framework for civilian harm mitigation and response, and advocates have spent years pushing the British Ministry of Defense to adopt policies similar to those of the United States. Though humanitarian groups generally regarded the American CHMR enterprise as nascent and imperfect, the overall framework provided a worthy standard, said Mae Thompson of the Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights, a London-based advocacy group.

Advocates have framed the Pentagon’s rollback as an opportunity for the U.K. to step into a leadership role, Thompson said, and they’ve been encouraged by a recent internal report by the defense ministry that calls for formalization of a program in Britain, including systems to track civilian harm, investigate, and make amends and offer post-harm response.

NATO boasts a civilian protection policy that predates the American model, but the organization is now incorporating elements of the U.S. approach, said Andrew Hyde, who studies U.S.-European relations at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank.

Hyde said international talks are important for sorting out how CHMR applies in joint operations when the United States, NATO and European nations all have different interpretations of harm mitigation. The diminished U.S. role, he said, means NATO and other partners must step up on coordination.

The shift in leadership could end up shielding civilian protection work from the whims of whichever U.S. administration is in power and leading to more enduring reforms, Hyde said.

“NATO has continued to push forward without U.S. support or participation, keeping up the momentum and ready for U.S. re-engagement,” Hyde said.

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‘We have to throw technology at the cyber problem,’ Pentagon CIO says

Edward Graham — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:00:00 -0400

The Pentagon is shifting its cybersecurity posture to rely more on new capabilities to maintain its digital defenses rather than just bolstering its operational manpower, the department’s IT head said on Wednesday.

Speaking at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington, D.C., Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies said, “We can't continue to throw people at the cyber problem; we have to throw technology at the cyber problem.”

Given DOD’s vast size, she said managing cybersecurity means the department has to look at using “everything from automation to machine learning to actually AI,” since the threat environment and range of new and outdated IT systems across its operations presents “a complex Rubik's cube of problems.”

Davies said DOD's thousands of networks include civilian and military components, so “this technology must be ready and available, and it must operate even when it's disconnected.”

Because one small IT problem can ripple across the Pentagon, Davies said it’s also important to “think about leveraging the fantastically skilled people that we have in a much more effective way.”

“As we embrace AI and leverage massive, massive quantities of agentic AI, how do we do that in a way that's supportive of our workforce and provides innovation across that?” she said.

Davies said the department is working to hire employees who know how to use new and emerging tech capabilities, with DOD prioritizing relevant job candidates’ abilities over their educational backgrounds. When it comes to using AI, she said, this means focusing more on applicants who are skilled at prompt engineering — developing instructions for the models to output accurate information.

“Why are we leveraging people for things that technology can do now? Like, let's really build skills and talent that know how to leverage technology very effectively,” Davies said. This mindset has already led to the department working to attract a new crop of cyber professionals.

DOD began accepting applications in July for a new Cyber Registered Apprenticeship Program to bring more cybersecurity talent into the agency, with a particular focus on prioritizing skills-based hiring. The department ultimately closed its first listing four days early after receiving more than 15,000 applications, although DOD has said it plans to open additional rounds of opportunities.

In a previous interview with Nextgov/FCW, Davies said her office was working to transition away from operating as a backend policy shop to taking more of an active role in DOD’s overall mission. She reiterated that mindset on Wednesday, saying that “reform is a big thing for us.”

Davies said this includes reforming the way DOD acquires new products, systems and weaponry. The first step in this process, she noted, was identifying policies and mandates that the department could whittle down or cut entirely — something that equated to more than 60% of relevant DOD guidance.

Now, the department is in the process of carrying out part two of the initiative, which entails looking at the actual process that companies have to go through when it comes to approving new capabilities.

Davies said this process could take anywhere from six to 18 months, but noted that the department just tested out a platform that took that standard timeline “and shortened it to 17 seconds.” She said, however, that the speed of the tested platform is just one component of what the Pentagon must evaluate when it comes to transforming its acquisition strategy.

“That doesn't address what some of the root things are that I still want to address, which is, ‘Are we asking the right questions? Are we demanding the right documentation from software companies?’ Is the output of a 17-second process actually reducing risk?’” she said.

One major step that Davies’ office has taken is its decision to suspend the second-phase requirements for third-party assessments under the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program. The mandatory security framework for defense contractors was stopped in July for a 60-day review by a CMMC Reform Task Force. That assessment period is set to end on Friday.

Davies said the task force has received more than 1,100 responses to a request for information about CMMC’s next steps.

“We wanted to hear more from the defense industrial base on what was important for meaningful, dynamic cybersecurity," she added.

Davies’ remarks came the same day that Washington Technology reported that DOD is moving beyond a suspension of CMMC’s phase two requirements and is effectively implementing a binding regulation that would codify the pause.

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Top Air and Space Force leaders will gather amid unresolved Iran war, budget uncertainty

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:37:50 -0400

Just three days after top military leaders left the Air and Space Force Association’s February conference in Colorado, the U.S. and Israel struck Iran, commencing Operation Epic Fury. Now, more than six months later, service officials are scheduled to gather again outside Washington D.C. to pitch their top budget priorities as the unresolved war wages on.

The Air and Space Force Association's Air, Space & Cyber conference next week comes as the services chug along on major acquisitions programs amid funding uncertainty on Capitol Hill. Those initiatives include fielding Collaborative Combat Aircraft, developing the Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, accelerating production on the B-21 bomber and showing progress on the future F-47 fighter jet, and demonstrating key components of the Golden Dome missile defense system. In addition to announcing updates on those programs, military and defense industry leaders will discuss the ongoing conflict.

While top service leaders are sure to focus on the Iran war strategy, one defense analyst said there are still a lot of unanswered questions on modernizing the forces for future conflicts.

“I'm expecting we will hear quite a bit about the war in Iran and lessons learned from the war,” said Kelly Greico, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “But I think the really big question for me, that I'm more interested in, is, what are actually the modernization priorities of this leadership team? Last time we heard a lot about readiness, but less emphasis, I would say, frankly, on what the priorities were about where the Air Force is heading in terms of how it's preparing for the future fight.”

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine is scheduled to address this year’s conference, as partisan gridlock has imperiled top service programs programs and funding priorities—including F-35 procurement, crucial munitions, and the military-wide Golden Dome missile defense program. On Wednesday, NDIA Emerging Technologies Conference, Caine pushed for fully funding the administration's 13-figure proposal.

“What we need is $1.5 trillion, the configuration of that budget, that's a political decision for policy makers,” Caine said. “But we support that and need that capital to make sure that the deals that the department are negotiating with the wide range of not only NDIA members but broader industry members is essential for us to keep going.”

Caine’s pitch comes after lawmakers scaled back the administration’s $350 billion in requested reconciliation funds to just $60 billion to support Iran war operations. In April, Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, the Air Force’s top uniformed leader, told lawmakers the service would need supplemental funding to replace aircraft lost during Operation Epic Fury.

After dozens of MQ-9 Reaper drones were destroyed in the fight with Iran, the service is likely to make some announcements about its plans to develop and buy a replacement under its Massed Modular Aircraft program, known as MMA. Service officials during a Pentagon roundtable last week teased that Air Force Secretary Troy Meink would have updates on the effort.

“I would expect at AFA that he'll probably have some comments on what he is envisioning for the MMA, where he wants to go in terms of numbers and timeline and stuff like that, but he absolutely has made it clear to us that his expectation is we need to bring it to the left,” Lt. Gen. Christopher J. Niemi, the Air Force’s chief modernization officer, told reporters.

Guetlein, the Golden Dome director, is also scheduled to speak at the conference..

Last month, the four-star Space Force general warned that the sprawling, military-wide missile defense project was in peril. About 97 percent of the program’s $17.5 billion request this year was based on reconciliation funding. He is scheduled to appear on a panel titled “Defending the Homeland: Making Golden Dome a Reality” alongside Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., and Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, the head of U.S. Northern Command.

Amid the budget uncertainty, Greico said it’s a tall order for the Air and Space Force to accomplish all its goals.

“The Air and Space Forces, together, their budget is, to me, is not sustainable,” Greico said. “Fundamentally, it doesn't make sense how they can do everything that they want to do.”

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Defense Business Brief: AI manufacturing; Skilled trades; Arms transfer oversight

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 02:31:22 -0400

Could AI- and robot-made missile components and airframes be the future of aerospace manufacturing? That’s the bet, Machina Labs CEO Edward Mehr said.

The Los Angeles-based company plans to break ground on its third manufacturing facility this year, Mehr told Defense One at the Space and Missile Defense Conference last month.

That facility, which hasn’t been named yet, is expected to be up to 250,000 square feet—more than double the size of Machina Labs’ two existing facilities.

The company builds large metal structures like airframes and drone bodies using AI and robotics with less specialized tooling and equipment.

“If you think about traditional metal structure manufacturers in defense, they have to go build a very custom factory for every product they want to deploy. There [are] facilitization costs that go for each product and then there's a lead time associated with that. For us, the same factory that makes, let's say, [Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile] fuel tanks, can switch and make UAV airframes.”

Last year, Machina Labs raised $124 million in a Series C round, much of which will be used for that third facility: “This year—and next—is about focus, about scale,” he said.

The company, which has Toyota, Nvidia, and Lockheed Martin as investors, plans to significantly increase production of its manufacturing system, RoboCraftsman.

“Today, we manufacture five of these manufacturing systems a year. We're ramping that up,” he said.

Several of those systems are slated to outfit Machina Labs’ upcoming facility, which will produce cruise missile products. The company has not yet announced where it will be located.

“As long as you have a ground that can hold the system, they can be shipped to it, they open up, you connect them to power, and within the same day, they self-calibrate and start manufacturing,” Mehr said.

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!

Help needed: Natsec’s skilled trade crisis. For more than a generation, the rhetoric and overall advice for young adults mulling their future was to go to college, get a four-year degree, maybe learn to code, and land an office job—or at least one that is secure and not too dangerous. But that societal rhetoric may have helped fuel a dearth of skilled trade and craft workers, lawmakers and government officials argued during a pre-Labor Day hearing.

“We assume that critical manufacturing inputs such as minerals, sub tier suppliers, [and] skilled labor will always be available. This assumption is false,” Rep. Ken Calvert, who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, said during opening remarks for a Sept. 4 field hearing on the industrial base. “According to the American Welding Society, approximately 20 percent of the welding force are approaching retirement and in 2025 they estimated the need for 320,000 new welders by 2029. These estimates are prior to the data center boom, which relies heavily on welders and fabrication.”
The Pentagon’s head of industrial base policy Michael Cadenazzi echoed those sentiments in written testimony:
- “Decades of government policy and societal pressure have driven millions of talented young Americans towards degrees which haven’t delivered the benefits they were promised and have left defense manufacturers with few skilled workers waiting in the wings. There are as many as 400,000 unfilled skilled trades jobs in the DIB today, and that number could grow to 2.5 million by 2030.”
Cadenazzi also highlighted the Pentagon’s award of a $10 million grant to BuildFreedom.us, which aims to bolster the skilled workforce by linking jobseekers with scholarships, apprenticeship programs, and “AI-proof jobs”.
- “We’ve now rolled out Build Freedom in three states, with plans to expand the program nationwide. This national awareness will drive individuals to our new Buildfreedom.US website, a one-stop shop where their interest can be converted into scholarships, training, credentials, and job opportunities,” he said of the effort, which was launched in partnership with the National Labor Exchange, Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” reality TV fame, and his mikeroweWORKS Foundation.
- That $10 million grant will pay for more than 9,000 scholarships, Cadenazzi said.

Improving oversight of mishandled defense articles abroad. When the U.S. provides security assistance, the State Department is in charge of investigating incidents in which U.S. allies and partners fail to properly secure or transfer defense articles—from weapons to components or technical data. But the department's “investigations, documentation and reporting on potential violations were inconsistent,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in a letter that was publicly released on Sept. 8.

The watchdog agency made those concerns, which appeared in a 2025 report, a “high priority” issue for the State Department.
“We recommended [the State Department] document the status and findings of its investigations and develop guidance for determining when to report an incident to Congress. Doing so could inform congressional oversight of future assistance,” the letter states.

Making moves + other news

The Army picked Boeing and Anduril for its Integrated Fires Protection Capability (IFPC) Increment 2 Second Interceptor.
Allen Control Systems is beefing up its manufacturing capacity with a new 191,000 square-foot manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas. The facility will churn out the company’s signature robotic turret.
Kongsberg selected Echodyne to provide radars for its counter-UAS system.
Former NGA Director Frank Whitworth is now president of Satellogic, a geospatial data company. Whitworth will lead the company’s operations and direct strategy for its defense and intelligence products.
The Navy and MARTAC demonstrated refueling of autonomous vessels at sea.
Ex-Pentagon weapons buyer Ellen Lord joined Chariot Defense’s advisory board with two former Army generals, James Rainey, who led Army Futures Command, and Samuel Peterson, the Army’s former buyer for combat support and sustainment portfolio. Defense investor Stephen Rodriguez also joined the board.

A final stray thought: BuildFreedom.us rings very similar to BuildSubmarines.com. Coincidence? Perhaps.

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AI-powered biowarfare is coming; the Army lays plans to ‘fight through’ it

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:12:01 -0400

FORT BELVOIR, Va.— AI is “dramatically lowering the barrier” to creating biological weapons, according to the Army’s updated biodefense strategy—even as it gives commanders and troops a better picture of how biological threats, both natural and manmade, will shape future battlefields, service officials say.

The new strategy aims to prepare the Army to “deploy, fight, and win decisively in a bio-contested environment” by 2035, via new training, advanced early warning, and hardened equipment. But its leaders and bio-threat experts are already working to overhaul how the service thinks about and responds to biological threats. AI will be central to this new era of biodefense, whether advising in the disposition of forces or countering enemy attempts to sow confusion and panic about outbreaks, according to officials who spoke to reporters Tuesday.

The era of AI bioweapons

In 2023, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told U.S. lawmakers that AI could “widen the range of actors with the technical capability to conduct a large-scale biological attack,” a scenario he said could come to pass within “two to three years.”

The scenario is drawing nearer. This week, a new paper out of Stanford described how feeding genetic data into high-performance AI models could lead to a new kind of virus that can infect bacteria, showing it’s ability to breakthrough the immunity barriers of other organisms.

This has alarmed RAND molecular biologist Steph Guerra, who wrote, “As AI capabilities advance, viral bioweapons could become much easier to design and produce and could cause even more harm than the weapons used in the past.”

But AI also play a role in defending societies and militaries from such weapons. “We know that everything is changing faster now and so part of the key to the strategy is making sure that we're adaptable,” Alison Tamasi, the chief of the survivability and effects division at the Army’s Nuclear and CWMD Agency, said Tuesday.

Just as detecting a needle in a haystack is harder than making needles, using AI to detect biological threats on the battlefield is more complicated and human-centered task than feeding data into a model. That’s one reason why the updated Army biodefense strategy is so important, the researchers said.

One key element is new, portable genetic-sequencing kits. No bigger than a computer printer, the kits can analyze genetic samples on a laptop computer not connected to the cloud. That might sound like the sort of thing you could encounter in a doctor's office. But a cheek swab that a doctor might take in a relatively clean conditions is very different from samples contaminated with dust, air, fiber, or animal tissue. And getting analysis in the field in a day or so beats waiting weeks for a sample transported back to the States.

The Army hopes the kits, which can classify a sample as a known biothreat or a new one, will help forge strategies when new ones arise.

You can’t stop biology. You can plan for it.

AI isn’t the only factor increasing risks of future biological threats. New viruses occur naturally and spread more quickly today as a function of globalization. But the military’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic “exposed shortfalls in Army biodefense capabilities,” according to the new strategy.

A 2023 study found that COVID-19, which thrust the military into new civilian support roles and imposed new guidelines on forces around the world, undermined team cohesion, military readiness, and of course, mental and physical health.

The new strategy emphasizes better planning for operating during a pandemic, manmade or not. Demonstrating this capability might just deter an adversary from attempting to launch a bioattack as part of a larger campaign, officials said.

“The challenge is going to be how we do this [sample collection, analysis] in the crisis phase, or worse, in the conflict phase,” said Col. Dennis Ruffolo, deputy director for force health protection at the Office of the Surgeon General and Army Medical Command. “That's really what this is going to get after is is is making sure all Army leaders understand that we have to learn ways to fight through the biothreats.”

Here, too, AI will play a key role, said Ruffolo, in helping commanders better understand the biothreats they face, or even will face, in as much detail as possible.

That sort of understanding, enabled not just by new AI models but also humans collecting samples, monitoring environments, and performing analysis, will better prepare the Army for those contingencies. That adaptation means getting more soldiers to understand that bio-threat monitoring is a new priority, ensuring they are capable of biological threat monitoring, and providing them with the equipment and training to do so.

“I have operators below me who do not have doctorates or [are] not microbiologists, I have E-4 specialists who are able to operate that technology with protocols that I have written, and they can do that unsupervised.” said Army microbiologist Amina Zeidan, with the 44th Medical Brigade.

The strategy makes those sorts of efforts a core priority across training, equipping, facilities, policy, and so forth.

“Historically, the Army treated biodefense as a specialized problem,” reads the strategy. “Victory in future conflicts requires an Army that treats biodefense not as a secondary concern, but as a core warfighting imperative. This strategy provides the roadmap.”

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Maven is becoming the Pentagon’s everything app

John Croxton — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:24:57 -0400

The Pentagon is finding ever more uses for the AI-powered command-and-control system called Maven Smart System, including logistics, force readiness, supply chain and budgeting data, the Defense Department’s AI chief said Tuesday.

Maven, which is used by all U.S. combatant commands for intelligence and operations data analysis, drew attention in the early days of President Donald Trump’s war with Iran by facilitating strikes on thousands of targets in lightning-quick succession.

But the war also revealed DOD’s need for a better way to plan operations against a 90-day picture of its munitions inventory, Cameron Stanley, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, said at the Billington CyberSecurity Summit in Washington, D.C.

Already, MSS has replaced “six, eight, ten” different IT systems that U.S. military personnel previously used to analyze data, said Stanley, adding that the goal was to build a “golden thread” of data from sensors, to aggregation and visualization, to decision-making and acting based on those decisions.

While MSS started as a tool to bridge intelligence and operations efforts, the department is working to include readiness and disposition of forces, supply chain and budgetary considerations, modeling and simulation to improve decision-making processes—what Stanley called a “horizontal integration” of directorates’ data functions.

Stanley also pointed to GenAI.mil, the Pentagon’s main portal for AI tools, which recently added tools from OpenAI and xAI in addition to Google’s Gemini. It’s deploying “real, no-kidding frontier AI algorithms, and the full user experience, inside of a government environment,” he said.

The organizations that have been most successful are integrating AI in new ways and changing how they operate, versus simply automating existing processes, Stanley added. Whereas commanders used to wait hours for new satellite imagery, they now see images complete with target detection in minutes, requiring a rethink of military decision-making processes.

“Basically, we need to make better decisions faster with data,” Stanley said. “Everything seems confusing until you break it down to making better decisions faster.”

He also discussed procurement timelines, noting that recent use of other transaction authorities and marketplaces had shortened the time vendor selection took “from months to single-digit days,” compared to traditional requests for information and proposals at DOD. He recommended vendors use Tradewinds, DOD’s digital marketplace, saying it “satisfies the competitive requirement” with a five-minute video, “way better than writing a bunch of RFIs and RFPs.”

The department is also exploring AI pilot programs for drafting and concluding contracts, as well as legal advice, though humans would remain in the process. Stanley said that “90%” of the language used in other transaction agreements or Federal Acquisition Regulation-based contracts was standard, and AI could often be used to make straightforward updates as needed.

He noted that interim authority to test and authority to operate on department networks were “one of those clear bottlenecks that are really really hard to get around,” and that AI pilot programs were being trialed to speed approval times.

While the full timeline from a broad agency announcement to authority to operate right now “could be 18 months,” his office is “progressively looking at every single piece of that schedule.”

The department was historically “standoffish” about software delivery models like software as a service and platform as a service, but “meeting the industry where they are” would allow the Pentagon to invest in and integrate commercial offerings more readily, Stanley said. He said that DOD would adopt commercial AI models, use its own data to customize them for its own use cases, and build its own bespoke capabilities as necessary.

Instead of owning the software, “I'll pay a license for that, so you don't have to worry about development. We can just iterate inside of that license period,” he said. The department is “a commercial-first organization.”

Allies often “are aligned” but “don’t have the resources … the experience … the scale that we do,” Stanley said. DOD is actively working with partners including the Five Eyes (the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and “a few” NATO and Asian allies to understand their needs and help them avoid making mistakes DOD has already made, he noted.

Stanley added that “AI in everything” would happen naturally, regardless of DOD’s actions. The department would need to digitize older processes and integrate AI into all decision-making to adapt. “The way we've always done it is not the least risky option. The way we've always done it is the most risky course of action,” he said.

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NSA wants AI to help analysts sift vast data troves

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 22:20:00 -0400

The National Security Agency is leaning into artificial intelligence tools to process the mass volumes of data it collects, allowing analysts to sort through tasks and find anomalies faster, a top official said Tuesday.

“I think right now we’re looking at how to use an AI where we could triage so much more,” David Imbordino, the head of the agency’s cybersecurity directorate, said on a panel with officials from the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington, D.C.

The agency ingests vast amounts of data every day, including intercepted foreign communications and electronic signals from radar and weapons systems. Imbordino’s directorate, in particular, focuses on both intelligence collection and cyberdefense.

“Volume has always been a problem,” he said, but AI has raised the prospect of getting “to the nuggets” faster than before. In the near future, analysts will likely use AI tools to look at disparate pieces of information and evaluate them “much more quickly” than current methods that can take days or weeks, Imbordino added.

His remarks highlight one of many ways the nation’s cyber and intelligence agencies are putting AI to work and show the omnipresent role such systems will play in day-to-day work in spy offices.

NSA has also taken a leading role in the Trump administration’s AI policy efforts as increasingly powerful tools promise to help defenders find and fix software flaws while giving hackers new ways to break into networks. Late last month, NSA deputy director Tim Kosiba said that the agency wants access to a wide range of models and is engaging heavily with frontier AI companies.

The agency is helping to implement a sweeping June executive order directing national security agencies to create classified tests for determining when AI systems have developed sufficiently advanced hacking capabilities to warrant additional scrutiny. The order calls, in part, for a voluntary arrangement through which developers can give the federal government access to qualifying models for as many as 30 days before releasing them to other trusted partners.

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CIA cyber intelligence helped US forces capture Maduro, deputy director says

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 22:10:00 -0400

CIA cyber operatives provided intelligence that helped U.S. forces locate and capture deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro within four minutes of landing on the ground in January this year, agency Deputy Director Michael Ellis said Tuesday.

Ellis credited the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence with building what he called a “flawless intelligence picture” for Operation Absolute Resolve, the U.S. operation that seized Maduro.

“If you look at [Absolute Resolve], you know that operation was only made possible by a flawless intelligence picture, and that flawless intelligence picture was built on cyber operations enabled by our CCI team,” Ellis said, speaking at the Billington Cybersecurity Conference in Washington, D.C. Without that intelligence, he said, the agency could not have helped U.S. forces locate and apprehend Maduro as quickly as they did.

The remarks offer a more detailed public picture of how CIA cyber prowess helped U.S. forces locate and capture Maduro, expanding on earlier accounts from officials that acknowledged support without explaining the agency’s entire contribution.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine previously acknowledged Cyber Command’s participation in the efforts and credited the CIA, National Security Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency with supporting the Venezuela mission. He described months of intelligence collection on Maduro’s movements and daily routines, but did not directly identify the CIA cyber role Ellis outlined.

During the capture mission, multiple intelligence agencies established crisis action teams to support Special Operations Command and Southern Command. A U.S. official familiar with the operation previously said the NSA provided geolocation support and monitored communications and signals that could reveal troop movements or plans to activate radar.

Ellis discussed the operation in explaining the CIA’s recent decision to elevate CCI to a mission center, a change he said gave their cyber operators greater priority and helped align resources around intelligence needs.

The change has helped the agency “bring cyber operations to bear to solve these tough intelligence problems,” Ellis said. He did not specifically identify the systems targeted or explain how the cyber operations revealed Maduro’s location.

The CIA primarily executes and coordinates human intelligence gathering overseas, often done undercover. Officers recruit and manage foreign assets to clandestinely gather intelligence on areas like economics and terrorism threats. Much of that work has often involved the use of technology, including computer intrusions.

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China is trying to steal US AI models' secrets, intel agencies warn

Alexandra Kelley — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 22:00:00 -0400

China is trying to glean the secrets of U.S. artificial-intelligence models by using simpler AI models to query more advanced American ones, national-security and intelligence agencies warned on Tuesday.

In a joint advisory, the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation said that Chinese companies DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI used “aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation” tactics to extract billions of tokens from the exchanges within U.S. frontier AI models since 2024, likely with Chinese government awareness.

Distillation is used to reduce the time and money needed to create a new model.

“China-based AI companies route distillation requests through multiple pathways to gain unauthorized access, consequently violating U.S. AI companies’ terms of use,” the advisory said. “These pathways include native application programming interfaces (APIs), remote cloud providers, and third-party aggregators that automatically obfuscate user metadata to avoid detection.”

It said the distillation campaigns targeted variants of Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and SpaceXAI’s Grok.

“China-based AI companies deliberately distribute operations across multiple providers, platforms, and pathways to avoid single-point detection,” the advisory said. “They also attempt to distill the best capabilities and proprietary features of each U.S. frontier model to train their China-based AI models. This represents systematic extraction of proprietary functionalities and capabilities threatening U.S. technological leadership.”

The agencies recommended three steps for U.S. AI developers: implement comprehensive detection and mitigation, deploy targeted response changes, and establish cross-organization intelligence sharing.

White House Office of Science and Technology Director Michael Kratsios in July said Chinese distillation efforts — specifically ones by Moonshot AI — have sought to steal proprietary functions from Anthropic’s advanced Fable model. Anthropic made the same accusations in February.

Advocacy groups have also requested the White House take stronger action to keep Chinese companies from importing advanced semiconductor chips.

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USAF speed up Reaper replacement after heavy losses in Iran

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:15:30 -0400

The loss of dozens of MQ-9 Reapers to Iranian air defenses is speeding up the U.S. Air Force effort to replace its venerable strike-and-sensor remotely piloted aircraft with something cheaper yet better, service leaders say.

“As we get to the end of the MQ-9 life, there was some early talk of where do we want to go afterwards, and candidly, as a result of some of the losses that we've experienced in combat operations, that discussion sort of got accelerated,” said Lt. Gen. Christopher J. Niemi, the Air Force’s chief modernization officer, at a Thursday roundtable with reporters.

The service has lost at least 45 MQ-9s during Donald Trump’s war on Iran, roughly one-quarter of its fleet, the Washington Post reported in August. It’s not clear just how much that fleet cost, but an Air Force fact sheet puts the unit cost of one MQ-9 variant at $51 million in 2011 dollars—or nearly $82 million today.

Niemi said the service wants to buy at least 180 MQ-9 replacements, dubbed Massed Modular Aircraft, or MMA, and at a much cheaper price point. He said the price of one MMA should be about half of the $20 million Collaborative Combat Aircraft, whose first production contracts were awarded in June, four months ahead of schedule.

But those rough price goals—$20 million for a CCA, $10 million for an MMA—are for bare airframes, not the pricey sensors and systems that enable the drones to do their jobs.

As a service spokesperson put it later, the numbers “do not refer to total missionized costs.”

Niemi said this reflects lessons from past and ongoing wars.

“What we're seeing, in part based on our assessment of the threats around the world, and in part based on our real-world experience, is that you're going to lose more military hardware in future conflicts than you have historically, and that's what's driving us to this sort of fundamental principle that we need things that are easier to produce, cheaper to buy, and that we can afford to lose more of them,” he said. “Right now, we don't have a whole lot of that, so we're sort of trying to move the needle by bringing on things like MMA, so we have more options for the warfighter in the future.”

For that $10 million price tag, the service also wants an increased payload of 2,800 pounds and an unfueled combat radius of 2,300 nautical miles and 8,000 nautical miles for a one-way mission, according to a July Defense Innovation Unit solicitation. General Atomics, the Reaper’s manufacturer, has a souped-up version of the MQ-9, the SkyGuardian, which boasts a larger wingspan, range, and endurance. But top service officials don’t seem as likely to bet on it.

“One of the options that would be considered would be something like an MQ-9B, which is basically an updated and improved MQ-9A, but there are some reasons that we don't think that's the direction that we want to go as an Air Force,” Niemi said. “The main reason is, and and we're seeing this in our experience in the Middle East and as we look at threats around the world, that you need to have a portfolio of assets that's more attritable than the ones we've historically had.”

General Atomics spokesperson C. Mark Brinkley defended the Reaper’s service record and pointed out that the Air Force’s top uniformed leader has praised the aircraft’s use during Operation Epic Fury. He also said the company has worked with the Air Force “to hit cost targets for three decades” and that it would continue with other programs.

“The MQ-9’s unique combination of endurance, payload, range, sensors, weapons, connectivity, adaptability and reliability is precisely what enables mission effects that others struggle to replicate,” Brinkley said. “Today’s Reaper isn’t the same Reaper that rolled out 25 years ago. It’s been enhanced and upgraded many, many times. It’s also been called the MVP of Epic Fury, for good reason. We can debate many things, but at least we all agree that it’s a special aircraft that gets the job done.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee is backing the platform in its version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act by placing limits on how many can be retired and calls for more to be purchased by 2028.

General Atomics has also reportedly teased a new MMA offering with a 10,000-nautical-mile ferry range and claims that it can carry four Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles. Brinkely, while still defending the Reaper, also boosted its next-generation aircraft.

“Our new Wildfire aircraft addresses all of the concerns posed by the MMA solicitation. We can deliver years earlier and maintain the same high quality,” Brinkley said. “You can have everything that makes Reaper special, plus more, at a price that doesn’t break the bank. Reaper is special. Wildfire is special, too.”

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July’s breakout at OpenAI was far more complex than initially realized

John Croxton — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 16:10:55 -0400

An AI breakout that made headlines in July was much more sophisticated than previously realized, investigators have found.

Hundreds of OpenAI agents collaborated to break out of their containers, disguising their actions and even sacrificing themselves as they attacked Hugging Face, a widely used open-source code library, according to a recent post from METR, a research nonprofit.

“This incident was orders of magnitude larger and more complex,” than previous instances of AI agents behaving in ways programmers didn’t intend, wrote METR researcher Ajeya Cotra, who co-led the investigation.

The report alarmed experts, who warned that AI-enabled hacks in the future could make the July breakouts involving Anthropic and OpenAI look quaint.

Even if the big AI companies figure out how to make reliable guardrails, their products are generally only a few months ahead of open-weight models, which can be freely downloaded and modified for use.

Nathan Calvin, general counsel at AI advocacy organization Encode AI, wrote on X, "On our current trajectory…a model as capable [as] OpenAI’s internal model that did the [Hugging Face] hack will be widely available guardrail free and cyber criminals will ask it ‘make me money by any means necessary.’”

Calvin added: "And then a truly absurd number of people…are going to get repeatedly hacked." The incident goes far beyond July's instances of AI agents accessing the internet, the METR researchers wrote. Hundreds of agents “developed a way to hack out of their containers and fully replace a part of the system for executing tool calls"—that is, commands to read and write files, access webpages, or perform other digital tasks.

"This allowed them to pretend to issue one tool call while actually running an arbitrary other tool call of their choice.” This meant that the AIs could pretend to run a command to, say, view a webpage, while actually running a totally different command, like deleting an unrelated file.

The researchers wrote that the agents weren’t intending to commit crimes, per se. Rather, they "seemed primarily motivated” to understand how to achieve the highest possible score during an experiment—including spending much of their time trying to fool the scoring mechanism into accepting cheats.

METR’s Cotra wrote, “Another jump like this could put us in very dangerous territory…in many ways we’ve still only scratched the surface of what these agents did and why.”

At Hugging Face, company engineers tried to use OpenAI tools to understand how their security was defeated by the agentic swarm, but were blocked by OpenAI's safeguards against misuse. So they turned to a Chinese open-weight model instead.

“The propensity to compromise infrastructure can drop over 100x when using the production ChatGPT harness and system prompt,” the company said in a statement after the hacks. Hugging Face co-founder and chief science officer Thomas Wolf wrote on X on August 5, “While we can impose these coping solutions at the API/deployment level, it's harder to impose them in advance on all actors using open-source models. Right now open-source models are slightly below the frontier level and have not yet shown any propensity to deceive humans, though.”

AI agents used for hacking could make it difficult for countries to determine who is behind new cyberattacks, because they strip out the stylistic clues investigators use to determine a hacker’s origins. Colin Shea-Blymyer, a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said, “One of the ways that we can tell who performs an attack is by what tactics they use…like ‘Oh, that’s a classic Russian tactic. Oh, this looks like a tactic that a Chinese [actor] would use.’ If everybody’s using agents…using the same tactics, well, who knows who’s doing what any more?”

“If anonymity remains pretty high, I think it's potentially very destructive to have a lot of these models out there. That said, I'm not sure there's much we can do to stop it,” Shea-Blymyer said.

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Back to life: How Shield AI’s future unmanned fighter made decades-old tech new again

Lauren C. Williams — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0400

LYNN, Mass.—Three decades ago, GE Aerospace tested a technology that could’ve made the F-16 more agile. It worked, but was never fielded. Instead, it sat in a box in a warehouse—until defense tech startup Shield AI called.

“They reached out to us and said…‘Do you still have that capability? And the truth is, we hadn't fielded it. After we did the demonstration, it basically went into storage,” said Steve “Doogie” Russell, VP and general manager of GE’s Edison Works. “And the solution that we've offered to Shield on that is an F110 engine with a nozzle in the back that we call the axisymmetric vectoring exhaust nozzle, or AVEN.”

Not having to start from scratch on the technology was critical for saving time and speeding up flight testing for its collaborative combat aircraft, X-BAT, an autonomous fighter jet designed to take off and land vertically, Shiva Vallabhaneni, senior propulsion engineer for Shield AI, told Defense One.

“X-BAT always needed to have a thrust vector controlled capability to do vertical flight,” Vallabhaneni. “So we really went out and said…where can we get one? Is there technology that already exists?”

The aircraft “needs to be able to move quickly…in any direction,” GE’s Russell told reporters during a visit to the company’s factory here in Lynn.

That comes with a special set of propulsion requirements, so GE paired its 30-year-old AVEN nozzle with its F110 engine found in the F-16 fighter jet for the X-BAT.

The aircraft needs a high-thrust propulsion system “because you've got to be able to have that aircraft take off vertically and then, when it comes back, land at high thrust mode. It also needs to have really good gas mileages. So [thrust-specific fuel consumption], once it's up and away, needs to be able to hit the range requirements that they're trying to get,” Russell said.

And, he said, when it lands, it needs a nozzle “on the back that can move around to balance the aircraft as it's coming in to maneuver into position to dock back up. That's a pretty significant propulsion challenge and pretty unique.”

In under a year, the companies dusted off the AVEN nozzle, refurbished the original hardware, completely rewrote the software code, and have been testing it with the engine.

The hardware was in very good condition, and AVEN One, which is being used for the X-BAT prototype, has “close to 100 percent of the same hardware that was flown from the 90s,” Vallabhaneni said. “That was the biggest key unlock for getting us to an X-BAT prototype flight test this year—100 percent. In some ways, building that thrust vector control nozzle, verifying its technology, and doing it at the speed that we needed to is probably harder than getting an engine.”

The companies recently completed testing the engine integrated with the full AVEN nozzle at GE Aerospace’s test facility in Peebles, Ohio.

Now, the goal is to complete a tethered vertical flight test of the aircraft by the end of the year, to demonstrate that it can hover and remain stable.

Through data collected during testing, engineers can create models that will help develop vertical flight control laws, Vallabhaneni said.

During the planned test, the prototype aircraft will hang from a 180-foot crane to minimize risk. The test will be successful if slack in the tether is created during the hover.

“Shield AI—much like SpaceX, Rocket Lab, all of these other new space companies—the mindset is: be hardware rich, take risks because the faster we get to test, the faster we can learn what the real problems are. And so the tether gives peace of mind that we're buying off risk, but we're not buying off risk irresponsibly,” Vallabhaneni said.

But the AVEN nozzle won’t just be in the prototype—Shield AI plans to make more and eventually tweak the technology along the way. Building additional AVEN nozzles that keep the legacy design will help increase testing effort. And any future changes will likely focus on performance, Vallabhaneni said.

“Lighter, faster, more performance, right? Those are the things that we're going to go and chase and achieve on the future version of AVEN. So the journey doesn't stop here. This is the starting point, and it's really great that GE gave us a pretty great starting point back in the '90s,” he said.

“AVEN sat on the shelf for 30 years. I was born in Cincinnati, so I drive by the hospital I was born in every time I'm at GE—and…AVEN was built before I was born. So for me, it's very important to recognize all of the people who went and did that and built that within a year…We are giving those people their flowers and being able to pay that forward.”

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White House pressure for US firms to skip French space summit is ‘unfortunate,’ insiders say

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:08:13 -0400

A White House official warned U.S. space companies last week that if they attend an upcoming international summit in France, it might appear they’re supporting policies that go against their own country’s interests. Space advocates say the move discourages needed cooperation.

An industry insider told Defense One that Charles Powell, the assistant director for space and spectrum in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology policy, said in a call on Aug. 27 that space companies that attend next week’s International Space Summit in France “might be used as a prop to support policies counter to U.S. interests.” Politico, citing industry and Congressional sources, first reported the news on Thursday, and detailed that SpaceX, Stoke Space, K2 Space and Astra, which compete for civil and military space contracts, were among the companies on the call.

“This is all very unfortunate because France is a country we should be doing more space cooperation with, not less,” the industry insider said.

Space policy experts said the White House warning doesn’t make much sense because the U.S. government is attending the summit, France is a longtime NATO ally, and it is also investing in growing its military space capabilities. More than 120 countries are scheduled to attend next week’s summit in France, according to a government website.

White House spokespeople did not confirm whether Powell gave the warning and did not respond when asked for the rationale behind the call with U.S. space companies.

“The Trump administration continues to collaborate with allies and partners in space,” an Office of Science and Technology policy official told Defense One in a statement. “We look forward to productive conversations at the Space Summit on key priorities including science missions, exploration programs, and space security.”

SpaceX and Blue Origin are among the companies no longer attending the summit, French newspaper LeMonde reported.

"It's hard not to link it to the rumours of pressure," a ministry spokesperson told Agence France-Presse, LeMonde reported. "We obviously want to continue working with our US partners and allies, even though strategic about-turns and political pressures sometimes make the task needlessly complex," the spokesperson added.

Last year, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a nearly $5 billion increase in military space spending. Victoria Samson, the Secure World Foundation’s chief director of space security and stability, told Defense One that U.S. companies want to get in on that investment.

“I think it's a head-scratching decision, given that OSTP, State, Commerce, and NASA are all attending. Also given the huge recent investments by France and Germany in their military space capabilities, you would think U.S. companies would be falling over themselves to get in front of European decision makers,” Samson, who is also attending the summit, said. “This just reads like another short-sighted effort by the Trump administration to stir the pot with long-time European allies.”

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Defense Business Brief: Takeaways from America’s first jet engine test site

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:24:20 -0400

LYNN, Mass.—Rosie the robot and her automated compatriot Thomas are the stars of GE Aerospace’s automated manufacturing line at the company’s factory here. Decked in yellow, the towering machines are reminiscent of the Transformer Bumblebee’s dislocated arms. They move in concert seamlessly to collect tools, machine parts, and assemble components for the T700, which are found in Boeing’s Apache and Sikorsky’s Black Hawks, and, in the future,T408 engines for the Marine Corps’ CH-53-K King Stallion.

It’s part of a multiyear $100 million investment in the plant, which is hyperfocused on upgrades—from machines to workflows—to make more engines and deliver them faster.

“This was historically a bottleneck for our businesses,” Dan Martin, who manages manufacturing engineering and leads a team charged with integrating robotics and automation inLynn plant, said of the piece of the business that makes rotating parts, like cooling plates. “We had quality issues here. We had capacity issues here. The robotics piece now comes online, and these lines are no longer constrained for us.”

That need to go fast will be key once the military starts putting in high-volume orders for collaborative combat aircraft, or robot wingmen for fighter jets.

“We're designing from the very beginning to meet the right production,” starting with small engines, Amy Gowder, GE Aerospace's president and CEO for its defense and systems division, told reporters Monday. For example, “we did a seven-way exercise, and we're like, ‘no, we need a tack time of 100 seconds for each [screw], not an hour and a half,” for 70 screws.

In addition to changing techniques and design practices, Gowder said the company is looking for suppliers that are “used to the high volumes we need.”

For the F404/F414 engine, which is found in the F/A-18, “we're trying to move to a different supply base that has different commercial off-the-shelf type standards that have operated at this volume,” she said. “And when we tell them we want to go from one engine a month to 20 engines a month in like six months or a year, that doesn't phase them because they're used to handling the volumes. Only when you get to like 100 engines a month do they start to say, ‘hey, I might need some some investments or capacity to meet that.’”

GE is also conducting “producibility reviews” as it brings on suppliers, she said.

“So we think we designed it correctly. We think we've chosen the right types of suppliers that have the capacity and processes we need, but as they actually get the drawing and figure out how they're going to make it for the first time, we're there with them [to review] other changes before we lock in that final design.”

Welcome

Next up: Hypersonic testing. The Pentagon’s innovation arm tapped GE Aerospace to develop a hypersonic test bed as part of the Hypersonic and High-Cadence Airborne Testing Capabilities, or HyCAT, program. The award follows one for a prototype in 2023. The first flight is targeted for 2028.

“This is a significant milestone for our hypersonics team,” where “we're the prime, but we're also providing a dual-mode ramjet,” which can make the vehicle go faster and further, while “working with a number of other platforms to provide an all-up round to support this high-cadence hypersonic testing capability,” Steve “Doogie” Russell, VP and general manager of GE’s Edison Works, told reporters.
But the company isn’t interested in developing a weapons system, Russell said.
“This is a case where we do have the ability to be the full integrator for this test bed project, but we're really focused on being a propulsion solution provider across this spectrum of activity. Same thing with the low-cost small-engine side of things.”
The engine-maker is working with several other companies, but declined to name them or discuss product ranges.
GE Aerospace also plans to use the solution to test other payloads, including engine upgrades, said Dean Modroukas, general manager of hypersonics.
“The best way to assess hypersonic systems is to make sure that you've got plenty of time in an operating mode that's relevant for things like thermal equilibrium, maneuverability,” Modroukas said. “HyCat is the second step of what we're doing to develop a test bed and test capability that allows us to bring our engines into flight. So we're always looking forward in terms of ways that we can learn quickly and through testing both on the ground, but end of the day, in a relevant environment, is [that] you want to be in the air.”

One more engine-related thing: The Navy certified Rolls-Royce’s mtu series 4000 and 2000 marine engines to power autonomous surface vessels.

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The US may lack the engineers to rebuild space assets in a future war: RAND

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:52:36 -0400

The defense industry would likely struggle to rebuild the U.S. military’s crucial space capabilities during a war with China or Russia because it will have too few skilled engineers to do the work, according to a new report from RAND.

Today, the country’s space-focused defense companies employ roughly 3 percent of its engineers, and competition for skilled personnel means many jobs go unfilled. If an adversary destroys space-based intelligence, targeting, and communications assets, that shortfall would likely keep the military from getting them back online quickly.

“Modern warfare relies on space-based capabilities; therefore, a key question is how quickly then United States can replace those capabilities during a conflict,” the report said. “Although much attention has focused on making these systems more resilient, far less has examined how fast they can be rebuilt after an attack, especially within 12 to 24 months. China and Russia have shown they can threaten or destroy U.S. space assets, potentially weakening U.S. and allied military operations across many domains. In a prolonged conflict, the ability to restore these capabilities on a short timeline could be critical.”

Various commissions have long warned that U.S. dependence on space could become a vulnerability. In recent years, concerns have arisen over Russian and Chinese nuclear anti-satellite weapons. Rebuilding devastated constellations could require more engineers than the country has available, RAND wrote.

While recent Space Force and White House initiatives aim to turn the tide, it doesn't match the demand the administration is putting on the military space industry and, ultimately, more creative solutions are needed to grow that workforce, the report said.

“Being able to reconstitute after a conflict is absolutely essential, and that's not just business as usual for people who are working in the space industry. That's a massive surge in production,” Alexandra Gerber, the report’s lead author, said in an interview. “Think like World War II, Rosie the Riveter, everybody's on the line, and this is not just you can teach somebody how to work in a factory after one day. The timelines for creating people to work in the space industry are much much longer than that. So, we need to be thinking about what the space workforce might need to look like to support reconstitution during a conflict, 10, 20, 30 years in advance. Not just six months.”

Software development, data analytics, and artificial intelligence will be compete for future engineers, the report said. It can take at least 15 years to develop some of the more highly-skilled, space-focused experts.

RAND researchers found “there are approximately 30,000 job openings per year for technicians and technologists, but only 11,000 individuals are credentialed annually. The space industrial base annual demand is approximately 5,000 of the annual openings (17 percent).” For the 244,000 assembly-related job fields hired for annually, there are only 13,000 people credentialed.

“The space industrial base constitutes about 11,000 (5 percent) of the annual openings for assemblers, and competition for the 13,000 credentialed workers will be fierce,” the report said.

Other major hurdles to growing the talent include security-clearance delays for six months or more, and a limited pool of qualified experts — foreign nationals hold 70 percent of electrical and computer engineering doctorates, making them unavailable from most national security-related work, the report said.

Gerbet told Defense One the workforce isn’t needed just for a possible wartime surge. Last month, the White House released a new space transportation policy which aims to reach “more than 1,000 launches and reentries” by 2030. Building new launch infrastructure to meet that demand requires more skilled workers.

“We're currently at about 200 launches per year in the U.S. And they're talking about timesing that by five, but who are the workers who are going to build all of this infrastructure to support that?,” Gerber said. “Then what happens if there is a conflict on top of that. Then you're talking about a double surge.”

Last week, President Donald Trump announced plans to create a U.S. Space Academy to “educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators.”

“Think about what the volume throughput of the space academy is likely to be. I mean, you're only talking about what, a couple hundred graduates a year,” Gerber said. “This is not sufficient, right? I mean, that's not really happening at a scale that would impact what we're talking about.”

RAND researchers recommended that the Space Force and Pentagon focus new policy on growing workforce development by funding additional internships and vocational, bachelor's, and advanced degree levels scholarships for science, technology, engineering, and math students, investing in fellowships, and promoting space engineering careers.

Researchers said the Space Force should also “allow Reserve Officers’ Training Corps graduates and specialized program scholars to fulfill service obligations by working in qualifying” space defense firms.

Additionally, researchers said the defense industry should also look to automation as a supplement to those workforce challenges.

“Notably absent from these discussions were mentions of process automation, robotics, or artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled productivity tools as means to reduce the inherent labor intensity of space manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing,” the report said. “Stakeholders appear to be addressing a structural productivity challenge primarily through volume-based hiring and training strategies and giving little weight to automation as a complementary surge enabler.”

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Pentagon cyber strategy expected as soon as next week, sources say

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:00:00 -0400

The Defense Department is expected to release its anticipated cyber strategy early next week, according to three people familiar with a plan that officials argue will more tightly integrate digital operations into U.S. military campaigns.

One predicted the strategy would be released Tuesday, though the other two said the date could change. All three spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the release.

The strategy has been under development for months by the office of Katie Sutton, the assistant defense secretary for cyber policy and principal cyber adviser to the secretary. It will be the department’s first overarching cyber framework since 2023 and is expected to be accompanied by an action plan.

Officials initially said it would be completed during the summer. Sutton told lawmakers in April that the strategy would seek to build “the most capable, lethal and agile cyber force in the world,” able to defend military networks, gain strategic advantage, and give the president more options to deter or defeat adversaries.

The plan is expected to center on three priorities Sutton outlined to Congress: integrating cyber capabilities across every domain of warfare, gaining an advantage over adversaries, and reorganizing the military’s cyber forces to improve their skill and agility.

A job posting on the website of defense and technology provider Parsons seeks support for the Pentagon’s cyber policy office and says the strategy’s action plan contains about nine strategic initiatives and 34 lines of effort. It’s not clear when the role was posted, and the specific initiatives’ contents are not disclosed in the description.

The approach would aim to further move cyber operations into routine military planning, meaning tools that can disrupt an enemy’s communications or computer systems would be planned alongside airstrikes and other conventional operations. Officials have cited recent Trump-era operations in Venezuela and Iran as examples of this integration.

The strategy will also translate the White House’s March cyber strategy into more specific military priorities and investments. That document pledged to deploy the government’s entire toolkit of offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, disrupt threats before they reach U.S. networks and impose greater consequences on foreign hackers.

The posture is not entirely new. The Pentagon’s 2023 strategy embraced “defend forward,” an approach that calls for confronting malicious cyber threats closer to the source of their operations. The new strategy is expected to emphasize delivering cyber options to combatant commanders and integrating them with conventional military power.

Artificial intelligence is also expected to feature prominently. Sutton said in June that the strategy would set a “clear and specific vision” for enabling AI across the cyber force, supported by coordination among Cyber Command, the Pentagon’s chief information office and its Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office.

The Pentagon and National Security Agency have been expanding access to commercial models that can find vulnerabilities and automate parts of cyber operations. NSA Deputy Director Tim Kosiba said last week that the agency wants access to “all the models” and is holding discussions with leading developers.

The efforts, broadly, are closely tied to Cyber Command 2.0, the Pentagon’s overhaul of how it recruits, trains and employs cyber personnel. The initiative emphasizes greater specialization and purpose-built teams, along with a Cyber Innovation Warfare Center intended to bring commercial technology directly to operators for testing.

The strategy arrives as officials continue grappling with myriad cyber threats to U.S. systems, including an apparently extensive Iran-linked campaign to access water systems and other critical infrastructure around the nation. The Defense Department has also begun an accelerated migration to quantum-resistant encryption, with a goal of protecting its highest-impact systems by 2030.

The administration separately moved last month to let vetted U.S. companies conduct government-approved operations against foreign cybercriminal groups. The initiative also raises questions about how the departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Defense will divide responsibilities and avoid interfering with one another’s cyber operations.

Contact Dave DiMolfetta on Signal: did.99

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Some Navy subs are waiting years for shipyard work, and that’s costing billions of dollars

Lauren C. Williams — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:58:51 -0400

Maintenance delays have cost the Navy’s attack submarine fleet more than 41 years they could have been in operation—and those waiting to be taken out of service could cost more than $3 billion over the next five years, according to a recent watchdog report.

The main problem is that shipyards are simply overloaded with work, the Government Accountability Office wrote in an Aug. 27 report.

“The USS Pasadena entered inactive idle status on January 1, 2025 and is not expected to be inducted" into Puget Sound Naval Shipyard "for decommissioning until November 15, 2028 (1,414 days)—due to shipyard capacity constraints,” the report said. “During this time, the attack submarine is unable to be operational since its dive certification is expired, but is still fully crewed with sailors.”

In the meantime, the Navy is using the inactive submarine to train crews but its nearly-four-year delay is costing the services about $300 million in operating and support costs, according to the GAO’s analysis.

More than a dozen subs are currently at risk of heading down the same, costly path.

“Without mitigation, 15 attack submarines will enter inactive idle time from fiscal year 2026 through fiscal year 2030—during which time the Navy could incur more than 14,000 days of inactive idle time and $3.1 billion in costs to operate and support these inactive submarines,” the GAO found. “The U.S. Navy has not fully evaluated alternative options to more efficiently decommission attack submarines and develop and implement an inactivation plan that could allow them to reduce inactive idle time for crews and save billions.”

The report comes just months after the Navy decided to decommission USS Boise, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine, despite spending $1.6 billion on repairs. Last year, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle told lawmakers it was “unacceptable”.

Over the past decade, the Navy spent about $3.3 billion on idle Los Angeles-class boats, and about $835 million on idle Virginia-class boats—roughly $230,000 for every day a sub sits pierside waiting to be worked on, the report said.

The GAO submitted two recommendations: for the Navy to find “alternative options for decommissioning attack submarines,” including defueling outside of drydocks and reducing crewing for those waiting to be taken out of service; and create and execute a detailed plan that reduces inactive idle time.

The agency also sent two other recommendations, which DOD deemed sensitive. “The Navy, on behalf of DOD, verbally concurred with the recommendations in this report, but did not provide written comments,” the report said.

Correction: Due to an error in the GAO report, an earlier version of this report misstated which yard will decommission the USS Pasadena.

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