Defense One - Policy

Blue wave presages a defense-spending showdown

Shaun McDougall, Forecast International — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 16:24:24 -0500

The Democrats' impending takeover of the House and the Senate will have sweeping effects on the Pentagon, from budgets to leadership to defense policy. The biggest near-term issue is the fate of the proposed reconciliation bill, which the Trump administration is counting on for $350 billion of its plans to spend $1.5 trillion on defense spending in fiscal 2027.

Even before the election, some Republican lawmakers doubted their ability to pass a bill through the reconciliation process, which is rarely used for defense funding. A lame-duck effort is unlikely to succeed, and January's seating of the new Democrat-controlled Congress is expected to kill the bill for good.

Defense spending

The administration pushed many top priorities into the unusual reconciliation bill, including:

• Munitions funding. The bill is a major conduit for money that would nearly double munitions spending to $76.3 billion to help rebuild stockpiles following several years of equipment transfers to Ukraine and a depletion of inventories during the war with Iran. It was meant to underwrite a production surge for air and missile defense munitions such as Patriot, THAAD, SM-3, and SM-6; plus strike weapons such as hypersonic missiles. Munitions funding is also included in a proposed Iran supplemental that faces resistance from Democrats who oppose the war.

• Golden Dome homeland missile defense system. The proposal includes $17 billion for a new Golden Dome for America Fund plus investment for related programs such as a Space-Based Air Moving Target Indicator capability and a revamped Space Data Network that would serve as the communications layer of the defense system.

• Unmanned systems. The bill includes nearly $54 billion for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.

• Aircraft: several F-35s and KC-130Js for the Air Force.

• Warships: The Medium Landing Ship and some investment in the Virginia-class submarine.

If the reconciliation bill is dead, lawmakers will have to decide whether to move any of those items into the defense appropriations bill.

The Pentagon’s $1.1 trillion base budget request—that's $242.4 billion, or 28 percent, over the FY26 defense appropriations bill enacted by Congress—will face more resistance. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., who is expected to once again lead the House Armed Services Committee after two years as its ranking member, said this week that he wants to keep total defense spending to $1 trillion in fiscal 2027.

The administration proposed to offset the Pentagon increase with reductions in domestic non-defense discretionary spending. The guns-versus-butter debate will be reignited, and it is unclear whether base budgets will stay above $1 trillion.

Political headwinds

Several programs are likely to face increased scrutiny in the new Congress.

Golden Dome’s space-based interceptors are a likely target for Democratic opposition. The Pentagon initially selected a dozen companies to work on SBIs, including Anduril, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and SpaceX. SpaceX, which has received $6.5 billion for the Space-Based Air Moving Target Indicator and Space Data Network programs, could face new roadblocks.

Also at risk: the Navy’s Trump-class battleship, the signature component of the proposed Golden Fleet. This author has already raised concerns about the practicality and affordability of the battleship, and Democrats are likely to push back on the program’s rapid development and construction plans. The Navy has chose General Dynamics Bath Iron Works and Huntington Ingalls Industries to build the ships, which would use a distributed construction approach. Leidos’ Gibbs & Cox was tasked with supporting ship design and engineering. If this program falls through, the Navy may revisit plans for the DDG(X) destroyer, which had been shelved in favor of the battleship.

The next Congress will also push the administration to end the war with Iran, which continues to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Democrats have been unwilling to act on the Iran-war supplemental request without establishing guardrails or an exit strategy. At the same time, Democratic majorities in the House and Senate are more likely to push for greater support for Ukraine, which could include more money, faster arms transfers, and pressure on the White House to avoid actions that could harm Kyiv.

Areas of alignment

The new Democratic minority is expected to continue to fund replenishing munitions stockpiles depleted during operations against Iran, despite Democratic opposition to the war itself. Counter-unmanned aircraft systems investment will remain a priority, from low-cost munitions to directed energy. Congress, which has long supported Navy shipbuilding, can be expected to add money for it, even if lawmakers disagree about specific platforms. There will also be continued support for developing autonomous gear and the networks that support them.

More budget delays expected

Congress failed to pass most budget legislation before the 2027 fiscal year began on Oct. 1, and the government is currently operating under a continuing resolution through December 11. That's not enough time to finalize a full spending plan, so the lame-duck Congress will likely pass another CR that extends into the next calendar year. Under the new Congress, passage of a final spending bill could be hindered by negotiations over the status of the Iran war, topline spending levels, the debt ceiling, or other policy issues.

Lawmakers might also pass a long-term CR, covering several months or even the rest of fiscal year. These stopgap spending bills typically restrict new start programs and production rate increases. Although lawmakers can provide workarounds for these limitations, as they did in fiscal 2025, a long-term CR could put a hold on dozens of new programs. The Army could see delays in starting procurement of the MV-75 tiltrotor aircraft and the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle. Funding would also be limited for its new High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System surveillance platform, Next-Generation Command and Control, and procurement of new Common Tactical Trucks.

The Navy would face funding gaps for its new FF(X) frigate program and procurement of new submarine tenders. Production of hypersonic Conventional Prompt Strike missiles and planned funding increases for MQ-25 development would also be blocked.

A long-term CR would affect several Air Force missile programs, including procurement of hypersonic AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapons (ARRW), Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missiles (HACM), and the Family of Affordable Mass Missiles (FAMM). The Air Force’s plan to start procurement of new Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) would be delayed without an FY27 spending bill, as would investment in new technologies to defend aerial tankers and a new aircraft to conduct the Looking Glass mission currently performed by the Navy’s E-6B Mercury.

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State Department's push to cancel hundreds of contracts left behind a trail of mistakes, watchdog finds

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 16:00:00 -0500

Widespread errors in State Department efforts to terminate contracts may have wasted money and exposed the agency to lawsuits, its inspector general said in a report published on Monday.

Within a month of Donald Trump taking office for the second time, the department began reviewing some contracts for termination, particularly ones regarding foreign aid and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Then Trump issued an executive order directing agencies to review their contracts and grants for cancellation or modification “to reduce overall federal spending or reallocate spending to promote efficiency and advance the policies of my administration.”

This led State workers to review nearly 5,600 contracts worth a total of about $65 billion. From Jan. 20 to June 15, 2025, the department terminated almost 400 contracts, totaling roughly $360 million. But auditors found several instances where employees didn’t rescind obligated funds.

Across at least six terminated contracts, there was about $8.1 million that still had not been deobligated as of August 2026, the IG reported.

“Because [contracting officers] did not take timely action to deobligate excess funds, the department’s ability to redirect those resources to other mission priorities was limited and the risk that the funds would expire before they could be used increased,” auditors wrote.

The watchdog recommended that officials repurpose the $8.1 million, which the department agreed to do, except for nearly $50,000 that it determined was owed to the contractor as part of the termination settlement.

Auditors also found that, out of a sample of 30 terminated contracts, 25 lacked adequate written termination notices. For example, the paperwork for 10 of the cancellations listed two different termination dates, which increases “the risk of disputed costs, administrative delays or contractor claims.”

The IG also highlighted four terminated contracts in which State employees didn’t ensure that contractors returned their government-issued laptops and phones. Similarly, the IG for the IRS reported in August that the agency could not account for nearly 600 agency electronic devices valued at more than $270,000 from employees who separated in spring 2025.

Auditors acknowledged that State, while undergoing the contract review, also was dealing with the Trump administration’s reductions to the civil service, a department reorganization and taking over the U.S. Agency for International Development’s operations. But they also emphasized that the agency did not standardize contract cancelation procedures and that some contracting officers had never terminated a contract before.

The IG recommended that State specify steps for returning government-issued property due to a contract termination, set procedures for reviewing unused funds from a canceled contract and establish a process for tracking deobligation actions. Officials concurred with all three.

The Government Accountability Office recently criticized State for entering inaccurate information into its grant management system following significant cuts to foreign assistance grants, contracts and cooperative agreements. For example, more than 4,000 awards (out of around 10,000) were categorized as both active and terminated.

The IG for the Veterans Affairs Department in September similarly reported on the VA’s contract cancellations, finding that employees generally complied with termination requirements but that, in some cases, they had “only a few hours” to complete reviews.

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'Permanent, serious' dialogue needed with China on AI: tech-focused lawmaker

David DiMolfetta and Christian Robles — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 13:00:00 -0500

Rep. James Walkinshaw’s vision for artificial intelligence regulation includes maintaining “permanent, serious” dialogue with China to mitigate the risk that powerful AI models pose.

That won’t be easy, but if the U.S. was able to maintain nuclear-disarmament dialogue with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, then the same can be said for communications with its top technology and economic competitor today, the Virginia Democrat argued Thursday at a GovExec event.

Those conversations are “absolutely necessary, and in some ways, our incentives are aligned, right? The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want rogue AI agents hacking their systems and their water authorities any more than we do, so we have to have that permanent dialogue and reach some agreements,” he said.

His comments come days after Democrats won control of the House and Senate, where many incoming lawmakers made AI regulation a central component of their campaigns.

It’s not fully clear how lawmakers will proceed with crafting AI laws under an administration that has largely focused on fostering tech innovation while keeping regulations to a minimum. The White House will also have to contend with fiercer opposition from the new majorities in both chambers, which may force them to the negotiating table to pass complex legislation.

Walkinshaw is hardly the first member of Congress to advocate for U.S.-China AI dialogue, though his position gives the comments added weight. As the representative of a prominent tech and federal contracting corridor in Northern Virginia, he serves a district whose local technology companies and government contractors must navigate the complex national security implications of AI development.

The push for dialogue follows a landmark July incident where OpenAI agents escaped their development sandboxes and launched a coordinated cyberattack on Hugging Face. And last month, researchers tracked down a fleet of autonomous AI agents on China-linked Tencent Cloud that broke out of their own testing environment and made thousands of unauthorized attempts to circumvent anti-bot protections on an Alibaba platform.

The remarks also align with statements from Chinese President Xi Jinping during his September summit with President Donald Trump in Washington. Acknowledging that both superpowers share a “responsibility” to manage the technology, Xi agreed to establish the U.S.-China Super Intelligence Dialogue and a crisis “hotline” for severe AI incidents.

Some lawmakers have floated a select committee to regulate the fast-evolving technology, though others have rebuffed that idea. Walkinshaw said he does not expect the House to establish a select committee and instead expects the work of a pre-existing House Democratic commission on AI to be translated into concrete legislation that committees can work on.

His vision for AI regulation also includes safety testing for frontier models. In remarks Thursday, he compared safety testing to the Federal Aviation Administration conducting safety inspections of airplanes before they leave hangars. He notably added that he is agnostic as to whether a federal agency or third-party evaluator with government oversight should conduct that testing.

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It’s easier to buy new amphibious ships than fix old ones faster, say Navy, Marines

Meghann Myers — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 13:35:58 -0500

The Marine Corps thinks it will need 40 amphibious ships—up from the Navy’s current 31—to achieve its long-sought goal of keeping three Amphibious Ready Groups with embarked Marine Expeditionary Units deployed at all times.

It's a shift in strategy that reflects the Navy’s struggle to reduce the amount of time its ships and submarines spend under repair. Few U.S. warships meet the service’s goal of being ready to go 80 percent of the time, and, on average, amphibious ships are out of service more often than not.

“If I'm sitting at 31 today, the only way for me to realistically increase that inventory is for me to build new ships and do a service-life extension on some of the ships that I currently have in the inventory, so that I am able to keep to maintain an inventory while I'm building new ships,” Shon Brodie, the Marine Corps’s deputy director of Maritime Expeditionary Warfare, told reporters Wednesday.

Brodie said the vice chief of naval operations and the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps have drawn up a plan that would increase the number of amphibious ships by about 25 percent, which would theoretically fill the gap while readiness levels are below 80 percent.

This larger amphib fleet would include 13 big-deck amphibious assault ships and 27 smaller dock ships, up from today’s nine and 22, he said.

The Navy and Marine Corps are to sit down with lawmakers this month to discuss how to fund the project, Brodie said.

That may not be realistic, said Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, just because of the massive expense it would require to operate and maintain 40 amphibs.

“And because maintenance costs grow, the Navy can't do all the work it needs to do on a ship, some of which is also deferred to a future availability,” Clark said. “The result is a readiness spiral where ships decline in material condition.”

A new Hudson Institute fleet design study suggests 35 amphibs, taking into consideration that those ships are vulnerable to a near-peer adversary and probably not a self-contained solution once the shooting starts.

“Larger surface combatants need to devote nearly all their weapons capacity to defense once the shooting starts, which necessitates them defending carriers that can conduct offensive operations at range and scale,” he said.

At the same time, the Navy isn’t giving up on doing a better job maintaining the ships it has.

“We're marginally better than we were before, and the expectation is that we can increase beyond marginally better here over the next couple of maintenance cycles,” Brodie said.

But the kicker is that not everything is within their control. If ARG deployments get extended, as they have been quite frequently recently, that increases wear-and-tear on the ships and loads down already delayed maintenance periods.

“So you've got to bring the ship back on time, get it in maintenance on time,” to make the plan work, Brodie said.

The aim is to enable the services to keep deployed three Amphibious Ready Groups-Marine Expeditionary Units, the three-ship formations that carry more than 2,000 Marines and their aircraft and weapons.

Commandant Gen. Eric Smith laid out his case for a 3.0 MEU-ARG presence in a 2025 oped in Defense One. Smith argued that national security required “one from the East Coast, one from the West, and one patrolling from Okinawa, Japan. (If you ask our combatant commanders what they need, the answer isn’t a total of three ARG/MEUs; it’s closer to five or six.) 3.0 is the minimum required to provide our nation and the Joint Force with a capability that can serve as both a warfighting formation and a cross-service integrator.

“It’s what keeps pressure on our adversaries, supports the maritime fight, and gives combatant commanders and national decision makers scalable options they can employ without delay to buy time, create decision-space, and if required to do so, be first to fight.“

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Dem lawmakers vow inquest into CISA cuts, intel policy

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 17:00:00 -0500

House Democrats plan to investigate how the Trump administration’s cuts to the nation’s cyberdefense agency affected its ability to protect federal networks and help states secure elections, while their Senate counterparts vow to scrutinize whether intelligence agencies can deliver findings that contradict the president without putting analysts’ jobs at risk.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who is in line to chair the House Homeland Security Committee when Democrats take both houses of Congress in January, said he and his colleagues would examine the department’s use of its powers against Americans, its immigration enforcement practices, and its dealings with contractors.

The party’s wins in both chambers mean Democrats will decide which officials to call before Congress and what records to seek, under subpoena authorities given to whichever party has the majority in a given chamber.

If a permanent director for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is nominated again, Senate Democrats will also have a say in who leads the agency. The same can be said for a nominee to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, whose previous leader resigned earlier this year.

“We will investigate the administration weaponizing DHS against Americans, its out of control immigration policies, and its blatantly corrupt self-dealing,” Thompson told Nextgov/FCW. “The American people expect nothing less, and we will deliver.”

The panel also plans to examine the department’s surveillance of Americans engaged in protected speech, its handling of whistleblowers and whether federal officials steered contracts to political allies. On cybersecurity, they want to know how DHS is preparing for attacks aided by artificial intelligence and what became of services the department scaled back.

What CISA lost in the cuts

Thompson and Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who is positioned to chair the Homeland Security cyber subcommittee, have already asked Congress’ watchdog to assess the impact of staffing cuts at CISA, which helps defend civilian federal networks and other frequent hacker targets like water systems and telecom networks.

CISA lost roughly a third of its workforce after Trump retook office, though the agency has made efforts to refill its roster. By September, about 250 prospective hires had tentative offers and were waiting for clearances, acting Director Nick Andersen said, as part of an effort under DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to recant some of the cuts made to the cyberdefense agency over the last two years.

Ramirez, in a June interview with Nextgov/FCW, said she was planning a significant DHS overhaul bill for next year. She also gave positive feedback on CISA’s rehiring plans, though she added it may not be enough.

In a post on X after the election, she had a message for Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, White House aide Stephen Miller and others involved in immigration enforcement: “Clear your schedule.”

In the Senate, the retirement of Michigan Democrat Gary Peters puts Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., next in seniority among Democrats on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Hassan and Peters have already asked DHS to preserve records belonging to former Secretary Kristi Noem and her adviser Corey Lewandowski.

Hassan has also pressed CISA on its own security practices after reports that a contractor left agency account information and passwords in a public database.

One issue facing both homeland security panels could come due before Democrats take over. A law protecting companies from lawsuits when they share information about cyber threats is operating under a temporary extension through Dec. 11. Without a longer renewal planted this year, the incoming chairs could inherit a fight over the legal protections companies rely on when communicating with the government about cyberattacks.

When intelligence findings conflict with the White House

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., are in line to chair the intelligence committees in their respective chambers after two years of disputes over whether spy agencies can deliver findings that contradict the president without putting analysts’ jobs at risk.

One major dispute centered on Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang Trump said was carrying out an invasion at the direction of Nicolás Maduro’s government.

Most U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that Maduro was not directing the gang’s operations in the United States. Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard subsequently fired the two leaders of the National Intelligence Council, which produced the assessment.

Warner also challenged Gabbard directly over Iran. At a Senate hearing in March, weeks after the U.S. and Israel went to war, he pressed her on a passage in her written testimony that she skipped in her opening remarks. It said Iran had made no effort to rebuild its uranium enrichment capability after U.S. strikes the previous June, a finding that bore on President Donald Trump’s claim that Iran posed an imminent threat.

A day earlier, Joe Kent, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, had resigned over the war, saying he did not believe Iran posed such a threat.

Last June, after Trump said U.S. strikes had “obliterated” three Iranian nuclear sites, a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency assessment suggested the attacks could have set the program back only a few months.

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired DIA Director Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse that August without explanation, Warner pointed to the dispute in accusing the administration of “treating intelligence as a loyalty test.”

Himes has already signaled one investigation he wants to pursue. In September, he alerted an association representing intelligence contractors that lawmakers could seek records and testimony about donations to Trump’s White House ballroom. He wants to know who solicited the contributions and whether companies believed giving money would help them secure government work or access to senior officials.

At least a third of the Republicans on the House intelligence panel won’t return to Congress in January. Missouri Rep. Ann Wagner and Pennsylvania Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick and Scott Perry lost reelection Tuesday. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik didn’t seek another term, and Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw lost his primary.

Himes and Warner also face a decision about the government’s own surveillance powers should lawmakers leave it unresolved this year, namely Section 702 authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Those authorities let spy agencies compel internet and telecom providers for contents of phone calls, emails and text messages of foreigners located abroad without a warrant, but, in doing so, agencies can also collect Americans’ data if they are communicating with a foreign target. The controversial program expired in June, though certain collection procedures can continue through this spring under court approvals issued in March.

Who oversees military cyber operations

Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., are positioned to lead the Armed Services committees, which help write the annual defense policy bill.

Smith told The Washington Post he wants to investigate military operations, politicization of the armed forces and possible corruption in defense contracting. Both lawmakers challenged the administration over the firing of Gen. Timothy Haugh, who led the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command.

Much of the detailed oversight of military hacking and network defense would fall to Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., if they move up from their current posts as ranking members. Khanna is the top Democrat on the House Armed Services cyber subcommittee, which also oversees Pentagon software purchases and AI programs.

Rosen is his counterpart on the Senate Armed Services cybersecurity subcommittee, where lawmakers have examined how the military recruits and trains its cyber forces. A major Defense Department Cyber Strategy was planned for release in September but has been sitting in limbo for sometime.

Khanna could also lead the House select committee on competition with China. That role would give him another avenue to scrutinize AI security. In October, he asked leading U.S. developers what they knew about Chinese efforts to obtain their code or use their models’ answers to train competing systems. He has also called for the U.S. and China to agree on when to shut down AI systems judged too dangerous to operate.

Morgan Adamski, a former executive director of U.S. Cyber Command and now PwC’s Cyber, Data & Tech Risk Platform Leader, said she will be watching how lawmakers approach CISA’s readiness and what federal agencies ask companies to report when they are hacked.

Hearings could give stakeholders a clearer picture of where federal defenses have fallen short, even if the rules they operate under stay the same.

“But greater oversight doesn't necessarily mean immediate legislative or regulatory change,” Adamski added. “The administration will continue to play a significant role in shaping federal priorities, so businesses should be prepared for continued policy uncertainty.”

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Cancellations, investigations, and even impeachment could be ahead under Democratic Congress

Meghann Myers — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 16:30:13 -0500

The Defense Department was already in Congress’s bipartisan bad graces before the midterm elections. In the wake of the Democrats’ overwhelming victory, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Trump administration are likely to face even more pushback for their handling of the Iran war and their plans for pricey initiatives like Golden Dome, Golden Fleet and Autonomous Warfare Command.

And that’s if Hegseth sticks around. Some lawmakers have voiced an intention to impeach him, while rumors swirl that he is angling to be appointed to Tennessee Governor-Elect Marsha Blackburn’s vacated Senate seat.

“My read is that nearly all Democrats and an increasing number of Republicans still want to remove Hegseth,” Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Defense One. “He has done nothing to improve his position with members of Congress since the House adjourned over this issue back in September, and it will be at the top of the docket when they get back next week.”

In the meantime, it doesn’t appear that Donald Trump intends to fire him. On Wednesday, the president told reporters that he thinks Hegseth is “doing a very good job.” Trump said he hadn’t heard that Hegseth was being considered for the Senate job, but said he’d be “very popular” in the office.

If Trump does change his mind, Harrison said, now would be the time to push him out and still have time to get a replacement nominated and confirmed.

Once the new Congress is seated in the new year, he added, “they will have a hard time getting anyone confirmed.”

Lawmakers will likely face pressure to investigate Hegseth and his administration for their handling of the Iran war, Harrison said, as well as “potentially improper access and contract awards for Trump’s political allies” like Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey.

Whether Hegseth stays or goes, much of his work reshaping the Defense Department is unlikely to stick, Harrison said. Anything that requires new funding is likely to hit a brick wall, and even initiatives that don’t cost anything may be undone by law.

“I think AUTOWARCOM is something they can do without Congress, but I would not expect it to receive any significant funding of its own,” he said. “The Golden Fleet definitely requires Congress for funding, so that is a dead idea—the battleship in particular.”

Democrats will also have the chance to roll back Hegseth’s culture-war pet projects, by passing laws allowing transgender troops to serve openly, re-renaming Army bases to follow the determinations of a congressionally mandated commission and perhaps even enshrining women’s right to serve in combat roles.

“In general, if it is a Hegseth initiative that requires congressional authorization or funding, it is likely not going to happen,” Harrison said. “If it is something the administration can do on its own, they will probably still try and then the new Congress may try to pass statutes that undo these changes.”

There may also be roadblocks for anything that the administration aimed to fund via a proposed 2027 reconciliation bill, such as billions for autonomous capabilities and critical munitions procurement.

“Assuming the huge increase in munitions funding requested through reconciliation does not pass in the lame duck, that is something the next Congress will have to deal with,” Harrison said.

The jettisoning of a reconciliation bill would also shrink the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion defense proposal down to a “still substantial” $1.1 trillion, Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Defense One.

“Many of the major defense initiatives have bipartisan support — drones, munitions, shipbuilding, and missile defense,” Cancian said. “There will be some drone organization, though it may not be a combatant command.”

A rebranding of Trump’s Golden Dome and the Boeing F-47, the Air Force’s six-generation fighter named for Trump’s position in the line of U.S. presidents, could also be expected, he said.

The Defense Department could also face pressure from some familiar faces, including Representative-elect Elaine Luria, D-Va., a retired Navy commander who won back her former House of Representatives seat, and who previously held a seat on the House Armed Services Committee.

In South Carolina, Nancy Lacore, a former Navy admiral that Hegseth forced to retire last year, flipped former Rep. Nancy Mace’s House seat, leaving open another HASC position.

“At this point, I don’t think they have the votes for removal in the Senate,” Harrison said of a Hegseth impeachment. “But it could be enough of an embarrassment to the administration if a decent number of Republicans in the House vote to impeach that they push Hegseth out.”

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Industry groups want cyber threat-sharing law renewed through defense authorization bill

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 18:00:00 -0500

A coalition of 35 industry groups is urging Congress to use the annual defense policy bill to renew a law that gives companies legal protections when they share information about cyber threats with the federal government.

In a Nov. 1 letter to the leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, the groups asked negotiators to keep a provision in the House bill that would extend the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 through 2035. The law lapsed during last year’s record government shutdown and has since stayed in place through a series of spending bills. Its current extension expires Dec. 11.

The signers include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Software Alliance, American Bankers Association, Airlines for America, the American Public Power Association and the National Rural Water Association.

“In this environment, the speed and breadth with which defenders share information determines whether they keep pace with adversaries,” the groups wrote. “That speed depends on the legal certainty CISA 2015 provides.”

The key liability protections in the law are designed to shield firms from lawsuits and regulatory penalties when sharing threat information with federal partners like the FBI or National Security Agency. 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 measure to lapse would create legal risks for companies sharing breach data, leading to a drop in private sector threat disclosures.

On the first day of the shutdown last year, cybersecurity attorneys were already fielding calls from clients about whether their existing agreements still protected them.

Congress restored the law through January 2026, when it reopened the government in November 2025. Lawmakers extended it again in February of this year, this time through Sept. 30, then moved the deadline to December in a stopgap funding bill.

A sticking point in the Senate reauthorization process has been what else to put in a longer renewal. Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., pushed for a 10-year extension during last year’s shutdown.

But Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Roll Call last month that he wanted a provision barring federal officials from pressuring social media companies to restrict speech. Paul — who has routinely pushed back on clean extensions of the law — said he and Peters had discussed the amendment several times without reaching an agreement.

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Financial aid for Ukraine is getting harder to find

Derek Bisaccio, Forecast International — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 17:28:11 -0400

European leaders meet next month to discuss ways to help Ukraine fill a projected €70 billion budget deficit. But their capacity for direct aid is constrained by efforts to rearm their own militaries amid a challenging economic environment, while Belgium continues to oppose the conversion of frozen Russian assets into a loan.

Western financial aid—€170 billion ($189.5 billion) since 2022—has been key to helping Kyiv stay financially afloat since Russia's wider invasion, according to the Kiel Institute. But the U.S. has drastically cut aid under the second Trump administration, leaving the European Union, Canada, Japan, Norway, and the United Kingdom to shoulder most of the burden.

Earlier this year, the EU approved a plan to lend Ukraine €90 billion to Ukraine through 2027, two-thirds of which will go to buy weapons and the rest to budgetary support. Around €14 billion has been disbursed to date, and by year's end that figure should grow to €45 billion.

But Russian attacks on critical infrastructure and other stresses mean that Kyiv is still looking at a budget deficit of around €70 billion for 2027.

European governments are spending more on their own defenses. In 2021, the defense budgets of NATO's European members averaged around 1.6 percent of GDP, below NATO’s then-target of 2 percent. The alliance has since boosted its goal to 2.5 percent of GDP, and at last year's summit, committed to raising ‘core’ defense expenditure to 3.5 percent over the next decade.

At the same time, they are facing rising debt and slowing economies. Eurozone countries have an average debt-to-GDP ratio of nearly 89 percent, and nearly 83 percent in EU nations generally. Buffeted by the trade wars and energy shocks of the Trump administration, eurozone economies will grow only 1.1 percent in 2026, according to a recent projection by the International Monetary Fund. Some northern EU members are in much better fiscal shape than their southern and western counterparts.

The budget picture is getting cloudier. Annual inflation in the eurozone rose to 3.8 percent in September, according to Eurostat, well above the European Central Bank (ECB) target of 2 percent. The ECB raised interest rates at its June and September meetings, and is expected to deliver another hike at one of the year's two remaining meetings. Rising prices may force the ECB to continue tightening policy, raising debt-service payments from government budgets.

Supporting Ukraine remains broadly popular in the EU, but the challenging economic environment makes it a tough sell for governments to increase aid to Ukraine along with their own defense spending. European governments are already facing domestic criticism over rearmament. Italy, for example, was approved for an allocation of up to €14.9 billion from the E.U.’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) loan facility, meant to aid rearmament. Yet Rome requested only about €8 billion from SAFE, as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government sparred with critics within her own coalition and in the opposition on financing more defense spending with debt.

Frozen Russian assets

EU countries are thus once again looking at alternative methods of backstopping Ukraine’s budget. One of the most obvious options is the conversion of frozen Russian financial assets into a loan to Kyiv.

After Russia's February 2022 invasion, the G7 froze Russian government securities held abroad. As much as $300 billion was impounded as a result and remains in limbo to this day, including about €210 billion held in the European financial system.

While the principal has remained untouched, the EU has begun to use the interest income on those securities to help Ukraine, on the grounds that Russia, as aggressor, should pay for the damage caused to Ukraine. That has generated about €8 billion, of which €3.8 billion has been delivered to Ukraine, and €4.2 billion has been reserved to repay E.U. or G7 loans to Ukraine.

In September, Germany and other E.U. members revived the topic of converting the Russian assets into a loan for Kyiv, POLITICO reported. Berlin views the step as a ‘win-win’ for the E.U., enabling the bloc to help Kyiv address its financial needs, while replacing some of the funds that would be reserved for Ukraine in the E.U.’s upcoming multi-year budget.

But the politics around seizing the Russian assets have barely budged.

Belgium is the custodian of much of those Russian funds, which are housed in the Brussels-based Euroclear. The Belgian government blocked a 2025 proposal to seize the funds, fearing that it alone would bear the legal and financial risk of seizing the funds. Earlier this year, the Bank of Russia sued Euroclear in a Russian court for the funds, arguing that they were illegally seized. The court backed the Russian central bank’s challenge in a ruling two months later, though it lacks jurisdiction to enforce the judgment.

Concern over the legal risks means Brussels will likely stymie the proposal again.

“I am certain that the European Commission will not make proposals to meet Ukraine’s financing needs through a new operation linked to Russian assets,” Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever told reporters on Oct. 21. “I am certain of that, because that is what was said.”

As European leaders prepare for a November meeting to iron out next year's assistance to Ukraine, the EU is already pushing other partners to increase their contributions to Kyiv.

The situation is becoming more urgent. Ukraine has largely exhausted its stockpile of interceptors, leaving its cities and energy grid vulnerable to Russian attack. The Ukrainian military intelligence agency HUR recently estimated that Russia can produce 10,000 long-range strike drones and decoys each month. Mounting damage increases Ukraine’s financial needs, as the country scrambles to keep the lights on.

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The Army’s only remaining SFAB helped broker a ceasefire in southeast Asia

Meghann Myers — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:35:16 -0400

A year ago, after months of fighting spurred by a century-old border dispute, Thailand and Cambodia struck a peace deal in Malaysia, with help from a small U.S. Army unit that had long been training both Thai and Malaysian troops.

The peace talks were led by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Malaysian Land Forces, which sought the advice of the 5th Security Force Assistance Brigade, the unit’s commander told Defense One.

“They asked our advisors, who were in the space of the land force headquarters, ‘Hey, what should we be thinking about? How can we effectively do this?,” said Col. Daniel Hodermarsky. “And we were reporting back to [U.S. Army Pacific] and leveraging experts from the higher headquarters to provide that advice to more rapidly enable them to to take the lead.”

At the same time, 5th SFAB had a team on the ground in Thailand.

“We didn't have anyone near the front or in the conflict, but we were able to say, "Hey, here's what we're seeing with the country team in Thailand,” Hodermarsky said.

But 5th SFAB—the Army’s only remaining train-advise-assist unit—didn’t just happen to be in the right place at the right time. The specialized unit, made up of experienced conventional troops who have already led a squad or platoon, and so on, has been regularly deploying to INDOPACOM to work with partner militaries since 2020.

“So we're able to give a bit more granular, real-time reporting back to the theater, and we're tied in directly with each country team, security cooperation office and defense attaché wherever we have adviser teams,” Hodermarsky said. “So we can get those liaise cells, those assessment cells, and say, ‘Hey, here's what we're granularly seeing, hearing. Here's what the partner is asking, or here's what they're talking about.”

The Army developed the SFAB concept in 2017, when training and advising the Afghan army had no end in sight and the service was anticipating expanding that mission beyond U.S. Central Command. The idea was that rather than rotating conventional infantry and other units as advisers, the service would cultivate specialized units for the mission. The 1st SFAB deployed in Afghanistan in 2018.

By May 2020, six SFABs had been established, each aligned to a different part of the world. They were staffed by volunteers coming off operational assignments, now experienced and theoretically qualified to train a partner unit.

Last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered most of the SFABs to be dissolved. The units assigned to European and Africa Commands have been shuttered, and their CENTCOM and National Guard counterparts will be gone by year’s end. 1st SFAB was reorganized as Army Security Cooperation Group-South in January.

That leaves only Hodermarsky’s 5th, doing its part to keep the United States in the good graces of INDOPACOM countries that might otherwise align themselves with China’s growing military power.

Some have argued that the moves are shortsighted.

“If the U.S. military continues marginalizing the advising mission or ignoring it altogether, then it means going back to the failed train-and-pray model,” argued a 2025 piece published by West Point’s Modern War Institute. “Fully staffed SFABs are not a luxury; they’re a necessity. Without them, the United States risks being flat-footed in the next war.”

ASCG-S and 5th SFAB’s continued existence are an acknowledgement that the train-advise-assist mission is still important for the DOD’s top two priority regions.

5th’s farflung efforts

In INDOPACOM, 5th SFAB has been shaping militaries from Mongolia to the Philippines, embedding in their professional military academies as well as advising their senior leadership.

“We were in the Philippine Army headquarters and their [Training and Doctrine Command] equivalent for years, as they transitioned from a counterinsurgency focus across the Philippines, to a national-defense focus for their land forces” Hodermarsky said.

His unit’s relationships have also laid the groundwork for major exercises the Army now does in INDOPACOM, including Balikatan and Cobra Gold.

“A persistent advisor team can stay in between the planning conferences and come up with the training plan, if we identify the partner unit that's going to exercise with the 25th Infantry Division or the the 7th Infantry Division,” Hodermarsky said. “And say, what are the training objectives for that Royal Thai Army unit or Philippine Army unit or Malaysian Land Force element? And then help them through that training progression.”

He said some division leaders call the SFAB the WD-40 of U.S. Army Pacific, because their teams ease friction between partner nations and conventional units visiting for exercises.

“We see sort of a reverse slope of advisor presence, as we hopefully work our way out of jobs in certain countries, so that you go from a partner force requesting more hands-on training and capability development through security force assistance, to where they're now really exercising as a flank unit or an integrated part of a U.S. division or brigade that is more capable, more trusted to be on our flank, or integrated into one of our major formations,” Hodermarsky said.

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Policy proposal would require firms to disclose how they use AI to develop new models

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 11:31:00 -0400

Artificial intelligence companies would have to report how they use their own technology to build new AI models under a proposal aimed at helping Washington track AI advances and whether developers are adequately testing their safety.

The plan, developed by Americans for Responsible Innovation and shared first with Nextgov/FCW, would require major developers to submit quarterly reports to a new Commerce Department office and disclose significant research changes within four business days. The group, which advocates for federal AI oversight, wants officials to know how much research AI is performing and how closely people are supervising it.

The proposal arrives as the White House deepens its involvement with AI companies while resisting calls for a broad new regulatory regime. President Donald Trump this month tapped Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton to lead the “Super Intelligence Force,” a task force coordinating government engagement with developers and other groups and assessing the technology’s risks. The executive order creating the group was signed late last month.

Clayton’s group is already working on how companies alert the government when something goes wrong. Following its first formal meeting, it assigned Pentagon technology official Emil Michael to develop protocols for labs to report breaches, hacks and other cyber issues. It also commissioned a study of risks involving cybersecurity, biological threats and control of AI systems.

ARI wants companies to report when AI takes on more of the work of building new models, even if nothing goes wrong. The group argues that automating research could speed up development and leave officials with less time to assess the risks of increasingly powerful systems.

“Washington’s visibility into that shift should not depend on what companies choose to announce,” a blog post for the framework says.

AI system development involves writing code, preparing data to train the models, running tests and deciding which results warrant further work. Automating more of those tasks could help companies produce more capable systems faster, but safety researchers and officials may have less time to assess those systems before they are put to use.

Recent cybersecurity episodes have shown what increasingly capable AI systems can do. This past week, researchers used AI to uncover critical weaknesses in PHP, software that helps run websites worldwide, prompting urgent warnings from U.S. cybersecurity agencies.

ARI’s blog also cites a landmark AI-cyber intrusion earlier this year in which an OpenAI agent escaped its testing environment and breached Hugging Face. The incident was soon followed by disclosures of AI agents that targeted federal systems.

Such hacking capabilities are among the risks ARI wants developers required to assess. Its proposed standards would also cover large-scale influence operations and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive threats.

A major change, such as fully automating a research cycle, could trigger the four-day notification requirement, the proposal says. Commerce could ask follow-up questions, require more frequent reporting and refer knowingly false or incomplete filings to the Justice Department. The framework also calls for a whistleblower program.

Commerce already evaluates advanced models through a NIST center that works with developers under voluntary agreements to assess risks, including hacking capabilities. The blueprint would draw on technical analysis from the existing hub — known as the Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence — to shape safety standards and determine which models fall under federal oversight.

It leaves open whether regulatory responsibilities would sit within Commerce or be shared across agencies.

Nextgov/FCW has asked the Commerce Department for comment on the proposal.

The administration has so far emphasized company-led safeguards, including a September accord signed by major technology executives that calls for internal controls, outside audits and independent oversight committees. Clayton’s task force is working to implement that agreement.

Earlier this month, Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., urged Clayton and White House science adviser Michael Kratsios to expand independent testing and strengthen protections against AI systems acting beyond their permissions.

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Are yearlong deployments the Navy’s new normal?

Jennifer Hlad — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 21:44:00 -0400

When the U.S. Navy destroyer John Finn left home in January, sailors expected to be home in March. Now, after extensions on top of extensions, their families have been told to expect them next March—after a 14-month deployment.

The Mustin, another Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, switched homeports this year, leaving San Diego in February and arriving in Yokosuka, Japan, in March. As the sailors stepped off the ship, they were told they needed to be ready to deploy “tomorrow.”

The Mustin actually left Japan in April for a deployment that was supposed to end in August. Now its crew has been told they will return in April 2027, the spouse of one of the sailors told Defense One.

These marathon deployments—a month or more longer than the carrier Abraham Lincoln’s record-breaking 322 days—may be the new normal for U.S. warships. Last week, a Navy official told families at Yokosuka that all ship deployments and patrols, stateside and overseas, will be 10 to 12 months long for the foreseeable future.

Asked about that statement, a Navy spokesperson told Defense One, “It is U.S. Navy policy not to discuss future operations or movements due to operations security.”

But last month, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle said that sailors and their families should expect “longer deployments” until “I can grow the Navy we need.” The service’s battle force currently consists of about 290 warships, down from 295 two years ago but up from about 275 a decade ago.

In recent decades, the Navy has generally kept deployments to six or seven months, although that is not a set-in-stone policy, said Katherine Kuzminski, vice president of studies at the Center for a New American Security. But, she said, “that commitment is being violated now.”

“Certainly, depending on operational needs and demands, I think service members and their families are fully on board with providing—with the requirements that are put on them in ongoing operations,” Kuzminski said. “A potential way that the Navy can mitigate this is actually to just commit to the longer term upfront and be clear with service members and their families.”

After initial reports of the Lincoln’s woes emerged, some veterans of other services and other conflicts were quick to post online about their own longer deployments. But the issue, Kuzminski said, is not so much the length of the deployment, but the “dissonance between what was said at the beginning and what is happening in actuality.”

That dissonance is particularly pronounced for the John Finn, one of several “forward deployed” guided-missile destroyers based at Yokosuka. While other Navy ships tend to deploy for about six months and then return home for a year, forward-deployed ships typically leave for two or three months at a time, then return to port for two to three months of maintenance before heading back out to sea. Those deployments are designed to keep the ships ready for combat in the region, deter aggression from China, and “maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

Last year, the John Finn left home in June for a “normal” deployment in the region and returned in early November. But much of the following two months were spent in hasty preparations to return to sea.

“We really only saw him a collective 20 days,” the spouse of a sailor on the ship told Defense One.

In early January, the ship left again, for what was expected to be a deployment of perhaps 45 to 60 days. It headed to the Indian Ocean and was involved in the boarding of a Venezuelan oil tanker before being directed to the Arabian Sea, shortly before Operation Epic Fury began.

The ship was part of the initial attack on Iran, the spouse said, and they’re “still there.”

Earlier this month, the sailors were told they would likely not be home until March 2027.

“There’s cars that were left on base that have been stickered to be towed and then to be junked. So there’s sailors that are going to come back and have no cars,” the spouse said. “They left in the winter months, and there’s some sailors that live off base and are single sailors and will have abandoned their entire house, their apartment, for over a year. And when they left in the winter months, when they left everything on heat mode, and then the summer came.” Sailors know “that they’re going to come home and all their stuff will be trashed.”

For families, it’s more than a year without a parent—without any of the planning for a long deployment.

“It’s been absolutely gut-wrenching to my kids,” the spouse said, and there is “next to no mental health support” available on base. The deployment length is “absolutely unheard-of for a destroyer,” she said.

The Finn’s story is extreme—but not unique among Yokosuka-based destroyers.

Photos posted on the Pentagon’s DVIDS media site show the Rafael Peralta in the Philippine Sea in November, in the South China Sea in December, and back in the Philippine Sea on Jan. 8. Then, instead of returning home, it headed for the Middle East in April, where it remains today. Families have been told not to expect the ship home until April 2027.

The Higgins, which lost power and propulsion for a few hours in the Indo-Pacific in April, continued its deployment after repairs and is currently operating in the Indian Ocean. The Milius left Japan in February and has been in the Middle East since March.

The Mustin left its old homeport of San Diego in February and arrived in Japan in March. Sailors are usually given 30 days to help their families move and settle in for a homeport shift, particularly when the move is to a foreign country, and the majority of the families had waited until the ship arrived to make the move. But “the moment they pulled in, my husband stepped off the ship, and he goes, ‘We have to be prepared to leave tomorrow,” a Mustin spouse told Defense One.

The ship did stay in its new port for a few weeks because of a sonar problem that required an expert to fly in to fix it, but sailors did not get time off during that time frame because they needed to be ready at a moment’s notice, the spouse said. They left in April with the expectation that they would return in August and then go out again over the holidays before monthslong scheduled maintenance beginning in February.

But when August came, the ship’s commander told the sailors they would be out for “about another month,” the spouse said. A few weeks ago, they were told they wouldn’t be home until April 2027.

The situation is all the more frustrating for sailors and families because the ship has spent virtually the entire deployment in the Indian Ocean as “backup.”

“They’re not in the blockade, they’re like the next in line, just out there waiting,” she said.

The distinction means that the Mustin sailors don’t get combat pay or benefits.

“I know they feel forgotten about,” she said.

The John Finn spouse said it has been frustrating for families and sailors to read all the media coverage of the Lincoln’s long deployment, while knowing that other ships supporting her were “left behind.”

“I can do a long deployment,” she said. “The problem with this is that there is no answer as to when this will be over. … Why are we not rotating ships? And then why are we there? Why are you sending home stateside ships before your forward deployed ships?”

In response to questions about why the ships have not been replaced, a Navy spokesperson said, “The Department takes a thoughtful and deliberate approach to global force management, continually balancing immediate operational requirements against risks across theaters.”

If longer deployments increasingly become the norm, Kuzminski said, it’s important that the Navy be upfront with sailors and their families about what to expect.

But the situation highlights another problem: The Navy doesn’t have a confirmed civilian secretary, “a person who is fundamentally the accountability to Congress on how things are working,” she said.

Without a Navy secretary, she said, it’s hard to answer the big questions: “Is this the new normal? How are you handling that? How are we preparing sailors for that? How are we preparing their families for that? How are we preparing our ships for that?”

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Qatar looks to bolster its military power with new hub, partnerships

Patrick Tucker — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:30:31 -0400

DOHA, Qatar–Wedged between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Qatar has long used artful diplomacy to keep regional conflicts at arm's length: it provides shelter for Hamas leaders, maintains ties with Israel, and hosts the region's largest U.S. military base. But the Israeli strike on this capital city in September 2025 and subsequent Iranian attacks have Qatari leaders racing to secure allies and boost the peninsular nation’s domestic defense industry.

"It's the first time that a mediator has been attacked. This never happened," Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar's deputy prime minister and minister of state for defense affairs, said Monday at the Global Security Forum in Doha.

Al Thani said Qatar is exploring new defense partnerships with the United Kingdom and other Western and regional partners. The government is also looking to spin up a domestic weapons-production hub. The country's priorities include air defense, counter-drone capabilities, cybersecurity and electronic warfare, areas identified in a defense review conducted in 2025.

A visit to the Milipol Qatar security exhibition, held alongside the Global Security Forum, suggested a banking trade show as much as a military expo, a reminder that Qatar lacks the large defense-manufacturing base of some regional neighbors.

Qatari officials believe the country can participate more directly in weapons design and manufacturing, rather than simply serving as a buyer. Maj. Gen. Mohammed Abdul Latif Al Mannai, a Qatari defense official, said a proposed partnership with Britain could incorporate operational requirements, intelligence and assessments of emerging threats into weapons development. Gen. Sir Roly Walker, chief of the General Staff of the British Army, said the countries were considering a much broader partnership—not just between operators, but their acquisition corps and suppliers.

"We have high-level political ambition for a 50-year strategic partnership to gear ourselves up for the future," Walker said.

"We need to position ourselves almost as a design partner to allow the ingenious engineers and creative entrepreneurs to develop the solutions to our problems."

Qatar is also looking to increase investment in defense companies, rather than simply purchasing their products. Mohammed bin Badr Al Sada, group CEO of Barzan Holdings, said British companies were already involved in discussions about the proposed hub.

"We work very closely with UK industries," Al Sada said. "Actually some of them, they are already in town as we speak. And we hope that we can see this hub active very soon."

Qatar's growing interest in defense production also reflects concerns about the limits of American security guarantees. Iran's June 2025 missile attack on Al Udeid Air Base showed that the presence of U.S. troops on Qatari soil did not, by itself, prevent an attack. And Washington has signaled its intention to play a less interventionist role in regional security.

Tom Barrack, U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special presidential envoy for Syria and Iraq, acknowledged that shift in an onstage interview Tuesday, while emphasizing that Washington was not abandoning its regional partners.

"We're not leaving. But what everybody's doing is saying, 'Okay, I can't rely on America to solve all my problems anymore,”

Defense One is a media partner of the Global Security Forum.

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Pentagon to start expanding Greenland bases next year: official

Meghann Myers — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 14:13:24 -0400

The Pentagon is spending the winter evaluating options for expanding U.S. basing in Greenland, according to a senior defense official, with an eye toward breaking ground on new facilities next year.

The Trump administration announced in September that military outposts at Mestersvig and Narsarsuaq would become U.S. bases, while expanding the existing U.S. footprint at Pituffik Space Base.

“Right now we're in a planning cycle because we're going to run out of execution window, from a weather perspective, to do anything almost immediately,” a senior defense official told reporters at a Tuesday event hosted by the Project on Media and National Security. The official spoke on background because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.

The moves come nearly two years after President Donald Trump, who had sought to purchase the independently-governed Danish territory in his first term, began suggesting that the United States might seize Greenland by force. In January, Trump sought to force a sale with threats to invade the island and impose punitive tariffs on Denmark and other NATO allies. Instead, he settled for expanding a 1951 treaty that allows the U.S. to base forces in Greenland.

Mestersvig, to start, has a 6,000-foot gravel runway, the official said, and has primarily hosted special operations forces.

“And so, as we talk with the teams…what are the options that you need on the northeastern side or on the eastern side of Greenland? What kind of capabilities? What do you want that to do? So we're having that conversation back and forth there,” the official said.

For Narsarsuag in the south, they’re looking at what kinds of upgrades the runway needs to support modern U.S. aircraft.

“So if it's capable of putting in C-130s, great. If I needed to put fighter aircraft in there for some reason…what would that take? How would I expand it?” the official said.

At this point, the official added, the Pentagon is looking less at housing specific capabilities and looking first at what’s even possible, both for equipment and for people.

“If I needed to create a capability and I needed to put people into a location for a period of time, what do I need to think about? I need to think about lodging, I need to think about food. I need to think about energy,” the official said. “So it's all of those types of things, not necessarily a, ‘Hey, I want to station this there right now.’ That's not where we're at in that conversation. We're more in the, ‘that location has this,’ and to the degree that I can do that by making strategic investments, that's smart.”

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State Department orders staff to call AI ‘super intelligence’

David DiMolfetta and Jory Heckman — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:42:00 -0400

The State Department has instructed personnel to replace “artificial intelligence” with “Super Intelligence” in official communications and rename its AI-related programs and systems, bringing President Donald Trump’s terminology change into the daily work of U.S. diplomacy, according to two people familiar with the matter and contents of an unclassified cable obtained by Government Executive and Nextgov/FCW.

The cable — dated Monday and addressed to the entire department — tells staff to use “Super Intelligence,” or “SI,” in new letters, emails, public messages, websites, reports, remarks and policy documents, subject to legal exceptions. Existing material should be updated when staff next revise it.

“All official titles and the names of Department governance bodies, systems, platforms, inventories, and programs must use SI in place of AI,” the cable states.

The instructions implement Trump’s Sept. 29 executive order, which directed executive agencies to adopt the new terminology across official communications. The cable shows how that broad instruction is being translated into specific requirements for diplomats and the department’s internal operations.

The order says the wording should reflect the advancing capabilities and promise of American technology. For now, however, it defines “Super Intelligence” as the same technologies and systems covered by the existing statutory definition of AI. In computing science, super intelligence is defined differently than the generative artificial intelligence technologies used today.

In recent weeks, administration officials had previously discussed the terminology change with certain State bureaus, people familiar with the matter said. But the cable appears to be the first organization-wide directive outlining where the new language must be used. The Associated Press previously reported such communications with State’s international organizations bureau.

The transition, while expected for some time, is significant because it would change how U.S. diplomats describe the fast-evolving technology in policy documents and discussions with overseas counterparts.

Foreign organizations retain their own names in internal writings. The cable specifically tells employees not to change references to China’s World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, even as the department replaces the term in its own materials.

The notice also spells out several exceptions to the replacement rule. Employees must preserve language required by law and existing legal citations, including quotations from statutes, regulations, treaties and other legal instruments. Contracts and grants are also excluded, pending further guidance.

Previously published documents, cables and archived web pages should not be revised or reissued solely to change the terminology, it adds. The instructions also preserve the published titles of existing presidential actions, programs and organizations, such as America’s AI Action Plan, unless the department provides further direction.

One program has already changed names. The cable says the American AI Exports Program is now the American SI Exports Program, citing an earlier State Department cable. The program’s public website already uses that name to describe its work helping American companies sell technology overseas.

For staff handling international agreements or departmental rules, the cable directs questions about terminology to the appropriate policy or legal office.

The vocabulary change is already appearing in senior officials’ public remarks. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross repeatedly referred to AI as “super intelligence” and “SI” during an Oct. 1 discussion on AI safety, following Trump’s order.

Office of Personnel Management CIO Adam Starr also used “SI” in remarks last week, describing efforts to help agencies adopt the technology. Starr said OPM had launched a SuperIntelligence Governance and Adoption Program, or SI GAP, to assist other agencies.

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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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