Defense One - Science & Tech

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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US military bought commercial satellite images of alleged narco airstrips, Chinese naval fleet

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 16:54:02 -0400

The U.S. military purchased satellite images that identified Chinese aircraft carrier positions and Ecuadorian airstrips allegedly used for drug trafficking, a new report from the Government Accountability Office revealed. But despite those and other examples of prior use, the Space Force still hasn’t fully embraced commercial intelligence, the watchdog said.

“Some Space Force officials told GAO about challenges they have faced related to purchasing and using commercial space data such as licensing costs, perceived use restrictions, and concerns over long-term access to the data,” the report said. “These challenges led to hesitation to purchase and use commercial data among these potential users.”

The Space Force’s Joint Commercial Operations Cell, the group that buys the majority of the service’s data, spent nearly $77 million between 2023 and 2025 on commercial space services through the Global Data Marketplace, an e-commerce site used by the military for unclassified images. The JCO has a working group to discuss purchases being made by the U.S. government, but Space Force officials aren’t included in that group, according to the report. That’s led to the hesitations and confusion about purchasing intelligence on the platform, the GAO said.

“This working group meets monthly and coordinates purchases. GAO found that many of the challenges reported by Space Force officials could have been addressed with discussions at the working group, but the Space Force officials were not part of the working group and information about the working group is not widely available,” the watchdog report said.

The GAO recommended that Air Force Secretary Troy Meink, who formerly served as principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, increase communication and awareness of the working group. The Defense Department concurred with the watchdog’s findings in a June 18 response.

“Increased communication about the working group could lead to additional Space Force and other officials engaging in discussions that could address perceived issues and improve the use of commercial space data and services for national security purposes,” the GAO report said.

The Space Force will need to rely on those commercial assets for future fights, according to the GAO. As adversary counterspace capabilities grow, the Defense Department needs private satellite imagery to fill in blind spots and decrease risk to its own space assets.

“Threats to DoD’s space assets from strategic competitors have grown substantially in number and intensity,” the GAO report said. “DoD is working to integrate commercial space solutions, such as data and services, to mitigate these threats as well as enhance its capabilities.”

Jon Ludwigson, GAO’s contracting and national security acquisitions director, said in a phone interview on Thursday afternoon that there are positives to using those commercial systems in tandem with the military’s highly-classified spy satellites.

“We're not going to use commercial data for everything, but if we can use it for some things, it reduces the pressure on the exquisite systems to do things,” Ludwigson said. “It also gives us the opportunity to cue others that we're watching in ways that don't require us to disclose that we're using exquisite systems.”

The National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence agency which builds and launches spy satellites, purchased commercial electro-optical imagery from Vantor, Planet Labs, and BlackSky through its $4 billion Electro-Optical Commercial Layer contract awarded in 2022, according to GAO.

Images purchased by NRO in 2024 showed “changes in Chinese aircraft carriers and other ships’ locations over time, and identify the types of ships” at Sanya Naval Base in Hainan province.

That same year, JCO purchased images that “helped the U.S. Southern Command identify possible clandestine airstrips in Ecuador.” The U.S. government shared the intelligence, which led the Ecuadorian government “to further investigate and disable the airstrips that were likely used by narcotraffickers,” GAO reported.

Identifying those sites and sharing their locations with Ecuador is an example of how governments can benefit from the unclassified imagery, Ludwigson said. It also protects and frees up use of the military’s most crucial spy satellites.

“When we go to share stuff that's coming off an exquisite system, that image is, itself, classified,” he said. “So, if we can use commercial imagery for those conversations with the Ecuadorian government or other governments to say, ‘Hey, look at this. This is what we think it is, and this is what we are concerned about,’ it’'s a commercial asset, then we haven't given up anything about our exquisite assets.”

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NSA wants access to ‘all’ AI models, top official says

David DiMolfetta — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:33:00 -0400

The National Security Agency wants access to artificial intelligence models across the commercial market and is holding extensive discussions with leading developers as it moves to carry out new White House directives on the technology, the agency’s deputy director said Thursday.

“We want access to all the models, and we’re going to take advantage of that,” Tim Kosiba said on a panel at an Intelligence and National Security event in Bethesda, Maryland.

Kosiba said NSA has used AI in various forms for decades, but the rapidly improving capabilities of newer systems are driving a more aggressive effort to obtain and deploy the fast-evolving technology.

“The transformative change that we see today is what these models can actually do,” he said.

The remarks offer one of the clearest public indications that NSA is actively engaging major AI developers as it assumes a central role in the government’s new framework for evaluating advanced models. They also follow months of internal deliberations among officials regarding the role the U.S. intelligence community’s primary signals intelligence and cyber organization should play in advancing U.S. AI competitiveness.

“There are a lot of conversations happening amongst industry, especially the frontier model companies,” Kosiba said. He didn’t identify the companies involved, say which models NSA currently uses or disclose whether any developer has provided the agency with access to an unreleased system.

The term “access” may cover several different arrangements. NSA could use a model through a company-controlled service, deploy a version inside a government environment or receive access for security testing of classified networks.

The conversations are occurring as NSA helps 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 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. It explicitly prohibits the creation of a mandatory government licensing or approval process for new AI models.

NSA’s director is responsible for deciding which systems meet the threshold for a “covered frontier model,” in consultation with the Office of the National Cyber Director, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other government offices.

A related national security directive issued in June instructed intelligence and defense agencies to form “deep, proactive partnerships” with industry and make the most advanced models available to national security personnel without delay. It also encouraged the government to avoid becoming dependent on a single company by obtaining technology from a diverse group of suppliers.

Kosiba’s comments didn’t establish that the voluntary pre-release program is fully operational or that companies have begun providing models through it. The White House told major developers earlier this month that open-weight models would not be included in the testing program. Unlike closed systems controlled by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, open-weight models make their underlying settings available for others to download and modify.

Government access to advanced AI has expanded. OpenAI’s latest GPT-5.6 models became available to federal customers this month through its FedRAMP-authorized enterprise service after their public release in July.

The push for broad access comes as the Defense Department remains locked in a legal and policy dispute with Anthropic over restrictions the company placed on certain military uses of its models. The Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after the company declined to relax some of those safeguards, prompting a lawsuit in which a federal judge temporarily blocked parts of the government’s action.

The NSA has gotten carveouts with the company, and is already using versions of Anthropic’s advanced Mythos model on an experimental basis, according to reporting from The New York Times earlier this month. Current and former officials told the newspaper that the agency is using the technology to test defenses protecting U.S. military networks and evaluate its ability to identify weaknesses in networks belonging to China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.

Parts of NSA temporarily lost access to Anthropic’s Mythos 5 amid an export control dispute between the company and the Trump administration, demonstrating how government access to commercially controlled systems can be affected by policy decisions outside the agency. The administration has subsequently lifted the restrictions that had affected access.

AI-enabled cyber risks have become an increasing flashpoint in recent months after Anthropic unveiled its first version of Mythos, an advanced model it withheld from public release because of concerns that its ability to find and exploit previously unknown software vulnerabilities could be misused.

Since then, Anthropic, OpenAI and other developers have introduced a growing family of models with similar capabilities, forcing policymakers to consider how to test the systems, control access to them and harness their abilities for cyberdefense without giving attackers the same advantage.

As NSA pushes to adopt AI faster, Kosiba said humans will remain responsible for checking that its use complies with surveillance laws and the agency’s internal rules.

“What the models are putting out, how we’re leveraging technology today, will always require that human to double-, triple-check and make sure we are in complete compliance with the law,” he said.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to add additional context from New York Times reporting.

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What Trump’s tech strategy means for the military, deterring China, and the future of AI

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 03:44:46 -0400

The newest White House tech strategy pushes faster development of emerging technologies for the military, gives defense innovators more room to experiment, and will broaden the federal market for young defense tech startups. But it also doubles down on a particular approach to developing AI—one that favors a handful of well-connected U.S. tech companies at the expense of other innovative approaches. That could benefit China and slow the U.S. military from getting the tools commanders actually want.

Here’s a breakdown of the winners and losers.

Winners: swarms, deployed AI, faster military technology

The strategy puts a big emphasis on new, tech-driven approaches to warfare, particularly the use of drones and even drone swarms alongside manned and legacy assets. Specifically, it calls for “optimal combinations of lower-cost (and sometimes lower-tech or attritable) platforms that can be deployed in larger numbers and complement more limited numbers of sophisticated platforms.”

Over the last decade, efforts to field autonomous aircraft alongside fighter jets or ships, for instance, have been uneven at best—even when the Pentagon changed its talking points on the necessity for large numbers of low-cost drones—constrained by programs' internal buying policies and previous commitments to other programs' investments. The Replicator program provides a vivid example, hailed as an essential pathfinder but receiving only $1 billion in funding.

The new strategy sets specific “priority areas” for new military research and spending: undersea, space, and AI and autonomy. These priorities are the most relevant to “deterrence in the Indo-Pacific”—as in, preventing China from launching a major conflict. Within those priority areas, it lists “multi-agent systems and swarm intelligence” and various uses of autonomy, from robotics to command and control, as “critical.”

The strategy also takes square aim at policies and practices that slow down military buying of new technologies. Building off other executive orders, it pushes Pentagon buyers to bypass traditional acquisitions in favor of a “mix” of contract types, such as performance-based contracts and other transaction authorities, or OTAs. It also resets the tone for military purchasing toward “faster non-traditional approaches that may involve higher risk but offer high potential reward,” something that commanders, younger defense tech leaders, and even lawmakers have long pushed for.

Perhaps most importantly, it also takes steps to actually grow the market for younger defense tech players beyond just the military. It takes aim at foreign military sales rules and export controls that hobble the sale of much defense tech to allies. That will be especially important for newer defense companies trying to secure early-stage investment to survive. And it calls for other federal agencies to build “streamlined pathways” for smaller companies to at least get their foot in the door, even via partnerships that don’t offer young companies much more than access to federal infrastructure, such as “Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) and Agreements for Commercializing Technology (ACTs).”

Losers: open weights, small AI

While the strategy champions smaller, more innovative players in defense, it also weighs in on the debate about what the future of AI should look like and comes down on the side of Big Tech companies that are pushing a specific, energy-intensive, and deeply unpopular future of AI over emerging strategies favored increasingly by researchers. China will benefit from the oversight, Michael Schiffer, a partner at Scalare Advisors and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia, wrote on Tuesday for Just Security.

In its section on critical technologies for support, the strategy lists “Foundation models, including large language, multimodal, and world systems.” The section also includes niche tech areas like brain-computer interfaces but omits entirely open-weight models and open-source software development.

Here’s why that’s important:

Foundation models, such as today’s large language models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, represent just one potential method for building AI tools—one that relies heavily on pushing as much data through as much computational infrastructure as possible to achieve something that looks like “reasoning,” but that’s really just plain old probability calculation.

Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei helped to transform that concept from a research effort into a massive endeavor to acquire computational resources and data as quickly as possible. Amodei explained it simply in a 2023 discussion with Dwarkesh Patel. “It turns out that raw scale—more compute and more data—drives capabilities far more powerfully than complex algorithmic inventions or hand-crafted architectural changes.”

A small handful of frontier AI labs, and their big cloud computer backers, are in a literal race for company survival because there’s only so much power, so many chips to continue to pursue “raw scale.” If, as Amodei says, just having more “more compute” and “more data” means having the best performing models, then whoever has the most of those resources can push out any competitor.

It’s no wonder the AI race has become a concentration of wealth and power, in just a handful of labs with their large cloud compute backers. No wonder, also, that public perception of AI has plummeted: just 18 percent of Americans believe it will be a positive force for the United States, one new poll found. But the foundation model approach does have its fans: large-scale U.S. cloud providers who have invested billions in foundation model labs.

The very way the strategy frames the issue plays to the idea that AI has one future and that winning the AI race or achieving dominance means favoring a handful of players. But it’s also a theme that plays out in many of the White House’s policies and executive orders around AI.

Meanwhile, alternative approaches to building AI are emerging. Rather than race to build more data centers and find more data to throw at the problem of AI, they use parameters that already exist that are freely available, called open weight models, as opposed to closed weights that are protected intellectual property. And they use those in conjunction with alternative architectures that make using those models more energy efficient. Many of these alternative approaches to building AI perform almost as well as what Anthropic and OpenAI are offering, and have the potential to do so at far lower energy costs.

Why it matters to the military

The finite amount of compute power, data, and good will when it comes to AI could become a strategic problem for the U.S. military. If public sentiment undermines congressional and financial support for research and development in the field, officials fear, the country might lose its AI edge to China, which has openly declared its intention to pull ahead.

In the meantime, frontier-AI models also create tactical and operational problems for the militaries that use them. Troops and military units in the field can’t count on the connectivity that tools based on large models need. And in a new report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Jake Steckler writes, “Ukraine’s computational architecture, consisting of Western cloud access, domestic data centers, and forward-deployed compute nodes, is already straining as it integrates more AI into targeting and coordination.”

Open-weight models don’t appear in the new strategy, though it does list niche and far-fetched concepts like brain-computer interfaces as “critical.” That’s a huge oversight and a potential gift to China, argues Schiffer.

“China’s advances in open-weight AI have exposed the limits of a U.S. strategy built too heavily on the idea of denying them access to American technology and American markets,” he said.

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White House S&T strategy calls for new approaches to safeguard US research

Edward Graham — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:20:00 -0400

The Trump administration says the nation’s science and technology research ecosystem needs to embrace “novel security solutions” to ensure the U.S. maintains its global edge, according to a new document publicly released on Monday.

The National Security Science and Technology Strategy published by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy outlines how the U.S. innovation sector should be leveraged and guarded to defend the country. The new document builds off last year’s National Security Strategy, which called, in part, for “protecting the competitiveness of the U.S. economy and bolstering the resilience of the American technology sector.”

To help safeguard the nation’s innovation sector from threats “that could impair U.S. economic and military strength and competitiveness,” the strategy calls for “approaches that protect without inhibiting the productivity and agility of the national security S&T enterprise.”

President Donald Trump previously moved to curtail illicit foreign interference in the nation’s research institutions, most notably through a January 2021 memo that sought to keep adversarial governments from exploiting U.S. science and technology research.

Lawmakers from both parties have also pushed legislation to limit Chinese involvement in federally-funded research projects, and the Pentagon similarly announced on Monday that it called for 30 U.S. academic institutions to review their ties with foreign entities.

But the strategy says research institutions need to take further steps to enhance their threat awareness, including conducting “automated research security vetting” of agency-funded research proposals and performing continuous monitoring of federally-supported projects.

It also calls for “bolstering counter-intelligence support to governmental and non-governmental research centers” — which would give researchers more immediate and timely insights into potential threats—and creating “risk-based review criteria and a repository of sharable information to enhance the efficiency of information collection and sharing among agencies.”

It noted, for instance, that the FBI-led Quantum Information Science and Technology Counterintelligence Protection Team “brings an interagency team of quantum experts and security professionals to fine-tune technology protection and security outreach activities for the quickly evolving quantum R&D community.”

Another section calls for “establishing cybersecurity guidelines for researchers and research institutions,” although it is sparse on the details of what this would look like. The National Science Foundation, for its part, has a research security policy framework that includes some cyber-specific guidance as part of its broader blueprint.

“Given the evolving nature of research security threats, security experts should embrace comprehensive, new, and novel security solutions, particularly where they can be crafted to address unique or nuanced requirements of specific technology fields,” the document said.

The strategy’s implementation section highlights the need to enhance K-12 and higher education training opportunities and bring more skilled talent into the federal workforce—an effort the Trump administration has been undertaking, in part, by prioritizing skills-based hiring over degree requirements.

Notably, however, the strategy references the need to attract more nonimmigrant tech workers to the U.S., which differs from the Trump administration’s prior stance that called for a more restrictive approach.

“The United States will further strengthen its workforce by attracting and retaining top-tier global talent in critical national security S&T fields,” the strategy says. “Agencies will collaborate on using existing authorities to recruit the exquisite talent necessary to ensure the national security S&T Enterprise leads the world in developing and applying these technologies.”

OSTP did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the strategy’s inclusion of the need to attract and retain global talent.

Last year’s National Security Strategy said, in part, that the U.S. “cannot allow meritocracy to be used as a justification to open America’s labor market to the world in the name of finding ‘global talent’ that undercuts American workers.”

Trump issued a proclamation in September 2025 that moved to restrict the number of H-1B visas, saying that the program has harmed American workers. The visas allow U.S. firms to temporarily hire foreign workers, with the tech industry notably using the program to attract nonimmigrant talent. The proclamation attempted to institute a $100,000 H-1B visa fee, although a district court has overturned that mandate.

In addition to calling for the nation’s innovation sector to embrace new security solutions, the strategy said the U.S. needs to speed up its pace of innovation, build up its domestic “technological resilience” and focus its science and technology ecosystem on “maintaining battlefield advantage, countering strategic threats to the homeland, and shaping the competition toward areas of U.S. strength.”

Nextgov/FCW Cyber Reporter David DiMolfetta contributed to this story.

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DARPA funds advancements in quantum networking

Alexandra Kelley — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0400

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is exploring how to scale the reliable transmission of quantum data and pave the way for a viable quantum internet by giving networking networking company Qunnect an award to further deploy networks designed to handle qubit traffic.

Pursuant to the contract, Qunnect is granted new funding to further deploy its Carina quantum networking solution, the company announced on Thursday.

Qubits are naturally more fragile than classical bits, and transmitting them from one node to another has been a persistent problem in scaling a viable quantum network. Carina addresses several outstanding problems in safely transmitting quantum data by operating at room temperature, stabilizing environmental noise, maintaining entanglement during transmission and other engineering challenges.

Qunnect will specifically focus on refining Carina’s polarization compensation nodule, its internal system that helps reduce distortions in data transmission.

“Quantum networking has mostly stayed in the lab for decades because entanglement can be lost as a result of environmental factors like heat, wind and other everyday fiber movement,” Noel Goddard, CEO of Qunnect, told Nextgov/FCW. “Carina is the only commercial product built to cancel that noise out in real time, like noise-cancelling headphones for both buried and aerial fiber. This is one of the keys to Carina distributing entanglement over existing infrastructure instead of requiring purpose-built fiber or being limited to pristine lab environments.”

DARPA declined to comment on the award. Qunnect declined to disclose the exact amount of funding in the contract.

“We made an early commitment to designing instruments that operate on the same infrastructure the world already uses,” Goddard said. “For the past five years, we focused on making quantum networking practical, and we’ve validated it through deployments in cities, and through partnerships with private industry and growing support from government agencies. We know that reliability is what will separate proof-of-concept demonstrations from useful networks that enable tomorrow’s applications.”

Quantum networking has received more attention at the federal level recently as the quantum computing industry looks to reach new levels of maturity and successfully share data between fault-tolerant machines. In 2025, DARPA unveiled its QuANET initiative, which aims to marry components of classical and quantum systems together in a functioning hybrid network.

Goddard said that Qunnect’s award is a standalone Small Business Innovation Research award.

President Donald Trump released an executive order earlier this year focused on advancing quantum information sciences and technology research that specifically focuses on spurring the development of a distributed quantum computing network, tasking agencies including the Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, the National Science Foundation and NASAn to craft and submit five-year roadmaps documenting their efforts to expand quantum networking.

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The lasers are coming, but don’t forget training

Lauren C. Williams — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:12:47 -0400

HUNTSVILLE, Ala.—Lasers and high-powered microwaves will need equal standing to traditional weapons when it comes to the Army’s approach to missile defense, the service’s space and missile-defense chief said. But as battlefield tech is developed and integrated, proper training will be key to keeping soldiers safe.

“Integrating systems like lasers or high-powered microwaves, there's a pretty significant burden of implementing that across training and organizations,” Lt. Gen. John Rafferty, who leads Army Space and Missile Defense Command, told reporters Tuesday at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium.

Rafferty’s top enlisted advisor concurred.

“I know everyone's talking about faster, cheaper—all those things are needed. But what's most important is our soldiers need to be trained on it,” Command Sgt. Maj. Rickey Jackson told reporters Tuesday. “We don't want to assume too much risk in that, because the soldiers are the ones that are going to have to use it and implement it. So I look forward to the rest of this week and hearing from industry and how we can do that, because ultimately our soldiers need it.”

In his keynote, Rafferty said air-defense strategy should balance the use of missiles, which can reach beyond line of sight, and energy weapons, which can be cheaper per round and used for closer ranges.

“We need a more comprehensive missile defeat strategy that focuses on interceptors—equally so on non-kinetic effects, both electronic warfare and directed energy—and the type of targeting [command and control],” on top of the ability to move sensitive data to lower classification levels “and make decisions to engage targets faster,” he said.

After decades of touting directed energy as a weapon of the future, the Pentagon may at last be on the verge of realizing its vision. Nascent programs such as the Army-Navy Joint Laser Weapon System and the Army’s Enduring High Energy Laser, as well as operational systems such as the Navy’s HELIOS drone-dazzler, suggest that directed-energy weapons may soon go mainstream.

The Army tested non-kinetic weapons during a recent test at White Sands. They synced C2 systems to get a clear picture of the battlefield and help soldiers pick the right weapon for the incoming threat, Rafferty said.

“The individual systems worked, right, because they're all systems that exist right now. That wasn't the trick. The trick was integrating them into a command-and-control system to make sense of and then assign effectors against those against those targets. So that, in a nutshell, is a sort of combined-arms approach to missile defeat or or a comprehensive missile-defeat strategy,” Rafferty told reporters.

“I'm not surprised that we could do it, I'm just thrilled that we actually did it, that we decided to integrate multiple C2 systems and figure out how to enable our soldiers to defeat complex threats.”

The Army has leaned forward on adding lasers to its armory through a directed energy program.

But ultimately, the concern isn’t about the Army’s ability to integrate new tech and weapons systems into its operations—it’s training.

“Clearly, there are technical challenges to integrating platforms into command-and-control systems and planning software that helps us to integrate the effects at the right place and time,” Rafferty said. “But in terms of our Army being well-equipped and agile enough to do this, I'm 100-percent confident.”

The challenge comes in making sure there’s an adequate power source, in “maneuvering and supporting” the system, he said.

“It's not about the laser anymore. It’s really about putting it together, packaging it, making it ruggedized, and coming up with the doctrine and the techniques…the sustainment that needs to be done to go from a high-end technological capability to a no-kidding weapons system that’s able to be…usable by 20-year-old sergeants,” Tom Karako, a missile defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Fox News in a recent interview.

That also means the systems have to work in bad weather and austere conditions, and be repairable in the field, he said.

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Rough waters help firm demo ‘expeditionary manufacturing’ aboard warship

Jennifer Hlad — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 02:03:37 -0400

HONOLULU—Heavy seas didn’t stop Firestorm Labs from printing “thousands” of unique parts aboard the USS Essex amphibious assault ship on the way to the Rim of the Pacific naval exercise here, the expeditionary manufacturing company announced this week.

“We were told it was the roughest water off the California coast in the last five years,” Firestorm CEO Dan Magy told Defense One. The company has an exclusive arrangement with HP, which uses a type of 3D printing called multi-jet fusion, “and what we’ve found is that the systems and the machines are quite resilient.”

“We think we’re building a contested logistics solution that is going to be scalable across all branches of the Department of War,” Magy said. “If we’ve seen anything from Ukraine and now from Iran… we need to rethink warfare from the ground up. We are increasingly dealing with contested environments where—you know, look at what just a blockade in one part of the world has caused to the ability to get products out, oil prices. Heaven forbid something like that happened in the South China Sea, where 70 percent of the things we all buy in the world are produced.”

Magy believes their xCell additive manufacturing unit—composed of two 20-foot containers that can go anywhere—"really represents a leap forward in how we're thinking about solving, maintaining legacy systems, but also building attritable systems like drones closer to the need.”

During a tour of the xCell unit used aboard the Essex, Duane Blank, field operations manager for Firestorm, showed off some of the parts printed at sea, including stops made to protect Apache helicopter rotors from scraping against the ship’s non-skid coating.

The nylon composite the company uses for printing works for “everything within the entire spectrum of warfare,” Blank said, from prosthetics to drones to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief items.

Among the items printed while pitching through Sea State 5 were a dozen Squall first-person-view drones, Blank said, which were later used as adversary aircraft during a counter-drone exercise as part of RIMPAC.

The “beauty of 3D printing,” he said, is the “ability to iterate” and get troops what they need “at the point of need.”

Magy said it’s a top concern.

“The No. 1 thing we're hearing from folks across the service is, ‘It's great if you make it in a factory in Alabama or California or Texas. What happens if the thing breaks on the battlefield? I have to put it in a box now for four months.’”

Sustainment wasn’t what the company initially set out to address, he said, “but it has become increasingly important for all of our customers, because there are a number of legacy systems that like, the supply chain just isn’t there anymore. Let alone the supply chain for something in Okinawa or in Bahrain.”

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Can an Alaskan spaceport ease Pentagon’s launch bottleneck?

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:30:13 -0400

Rocket Lab’s announcement that it would launch suborbital rockets from Alaska could ultimately give the Pentagon a much-needed new option for national-security launches, the company and space experts told Defense One.

Last week, the Space Force’s acquisitions arm announced a $266 million, multi-launch contract with the California-based rocket company. That will cover 12 to 18 launches, which will start this year and “primarily take place from a new Rocket Lab location at the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska (PSCA) in Kodiak," the company said.

These missile-defense missions will be handled by the company’s HASTE rocket, a suborbital variant of its Electron.

Both rockets “use the same launch infrastructure so yes, operating out of Alaska naturally opens the door to a broader range of possibilities including orbital launch,” a Rocket Lab spokesperson said. “It’s important to remember too that the core systems, infrastructure, and expertise we build and refine in Alaska aren’t tied to just one location.”

Top Space Force officials and lawmakers are concerned that the Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg bases will be unable to handle the projected increase in military-satellite launches. The Space Force expects to launch more than 100 rockets a year within five years and potentially thousands a year by 2036.

An Arctic national-security launch site would reduce the bottleneck and help the military reach polar orbits, said Clayton Swope, the deputy director of CSIS’ Aerospace Security Project.

“Putting something in Alaska, you kind of get both of those things,” Swope said. “You get this diversification away from the two main launch sites we have, and you are creating a launch site that is more optimized around a different type of use, which is related to the orbit, the inclination.”

The state-owned spaceport where Rocket Lab will host its new launch location boasts “a low population density, manageable air and maritime routes” that would distinguish it from some other launch facilities. But it has hosted just nine orbital missions since it was founded in 1998.

Charles Galbreth, a retired Space Force colonel who directs space studies at the Mitchell Institute, said the Rocket Lab expansion “could potentially be very helpful” for small and medium national-security launches—eventually.

“It's a capacity or a capability waiting for a demand signal,” Galbreth said. “So there's got to be the combination.”

Alaska can be an important addition, yet its isolation will present challenges, said Brian Weeden, who directs civil and commercial policy for the Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy.

“I certainly think there is room for an expansion of different kinds of launch activity in Alaska. I don't think it's going to probably take the place of also standing in other areas,” Weeden said. “You're still going to need power. You're going to need to get rocket fuel up there. You're going to get the payloads transported up there, and that may be a little bit harder to do in a more remote location like Kodiak, as opposed to a place like Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg, where a lot of infrastructure already exists.”

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As AI models break free, White House works with firms on secret safety measures

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:25:04 -0400

No one is saying, officially, what was decided when top frontier AI labs—Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta—met with White House officials on Tuesday to discuss voluntary guidelines for testing new models.

But Democratic lawmakers described the Trump administration's approach to regulation as “ad-hoc and unpredictable,” and said it’s likely to boost global adoption of rival Chinese models at the worst possible time.

Two officials with one of the labs said that Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI submitted a joint draft of the regulation around nine days ago and then began to work with each other and with the White House to find points of agreement. According to the officials, the labs all agreed they should be able to continue A/B testing as part of the process for developing models, and the White House concurred.

Companies that agree to the framework will submit their models to U.S. inspectors to be evaluated for safety for 30 days before those companies can receive federal funding—including from the Defense Department, whose 2027 budget request seeks more than $54 billion for AI companies, according to the officials.

A June White House executive order adds that models from participating companies would get extra intellectual property protection from Chinese competitors or others who might seek to steal secrets.

The White House is not commenting on how it will conduct the inspections. One of the officials said the the Office of Science and Technology Policy is still trying to set testing standards and how bodies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will conduct or design tests.

The murkiness around the policy’s details has angered some top lawmakers. In a Tuesday letter, Senate Democrats ask the White House to “provide an unclassified response, with a classified annex if necessary, clarifying the Administration’s current policy and approach to limiting access to advanced AI models.”

The lawmakers also evinced concern about the models' new abilities to defy easy inspection, scrutiny, and limitation.

“During an internal evaluation [in July] OpenAI models escaped their testing environment and used high-level technical capabilities to compromise a third party’s network without any instructions to take those actions,” the letter reads. “The Federal Government cannot be passive as these capabilities emerge.”

AI’s Jurassic Park moment

Last week, Chinese company Moonshot AI released a new open-weight model, Kimi 3, that performs as well as some top U.S. models and is being offered to consumers around the world at a far lower price.

Lawmakers and others are increasingly worried the United States could fall behind China in a race to develop faster, more efficient, more profitable models and to shape the way global populations use, buy, sell, and even build AI. Open weight models have become a key point of contention.

Anthropic wants more scrutiny of open-weight models and more efforts to curb sales of high-performance chips to China to thwart distillation attacks. But others in the industry are taking a more supportive view of open weights.

A former senior White House official and a former senior defense official with direct knowledge of the discussion said Anthropic pushed for more language in the framework to address open-weight security, but came away disappointed.

Anthropic did not comment for this story.

In recent months, several of the newest AI models have broken out of their virtual testing containers.

Anthropic disclosed the first such incident in April, when an early version of their Mythos model was able to “autonomously write some remarkably sophisticated exploits,” including one that allowed it to escape an isolated testing environment that programmers use to test code for effectiveness and safety before it’s released.

Anthropic pulled the model from general release, but made it available under "Project Glasswing" so the government and a handful of large companies could find and fix vulnerabilities in their software.

The White House responded with an export-control ban on June 12, barring access to the model not just to foreign countries but even foreigners in the United States. That meant that Anthropic’s own researchers, many of whom were born outside of the United States, could not work on the model. The White House reversed the ban on June 30.

In July, tensions around a national AI safety strategy, or lack thereof, grew hotter. Both Anthropic and OpenAI revealed new incidents in which models breached their containment. It came as no surprise to many veteran cybersecurity experts. AI researcher and author Gary Marcus, in 2022, predicted such a possibility on his blog, describing it as an “AI’s Jurassic Park Moment.”

Last week, AWS Chief Security Officer Stephen Schmidt told reporters: “Containers are not security boundaries. I actually have a T-shirt that says that, which I started wearing about three years ago.”

AWS hosts multiple models for users through its Bedrock platform. Schmidt said the AI Mythos era requires a far more vigilant approach to cybersecurity, especially for researchers.

“One of the reasons that we built the virtualization infrastructure for AWS using our own Nitro Hypervisors so many years ago was we realized that containers were not an appropriate security boundary then. The same is true for AI. You cannot use an AI container as a security boundary.”

In March, a group of British researchers calculated the sandbox breakout period for various large language models, which proved very accurate months later.

A follow-on paper published this week by the same group describes how to build better containment environments for the models emerging today.

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Pentagon counterdrone task force has a new AI-powered marketplace

Lauren C. Williams — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:18:13 -0400

The Pentagon’s counterdrone task force awarded Kaizen Laboratories $15 million to build a “two-way” marketplace designed, in part, to make selling tech to foreign militaries easier.

The site was built from a “blank slate” and developed to facilitate the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Sale Fast Lane Initiative, Nikhil Reddy, Kaizen’s co-founder and CEO, told reporters ahead of the announcement.

“We just launched it, and we'll continue to bring on more partner nations, a ton more vendors to the system,” Reddy said.

The AI-backed marketplace has been online for about two weeks, but details of the contract weren’t publicly released until late Monday. The Pentagon awarded Kaizen the contract on May 8 through a rapid acquisition tool called an other transaction agreement.

The new marketplace aims to provide a single point of purchase for the U.S. military and allies and partners, while helping them find the right technology that’s also interoperable. State and local agencies are also being onboarded, Mike Obadal, the Army undersecretary, said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event Thursday.

“Networked air defense, whether it's counter-UAS or ballistic missile, is critical because everyone has to be able to see the same picture,” which can mean sharing or having “commonality” in information and equipment where possible, Obadal said.

The Defense Department, other federal agencies, and certain “foreign governments are able to go on the counter-UAS marketplace, where we have a number of different industrial options. We've got all kinds of AI workflows in there. You can say: ‘Here's the problem I'm trying to solve, and it'll set up a package for you.’”

The platform is particularly helpful with foreign military sales, for which the portal and its Amazon Web Services backbone allows the Pentagon to “start the paperwork for a foreign military partner that immediately becomes a letter of intent or a letter of request,” Obadal said. “The initial ask from a foreign government is, ‘we would like to investigate these capabilities.’ Traditionally, that goes into our FMS, our foreign military sales process, which takes months at best to get to the other end.”

Australia, Poland, Republic of Korea, Romania, and the United Kingdom are currently approved to use the marketplace, which could help the U.S. align its counterdrone tech with their militaries.

“Allowing them access to the pricing, the availability, the capabilities, all on a digital database … And then the backside of that, generating the FMS process and starting that FMS process is incredibly powerful,” Obadal said. “And so now we can come together with an informed discussion on how do we network counter-UAS between our countries, our deployed forces, our partners…That's what we're trying to promote with the use of modern tools like the marketplace.”

Reddy said he wants to make the marketplace the best “on the internet,” with lots of features, such as integrating test data, that he hopes to add in a matter of weeks.

“There's a ton of agentic tooling that we want to build into the platform, discovery, comparison of products…Testing integration so that you purchase an asset and you can immediately see testing and integration data to ensure that compliance is there,” Reddy said. “We've met with logistics leaders across the military that want repairability information and right-to-repair catalogs built into the marketplace. So all of that is coming.”

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How the UK is helping Ukraine hit Russian targets

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:47:09 -0400

A new tech-sharing agreement allowing Ukrainians to make a British-designed radar jammer called Stone Cloak may soon help Ukraine accelerate drone strikes on Russian targets.

Ukraine has been using British-built versions of the digital jammer—about the size of a computer tablet—on long-range strike drones already this year. But the agreement allows the country to mass-produce it themselves so it can be more rapidly scaled across their drone forces.

The British government announced the existence of Stone Cloak for the first time on Saturday as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with the new prime minister at a naval base in Portsmouth. The occasion is the annual Sea Breeze joint exercise. Ukrainian, U.S. and British sailors paid “special attention” to countering Russian air defenses during this year’s Sea Breeze according to Ukraine’s national news agency.

“At this point, we don't know the full details of Stone Cloak, but suffice it to say, the system will likely increase mission effectiveness against some of the Russian air defenses,” Jeffrey Fischer, a retired U.S. Air Force officer, told Defense One via email.

Ukraine uses a variety of electronic warfare systems as part of its drone operations. But the ones provided by partners like the U.K. are often backed by larger research budgets. Operators and developers can also test them in a more controlled environment than the Ukrainian battlefield. But they can emulate the unique electronic warfare aspects of such places–so long as Ukrainian operators are allowed to participate, such as the Hedgehog 2025 exercise in Estonia in which the participating Ukrainian team exposed large gaps in NATO drone warfare concepts. That’s why new technology emerging from joint Ukrainian-allied exercises is a big deal. But the actual sharing of intellectual property related to that technology is more rare.

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham on Monday described Stone Cloak as “the best of homegrown British innovation, and proven on the frontline” of Russia’s war on Ukraine. That frontline has moved back toward Moscow, thanks in small part to British-donated Storm Shadow missiles, which Ukraine has been using to hit targets in occupied territory going back to 2023. However, the United Kingdom never transferred the actual design technology to Ukraine, just the missiles themselves.

The new announcement shows how quickly technology sharing between the two countries has evolved in just three years, as well as the speed of Ukrainian weapons development and manufacturing compared to some NATO counterparts.

The United Kingdom spent six years developing and deploying Storm Shadow. Manufacturing relied on specialized European supply chains. French and Italian partners were involved, which made a tech transfer bureaucratically difficult. And the missiles were expensive gifts, averaging $2 million apiece.

These and other factors compelled the U.K. and Ukraine to enter into a joint agreement to develop a new long-range strike drone with streamlined and simplified requirements—a 2024 effort called Breakstop that British officials say will deliver missiles for frontline use later this year. That timeline—less than 24 months from concept to full deployment—is far faster than Storm Shadow and much less expensive. Meanwhile, Ukraine also announced its own long-range strike missile, the Flamingo, or FP-5, which is also capable of striking Russia but costs much less than the Storm Shadow.

Fischer said that the contrast in innovation speeds helps explain how such intellectual-sharing partnerships help the United Kingdom as much as they do Ukraine. “One critical but often overlooked lesson from the Ukraine war is the extremely rapid adaptation cycle Ukraine is able to implement. In some cases, battlefield lessons are implemented in less than 10 days to new systems. In my seven combat deployments, NOTHING has ever come close to that.”

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NIST unveils new AI evaluation platform

Alexandra Kelley — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:56:00 -0400

The National Institute of Standards and Technology launched a new program on Monday granting researchers access to an isolated testbed environment to safely evaluate artificial intelligence models against various commands.

The AI Technology Evaluation, or AITE, is a voluntary testing vehicle focused on AI model safety analysis. It provides blind data for models to process when completing tasks to gain objective insights and conduct evaluations of model capabilities. Notably, the evaluation data is not intended to serve as training data for the models.

Initially, AITE will focus on conducting image analysis tasks using large vision language models across three domains: quantum science, genomics and public safety. More tasks will be available in the future.

AITE’s fundamental goal is to offer a universal rubric to effectively evaluate AI models' capabilities and determine the state of the art for model performance.

“The infrastructure provided by NIST will provide common data, metrics and scoring to help developers understand the performance of their models,” the press release said.

Both data providers and model providers working with AITE will need to submit materials related to the testing. Data providers are asked to submit original datasets that are inaccessible publicly, along with a “meaningful” task suited for the data.

Model developers, likewise, will submit their AI models to be tested using the datasets. The first set of evaluations will start in August 2026.

The formation of AITE is the latest step in the Trump administration’s strategy to work with major AI developers in advancing model safety through voluntary model submissions.

The Commerce Department announced a renegotiated deal in May between the agency and three companies—Google Deepmind, Microsoft and xAI—to evaluate their models through the Center for AI Standards and Innovation.

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Lockheed Martin unveils baby Patriot missile to address urgent gap

Patrick Tucker — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:29:40 -0400

With demand for Patriot PAC-3 interceptors sharpened by Russian and Iranian ballistic missile attacks, Lockheed Martin unveiled plans to build a smaller and cheaper, if less capable, version of the exquisite interceptor.

The Adapted Capability Effector, or ACE, missile would use the PAC-3's launcher and command and control software, but a less expensive rocket motor, radar, and electronic brain, according to a company announcement and remarks by Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control president Tim Cahil at the Farnborough International Airshow.

The ACE lacks some of the features to counter the most advanced missiles, said Cahil, but is intended to be useful against the type of lower-tech short-range ballistic missiles that Iran and Russia have used in recent destructive attacks.

Said one missile defense analyst, “It is conceivable that if you affect the cost drivers, that you—that's probably how you get down to a lower cost. The cost drivers and the bottlenecks of the current PAC-3 missiles are things like the seeker.”

Tom Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project at CSIS, said, “The United States and its allies, the entire PAC-3 community needs as many PAC-3s as industry collectively can produce. But we're also going to need alternatives, and not everything needs the most exquisite capability. And so this is why the low-cost interceptor competition is important and urgent.”

Cahill cautioned that the missile is not “designed to go after drones.” It is, however, designed to address a defensive gap that today’s wave of defense tech startups have been unable to fix: a less expensive way to shoot down, say, an Iskander-M traveling at 5,600 miles per hour.

While Ukrainian and U.S. companies have developed counter-drone solutions, short-range missile defense is one of the few areas where Ukraine can’t replace a U.S. capability.

That’s a deadly problem for Kyiv. Last July, the White House claimed that its aid to Ukraine had drawn the Pentagon’s stocks of Patriots. That turned out not to be true at the time, but became so after President Trump launched his war on Iran in February. An By April, CSIS wrote, the United States had used up about half of its supply.

When Ukraine ran out of PAC-3 interceptors this month, Russia responded with increased short-range attacks.

That supply-and-demand gap is prompting more defense companies to try to produce ballistic-missile interceptors. But so far, none has succeeded. The closest European alternative to the Patriot, the French-Italian SAMP/T, is not as effective, Ukrainian officials have said.

Lockheed, meanwhile, is pitching the idea of ACE missiles to at least some of the 18 countries that already have compatible PAC-3 launchers.The company envisions “joint development and production with European partners,” according to their statement.

Cahill said the new interceptor might enter production in 2028—or possibly even sooner, depending on how ready governments are to open their pocketbooks and work together.

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Can new drones, 3D printers defeat distance’s tyranny? RIMPAC aims to find out

Jennifer Hlad — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:36:41 -0400

SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, Hawaii—Replacing broken parts and resupplying ships at sea is a challenge anywhere, but in the Pacific theater, that problem is magnified by thousands of miles of sea water. Now, as part of the sprawling Rim of the Pacific, the U.S. military is practicing how it might use tech like self-driving boats and 3D printers that can be thrown out of airplanes to overcome the region’s oft-lamented tyranny of distance.

“We are piloting this program during RIMPAC to experiment with the idea of what theater-wide advanced manufacturing is going to look like for the joint force,” Rear Adm. Michael Mattis told reporters during a media day at the U.S. Pacific Command Joint Advanced Manufacturing Center, calling it the U.S. military’s largest advanced manufacturing demonstration so far.

This year’s RIMPAC features “38 countries, 31 surface vessels, five submarines, over 30,000 personnel, almost 180 aircraft, and over 1,100 personnel that are going to be doing our landings,” Mattis said. “In that process, it’s an enormous experiment for us to figure out how to sustain the joint force.”

Marine Lt. Col. Michael Radigan said the experiment—coordinated by Fleetwerx and the Naval Postgraduate School’s Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing Research and Education—is bringing together a “trifecta of advanced manufacturing, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence… to deliver true parts that the joint force needs.”

“What are we trying to do? Very simply, this is Uber for manufacturing delivered at the speed of Amazon, for the highest quality of parts, and we have the opportunity to do it in the most contested of environments. And that’s extremely challenging,” Radigan said.

Some of the experiment’s technology was put on display in a sun-scorched field at this Army base near Oahu’s North Shore. San Diego-based Firestorm gave a tour of its expeditionary advanced manufacturing cell, which comprises two shipping containers that can be set up by two people in a few hours. Norway-based Fieldmade displayed what it calls an “additive manufacturing micro factory”—a rugged 3D printer that can be parachuted from a plane and set up in minutes.

Florida-based Snowbird Technologies showed off its own 3D printer, housed in a compact shipping container, that works on land and aboard a ship at sea.

Rhode Island-based Havoc exhibited a 14-foot autonomous boat it printed for the exercise. The solar-rechargeable unmanned surface vessel is built to operate in moderate seas—and to right itself if it capsizes in heavier weather, said Sea Thomas, Indo-Pacific director for the company.

And Los Angeles-based Splash Industries displayed a 10-foot Typhoon, an autonomous drone boat with a Pelican case attached to the top. CEO Ivan Avanesov told reporters that the USV had recently executed the first autonomous resupply of a warship at sea when it drove straight onto the well deck of the USS Essex amphibious assault ship underway during RIMPAC. The Typhoon USV later drove itself through rough waters to an aircraft carrier 100 miles from shore, Avanesov said.

But the gear is just part of the puzzle. “I think we’ve actually got the technology pretty good,” Radigan said. “It’s all the other things that have to happen throughout the theater in order to be able to deliver those [high-quality parts], the logistics, and creating this into the scale that you’re going to see today. So it’s all about operationalizing advanced manufacturing.”

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How a former Marine is rewriting the future of battlefield AI

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:11:28 -0400

One stubborn former Marine is changing how the Pentagon moves data to farflung troops—a change intended to enable them to use advanced AI tools, and one that just might reshape how lightweight models are developed.

Some of these new workflows have already been used during the U.S. war on Iran.

“If you look at what's happened with Operation Epic Fury, in particular, we were able to incorporate dozens of new feeds in real time that allow us to not only serve up that data in the right format, right structure, and everything else for those, for those applications to leverage, but also get data at the speed of conflict,” Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, said at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C., last week.

Stanley was talking specifically about the War Data Platform, a branch of the Pentagon’s Advana data system being developed to digest thousands of data feeds. The WDP is a key part of defense leaders’ plan to use AI to help commanders make decisions faster.

But another key to the plan is developing ways to get those tools and that data to troops in and around the battlefield, where connectivity is minimal or absent. Nowhere is the challenge more acute than in Indo-Pacom Command, with its vast distances and powerful potential adversary.

That’s the main challenge picked up by Bala Selvam, an entrepreneur and a former Marine, when he stepped into the job of chief technical officer for Special Operations Command Pacific in early 2025.

A race judged in milliseconds

When Selvam took the job, he found that the Defense Department’s data workflows were largely being developed in places with excellent networks and plenty of computing resources. That had produced a culture of shipping huge amounts of data with little concern for latency.

In the continental United States, or even European or Central Command, “It didn't matter because you had all the compute you needed,” Selvam said at the AWS event.

But that wouldn’t work at INDOPACOM.

The distance from the command’s Hawaii headquarters to its second-largest data center is 9,000 miles—too far for efficient data transfer, even with low-earth-orbit satellites, Selvam said.

Analysis and bureaucracy might stretch the data’s journey by yet more thousands of miles before it gets to warfighters at the edge.

“If you're SOCOM, it goes back to Tampa, or if you're any other service, back over here”—that is, Washington, D.C..

All of that was limiting how quickly operators could merge top-secret data and open-source data, analyze it, send it to troops, and share it with partners. The deadline is a matter of milliseconds, with China working 83 percent as quickly. So staying ahead of that number is critical to moving information faster than the adversary. Losing that race just might mean losing a conflict.

The problem only got harder as more data streams emerged. And it also meant that troops in or near conflicts would be unable to use advanced AI tools that require heavy use of enterprise compute resources.

The approach

Rather than try to solve each problem he discovered, Selvam decided to figure out just what everyone actually needed. It’s the kind of analysis that a big U.S. consultancy might require millions of dollars to complete.

Selvam started by going to INDOPACOM senior leadership. “‘Write down everything that you expect everyone to do,’” he told them. "I think a list is going to be in the hundreds. It was actually like 10 things.”

Selvam took this list of “commandments” and worked his way down chains of command, asking everyone to lay out what they were using and how. He found many commanders buying software and tech tools that didn’t match up with what they needed to accomplish.

One category, in particular, stood out.

“They kept saying, ‘the AI.’ I got so mad that I said, ‘If you do it, I might, like, throw a wild dog in your house,” he said. “If you're gonna say AI, tell me what exactly you're doing…If you can’t tell me that, you're not using AI.”

To force commanders to define their tasks, Selvam began to physically deprive them of their technology.

“I actually almost got, like, fired. I took everyone's computer away, and then I hid it. Then I put whiteboards in everyone's rooms with their actual task. I forced everyone to walk into the [Joint Operations Center] to put in their inputs. When they said the words, ‘I wish I had this technology; I did this virtually,’ I gave them back the computer with only that thing. It was like an Excel sheet and a PowerPoint slide. And then when they said, ‘Man, I wish I could do this faster,’ then I gave them back Palantir and Databricks [a cloud-based data analysis and AI platform] and everything else.”

For Selvam, this wasn’t about instilling tech discipline; it was implementing business best practices. The process yielded a record of what everyone actually needed to do their jobs.

“If you want to know what a good tech company looks like, look at their documentation. Same concept here,” he said. “So, for every bit of our work, we will write processes, procedure business rules, and we will build based on those process procedures or business rules.”

A key meeting

Armed with a much better understanding of what people actually needed to get done, Selvam turned his attention to the problem of getting data where it needed to go. For that, he needed help.

Around January, he traveled to the Crystal City, Virginia, offices of AWS, which makes billions of dollars selling the Pentagon the sort of enterprise cloud capability that won’t be available at the edge of combat. There he met Joshua Hobgood, who leads AWS’ efforts to sell AI-related services to the world’s militaries.

“I want to solve for AI at the edge,” Selvam told Hobgood, who described the meeting to the AWS Summit audience. Hobgood answered that it was a common problem, to which Selvam replied, “Yeah. But we're going to do it right.”

Over the next two hours, they hammered out a new plan. First, they would build smaller cloud compute clusters, or nodes, that would require less power and infrastructure, and, hopefully, be harder to target in a conflict. These would be designed to support battalions—a few thousand troops—and would replace larger nodes meant to cover entire divisions of 20,000 or more, Hobgood said.

He said that making this work will require commanders to follow Selvam’s procedures governing which tools people use and for what purpose. When SOF commanders “give out tasks, they will specifically say, ‘Humans, you will do these [six] out of these 10 tasks…These other four, here's how you're gonna let the [AI] agents take over that.’”

The next step was to make sure those agents, or whatever other AI tools were running at the edge, were feeding data back to the cloud.

“We based the solution on the idea that…up to the point of a conflict scenario, there will be connectivity. So we wanted to create a system that could continuously learn,” Hobgood said. “The core assumption to that was that the majority of your AI inference, your data analysis, would happen in the cloud, in the AWS cloud.”

But as they worked to flesh out the ideas over the next few months, Selvam and Hobgood realized that AI tools could be built to sip power and compute—and still deliver results to troops in the field.

“We're at a point where we can use smaller and smaller models…to get, actually get, the best results,” he said.

That’s going to be vital as the Pentagon works to integrate more and more information into the War Data Platform. In May, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office said the WDP was drawing upon some 4,000 data sources from more than 55 organizations.

“What we're trying to do is really create that single pane of our single repository of truth for a lot of data that was disaggregated and come together into a single platform that allows for very quick connection of data sources to different types of applications,” said Stanley, who leads the CDAO.

It’s unclear how Selvam’s proposed brigade-sized compute clusters will relate to the platform.

But, said Stanley, “That's going to become a program of record here pretty soon.”

Selvam said the effort was supremely worth it.

“I'm not gonna lie to you; my entire 18 months has been like, ‘If I don't solve the [cross-domain solution] problem…my life would just be meaningless.’ But if I did solve it, I'm going to put it on my tombstone…It's going to say, ‘I solved the [Department of War] CDS problem.’ That's what it's going to say, I swear to God.”

Nextgov’s Alexandra Kelly contributed to this story.

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AI can now power every stage of a cyberattack

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 21:00:00 -0400

Just two years ago, hackers were tapping into generative artificial intelligence to probe targets, translate technical material and troubleshoot malicious code. The technology sped up some key parts of a cyber operation, but other stages remained solely in human hands.

That line is now beginning to blur. In a range of cyberattacks observed over the past year, AI systems generated commands, tested vulnerabilities, and helped hackers move through victim networks, sometimes carrying out thousands of commands with less human direction than researchers had previously seen, according to research released Monday night by cybersecurity firm Check Point.

It means AI has now been used in some form at every stage of a cyberattack, from identifying targets to exploiting vulnerabilities to stealing data, to help hackers achieve their goals.

The shift does not yet amount to fully autonomous hacking, a top company executive told Nextgov/FCW, but it shows that AI is moving from an occasional aid to an extra set of hands throughout the entirety of an intrusion process. The findings also highlight how rapidly the global cyber ecosystem has adopted AI, with the technology now embedded across every part of an offensive operation rather than confined to isolated tasks.

“We watched criminal groups breach government agencies at scale, using AI as the primary operator rather than a background assistant,” the Check Point report says. In most cases, the AI model’s role was revealed by the attacker’s own mistakes or monitoring by the AI provider, rather than tools or safeguards deployed by the victim organization.

For these AI-enabled pursuits, hackers have used open-source models and purpose-built malicious AI tools sold on the dark web, but major commercial providers remain their primary choice, company threat intelligence lead Sergey Shykevich said in an interview.

The research points to the Gentlemen ransomware group as one instance of how AI is being folded into routine criminal operations. Members compared mainstream commercial models based largely on which imposed the fewest restrictions and used AI to help build internal tools, including a management platform developed in three days.

The findings also highlight VoidLink—a sophisticated toolkit for remotely controlling infected computers — that researchers initially believed had taken a team several months to build. Check Point later found that a single developer produced roughly 88,000 lines of working code in under a week using a commercial AI coding tool.

Hackers tend to first choose U.S. AI models like ChatGPT or Claude because their responses are generally considered higher-quality, but they have a tougher time exploiting those families of models because of stronger guardrails designed to prevent malicious use of the tools, Shykevich said. When those attempts fail, they then pivot to Chinese-made AI platforms that have lower guardrails.

“They are trying to jailbreak those [Western] models, but when they are not successful, they just go to DeepSeek, Qwen and Trae,” he said, referring to a trio of AI models and platforms originating in China. Qwen is a suite of AI and large language models developed by Alibaba, while Trae is an AI-backed code editor and programming platform built by ByteDance. Ransomware gangs have been heavily leaning on those Chinese models to help generate code for their exploits, he noted.

Chinese AI models have recently grown more capable and widely used for coding tasks. Beijing has discussed restricting overseas access to some advanced models, underscoring their growing national security value and their appeal to cybercriminals seeking tools to help with their exploits.

When asked how these new dynamics involve targeting U.S. government and critical infrastructure organizations, Shykevich said there are certainly higher and faster levels of exploitation attempts, though he assessed that’s due to a combination of AI-enabled speed and geopolitical tensions.

He said that, in an ideal world, security flaws should now be patched within several hours of discovery, though he immediately acknowledged that would be next to impossible. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recently revamped its remediation timeline guidance, ranging from three days for the highest-risk flaws to 60 days for lower-priority issues.

The move is part of CISA’s response “to the current threat landscape where AI software services can assist threat actors to find and exploit vulnerabilities,” the agency said last month.

The findings come as the latest tranche of frontier AI models is showing sharp gains in their ability to perform cybersecurity tasks. OpenAI last week released GPT-5.6, which it called its strongest cybersecurity model yet, reporting substantial gains over its predecessor on benchmarks testing exploit development and proof-of-concept generation.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has given the National Security Agency, CISA and other federal officials until Aug. 1 to develop a classified process for benchmarking the advanced cyber capabilities of frontier AI models and determining which systems need additional government scrutiny.

“The most significant shift this report documents is not a new technique. It is pace,” the Check Point report says. “A vulnerability now becomes a working exploit within hours of disclosure. Phishing campaigns run at a quality and volume no human team could match. Intrusions span dozens of targets simultaneously, with AI handling the operational work between check-ins. Security teams working at human speed cannot match that cadence.”

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How Ukraine won the first great robot war

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:02:31 -0400

In the spring and summer of 2026, the story about Russia's war in Ukraine changed. The defenders are combining air and ground drones, autonomy, and swarming to re-capture territory with robots while risking fewer humans—increasing casualties for Russia while decreasing them for their own forces. Some four and a half years after confidently launching his invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin has dwindling military options.

In this short documentary, analysts, entrepreneurs, European experts, and NATO military officials describe how Ukraine defied expectations and changed the future direction of military technology—and of war itself.

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Lightweight cells powered by nuclear waste could drive tomorrow's drones

Lauren C. Williams — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0400

How many missions could a drone or satellite fly with a battery pack that can last decades? And what if that battery could be fueled by nuclear waste?

That’s the future scientists are working toward in DARPA’s “Rads to Watts” program, which aims to create lightweight batteries with a high energy density. And a recent $3.37 million contract award aims to fund a viable proof-of-concept device that can produce more than 10 watts per kilogram with a yearslong shelf life.

“Solar cells directly convert sunlight into electricity…Ours directly convert radiation into electricity,” said Stafford Sheehan, CEO and founder of Project Omega, which describes their radioisotope power sources as mini-generators that replace traditional batteries.

“We already have some of these small devices running; the ones that are specifically designed to meet the DARPA figure of merit are going to come out early next year.”

Several organizations are participating in the program, with Morgan State University serving as the prime contractor and handling basic research and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory handling nuclear materials and testing. Northrop Grumman and ARA will bring computational modeling to make sure the prototype meets performance standards.

Project Omega will build the nuclear power generator based on a radioisotope found in nuclear waste, and Widetronix is designing the semiconductor power converter. The goal is to produce a working prototype by early 2027 at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The power cells could be used in “any application where a battery dying is a pain point,” Sheehan said. “One example is on satellites: if you lose power on a satellite, you lose the satellite, it's gone…if your batteries die and you don't have any sort of backup power.”

These power sources use isotopes separated from nuclear waste and convert radiation directly into electricity.

“At a high level, we take nuclear waste, we recycle it into two products: one is fuel for reactors…the other are power isotopes, so isotopes you can use to power things,” Sheehan said.

Radioisotope power sources have been used in everything from smoke detectors to space systems. But Project Omega hopes to do it on a larger scale.

“There are over 100,000 metric tons of nuclear waste sitting in the 52 reactor sites around the country; so there's plenty of nuclear waste currently. The federal government gets sued for billions of dollars every year just because they haven't dealt with the nuclear waste,” Sheehan said. “It's very valuable to have a battery that lasts.”

Omega’s power cells consist of a solid state, or “chunk,” of isotope that will be layered with the semiconductor to generate power. They also work in extreme temperatures—something that would benefit military operations using unmanned systems in harsh environments.

“We have been using these radioisotope power systems in space for decades,” Sheehan said. “We're just taking the systems that we use for space and we're using a different isotope,” Strontinum-90, which is less hazardous than the Plutonium-238 isotopes used in similar systems.

The award comes as the Pentagon grapples with increased demand and use of drone systems

that have to be charged and the persistent need for more power generation on the battlefield.

“Over the next 18 months, the program will focus on reducing technical risk, testing system performance under realistic conditions, and generating the data needed to inform future development and transition pathways,” a PNNL official wrote in a statement to Defense One. “Key challenges include improving energy conversion efficiency, validating long-term reliability, managing radiation effects, and ensuring safe, secure handling and deployment.”

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GenAI.mil records almost 1.7M users, plans new model additions

Alexandra Kelley — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0400

The Department of Defense plans to bring new models onto its internal, department-wide artificial intelligence marketplace and deploy them at higher classification levels, part of its updated procurement policy that aims for “commercial-first” in its deliverables.

Cameron Stanley, the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at DOD told attendees at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday that as GenAI.mil reached a record 1.7 million users—along with the creation of over 100,000 custom agents—even more models will soon be made available on the platform.

“We're looking forward to advancing, getting new models on to GenAI.mil, we're looking at GenAI.mil going to higher classification levels,” Stanley said. “It's just a really exciting time for generative AI in the department.”

GenAI.mil already hosts capabilities from SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon Web Services that are available at Impact Level 6 and 7, as the Pentagon announced in May.

OpenAI confirmed in mid-June that its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, will be eligible for controlled, unclassified information through GenAI.mil in July.

One major use of AI for the DOD has been to aggregate data for warfighters, resulting in faster decision-making. While Stanley said that “well-trained” soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardians and marines traditionally make these critical military decisions, AI is helpful in parsing through large volumes of data quickly

“Human cognition is just not going to be able to keep up in a lot of battlefields,” he said. “So what we've done—very successfully—is identify ways where we can accelerate certain identification of the right pieces of data or information in order to make that better decision.”

Stanley clarified that the addition of agentic tools to support analytics is deliberate, and features “very tight guardrails” to accelerate the analyses that he estimates would take two to three human analysts operating in disparate systems to identify.

“So we go from—instead of having six or seven systems we have to go across in order to make that decision—we're now doing it instantaneously, or nearly instantaneously, with humans appropriately managing the entire workload process and actioning it from the same system that we identified the decision from,” he said.

The goal of Stanley’s office, he said, is to be a “commercial-first organization.”

“We're trying to put the vendor next to the warfighter and have the vendor have one goal, one job, that's it, and that is to deliver exactly what the warfighter’s needs are,” Stanley said. “What we do is we create the environment with the right tools and the right environments with the right security in place with the right contracts in place.”

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Pentagon recruiting new tech talent for AI implementation

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 10:04:38 -0400

The Pentagon on Tuesday announced a new campaign to recruit hundreds of young programmers for AI and engineering challenges, according to an advance notice seen by Defense One.

“War Force is a call to action for patriotic forward-deployed engineers who want to serve their country and the warfighter,” Defense Department CTO Emil Michael said in a statement viewed by Defense One.

Successful applicants, referred to in this OPM job listing for a “forward deployed engineer(s),” will work for two-year stints to implement the department’s AI Acceleration Strategy as well as other critical IT needs. Most of the positions will be based in Washington, D.C., and candidates should be able to hold a top-secret clearance.

The “War Force” is a part of a broader push between the White House and participating tech companies to bring early-stage software talent into the federal government, an effort dubbed “Tech Force.”

Those selected to participate will work with a variety of teams on implementing frontier AI, machine learning, automation, scaling new software tools and solving other critical IT needs across the military and the Department.

War Force recruits will “join a cohort of individuals that receive leadership training, get exposure to America's top technology CEOs and gain unparalleled exposure to policymaking and national-scale impact,” according to the listing. “This may include CEO fireside chats, networking events, coding training/certificates, and other opportunities.”

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Pentagon launches ‘War Force’ initiative to onboard tech talent

Edward Graham — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:45:00 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management and the Pentagon jointly announced the launch of a new initiative on Tuesday to bring top software engineering talent into the Department of Defense, part of a broader governmentwide push to hire more skilled technologists.

The recruitment effort, called War Force, operates under OPM’s larger Tech Force program. That initiative launched in December 2025 to onboard tech and cybersecurity professionals across federal agencies, although it notably followed Trump administration moves to let go of thousands of tech-focused workers and shutter several innovation-focused units.

OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a statement that War Force “builds on the momentum of Tech Force by connecting outstanding engineers with opportunities to solve complex challenges alongside the War Department.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order last September that authorized DOD to use the “secondary title” of War Department — framing that is also reflected in the initiative's name.

OPM said the War Force recruitment effort “will launch with a targeted hiring campaign,” with a focus on bringing in applicants who have experience “deploying and integrating advanced technologies — including frontier AI, machine learning, automation, and data systems — and designing, building, and maintaining reliable software solutions that directly support operational needs on behalf of the American warfighter.” Job applications will be accepted through July 10.

Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael said in a statement that the War Force will help with “executing the key tenets of the War Department’s AI Acceleration Strategy.” That guidance was released in January and outlines the department’s plans for rapidly integrating AI capabilities into its operations.

The War Force recruitment effort also comes after DOD announced in April that it was launching a cyber apprenticeship program this summer to bring more skilled personnel into the agency.

During public remarks at the SAP NOW summit in Washington, D.C., last week, Pentagon Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies said the apprenticeship program “has already generated more than 70,000 inquiries,” despite the effort not officially launching until July.

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Army using AI, robot boats for Pacific logistics

Jennifer Hlad — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 07:22:25 -0400

The Army’s 8th Theater Sustainment Command is using artificial intelligence “to help us make better-informed decisions” for supply chain management in the Pacific, the unit’s commander said Friday.

“For logistics, a lot of what we do is very similar to what the commercial world does, and so I have leveraged, and we are leveraging commercial partners with, you know, how do they do warehouse management regionally, and then how do they look at, how do you time delivery of supplies to the location it’s needed, and kind of, what are those time-distance factors,” Maj. Gen. Gavin Gardner told reporters. “ I’m looking at partners, and I’m talking to partners that do that on a global scale, because the distances between the continental United States to the forward positions that we train or live at, like the Republic of Korea or Japan, we’re constantly looking for smarter ways to do that.”

“When resources are not unlimited, how do you best look at demand analysis over time and space, and stock forward the right things versus stocking everything? Because we just can’t afford to do that,” he said. “And so we’re using AI right now to help us see that.”

The command is also already using “very capable” autonomous watercraft in the Pacific and is working with industry to develop and test larger and faster vessels, Gardner said.

“We have industry partners that are creating vessels right now in the water that are over 100 feet long that would move anywhere between four and eight 20-foot equivalent units… think the containers you see moving up and down most of your ports today,” he said. “That capability is already in play, and it’s going through experimentation now, and the 8th TSC, along with the rest of the United States Army, is looking to partner, test, and innovate those autonomous watercraft first out in our region, because if you can work in the Pacific, you can work anywhere in the world.”

But the rules will need to evolve to keep up. Current U.S. maritime laws require a minimum crew size for vessels, limiting autonomous operations to testing or pilot programs for commercial use.

“We need to get the laws of the sea that our Coast Guard currently use to mandate watercraft operations that currently have to be manned when it enters into a port, that we’re comfortable having unmanned systems enter into ports, so that we can rapidly receive and download autonomous watercraft like we do manned watercraft today,” Gardner added.

Gardner said he’d also eventually like to see “anywhere between 30 and 100” medium-sized autonomous vessels in the U.S. Indo-Pacific theater, “berthed up everywhere from Korea to Japan, the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, Thailand,” to help meet the “constant demand for Army watercraft time now to deliver equipment and supplies in the theater.”

The unit has one Maneuver Support Vessel (Light), a manned landing craft that will eventually replace the Vietnam-era Landing Craft Mechanized-8, and has been testing it for about nine months to get data to shape the future design of the vessel. The vessel is nearly four times faster than the older watercraft, and much smaller—but also “much more capable” of operating in shallower water, Gardner said.

“So I’m actually going to different sets of beaches, and so you can put up to two HIMARS onto an MSV-Light, approach a beach very rapidly, bring it into position, download it, and then those platforms can get off and do their fire missions,” he said. “We’ve rehearsed this quite a bit with both the 25th Infantry Division and the 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force,” and have also put multiple Marine NMESIS anti-ship systems onto the vessel for “rapid insertions.”

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