Defense One - Policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump floats ‘AI Force’ to boost industry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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US absent as western powers meet on wartime protections for civilians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact Dave DiMolfetta on Signal: did.99

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Stopgap funding bill temporarily extends key cyber info-sharing law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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House defers potential shutdown with a stopgap spending bill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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‘Change agent’ Army secretary resigns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We cannot fucking wait.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, every commander rebuffed the idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Casualties, Outrage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lawmaker pushes for AI containment language in FRONTIER Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Russian hurdle in Trump’s new offensive cyber program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bill expanding paid leave for feds pared back in Senate

Erich Wagner — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 17:54:59 -0400

Legislation aimed at improving the amount of paid leave federal employees are eligible each year took another step forward as Democratic senators introduced companion legislation shortly before Congress left for its August recess.

In June, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers introduced the Comprehensive Paid Leave for Federal Employees Act (H.R. 9261), a measure that would provide feds with up to 12 weeks each year of paid family leave, to be used to attend to a serious health condition or care for a spouse, child or parent. It also would cover absences needed in connection with a family member’s deployment into active-duty military service, or to help a family member who has been the survivor of domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking.

And last month, Sens. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and seven other Democrats introduced their own version of the bill (S. 5168). That measure also extends 12 weeks per year of paid family leave to federal workers to deal with a health condition or a family member’s health condition and to attend to a family member’s military deployment, but it excises the provision relating to victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking.

“Right now, our laws are forcing federal workers to make the impossible choice between caring for their families and keeping their jobs,” Schatz said in a statement. “Our bill will provide federal workers with 12 weeks of paid leave, giving them the time they need to take care of their own health and their loved ones.”

Paid family leave and other provisions relating to federal workers has recently been a tougher sell for the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol. In 2019, as lawmakers considered providing 12 weeks of paid parental leave to federal workers each year via the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, the House’s version of the legislation also included family leave, only for the Senate to balk during negotiations between the chambers.

Likewise, the House has included a provision blocking President Trump’s anti-union executive orders’ implementation at the Pentagon in both last year’s NDAA and the one currently under consideration. The Senate stripped the provision from their version of the bill last year.

Despite the more pared-back approach, the Senate’s family leave bill has still attracted the support of several unions and other federal employee associations.

“Expanding paid family and medical leave ensures federal employees never have to choose between caring for themselves or a loved one and serving the American people,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “This legislation will strengthen the federal workforce, improve employee retention, and help the government remain a competitive employer for the dedicated public servants our nation depends on.”

“Federal employees should never have to choose between caring for their loved ones and paying their bills on time,” said National Treasury Employees Union National President Doreen Greenwald. “The Comprehensive Paid Family Leave Act would provide federal workers with the flexibility and support they need during some of life’s most significant moments. As the federal government works to attract and retain talented public servants, providing comprehensive paid family leave is both the right thing to do and a smart investment in the workforce.”

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As warfare becomes engineering, the era of the digital mercenary dawns

Patrick Tucker — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:28:52 -0400

Private cyber firms will be allowed to take action against foreign threats under a new White House policy, another step into a future where tech developers are ever more closely entwined with military operations, which now evolve faster than governments can keep up.

Under the policy, announced Wednesday, the U.S. government will pay private cybersecurity companies to “manipulate,” “degrade,” “disrupt,” and “destroy” foreign adversary computer networks. The U.S. government historically reserves the right to take those sorts of actions, although they increasingly do so with help from front-line private workers.

The companies will undergo vetting, be supervised by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and be forbidden to take actions that could “result in the loss of life or serious injury,” according to the presidential memo.

“The United States just revived privateering for the digital age,” wrote Jeff Gray, who led training for DHS’s emergency response team and currently leads incident response training with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The phrase recalls the 17th and 18th centuries, when governments issued letters of marque that allowed swashbuckling sea captains to attack foreign merchant ships. That official authorization is what distinguished men like Captain Kidd and Henry Morgan as “privateers,” not pirates. But when they lost that marque, many, like Kidd, went on to be pirates anyway.

Gray acknowledges that the term isn’t a perfect fit; for one thing, letters of marque are granted by Congress, not the president. Nevertheless, he says, “The government is authorizing private actors to conduct offensive cyber operations on its behalf, under its control. That's privateering.”

The memo says hiring private hackers is only logical: “American businesses’ innovative capabilities have historically been underutilized” to “secure a critical offensive cyber advantage for the United States.”

Russia has been doing this sort of thing for years: enlisting, or coercing, private companies and groups to carry out cyberattacks against Western targets.

One cybersecurity exec said the policy makes sense, especially as AI gives adversaries more tools.

“There will be more cyberattacks for sure, so I do think you want to expand the takedown activity as well,” said the executive, a founder of a prominent U.S. cybersecurity firm that works with the U.S. government.

AI-assisted cyberattacks rose 89 percent in 2025, according to a February report from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.

Gray also described the strategy as “strategically sound.” But he expects it to provoke a short-term increase in attacks, and over a longer timeframe, to cause adversaries to shift tactics, accelerate operations, and gain additional “cover” to hide their operations.

Finally, Gray noted that law-enforcement agencies have long hired private firms for this sort of work, particularly taking down botnets. “The work is still the same. But the environment just got more complicated,” he said.

The cyber exec agreed. “Instead of a law-enforcement person pushing the button, it will be a private-sector person,” said the company founder. “I expect every Israeli cyber startup to jump at the chance.”

Cyberops and physical war

The policy is the latest indication that software weapons are evolving to be as crucial as hardware on the modern battlefield—and that is putting private coders and weapon designers closer to real-world operations. In Ukraine, for example, engineers with drone maker Shield AI and other contractors work closely with soldiers, sometimes under fire, to modify weapons based on digital attacks.

The job of fighting is, more and more, becoming a job of engineering, said one former senior defense official we spoke to in 2025, just after Donald Trump returned to office. The official said that the Pentagon’s new leaders were considering a plan to let drone makers and other tech companies conduct operations under company-owned, company-operated agreements.

The idea was not without precedent. SpaceX operates the Starlink satellites that connect U.S. troops, rather than allowing U.S. personnel to do so. And under the first Trump administration, the Pentagon paid Anduril to maintain and update drones in the field, deploying along with special operations forces.

The official said putting engineers in the field is essential to getting new capabilities to the front lines faster.

“A lot of these technologies,” they said, are “super exquisite, they're fragile, they're very technical. The people that built them are the ones that know how they work.”

Having the weapons’ makers observe and even operate their products in the field reduced red tape in getting new designs approved, changed, or deployed.

The official last year acknowledged that most defense firms don’t operate that way, and federal law outlines boundaries on what defense contractors can and can’t do (engaging in combat is in the "can’t do" column). But ultimately, they said, “If you want capability in 2027 the only way you're going to get is if this happens.”

In April, CENTCOM hired Shield AI to provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance to U.S. forces with its V-BAT drone, under a contractor-owned, contractor-operated arrangement.

Brandon Tseng, Shield AI’s co-founder, said of the agreement: “We aren’t just bringing the V-BAT product and service to the Navy; we’re bringing a world-class team with a wealth of operational experience and the ability to produce undeniable outcomes for our warfighters.”

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Intel ops are underway at Space Command’s nascent Alabama HQ

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:24:35 -0400

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Less than a year after President Trump reversed a Biden-era decision to keep U.S. Space Command in Colorado, space intelligence operations are being conducted in existing offices at Redstone Arsenal while a permanent headquarters is built on base.

By year’s end, SPACECOM plans to have roughly 200 of the 1,800 Colorado-based positions at the Army base. Roughly 50 of those employees are already conducting missions with the command’s Joint Intelligence Support element, or JISE, which is already doing analysis for space operations and coordinating with allies. Those analysts are also coordinating with colleagues working, at least for the next few years, at Space Command’s existing headquarters in Colorado.

“We've designed our facilities with collaboration spaces and with the collaboration tools that allow our personnel here in Huntsville—of course, those numbers are growing—to work back with our people in Colorado Springs to execute our missions,” Whiting told reporters on Wednesday. “So far, our folks are crushing that, and I'm very proud of how they're performing.”

Reporters toured the up-and-coming facilities and saw the progress of the new headquarters on Wednesday during the Space and Missile Defense Symposium here. While the personnel moves and construction projects will not be complete until 2032, military officials said that the combatant command remains focused on its mission.

In April, Gen. Stephen Whiting, Space Command’s leader, hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Joint Intelligence Support element on base. Wednesday’s tour was among the first access allowed to media outlets.

“Make no mistake, the JISE leading this charge serves as a symbol of our commitment to ensuring mission needs are executed flawlessly throughout this move,” Brig. Gen. Nathan Rusin, who leads the USSPACECOM Intelligence Directorate, said in an April press release.

In 2021, in the last weeks of his first term, Trump announced that Space Command would move its headquarters from Petersen Space Force Base in Colorado to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. Several congressional probes followed. In July 2023, President Biden reversed the decision and said it would stay in Colorado.

An April 2025 Defense Department Inspector General’s probe wondered why the 2023 basing decision was made by the White House instead of Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. The service secretary told lawmakers in 2023 he thought “the projected cost savings, together with the availability of potential mitigation measures, outweighed the operational risks that had been identified” for moving the command to Alabama.

But a May 2025 Government Accountability Office probe showed that if SPACECOM headquarters were to remain in Colorado that “new military construction would be needed to support the headquarters’ operations” and that officials “faced ongoing personnel, facilities, and communications challenges” in setting up a permanent facility out West.

Whiting told reporters that the goal is to have half of SPACECOM at Redstone Arsenal by 2028 with a full move-in completed by 2032. The command’s joint operations center, the main command-and-control hub for space warfare missions, will remain in Colorado until the completion of the new headquarters.

“The opportunity for U.S. Space Command is that we get a purpose-built command and control headquarters out of this, we did not have that in Colorado,” Whiting said. “So to get this facility is going to be an incredible accelerant to our mission.”

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New Marine commander takes the helm in the Pacific

Jennifer Hlad — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:39:12 -0400

MARINE CORPS BASE HAWAII—The Marine Corps’ “future lies in the Pacific,” Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said Tuesday as Lt. Gen. James Glynn transferred command of roughly two-thirds of the service to Lt. Gen. Roger Turner.

Glynn is a “once-in-a-generation” talent whose “efforts under a constrained budget, doing things across the expanse of the Indo-Pacific” have been “truly Herculean,” Smith said at the U.S. Marine Corps Forces Pacific change of command ceremony here. But Turner, who comes to the command from the Okinawa-based III Marine Expeditionary Force, also has “spectacular” leadership skills, technical ability, and interpersonal skills, Smith said.

“We’re a Pacific-facing nation, and we put our best and brightest out here,” he said.

Adm. Samuel Paparo, who leads U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, echoed that sentiment minutes later.

“We live in incredibly dangerous times, and we live in incredibly dynamic and exciting technological times. Our nation is under threat like it hasn’t been in generations, and it requires hard, innovative, smart, determined people in order to meet the challenges of the time,” he said.

Glynn has been “so key in transforming the Marine Corps,” and “meeting the challenge of the times,” going from “leading a formation of 40 in Desert Storm in 1991 to leading a formation of 84,000 in 2026,” Paparo said.

As commander of III MEF, Paparo said, Turner has already “changed the face of the United States Pacific Command,” “enhanced deterrence,” and “never given up an inch, and gained ground. It is the most Marine thing that you can do.”

Glynn and Turner graduated from The Basic School together, but “absolutely no one” 37 years ago was saying “there goes the next two commanders of Fleet Marine Forces Pacific,” Glynn said.

Now, as Glynn steps into retirement, he said he stayed in the Marine Corps as long as he did “because I like to fight. I like to fight in this outfit, because we win. And who doesn’t like to fight for a winner?”

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‘There is no Golden Dome’ unless Congress prioritizes funding, general warns

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:25:54 -0400

HUNTSVILLE, Ala.—The sprawling Golden Dome missile-defense program is in peril because the White House decided to seek the vast majority of its 2027 funding via a controversial budget maneuver, the program’s leader said Tuesday.

Gen. Michael Guetlein didn’t explicitly call out the administration’s decision to propose using reconciliation to fund about 97 percent of the program’s $17.5 billion request. But the Space Force four-star did say it creates a “tough budget environment" as lawmakers remain cool to the administration’s request for a third partisan-led defense-funding measure.

“If they don’t figure it out, there is no Golden Dome,” Guetlein told attendees at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium, “because there is no funding.”

His public cry for help contrasts sharply with the mysterious gag order imposed by Pentagon leaders at last year’s symposium.

And it comes, Guetlein said, as the program makes good progress. He said that 90 percent of the roughly $24 billion allocated for the missile defense program through last year’s reconciliation effort has been obligated. He also said there’s been two “phenomenally successful” tests tied to the effort, and that contracts have been awarded for many of the key parts, such as space-based interceptors, radars, and data networks.

The general also warned that progress could stall without consistent funding.

“So if there's no additional funds, we have to continue to leverage the enormous amount of investment that [Congress] already gave me in reconciliation in FY 25-26, and then leverage that going forward,” Guetlein said.

One of Golden Dome’s cornerstone capabilities—space-based boost-phase interceptors— could be too costly for the final architecture. Physicists have said such a scheme would require thousands or even tens of thousands of armed satellites to provide 24/7 defense against even a handful of incoming missiles.

In April, Guetlein told the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee that if building and deploying satellites armed to down enemy missiles early in flight can’t be done affordably or at scale then “we will not go into production.”

On the sidelines of the symposium, Guetlein told reporters that he hadn’t seen anything from the defense industry to change his mind on the affordability of space-based interceptors, but added he was impressed with what he’s seen.

“All of the providers that are part of the competition are progressing exceptionally well,” the general said, adding that he expects those companies developing the technology to progress to the next stage, which involves building the on-orbit capability. He declined to say how Space Systems Command plans to test those interceptors.

Guetlein told reporters that the Defense Department is already planning for contingencies if they don’t secure the requested funding in the 2027 budget, but said no final maneuvers have been settled on.

“There are discussions within the department about how to go forward because we have diversified execution of a lot of these capabilities, and a lot of these capabilities are already requested by combatant commands,” Guetlein said. “There are some alternatives that we can pursue. We have not made any decisions on any pathway.”

He said, as an example, that some of the capabilities in the Golden Dome program are also being funded by the Space Force, and added that the service could continue to work on those systems.

Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said it isn’t likely that Golden Dome would have to raid various service budgets to continue its progress.

“I think that Congress would prioritize Golden Dome funding and find it another home, either through a supplemental bill, a smaller reconciliation package, or tuck it into a higher base budget,” Harrison said.

Earlier this year, Golden Dome’s price tag had already swelled $10 billion over the original $175 billion goal, and the potential long-term costs have already been the focal point of criticisms.

In the absence of a publicly released architecture, Congressional Budget Office analysts crafted an estimate for a national missile defense system based on Trump’s “Iron Dome for America” executive order. The watchdogs calculated it would cost $1.2 trillion to “develop, deploy, and operate” for 20 years.

Guetlein has since gone on defense, publicly pushing back on that trillion-dollar figure and saying that the analysts “did not estimate the architecture that we're building.”

During his panel at the symposium, Guetlein acknowledged Golden Dome’s steep price tag, but averred its necessity.

“That’s a lot of money. That’s one of the biggest systems that we’ve ever put together as a nation,” he said. “We got to keep it affordable.”

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How Congress is reshaping the administration's FY27 budget

Shaun McDougall, Forecast International — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:21:24 -0400

The start of the 2027 fiscal year is less than two months away, and in typical fashion, the annual defense budget is in limbo. Three out of Congress' four defense committees have released markups that adhere to the Trump administration’s $1.1 trillion topline request. None has addressed the White House's proposal to spend another $350 billion through the unusual use of reconciliation funding, though discussions are underway for a smaller reconciliation package that could include money sought in a supplemental request for operations in Iran and other priorities.

The administration's decision to seek funding for many of its top priorities through the reconciliation process—until last year, it had never been used for defense appropriations—creates a "terrible risk," as Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, put it earlier this year. Congressional resistance to the idea of using novel funding mechanisms could mean that various programs get far less money than the adminstration wants.

Per Forecast International's U.S. Defense Budget Spotlight dashboard, the biggest drops would be seen in defense industrial base and equipment investments contained in the Defense-Wide accounts, such as:

$54.6 billion for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group
$40.6 billion for Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment
$30.5 billion for equipment funded through the Office of the Secretary of Defense
$30 billion for Defense Production Act purchases
$20 billion for the Office of Strategic Capital Loan Program
$17.1 billion for the Golden Dome missile defense initiative

Infographic by Jorge Morejon

The White House also sought to buy many munitions through reconciliation, a choice rendered fraught by the subsequent decision to launch the war on Iran and expend much of the Pentagon's stockpile. For example, the reconciliation portion of the request contained $10.9 billion for Patriot interceptors and $10.5 billion for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors. The administration also aims to use reconciliation to backfill other programs, such as the F-35, KC-130J, and several shipbuilding programs.

Acquisition adjustments

Dozens of programs across the services would see their funding adjusted under the legislation released by the House and Senate armed services committee and the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) legislation. The Senate Appropriations Committee has not released its markup. House appropriators recommended the biggest variance from the administration request: a $10 billion cut for procurement programs and a $2.2 billion plus-up for research, development, test and evaluation.

Discretionary research budgets came out ahead in all the defense bills so far: proposed increases of $2.2 billion by the HAC, $1.1 billion by the SASC, and $687.2 million by the HASC. All three committees recommended additional funding for Army and Navy research, to varying degrees, while the adjustments for the Air Force’s account were mixed. The HAC and SASC proposed to add $1.7 billion and $1.6 billion, respectively, while the HASC recommended a net reduction of $480.9 million. Meanwhile, every committee cut the Space Force’s research budget, from as little as $201.4 million by the HASC to as much as $3.1 billion by the HAC. Defense-Wide research was also cut by nearly $1 billion by the HAC and SASC, while the HASC proposed to add $558.1 million. The Air Force’s E-7, the Navy’s F/A-XX fighter, and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) are poised to benefit from congressional adjustments, while efforts like the hypersonic Conventional Prompt Strike and the Space Force’s Automate Sat C2 effort may lose funds.

The graphic below shows total procurement and RDT&E funding adjustments by branch across the three defense bills that have been released so far.

Infographic by Jorge Morejon

On the procurement side, one of the standout performers is Army aviation, which did not benefit from the overall influx of money in the FY27 request. Despite the record size of the request, Army aviation funding declined in FY27 compared to FY26 levels and was $1 billion less than originally planned by the previous administration. Driven by ongoing transformation efforts, the request reduced funding for key programs, including the UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47 Chinook. The HASC and HAC aimed to reverse some of those cuts, recommending increases of 27 percent and 47 percent, respectively, for Army aircraft procurement. However, the SASC recommended further reductions, trimming the service’s aircraft account by 7 percent. Following the initial release of the FY27 request, the Pentagon said it was open to revisiting its proposed aircraft reductions for the Army, and additional funding is expected to appear in the final version of the defense spending bill. Outyear spending plans may also be more favorable to Army aircraft.

The SASC pushed for a 12 percent increase in Air Force missile spending, a move the other committees did not match. That adjustment stems from an additional $845 million for the service’s Family of Affordable Mass Missiles (FAMM) program, which aims to field a range of new low-cost cruise missiles. House appropriators did recommend an extra $300 million for FAMM, which would offset a lack of reconciliation funding for the program. However, the committees reduced discretionary Army and Navy missile funding across the board.

The White House asked for a boost for Navy shipbuilding this year, but lawmakers demurred. The SASC and HAC proposed reducing the shipbuilding account by 5.1 percent and 5.8 percent, respectively. The SASC removed $1 billion requested for the BBG(X) battleship, as well as $2.4 billion for CVN refueling overhauls. The submarine tender program was also cut by up to half. House appropriators recommended stripping approximately $2.2 billion for the service’s P-8A maritime patrol aircraft.

Topline with caveats

Even without reconciliation, all the budget proposals released by congressional defense committees so far sign off on a $1.1 trillion discretionary budget request, which is around $242 billion more than the FY26 base budget and $91 billion more than the total FY26 enacted level. The latter included around $152 billion from the initial reconciliation bill signed in July 2025. The result is that many of the appropriation accounts that faced discretionary cuts in the congressional markups are still funded at higher levels than in previous years, and the administration expects future base budgets to to exceed $1 trillion.

At the same time, the administration’s efforts to quickly increase production of munitions, drones, and missile defenses, among other priorities, may have to be tempered. Reconciliation requires only a simple majority in both chambers, several Republican lawmakers said they do not see enough support to pass a $350 billion reconciliation bill. Meanwhile, the defense industry is already struggling to keep up with growing demand.

The GOP has been working on a smaller reconciliation bill that includes $60 billion for the Pentagon. If adopted, that funding would primarily support initiatives contained in the Iran war supplemental request, particularly munitions replenishment. At the same time, the House and Senate have drafted continuing resolution proposals with the understanding that a final discretionary defense budget will not be passed until after the mid-term elections, meaning the FY27 budget process is far from over.

Editor's note: This post has been updated to correct a data discrepancy in the underlying legislative text. The HAC's topline procurement cut is $10 billion, with a P-8A reduction of approximately $2.2 billion.

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The government was ready to expand its voting-security work. Then it pulled the plug

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:00:00 -0400

LAS VEGAS — After spending roughly six weeks analyzing Dominion voting systems used in Puerto Rico’s 2024 elections, Mojave Research came back to the Trump administration with findings that startled its researchers.

The systems contained at least a dozen high- or critical-severity software vulnerabilities. Passwords were reused, firewalls were disabled and basic cryptographic protections were poorly implemented. And in Puerto Rico, active cellular hardware modems opened additional pathways into underlying software that was thought to be isolated.

But the small cybersecurity firm found no evidence that any of those weaknesses had actually been exploited, or that votes had been changed. The company still wanted more time to be certain.

Federal officials initially seemed willing to give them considerably more of it. The company was asked to grow the team working on the effort from roughly 10 people to about 60, according to CEO Jason Wareham.

Chief Technology Officer Manbir Gulati also said Mojave received an authorization to proceed with a follow-on effort, hired personnel, and was given funding to acquire equipment for examining more voting systems ahead of the November midterms. A contracting officer had even been brought in to finalize the new agreement, Gulati said.

Then, as Mojave prepared to move ahead, the work was abruptly shut down.

Wareham and Gulati recounted the episode on Friday at DEF CON hacker convention’s Voting Village, where they publicly unpacked their technical findings before sitting down with a small group of reporters and onlookers.

Their account fills in new details about a federal effort that grew out of the Trump administration’s broader focus on voting machines and election interference, and the political pressures that emerged when Mojave’s findings did not support claims of election manipulation.

The ODNI request

Mojave never set out to become an election security provider. Its involvement began last year through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under then-director Tulsi Gabbard, where it was already performing unrelated technical work for the agency when officials approached the company about examining voting machines and data obtained from Puerto Rico.

Reuters reported in February that the May 2025 operation was tied to an effort involving ODNI and the FBI to investigate allegations that Venezuela had hacked Puerto Rico’s voting systems, though Gabbard’s office denied that Venezuela drove its work and said the examination was focused on technical vulnerabilities. The probe produced no clear evidence of Venezuelan interference.

Wareham said at DEF CON that ODNI asked whether his team of reverse engineers and forensic specialists could travel to Puerto Rico and capture an image of a voting system that had actually been used in an election, without the vendor overseeing the process. He agreed, thinking it would be a relatively small addition to Mojave’s existing contract.

The assignment instead dropped Mojave into a much larger skirmish over American elections. “Ultimately, I made the worst decision of my life in a business context,” Wareham said.

President Donald Trump has spent years falsely maintaining that his 2020 loss was stolen and the product of widespread fraud and foreign interference, claims that have been rejected by courts and officials in his own administration. A 2021 intelligence community assessment found no indication that a foreign actor attempted to alter ballots, vote tabulations or any other technical aspect of the election.

Since returning to office, Trump and allies have revived investigations into the 2020 contest and pushed election security back to the center of his administration’s agenda. Gabbard’s ODNI was one part of that effort, hauling off and analyzing voting systems from Puerto Rico and later becoming involved in a federal investigation of 2020 election records in Georgia.

Wareham said the ODNI officials directly overseeing the company’s technical work wanted the research to continue. Both he and Gulati described the ODNI staff they worked with as professionals who wanted to protect the security of election systems.

The resistance, Wareham said, came from a separate White House collective that was repeatedly dissatisfied Mojave had not produced evidence supporting claims that the 2020 election had been manipulated.

“There was a separate group — let’s call them White House-adjacent — who was dissatisfied,” he said. “They were dissatisfied overall that I was not willing to name and shame at that moment” and declare that Trump had actually won the 2020 election.

Asked whether he believed Mojave’s government work was axed because it failed to find the “smoking gun” some officials wanted, Wareham said: “I believe that was part of the termination, yes.”

Reuters reported in April that Kurt Olsen, a prominent 2020 election-denier and Trump adviser involved in efforts to investigate the election, pressed Mojave to broaden its work in search of evidence that could support those claims.

Olsen, who now works at the Justice Department, turned against the company when its research failed to uncover evidence that the Puerto Rico machines had been hacked. He advocated terminating its work and accused Mojave of secretly receiving money from billionaire George Soros, a frequent target of right-wing conspiracy theories, the news agency reported. ODNI has said Mojave’s contract ended because the company completed its voting-machine analysis.

Wareham said an ODNI official informed him while Mojave was preparing to expand its work that the company had been accused of receiving Soros funding. The allegation prompted him to compile a detailed accounting of the young company’s funding sources within three days and send it up the government chain. Asked who he was told had made the accusation, he said an ODNI official reported to him that it was Olsen.

“One, I’m not funded by George Soros,” Wareham said. “Two, it would be great to be funded by George Soros because I would probably not be here, I’d be on a yacht.”

The company kept moving forward. Wareham said Mojave briefed the White House on some of its findings around September. The firm believed it was heading toward a broader effort to remediate vulnerabilities before the midterms and conduct a deeper analysis for signs that the weaknesses it discovered had ever been actually abused.

Then came the record-long government shutdown. Wareham said that on the day he expected an expanded contract to move ahead, Mojave instead received a stop-work order and no additional funding.

“I think the government shutdown was all that was required, really, to have some folks that I didn’t know were still in the game, again, White-House adjacent, to take their shot,” he said. Wareham stopped short of saying he had direct proof that White House officials ordered Mojave removed because of its findings, but said “it was reported to me it was Kurt Olsen” who led the efforts.

The White House, ODNI and Olsen did not return requests for comment.

Identified vulnerabilities

Mojave had found many issues with the machines it examined. Gulati described the Puerto Rico system during the Voting Village presentation as “deeply insecure,” saying it did not meet the security bar he would expect from “an average low-risk application, let alone critical infrastructure.”

Researchers identified at least 12 major vulnerabilities in commercial software installed on the system, Gulati said. Mojave successfully executed five of them. None were newly discovered flaws, and fixes were already available — in some cases well before the system was used in the election.

Other weaknesses were rooted more deeply in how the system was built and deployed. Some passwords could be easily cracked and others were embedded directly into software. Firewalls were turned off on critical systems and ports were left open. Gulati was particularly critical of the system’s cryptography, which he described as being “in shambles.”

The company does not believe every problem it found necessarily stopped at Puerto Rico, as its formal review covered only one system from one manufacturer in one jurisdiction. Gulati suspects the issues could extend beyond a single voting machine company, though Mojave has not examined enough systems from other manufacturers to establish that.

“I don’t expect that the problems are unique to them,” he said. “I think many manufacturers probably exhibit the same problems.”

Mojave produced an approximately 100-page document of the Puerto Rico findings. Gulati said Mojave has been in discussions with Liberty Vote — which acquired Dominion’s election business last year — and that Liberty told the researchers it does not plan to make changes before November.

Liberty said it has not received Mojave’s report.

“Liberty Vote is not in receipt of any such report so, therefore, we cannot provide any comment,” a spokesperson said. “As always, Liberty Vote is committed to advancing the future of secure American elections.”

No evidence of vote tampering

Looking at the systems headed into the midterms, Gulati said, “I do know that as of now, the state that we have described is going to be pretty similar to what will be deployed in November.”

Despite the extensive findings, Gulati repeatedly returned to what the researchers did not establish: “We found extensive and largely unacceptable weaknesses,” he said in the presentation. “But we did not find evidence that those weaknesses were actively exploited or that votes were altered.”

That distinction has drawn renewed attention as Trump and his allies again focus on election matters.

Last month, the president used a prime-time White House address to release newly declassified intelligence he said showed China interfered in the 2020 election. Among several disclosures, Trump pointed to intelligence showing Beijing had acquired personal information on roughly 220 million American voters. But the documents did not show China altered votes or gained the ability to manipulate voting systems.

Gulati echoed those conclusions Friday when asked about the declassification.

“The China thing isn’t really much of anything,” he said, arguing that a large amount of the voter information at issue could be obtained commercially and should not be confused with access to election systems in ways that can manipulate votes.

“There is no evidence that I know of that says China successfully or any other country has successfully infiltrated our systems and manipulated votes in any way,” he added.

Wareham called the 100-page document a preliminary report and said the firm had wanted another six months to a year to dig deeper into the underlying data.

Gulati said the company’s interactions with the ODNI employees overseeing that work were markedly different from the political pressure the researchers later encountered. “We were never pressured to put anything in our reports that was untrue or politically leaning in a certain way,” he said of those officials.

Wareham said Friday that Mojave itself has pushed for its report to be made public for roughly a year and has recently been told it could soon emerge through a Freedom of Information Act request. Nextgov/FCW could not immediately determine the origin of the FOIA requester. As of publishing time, ODNI’s FOIA logs are available up until January 2025.

“I’m a little annoyed that we are very close to midterms and we had a whole year to freaking figure this out,” Wareham said.

With their government work scrapped, he announced at the Voting Village that he had filed paperwork to create the Machine Assurance Institute, seeking to bring together cybersecurity researchers and election technology companies to examine and independently verify voting infrastructure.

“We wanted to be the national security answer, and put to bed, finally, discussions about prior elections and/or accusations of voter fraud,” said Wareham. “Because, believe it or not, I find it fairly national security-destabilizing to constantly accuse each other of cheating.”

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Did AI blow a $450M Army contract decision? Company lawsuit says yes

Christian Robles — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 11:34:00 -0400

Trax International Corporation is asking the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to direct the Army to reevaluate bids for mission support services at White Sands Missile Range — in part because the department allegedly misused AI to determine the contract award.

Trax's complaint, filed in late July, alleges that the Army used AI that hallucinated multiple times, creating the false impression that the company's bid was weaker than rival Southwest Range Services’ successful bid of roughly $450 million. The Government Accountability Office denied Trax’s bid protest in May.

The lawsuit claims that records the Army provided to GAO did not explain whether assigned strengths for the Southwest Range Services bid came from a human at the Source Selection Evaluation Board or an AI tool.

The suit also claims that the Army conceded that one of the weaknesses it identified with Trax’s bid is unsupported by documentation. In fact, the suit said, the purported weakness is a “classic AI hallucination, with made-up references to TRAX’s proposal, that no one on the [Source Selection Evaluation Board] checked.”

“Given the $29.4 million price premium associated with [Southwest Range Services’] proposal, there is a reasonable possibility that the removal of this Weakness could have changed the award decision,” the lawsuit states.

The Army declined to comment on the ongoing litigation.

Trax is not the first contractor to publicly allege that an agency has wrongfully used AI to evaluate contract bids.

Salient CRGT alleged that a Defense Department subagency improperly used AI, rather than human employees, to evaluate bids. The Government Accountability Office dismissed the allegation in a decision dated Jan. 5, 2026.

Contractors will likely continue to scrutinize federal agencies’ use of AI in evaluating bids, according to David Timm, a partner at Burr & Forman.

In a recent Washington Technology op-ed, Timm raised concerns that few civilian agencies are reporting the use of AI in bid evaluations as “high-impact.” That means agencies have either not implemented minimum risk practices or have not publicly disclosed them if they have, he told Nextgov/FCW in an email.

The Defense Department has said that it used AI to help evaluate bids in several recent solicitations. But if agencies don’t widely disclose this, it could become harder for contractors such as Salient CRGT and Trax to successfully argue the government misused AI.

“More bid protests are likely to come as the ungoverned and undisclosed use of GenAI tools results in errors throughout the procurement, but if agencies do not comply with the [Office of Management and Budget] rules it will complicate how contractors prove their allegations,” Timm wrote in the op-ed.

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