Defense One - Policy

The real job of the Army’s new ‘robotics technicians’ is constant adaptation

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:10:17 -0400

You likely have a picture of the future of drone-assisted warfare: a soldier in a trench or a bunker, eyes enveloped in a virtual reality headset, hands clasping a controller, attention on targets below the drone he steers. But the reality of robot-assisted soldiering has already moved elsewhere, according to the military leaders who are training elite forces for future conflict.

On Oct. 2, 10 warrant officers became the Army’s first robotics technicians under the new 390A military occupational specialty. On Tuesday, Maj. Gen. Jason Slider, who commands the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, described how their jobs will go far beyond remotely piloting or maintaining a drone or ground robot.

“It's important that it's not a pilot. We're not building a pilot. What we're building is a soldier that can adapt a piece of robotic kit to the mission, to the enemy, to the terrain,” Slider said at a Defense One event on the sidelines of the AUSA annual conference.

He described this as one of the most important lessons to emerge from Ukraine in terms of designing doctrine and training for the age of battlefield autonomy.

“We looked at the Nagorno-Karabakh, at Ukraine, and we're studying the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East,” he said. Militaries that “solely focus on pilots quickly lose the advantage to an adversary or an enemy force that can adapt that piece of tech to the mission.”

Adaptation was key to Azerbaijan's 2020 victory over Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh. A 2021 report from the Center for Army Lessons Learned describes an Azerbaijani tactic in which “remotely piloted Soviet-era AN-2 biplanes flew at low altitudes as decoys to force the Armenians to respond against the perceived threat,” a use of robotics to surprise and confuse the enemy, not just drop bombs on them.

The United States used a similar tactic in the Middle East at the outset of Operation Epic Fury earlier this year, swarming Iranian forces with cheap drones modeled after the Shahed drones that Iran was using against U.S. forces. Both cases show the importance of deploying robotics, autonomy, and semiautonomy in ways the enemy had not yet predicted.

Chief Warrant Officer 5 Michael Updike, one of the architects of the 390A program, said at the Defense One event that the robotics technician military specialty will include aspects of intelligence analysis, command and control, communications, software development under extremely difficult and disconnected conditions, and even acquisition.

“What it encompasses is different pillars of not only software engineering and mechanical engineering but your data science, understanding research and development,” Updike said. “They have to do all that innovation in the field without…large-language models that are connected to the internet.”

The job will also entail rapidly inventing new capabilities on the ground, much as Ukrainian forces have done, and working with contractors who can do so as well.

During the first phase of the 19-week 390A training course, a group of students improved hardware and software to allow drones under electromagnetic attack to communicate with one another in a mesh network.

“They took a high-definition, $1,000 camera, put it on this quadcopter. They were being jammed in frequencies but they were using a mesh network. So, even though one node was taken out, they had multiple nodes where they could still have communications with the quadcopter or the unmanned drone to be able to still accomplish that mission,” Updike said.

To teach the skills of constant adaptation, Slider said, much of the course is designed to “drive failure” and force reconsideration. That’s something that the course architects themselves had to do when f, the students began, in Slider’s words, “outpacing the curriculum” four weeks in. They were too good at drone warfare, which meant that the course wasn’t hard enough. So Slider worked with academics, sources, and international partners to make the course more difficult, adding additional weeks of training.

“The problems that they were able to solve during the culminating exercise were much closer to the need that the operational force was communicating to us,” the general said.

The 390A program won’t be limited to Fort Bragg. This week, acting Army Secretary Adam Telle said, “Traditionally, historically, those types of [military occupational specialty] might live at — with the special forces and never be proliferated throughout the Army.”

Telle said that his office was working with the office responsible for special operations and low-intensity conflict to expand the specialty but did not provide further details.

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Hegseth, service secretaries discuss ‘generational change’ of Autonomous Warfare Command

Patrick Tucker and Meghann Myers — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:07:44 -0400

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s vision for the planned Autonomous Warfare Command over the next two years “is that we're still iterating, we're still adapting, we're still learning, and we're moving faster and faster because we're doing it. We understand how to do it better with each iteration.”

Hegseth sat down to discuss the Defense Department’s efforts to advance its autonomous capabilities with the service secretaries and the Pentagon’s top civilian for special operations during a panel Wednesday at AUSA’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., but the discussion offered few details on what the forthcoming AUTOWARCOM, scheduled to activate by Oct. 1, 2027, will look like and how it will accomplish its mission.

The secretary, who has ordered cuts to and flag officer positions across the military services, was asked why a four-star combatant command is the correct vehicle to speed up acquisition and fielding of autonomous systems. He said that sometimes a general is the best person to get the job done.

“Let's put rank where we need it to ensure we can drive change quickly,” Hegseth said. “We're going to use rank to drive change with the right people in those positions, but not just legacy formations and commands which have gathered over time and haven't led to battlefield efforts.”

He did not say whether a search is on for commander candidates and what kind of experience he’s looking for.

The Army on Tuesday announced it would rename its Futures and Concepts Command, headed by Lt. Gen. Mac McCurry, to Futures and Autonomy Command, which will be the service’s component command nested under AUTOWARCOM.

The other services haven’t made any announcements about their own forthcoming autonomy commands. The Navy did not immediately respond to a query from Defense One on its plans. The Air Force referred questions to Hegseth’s office.

Much of the discussion focused on the services’ current use of unmanned platforms, as distinct from autonomous systems, which generally function without a human operator.

Hegseth said that AUTOWARCOM would deal not just with procurement, but also with training and doctrine around unmanned systems.

Two of the speakers mentioned an Army effort to open up its test ranges to private companies that make “drone, counter-drone, and long-ranges fires solutions.” Announced in August, the Army Permissive Test Range Expansion effort includes a website that promises a response within four weeks to companies that apply to use the ranges.

“Before, we kept these test ranges to ourselves for our own purposes. We were prioritizing and micromanaging the use of these ranges,” Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle said Wednesday. “To the degree that our bureaucracy is living in the way of our most innovative people from iterating quickly, it's a shame.”

The Army is also working to open “theater innovation labs” outside the United States, said Derrick Anderson, assistant defense secretary for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict. Anderson said the labs, which are being launched in conjunction with U.S. Special Operations Command, meant that “operators sitting here stateside iterating on these autonomous systems” would have a “place to go and iterate” when they go abroad as well.

Anderson added that the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group run by the Defense Innovation Unit will be folded into SOCOM’s new Task Force Autonomous Warfare.

One day before Hegseth took the AUSA spotlight, Army officials had offered some insight into their plans for autonomous warfare on Tuesday, including “appropriate levels of human judgment,” Army Chief Technology Officer Alex Miller said during a panel.

“Things like counter-battery fire, things like air and missile defense, things that happen at a superhuman speed and scale—want to have humans on the loop for decisions, but then we cannot be limited by you know the 20 watts that have up here,” Miller said, pointing to his head. “If we are taking thousands of drones or hundreds of rounds, we can't put that on a human. We want to enable them to be a crew chief for superintelligence and autonomy.”

On Wednesday’s panel, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said his service is experimenting with autonomous fighter aircraft at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

Last year, the Pentagon came under fire for its intentions around autonomous capabilities when AI company Anthropic, then a vendor to the Defense Department, protested the potential use of its models in support of lethal autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance.

Currently, artificial intelligence is used in collecting intelligence, identifying battlefield and data management. AUTOWARCOM would ostensibly be an entire combatant command built around autonomous platforms, but none of the senior officials on stage Wednesday identified any of the advancements the department hopes to make in their use.

“It will be a leader in the way we fight going forward, and I think we'll look back and say that was a no-brainer,” Hegseth said. “We should have done it 10 years earlier, but at least we did it.”

Lauren Williams contributed to this report.

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Army brings back ‘night court’ audit of programs, shifting more than $100M

Meghann Myers — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 06:00:00 -0400

The Army may have a new take on acquisition and modernization, but senior leaders have brought back an innovation from the first Trump administration: top-to-bottom reviews of program spending.

“Night court,” as the Army calls it, started in 2018. Then-Army Secretary Mark Esper and Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley would meet up at the end of the day to hunt through reams of Army program documents for savings. Ultimately, tens of billions of dollars were reprogrammed to new priorities.

Over the summer, service leaders relaunched the effort to evaluate the Army’s many programs.

“Everything from basic research, all the way up—how is that lining into where we're actually taking the Army, from a modernization perspective?” Brent Ingraham, the Army’s civilian acquisition chief, told reporters Thursday of the new round of night courts.

They started with science and technology programs earlier in the summer, Ingraham said, ensuring that the Army’s basic research was aligned with larger goals in the new Portfolio Acquisition Executive offices, which are now responsible for the entire lifecycle of an Army program.

“We roughly found, I'll say, a little over $100 million of S&T funds that could better be realigned to match where the portfolios were headed,” he said.

Next they reviewed foreign military sales contracts.

“How can we improve on delivery of those capabilities?” Ingraham said. “And so it's really sort of looking at how we become better partners to our allies and partners on delivery of capabilities.”

Sustainment is the most recent bucket added to the review, he said. PAEs are reviewing their programs to realign what it will cost to sustain current and planned programs, what can be cancelled, and where they might save money by bringing maintenance in-house.

“The Army sort of fundamentally changed how we do budgeting, inside the department as well,” Ingraham said. “And so now the PAEs get to see the whole portfolio, not just traditional procurement and [research, development, testing and evaluation] dollars, but they see the [operations and maintenance] and the S&T dollars, so they can understand how it fits across the whole portfolio.”

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The Pentagon awarded $350M to a firm tied to a senior DOD official

Aaron C. Davis and Robert Faturechi, ProPublica — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:00:00 -0400

Among a cadre of Wall Street executives brought into the Pentagon during President Donald Trump’s second term, George K. Kollitides II has emerged as a powerbroker with a broad mandate to improve procurement of weapons and critical minerals.

The longtime partner at the private equity firm Alvarez & Marsal Capital has framed his tour of duty in government as a service to the country. But the work he’s leading has also been a boon to his old friends in the private sector, government procurement records show.

In April, months after Kollitides had started work at the Pentagon, he was listed on a securities filing as continuing to work for his old company as a senior adviser. Two months later, the Defense Department finalized a $281 million no-bid consulting contract with an affiliate firm, Alvarez & Marsal Federal, to advise Kollitides’ new Pentagon office, the records show.

That contract, large for consulting work even by Defense Department standards, is the second in a pair of deals that since December have awarded almost $350 million in military spending to the firm — about five times more than Alvarez & Marsal entities had received from all U.S. agencies combined in the two decades before Trump returned to office, according to federal spending data. Both of those contracts have been for work connected to Pentagon offices where Kollitides is the head or has a senior role.

The deals remain shrouded in secrecy, records show, because they were signed under an unusual contracting method the Defense Department uses to fund experimental weapons — work A&M has never claimed to do. They have begun to send unprecedented sums of taxpayer money to a company that boasts helping government agencies create a “customer-centric culture” and that is deeply intertwined with the private equity firm where Kollitides was a partner for almost 10 years. The two partner firms tag-team investment deals and share back-office support, company documents and federal filings show.

Kollitides was still working with A&M Capital when the deals were signed. It’s unclear if he will benefit financially from the windfall of military spending on A&M consulting. His employment at the Pentagon is under a special classification that allows him to keep his financial disclosures confidential.

Ethics experts said it’s generally illegal for executive branch officials to play a role in awarding contracts that would have a direct impact on their own finances, unless they were granted a waiver.

“It looks way too cozy to be legitimate. I think taxpayers should be appalled,” said Virginia Canter, a former federal government ethics lawyer. “There are a million consulting firms in D.C. and New York. Why would you sole-source this contract? They’re not sending replacement parts for a ship that is sinking.”

After ProPublica sent questions to the Pentagon, Kollitides and both A&M entities early this week, A&M Capital said Kollitides had just stopped working there days earlier.

In a statement, A&M Capital said it is a “separately capitalized and separately managed firm from the Alvarez & Marsal consulting business” and its “management and employees have no involvement in the day-to-day operations of the consulting business, and vice versa.” The firm said that none of Kollitides’ work for it related to the “defense industry, the Department of War or Mr. Kollitides’ government service.”

The Alvarez & Marsal consulting business did not answer any of ProPublica’s questions, including how it became aware of the possibility that it could seek the $281 million no-bid contract and what services it is providing to Kollitides’ Pentagon team. The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported the existence of some of the Alvarez & Marsal contracting.

“We are proud to serve clients across all industries, and all levels of government,” the company said in a statement. “The common denominator is always the same: we help solve difficult problems.”

“It looks way too cozy to be legitimate. I think taxpayers should be appalled.”
Virginia Canter, former federal government ethics lawyer

Kollitides did not respond to questions about whether he played a role in A&M securing contracts to work for his office, but a Pentagon spokesperson replied for the department and on Kollitides’ behalf saying they both followed all applicable rules.

“The Department of War maintains a rigorous, multi-layered ethics framework that includes financial disclosure reviews, divestitures where appropriate, and screening to prevent conflicts of interest,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Jacob Bliss wrote in an email. Kollitides, he added, “is in full compliance with all ethical laws and regulations. Any claims otherwise are false.”

There is widespread bipartisan agreement that the Pentagon’s procurement systems are in need of radical reform and private-sector know-how could help the country better secure supply lines and accelerate the development of new weapons to ensure the military is prepared to fight future wars.

But current and former defense officials say the massive spending for connected consultants is a reflection of a changed Defense Department under Trump. They say a clubby and politicized culture has taken hold in a wing of the Pentagon controlled by Kollitides and other former Wall Street executives recruited by Steve Feinberg, the billionaire private-equity titan who is now the deputy defense secretary. It’s an operation, they say, that favors people and companies that have close ties to the administration.

This year, ProPublica reported that the Office of Strategic Capital, a unit at the Pentagon that Kollitides helps lead, granted a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr. a $620 million loan after a top aide to the president intervened on the company’s behalf. A group of Democratic lawmakers accused the office of “a staggering level of corruption and influence peddling.”

ProPublica also reported that the same Pentagon unit was considering a loan to Unusual Machines, a second company connected to the president’s son. A defense official told ProPublica recently that the unit is now in the late stages of a $220 million loan for the Florida drone parts maker, where Trump Jr. sits on the advisory board and was granted a stake.

The Pentagon did not respond to a question about the advancing loan process for Unusual Machines and if Trump Jr.’s connections were playing a part. After the earlier loan to a Trump-connected company, the Pentagon said “no company receives preferential treatment” and “political connections play absolutely no role in the Department’s funding decisions.” Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson pushed back on criticism, saying the Defense Department is conducting extensive due diligence on potential lending.

That Pentagon lending unit was launched during the Biden administration with an open application process for interested companies. Current and former officials and people who have interacted with the office say Kollitides and other leaders now rely more on their own personal networks to choose companies to fund — as well as the consultants to vet those deals.

Multiple Pentagon Hats

That reliance on personal networks is how Kollitides got to the Pentagon.

Feinberg first hired Kollitides more than two decades ago.

Then a rising private-equity star who had graduated from Columbia Business School, Kollitides moved up the ranks at Cerberus, Feinberg’s firm, taking the reins of its aerospace, defense and government groups. In 2012, Kollitides took on an especially sensitive and more public job for the private-equity giant. Kollitides was named chief executive of a Cerberus company combining Remington, the nation’s oldest gun maker, with more than a dozen other firearms and parts companies, eliminating hundreds of jobs from New York to Georgia to Montana.

After three years with the Cerberus-owned gunmaker, Kollitides left and became a partner at Alvarez & Marsal Capital, an offshoot of A&M consulting, whose co-founder also had long-standing business ties to Feinberg.

Some former business associates said they were not surprised that Kollitides jumped at the chance to rejoin Feinberg at the Pentagon. The two share a love for firearms and defense industry investments. They have also both described their work addressing the military’s most vexing supply chain issues as a patriotic calling.

“Americans need us at the Pentagon and our civilians and our contractors to do better,” Feinberg said last year. “We can’t fail, we can’t make excuses, we must succeed.”

On social media, Kollitides has shown the kind of partisanship long taboo in the Pentagon but now fostered in its ranks by Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Kollitides has decried the “Democrat Party,” warned of the ills of socialism and posted that “the government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.”

Over the last year, Feinberg has continued to heap responsibility on Kollitides: naming him his co-chief of staff and senior adviser; vice chairman of the Office of Strategic Capital’s investment committee; and director of two other new offices, the Economic Defense Unit and the Business Operators for National Defense, or BOND — the office with the $281 million no-bid contract.

His employment status allowing him to hold any of those roles at the Pentagon is somewhat of a mystery.

Unlike Feinberg, who was confirmed to his post by the Senate, Kollitides was reportedly first brought onto the federal government last year as a special government employee, or SGE, a designation that allows someone to work in government for no more than 130 days a year. Kollitides seemingly exceeded that cap several months ago.

But in the Pentagon’s email system, Kollitides’ name now carries an abbreviation signifying he has been designated an HQE, or highly qualified expert. His employment classification, which the Pentagon confirmed, is designed to hire people who bring “enlightened thinking and innovation” to Defense Department roles that can last up to six years.

That distinction brings a unique benefit for Kollitides. Financial disclosures filed by HQEs are generally confidential, while those of high-ranking SGEs are often subject to release once a person fills a government role for more than 60 days. It’s unclear if Pentagon ethics officials granted Kollitides a waiver to keep any disclosures confidential.

(ProPublica requested Kollitides’ financial disclosure forms in August, but the Pentagon has not yet responded.)

Kollitides’ continued tie to Alvarez & Marsal Capital surfaced in April in a securities filing by a second company with which the defense official was taking a leadership post.

Days after Feinberg named him the head of BOND, granting Kollitides deep visibility into weapons production rates of U.S. military contractors, Kollitides took a seat on the board of D. Boral Acquisition I, an offshore shell company whose affiliate D. Boral Capital has partnered with defense-related businesses. Bloomberg Government first reported the filing in July, and that Kollitides stepped down from the position at the end of September.

Kollitides’ biography in the filing described his current roles at the Pentagon, then added that “he is also a Senior Advisor” to Alvarez & Marsal Capital and that he previously was a partner and co-head of one the firm’s funds.

The A&M entity that Kollitides is described as still advising in the filing is essentially the private-equity partner of the sprawling Alvarez & Marsal firm that includes A&M Federal, which is now providing consulting services for his offices at the Pentagon.

Though the private-equity and consulting businesses are distinct, they work together, share back-office staff for human resources and tech support, and have overlapping ownership, according to company documents. The private-equity arm describes itself as having a “strategic relationship” with the consulting side of A&M. The firm boosts its investment decision-making by working with the consulting firm’s thousands of employees around the globe to assess particular companies. And after the fund takes a stake in a company, it deploys the consulting arm’s employees to improve that firm’s operations and make the company more valuable.

In other words, the fund’s success hinges on the consulting firm’s.

Whether Kollitides violated government ethics rules hinges on details that he and the Pentagon have declined to provide.

A Defense Department official told ProPublica that Kollitides “does not and has never had” any investments or financial relations with A&M consulting. The official said Kollitides is also “recused on any conflicted matters related to A&M Capital,” which could be referring to Defense Department decisions related to companies A&M Capital has a financial stake in.

Ethics experts said that without a written waiver, executive branch officials are generally barred from participating in decisions, such as the awarding of a contract, that would have a direct impact on their financial interests. That law, the experts said, could apply even if the official doesn’t have a stake in a company but just draws a salary — the rationale being that they’ve improved the odds that the company will be able to continue paying them.

The Pentagon official did not answer specific questions about whether Kollitides was being compensated by A&M Capital when the contracts were signed, if he played any role in the contract decision-making process or if he sought or received an exemption to do so.

A “Blank Sheet of Paper” Contract

A&M’s first contract with the Pentagon was signed in December, months after Kollitides joined the government. That $67.6 million deal was awarded to Alvarez & Marsal Federal through a Defense Department entity focused on efforts to strengthen the nation’s industrial base.

The full scope of work that A&M provided is unclear. But documents reviewed by ProPublica show that by late last year, the firm had begun helping to vet possible loan deals for the Office of Strategic Capital, the lending unit then run in part by Kollitides.

Like that first contract, the larger, $281 million deal that followed to advise Kollitides’ BOND office came in the form of what is called an OTA, or other transaction agreement, which allows agencies to bypass regular federal contracting rules on public disclosure and oversight.

Congress first authorized the Defense Department to use the contracting method in the 1980s to fund breakthrough technologies without publicly disclosing much about the work. The Pentagon has increasingly turned to OTA contracts over the last decade to quickly fund a broader range of one-time costs, including prototype weapons and urgent production needs, even as government auditors have lamented OTAs as a “blank sheet of paper” arrangement with little oversight or accountability.

Still, experts said an OTA contract for consulting work was extraordinary. That’s because consulting is one of the simplest services the military can buy, and it has a long history of doing so through competitive bidding. Firms often publish the hourly costs for their associates, managers, and other work before solicitations are posted.

But like black-box OTA contracts for secret weapons systems, the funding mechanism has hidden from public view details of what taxpayers are getting for the money.

The sheer size of the A&M contract stunned experts.

At $281,089,206.65, the consulting contract is among the largest OTAs funded through the Defense Department’s main support division in the last decade, including for top-secret semiconductor projects and underwater drones, records show.

The Pentagon has said little about the impact of BOND since Hegseth claimed in February that the new entity would revolutionize military purchasing.

The defense secretary said that under the program, the military would embed former corporate executives, or, as he put it, “elite, private-sector patriots” to help optimize and accelerate the manufacturing of critical munitions. Hegseth said he thought the exercise would help the Pentagon increase resiliency in supply chains. The “era of managed decline is over,” he said.

In private recruitment materials for those executives, as well as for candidates to fill posts in other Kollitides-run units, the stakes and the mission for BOND were described in even starker terms: Neoliberalism and trade deals have left the U.S. as a country that “can no longer manufacture ships, munitions or planes in a timely manner.”

The recruiting materials cast the job of fixing that systemic problem as part-time work: “Recently retired Fortune 100 executives spend five days per month solving public- and private-sector operational challenges,” read pages viewed by ProPublica.

Two people familiar with A&M’s work for BOND said the firm’s consultants have accompanied former executives on trips to review work at major defense contractors such as Lockheed, Boeing, RTX and BAE Systems. BAE acknowledged a visit by BOND representatives but declined to comment further. Lockheed, Boeing, RTX and other companies contacted by ProPublica did not respond to requests for comment.

Contracting experts said that A&M is likely not guaranteed the full amount, and that contracts like these typically span several years, but records show A&M has already been paid about $31 million.

Not everyone, however, is welcome to participate.

One former military officer who worked in the defense industry told ProPublica he was contacted by an outside recruiter for Kollitides’ new BOND office. The recruiter, he said, told him that all applicants would be asked who they voted for.

The former military officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, said he expressed discomfort with that line of questioning. He received an email shortly after from the recruiter telling him he was no longer under consideration. The Pentagon did not respond to a question about the officer’s account.

“Getting more effective and efficient is not a political question,” the former officer said.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.

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The Pentagon’s autonomy command should draw on lessons old and new

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 21:48:42 -0400

As Pentagon leaders launch their latest effort to accelerate the development and deployment of autonomous and robotic systems, they can draw on key lessons from past attempts and recent breakthroughs.

The planned Autonomous Warfare Command, slated to launch by next October, will promote “not a particular drone, but the ability to adapt in combat” against “realistic opposition,” according to a Sept. 30 memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who added: “We do not have a decade to transition our procurement and doctrine.”

That’s because on today’s battlefields, effective adaptation to “realistic opposition” is something that happens in weeks, not the months and years it typically takes defense contractors to update designs or even issue software patches. Fortunately, the Pentagon isn’t starting from scratch.

Start with the mission, not the robot

Start with asking commanders and operators what they want from autonomy and robots, rather than trying to dazzle them with an experiment or demonstration that isn't relevant to what they need.

One example is Maven Smart System, an AI intelligence platform widely adopted by the U.S. military and NATO forces—and a model for getting emerging technology to the force faster. A noted 2024 report for CNAS wrote, “A clear, urgent, but broad problem definition permitted Maven to more directly meet user needs.”

So what do combatant commanders want now? Here’s Gen. Frank Donovan, commander of U.S. Southern Command, speaking in May at a Defense One event:

“Most of the systems we're looking at are primarily our domain awareness systems, and…We can match the robots to the environment whether it swims, it flies, it has feet, whatever it does.”

Donovan had just finished leading the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, the special-operations effort to apply autonomy and robotics to missions. He discovered that robots were needed not just to replace humans in combat but to better understand what was happening in the places where boots weren’t on the ground.

“Our partners, who have the access and placement where they live, have to work in, in the rough terrain, the jungle, over the horizon, thousands of miles at sea.”

Build communicative autonomy

Donovan said most of his work at the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group was about getting people partners to talk about what information they needed from robotic systems and what information they wanted those systems robots to have.

“We don't talk about robots. We talk about the data environment, right? With the different data layers that we need at the very forward edge so our [special operations forces] and our conventional force teammates with a...cell phone they can actually plug into that data network, and whatever robot shows up with the capability, they can leverage it instantaneously.”

Autonomous systems will become even more important when network access is blocked by adversary electronic-warfare capabilities, said one former senior defense official who worked to field AI software to U.S. and allied forces.

“The next step is getting these systems to true autonomy that can handle the operating environment. In any conflict, GPS and comms will be denied and degraded. We see it today in Ukraine and the Middle East, and it's a certainty in any future fight,” they said.

Buy the brains and body separately

Another lesson comes from the auto industry, which has turned to external partners for its autonomy needs.

By contrast, the former senior official said, “The Department has mostly asked industry to self-organize to deliver autonomy alongside the vehicle.” For example, Pentagon buyers seeking autonomous drones have simply asked manufacturers to build autonomous versions of their remote-controlled aircraft.

That’s the wrong approach, the former official said. Drone makers “build excellent platforms, but autonomy is its own discipline. Commercial self-driving figured this out years ago: the automakers build great vehicles and partner with autonomy companies for the driver,” they said. “Defense needs the same model.”

Make it modular

The former official added that Pentagon buyers should specify that the autonomy package should be modular—that is, able to be upgraded as threats change and technology improves.

That’s true not just for individual weapons, but across the force and indeed across alliances, they said. “Open standards are what make that partnership work at scale.”

This was underscored by a recent NATO experiment in Portugal. In September, the alliance’s Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation, or CMRE, wrapped up its biggest annual exercise: Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping with Maritime Unmanned Systems. This year’s edition featured a demonstration that showed what an Autonomous Warfare Command will look to replicate: robots receiving orders not from humans but from software.

“For the first time, we had materialized our vision for future operations. We had algorithms looking at what the mission was looking like and automatically giving tasks to drones,” said João Alves, a principal scientist at CMRE.

That wasn’t the result of a new sensor or piece of AI software but rather a policy change: partner militaries agreeing to adopt a standard for the systems that they were buying.

Instill trust

The biggest challenge any military office, command, or unit will face when using autonomous weapons is knowing when to rely on them.

That’s the big conclusion of a 2017 study of autonomy safety failures involving Patriot missile batteries.The most dramatic case was the 2003 downing of an F-18 by a Patriot in Iraq.

“The tactical director at the battalion command and control node gave the order, ‘Bring your launchers to ready.’ That directive was tantamount to an order to engage. But that was not what the tactical director intended,” Army engineering psychologist John Hawley wrote in the study.

Even with everything else in place—a specific mission, open standards, and shared data, the right training—the biggest challenge any command or unit faces when employing autonomy is “sustained high reliability in a complex and unpredictable operational setting,” Hawley concludes.

That same question—does this software program understand what I intend it to do?—has only grown more urgent with each new instance of an AI software agent breaking the law in service of a poorly defined user request.

If AUTOWARCOM is to set a course for the military, its leaders must recognize why previous efforts in autonomy succeeded or failed, and acknowledge that human trust can’t be automated.

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US spy chief tapped as White House AI czar

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 11:00:00 -0400

The nation's top spy is now also the White House's AI czar.

President Donald Trump named Jay Clayton, who was sworn in as director of national intelligence in July, to lead what Trump referred to in a Truth Social post as the “Super Intelligence Force” meant to coordinate the government’s engagement with various organizations, critical-infrastructure providers, and AI companies.

Last month, Trump ordered federal agencies to start calling AI "super intelligence."

According to its charter, the task force will create plans to handle AI-enabled threats, streamline breach notifications, and improve government-response capacities while aiming to avoid overregulation. Its creation follows growing public concerns over AI safety and cybersecurity risks, as well as heated political discussions over the data-center buildouts that power many of today’s AI systems.

“The risk of not being first is high,” Clayton told the Wall Street Journal in a Saturday exclusive that discussed the task force. “Not being first increases the identified, and unidentified, risks, particularly from our adversaries,” he said. “Being first will better enable us to address those risks on behalf of the American people.”

The task force has three vice chairs: Defense Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson. Its members include Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other senior advisors, alongside external advisors like venture capitalist David Sacks — who previously worked as Trump’s AI and crypto czar early in the administration — and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It will have 120 days to report on the risks and opportunities of AI and establish a plan for the federal government to tackle it.

The panel’s establishment marks a shift for an administration that has predominantly maintained a hands-off approach toward AI governance. But officials have faced mounting pressure over the past six months to respond as a new generation of sophisticated, autonomous AI models demonstrating advanced cybersecurity capabilities have repeatedly circumvented or escaped technical safeguards.

Its creation highlights a steady group of voices in the administration and tech industry that believe the time for AI safeguard discussions should begin, though Trump and other officials have largely continued to lean toward a more relaxed approach to regulating the technology.

In public discussions, officials and researchers typically frame AI development as a trade-off between slowing down for safety and accelerating to maintain an edge over foreign adversaries pursuing AI for military and economic gains.

China has especially become a major player in the global AI race. Clayton’s appointment to the task force appears to signal a shift by the administration to cast AI as a geopolitical and national-security subject area.

His dual role is a unique move for the White House, placing the current DNI — who oversees the 18 U.S. spy agencies — at the helm of broad domestic technology and economic policy discussions. Clayton brings a background as a corporate lawyer and former SEC chairman, distinguishing him from tech-focused people from Silicon Valley.

AI has already transformed how spy agencies digest vast troves of collected data and build intelligence products, among other things.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that he welcomed the administration’s attention toward the fast-evolving technology but said Clayton’s new title lacks a coherent strategy.

“We still do not know what authority this new role will have, whether it will include developing safety standards or reviewing the most advanced models, or how it fits into the administration’s broader approach to AI,” Warner said in a statement. “That lack of clarity is especially concerning as leading AI companies themselves are confronting increasingly capable systems that can evade safeguards and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities.”

“I hope this appointment is an opportunity for the administration to move beyond slogans and toward a serious, coordinated national strategy for AI,” he said.

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Hegseth plans ‘Autonomous Warfare Command’

Bradley Peniston — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:01:05 -0400

The Pentagon will create a combatant command to lead its efforts to develop and deploy robotic weapons, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday in a speech peppered with Bible verses and insults to the press.

The new Autonomous Warfare Command, or AUTOWARCOM, will be “a new four-star combatant command with service-like authorities built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force,” Hegseth said. It is to stand up by Oct. 1, 2027, according to a memo released after his speech.

The secretary seemed to say that planning for the new command would flow from the three-month-old direct reporting portfolio manager for unmanned offensive and defensive systems, whose “culminating mission” will “take place over the course of months, clearing the path for Autonomous Warfare Command.” In the meantime, the office is being given a new task: to “prototype a new construct called warfighting acquisition” that “fuses operators with entrepreneurs in rapid adaptation cycles while distributing decisions and dollars closer to frontline units, to combatant commands.” He said the office would henceforth be led by Owen West, who currently runs the Defense Innovation Unit, and a Navy senior chief petty officer who is both a SEAL and a test pilot. It will also be renamed “Project Agincourt,” the secretary said, miming a bow and arrow.

To further speed the adoption of unmanned technologies, Hegseth said, the Army, Navy, and Air Force Departments will create “new MOS frameworks”—a reference to the job classifications of the Army and Marine Corps—”to support our shift to autonomy. We need institutional knowledge and career paths for a new generation of autonomous warfighters.”

The secretary also announced a committee with a four-month deadline “to creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer and capabilities we must master.” The committee, dubbed Project Meridian, will be led by defense contractors Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich, the 83-year-old former Speaker of the House whose mixed scientific legacy includes dissolving Congress’ non-partisan scientific advisory office.

‘FORTRESS America’

Hegseth said that the U.S. military has become “Dependent on foreign mines for rare earths, on overseas factories for microchips, on foreign supply chains for weapons, and on a civilian power grid to keep the lights on at our bases.” So, he said, he is launching an effort to ensure that every U.S. military base will eventually generate its own electrical power; he gave no timeline or cost estimate. He also said the military will increase its stockpiles of munitions and critical supply-chain materials. It will also stockpile medicine and blood, part of what Hegseth called “a national insurance policy for the American homeland.”

As part of this “FORTRESS America” effort, Hegseth said, the U.S. military will build a new base in the state that makes the best pitch for it. A DOD statement said the base will “serve as a foundational hub for integrated defense operations, distributed command-and-control, and resilient cyber and technological capabilities.” The secretary said the base will cover “hundreds of thousands of acres,” house 15,000 to 25,000 troops, and have structures of “timeless classical architecture” to comply with an August executive order.

Other new initiatives include a planned Office of Religious Affairs that will report to Hegseth personally. “ORA will ensure religious affairs are no longer dispersed across distant bureaucratic layers, giving senior leaders a dedicated capability to protect free exercise, remove policy barriers, identify unmet requirements, and secure the support needed for the Service chaplaincies to succeed,” a DOD statement said.

Hegseth continued a pattern of espousing conservative evangelical religious beliefs in official speeches. He quoted the Bible several times, called children “precious souls made in the image and likeness of God,” and said that “America's military must understand the difference” between God and evil.

The defense secretary also took pains, beginning with the second sentence of his speech and continuing at intervals until his closing thoughts, to lambaste what he called the “hyperventilating” and “delusional” media for, among other things, reporting on the swift depletion of key munitions in the war on Iran. He said that “partisan activism that intentionally smears the troops” amounts to “treason, actually.” He cited no evidence of smears or activism, nor any basis for telling the assembled troops that “it's your movements and bases that they reveal to the enemy.”

Hegseth prompted and drew light applause on a few occasions, a change from the resolute silence at his high-profile speech a year ago; the video feed did not reveal whether the clapping came from the carefully selected junior officers and senior enlisted leaders, or from others in the audience. “This is decidedly not a trifling matter of decorum or politeness," Peter Feaver, a noted expert on civil-military affairs, wrote a day before the speech. "The safety of the American republic and the constitutional order depend on elected political leaders trusting that the military they have inherited from previous administrations will serve in a nonpartisan fashion.”

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White House unveils ‘super intelligence’ executive order and industry accord

Christian Robles — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:20:00 -0400

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday instructing agencies to refer to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents and other non-statutory documents.

The order gives the assistant to the president for science and technology 60 days to submit, in consultation with agency heads, proposed legislative language establishing a definition for super intelligence, or SI.

That assessment will include whether SI should modify, expand upon or supersede the legal definition of AI. Trump unveiled the term “super intelligence” last week at the United Nations General Assembly and teased that it would become federal policy at a launch event for America.gov on Tuesday.

The order came hours after Trump and top administration officials met at the White House to discuss AI safety. During the meeting, leaders of major technology companies signed an accord on frontier model safety.

AI safety “starts with every company that is training and deploying frontier models having robust internal processes and controls to ensure that their technology behaves as intended and that any issues are promptly identified and resolved,” according to a copy of the accord.

The document says a participating company will have four layers of controls and audits: “robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of its models during training and deployment around areas like cybersecurity,” an internal team to oversee controls, partnerships with independent external auditors and a designated independent committee to oversee reports from internal teams and external auditors.

The accord was signed by Trump, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, xAI CEO Elon Musk and NVIDIA President and CEO Jensen Huang.

“We agreed to a number of things that include joint monitoring, board special committees, just generally grading each other’s homework,” Musk said at the America.gov launch event Tuesday afternoon.

The accord and AI rebranding come just months after an OpenAI model escaped its testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face. The accord also comes as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle continue to fight over new measures to ensure AI products are safe.

Vice President JD Vance also delivered remarks Tuesday afternoon where he defended the administration’s preference for working with, rather than regulating, top AI companies.

“The solution to some of the AI risks is for you guys to take the risk seriously, not to come to the government for a regulatory regime that may make things worse if it’s not smart and careful,” Vance added.

But Vance threw cold water on proposals to create a Food and Drug Administration- or Federal Aviation Administration-style regulatory body to oversee frontier models.

“The problem with that is one you have to get regulators who are actually smart about what’s going on and most bureaucrats just know way less about this than the people who are actually building these products,” Vance said.

The vice president argued that the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department already have the authority to hold AI developers responsible for creating products that harm consumers.

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Polish defense official says US has decided to establish a base in Poland

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:03:57 -0400

Poland will fulfill a longtime goal of hosting a permanent U.S. military base, a Polish defense leader said Friday, adding that the two countries are nearing an agreement to jointly develop weapons.

“We understand that decision has been made,” Paweł Ksawery Zalewski, secretary of state at Poland’s Ministry of National Defence, told an audience in Washington, D.C.

Asked for comment, a Pentagon spokesman said, “We have nothing to announce at this time.”

The Polish government first sought a U.S. military base within its borders in 2018, when it offered to name it after President Donald Trump. Trump, at the time, said that he was “looking at it.”

Since returning to office, Trump has moved to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Europe even as Russian President Vladimir Putin has increased missile and drone strikes against Ukraine and escalated a hybrid warfare campaign against NATO allies. Trump has also made overtures to the Russian leader, such as inviting Putin to attend an upcoming meeting of the G-20 in Miami, Florida.

Zalewski argued that, despite appearances, Trump remains committed to a stronger NATO under the NATO 3.0 concept, and said his discussions with U.S. military officials were as productive and meaningful as ever.

He couldn’t say how many U.S. troops would be stationed at the new base but acknowledged that the Trump administration has not yet fulfilled its May promise to put an additional 5,000 troops in his country.

“I'm always very hesitant to discuss the numbers, because it is not the numbers which matters, because, you know, what matters is capabilities, " he said.

Zalewski said the details of the basing agreement are still under discussion between Polish and U.S. military officials.“We are just talking how to execute it in the right way, because, you know, it's a very important decision in terms of logistic financing. You know we are offering financing of the whole infrastructure. We are contributing to financing [for the] stay of each American soldier on the level of $15,000 per year,” he said.

The two countries have also agreed on the outlines of an agreement to jointly produce new military capabilities by allowing more joint ventures between U.S. and Polish defense producers.

“We understand the decision on the American side has been made,” he said.

But the agreement must contend with U.S. laws and regulations regarding defense exports.

“What is needed to do is first to cut the red tape,” he said.

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The Navy’s public shipyards will take more decades to repair, GAO says

Lauren C. Williams — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:51:52 -0400

The Navy's effort to fix and improve its shipyards will take decades longer and cost billions more than initially planned—and Congress has not been systematically kept apprised of the growing complexity of the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program, the Government Accountability Office has found.

“Without a full picture of how much has been spent, what remains to be funded, and what risks may affect SIOP progress, Congress could make consequential decisions for SIOP based on incomplete information, thus risking billions in taxpayer dollars and a lack of program oversight for the decades to come,” the GAO wrote in a report released Friday.

The Navy must already submit reports related to its shipyard construction efforts to comply with nearly a dozen legislative provisions. But the watchdog agency suggested that Congress should require the service to “annually report consolidated, standardized status updates,” including revised cost and schedule estimates for the entire plan.

The Navy’s public shipyards—Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and Puget Sound Naval Shipyard— maintain and update the service’s nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers. The service has struggled for years with maintenance backlogs that have, in at least one case, led a submarine to be retired early rather than fixed up.

Planning for the shipyard upgrades started in 2018 and has taken several years longer than anticipated because the Navy “underestimated the time needed” and “did not fully account for the many challenges, uncertainties, and complex analyses needed to sufficiently plan for an endeavor of SIOP’s magnitude,” the report states.

New projects and costs were also discovered during design and planning.

For example, the Navy found at least $1 billion would be needed for “facility retrofits and new construction to mitigate newly assessed seismic risks at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard” since 2023, the report states. “In 2023, the Navy completed emergency drydock retrofits and repairs. The Navy also requested $830 million to conduct seismic upgrades for Dry Dock 4…in its fiscal year 2026 budget request.”

The GAO’s analysis ran from September 2024 through September 2026.

Earthquake risks were included in SIOP’s original 2018 assessment, the GAO noted.

Many shipyards and their facilities were built close to a century ago, with problems seen today compounded on top of “long-deferred maintenance and worsening decrepitude during that time. As a result, unexpected facility and construction site conditions led to new projects being identified or additional work added to projects during construction,” the report states.

Navy leaders are expected to consider the SIOP plan and cost estimate by this month.

The GAO made three other recommendations, including reviewing future program needs in the oversight framework and documenting the SIOP’s role and duties to improve project risk management.

The Navy hasn’t “fully documented” SIOP’s roles and responsibilities despite creating multiple organizations to manage the program’s projects.

“Doing so would formalize their new SIOP roles and help to ensure not only their ability to effectively implement SIOP’s essential projects but also the continuity of the critical shipyard operations to maintain and modernize the U.S. naval fleet now and throughout SIOP’s extended timeline,” the GAO wrote.

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Trump floats ‘AI Force’ to boost industry

Edward Graham — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:00:00 -0400

President Donald Trump said over the weekend that he plans to create an "AI Force" and appoint a czar to boost artificial-intelligence companies.

"We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows! However, we will also be looking for BAD, and we can do that, very easily, with our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System. For this purpose, I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term. To that end, I will be announcing, in the near future, the AI 'Czar' — Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!" Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Saturday morning.

Trump blamed “Radical Left Dumocrats” for widespread concerns about data centers and the potential dangers of unchecked AI development.

The president’s announcement comes after weeks of high-profile warnings from leading tech executives about the potential harms that advanced AI models could cause unless officials step in to regulate the industry. Congressional lawmakers and state leaders have also floated proposals to institute so-called ‘kill switches’ to disable AI systems that go rogue. But Trump and others have pushed back on calls for across-the-board development slowdowns.

David Sacks, who served as the Trump administration's AI and crypto czar until March, shared Trump’s post on X and agreed that a pause on AI development “would not make America safer” and “would hand the frontier to China.”

Trump’s newest proposal is light on details about what role the AI Force would have in overseeing advanced models, or what additional responsibilities it would be handed. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the role of the AI Force or its primary mission.

Michael Kratsios, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, appeared on Fox News Sunday and said that Trump’s post describes “how important it is that we as an administration coordinate in order to make sure that this great technological innovation that’s transforming the country, that’s driving economic growth, continues to do so.”

He added that “these implications of AI spread across so many different agencies, so being able to have someone at the White House to be able to work on all those issues across the agencies is really critical.”

But stakeholders in the space have expressed confusion surrounding what, exactly, the AI Force would do.

“Poll after poll shows the American public is alarmed by recent warnings from AI developers and whistleblowers as well as the rogue AI incidents that took place this summer,” said a spokesperson for AI safety advocacy group Americans for Responsible Innovation. ”There’s pressure on the President to do something, and that’s what this announcement could be designed to address.”

Earlier this month, the Institute for Security and Technology released a survey of current and former national security officials, one-third of whom believe that an AI model will operate outside human control within the next decade.

Philip Reiner, the think tank’s CEO and co-founder, said Trump’s description of the AI Force being like Space Force was “the shape of an answer, but without the substance.”

The service branch, which was established during Trump’s first term and aims to maintain and protect U.S. interests in space, was created through action by Congress, which directed its creation as part of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act.

“Space Force works because Congress can give it a doctrine, a budget, a personnel system, but there's no equivalent for AI,” Reiner said. “It's a capability that cuts across every domain.”

He said that the AI Force might be akin to Space Force in terms of Pentagon oversight, saying that “this is more of an actual [Defense Department] lane, is the sense that you get.”

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Agencies spent nearly $10 billion for feds not to work in 2025

Erich Wagner — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:18:20 -0400

The federal government spent nearly $10 billion placing more than 100,000 federal workers on paid administrative leave for extended periods last year, a sixfold increase from two years prior driven largely by the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program aimed at encouraging feds to quit public service.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office found that around 70% of that money, or $6.7 billion went to feds who opted into the DRP, a program by which agencies paid employees to stay home, in exchange for their resignation by September 2025—or December of that year, for retirement-eligible workers. While federal employees took 4 million workdays worth of leave in 2023 and 4.4 million in 2024, that number ballooned to 21.6 million workdays last year.

“Paid administrative leave usage peaked in July 2025 at nearly 3 million workdays; approximately 2.5 million of those workdays were associated with the deferred resignation program,” GAO wrote. “In 2023 and 2024, fewer than 600 federal employees took more than 90 workdays of paid administrative leave; in 2025, almost 100,000 employees took more than 90 days of paid administrative leave.”

The deferred resignation program came shortly after the Office of Personnel Management issued long-awaited regulations implementing the 2016 Administrative Leave Act, a law aimed at curbing the use of paid administrative leave.

OPM told agencies that those regulations would not take effect until September 2025, and later proposed a new rule codifying workforce realignment as a valid use of paid leave. OPM’s current guidance for agencies considering a deferred resignation program is to cap the period of paid administrative leave at 12 weeks.

GAO noted that its estimates regarding the costs of leave approved in connection with the deferred resignation program and other workforce restructuring efforts are likely a modest overcount. That’s because employees commonly misreport similar forms of paid time off, such as for a federal holiday or a doctor’s appointment, as well as the fact that OPM has not set up a dedicated leave category for leave connected to a workforce restructuring effort.

That means policymakers can’t know whether the Trump administration’s workforce reductions are actually reducing the cost of government, the report found. OPM Director Scott Kupor has previously said the DRP would save taxpayers $20 billion each year.

“To calculate the long-term government-wide savings of workforce reduction efforts, OPM needs to know the short-term costs of using paid administrative leave,” GAO wrote. “[Without] an accurate understanding of how much paid administrative leave costs the federal government, there is no way to accurately determine to what extent the government-wide cost-savings goal is being met. OPM officials stated that they have no plans to create an additional subcategory of paid administrative leave associated with workforce reductions.”

GAO recommended the OPM acknowledge the data reliability issues inherent in its public-facing paid leave data, as well as create a new category in federal payroll systems to report workforce-reduction related paid leave. In its response, the dedicated HR agency reversed course and said it would begin the process of creating a new leave category to better track the usage of and reasoning for paid leave.

“OPM agrees that a dedicated administrative leave data element for workforce reduction efforts would enable more timely reporting on its use and simplify future analysis,” Kupor wrote. “OPM will begin the process of developing a new paid administrative leave category focused on workforce reduction efforts, in coordination with agencies and payroll service providers.”

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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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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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Stopgap funding bill temporarily extends key cyber info-sharing law

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:12:00 -0400

The House approved a continuing resolution on Tuesday that funds federal agencies through Dec. 11 and extends key federal cybersecurity authorities and tech programs past their Sept. 30 expiration date, including the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015.

The legislation, part of a broader package that President Donald Trump is expected to soon sign to avert a fiscal year 2027 government shutdown before the midterm elections, temporarily prevents the cyber information-sharing law from sunsetting at the end of the month when the federal budget resets.

That law provides liability protections to private sector companies that voluntarily share cyber threat intelligence with agencies like the NSA or the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Efforts to secure a long-term reauthorization for the law have faced repeated delays over the past year despite broad support from officials and industry. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chair Rand Paul Paul, R-Ky., has routinely pushed back on clean extensions of the law.

The key liability protections in the CISA 2015 law are designed to shield firms from lawsuits and regulatory penalties when sharing threat information with the government. That data often includes personal or proprietary information tied to individuals and companies affected in cyber intrusions.

Industry groups have consistently warned lawmakers that allowing the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act to lapse would create legal risks for companies sharing breach data, leading to a drop in private sector threat disclosures. Federal cyber officials have similarly stated that the loss of statutory authority would disrupt real-time threat intelligence sharing across public and private networks.

The spending measure extends several other federal IT and cyber authorities scheduled to expire on Sept. 30, including the Technology Modernization Fund, which provides capital for civilian agency IT upgrades. Around $5 million is authorized for the fund to continue approving and financing new agency tech modernization projects. Also extended is the Federal Cybersecurity Enhancement Act, which authorizes the National Cybersecurity Protection System for federal network intrusion detection.

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House defers potential shutdown with a stopgap spending bill

Jory Heckman — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:00:00 -0400

The House approved a stopgap spending bill on Tuesday that will keep the federal government funded through early December, taking a government shutdown off the table until after midterm elections this fall.

The House voted 370-48 to pass a continuing resolution that will keep the federal government funded through Dec. 11.

The continuing resolution includes a provision that temporarily blocks the Office of Management and Budget’s proposed rule that would put federal grant funding under review by political appointees. It also includes language that would prevent the Trump administration from transferring funds from other programs to Border Patrol.

The Senate passed the stopgap spending bill in a 90-6 vote in July before leaving for its summer recess.

Federal employees dealt with the longest government shutdown in history last year, followed by the longest partial shutdown, which affected the Homeland Security Department. Both shutdowns led to federal workers missing paychecks.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters Tuesday morning ahead of votes that Congress is “going to avoid the threat” of another government shutdown.

“On this CR we'll take up, it simply holds funding steady at current levels through Dec. 11, as Republicans work to complete the full-year appropriations process,” Johnson said.

The stopgap spending bill gives Congress more time to reach a deal on a comprehensive spending package for fiscal 2027. So far, the House has passed three of 12 spending bills that make up a comprehensive spending plan. The Senate has passed none.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said, “The fiscal-year deadline is outpacing the work that remains” but that the continuing resolution will ensure constituents “will continue to get the services they need.”

“This will allow Congress time to get past the November elections, and allow us time to assess and move forward with further appropriations measures in November and December,” Cole said.

House Appropriations Committee Ranking Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. said the CR is a “marked improvement” from an earlier version that would have kept the government funded through Dec. 4 but would not have blocked OMB’s proposed rule.

“The continuing resolution we are considering today is in no way a substitute for the full-year funding process. It is merely a means to complete this important work while averting a lapse in government funding,” DeLauro said.

The House passed the previous Dec. 4 CR largely along party lines, with Republicans overwhelmingly voting in favor. House Democratic leaders rejected the earlier stopgap spending bill, but House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said this latest version would receive “broad bipartisan support."

Vice Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus Ted Liu, D-Calif., said he would vote for the CR, “even though doing CRs is a stupid way to run government.”

“It is not a good way to run our federal government. But it's the only alternative that's gonna be put before us,” Lieu said.

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‘Change agent’ Army secretary resigns

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:41:32 -0400

Dan Driscoll, whom President Donald Trump in 2024 hailed as “a disruptor and change agent,” has resigned as secretary of the Army.

The move was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. A source directly familiar with the matter confirmed the news and said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s purging of generals who were tied to Driscoll’s innovation and transformation efforts was a primary cause for the resignation.

“Driscoll brought up concerns with the administration surrounding Army transformation and readiness, and Hegseth's blocking those efforts, specifically by firing the generals who were responsible,” the source said.

A former Army Ranger who led a platoon with the 10th Mountain Division, Driscoll graduated from Yale Law School and worked in investment banking before the White House tapped him as the Army’s top civilian leader.

In the post, he worked closely with a tight set of uniformed military leaders to push a reform agenda across the Army. Those leaders included: Army Chief Gen. Randy George; Gen. David Hodne, commander of Transformation and Training Command; Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus; and Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa—all of whom Hegseth has pushed out or removed.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I, in a statement, said that he did not welcome the news. “I am alarmed that Secretary Driscoll’s leadership of the Army stands in stark contrast to Secretary Hegseth’s disastrous tenure atop the Defense Department.”

“We cannot fucking wait.”

Driscoll launched his reform agenda, the Army Transformation Initiative, in May 2025—an agenda informed, at least in part, by Ukraine’s experience rapidly innovating new technologies to resist Russia’s invasion.

“When you look at Ukraine, [they] have not accepted the current version of a thing as sufficient, and they have MacGyvered and come up with whatever they have to do to get to an outcome they need,” he told Pentagon reporters last November.

The key elements of Driscoll’s agenda included integrating artificial intelligence into decision making; pushing more purchasing, equipping, and equipment modification powers down the chain of command, closer to actual warfighters; deploying modernized drone formations; and addressing what he described as a “gap” in counter-drone technology.

“I am publicly on record saying we are learning a lot from them, and we are changing a lot of the lessons that they have taught us,” he said of Ukraine’s military.

In a peppery AUSA address last October, Driscoll described the urgency of transforming the United States Army. “We will win with silicon and software and not our soldiers’ bodies… No one can predict the next war, but we cannot wait, we cannot fucking wait to innovate until Americans are dying on the battlefield.”

Following the ouster of Gen. George, new acting chief Gen. Christopher LaNeve ordered a battalion that had been working with Ukrainians to integrate lessons learned from drone warfare to return to being a traditional infantry battalion.

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Here’s what Trump’s new ‘Space Academy’ could mean for the US military

Thomas Novelly — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 16:32:46 -0400

President Donald Trump’s mandate for a new “Space Academy” puts defense leaders under a NASA-led initiative that could mean military service requirements for the future school's graduates.

Trump signed the executive order on Friday at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston during a ceremony where he presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four crew members who are to take the Artemis II spacecraft around the Moon. It appoints a commission, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Air Force Secretary Troy Meink and chaired by NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, to “strengthen the nation’s space workforce” by planning for a new national academy.

“Given the rapid growth of the U.S. Space Force and commercial space industry, and the expansion of our ambitions to the Moon and far beyond the Moon, it’s clear we will need to educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators,” Trump said at the ceremony.

The idea of a Space Academy isn’t new, but one defense expert told Defense One it’s unclear how a new institution would further the administration’s military space-related ambitions. The Space Force does not lack for recruits, although its civilian workforce was cut during last year’s federal workforce purge. Currently, the Space Force commissions new officers through the Air Force Academy, ROTC, or Officer Training School. Friday’s executive order instructs the commission to consider imposing military-service requirements on academy graduates.

The order calls for an evaluation of “service obligations for graduates, including service in the armed forces” and explores “prerequisites for applicants, including citizenship status, security clearances, and government employment or military status.”

Air Force officials declined to comment and clarify details of the executive order. White House spokespeople did not immediately respond when asked for details and how a Space Academy would interact with the armed services and officer-commissioning pathways. The commission has 120 days to submit a report to Trump “proposing key details” to establish the Space Academy.

A White House fact sheet said the Space Academy will “combine rigorous technical education with leadership development and public service, preparing graduates for careers supporting America’s military, civil, and broader space enterprise.”

“In the years ahead, we will return NASA astronauts to the lunar surface, build the Moon Base, get underway on nuclear power, ignite the orbital economy and launch more missions of science and discovery,” NASA’s Isaacman said in a news release. “I have no doubt that so much of the future talent that will graduate and contribute to these exciting endeavors will be educated at the United States Space Academy.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the conservative think tank’s playbook for the Trump administration, pitched the idea of creating a “Space Force Academy.”

“Explore creation of a Space Force Academy to attract top aero–astro students, engineers, and scientists and develop astronauts,” the playbook read. “The academy could be attached initially to a large existing research university like the California Institute of Technology or MIT, share faculty and funding, and eventually be built separately to be on par with the other service academies.”

Todd Harrision, the American Enterprise Institute’s defense budget and space expert, called the executive order “out of left field” and fears it will further muddy civilian and military roles.

“NASA, the Space Force, and the intel space agencies—they all have very well-defined lanes and responsibilities and areas of expertise,” Harrison said. “Intermingling them like this does not sound like a good idea.”

Harrison also questioned the idea of a government-run “Space Academy” when there’s world-class private and public universities that produce top-notch aerospace and engineering students. The Space Force recruits from such schools under its University Partnership Program.

Trump’s push to bolster space-related careers comes as the Space Force works to rebuild its civilian workforce after the administration’s hasty cuts last year.Officials have been aggressively trying to hire talent to manage a requested $71.3 billion service budget, which would be the largest year-on-year increase, by percentage, for any military service branch since 1952, according to a report from the Aerospace Corporation.

The Space Force hasn’t struggled to hit its uniformed recruiting goals. Service leaders have pitched plans to double the number of its guardians. Harrison said it’s not clear how the Space Academy aligns with those realities.

“It’s not consistent with the other workforce changes the administration has been making,” Harrison said. “It doesn’t appear there is a clear need for this. The other thing too is … they’re going to need authorization and funding from Congress to actually do this. So, what is their plan there?”

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Senior officers advised Hegseth to keep civilian-protection program. He axed it anyway

Megan Rose and Hannah Allam, ProPublica — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:35:21 -0400

Shortly after taking office last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth polled the nation’s top commanders about cutting a program designed to protect civilians during U.S. military operations.

Hegseth had bet senior officers would endorse his view that focusing on civilian security was “woke” and out of step with “maximum lethality,” current and former defense officials told ProPublica.

Instead, every commander rebuffed the idea.

The poll from early 2025, which has not been previously reported, cemented top-level military support for Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a relatively new program adopted after years of heavy civilian tolls in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. As part of its mission, CHMR (pronounced “chimmer”) stationed personnel within major regional commands. Officials tried to develop a picture of life on the ground in combat zones to aid decision-making on military strikes and avoid or minimize civilian harm.

In the poll, Hegseth gave commanders three options: cut 65% of staff but keep the effort operational, continue with only a small centralized office in Washington, or eliminate the program.

Nine commanders chose the first option to preserve the enterprise as much as possible, according to a memo reviewed by ProPublica. Leaders of two commands, one overseeing the nuclear arsenal and the other focused on cyber threats, declined all three options, asking to maintain the full program.

Leaders at U.S. Central Command, the Tampa, Florida-based center that oversees military action in the Middle East, pressed to keep its full CHMR staff of 16. Eliminating or scaling back the effort would “result in decreased efficiency of U.S. lethal operations due to an increased risk of target misidentification and reduced battlespace awareness,” a memo reviewed by ProPublica said.

Erik Kurilla, the Army general who was then in charge of Central Command, and several other senior officers directly involved in combat operations had appealed to Hegseth to keep the program. They explained that it was a valuable tool, another retired general said — but “that intent was overridden.”

Hegseth gutted the effort, leaving only a handful of people to carry out the mission. It was stripped of almost all of its funding, even as the U.S. launched new campaigns in Somalia, Yemen and Iran. One official summed up the Hegseth approach as: “Bombs away!”

Hegseth’s early exchanges with the generals made clear that the civilian harm program had no future in his reimagined “Department of War.”

“No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement,” Hegseth would later tell a gathering of hundreds of generals and admirals.

But now, after U.S. missile strikes have killed hundreds of civilians in Iran and Yemen, episodes that drew global criticism and questions from Congress, the program could soon be partially revived.

The about-face would mark a rare reversal in a department that hasn’t tolerated dissent under Hegseth and President Donald Trump. Last year’s military memos detail a delicate pushback that may preserve at least the framework of the civilian security campaign.

Current and former defense officials described the evolution of the civilian security program on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.

The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment about the poll or the program’s revival.

Casualties, Outrage

The first major military operation of Hegseth’s tenure — an air campaign in Yemen in the spring of 2025 — killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 others. The majority of the deaths came from just two strikes, ranking them among the deadliest for civilians the Pentagon has acknowledged in modern warfare, said Airwars, a British watchdog that tracks civilian harm from military operations. The toll was confirmed in the Pentagon’s 2025 annual report for civilian casualties, The Washington Post first reported.

Hegseth described the Yemen operation at the time as a “clear, limited mission executed with ruthlessness, full stop.”

By the time the U.S. began attacking Iran the next year, the Pentagon’s civilian protection program was down from a little under 200 people to around two dozen, some working only part time, the current and former defense officials said. Central Command, which said it needed a minimum of nine of its 16 staffers to function, was left with one person.

On the first day of the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, a U.S. airstrike hit a school in Minab, a city near the Strait of Hormuz, killing more than 100 children and igniting international outrage.

The Shajarat al-Tayyiba Primary School is in ruins in Minab, Iran, on March 31. Hamid Vakili/Anadolu via Getty Images

Hegseth and the commander in charge of the Iran operation, Adm. Brad Cooper, were questioned about the strike before Congress. Hegseth said the U.S. does not target civilians and would investigate. Early reports on that investigation, yet to be publicly released, have said outdated U.S. intelligence led to the attack on the school.

Democratic senators and humanitarian groups questioned whether the cuts to the civilian protection personnel also contributed to the school tragedy.

In a letter to Hegseth in April, 11 senators said the school strike, as well as other deadly attacks on civilians in Iran, reflected “the administration’s broader disregard for the strategic, legal, and moral imperative to minimize civilian harm,” noting the dismantling of civilian harm reduction efforts. “This is a concerning pattern and raises questions about whether the administration is upholding international law and the laws of war,” it said.

Previously, a Pentagon spokesperson declined to answer questions from ProPublica about the letter, saying it would “respond directly” to Congress.

Concerns were voiced by military leaders before Hegseth largely eliminated the operation. One exception is the Department of the Army, headed by a civilian appointee, which agreed with getting rid of CHMR entirely.

Leaders at Central Command told Hegseth’s top staff in a memo that CHMR “enhanced our precision and accuracy, making us more lethal.” The memo added, “The operational and strategic value of this work is widely recognized.”

At the same time, the Joint Staff echoed the commanders’ sentiment. According to correspondence reviewed by ProPublica, the Joint Staff disagreed with the Army acting secretary, who said in a February 2025 memo that the program was redundant and recommended Congress repeal the law that set it in motion.

As pressure has built from both Congress and within the military to restore the program, the Defense Department appears to have backpedaled.

In April, Elbridge Colby, the Defense Department’s undersecretary of policy, sent a follow-up memo about the civilian-protection enterprise to Hegseth. This time, there was only one proposal on the table: reboot the program, albeit at reduced staff levels with 70 full-time people.

In that memo, Colby wrote that maintaining 35% of CHMR would address investigations into civilian harm, reports to Congress and payments to those harmed.

The same commanders Hegseth polled earlier endorsed the move, several defense officials told ProPublica.

The proposal would allow all regional commands to reconstitute their civilian-harm-reduction staff, and the Virginia-based Civilian Protection Center of Excellence for training, data, and research would move from under the Army to the Joint Staff. The move, officials say, gives the mission more heft and eases collaboration with the Navy and Air Force, which are at the forefront of the administration’s campaigns.

“If not for the combatant commanders,” one defense official said, the program would be “dead.”

The harm-mitigation effort makes up a tiny fraction of the Defense Department’s billions in spending. The center near the Pentagon had an annual budget of $7 million, officials said, with the cross-command total for all civilian security work estimated at around $80 million before the cuts. Officials expect a refashioned program to operate on a smaller budget.

Military leaders steeped in lessons from the post-9/11 “forever wars” repeatedly have affirmed harm mitigation as an asset on the battlefield. Civilian casualties undermine U.S. objectives and help boost insurgent recruiting, analysts say.

The Pentagon had formalized CHMR in 2022, detailing steps to protect noncombatants and investigate reports of casualties. Commanders had publicly championed the program in congressional testimony and defense journals. The current head of European Command, Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, co-wrote a paper calling it a “watershed” development.

In some cases the staff acted as a “red team” pushing back on strikes and the possible collateral damage. The center of excellence focused on institutionalizing best practices, training service members and collecting data on civilian harm.

Those efforts and “operational effectiveness are the same thing,” one retired general told ProPublica. “They’re two sides of the same coin.”

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As US preps for more space launches, WH orders integration with air-traffic control

Edward Graham — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:37:00 -0400

A new space-transportation policy released by the Trump administration Thursday aims to build the infrastructure needed to rapidly increase U.S.-led rocket launches in coming years, including links to the nation's modernizing air traffic control systems.

President Donald Trump’s strategy sets a goal of supporting “more than 1,000 launches and reentries” by 2030, largely through working with commercial companies to build sites across the country.

This will require the Pentagon and NASA to work together to “operate Federal launch and reentry ranges and facilities in a transparent manner that accommodates government and non government users,” Trump's memo said.

Other relevant agencies will also need to be involved in these discussions, the strategy adds, to develop and publish range schedules that can “maximize efficient use of range resources for commercial users” and “optimize launch capacity.”

To facilitate more space launches in U.S. airspace, the memo directs the Transportation Department—with the Pentagon and NASA—to “implement a plan to integrate space launch and reentry management into airspace and traffic control modernization efforts” and “designate priority airspace for critical space launch corridors” within 180 days of the policy’s release.

Under Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration has been driving the administration’s effort to overhaul the nation’s outdated air traffic control systems.

The modernization initiative was announced by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in May 2025 after several high-profile airspace incidents, including the deadly collision of an Army Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial airliner near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport that January.

While the project includes some brick-and-mortar upgrades at U.S. airports and related facilities, most of the effort is focused on updating outdated air traffic monitoring and communications systems.

The One Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law in July 2025, allocated $12.5 billion for the modernization effort. Five months later, Transportation officials said they would need an additional $20 billion.

It remains to be seen what steps will be needed to integrate the administration’s strategy with the air traffic control modernization effort, and whether or not this will have any impact on the project’s timeline.

The FAA announced in December that it awarded Peraton a $1.5-billion contract to serve as the project’s prime integrator, although Politico reported on Thursday that officials within the agency were growing frustrated by the company’s management of the massive systems overhaul.

In April, Duffy said, “We’re on track to have this project completed before President Trump leaves office.”

Asked for comment, Transportation directed Nextgov/FCW to a Friday press release that announced the agency’s request for public comment on where new space launch facilities should be built, as well as how it should go about setting aside “priority airspace” for future launches.

Neither Transportation’s request for information nor its press release includes details about how the space transportation policy would be integrated with the agency’s air traffic control modernization project.

An FAA spokesperson similarly pointed to Transportation's release and said the agency is "seeking input on how increased launch cadence can be integrated into the U.S. airspace system."

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Lawmaker pushes for AI containment language in FRONTIER Act

Alexandra Kelley — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:29:00 -0400

A Democratic lawmaker hopes to include language prescribing large language model containment practices in pending House legislation on artificial intelligence in the wake of the OpenAI models' attack on Hugging Face networks.

Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., gave updates on the House’s AI-related legislative plans during a Center for Strategic and International Studies event Monday. He said the OpenAI models’ breach from containment environments during routine testing has prompted potential updates to the pending FRONTIER Act, which was introduced in July by Reps. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Lori Trahan, D-Mass.

“There's a lot of things that we're trying to fine-tune in the bill, and we're going to be working on that in September,” Subramanyam said. “A lot of what we're doing in the bill is encouraging third parties to be involved with the companies along the way, to make sure there's containment in place. It's assumed in the bill that we're going to be doing a lot on containment, but one of the things I'm going to be working on is trying to see if we can get explicit containment prescription guidelines in the bill to do that.”

Currently, the bill’s language features risk mitigation efforts that hinge on independent safety evaluations and assessments of the lifecycle of a given model, including training and deployment, along with auditing ongoing compliance efforts. It also explicitly mandates the creation of a vehicle to report critical safety incidents related to AI models.

Subramanyam, who on Aug. 10 joined fellow lawmakers in signing a letter asking for OpenAI to disclose more information about the containment breach, said the window for Congress to act is closing.

“I'm hoping that by the end of the year … we, as a Congress and as a federal government, have at least worked towards solving the big concern about an AI model getting out and going a little crazy and doing a lot of harm to a lot of people,” he said.

Subramanyam added that he is actively looking for feedback on the best ways to codify containment strategies outside of voluntary participation from large AI developers.

Leadership at Hugging Face voiced support for a standardized incident reporting method as well. Ian Reynolds, the AI public policy manager at Hugging Face, also said at Thursday's CSIS event that it would be helpful for lawmakers and policy officials to improve the path to incident reporting on future agentic misalignment.

“We need better standardized disclosure and transparency requirements in this space to help build broader ecosystem resilience,” Reynolds said.

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NSA's non-disclosure agreements lack whistleblower-rights provisions: watchdog

Erich Wagner — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:00:00 -0400

The National Security Agency routinely fails to inform employees of their rights under whistleblower protection laws when they sign non-disclosure agreements, the intelligence agency’s inspector general concluded this week.

Although the NSA is not subject to the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, Congress has since 1988 used annual appropriations laws to compel the agency to follow most of its rules. The exceptions are those enforced by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which lacks jurisdiction to review matters involving counterintelligence and foreign intelligence.

But according to a report from the NSA inspector general, most of the agency’s non-disclosure agreements lack the required reference to federal whistleblower protections, meaning that its employees “may not be aware” of their rights to disclose violations of law or instances of waste, fraud and abuse.

“We identified five unique NSA-developed NDAs. One of the five NDAs, NSA’s Security Agreement, did not include the current required whistleblower provisions but did include language related to whistleblower protections and had some statutory references,” the inspector general wrote. “The remaining four NDAs made no mention of whistleblower protections . . . Additionally, the OIG identified another five agreements that were not titled or identified as nondisclosure agreements but implied nondisclosure obligations and did not include the required whistleblower protection provisions.”

The report comes as the Trump administration considers promulgating a standardized NDA for use across government. The proposal has drawn bipartisan criticism for the chilling effect it could have on employees who witness misconduct while on the job. The critics include Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who requested the inspector general’s review.

The watchdog also found that the process by which NSA employees obtain access “compartmented information” include more nondisclosure provisions that similarly lack the needed whistleblower protection language.

“The subject matter experts we spoke with explained that individual offices develop their own access agreement brief sheets using a template, and an affiliate’s acknowledgement of one of these electronic brief sheets serves as the nondisclosure agreement,” the report states. “In interviews with SMEs, two opened brief sheets of their own and noted that the required provisions were not present. We reviewed the template and noted that it lacked inclusion of the required whistleblower protection provisions.”

The inspector general recommended creating a process to ensure all nondisclosure policies, forms and agreements include the statutorily mandated whistleblower protection language, as well as assigning the task to an official within the agency.

NSA concurred with the IG’s recommendations and said it planned to assign compliance to the agency’s chief of staff.

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The Russian hurdle in Trump’s new offensive cyber program

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:26:00 -0400

President Donald Trump’s new plan to enlist private companies to help disrupt cybercriminals abroad may face a fundamental problem when it comes to Russia: distinguishing criminal hackers and state-backed operatives.

Russian intelligence services have long tolerated, protected or intermittently recruited financially-motivated hackers without exercising full control over them. That dynamic gives Moscow easier access to hacking talent, and it complicates a major carveout in Trump’s new directive that excludes groups part of or directed by a foreign government, experts and former U.S. officials say.

“The line between government control, government-affiliated and government-acknowledged is certainly blurry in Russia,” said Michael Daniel, president and CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance and a former White House cybersecurity coordinator under President Barack Obama. “Determining the exact relationship between malicious actors and the Russian government has long been a challenge and is often impossible.”

A White House memorandum signed last week paves the way for vetted U.S. companies to conduct cyber surveillance and operations that manipulate, disrupt and destroy systems used by foreign criminal groups. Companies would work under contracts with the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, and every operation would require written approval.

The memo says eligible targets cannot be “an institutional part of a foreign government” or “wholly operated under a foreign government’s direction.” It then instructs officials to assume a group is not part of, or wholly controlled by, a foreign government unless “clear intelligence” establishes that connection.

Such intelligence collection from spy agencies like the National Security Agency and CIA can help firms determine targeting criteria, though it may not be enough for Russia’s ever-evolving cyber landscape.

“Russia’s cyber web is opaque and always shifting, blurring lines between government and cybercriminal, with no single rule for understanding each and every relationship,” said Justin Sherman, CEO of Global Cyber Strategies, a Washington, D.C.-based research and advisory firm.

Some of that ambiguity is intentional and allows the Kremlin to expand the pool of hackers it can covertly draw upon, Sherman said. It also reflects broader and pervasive corruption conditions inside Russia.

U.S. companies may have insights about those groups but lack the broader intelligence available to the government. Federal agencies, meanwhile, can only share or declassify so much, he said. “Private companies have critical insights in some ways and limited in others,” Sherman said. With an incomplete picture, “you’re bound to get it wrong some of the time.”

Simple indicators don’t necessarily settle attribution questions, he added. Ties with the FSB — Russia’s Federal Security Service that succeeded the Soviet Union’s KGB — do not by themselves prove that a criminal group is state-directed, nor does a Russian intelligence service’s use of tools developed by criminals establish continuous government control.

“Simple, bumper sticker ideas for deciding if a Russian cybercriminal is a state actor or not will often collapse in practice,” said Sherman.

Past cases illustrate how those relationships can work. In 2017, the DOJ charged two FSB officers with directing and protecting criminal hackers involved in the breach of Yahoo. Prosecutors said one of the hackers also conducted separate intrusions for personal profit. The Treasury Department has similarly said Maksim Yakubets, the alleged leader of the Evil Corp cybercrime organization, worked for the FSB and was tasked with projects on behalf of the Russian state while his organization carried out financially motivated attacks.

“The Russians haven’t been strangers to using private sector proxies to get what they want, as long as they’re not attacking them,” said Chris Painter, a former State Department cyber coordinator and White House cyber official. He questioned how a company could determine where a particular group falls along that continuum when the answer is often not immediately apparent, even for well-resourced governments.

The new policy is the latest step in an offensive cyber posture the administration has been building for the last year. Trump’s national cybersecurity strategy, released in March, called for “unprecedented coordination” between government and industry on offensive and defensive missions. It pledged to “unleash the private sector” by creating incentives for companies to identify and disrupt adversary networks.

But that set-up remained unclear for months. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said shortly after the strategy’s release that he was “not talking about private sector, industry or companies engaged in a cyber offensive campaign.” Instead, he described companies sharing information and capabilities that would enable the government to respond.

Some industry executives interviewed by Nextgov/FCW in April nevertheless predicted that the government would eventually contract with companies to support cyber operations. They also raised unresolved questions about legal authorities and how experts would define the fine line between creating obstacles for adversaries and hacking them offensively.

The administration moved further in May when its counterterrorism strategy explicitly identified offensive cyber operations as one of the tools Washington could use against threatening groups and the states that support them. That document offered scant details about how such operations would work.

Sherman argued that the U.S. shouldn’t let uncertainty about Russia’s cyber links stop it from taking action. The United States is overdue to reconsider assumptions about restraint and do more to counter Russia’s offensive cyber activity, he said, but a more aggressive posture does not make the underlying attribution decisions any easier.

Daniel said that ambiguity could give Washington leverage. Moscow could either let an operation against known criminals go unanswered or object and risk exposing its ties to them.

“The U.S. could use this formulation to call the Russians’ bluff — either acknowledge a relationship or let the group take the damage,” he said. But maintaining that bind would require the United States to choose its targets carefully. If a company inadvertently struck clandestine personnel from Moscow’s intelligence and security agencies, he added, the operation could create substantially greater consequences.

Cybercriminals routinely operate through hijacked servers and systems belonging to unwitting third parties, meaning companies carrying out hacks may have to distinguish targeted criminals from the infrastructure they have compromised.

“A lot is left to be determined on how the oversight is going to work, how the targeting is going to work,” Painter said. “That’s all supposed to be decided in 60 days,” he said, referring to the timeline the new policy must be developed by.

Painter said the best version of the program would be a tightly controlled process in which the government uses intelligence provided by companies and its own agencies to select legitimate targets. Companies would likely want written assurances that the government had approved a target and that their actions were covered by the program, he said.

The public directive does not explain how responsibility would be divided if a contractor followed an approved plan and the underlying intelligence proved wrong. Much of the operational process will also be governed by a classified annex.

Coordinating government decisions and private-sector activity in something approaching real time will itself be difficult, Daniel said.

“I don’t know of any analogous precedent,” he added.

A DHS spokesperson did not respond to questions about how the administration would distinguish Russian cybercrime groups from state-linked actors or who would bear responsibility if a target were misidentified.

The department “looks forward to implementing President Trump’s directive to combat cyber-enabled transnational crime threatening Americans and our businesses,” the spokesperson said.

“Last year alone, cyber-enabled Transnational Criminal Organizations stole more than $20 billion directly from Americans through rampant fraud, ransomware, and extortion schemes,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said when asked the same line of questions. “The Trump administration is mounting an aggressive campaign to disrupt these illicit syndicates and dismantle them at the source.”

The Justice and State departments did not provide comments. Russia’s embassy in Washington was also contacted.

The prospect of operations against pro-Russia cybercriminals carries a possible diplomatic dimension. Trump has continued direct engagement with Russian President Vladimir Putin and has sought to broker an end to the war in Ukraine. The two leaders agreed in July to maintain contact and speak again.

The administration has previously adjusted its cyber posture during negotiations with Moscow. Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., who chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s cyber panel, confirmed last year that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a brief pause in U.S. Cyber Command operations against Russia as the administration pursued Ukraine talks.

The memorandum requires coordination with the State Department, suggesting diplomatic consequences will be considered before an operation is approved. It does not say publicly how officials would weigh disrupting a Russian cybercrime group against other negotiations with the Kremlin.

“If there’s a decision made that says we’re being careful with Russia now because we’re in some sensitive talks, that will play into it,” Painter said. Companies could also “paint the target on themselves” and face Russian retaliation if their involvement became public, he added. Even if a company is required to keep its role secret, it wouldn’t prevent an adversary or another party from exposing it.

“I understand what they’re trying to do, and if it has really robust oversight, and including targeting and review and oversight of what they’re doing, it might work fine,” Painter said. “But there’s so much of a chance of that going wrong.”

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