Defense One - Science & Tech

Unraveling the Pentagon’s quantum problem

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 05:28:14 -0500

HONOLULU—Preparing for a quantum computer attack means two things: knowing exactly which systems will need to be upgraded and making sure everyone understands how serious the risk is to sensitive data protected by standard encryption.

“Our adversaries are using quantum. How advanced are their capabilities? We don't totally know. But the reality is that that presents some threats, and the challenge with, you know, post-quantum cryptography is this idea of ‘harvest now, decrypt later,’” said Matt McFadden, vice president of cyber for GDIT, during a panel discussion at the TechNet Info-Pacific conference here. “The reality is, with ‘harvest now, decrypt later,’ our adversaries can be harvesting data for a really, really long time,” and eventually a quantum computer will be able to break the standard encryption used today.

Post-quantum cryptography, or the mathematical algorithms needed to secure networks and systems from attacks using quantum computers, is a challenge each military service must tackle. But the White House put a timeline on it for federal agencies—by Dec. 31, 2030—for high value assets and high-impact systems “to use PQC for key establishment” in an executive order issued June 22. The deadline “to use PQC for digital signatures” is 2031.

“It’s just this one more threat vector that we have to be concerned about as we develop our resilient architecture,” said Col. Tassika Davis, Pacific Air Forces Command’s director of cyber operations and warfighter communications. “Now, we need to make sure that our architectures are cryptographically agile, so that we can shift and move and continue, and not degrade mission capability, while we are also providing the most current defense capabilities.”

To do that takes mapping the whole IT ecosystem as it is, “looking at it from the entire threat picture, and then planning against that,” she said.

It sounds simple but just knowing what exactly needs to be protected is a key, yet challenging first step, GDIT’s McFadden said during the panel.

“It's hard to migrate when you don't know what you have. So, really, the first step in this process is really having a comprehensive inventory,” he said, including certifications for apps, devices, and networks. “One of the things you realize pretty fast is like you're very reliant on third-party providers…you’ve got to really work together with the system owners, the third-party suppliers, your supply chains, and basically build that governance team to help drive” compliance and crypto agility, or the ability to combat quantum cyber threats.

Securing systems for a post-quantum threat becomes more complicated when the platforms that need to be upgraded don’t stay in one place for long.

“Ships are being extended more than they have been. There are crises that are popping up everywhere. And we used to be in a period of [maintenance] availabilities, which means we had about nine months to a year to do modernization. Now you’ve got 45 days,” said Capt. Victor Taylor, Pacific Fleet’s director of communications and information systems, during the panel. “So, how do I break up these big pieces of modernization into modular…shorter windows? How do I execute the configuration management? How do I have the teams to do it at scale at multiple locations? And then how do I schedule it with all the dynamic changes that are occurring? And so, if we think we're going to do that with our old processes, that's not the case.”

And part of the Pentagon and military services upgrading their high-value systems to withstand a quantum attack will be making sure individuals are aware of the quantum threat.

“The first thing is to acknowledge that it's a real problem. Like Q-Day isn't a thing that's going to be beyond our retirement. Q-Day is going to be a thing that happens…definitely within the next five years,” Peter O’Donoghue, Quantum Sky’s chief technology officer, told Defense One after the panel. “So, then you need to plan for it. You need to actually fund it.”

The Pentagon released a post-quantum cryptography strategy earlier this year. And its implementation “could be added to the Pentagon’s existing network modernization,” O’Donoghue said.

But how organizations upgrade their systems will vary—and take awareness, he said.

“There's no one-size-fits-all [solution], but I think each department, each agency needs to actually understand what the risk is and start buying it down and taking action. Like sitting on your hands and going into a kind of analysis paralysis is not the answer. Denying it is definitely not the answer either,” O’Donoghue said.

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The Pentagon’s IT agency wants to bridge network gaps in the Pacific

Lauren C. Williams — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 23:37:52 -0500

HONOLULU—Lags in communication could undermine even the most advanced technology available, the deputy chief of Indo-Pacific Command warned Thursday.

“If we field cutting-edge compute and advanced software applications, but retain rigid, multi-layered bureaucracies requiring hours to authorize time-sensitive engagements, then we've negated our technological overmatch,” Lt. Gen. George Rowell, deputy commander of INDOPACOM, told attendees at TechNet Indo-Pacific. “No competitor on Earth can match America's network of capable allies and partners. That network is our greatest advantage. It is our strategic center of gravity. But the old ways of connecting with partners are simply no longer sufficient.”

Upgrading military networks in the Pacific so the U.S. can quickly share battle details with allies has been a key priority in recent years. The command recently deployed the Pacific mission partner network, a unified version of a series of bespoke networks for individual allied or partner nations in the region. Throughout the year, the command has tested the network in military exercises, where it has shown progress and allowed better coordination, with fewer devices to toggle between.

Still, there are still gaps that need to be addressed to improve communications with allies and partners.

“We're in the middle of a transition right now,” said Col. Michael Hlad, who leads the Defense Information Systems Agency’s regional field command in the Pacific. “We are migrating to a data-centric environment, helping our partners understand what does it mean to be zero trust? What are the key items that we need to agree on, let's say, from an identity standpoint, a data standardization standpoint?”

While some nations are more technologically aligned, such as the Five Eye partners, the plan is to build a data-sharing environment malleable enough to bring in other nations as well.

“I don't know what the coalition of the future necessarily looks like,” Hlad said. “So how are we, DISA, building a coalition environment that is agile and common enough that we can bring in those partners instead of making it brittle…where it's just bilateral or just multilateral? We've got to bring that agility to [Indo-Pacific Command] as well as our partners, so they're able to integrate for an [humanitarian assistance and disaster relief] scenario as well as a high-conflict scenario of the future.”

Getting to that common digital ground means agreeing on what tools and methods to use.

There must be “clear standardization of what that common architecture looks like,” Hlad said. “This only works if we get the data right. And we are still siloed.”

In addition to improving communication with allies and partners, one of DISA Pacific's top priorities is to improve data transfer, speed, and security in the region.

“How do we have better transport resiliency in the Pacific so that we can make sure that the critical feeds and data are where we need them?…How do we deliver those for the warfighters in the Pacific so the data is closer to the operational need?” Hlad said.

The field command recently unveiled the Regional Network Operations Security Center Pacific—which aims to increase network support for INDOPACOM’s headquarters.

“That's an enhanced [network operations center]. That's an enhanced [security operations center]. That's a regional service support desk, and that's some data fusion capabilities that were not resident in this theater to synchronize,” Hlad said.

The idea is for the center to respond to connectivity challenges, including when undersea cables cut out and during electromagnetic spectrum or application disruptions.

The center has yielded a 20 percent personnel increase to assist in solving those connectivity problems, Hlad said.

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Army pilots are trying virtual reality to stay more alert in flight

Meghann Myers — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 14:23:53 -0400

The 101st Combat Aviation Brigade is testing a virtual-reality headset to see if it can make helicopter pilots more alert.

For the next eight months, the unit will incorporate the Oculus-based NeuroTrainer into their flight-training regimen, to measure whether pilots’ reaction times improve.

“In the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, our pilots operate in unpredictable environments where split-second decisions dictate mission success,” Col. Anthony Marston, the unit’s commander, told Defense One. “By putting our aviators through the targeted exercises using the NeuroTrainer, we want to see if it can measurably improve their processing abilities.”

Pilots will do three headset sessions a week, playing two games for at least six minutes. One game requires them to catch orange balls while dodging projectiles, and the other challenges them to identify a robot teammate outside of their immediate field of view, then swat a ball in that teammate’s direction.

“All the VR-based exercises are designed to challenge and improve reaction time, situational awareness, and quick-decision making,” said Capt. Drew Lightsey, a spokesman for the 101st CAB.

During the initial phase of the program, unit pilots will do a round on the NeuroTrainer and then get in a helicopter simulator to measure their cognition, a news release said.

“It had a little bit of a learning curve to start,” said Chief Warrant Officer 2 Eric Low, a CH-47 Chinook maintenance test pilot. “Once you start to get the hang of it, it felt like a video game. I like how it challenged different aspects of hand-eye coordination and the ability to track multiple objects at the same time.”

The second phase begins at week 15, when 70 pilots will be evaluated on their long-term results.

“Evaluators will consider the speed at which aircrews perform emergency procedures in the simulator and a qualitative assessment asking open-ended survey questions on how participants felt they improved after using the system over time,” Lightsey said.

Down the line, the NeuroTrainer could become a tool for pilots to use on days when they aren’t flying, or for staff pilots who don’t fly frequently but need to keep their skills sharp.

“I think this device could bring awareness to some of the underlying issues affecting our pilots,” said Victor Rodriguez, cognitive performance specialist for the 101st CAB’s Holistic Health and Fitness program. “The performance results could help us recognize when to discuss stress, oversaturation, or emotional regulation with them to help them improve.”

The press release said that similar headset tests are taking place at Navy Fighter Weapons School, Air Force Special Operations Command, and the 75th Ranger Regiment.

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At last, Army seeing progress in Pacific network

Lauren C. Williams — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 17:52:41 -0400

WASHINGTON—After years of frustration, Army leaders are starting to see progress on upgraded networks designed to make it easier to communicate with allies and partners in a Pacific conflict.

“When I arrived at [U.S. Army Pacific Command], we had an exercise in Japan—and I'd only been in command a month. It was a trilateral exercise between the U.S., Japan, and Australia. And we literally couldn't pass voice data to each other. We couldn't create a common operating picture without physically putting icons into this system,” Gen. Ronald Clark, commander of U.S. Army Pacific, told reporters earlier this month.

“It was so frustrating to me because I just left working in the Pentagon where I had literally attended both the signing ceremonies for AUKUS…sharing our most sensitive defense technology. But we are using basically a swivel chair to have a conversation with regard to land forces.”

In recent years, the Army has been building and testing the telecommunications pipelines that allies and partner militaries would rely on in a war with China. U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has a broader Pacific Mission Network, previously known as the INDOPACOM Mission Network, which is used on a more strategic or operational level.

Earlier this year, the U.S., Australia, and Japan used the Pacific Mission Network during the large Balikatan exercise to get a “real-time picture of participating forces across the entire training area,” an Army spokesperson told Defense One.

Months later, the nations reconvened for Yama Sakura 91, an annual military exercise with Japan and Australia that ended Sept. 10.

“Yama Sakura 91 demonstrated the live sharing of simulated information in a command post exercise, while Balikatan 26 demonstrated the live sharing of real-time information across a physical training environment and multiple echelons,” the Army said.

That network, which connects dozens of nations, was the linchpin for USARPAC to test whether it could share and see the same information as allies and partners.

“The [mission partner] enclaves work, so we're able to pass and share data in a way that we had not been before,” Clark said, at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference, calling the network an “important and critical innovation” that addressed years of frustrations.

That means commanders can more easily send “target-quality data” and share a “common operational picture” without needing to swivel between workstations.

For example, Maj. Gen. Bernard Harrington, who leads the Army’s Multi-Domain Command-Pacific and 7th Infantry Division, can gather information on “land-based long-range precision fires, sensors, space capability, [electronic warfare], cyber” and then share it with Pacific Fleet Commander Adm. Stephen Koehler, who led the exercise, and “can then integrate that [data] into a joint context in the fight,” Clark said.

The progress on the Pacific Mission Network comes as the Army looks to add more tech and sources of data—mostly drones—to its forces. That means being able to see, control, and learn from devices and the information they collect will become increasingly important on the battlefield.

Seventh ID recently finished an exercise called Bayonet Quest near Lake Huron, Mich., in which it was able to coordinate high-altitude balloons, and aerial and maritime drones, using a shared data connection, Harrington told reporters.

“We used multiple [unmanned aerial systems], multiple [unmanned surface vessels], long-range, one-way attack, and a high-altitude balloon,” he said. The division also collected and analyzed data from all of those systems using a single data layer.

During the exercise, which ended Oct. 6, the Army was also able to orchestrate the drones and coordinate simulated attacks with an “adaptive and agentic” command-and-control system.

“We were able to pull in a vast amount of data, make sense of it quickly, and then task those systems through a large language model, reducing the need for soldiers on individual ground control stations,” Harrington said in a statement to Defense One.

The exercise showed how unmanned systems could be used in the Pacific, particularly from different locations, which could help keep soldiers safe, he said.

The exercise wrapped earlier this month, but the division plans to keep training with the concept and employ it in future exercises with allies and partners.

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Navy’s tech playbook serves as ‘toolkit’ for rest of government

Frank Konkel and Christian Robles — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:00:00 -0400

The IBM Center for the Business of Government and Foundation for American Innovation published a playbook for enterprise IT modernization over the summer based largely on the U.S. Navy’s successful framework for technology acquisition.

“Basically, they observed something we were doing — we were getting a handful of wins on common problems, and other agencies started copying it, and we started sharing what we were doing,” Navy Chief Technology Officer Justin Fanelli said on the sidelines of the SAP Public Sector Summit on Oct. 14 in Washington, D.C.

“They asked us, ‘What are you doing that’s different from other pockets that aren’t moving as fast?’ And essentially, we said, ‘Oh, we have a kit for that because we moved from the world of build-everything-yourself to a fast adopter,’” Fanelli said.

The aforementioned kit—the Navy’s framework for technology acquisition — became the basis for a roundtable discussion that culminated in the playbook. It gives three recommendations to agencies for modernizing technology systems.

The first recommendation is to understand the systems agencies operate and how they communicate with each other. The playbook says IT mapping best occurs by mapping processes, data and finances.

“To do modernization that actually benefits the portfolio, you need to have a picture of that portfolio going in,” Daniel Chenok, executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government, told Nextgov/FCW.

The second recommendation is to measure pilots against existing systems they are meant to replace with standardized outcome measures. The Navy picked user time saved or lost, adaptability, cost per user, user experience and operational resilience metrics to assess technology, the report notes.

Fanelli said that prior to 2025, the Navy was only executing a few true technology pilots each year. That year, the Navy increased its pilot use by ten times to about 25, and in 2026 has “dozens and dozens” of ongoing pilots on everything from AI, hosting hardware, edge computing and autonomy functions to nuanced technology like float sensors.

“It’s a pretty wide scope,” Fanelli said.

The department, he said, is now communicating with the same tech terminology and more transparently with each other about ongoing pilot work, reducing duplicative, siloed efforts.

In addition, the Navy has found the private sector to be a willing partner in piloting its commercial technology. Both decisions have allowed the Navy to increase its pilot proclivity without breaking the bank or budget.

“Instead of using only government money to do piloting, there are just way more private sector companies who are using their own funding to do pilots to say, ‘Hey, this is already a pretty mature capability.’ (Then), We only have to fund the last five yards (to score a touchdown),” Fanelli said.

Several pilot programs are now critical to department operations. For example, Project Dynamis was piloted by the Navy and U.S. Marine Corps in September 2025 to close the “sensor-to-shooter” gap. The program now deploys critical software like the Maven Smart System to major commands, including the Marine expeditionary forces, and is the command-and-control program of record for the Marine Corps.

So far, Fanelli said ten pilots have transitioned to enterprise services or programs of record, and there is a queue of more than two dozen potential use cases.

“Those pilots have converted into, in many cases, designated enterprise services or programs of record,” Fanelli said. “So instead of hundreds of competing things that float around forever, we're now converting pilots into higher value and higher-impact enterprise services.”

“That is allowing us to cattle-drive legacy [technology],” Fanelli added, referencing Operation Cattle Drive, the Navy’s strategic initiative to identify, consolidate, and retire redundant, insecure and outdated IT systems.

Operation Cattle Drive demands structured divestments from old and outdated technology, and serves as the impetus for the playbook's third recommendation: to adopt an “acquire while divesting” strategy to ensure agencies do not layer new technology on old systems.

Agencies could meet the strategy by requiring divestment planning in solicitations, incorporating divestment planning in project planning and including retirement milestones in funding plans, the playbook says.

“There’s an old [President Ronald] Reagan quote summarized: ‘The closest thing to life everlasting is being a government program,’” Fanelli said. “How are you actually getting rid of things?”

The playbook builds on recent work from the IBM Center for the Business of Government, including a digital modernization implementation framework and an IT modernization roadmap.

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Add ‘post-AI’ encryption to your to-do list

John Croxton — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 01:30:19 -0400

Even as federal agencies move their most sensitive systems to new forms of encryption following an order from the White House in June, the release this month by OpenAI of new results to theoretical math problems has sparked concern about whether even proposed post-quantum encryption will be safe from increasingly capable AI models.

Encryption is what keeps online data secure; encrypting a message means applying mathematical equations to disguise its contents to an attacker. But new math techniques could let an attacker decipher encrypted messages without a key: the equivalent of a safecracker using the click of pins in a lock to find the right combination. If existing encryption algorithms fall, huge swaths of the internet would be at risk of attack.

Plans for post-quantum encryption may need to incorporate stronger multi-layered defenses—and move forward more quickly than the White House anticipated—to protect data that hasn’t yet been collected.

Encryption works now because, in practice, there are ways to make it very easy for someone with the key to apply some math and reveal the original message, but not to find the key or solve the equations by brute force in a reasonable amount of time. But the encryption techniques currently in widespread use haven’t been proven theoretically safe; they’re trusted because nobody has been able to crack them so far. So if new math is discovered that makes solving encryption schemes much easier, the foundations of the internet’s security would be at risk.

AI systems have been churning out math discoveries at an unprecedented rate. In May, an OpenAI model disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a well-known problem in a subfield of math called discrete geometry. And in September, the company announced its AI had a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations. The equations make up one of seven Millennium Prize Problems, some of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics.

“It just solved 400 problems, any of which, if a human had solved it, that could have been the highlight of their career, that could have been their tenure case,” Scott Aaronson, author of Quantum Computing Since Democritus and Chair of Computer Science at UT Austin, said in an interview.

Omer Reingold, computer scientist and co-winner of the Gödel Prize in 2009, wrote before the latest release that, “The world of mathematics, including theoretical computer science, is in turmoil. Even the Millennium Prize Problems…are no longer beyond the reach of LLMs.”

The OpenAI papers showed new results, “in just about all areas of math, but with this very conspicuous exception that there was nothing in cryptography. And that can't possibly be an accident,” Aaronson said.

Justin Drake, a security researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, wrote that he believes there was “backroom interventionism.”

“I've witnessed first-hand the U.S. government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case,” he said.

Regardless of whether OpenAI redacted encryption results from this particular release, the flood of new results has prompted fears that AI systems could find weaknesses in existing encryption algorithms. The cryptocurrency industry, which depends on encryption to safeguard its digital currencies, has been particularly alarmed.

As part of the way cryptocurrencies function, many crypto accounts expose some information about themselves when they send money. On X, formerly known as Twitter, Drake wrote, “Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for ‘bunker mode’. My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses.”

A “fresh address” is one that has never been used to send money to another account, limiting the ways future attackers might break its security.

Other cybersecurity experts are skeptical that AI will have much of an effect on concrete security issues. “Cryptographers are incredibly conservative... we put a lot of buffer into [secure encryption], an enormous amount,” said Bruce Schneier, security guru and author of the bestseller Applied Cryptography.

His concern is more on implementation questions in cybersecurity than the possibility of breakthroughs in theoretical math.

“Computer security is so bad. That's the worry. Finding vulnerabilities in code, hacking into systems. Those are the worries, not the math ... Of all the security things going on, math is the strongest we have,” Schneier added.

Emily Wenger, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, who has used machine learning to test the security of post-quantum encryption methods, said she doesn’t think “advanced large language models are going to break all encryption.”

“But when you make practical implementation choices... we found in the past that certain instantiations of these algorithms are insecure,” she said. “There's kind of two ways to break these things. You can either prove something about the math problem, or you can look at implementation choices.”

Aaronson noted that undermining the math behind widely used encryption algorithms like RSA would have sweeping consequences. “These mundane vulnerabilities, you can play the game of whack-a-mole. As soon as you find one, you patch it. Whereas if there's a break of RSA ... if all of our public key crypto systems were broken, then we would really have a problem, the way that we have constructed the internet.”

Dan Boneh, a cryptography expert and professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford, said in a video that losing current forms of encryption “would affect the entire internet... it affects the entire digital world. So, home banking, healthcare, government communications, everything [would be] impacted by such a break.”

But some experts are optimistic that security will ultimately become stronger from the increased attention.

“In the past, when someone would make an assumption and build a [cryptography] system based on it, we'd have to wait 10 years before that system could be deployed, to give people enough time to analyze it. And now all of a sudden we can accelerate this process tremendously using these models... we can just let a model run for a month, try to break it, and if the model can't break it, boy, do we have a lot of confidence that the assumption is valid. So we actually have the prospect to have more confidence in our security than ever before,” Boneh said.

Schneier concurred, saying, “It's an arms race. I think AI is the first technology that's potentially flipping that arms race to a defender advantage … Microsoft used AI to patch 900-something vulnerabilities for a Patch Tuesday last month. But they will never again be problems. You're already being attacked at computer speeds. Now you can be defending at computer speeds.”

Still, any transition would be costly. For a typical commercial firm, building “crypto agility,” or the ability to quickly switch the organization’s data to new types of encryption, may be the best response to encryption uncertainty. But for the defense industrial base, adversaries have been collecting their online data in its encrypted form for years, so switching now would have little effect on their ability to decode existing data.

Intelligence agencies both foreign and domestic have long embraced “harvest now, decrypt later” as a method of espionage, collecting encrypted data over time and storing it, in preparation for breakthroughs that would allow them to crack existing encryption.

“You have to assume that intelligence agencies are vacuuming up your data now, and that's all the more true if you think that AI could potentially discover breaks for these systems within the next year or two,” Aaronson said.

For organizations that deal with restricted or classified information, the prospect of AI math breakthroughs adds another ticking clock to the post-quantum future many have only begun to prepare for.

The federal government is targeting a comprehensive move to post-quantum encryption in the coming years. Agencies must follow Executive Order 14412 and OMB memo M-26-15, requiring them to migrate key systems to post-quantum cryptography in stages from Dec 2030 to 2035. The NSA has its own schedule for national-security systems. Contractors would also be subject to NIST’s cryptographic standards by Dec 2030 under the EO.

But new math results relevant to encryption could require a different approach. Aaronson said of AI undermining classical encryption or post-quantum algorithms, “Either of those could fall without the other. There's no logic.”

The prudent move for organizations may be “crypto agility,” the capacity to swap and layer different algorithms on top of each other as needed. With a proper agility posture, even broken encryption algorithms would not result in widespread harm in most cases.

“You should be getting crypto agility for post-quantum. So you should be doing it already. And if you're not, you should,” Schneier said.

Matthew Green, an associate professor of computer science at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute and author of the blog A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering wrote, “I can’t see the future. Nobody can. But so far, betting against models and in favor of human intelligence being the limit has not worked well for any of us.”

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Army converts Futures and Concepts Command to Futures and Autonomy Command

Meghann Myers — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:55:24 -0400

When Lt. Gen. Mac McCurry woke up Tuesday morning, he was the commander of the Army’s Futures and Concepts Command. By the afternoon, the service had announced that his outfit will become the recently announced Futures and Autonomy Command.

FASCOM will be the Army’s component organization within the Defense Department’s planned Autonomous Warfare Command, it announced Oct. 1.

“You know, we did decide to keep the patch, because that's honestly one of the hardest things to do,” McCurry said of his command’s uniform insignia, at the AUSA annual meeting in Washington, D.C. “If we can get the patch, we can get autonomy. I haven't ruled out Optimus Prime 6 as my future callsign.”

FASCOM’s commander will also become the Army’s first Portfolio Acquisition Executive for autonomy, with authority over the full procurement effort for autonomous systems.

“We are incorporating autonomous and unmanned systems at every single echelon, across the formation, with the force structure to match, including introducing UAS and robotics military specialties to integrate these technologies at the point of need,” Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the acting Army chief of staff, said Tuesday during a speech at the AUSA annual meeting.

FASCOM will function much the way Army Cyber Command and Army Special Operations Command support U.S. Cyber Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, with an Army mission and force structure that also reports to the joint combatant command.

The point of the larger autonomy project is not to start fully automating existing warfighting functions, said Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer.

Autonomous systems will compile information and help commanders make decision, but there will be “appropriate levels of human judgment” before weapons are fired.

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

The service secretaries and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are slated to discuss more details about AUTOWARCOM on Wednesday during a panel at the final morning of AUSA’s annual meeting.

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Army plans ‘rodeo’ to round up supply-chain problems

Patrick Tucker — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 23:27:22 -0400

The U.S. Army is planning a "rodeo" to round up problems that slow the deployment of new weapons, and rope in new ways to improve supply chains and make parts in more places, the service’s acting chief said today.

The “Manufacturing Rodeo,” planned sometime in 2027, will serve as a sort of public competition to expose where the industrial base is failing to meet demand and where new players are providing innovative approaches.

“We need to strain the nation's larger industrial base. We're going to stress-test the supply chain, the manufacturing processes, and see where it breaks,” Adam Telle said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington, D.C.

Production bottlenecks and a lack of suppliers for many key parts have plagued the Army for decades. The Government Accountability Office, among others, has detailed many breaking points. But, Telle said, those reports don’t capture how bad the problem could become as the Army seeks new drones and counterdrone weapons with components made by companies far from the service’s control.

For instance, he said, the Army needs to “make millions” of one-way attack drones.

“It may look simple, but it's a flying supply chain. If somebody else controls one part, they can break the whole thing,” the acting chief said.

Parts for such drones are largely made in China, which uses its market dominance to help other autocratic states like Russia and Iran attack U.S. forces and partner militaries in Europe.

Telle, who did not name any adversary, said that “an economy that's an extension of the national-security apparatus” can be “ruthlessly efficient” in deploying weapons.

“Over there, you flip a switch, and by law, by design, the economy is nationalized,” he said.

The acting Army chief listed steps the Pentagon has taken to overcome bureaucratic sluggishness in developing and deploying new technologies, such as pushing more acquisition authority down to battalion-level commanders, getting more self-sustained power on U.S. bases, and introducing a program to allow private companies to test new weapons on U.S. Army ranges. New private ranges, such as Second Bend Labs, are also renting time and space to defense startups eager to gain a foothold.

Telle said fostering new companies is more important than any single program.

“When someone tells you the Army's biggest acquisition program is this tank or that helicopter or this missile system, tell them they're wrong. The biggest acquisition program in the Army is building a system of seamless, frictionless, symbiotic relationship with American ingenuity.”

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Army’s new command plans to streamline autonomous warfare acquisition

Meghann Myers — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 02:44:47 -0400

The Army is bringing futures back.

The service announced the creation of Futures and Autonomous Systems Command on Friday, a day after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the creation of a new combatant command for autonomous warfare in a speech to troops.

"Secretary Hegseth made it clear: We are done with the bureaucratic inertia holding back modernization,” acting Army Secretary Adam Telle said in a news release.

So how do they cut through bureaucracy with a new bureaucratic organization?

FASCOM will stand up in the wake of last year’s decision to consolidate Army Futures Command and Training and Doctrine Command, part of a multi-year effort by the service to reduce its general officer ranks. Hegseth has since taken the idea military-wide.

The difference is that FASCOM will be led by an acquisition executive, where Futures Command had four-star generals with infantry backgrounds at the helm during its short tenure. Though the command endeavoured to fix the Army’s broken requirements process, ultimately the final decisions and acquisitions were made at the Pentagon, creating a disconnect that FASCOM won’t have to deal with.

“So maybe this is kind of Futures Command 2.0, right?” John G. Ferrari, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and retired two-star general, told Defense One.

Except this time, rather than a standalone four-star command with no joint equivalent, FASCOM could nest under the new Autonomous Warfare Command as a service component.

“I think their theory of the case is that you have too many disparate organizations within the Pentagon working this, and that they're working in some cases counter to each other,” Ferrari said, referring to the Defense Innovation Unit, various service PAEs and the recently created Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.

A combatant command “gives a single military leader the authority, the responsibility, and the resources to drive this,” he said. “So I think it's an admission that the current organizational structure isn't going to deliver in a timely manner.”

It’s also a more permanent solution than another working group or special unit.

“I think what they're trying to do is create an enduring organization that will drive this thing into the future, for the future, and outlast them,” Ferrari said. “Because regardless of who wins the next presidential election, it won't be this president, and so there'll likely be changes…the thing that endures are these combatant commands.”

What we talk about when we talk about autonomy

The Defense Department’s push toward autonomous warfare is not about robot drones finding, fixing, and deploying their weapons at will—at least not yet.

The war in Ukraine is a test bed for autonomous operations, with Ukrainian troops using artificial intelligence to identify targets and help guide a weapon to the target. On the Russian side, according to Center for Strategic and International Studies fellow Kateryna Bondar, there are some indications that fully autonomous drones have attacked civilian targets.

“We can just infer this indirectly, because analysis of those systems show that they don't have any connection or communication system…and also they carry NVIDIA chips, which are able to process AI models on board, and also just observations how they behave,” she said.

And they’re not very accurate, she added, something that the U.S. military isn’t inclined to experiment with.

“So I would say that autonomy that is being deployed right now, it's not some super sophisticated technology, AI-enabled full autonomy, or anything like that,” Bondar said. “It's more a function that assists the human operator in getting the drone to a place where the target is, and then actually engaging it.”

Ukrainians are also using AI-assisted analysis to gather intelligence, but humans still do the decision-making.

“Now they're trying to train agents which can perform as humans, and this is, I think, a turning point where we can actually get to autonomous,” she said. “And I would also call it a weapon system because, if this agent is able to act and activate whatever effectors we have—be it missiles, be it drones, whatever it can employ—then the decision-making system and this agent can actually be called a weapon system.”

FASCOM would bring together the Army’s existing transformation efforts with regard to unmanned systems, with a new push to prioritize autonomy.

Telle’s memo calls on the service’s operations chief to figure out what kind of manning existing units will need to incorporate autonomous capabilities and designate a Portfolio Acquisition Executive for autonomy.

Someone with an operational background should be in charge, Ferrari argued. Currently, the six PAEs are lead by a mix of general officers and civilian acquisitions professionals.

“If it's just led by an acquisition executive, then you're going to have the same problem that the Army always has, which is an acquisition executive's leading something, not a warfighter,” he said.

There are, though, some battlefield lessons the U.S. military can incorporate, Bondar said, to be able to work with the bureaucracy of a new command without making new technology acquisition so rigid.

“There's a lot of conversation about feedback loop, and it actually makes sense because…when every commander or every unit, whoever is buying drones, has the direct phone number of the manufacturer, they can immediately call and say what should be improved, what didn't work,” she said. “Because for them, giving this feedback, it's not some sort of obligation or part of procedure—they really feel this need because their lives depend on this, and the lives of their people.”

The Army has its own version of this approach, once called Transformation-in-Contact and now dubbed Continuous Transformation, in which they invite vendors out to field exercises to get live feedback on their products.

The key to bringing it all together will be the funding, Ferrari said, which would have to come from this year’s proposed reconciliation bill. Otherwise, the service will be forced to wait until fiscal year 2028 to get into a budget.

The service is expected to provide more details about FASCOM’s genesis at the upcoming AUSA annual symposium in Washington D.C., which begins Oct. 12.

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GenAI.mil saw more than 2 million users in one week, top DOD official says

Edward Graham — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 22:00:00 -0400

The Pentagon’s enterprise-wide generative artificial intelligence platform is continuing to see high levels of use across the department, with millions of civilians, contractors and military personnel taking advantage of the service.

In a discussion with Punchbowl News on Wednesday, Defense Department Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer Cameron Stanley said “as of last week, we've had over 2 million people in a week across all three models log in and use AI.”

GenAI.mil, which DOD launched in December, currently hosts three AI models: Google Cloud's Gemini for Government, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Mil and xAI’s Grok for Government. The service provides vetted, internal AI tools to help users with unclassified tasks, such as analyzing information and creating and refining documents.

The department employees roughly 3 million total personnel who can access GenAI.mil.

Stanley called the platform “a huge, a huge win for the department,” adding that he initially thought AI use across the Pentagon “was going to be a harder sell.”

“Before GenAI.mil was rolled out, we had a total of maybe 80,000 folks that were using AI across the entire department in similar deployments,” he said. “The first week that GenAI.mil was released last year, we had over 300,000 people log on.”

Stanley said users were also quick to take advantage of Google Gemini for Government’s Agent Designer tool, which was rolled out on the platform in March and allows approved civilians, contractors and military personnel to create custom AI agents that can help them automate rote tasks.

“Within two weeks [of its deployment], we had over 50,000 agents that people are using,” he said. These aren't complex, robust agents; they're helping people with their daily workflows.”

The latest figures continue to show a rising uptick in DOD use of tools available through GenAI.mil. During an event in July, Stanley said the platform had reached a then-record of 1.7 million users, who had created more than 100,000 custom agents.

Wednesday’s discussion about the Pentagon’s uses of AI comes amid growing concerns from some lawmakers and tech executives about the dangers posed by advanced models, as well as how the capabilities will be utilized moving forward. During a speech at the UN on Tuesday, President Donald Trump voiced his continued opposition to slowing AI development, saying “we’re going to encourage it, not rein it in.”

Stanley similarly argued that “unilateral disarmament is the wrong approach.”

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'Super Intelligence': the president’s new term for AI, explained

John Croxton — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:16:27 -0400

President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a rebranding of the term “artificial intelligence,” saying during the United Nations General Assembly that from now on, it will be called “super intelligence.”

“From this point forward, all of United States’ documents, and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use the much more accurate term, ‘super,’ as opposed to ‘artificial’,” he said.

Though the rebrand may have been a surprise to many, superintelligence is already an established term in AI literature. It was popularized in philosopher Nick Bostrom’s 2014 bestseller Superintelligence, which defines the term as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.” Artificial superintelligence, or ASI, thus refers to future AI systems that could be much smarter than humans, and contrasts with the weaker forms of AI that exist today.

ASI is a step beyond AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which OpenAI defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” By this definition, today’s AI isn’t AGI yet, much less ASI, since we can’t yet hire AI as a reliable virtual employee.

Some experts dislike the term superintelligence, or question whether it’s a coherent concept. In the influential 2025 paper “AI as Normal Technology,” authors Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan write, “We do not think there is a useful sense of the term ‘intelligence’ in which AI is more intelligent than people acting with the help of AI.”

But others say the possible renaming contributes to an ongoing conversation about AI’s growing abilities.

“‘Super’ does align well with the fact that AI is exceeding human capabilities in a growing range of tasks and by increasing margins, which can have distinct national security implications beyond simply matching human performance,” said Caleb Withers, a research associate for the Technology and Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

For example, in early September, OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem, one of the most important open problems in math.

As AI becomes more capable, it has grown increasingly central to the U.S.-China relationship. Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping are slated to meet this week to discuss trade and AI issues. Bostrom, who has warned of the dangers of fully superintelligent AI systems, said an all-out AI race increases the risk that the technology gets out of control. “If competitors are convinced that coming second [in the AI race] means the total loss of everything they care about, they will take whatever risk necessary to bypass their rivals,” he said.

Trump reportedly worries that an AI slowdown could cause a market crash, and sees “super intelligence” as a critical sector for America to stay ahead of China. “Whoever wins AI, you have to remember this, and now I say, whoever wins SI, whoever wins super intelligence, wins. That’s the group that wins.”

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NATO’s thumbs-up for AWS shows Europe still needs America

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:47:35 -0400

Amazon Web Services has become the first cloud provider cleared to handle sensitive information for all NATO members, underscoring that an increasingly independent Europe still relies on capabilities made in America, and suggesting that it's not as hard for U.S. firms to compete there as the White House insists.

The company announced on Tuesday that it has received alliance approval to handle information at the NATO RESTRICTED level, which is not classified but requires safeguarding.

As European militaries fuse radar, satellite, and even acoustic information to more easily detect Russian drones and other threats, NATO-approved rapid data and information sharing is critical.

AWS, which already handles sensitive military and intelligence data for many NATO members, beat its competitors—primarily from other U.S. cloud providers such as Microsoft—to win the alliance’s first blanket approval. That’s the result of “a sustained, multi-year effort,” David Appel, acting vice president of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS, said in the company’s Tuesday statement, AWS worked with Spain’s National Cryptographic Centre, or CCN, to test its services against NATO security directives; CCN then shared its findings to all member states.

The announcement also reflects a broad, evolving NATO digital transformation strategy. The alliance is eager to incorporate more commercial information technology into its coordination and planning. And AWS remains the biggest commercial cloud operator in Europe, with nine data-center clusters, or regions, across Europe, including the U.K.

“Strengthening NATO’s ability to securely leverage commercial technology is key to building a more resilient and agile Alliance,” according to Dylan Browne, general manager of the NATO Communications and Information Agency, or NCIA, as quoted in Amazon’s statement.

While NATO members and AWS cloud users across Europe will be able to share their data more easily, they will also be able to retain control over it. The 2024 European Union Data Act requires cloud providers to protect EU data from other governments, including the United States. Practically speaking, that means housing data on European soil beyond the reach of U.S. court orders, although that’s not an explicit requirement of the Act. AWS, like Microsoft and other enterprise cloud providers, has been investing in European versions of its cloud stacks to meet those Data Act requirements.

Tuesday’s announcement shows both that U.S. technology is still a core feature of NATO military capability and that it is central to NATO’s future plans. But it also shows that European Union regulations on data storage aren’t a challenge to the success of U.S. cloud companies across Europe, even though White House rhetoric and executive orders suggest otherwise.

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Will airmen trust AI? The Air Force’s future plans depend on it

Patrick Tucker — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—As Air Force leaders prepare to hand AI more decision-making power in the years ahead, they're also working to get airmen comfortable with that.

“A little bit scary, but we need to lean into it,” Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said at the Air and Space Association’s Air, Space & Cyber conference this week. “Autonomy is one of, if not the key technology enabling cost-effective combat power.”

Although Meink didn’t say so explicitly, “leaning in” will require new thinking on building trust between human airmen and the AI assistants, chatbots, and autonomous drones that will surround them. But other parts of the Air Force have spent a lot of time thinking about it, especially as the service works to field 500 highly-autonomous collaborative combat aircraft, or CCAs, by 2032.

“There’s a trust and autonomy question,” said Michael Gregg, director of aerospace systems at the Air Force Research Laboratory. “We have psychologists and behavioral scientists in our 711th Human Performance Wing that are actually studying this problem: How do you actually team machines with humans to make the human really really good at what they do and aid their decision-making? That is the future.”

And for some missions, like protecting air bases from drone attacks, the Air Force is exploring the possibility of not augmenting but replacing human decision-making. The waves of drones striking Ukrainian cities and ravaging U.S. bases in the Middle East have service leaders exploring the use of agents—AI tools that can take action—to work the process of obtaining approvals to launch counter-attacks.

That will require humans to define acceptable risk for allowing AI agents to make decisions.

“There is an increased push on how we use agents and agentic workflow into everything from fires to our back-office activities, and like you'll see a lot more of that coming this year,” said Ben Van Roo, the CEO of Legion Intelligence, a company that develops agentic AI agents for national-security purposes.

The question of AI directing “fires” is controversial, as the term suggests allowing a software program to launch a missile, fire a gun, or launch a deadly weapon. While there are some exceptions, military doctrine states a strong preference for meaningful human control over potentially lethal effects.

But cyber, directed energy, and other non-lethal technologies are giving the military more fires it might deploy without human oversight, said Mike Hiatt, the chief technology officer at Epirus, a company that makes microwave and other directed-energy counter-drone defenses.

“If you can have an option that has lower collateral effects and no collateral damage, you know, which is what the directed-energy weapons offer, you start to be able to change your risk calculation. You start to be able to make decisions where you say ‘OK, I'm a little more comfortable with putting this part of the system on a fully autonomous mode,” Hiatt said.

Van Roo said the decision processes to allow autonomous cyberattacks or nonlethal effects could eventually be accelerated with AI, or even automated completely.

“We're really still in the infancy right now of how we think about where we're going to use agents, what are we going to allow them to decide on? How do they work their way into our tactics, techniques, and procedures, into our doctrine?” he said.

Getting leaders and operators to be comfortable with AI agents will require new doctrine, training, and permissions, as well as a high degree of confidence that AI tools will perform in predictable ways.

“This is going to happen right now in front of us before AI and killer robots take over the world,” he said.

This year’s conference occurred amid a national debate over the dangers of AI, how it should be regulated, and who should decide.

The summer’s disclosures by Anthropic and OpenAI of surprising and dangerous model behavior were followed on Sept. 9 by the high-profile resignation of an Anthropic engineer who claimed a 10-percent probability that AI “could kill all humans.” The following day, representatives of those companies and Google intensified efforts to create an industry-safety body while signaling openness to Congressional action. But regulation is opposed by President Donald Trump, who posted this week, “The only control or ‘guardrail’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

Pentagon leaders’ willingness to accept AI may stem from the fact that their current systems failed to keep key U.S. bases safe. But it may also reflect several years of Defense Department efforts to grapple with concerns about intent, alignment, and safe use that frontier AI labs are just now grappling with. Since 2019, the military has had a list of ethical principles to guide AI development, experimentation and use. It also reviews processes, experiments, and testing procedures for new technology, including software and, of course, the most dangerous weapons on Earth.

But the pace of AI advancement is quickly changing concepts of how to develop and test weapons. Ryan Tseng, president and co-founder of Shield AI, told the crowd at AFA that his company had worked with Ukrainians to improve the strike capability of one of the company’s drone weapons by 70 percent through “advanced autonomous behaviors.”

If autonomous drones are the signature feature of the war in Ukraine, many military officials expect the next conflict to be defined by rapid collaboration between agents, humans, and drones that will speed up strikes and counter-strikes. That will require continuous evolution on building trust between humans and AI entities as well.

“When we think about a future that's going to have very large-scale deployments of systems that need to interoperate with each other,” said Tseng. “It's a much larger decision space. A lot more things can happen.”

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Air Force contemplates unmanned tankers

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:20:29 -0400

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—With an eye on the Navy’s progress toward an unmanned aerial tanker, Air Force planners are asking questions about their own future tanker fleet.

“Thinking beyond the current KC-46 buy and the program extension. Whatever that next tanker looks like—our advanced tanker system—it's got to be connected. It's got to be able to defend itself. But it begs the question: Does it need to be manned? Could it be optionally manned, or could it be autonomous, or is there a family of solutions maybe that would answer that question?” Lt. Gen. Daniel Tulley, who leads Air Mobility Command, told reporters at the Air, Space, & Cyber 2026 conference.

The Air Force is currently buying Boeing KC-46 Pegasus tankers and spent $12 million to explore buying a new tanker this year. But it zeroed out funding to continue those explorations in the 2027 budget request and is asking instead for $13 million for “advanced tanker systems.”

Tulley said the Navy’s work on the Boeing MQ-25 Stingray suggests that his own service might eventually not need manned tankers. The Navy announced on Thursday that the MQ-25, which first flew earlier this year, has received approval to enter low-rate production. The service also ordered three more aircraft, bringing its total to 14.

“I do not believe that it has to be manned, a future air-refueling solution,” he said. “But then, how do we, the U.S. Air Force, bring that to bear in scope, scale, and range?”

A drone tanker for the Air Force would need to be a very large aircraft with the capacity for fuel and the ability to fly for a long time. The KC-46, for example, can fly nearly 7,400 miles and carry more than a thousand tons of fuel. The MQ-25 can fly about 500 miles and carry up to 7.5 tons of fuel.

“An optionally manned or an unmanned tanker at the ranges we need it to operate at is a very large aircraft. And we're not yet to where we're employing fully autonomous large aircraft,” Tulley said.

“Just about any large aircraft these days made by Boeing can take itself off with very little help, can fly on a programmed route and pretty much land itself on autopilot, bring itself to a stop on the runway. But we don't employ it that way with a system that's controlling it and then taxiing it in and making it a part of a more effective, broader system.”

One maker of autonomous-aircraft control systems said the vision of autonomy for large aircraft was getting clearer. And while the technology isn’t there yet, there’s progress, said Matthew George, CEO of Merlin Labs.

“We’re the furthest along in the world on making that real—in our opinion,” said Matthew George, CEO of Merlin Labs. “So we're going to be implementing autonomy on the C-130J, which is the same general size class” as the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker.

“And the advantage with those aircraft is you can start to implement autonomy still with human crews aboard, and you can supplement those human crews in a way that's pretty helpful. That's a way that you can start to chip away at that without actually going fully to the unmanned tanker right away,” George said. “The goal is that the unmanned tanker is ready, and the autonomy ends up being ready at the same time.”

George agreed with Tulley’s point that many aircraft can somewhat fly themselves, but there are instances, such as emergency situations, when a human needs to make a decision.

“What's really hard is those edge cases and those emergencies—or those things where there are decisions to be made. So, for instance, if you're going to a destination and then there's weather in between, how do you get around the weather?” he said.

And beyond technology, there are policy challenges.

“None of this matters unless it's certified and safe. So for us, getting certification done is important, and that's what we're working really closely with the Air Force on this year,” George said. “We're taking that [autonomous pilot] brain and putting it onto the C-130J. And as far as we know, that's going to be the first time autonomy fully takes control of an operational U.S. Air Force aircraft.”

No date was provided for when that flight will occur, but the company’s technology completed a critical design review, George said.

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NGA official takes top AI job at Cyber Command

Edward Graham — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:00:00 -0400

U.S. Cyber Command, the Pentagon’s combatant command responsible for planning and conducting military cyberspace operations, has a new artificial intelligence lead, a spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday.

“U.S. Cyber Command welcomes Rear Adm. Ronzelle Green as the Command’s new Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer and thanks Brig. Gen. Reid Novotny for his leadership and service,” a representative for the combatant command told Nextgov/FCW.

Green, who has worked at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for roughly three years — most recently as its director of geospatial intelligence innovation and research — is Cyber Command’s second-ever AI head. Novotny was the first official tapped for the position last November and served in a dual role as CAIO and as cyber force generation lead for the Pentagon.

The Record first reported the news of Green’s new role.

In a LinkedIn post last year announcing his new position, Novotny said “part of my role is embracing AI because like anything new, it is not the technology but yet the culture that is difficult to change.”

Novotny further outlined his approach to adopting AI during an April conversation with Axios, saying that he was solely focused on providing Cyber Command’s personnel with the best AI capabilities, regardless of their origin.

"To survive anywhere, just in case our operators want an open-source, made-in-China model or something very boutique, we have to create the infrastructure and that ability to be agile — no politics,” he said at the time.

In addition to his prior work at NGA, Green also brings more than 30 years of IT experience in the private sector and within intelligence community agencies to his new role as Cyber Command’s CAIO. He previously served as the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency’s chief information officer from 2020 until 2022, and has held roles within the Pentagon and National Counterterrorism Center throughout his career. Green is also a senior officer with the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve.

Cyber Command is led by Gen. Joshua Rudd, who also serves as head of the National Security Agency in a dual-hatted leadership role. NSA and Cyber Command, however, have taken somewhat differing approaches in their adoption of and focus on AI.

Under Rudd’s watch, NSA is in the process of a major reorganization that would establish five mission centers focused on AI, China, cybersecurity, combat support and global intelligence. The planned creation of the AI-focused center comes after NSA officials have voiced support in recent months for the use of more AI tools to bolster the agency's cyber and intelligence analysis operations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is the US pushback?

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

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

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

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

At least when it’s made by foreigners.

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

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‘Digital employees’ are coming to the Defense Logistics Agency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DLA is also working to clean up its datasets.

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

‘AI is the new gunpowder’

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

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

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

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

A legacy of change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simerly expressed pride in his DLA team.

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

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

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

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

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

The era of AI bioweapons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Maven is becoming the Pentagon’s everything app

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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NSA wants AI to help analysts sift vast data troves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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USAF speed up Reaper replacement after heavy losses in Iran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Niemi said this reflects lessons from past and ongoing wars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The US military gets its own ChatGPT today

Patrick Tucker — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Updated: 5:29 p.m.

The Pentagon’s main portal for AI tools now offers ChatGPT and Grok for Government alongside Google Gemini.

A Defense Department official said the OpenAI product, dubbed ChatGPT Mil, would bring new strengths to GenAI.mil, where troops and defense civilians can use generative-AI tools to work on controlled, unclassified information, or CUI.

“Gemini, I like for search functionality or scraping certain sources. Chat for more, like, text-based work,” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak before the official announcement on Monday. “We want to have access to all these different models, so people, if they prefer one for a certain task, they can use it.”

Work began in February to create a version of ChatGPT that could be used for CUI. In June, an OpenAI official said they believed it would be deployed in “early July.”

A DOD press release slated for release today said ChatGPT Mil would bring “a familiar commercial experience into the Department’s secure environment, tailored to warfighter needs...ChatGPT Mil supports document-heavy unclassified work across the Department, including planning, policy, logistics, and administration, and is built for scale to support more than 3 million Department personnel. This deployment accelerates routine tasks and frees up time for more critical projects across the Joint Force.”

One OpenAI official, who requested anonymity to speak before the official announcement, offered ideas for how the military might use its special version of ChatGPT. Operators at Northern Command might use it to streamline planning, resource allocation, or disaster response with FEMA or other parts of the federal government. Or the Joint Staff’s logistics directorate might use it to simplify paperwork and documentation. The official also suggested that logisticians at combatant commands “would be a natural audience, with uses such as reconciling supply and maintenance updates, drafting transportation requirements.”

In background talks, OpenAI and Pentagon officials said they don’t want to use models on the GenAI.mil platform for combat. The Pentagon has argued that they should be able to use AI products as they like, a sticking point in disagreements between the department and AI model maker Anthropic. And OpenAI has said that ChatGPT’s need for connectivity and large amounts of computing power doesn’t make it a good fit for combat anyway. The department is continually testing and seeking a number of other tools for those types of operations and actions.

Customized for security

Like the GenAI.mil version of Gemini, the military version of ChatGPT has additional security functions built in.

“When you're dealing with CUI within the department, it's obvious this is stuff that cannot be on a commercial model. We have to build it in a separate sort of environment. So it's engineered in a way to be separate from the commercial model,” said the defense official.

Prepping a frontier model for use on GenAI.mil is an “arduous” process, said one former defense official who was involved in such tests. It requires building out the “environment”—that is, finding the compute resources, keeping track of the users and their unique security conditions, compiling the data that the model will use, and anticipating the sorts of requests that users may have.

“Think of having to pass security guardrails for both DISA [Defense Information Systems Agency] and the NSA,” the former defense official said.

As DISA builds the environment, NSA looks for ways that attackers might invade it—or the model might escape it, the official said.

The Pentagon launched GenAI.mil on Dec. 9 with one tool: Google’s Gemini. Around the same time, Pentagon officials signed an agreement to bring Elon Musk’s xAI tool to the platform, but no formal deployment has since been announced. On Monday, the Pentagon announced that Grok for Government, an AI product of Musk's Starshield AI, was now available on GenAI.mil.

Joe Larson, who leads OpenAI’s government sales, said, “ChatGPT on GenAI.mil will make unclassified work throughout the Department more efficient, freeing up time and resources so DoD personnel can focus on the mission. This integration is grounded in our national security principles, pairing access to powerful tools with clear safeguards, meaningful human judgment, and accountability for high-stakes decisions. We’re excited to see what the Department’s extraordinary workforce builds with it.”

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Can AI help the Marines simplify sustainment in the Pacific?

Jennifer Hlad — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:50:49 -0400

When a Marine planner is trying to determine whether a deployed unit has everything it needs, they must query several separate databases while cross-referencing supply levels, maintenance records, and more to create a spreadsheet. Marine Corps Forces, Pacific, is hoping an AI-powered logistics platform can make that process much faster and easier.

Defense tech company Tagup on Thursday announced a modification to its $2.1 million Small Business Innovation Research contract that will extend the use of its Manifest platform to certain theater sustainment cases in support of MARFORPAC. The platform is already being used by a handful of Marine units at the tactical and operational levels—and the company said its application in Marine medical logistics has resulted in a 25 percent reduction in purchasing costs and a 30 percent reduction in materiel handled, “with no compromise to readiness.”

Jon Garrity, CEO and co-founder of Tagup, said Manifest pulls from a variety of data sources to help Marines decide “what materiel, what resources do you posture where and when, and ultimately tying it back to measures of output or outcomes.”

On the supply side, it looks at the industrial base, he said. “We loaded over 4 million vendors in platform, we’ve got over 16 million parts represented. What are the lead times for each of those? How do we think about that? What are the locations of those vendors? What are the sources of supply?…and then the demand side is also, of course, critical.”

Historically, Garrity said, “at a theater level, a lot of this analysis was done at a headquarters level, not driven from the micro data. Imagine, for ground vehicles, you have every single maintenance action that’s ever been taken....That’s not used, generally speaking, to build theater-level [courses of action], and so that’s now the opportunities. Hey, we have technology and capability, AI capabilities that allow us to take the micro data, every single service request, every bit of inventory on the demand side, and then connect it to the supply side. What do we have? Where is it? Where’s the industrial base to be able to connect the two?”

Sustaining forces that are spread across the vast Indo-Pacific is a challenge, a MARFORPAC spokesperson told Defense One via email. “Marine units are highly dispersed, which intensifies standard logistics friction points.”

To overcome that challenge, the command “is testing how a unified logistics decision-support tool might automate” the data aggregation that could otherwise take several days of work, “to see if the software can ingest those disparate data streams and generate comparative courses of action—quantifying the impacts on readiness, cost, and operational risk—in near real-time or a matter of hours.”

Garrity said Manifest can also help Marines better use the materiel they send forward, “so as a result, you’re maintaining higher levels of readiness for the end items that that materiel supports, you’re… making better use of the space available on a [deployed ship], and you’re typing up less capital, less cash, in the materiel that’s not being used effectively.”

The platform, which the company calls “an AI-powered multidimensional logistics decision engine” has a conversational AI interface called Argus that allows users to ask questions “and explore scenarios in plain language.”

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Privacy-focused communication app aims for military customers and beyond

Patrick Tucker — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:39:29 -0400

HONOLULU—A new encryption-based app, Kibu, available to U.S. military operators and foreign military partners, could change the way militaries and consumers communicate.

Civilian and government officials are accustomed to using their own phones and tend to rely on commercial messaging apps, even when they shouldn’t. For example, U.S. operators in Poland and elsewhere have communicated with Ukrainian counterparts over the popular communication app Signal, because of its wide adoption and availability on regular consumer phones.

But those conversations—particularly those involving U.S. special operators—may occur over networks that the U.S. military doesn’t own, so-called dirty networks. This is because they often conduct operations with allied militaries that don’t have access to U.S. top-secret communications platforms or equipment, a challenge that participants at a recent irregular warfare symposium here highlighted across multiple discussions.

“Government executives, they tend to be using their personal devices. They're on Signal,” Eftychis Gregos Mourginakis, co-founder of secure messaging app Kibu, told Defense One during the Global SOF Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium.

But there’s no guarantee that the individual on the other end of the phone is the right person, or even a person at all, he said. “How [do State Department officials] trust that when they're talking to their British compatriot, that it’s actually that person? Like, how do you fill that gap? You can't do it with voice. You can't do it on video.”

Recent incidents involving AI agents posing as humans have highlighted the growing trend—one that a current military official who tracks adversary disinformation campaigns said is a big problem, especially for the military and intelligence communities.

“AI has made deception scalable. We’re no longer just fighting phishing emails, we're fighting synthetic voices, cloned faces, and entire fake identities convincing enough to fool the people who know the real person best,” the official said.

A small number of U.S. special operators are now testing Kibu, which uses encryption and other verification features to make sure that person—or AI agent—you’re talking to is who they say they are. That includes not just device-to-device encryption, but also biometric authentication and, for military members, can include other forms of identification as well. Organizations can add their own, such as the CAC card requirement. The app even has special passcodes in case the user has their own phone or device but is in a situation where someone else is trying to access it against their will.

The app isn’t tied to a device SIM card, phone number, or even PIN number. And different organizations can host it in different cloud environments. “So if an organization basically signs an agreement with us, all of their end users on this platform are totally air-gapped,” Mourginakis said.

And even as the military faces the challenge of keeping adversary AI agents out of sensitive conversations, they also want to use more AI under what the military calls “meaningful human control.”

Mourginakis said the app allows individuals to build their own agents within the environment to communicate with unmanned weapons but still report back to the human operator.

“The identity can look like a human identity, but it can be sandboxed by the human users in that space. They need to biometrically prove it,” he said. “You can see we have a decision quorum. So if I need in this group to authorize certain things, say a certain number of these people need to approve these actions, here they can communicate about it, they can talk about it, they can share the intelligence they need, and then go, hey, yeah, I'm good to do this. Commit my decision. Thumbs up. It's approved.”

While military members face the most immediate need for that sort of verification, Mourginakis said, secure communication is a growing priority for civilians as well.

He sees a shift away from tech products that monetize consumers’ data and push sharing of content toward companies that prioritize privacy.

“Now because of that and the rise of AI slop, the biggest premium service is going to be privacy, trust, security as a service.”

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