Defense One - Science & Tech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strike drones FTW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changing fortunes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updated: June 2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Q&A with SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Frank Donovan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What is your biggest concern?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The technology readiness experiment, or T-REX, was one of a series of rapid joint-service prototyping events begun in 2023. It also debuted a number of small startups like SplashOne Robotics, who are looking to partner with Ukraine. SplashOne showed off a quadcopter that shoots at other drones using autonomous targeting software called Gunner. Founder Jeff Wright said they “have game” against a variety of Russian one-way-attackers–the SuperCam 350, Orlan10, Molynia and even hard-to-hit Geran-2 drones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Smaller, easier, smarter: what special operators want from AI

Patrick Tucker — Sun, 24 May 2026 04:37:39 -0400

TAMPA, Florida—U.S. special operators want AI tools that offer the power of giant data centers out on the disconnected front lines.

SOF units already use generative AI “heavily” for things like resource allocation and force deployment, and are “delving” into its use for tactical operations, said Rob McClintock, the program manager for intelligence for the program executive office for digital applications.

But today’s tools typically run in the cloud, connected to massive data centers. Operators need them to work in remote locations beyond reach of networks. Physical proximity to the “tactical edge” enables faster use of mission-critical data and faster decision-making, officials at the Global SOF Foundation’s SOF Week event here said this week.

So Special Operations Command is looking for frameworks that extend the power of cloud computing much closer to where data is collected and used—a concept sometimes called “fog computing.”

They’re also looking for versions of large language models that require less computing power while still understanding human intent with less instruction.

“In that conversation about managing the cognitive load on operators, voice command is a logical step,” said Col. Robert “Ramsey” Oliver, PEO of SOCOM’s SOF Warrior.

Today’s biggest consumer-facing tech and AI companies don’t build products for niche tactical needs. Melissa Johnson, SOCOM’s acquisition executive, said the solution will likely emerge from smaller startups.

“From an acquisition perspective, we're not just limited to the bigger companies with their own mindset, because AI is very dynamic,” Johnson said. “Sometimes the smaller organizations, smaller businesses bring those solution sets.”

The most desirable feature of any AI tool for SOCOM is simply making it easier for operators to do what they already do. For example, getting different types of drones to work together, or planning and carrying out missions with just a few spoken or even gestured commands, said Lt. Col. Aaron Davidson, the program manager for the unmanned systems autonomy and Interoperability portfolio.

McClintock said they’re also looking into AI “agents” that can plan, revise and execute strategies.

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A Ukrainian ground robot defended a position from Russian assault for six weeks

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 19 May 2026 15:42:42 -0400

A single remote-controlled Ukrainian ground combat vehicle defended a “key intersection under constant adversary attack” for 45 days last summer, according to a 3rd Army Corps spokesperson who called it “Ukraine’s first fully robotic defensive operation of a position.” It likely won’t be the last.

The robot—a Droid TW 12.7 armed with a machine gun—and its operator, some 10 kilometers away, “disrupted every attempted breakthrough and prevented enemy infiltration,” with no loss of Ukrainian life, the spokesperson said in a recent interview.

As the United States and other militaries work to catch up, Ukraine is putting remote-controlled air and ground systems to uses the world has never seen.

“Drones in the air provided continuous surveillance” for the operation, the officials said. “They detected enemy movement and transmitted information in real time. Once a threat was confirmed, the operator received the signal and engaged the target with the machine gun.”

Olena Kryzhanivska, a defense analyst who was first to report on the operation, writes that Ukrainian ground robots now perform 80 percent of logistics tasks on the front lines— from carrying explosives into enemy positions to evacuating the wounded. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense hopes to bring that up to 100 percent.

Kryzhanivska writes that unmanned ground vehicles, which can cost $10,000 to $30,000, will soon take a much larger role in combat.

“There is an expectation that we might see the first encounter between Ukrainian ground drones and Russian ground drones.”

But practical challenges stand in the way of the fully roboticized front line, the Ukrainian army spokesperson said.

“Battery charge is a major factor. There is never enough of it. The main solutions are either installing higher-capacity batteries on the systems or equipping each platform with two to four batteries. The same applies to ammunition load. There is never enough,” one said.

Another hurdle is the amount of training it takes to produce a ground-robot operator.

“Planning and executing an operation with an [unmanned ground vehicle or UGV] is significantly more difficult than, for example, operating a UAV, because the number of obstacles is substantially higher,” an official said, adding that it requires a deeper understanding of terrain, navigation, and other nuances that also bedevil self-driving cars. “It is a misconception to think that any UAV pilot can simply sit down and successfully carry out an operation with a UGV.” .

As autonomy improves, a single soldier might be able to control multiple robots on different missions. But Ukraine limits what its lethal robots can do.

“Ukrainian forces are still operating in the territories that are populated by civilians. There are children. They are elderly. So just giving ground robots that ability to make decisions, to engage, to strike and kill, that would be a very dangerous development, and Ukrainians are against that,” Kryzhanivska said.

The Ukrainian officials emphasized that humans will remain part of the decision-making process.

“Everything that happens in war must be controlled and coordinated by a soldier. The missions performed by our systems carry a high level of responsibility,” one said.

Still, new concepts of “predictive intelligence” could enable ground drones to make more decisions as part of a network of sensors and intelligence nodes. They might, for example, predict where or how enemy forces might move in order to get into position.

It’s a concept that Lt. Col. Eric Sturzinger, who leads research and engagements at the Army’s Artificial Intelligence Integration Center, is exploring via the Tactical Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, or JEPA—a framework to enable drones to predict how adversaries might plan an attack, potentially making ground robot operations even more effective.

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Advanced AI models bring government to ‘reflection point,’ CIA official says

Frank Konkel — Mon, 18 May 2026 18:00:00 -0400

Advanced AI models with unique hacking capabilities like Anthropic’s Mythos should bring federal agencies that handle some of the government’s most sensitive information to a “reflection point,” according to one of the CIA’s top tech officials.

“I think it is a reflection point and I think people need to view it in that fashion,” said Dan Richard, Associate Deputy Director of the CIA’s Digital Innovation Directorate. Richard spoke on a panel Friday at the Qualys ROCon Public Sector 2026 conference in Tysons Corner, Virginia.

A previous version of the Mythos software was released to a limited group of tech companies in April with much fanfare, due to its ability to detect countless software bugs and defects.

Security researchers and experts reacted with a mix of excitement and caution, with some warning the software could usher in a new era for hackers and lower the barrier to entry for would-be attackers. Mythos and competing models like OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 have forced executive agencies to grapple with their capabilities and prompted emergency briefings for lawmakers.

Richard said he feels “bullish in terms of the opportunities that are out there,” largely because these AI models can help agencies like the CIA deal with the deluge of data they generate and automate responses to potential threats. He likened the current Mythos-driven moment to Ukraine’s response to Russia’s invasion in 2022.

“[Ukraine] had gone through a decade of the Russians infiltrating their networks and having to deal with that implication, but when the Russians attacked in 2022 the Ukrainians were prepared because they understood they couldn’t do it themselves,” he said. “Shoulder-to-shoulder with them were the private sector vendors to support what they were doing and to help what they’re doing.”

Richard said the U.S. government is in the “same position” now, and public-private partnerships will be key to ensuring the nation gets it right.

“80% of our nation’s critical infrastructure is in private sector hands, so there is no solution that does not include private sector partners,” Richard said. “We talk about partnership all the time, but this is really different. This isn’t transactional. This is us, as a country, figuring out with the academic community, with the private sector community and with our public sector partners working together to be able to defeat and take advantage of what I see as an optimal opportunity for the agency, but for the country.”

Joe Kelly, division director of the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security at the University of Maryland, said advanced AI models are going to lower the barrier to entry for would-be hackers.

“The real danger when we look at something like Mythos — whether you believe the hype or not — is it certainly creates what we already see with Claude Code, the ability for script kiddies to cause real damage even without knowing what they’re doing,” Kelly said. “It’s going to lift all those. I do worry about the complexity that we’re entering in this era.”

‘It’s moving so fast, it’s scary’

IonQ Chief Information Officer Katie Arrington, who spent most of 2025 serving as the Pentagon’s chief information officer, said the influx of advanced AI tools — and the speed at which they’re emerging — will test government to the extreme. Existing governance requires IT security vulnerabilities be patched within 30 days, and 15 days for vulnerabilities designated “critical.”

“You don’t have time like that anymore,” Arrington said during a panel at the Qualys event. “We’re talking about a tool that can find every vulnerability in seconds on a platform.”

Arrington said these kinds of advanced AI models weren’t a discussion item even 12 months ago. At that time, the Pentagon was just trying to improve the speed that it could bring general AI tools into its networks.

“It’s moving so fast, it’s scary,” Arrington said. “It scares me and it excites me how fast Mythos came alive.”

Qualys CEO Sumedh Thakar said federal agencies may need to take a more proactive — rather than reactive — approach to risk management to deal with the growing range of threats from advanced AI tools. His company is using its AI-powered cybersecurity tools, including TotalCloud, which recently received authorization to operate in the government’s FedRAMP High environments, to allow customers to automate vulnerability patching, reducing some of the manual processes and “dashboard tourism” cyber professionals otherwise deal with.

Thakar said autonomous remediation allows savvy customers to “battle AI with the speed of AI.”

“Now with attackers leveraging AI, as soon as a patch comes out, they can reverse engineer the patch and they can start to figure out the exploit. Your 30 days has become 30 hours, or three hours,” Thakar said. “What we really focus on is to get over the fear of autonomous remediation. It’s not an option.”

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Even as drones usher in an era of ‘cheap kill,’ Army leaders look to what’s next

Jennifer Hlad — Sat, 16 May 2026 02:30:57 -0400

WAIKIKI, Hawaii—Drones are everywhere U.S. Army Pacific forces go these days. Last week, the 25th Infantry Division used uncrewed vehicles, vessels, and aircraft to fight a simulated battle on a Philippine beach. This week, two more buzzed about the USARPAC commander’s head as he delivered the keynote speech at AUSA’s Land Forces Pacific symposium.

“For us, innovation is not something we simply talk about, it’s what we put into action every day,” Gen. Ron Clark said.

“This drone, the Kestrel, was produced by our soldiers at The Forge,” he said, indicating a first-person-view quadcopter that can be adapted to drop munitions or for one-way attack. The other was a Skydio X10, which is used for short-range reconnaissance and surveillance.

“In today’s fight, we should never send a soldier when we can send an unmanned system,” Clark said.

Protecting against enemy drones is also a high priority, I Corps commander Lt. Gen. Matthew McFarlane told a small group of reporters here.

“As we’re seeing the absolute proliferation of drones, the importance of passive defense measures can’t be overstated,” McFarlane said.

That includes things like putting command posts underground, or covering them so they are not easily detectable from the air, he said. “We’re very conscious of making sure we’re protecting ourselves from the real air threat that we’re seeing around the world.

Indo-Pacific Command leader Adm. Samuel Paparo highlighted the proliferation of drones in his keynote speech, describing one of three “meta-trends” he believes are reshaping warfare as “the commoditization—and by commoditization, I mean everybody has it—of small, cheap unmanned systems.

“It's expanded access to core capabilities once reserved for great powers,” he said. “Proliferated unmanned systems have made cheap kill, at scale more possible, more probable. Has made a traditional assault—ground assault, air assault, airborne assault, amphibious assault—much more costly than is in our formal doctrine,

In Ukraine, the Russians lose “approximately 100 human beings per square kilometer of ground that they take and that then they subsequently lose,” Paparo said, calling the Ukraine war “a wide laboratory of the commoditization of cheap kill.”

But while the U.S. Army, and the defense industry, have wasted no time applying lessons from Ukraine about unmanned systems, they must not stop there, Gen. Xavier Brunson warned.

“People will tell you that the lesson from the fight in Ukraine is drones, drones, drones, drones. I beg to differ,” said Brunson, the commander of United Nations Command, Combined Forces Command, and United States Forces Korea.

“That's surface, and that's easy. Don't Occam's razor strategic things. Don't just say the simplest solution is going to be the solution. That's not it.”

Brunson urged attendees to think about “the next thing,” which he believes will be commercial space.

“Oftentimes we learn the wrong lessons and we get stuck with them because it’s easy,” he said. “Listen, I am not against…the development of drones. I’m not saying that at all. What I’m saying is we can’t be stuck there. We have to keep going forward. Warfare, if nothing, is about offset, and what I continue to think about when I’m awake at night in the bed is, what is the next offset? Because if we don’t think about that, if we don’t give ourselves to the thought of the next offset, we’ll be doing drones 10 years from now, and thinking that’s still the way.”

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West Pointers can be trained to better evaluate, appreciate AI, study finds

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 13 May 2026 12:47:36 -0400

Although Americans generally trust AI less than, say, Chinese people, they are often willing to accept a chatbot’s wrong answers. As Pentagon leaders push broader use of such tools, a new paper offers some reassuring news: West Point cadets can be trained to be more appropriately skeptical of AI’s output—while remaining broadly optimistic about its potential.

Researchers from Georgetown University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Military Academy published a paper last week comparing 236 West Point cadets to a demographically similar sample of 702 members of the public. The paper explores automation bias—humans’ tendency to over-rely on automation—and algorithm aversion, an inclination to “prematurely distrust automated outputs in ways that increase the risk of accidents or mistakes.”

One hypothesis they sought to test was that the pressures of battle would make military members would be more inclined to trust faulty outputs from a decision-support system, or DSS.

“Major powers such as the United States, China, and Russia are experimenting with integrating AI DSS into their command structures, thereby decreasing their sensor-to-shooter timelines,” they write. This might lead officers “to delegate decision-making authority to AI DSS.”

The military has long grappled with AI-enabled decision assistants. But the recent arrival of large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini led West Point to declare a special academic focus for the 2024-25 school year: “The Human and the Machine: Leadership on the Emerging Battlefield.”

This and other efforts seemed to work. In the study, West Pointers demonstrated “AI knowledge scores” nearly twice as high as the general public, and were less than half as likely to commit an automation bias error—that is, to trust a mistaken chatbot.

Cadets were also more likely to assess AI output by looking at the tool’s own confidence indicators, something few regular users do.

“These findings align with the way the USMA seeks to train cadets so they can achieve justified confidence, that is, to be properly calibrated so their expectations of an AI system’s accuracy match the reality of the accuracy of the system,” the researchers wrote.

In the study, about twice as many cadets expressed worry about the dangerous consequences of AI than did members of the public, but they were much less likely to describe AI as “sinister.”

Cadets were also more enthusiastic about the potential of the technology: 87.7 percent saw strong beneficial applications for AI compared to 72.5 percent of the public, while 79.5 percent described it as “exciting,” versus 61.6 percent of the public.

UPenn’s Michael C. Horowitz, a former deputy assistant defense secretary for force development and emerging capabilities, told Defense One that the study “shows what some of the opportunities might look like for further training within the U.S. military at least. This suggests that training to reduce the risk of automation bias for military personnel using artificial intelligence could be effective.”

Horowitz noted that cadets’ training is “probably not representative of the average military right now, but it shows the path forward, at least for the U.S. military.”

Such training might also benefit the U.S. public, which might soothe the worries of technologists and leaders who say Americans’ declining trust in AI, compared to populations in China, is a national security concern.

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US investors warm to Ukrainian defense startups—but export laws slow cooperation

Patrick Tucker — Mon, 11 May 2026 04:31:38 -0400

Ukrainian companies are attracting American private investment and Pentagon interest with award-winning drones, but U.S. export laws threaten to squelch efforts to develop technology, company execs said Friday.

U.S. investors are pouring money into Ukrainian defense startups. For example, Swarmer, which makes AI software to control multiple drones simultaneously, saw its shares rise 700 percent on its first day of trading.

Meanwhile, a joint effort of Ukraine’s SkyFall and UK’s SkyCutter won the initial competition of a series held by the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance effort, which would grow by several thousand percent to $54 billion under the White House’s 2027 budget plan. Several other Ukrainian drone companies took spots on the leaderboard.

“We're excited about that,” Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael told reporters at the Pentagon last week. “These companies now that have gotten big and had a lot of expertise, if they're willing to do it in America, because we want to control our own supply chains. I think that's excellent.”

But Ukrainian companies say U.S. export-control laws make it all but impossible to build cutting-edge defense products in the United States. Take Airlogix, which has a joint venture with Auterion, a U.S.-German company, to develop and build drones in the United States. The company has found it can take four months to obtain licenses to send its U.S.-developed tech to Ukraine, even if the tech it developed in the United States is based on information from the Ukrainian front line.

“That is not fast, I would say. We iterate with a pace of weeks, not months,” Airlogix CTO Mykola Mazur said Friday at the Special Competitive Studies Project AI+ Expo in Washington D.C.

This should be remedied, perhaps by granting Ukraine a special status, like designating Taiwan a major non-NATO ally, said John Hardie, the deputy director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Russia Program.

Failure to lift the barriers will slow the Pentagon’s efforts to buy the best drone and counter-drone technology, which increasingly comes from Ukraine, said Joseph Gagnard, who runs U.S. field operations for Swarmer.

“There has to be some sort of middle ground where the government says, ‘OK, this technology is born in Ukraine. This technology was shared with the United States for our benefit. There's got to be some sort of expedited ITAR process that is going to encourage countries to do this—Ukraine specifically,’” Gagnard said Friday.

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Pentagon seeks smarter, self-organizing drones as autonomous-warfare budget is poised to skyrocket

Patrick Tucker — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:47:59 -0400

Two requests to industry may help the Pentagon address one of the emerging challenges of warfare: enabling a relatively small number of human operators to direct a far larger number of robots.

The Materials for Physical Compute in Untethered Robotics effort seeks to make autonomous systems more intelligent, while Decentralized Artificial Intelligence through Controlled Emergence aims to help robots form teams and carry out missions. These DARPA projects may feed ideas to the Defense Autonomous Working Group, the lead Pentagon office for drone warfare, whose budget would soar from $226 million this year to $54 billion under the new 2027 spending proposal.

Much of that huge sum will be wasted if the military spends it before establishing a clear understanding of how operators will buy, train on, use, and maintain autonomous weapons, according to a recent commentary piece by David Petraeus, the retired Army general and former CIA director, and scholar Isaac Flanagan. Writing for The Hill, they argue that the lack of such understanding constrained the use of drones during the past decade of U.S. wars in the Middle East.

“Each Predator combat air patrol of continuous surveillance required nearly 150 personnel,” they write. “As demand for drone coverage surged, the limiting factor was not the number of aircraft but of the trained personnel and the organizational structure to enable them.”

Until the military fixes this, they write, any new drone is “not a weapons system at all—it is an asset on a spreadsheet.”

The new DARPA efforts aim to help change that.

Materials for Physical Compute in Untethered Robotics seeks to help robots think and reason without relying on connections to vulnerable data centers and without using valuable battery life to upload video and receive commands. Even the most advanced robotics “still require constant internal data processing, with either the end-users or data centers, creating delayed actions through latency and consuming power for data transmission,” the request for information says.

The RFI also urges industry to move beyond the conception of autonomous systems as assemblages of wire, metal frames, and motors. This mindset has been “yielding a robot with small behavior diversity. Therefore, current robot capabilities are limited in ever-changing and contact-rich environments.” It seeks new concepts at the “material, component, and kernel level”—down to chemistry and physics—that can change the very nature of machine intelligence.

DICE aims to enable machines to talk and collaborate with each other, to “dynamically form teams using peer-to-peer coordination to execute complex missions.”

The two DARPA projects are hardly the Pentagon’s only efforts to answer fundamental questions about robots. A contest run by DIU, the Defense Department’s innovation arm, seeks ways to control drones with plain language commands, as one might direct a soldier or a large-language-model tool.

The problem that Petraeus and Flanagan discuss is not as simple as it seems. Technology is moving faster than doctrine. So should doctrine come first? Or the other way around?

U.S. Southern Command is moving to answer that sort of question. Last week, Gen. Frank Donovan announced the SOUTHCOM Autonomous Warfare Command to “maximize the efficient fielding of autonomous systems.”

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Former head of ‘Pentagon’s think tank’ joins Anthropic

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 01 May 2026 09:24:27 -0400

The United States has “a tight time window to adapt” to the “civilizational" challenge of AI, according to a former senior Pentagon thinker who's joining Anthropic as a “strategist-in-residence.”

James Baker led the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment—often referred to as the “Pentagon’s Think Tank”—from 2015 to 2025, when it was temporarily closed by the Trump administration. At Anthropic—the AI company now amid a six-month withdrawal from federal service, as ordered by President Trump—Baker will to lead analysis of how AI is affecting U.S. institutions and competition with China, the company announced Friday.

As ONA director, Baker advised defense secretaries and national security advisors on the long-term effects of emerging technology on national security; he had earlier served on the Joint Staff and in other advisory roles.

For decades, ONA helped the U.S. military adapt to social, economic, environmental, and technological trends. The office was established in 1973 by Andrew Marshall, a policy strategist in the Nixon administration. Using a data-driven, “system-of-systems” approach, it sought to predict the interrelation and effects of trends from tech development to military affairs to labor. The office forecast how information technology would greatly increase the speed of warfare and the availability and precision of new weapons, including cyber and electromagnetic effects. These ideas prompted rethinking of force structure and underscored the need to accelerate acquisition reform.

In its final decade, ONA sought to understand implications of accelerating artificial intelligence, especially by Cold War institutions that Congress has been slow to change. A 2016 summary study, which formed the basis for an unclassified 2017 Belfer Center examination, identified a “Cambrian explosion” in robotics and artificial intelligence that would make warfare cheaper and faster, and reduce the advantage of expensive investments in "exquisite platforms” such as $90 million jets.

That trend is playing out today in Ukraine, which is using drones to decimate expensive Russian naval and air defense assets.

But in an interview, Baker said the national-security effects of AI stretch far beyond the military. Only by appreciating the vulnerability of all institutions, including the Defense Department, will society be able to adapt to the changes that are coming.

“We aren't spending enough time thinking about the implications of recursive self-improvement,” he said, meaning intelligent systems that improve themselves far faster than their creators anticipate. “The greatest risk is the long-term viability of present institutions in war and in peace. That’s one of the questions I came to Anthropic to work on. It’s a multi-decade structural—even civilizational—problem.”

The Defense Department shuttered ONA last March, which a spokesperson said at the time was part a series of cuts to basic research not immediately application to weapons. The spokesperson said that the reorganization would help the Pentagon address “pressing national security challenges.” In October, the department reinstated a smaller version of ONA.

In March, the White House designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after company executives declined to make their tools available for mass surveillance of U.S. citizens or to guide fully autonomous weapons.

In April, Anthropic announced that it would limit the release of a new AI tool dubbed Mythos to a handful of federal agencies and corporations to help find discover cyber vulnerabilities. The number of new vulnerabilities logged in the National Vulnerability Database nearly doubled this month.

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SOCOM adding AI, autonomy ‘at every level,’ commander says

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:54:16 -0400

AI and autonomy are being integrated into special operations “at every level,” the leader of U.S. Special Operations Command told lawmakers on Tuesday—an indication that SOCOM, like smaller organizations everywhere, is well-poised to take advantage of disruptive technologies.

They are “critical” to sensing the battlefield, continuously surveilling adversary forces and targets, and “the ability to project violence, should that be required,” Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. He added that they are also key to improving international partners, underscoring their particular value to special operations.

Bradley’s testimony underscored a larger phenomenon playing out in boardrooms as well as on battlefields: small and nimble groups—whether non-state actors, software startups, or militaries like Ukraine’s—derive greater return on their AI investments than do more established or incumbent players. The boom in market valuation of small AI-focused defense startups like Anduril, Shield AI, or Swarmer versus slower growth of traditional players tells that story, as does Ukraine’s use of drones and autonomy to withstand Russia’s invasion.

SOCOM is better positioned to adopt AI than, say, the U.S. Navy, which is also trying to fund and sustain multibillion-dollar aircraft carriers and other maintenance-thirsty warships. Even the Navy’s forays into autonomy tend to be on the larger side, like its plan to spend $6 billion to acquire 70 Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels. At a hearing last week during a hearing, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., responded with clear disapproval at spending that amount of money to get 70 surface craft—good value compared to the cost of a destroyer but not compared to the Ukrainian robot boats that have corralled the Russian Navy.

Meanwhile, SOCOM has launched a broad request to industry for new ideas for maritime autonomy, human performance, command-and-control technology, and “scalable effects”—as in technologies that can be increased in number or intensity, such as directed energy, electronic warfare, cyber-enabled effects, and precision engagement tools. The request bespeaks flexibility in a way that the Navy’s 70-MUSV order does not.

AI enables asymmetric warfare—SOCOM’s specialty—more than traditional warfare, and the special operations command has fewer obstacles than the service branches to fast implementation. A case in point is Maven, an Air Force Special Operations Command tool for video and data analysis that has become a widely used program of record

“From the battlefield to the back office,” SOCOM is ‘finding ways to be able to bring autonomy, attritable, mass autonomy, to bear is a very important part of how we on the edge can leverage our placement and access,” Bradley said.

Partners

But SOCOM also plays a key role in helping partner militaries develop new capabilities quickly. Bradley described how SOCOM is seeking to use AI and autonomy “not only to serve our own interests, but to be able to help our partners who generally don't have the same budgets we do, to be able to buy that kind of capacity to give them asymmetric advantages… I think that's critical, because it is not just about what we bring, but it's about enabling those partners.”

Bradley, similar to other military leaders, pointed out the unique relationship that the U.S. military has forged with Ukraine. Special operations forces were critical to helping Ukraine stand up new concepts and tactics to thwart Russia’s advance in 2022. Today, that relationship provides key knowledge and training benefits back to U.S. Special Operations Forces. “Frankly, we learn from them,” he said.

That partnership is especially critical in finding real-world and relevant data to inform SOCOM training, concepts, and buying, namely testing new gear under spectrum-warfare conditions and real-world threats. Meaningfully testing new equipment for use against an actual modern adversary “requires more exquisite ranges that have the ability for us to be able to practice, train and rehearse in increasingly contested electromagnetic spectrum environments. Those are difficult to be able to produce inside the United States,” he said. “We have to be able to bring together our standard, exquisite weapons systems now with teamed and collaborative autonomy, and there are very few places inside the United States where that is an easy thing to do, in many places where it needs to be done, and we are working to do that.”

Industry, however, has the most to gain from longstanding military-to-military partnerships with Ukraine and its innovative forces and companies.

“I will say that many of our business, our defense industrial base partners, are watching this as well,” he said. “And of course, the Ukrainians are driven by the existential need for that cycle of adaptation. As we watch that, I have great confidence that our industrial base here can do the same.”

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Navy scientists seek tech breakthroughs in areas that companies ignore

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:10:34 -0400

As private-sector investment in defense-technology research rises, the Navy’s chief science office is refocusing its efforts on areas that companies are ignoring, but that will be relevant 15 years into the future, the head of the Office of Naval Research says.

“It's our goal to actually help folks see not just what the Navy needs now, but what the Navy will need in the next three” future years defense program, or FYDP, cycles, Rachel Riley, who heads the office, told the audience at the Sea-Air-Space symposium Tuesday. “What we're trying to identify is: what are the things that industry cannot or will not solve?”

These include new undersea technologies and novel forms of power and energy. It also means artificial intelligence that delivers answers in a way that is transparent and understandable to humans, and especially commanders.

Riley’s priorities reflect the Trump administration’s decision to spend less on military-led basic scientific research—an ONR specialty—and more on applied research.

“We have roughly $3 billion a year. That's a lot as a taxpayer; as an innovation leader like you, you can do a lot with it, but maybe not as much as you might want to. And so what we're trying to identify is, what are the things that industry cannot or will not solve,” Riley told the audience.

In the past, Riley said, ONR hasn’t done a good job of surveying private-sector research so it can focus its own efforts on challenges unlikely to be solved for the commercial market.

“Interestingly enough, a reaction that I get a lot [from ONR colleagues] is, ‘We just don't know what industry will do.’ If there's a large addressable market, if there's dual use, if there's a short time in terms of from flash to bang, then that's really right for investment” by the private sector, she said.

Correctly choosing ONR’s projects, she said, “requires us to be a little humbler in terms of—you know, some of the things that historically have been only our problems aren't anymore. I think that's a success story.”

One of those areas is explainable AI. While the cost of a false positive, or “hallucination” in AI-speak, might be low in a commercial setting, the consequences can be far higher in military operations. A growing body of research indicates that such errors are inescapable in commercial large language models, so the military needs a new approach—one that has no immediate market need.

“If you are trusting an autonomous system with American lives, then you need to make sure that you have full confidence in what that does. And a lot of times that requires looking inside the black box. That's actually harder from a technical perspective and requires more work up front,” Riley said. “How do we invest in encouraging people—don't just train this thing and say, ‘It's a great idea.’ Let's actually be able to give the operator confidence.”

The office plans to launch a series of “innovation-to-industry days” to “influence industry [internal research and development or] IRAD investments, to help educate our folks about capabilities that may be more mature in industry than we know today, and also to help you all see the things that may be dual use coming down the pike.”

ONR’s Naval Research Laboratory, led by Capt. Randy Cruz, is also refocusing on research areas that the commercial sector is ignoring.

“Of our one and a half billion dollars of revolving funds, about 80 percent of it is someone telling us what to do, as in ‘I need you to solve this problem,’” Cruz told the Sea-Air-Space audience on Monday. “Another 20 percent roughly is our researchers coming up with these ideas,” based on post-deployment reports and market research trends.

That process has led to new programs like the Mission Robotics Vehicle, a satellite with arms to repair other satellites. NRL, working with Northrop Grumman, will launch the satellite in July. Cruz called it a tow-truck for satellites. It’s an area that private space companies have ignored, since their business model is based on more launches to put more satellites in orbit, not fixing old ones. “The cost of these exquisite systems is unbearable, so the idea of servicing them... is looking very, very appealing.”

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Why the US can’t copy Ukraine’s robot navy

Patrick Tucker — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:20:03 -0400

Ukraine’s sinking of much of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is “case alpha” in finding new ways to use robots across land, sea, and air, the U.S. Navy's assessment chief said Monday. But the United States can’t just copy Ukraine’s homework and apply it to the vast, well-observed Pacific, or even the Red Sea, where it’s now tasked with enforcing a naval blockade and “getting a lot of unmanned stuff thrown at us,” said Rear Adm. Doug Sasse.

The Navy last week took possession of its first Sea Hawk, a 145-ton unmanned trimaran. It will deploy as part of the Theodore Roosevelt strike group in the Pacific later this year, Sasse said at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference.

By 2030, the Sea Hawk will be joined by "thousands" of small unmanned ships and “any number” of aerial drones by 2030 in the Pacific alone, Capt. Garrett Miller, commodore of Surface Navy Development Group One, said at the conference.

Ukraine sank at least eight Russian warships in 2023 and 2024 with just a fraction as many sea drones. It's an operating model that “shows great promise in a very constrained sea" whose shores are covered with thick forest, Sasse said. A military could launch a drone "in the water really quickly, and it doesn't have to run an incredible distance” to strike its target.

That model won't work in the world's largest ocean. “When you look at what's going on in the Pacific, there are no trees to hide behind as you're coming across," he said. "You're sitting on the surface of the ocean, maybe under observation" for the entire crossing.

Operation Epic Fury in the Red Sea has also highlighted the importance of human naval crews, even as Iran’s relentless attacks with one-way Shahed attack drones illustrate—similar to Ukraine’s experience—how cheap drones can eat away at a larger military’s advantage.

The U.S. Navy would like to keep its advantage, so its focus right now is integrating more robots into a larger manned fleet, Sasse said. That provides a different set of challenges.

“Once you start saying, ‘All right, it's gotta travel with a fleet. And it's gotta keep up with a carrier strike group [which can travel at speeds above 35 miles per hour across vast distances.] It's got to have range. It’s got to have 30 days endurance... And it's gotta be cheap. All those things are violently opposed. Suddenly that [unmanned surface vehicle] that’s traveling as part of a strike group starts to look like a frigate or a [guided missile destroyer],” Sasse said.

The United States has deployed its own sea drones to the CENTCOM area to support current operations, said Rear Adm. Derek Trinque, director of the Navy’s surface warfare division. But those were for “expanding the battle space awareness and ensuring that our forces are more effective as a broader team,” he said—not for attack.

The U.S. doesn’t have a shortage of weapons to sink ships. But the mission of enforcing a naval blockade after lambasting Iran for trying to do the same means the United States can’t use attack robots in the same way as its adversary.

“Just look at the examples from this past weekend, where USS Spruance interdicted a blockade runner,” Trinque said. “You need manned platforms for that.”

That means that even as the Navy adds thousands of robot ships, the “command and control will remain as it is,” Trinque said. “There will still be commanders and commanding officers who have the accountability for the proper utilization of all of our systems, including unmanned … I expect that we will see some centralization of the warfighting development for unmanned systems. And so where we have aviation and surface [warfare tactics instructors] right now, we might have robotic and autonomous systems [instructors] in the future.”

Still, the rise of robot weapons is already influencing ship design and informing new concepts. The Navy will deploy a wide variety of air, sea, and undersea drones aboard already existing frigates and destroyers—within specific containers that work with the ships’ existing frames. But as new unmanned ships like the medium unmanned surface vessel, or MUSV, come online, the look of the Navy will change more rapidly, even as the human-decision making remains central to command and control.

“We built 30 years of growth in the Arleigh Burke class [of guided-missile] destroyers because we had to,” Trinque said. “And we're going to build 30 to 40 years of growth into the battleship. And we are going to build growth into the frigate. But for MUSVs, we don't have to do that because we can get more advanced MUSVs as they become available.”

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‘Best drone’ innovation winner developing enemy drone recovery system with the Army Research Lab

Meghann Myers — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:01:24 -0400

NASHVILLE—A group of soldiers from the Pennsylvania Army National Guard is teaming up with the Army Research Laboratory to develop a prototype enemy drone recovery system that won the innovation award at the Army’s first Best Drone Warfighter competition in February.

The idea came together over a “couple beverages” after Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Reed and his 28th Infantry Division Innovation Team got the invitation to enter the competition late last year, he told an audience Thursday at the Army Aviation Warfighter Summit.

“So we wanted to come up with something that wasn't just the run-of-the-mill, Army-type system, something that industry would be excited about and potentially be able to take and make it scale from there,” he said.

They came up with Project RED—Recovery Exploitation Drone—an unmanned system that uses AI to find downed enemy drones, and an attached robot arm to pick up those drones and fly them back to the unit to download their data.

“We're currently working with Army Research Laboratory at this time to kind of refine our product, create more autonomy, more stability in the flight controls,” Reed said. It’s part of a one-year research-and-development agreement with ARL.

Other units are already starting to work on their pitches for next year, Reed said as part of a panel discussing lessons learned from the first Best Drone Warfighter competition.

He suggested creating sub-categories for the “best innovation” award with different budget thresholds, to give units of varying size and resources more room to develop their ideas.

He was joined by Sgt. Javon Purchner and Staff Sgt. Angel Caliz, who won the best drone operator and best team portions of the competition.

Purchner, a fire support specialist, brought several years as a first-person view drone hobbyist to the competition, he said. He suggested units give soldiers more designated time to train on drones.

“At installations, have actual courses for soldiers that want to compete,” he said. “They can have time to actually go out and practice their flying skills and have that time set aside for them, because flying FPV drones isn't just as easy as picking up the controller and flying. It's something that takes a lot of time and practice to become proficient at.”

Purchner’s leaders were so impressed with his skills that they plucked him from his unit in 1st Cavalry Division to serve at III Corps headquarters and develop a training center with multiple levels of courses to train new drone pilots at Fort Hood, Texas.

Caliz said he’d been practicing the hunter-killer drone mission with his fellow 2nd Cavalry Regiment soldiers, giving him an edge.

He suggested that next year’s competition include electronic warfare interference to make the scenario more realistic. He also had some suggestions for industry to make the drone mission more viable.

One would be some sort of transport system for drones, he said, because when you’re a team carrying five to 10 of them, they no longer just fit in a backpack. Another idea was a new kind of ground control station.

“I'd like to see more mobility. Something smaller, more compact,” he said. “Something that doesn’t tie you down to a certain case or certain bag, something that’s not too many wires.”

Assuming the second annual Best Drone Warfighter competition becomes a reality, leadership would like to expand the challenges with a nighttime portion, said Col. James Brant, the lessons learned and training manager for the Army Aviation Center of Excellence.

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Russians will surrender to robots. Russian robots won’t.

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 22:19:14 -0400

NATO is studying how to use ground and air robots to replace human soldiers in assaults, something Ukraine has been doing for more than a year. But that hasn’t stopped Russia’s continuous assault with its own, increasingly autonomous one-way attack drones.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a social-media splash with a video describing a historic first from last July: a skirmish in which Russian troops surrendered to Ukrainian robots.

“The future is already on the front line—and Ukraine is building it,” Zelenskyy said in the video, adding that Ukrainian robotics companies “have already carried out more than 22,000 missions on the front in just three months.”

Still, the Ukrainian president offered far fewer details than did Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade in its own July 2025 post.

“Enemy fortifications were attacked” by first-person-view aerial drones and ground robots armed with explosives and made by Nazemnyi Robotychnyi Kompleks, the post said. “The next robot was already approaching the destroyed dugout when the enemy, in order to avoid being blown up, announced surrender. The occupiers who survived were taken to our lines by ‘birds’ [aerial drones] and, according to the regulations, taken prisoner.”

“The operation was carried out without infantry and without losses on our side,” it said. “The occupiers surrendered to the ground robots of the Third Assault!”

Ukraine’s ground-robot game advanced quickly in the following months, said Olena Kryzshanivska, a senior editor at the NATO Association of Canada who first relayed the news to English-language audiences.

“Already…[by the] beginning of this year, we saw several documented cases when UGVs [unmanned ground vehicles] were used for strike missions. They were either delivering grenades [or] they were sometimes … attacking trenches, attacking Russian troops,” Kryzshanivska said in February during a podcast with CNAS adjunct senior fellow Sam Bendett.

That sort of combined robotic fast maneuver is one of the ways Ukraine is forcing a reconsideration of decades of military doctrine, and NATO is taking notice. In February, its Allied Command Transformation announced the extension of a study on Force Lethality Enhancement to build out “a few practical force options and test them against realistic scenarios to see what works, and what it would take to use them on operations.”

Another alliance effort to integrate ground robots, part of the multidomain Task Force X, is being led by Brig. Gen. Chris Gent, NATO deputy chief of staff transformation and integration.

Venture capitalists are taking note as well. Eric Brock of Ondas Capital told Defense One in January that his firm is investing in “ground robots that are tailored towards defense and homeland security but also critical infrastructure protection in certain places.”

Challenges

The biggest constraint in using first-person-view drones is that an operator can generally fly just one at a time. But the drone can fly itself to waypoints, loiter in the air, and reconnect after brief communications interruptions.

Ground robots, by contrast, need constant attention because navigation remains a technical challenge, John Hardie, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told reporters in February. And UGV operators must also stay in frequent contact with the operators of the aerial drones above.

“My understanding is that they've experimented with autonomous navigation, but it’s especially difficult with [unmanned ground vehicles] for that to be reliable. So I don't think they're there yet,” Hardie said.

Ukraine has also been hunting for alternatives to GPS, which is jammable. Since 2023, it has been experimenting with visual- and terrain-matching systems and other AI-powered ideas for long-range navigation, Hardie said.

Russia, too, has carried out robotic operations in large volumes. But they’re limited to strikes with one-way attack drones like Shaheds and, occasionally evacuation of the wounded, not taking positions.

The Lancet drones produced by Russia’s ZALA company are guided on final approach to their targets by matching camera imagery to preloaded maps. It works well enough—because Russian forces place less of a premium on collateral damage or striking the right target.

For Ukrainians, the goal is greater autonomy, allowing one operator to preside over fleets of ground and air robots but with confidence that they will perform the mission assigned, hit the target that they’re supposed to hit and not simply whatever happens to be there when the drone finally arrives. It’s the same sort of complex multi-drone swarm capability that the Pentagon is seeking to develop.

Ukrainian Air Force Capt. Max Maslii, deputy chief of staff for the 96th Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, described that goal as a departure from the way Russia operates “autonomous” drones like the Lancet, as isolated flying bombs.

Under the “new paradigm,” Maslii told Defense One, the drones would be able to “find the … more efficient way to accomplish this mission, together with such machines.” At that point, he said, operators wouldn’t be stuck piloting one drone at a time. They would work more like technicians managing a larger, more complex system.

“Our job will be … to produce a lot of drones, to put them in the proper place, to take care [of] the systems that manage those drones, and just to, you know, turn them on.”

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Put nuclear reactors in space within a few years, White House tells Pentagon

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:12:22 -0400

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.— Launch nuclear reactors to orbit as soon as 2028 and to the Moon as soon as 2030—that’s the White House’s new order to the Pentagon and NASA.

The six-page policy memo released on Tuesday calls for a dual design competition between the agencies that is to produce a “nearterm demonstration and use of low- to mid-power space reactors in orbit and on the lunar surface.”

“The United States will lead the world in developing and deploying space nuclear power for exploration, commerce, and defense,” the policy reads. “Agencies will establish cost-effective partnerships with private-sector innovators to meet near-term objectives that include safely deploying nuclear reactors in orbit as early as 2028 and on the Moon as early as 2030. Achieving these near-term objectives will establish technological viability essential to unlocking space exploration, commerce, and defense applications.”

Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House’s science and technology policy office, unveiled the policy at the Space Symposium here. He tied it to President Donald Trump’s December executive order that aimed to “ensure space superiority” for the United States.

“Nuclear power in space will give us the sustained electricity, heating and propulsion essential to a permanent robotic and eventually human presence on the moon, on Mars, and beyond,” Kratsios said.

The defense applications for a nuclear reactor are wide-ranging, said Todd Harrison, a space policy and budget expert for the American Enterprise Institute. With a reliable energy source, the military could use it to power some of its most crucial future missions.

“You could run data centers in space, you could use it to power mission-critical systems that can never really go without power, like missile warning, strategic communications, Harrision said. “Directed energy, jamming, data centers, all of those things could use a lot of power.”

Within 90 days, the Pentagon must brief the White House’s science and technology policy office, management and budget office, and National Security Council on “relevant use-cases and payloads” for the systems and “best use of the 2031 mission,” according to the policy.

Those offices, along with the Defense Department, will decide on the final mission for that technology.

On Earth, the Defense Department has worked for decades to field nuclear microreactors to power its military bases. Last year, the Army announced last year that it aimed to break ground on a microreactor on a U.S. base by 2027. As well, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit declared eight companies eligible to build those microreactors.

Last week, the Air Force and Defense Innovation Unit selected Buckley Space Force Base, Colorado, and Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, as possible locations for two microreactors. There is also a standalone pilot program that will test the operational benefits of a reactor at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska.

Top U.S. officials have dismissed the fears of groups such as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, who have pointed out that microreactors on U.S. bases “could become attractive targets for an adversary.”

Currently, there are no nuclear reactors in space and no operational microreactors on Earth within the United States. Harrison said the White House’s timeline for moon-based reactors is ambitious.

“The timeline and feasibility strikes me as rather aggressive,” Harrison said. “Demonstrating a microreactor on Earth would be challenging by 2028, doing it in space is even more challenging.”

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CIA employees will get AI 'coworkers'—and eventually run teams of AI agents, deputy says

David DiMolfetta — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:45:00 -0400

The Central Intelligence Agency aims to integrate artificial intelligence-powered “coworkers” into analysts’ workflows in coming years, a top official said Thursday.

CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis said these AI coworkers would be housed in agency analytics platforms to help humans with basic tasks.

“It won’t do the thinking for our analysts, but it will help draft key judgments, edit for clarity and compare drafts against tradecraft standards,” Ellis said in a speech at a Special Competitive Studies Project event on AI and the intelligence community. The AI tools would help triage and flag trends for human analysts to review.

And within a decade, Ellis said, the CIA will treat AI tools as an “autonomous mission partner” and officers will manage teams of AI agents in a hybrid model to increase the speed and scale of intelligence work.

Last year, the agency had more than 300 AI projects, and, for the first time in its history, used AI used to generate an intelligence report, he said.

Ellis' remarks provide a rare public glimpse into how the spy agency is integrating frontier AI systems into its day-to-day operations, and the expectation that they will soon become part of officers’ workflows.

The CIA primarily executes and coordinates human intelligence-gathering overseas, often undercover. Officers recruit and manage foreign assets to clandestinely gather intelligence in areas such as economics, terrorism, and cyber threats.

Much of that work involves the use of technology, though some argue that advanced AI tools may reinvigorate old-school tradecraft techniques.

But there have been benefits to technological investments. The agency recently elevated its Center for Cyber Intelligence into an entire mission center, a move that’s “paying dividends already by allowing us to deploy new tools to the field and gain more access to priority targets,” Ellis said.

“The battle of cybersecurity will be a battle of artificial intelligence,” and whoever best harnesses AI models will wield “enormous power,” he said. “Having a new mission center centered around cyber intelligence will put us on the path to secure the upper hand.”

The agency also recently announced a new acquisition framework to better integrate technology.

Ellis said the CIA doubled its technology-related foreign intelligence reporting, to track how foreign adversaries like China are using advanced AI and other technologies. Those intelligence products focus on technology use abroad and can include findings on areas like semiconductors, cloud computing, infrastructure, cybersecurity or R&D.

Ellis did not mention Anthropic’s Project Glasswing, a consortium announced earlier this week meant to help secure critical software against AI-driven attacks. The project was fueled by a powerful, non-public Anthropic frontier model the company says has already uncovered thousands of vulnerabilities but could be weaponized in the wrong hands.

The intelligence community and its industry suppliers are already examining and discussing how such a model may impact the future of cyber missions, Nextgov/FCW reported Wednesday.

Earlier this year, Anthropic declined to ease restrictions that kept its tools from being used for domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. That led the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to designate the company's products as a “supply chain risk” designation and President Trump to order that all federal agencies phase out their uses of Anthropic tools. The company has legally challenged the move.

Ellis did not single out Anthropic, but he cautioned that the CIA “cannot allow the whims of a single company” to constrain its use of AI and said the agency is looking to diversify across multiple vendors to preserve operational freedom.

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‘Hybrid constellations’ are making it hard for militaries to hide

Patrick Tucker — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:00:00 -0400

A planned satellite constellation will be able to image any location on Earth every 15 minutes and take more detailed images, a novel capability that could reveal even the nimblest and stealthiest military maneuvers, its developer says.

On Thursday, Vantor announced plans to enlarge its current fleet of 10 satellites “five-fold” with spacecraft that will produce images with 20cm resolution—better than its current 30- and 40cm imagery. The company also plans to add two dozen high-revisit/lower-res satellites. When the constellation is complete some time after 2029, Vantor officials said it will vault the company to the forefront of the space-imagery industry.

“The geo accuracy of our exquisite data combined with the revisit data—we can actually fuse that data and have highly accurate imagery that nobody else can do,” Vantor CEO Dan Smoot said in an interview.

The space-imaging race

The planned constellation is part of the increasing competition between space-imaging giants.

Maxar, which renamed itself Vantor in 2025, was created by the merger of Maxar Intelligence, with its two synthetic aperture radar satellites, and DigitalGlobe, whose Quickbird had a high-for-its-day resolution of 2.4 meters. The new company focused on satellites of higher and higher resolution.

Its services were generally complementary to those of Planet, whose cheaper, smaller, lower-orbit satellites collected lower-resolution imagery more often and over a much larger portion of the Earth. But in 2023, Planet became the first company to offer high-resolution imagery and persistent coverage when it launched the first of its six 30cm Pelican satellites.

Today, Vantor’s Smoot says the U.S. government and other customers are increasingly seeking imagery for damage assessment.

“We've seen a lot in Ukraine, of course, and we're starting to see that utilization in the current conflict” in the Middle East, he said.

Vantor’s planned Pulse constellation will enable it to take twice as many photos of a given area than its competitors, while its Vantage satellites will take pictures with 10cm finer resolution than Planet’s Pelican can produce. That sort of capability can reveal operations that are extremely difficult to spot, such as a submarine surfacing, as Vantor demonstrated in a picture it provided to Defense One.

But advantages in resolution and revisit are fleeting. Planet has its own plans to add higher- and lower-resolution satellites, the company said this week. And other competitors are emerging such as Austin-based SkyFi, which NATO selected for an accelerator program in December. More importantly, satellite images, once an exclusive capability of the U.S. military, are empowering adversaries. Russia is reportedly providing Iran with satellite imagery to help target U.S. forces. Other militaries want imagery to help guide strikes in GPS-denied areas or by artillery and rockets that lack internal guidance systems.

“As you can imagine, you need to be accurate within a couple meters,” said Smoot. NATO allies and other countries are “starting to really learn the value of that as they start to rearm, and they also start to realize that they don't have those inherent capabilities built into their national defense systems.”

But the rise of AI may be the biggest reason that Vantor and others are building hybrid constellations of high- and low-resolution satellites. A single system for high-res and low-res imagery and AI analysis allows customers to better manage the security of their data. The company’s Tensorglobe platform enables customers to obtain data without switching providers.

All of that is enabling a new era of satellite imaging that would give smaller countries the ability to target missiles as effectively as larger ones.

“That is actually one of the most unique propositions about us doing this hybrid constellation,” Smoot said. “The way we're doing it, it actually will bring that what we call targeting-grade categorization to sovereign nations.”

In other words, as the competition intensifies, hiding from the sky will become more difficult for everyone.

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Army operations center is trying to solve battlefield data problems in real time

Meghann Myers — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:54:18 -0400

As the Army works to gather and organize data to support battlefield decisions, it has created a task force to help with small, short-term problems—and in the longer term, to shape the service’s overall approach to data management.

The Army Data Operations Center went live on April 3, service officials told reporters on Tuesday, and so far its small team of civilian and soldier data and software engineers have received seven requests from different organizations to help deconflict.

“It used to be about firepower, but it isn't really about that anymore,” said Lt. Gen. Jeth Rey, the Army’s chief of staff for command, control, communications, cyber operations, and network architecture. “It's really about who can get the data to make decisions faster, to dominate.”

The task force might help, say, to get a partner force’s data flowing into the Army’s next-generation command-and-control platform so that a U.S. commander can compare what the two militaries are seeing on one screen.

The ADOC is organized into a “warfighter engagement cell” that that triages requests, then feeds them to data engineers at the “finish cell” to come up with a solution, who then runs that by the “data management cell” to figure out what kinds of policies need to be created or modified to fix the issue in the long-term.

“Those things are actually a lot more difficult than what you think, to be able to do—because it might be different cloud environments, it might be different [areas of operations], data owners— and you need to go through all the access requests,” said Brig. Gen. Mike Kaloostian, who heads the Command and Control Future Capability Directorate at Army Transformation

and Training Command.

ADOC has so far been fielding requests from units in training environments, he said, but it’s technically open to responding to troops in combat, and will prioritize those tickets.

“We haven't received anything yet to support those operations, but if there were to be a request, we would surge on that and prioritize that appropriately,” he said.

For the first 180 days, ADOC will respond to requests and track trends to give the Army feedback on which fixes can be incorporated into training or standard operation and whether the help-desk model is necessarily in the longer term.

“The Army will make informed decisions about what the structure should be and whether a centralized capability in the future is even needed, right?” Kaloostian said. “We just aren't mature enough as an Army right now to really, truly become data-centric. We need something that can aid the continuous transition and transformation of the Army to a data-centric force.”

It’s possible that the future looks like a centralized operations center that deals with the “higher-level heavy lifting” of organizing different data formats from their respective systems, so that soldiers on the ground aren’t having to sort through it themselves, said Lt. Gen. Chris Eubank, who heads U.S. Army Cyber Command.

“So I think the cyberspace domain is evolving at such a rapid pace that the organizations involved in that domain must evolve as well, but I think it's a necessary thing right now,” he added. “And the hope is we're creating soldiers that are data-smart more and more, and the heavier lifting is done inside of a central organization, if need be.”

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As aircraft losses mount, Pentagon wants a software fix to see through the fog of war

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 04:40:29 -0400

The U.S. planes that have gone down in the Middle East since the launch of Operation Epic Fury all lacked the same thing: a common operating picture that includes relevant intelligence and data. The Defense Innovation Unit announced Monday it’s looking for a fix.

The request: an open-architecture software suite to fuse real-time data into a credible picture of moving objects, threats, and conditions. The idea is to give pilots a broader understanding of reality in a way that is unremarkable to American motorists with easy access to data about ever-changing conditions but aspirational for air crews flying planes outfitted with antique computer hardware.

U.S. Air Force officials have warned of a lack of a common operating picture among airframes, particularly transport planes like C-130s, for years. But the loss of seven aircraft in just over a month, due mostly to communication errors and friendly fire, has exposed a big gap in how U.S. planes communicate with one another and with ground forces.

At the outset of the war on Iran, the U.S. lost three F-15E Strike Eagles due to Kuwaiti friendly fire. In March, they lost a KC-130 refueling tanker when it was involved in a mid-air mishap with a second tanker, due in part to a transponder failure but, again, pointing to a gap in the planes’ ability to fuse data to identify one another.

During the rescue effort that followed an Iranian shootdown of an F-15E Strike Eagle and an A-10 Thunderbolt on April 3, the U.S. destroyed two MC-130J transport planes when the planes were unable to take off from their makeshift runway, U.S. President Donald Trump said in a press conference on Monday.

“It was sandy, wet sand, so we thought there may a problem taking off because of the weight of the plane… And then we also had all the men jumping back onto the planes, and they got pretty well bogged down.”

It’s the sort of problem that access to real-time data on terrain, weather, and other factors could have solved. But most older transport planes lack up-to-date maps or terrain data, forcing crews to “rely heavily on pre-mission planning products, voice updates, and aging platform-specific displays,” according to DIU’s ask.

Because computer hardware varies widely throughout the U.S. aircraft fleet, the Air Force and aircrews frequently use workarounds such as software-defined radios or off-the-shelf communications equipment to get the data they need. But there is no common standard, which makes it difficult for aircrews to know what data they need.

“This problem is especially relevant for large, high-value airlift and tanker aircraft that utilize avionics and mission systems that are optimized for more permissive operations,” according to the announcement for DIU’s “Open Mission Engine” program. The new effort seeks software that can combine all the relevant friend, foe, intelligence, and logistics data into one place in real time, not afterward.

While the solicitation doesn’t mention Operation Epic Fury by name, the rising number of U.S. military aircraft mishaps shows how urgently the U.S. military needs a way to better let planes communicate with each other.

Among the features that DIU wants the new software “engine” to have is a “moving map” application that “uses relevant operational data into a single aircrew display, including blue-force awareness, threat and airspace overlays, mission updates, and route decision support.”

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From launch to recovery: Here’s how Space Force is backing NASA’s Artemis II mission

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:31:35 -0400

Space Force guardians are supporting NASA’s first crewed launch to the moon in more than 50 years by forecasting the weather and monitoring security, and, in an emergency, would make the call to abort Wednesday night’s historic mission.

The service’s Space Launch Delta 45 is tracking by weather and rocket safety conditions for NASA’s launch out of Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. There will be 28 crew members in the mission control center, in contrast to the four or five members used for a typical launch, service officials told reporters during a roundtable Monday.

Boeing’s Space Launch System rocket doesn’t have an autonomous flight safety system, which would automatically stop the mission in an emergency. That means more eyes are needed to monitor key data on the rocket and in the skies.

“When you don't have an autonomous flight safety system, you have to call up multiple range assets and resources for that function,” said Lt. Col. Gregory Allen, 1st Range Operations Squadron commander. “So that is exactly why we have so many personnel on console for this.”

The last Apollo mission in 1972 marked the last crewed mission to the moon. The Space Force, since it was created in 2019, has taken on a major role in rocket launches and oversees military and U.S. government missions from Florida’s Cape Canaveral and California's Vandenberg Space Force Base. Additionally, the 1st Air Force’s Detachment 3, the only Defense Department unit tasked with rescue and recovery of commercial space crews, has four helicopters ready at Patrick Space Force Base in case the crew needs to abort the mission.

Service officials told reporters that airmen and guardians are ready for Wednesday’s launch and opened an emergency operations center manned with first responders, bomb technicians, and others they can “surge” if needed, said Col. Chris Bulson, the deputy commander for installation support.

“SLD 45 has a robust team of folks on standby for this particular mission that are well versed with the SLS rocket, the systems on board, and have great teamwork with our detachment three partners to assist them should a recovery be necessary,” Bulson said.

Given the large public crowds for the event, Space Launch Delta 45 is also preparing for more security patrols and more people to manage crowds on land as well as boaters watching from the ocean, he added.

The Delta’s 45th Weather Squadron has forecasted favorable conditions for Wednesday’s launch. Unlike the National Weather Service or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Space Force’s squadron uses guardians who focus on specific factors and local weather that would affect crews, missions, and launch vehicles and pads.

They also monitor last-minute winds and conditions in case the Artemis II crew needs to abort mid-flight, Col. Douglas Oltmer, the weather squadron commander, told reporters.

“If the winds are too strong on shore, and they do have to abort en route, they will need to land over the water for the emergency,” Oltmer said. “So that's one of the things we're forecasting for on our end as well.”

The squadron’s weather forecasting doesn’t stop once the crews enter outer space. The Space Force has a team alongside the 1st Air Force’s Detachment 3 aboard the Navy’s USS John Murtha transport that will monitor recovery conditions for the crew when they splash down in the Pacific Ocean after their 10-day journey. The four astronauts are scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center sometime after 6:24 p.m. on Wednesday, and are scheduled to return off the coast of California on April 10.

“With Artemis, we started back in November, providing all the support all the way to day of launch, all the way until they recover, and then we actually forecast to bring the capsule all the way back across the country from the West Coast,” Oltmer said. “It's probably one of the coolest jobs an Air Force meteorologist can have here.”

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AI may revive old-school tradecraft even as it transforms intelligence work

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Artificial intelligence is widely expected to revolutionize intelligence-gathering, enabling faster, cheaper and more scalable collection of information. But a new analysis suggests the technology may also spur a return to some of espionage’s oldest methods.

A recent article in Studies in Intelligence, the CIA-backed academic journal, argues that as AI degrades the reliability of digital communications like text messages and video calls, traditional human intelligence tradecraft — like dead drops, brush passes and in-person meetings — could regain renewed importance.

The same technologies that improve intelligence gathering may make it harder to trust the data those tools produce or transmit, argues the author, Thomas Mulligan, a RAND Corporation researcher who served in the CIA from 2008 to 2014.

AI is already being used to generate convincing deepfakes and fabricate messages. Mulligan argues that these introduce a new source of “noise” into digital communications, which makes it harder to distinguish between authentic and synthetic signals.

That has implications for how spies communicate with their sources.

“If my friend tells me, face-to-face, that he is in trouble and needs money, I can be confident that that’s true,” Mulligan writes. But when the same message is delivered through an electronic medium, it becomes “more likely a scam than a bona fide plea for help.”

That dynamic elevates the value of communication methods that are not mediated through electronic means.

A properly executed dead drop, for instance, allows an intelligence officer to securely receive information while also verifying that it came from a specific human source, rather than an AI-generated deception, he says. A dead drop involves a secret location used to exchange information or physical items between people without requiring them to meet face-to-face.

The same logic applies to brief, in-person exchanges like brush passes, in which spies and sources pass materials to one another during a quick, seemingly routine encounter in public.

The argument runs counter to assumptions that advances in AI will diminish the role of human intelligence, or HUMINT, in favor of more technical collection methods.

Long before the advent of spy satellites and tailored computer hacking kits, human intelligence dominated espionage as the world’s oldest form of spying. From royal couriers and informants in the Persian Empire carrying sensitive information across imperial networks to the Culper Spy Ring’s use of invisible ink and dead drops during the American Revolutionary War, intelligence once solely moved through people.

In recent months, the Trump administration has made it a point to highlight contributions that CIA operatives have made toward its national security achievements, including efforts targeting the government of ousted Venezuela leader Nicolás Maduro. The agency has also taken a more public-facing posture, releasing recruitment videos aimed at sourcing in China. And in the months leading up to the Iran war, agency spies had been reportedly tracking the movements of now deceased Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

At any given time, the CIA, the nation’s primary human intelligence agency, may be operating across dozens of countries worldwide to collect foreign intelligence or conduct covert action — activities intended to influence political, economic or security conditions abroad, while concealing the U.S. government’s role.

Mulligan’s paper also comes as the tech industry has pushed for AI adoption across government agencies, including offices focused on national security and intelligence. In February, the CIA announced a major overhaul of its technology procurement process, as part of an effort to more quickly adopt leading-edge capabilities for use in its missions.

In a phone interview, Mulligan said AI may play a more permanent role in helping human spies craft better-sounding communications, just as cyber experts have argued that AI tools greatly enhance and scale bad actors’ phishing campaigns.

“A core part of being a case officer and human intelligence operations is persuasion, talking to a prospective agent or a recruited agent and trying to convince him or her to do things that can be difficult, can be dangerous and can be stressful,” he said. “I think AI has a constructive role to play, from the point of view of a case officer, in enhancing his or her ability to persuade.”

But there’s a prevailing question about how much intelligence practitioners risk when they outsource tasks to AI. Gathering intelligence from other people “is a human business at the end of the day, and it does involve an agent and a case officer as a team engaging in a difficult and sometimes dangerous relationship,” Mulligan said.

“My view,” he said, “is that [HUMINT] will have to have a human element — a real, essential human element — for the foreseeable future.”

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