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Q&A with SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Frank Donovan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What is your biggest concern?

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

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

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

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

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Cyber Force? Senator pushes to create service branch under the Army

Thomas Novelly — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:19:58 -0400

A new cyber-focused military service branch would sit under the Army if one senator’s proposal comes to fruition.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is spearheading a markup amendment to the Senate’s 2027 National Defense Authorization Act that would create a “Cyber Force” as the next armed service branch. The senator’s office confirmed that the amendment proposes to establish the branch under the Army, just as the Space Force and Marine Corps sit under the Air Force and Navy.

Similar provisions are reportedly being floated in the House, according to two people familiar with policy discussions. Earlier this year, Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, told the Center For Strategic and International Studies that a “Cyber Force is inevitable” and “we’re going to get this done.” A Fallon spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Friday asking about a potential amendment.

“New and escalating cyber threats on the battlefield demand a change to our current approach. The status quo and years of incremental changes are not meeting the current threat and are insufficient as that threat grows,” Gillibrand told Defense One in an emailed statement. “I believe, and many experts agree, that the creation of a dedicated Cyber Force will ensure the United States is ready to fight and win on the modern battlefield and protect our national security.”

The proposed amendment marks the latest push in a years-long effort. Gillibrand and House lawmakers have backed the idea before. In the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, lawmakers commissioned the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to study “alternative organizational models for the cyber forces of the Armed Forces.” Those findings have not been released. Details from the amendments showing what a Cyber Force might look like are not yet public, but think tanks and national security experts have already been pitching their own force designs.

A 2024 Foundation for Defense of Democracies report concluded that a Cyber Force could sit under the Army, muster about 10,000 personnel, and need a budget of around $16.5 billion. In August 2025, the FDD and the Center for Strategic and International Studies announced a commission on Cyber Force Generation. A report from those think tanks is scheduled to be released next month.

One former military official said there would be strengths to a cyber-focused service, but putting it under the Army is a bad idea. They argued that cyber would remain a secondary priority amid the branch’s many missions.

“The Army is the largest service by far,” the former official said. “Manpower-wise, it's like half the department, and it's like, ‘we'll put it under because it'll be easy for the Army to just put in another force.’ It's already hard enough to run the Army as it is.”

Mark Montgomery, a retired Navy rear admiral and an FDD senior fellow who advocates for a Cyber Force, argued that this year is an ideal time to create a new service.

“Timing-wise, you need to do this in the beginning or middle of an administration, not at the end of an administration,” Montgomery said.

The proposed amendment would need to survive multiple Senate and House edits to make the final compromise NDAA.

It’s not clear if the Trump administration would support the latest bipartisan push. Last year, the Pentagon rolled out CYBERCOM 2.0, a series of policy changes aimed at beefing up the recruiting, training, and missions of the existing U.S. Cyber Command.

Katie Sutton, the assistant defense secretary for cyber policy and principal cyber advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, defended the Cyber Command reforms during a January Senate hearing, and said a renewed command and a new service could co-exist.

“I think this is a really important debate for us all to be having about the future of the cyber warfighting domain,” Sutton told the Senate Armed Services Committee in January. “I do think one of the most common misconceptions about Cyber Command is that it is a debate between Cyber Command 2.0 and a cyber force, and they are actually separate debates that I believe both need to be had, and we need to look closely at the pros and cons of both.”

Advocates for a separate and independent cyber-focused service branch say it aligns with the Trump administration’s calls for “offensive cyber operations against those planning to kill Americans,” the White House’s new counterterrorism strategy said. It also comes as President Donald Trump and Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, acknowledged the growing role of cyber effects in U.S. military operations in Iran and Venezuela, Defense One and sister publication NextGov/FCW have previously reported.

“The president says, ‘We've got to be more offensive’ but then you got to better generate forces to be offensive, and we don't generate enough forces to do both offensive cyber and defensive cyber operations,” Montgomery said. “A cyber force is clearly necessary.”

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Software patches from Army hackathon going straight to troops in CENTCOM

Meghann Myers — Fri, 29 May 2026 14:22:06 -0400

Engineers from top defense contractors have spent days behind their laptops at Fort Carson, Colo., coding up ways to enable weapons, sensors, and command-and-control systems developed independently to share information.

Dubbed Project Jailbreak, the effort is part of the Army’s first hackathon to integrate its many proprietary software programs. Some of the fixes have already been pushed to deployed troops, according to the Army’s chief technology officer.

“A couple of the software patches have gone forward, luckily…we're still in a lull of action. There hasn't been a ton of incoming, so we haven't used them in an offensive capacity,” Alex Miller said. “Our goal is to push the rest of that forward in the next 30 days.”

Representatives from Anduril, Boeing, General Dynamics, L3Harris, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, Perennial Autonomy, and RTX are working on integrating dozens of their products, in a push to cut down on the number of screens it takes to look at the battlefield and either launch missions or respond to threats.

“So if you've been into any joint operation center or tactical operation center, there's screens everywhere, and that is because we, over time, have tried to give as much information visually as possible,” Miller said. “What that has unintentionally done over time is forced our people to be the integration point, which is really rough if you're cold, tired, wet, and hungry. So, if you've been fighting and, you know, 20-hour days and you're getting a little bit of sleep, it just doesn't scale very well.”

The Army is working to eliminate this issue with its next-generation command-and-control platform, which is still in testing and development. But in the meantime, it has endless existing technology that needs to be linked up now.

To do that, service leaders invited major contractors to Fort Carson for a series of hackathon events. The first push was to integrate existing counter-unmanned and air-missile defense systems, tightening defenses against the types of weapons that have targeted U.S. troops in the Middle East during the war in Iran.

“At the end of 30 days, hopefully we've given them more decision space, more space to be able to decide what system, what effector, how they're going to defeat the threats that they're facing every day, based on all of the different capabilities over the years,” said Brent Ingraham, the Army’s assistant secretary for acquisitions, logistics, and technology.

It actually wasn’t that difficult to convince defense industry giants to send engineers to the hackathon on their own dime, officials said, nor to convince them that opening up their proprietary systems to each other is a necessary step in the way the Army is doing development and acquisitions now.

“My perception of this is there had been a first-mover problem…where none of them could take the first step without being certain the others would come,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said. “And so once they were certain that the United States Army, as the convener, was requiring everybody—or strongly recommending everybody—to show up, everybody came quickly, and it has unlocked massive momentum.”

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Data brokers are helping enemies target US troops. The Pentagon must step up, lawmakers say

Edward Graham — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:10:00 -0400

Adversaries have used commercially available location data to target U.S. servicemembers in war zones, a bipartisan group of lawmakers revealed Thursday.

In a letter to Pentagon CIO Kirsten Davies, 14 members of Congress — led by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C. — warned that the department “has not taken basic steps to protect U.S. military personnel from the serious counterintelligence and force protection threat posed by the collection and sale of personal information, including cell phone location data, by data brokers.”

Reuters first reported the news.

Last month, U.S. Central Command revealed to lawmakers that it “has received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater.” The letter includes CENTCOM's answers to questions on the subject.

This type of data can be acquired from legitimate data brokers for a nominal fee and then used to track a person's location, particularly ones who follow set routines or are based in remote areas.

“That foreign adversaries are still able to buy location data collected from the phones of U.S. personnel serving in military hotspots is a direct result of DOD leadership’s failure to prioritize this threat and implement common sense cyber defenses recommended by federal cybersecurity experts,” the lawmakers wrote.

The Pentagon has been aware for some time now of the security vulnerabilities posed by publicly available location data from smartphones or other wearable electronic devices.

When mobile fitness app Strava released a Global Heat Map of its users’ activities in late 2017, it inadvertently gave away the locations of some U.S. military sites in the Middle East and provided precise details on the routes personnel took when they jogged. Similar location data from running app Polar also revealed the locations of military personnel, and could be used in some cases to track them to their homes.

DOD subsequently issued a directive in August 2018 that banned uses of apps and devices that share geolocation data “while in locations designated as operational areas.”

In their letter, however, the lawmakers said CENTCOM shared that it “only rolled out the capability to administratively disable location sharing on smartphones” this month. The combatant command also revealed that the Pentagon has not yet taken steps to deactivate the tracking numbers on smartphones that are used by advertisers and data brokers.

“Both iOS and Android also include an opt-in privacy setting to disable this unique advertising ID, which the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommend,” the letter said. “Unfortunately, USCENTCOM confirmed that the advertising ID is still not disabled on government-issued smartphones, but stated that the Defense Information Systems Agency is currently testing a capability to do so.”

The lawmakers urged DOD to disable the advertising ID on all agency-issued smartphones and to issue guidance requiring personnel to do the same on their personal devices brought overseas or onto military facilities. They also called for the agency to remove web browsers “designed to facilitate data collection by Google and other advertising companies” from Pentagon-issued devices.

“Instead, DoD should pre-install on DoD devices and require the use by DoD personnel of privacy-focused web browsers that protect users with anti-tracking cyber defenses, such as ad blocking and the Global Privacy Control (GPC), which is already enforced by law in 12 states,” the letter said.

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Army’s data-merging cell needs a few years to untangle the mess

Meghann Myers — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:20:53 -0400

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Maryland—Much has been made of the new systems the Army is bringing online as part of its Continuous Transformation efforts, but getting old systems into shape is also part of the effort. In a small office space at Combat Capabilities Development Command, a group of 25 soldiers and civilian engineers, on loan from local units, is fielding requests from across the service to make its many data systems talk to each other.

The pilot Army Data Operations Center, launched on April 3, is to run until the end of September, when the Army will decide whether and how it will continue. To date, the team has fielded 68 tickets—from next-generation command-and-control testing, to radios for a deploying unit, to behavioral health data for soldiers and families at home.

Maj. Becky Boorbach, a data officer with the 25th Infantry Division, vouched for the ADOC’s work. Part of her job includes prepping for Exercise Balikatan in the Philippines by pulling Air Force-compiled international weather data into soldiers’ C2 screens.

“We made a similar connection last year, predating the ADOC. That connection took us three months to make,” Boorbach told reporters Wednesday.

It went much more smoothly at this year’s Balikatan, she said: “So being able to do this during the exercise and having that connection come online was really critical to be able to work with our joint partners and complete that exercise.”

Fulfilling some requests takes just a few hours, according to ADOC’s dashboard, while the average is about two to three weeks. Most of those delays are caused by waiting on managers to sign off on the administrative permissions to send the data through new channels, the ADOC boss said.

“We do know some of these are long-term Army challenges that we're tackling now, that will take weeks,” said Brig. Gen. Mike Kaloostian, whose main job is leading the Command and Control Future Capability Directorate at Army Transformation and Training Command.

More urgent requests are fielded through a 24-hour Warrior Engagement Cell, like a request for organizing 82nd Airborne Division radio data as they prepared to deploy for Operation Epic Fury.

So far, ADOC hasn’t had any tickets from troops in combat, Kaloostian said, but they are prepared to field them.

The ADOC is one of several ways the service is trying to open all of its information silos. Right now at Fort Carson, Colo., engineers from a range of defense contractors are in the midst of a “hackathon sprint” to enable data-sharing among their varying systems.

Kaloostian’s team is thinking longer-term.

“I think we can get to that point in our Army's future, or in the joint force’s future, where you don't need an organization that's really doing this, because you're going to have the automation…that's going to be doing these connections for us and helping solve, and we won't need as much human interaction,” he said.

Eventually there may be AI applications that can grant permissions and deconflict data channels, but for now, it requires human beings to straighten out.

“We're not going to get to that level in the next two to three years,” he said. “So I think this capability is absolutely necessary…and we'll see—maybe beyond two, three years—where we are at that point.”

Ultimately, ADOC’s goal is to put itself out of business, while NGC2 comes online integrating data to begin with. In the meantime, they’re looking for the funding and permanent staffing to keep the mission going.

“Come 30 September, that's the last day—then the Army needs to make a decision whether they're going to pay for the people side of this,” Kaloostian said.

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Iran war needs an inspector general, senator notes

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:01:00 -0400

A Democratic senator on Thursday requested that an inspector general oversight body designate one of the agency watchdogs to spearhead reviews of the ongoing war in Iran, citing a requirement in federal statute.

In her letter, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., pointed to a provision in the U.S. Code mandating that the chair of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency tap an IG to head oversight of a military “overseas contingency operation that exceeds 60 days.”

The U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes against Iran on Feb. 28.

“IG quarterly reporting, audits, inspections and investigations related to OCOs have promoted valuable transparency and accountability across presidential administrations and enable federal agencies to be better stewards of taxpayer dollars,” Duckworth wrote. “The need for you to appoint a lead IG to advance these aims and conduct joint, comprehensive and independent oversight of contingency operations against Iran has never been greater, as the Trump administration’s explanations of the president’s purported mission, lines of effort and desired end states with respect to Iran are constantly shifting, and often contradict themselves.”

Defense Department officials have testified that the war has cost an estimated $29 billion.

The CIGIE chair is limited to selecting the IG for the Defense Department, State Department or U.S. Agency for International Development. While the Trump administration folded USAID into State in 2025, the USAID IG office is still active.

The designated IG would be responsible for developing a strategy for oversight of the military operation, reviewing the accuracy of associated spending information provided by federal agencies and resolving any jurisdictional crossovers. They also would be required to issue regular public reports on their activities.

In her letter, Duckworth argued that the war in Iran meets the definition of an OCO because Operation Epic Fury is identified as one in the DOD’s casualty database and because members of the National Guard have been deployed to the region. Under federal statute, if a military action includes ordering a member of the National Guard to active duty, that qualifies it as a “contingency operation.”

Duckworth requested that CIGIE Chair Cheryl Mason provide her selection for the IG by June 5. Mason also is the IG for the Veterans Affairs Department.

Andrew Cannarsa, CIGIE's executive director, said in a statement to Government Executive that the council has "received the letter from Senator Duckworth and is working to address the senator’s inquiry."

The senator has criticized Mason’s confirmation as VA IG and election to CIGIE chair because she previously served as a senior adviser to VA Secretary Doug Collins. As such, Duckworth and good government groups have contended that Mason cannot provide independent oversight.

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The Navy used drones to sink a retired warship

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:03:11 -0400

A U.S. warship used aerial and maritime drones to help sink a decommissioned frigate last fall, Fourth Fleet officials have confirmed, adding that the experience is now shaping how the Navy will go into future battles.

On or about Sept. 28, somewhere in the Fourth Fleet’s slice of the Atlantic Ocean, the littoral combat ship Cooperstown launched four unmanned aerial vehicles and one unmanned surface vessel against the former USS Simpson, a Perry-class guided missile frigate that was until recently the last modern U.S. Navy vessel to have sunk an enemy warship.

The robot formation executed three kinetic strikes against the Simpson as part of live-fire attacks that put the hull on the bottom and capped the weekslong, multinational UNITAS 2026 exercise.

Neither the drones’ participation in the SINKEX nor the identity of the warship that went to its watery grave appear to have been previously confirmed.

The drone attack was largely coordinated by personnel ashore, not aboard the relatively lightly crewed Cooperstown, a Fourth Fleet spokesperson said.

“The exercise was primarily commanded from the Maritime Operations Center, MOC, ashore, with some senior staff elements afloat. The Robotics Operations Coordinator was part of the element ashore at the MOC, monitoring the status of each [automated unmanned system] and event serials in which they participated,” the spokesperson said via email. “We also conducted coordinated anti-submarine warfare against a diesel submarine using long-dwell USVs with acoustic capability.”

The Navy is refining its approach to assessing and buying unmanned surface vessels as it works to integrate drones across domains into its fighting structure.

Could data centers at sea set drones free?

Situational awareness experiments were also conducted aboard Cooperstown, such as using flying drones to collect targeting data. These were underpinned by a “deployable data center” transported from Mayport, Florida, set up in Norfolk, Virginia, and ultimately put aboard the littoral combat ship. The data center, provided by Armada, was equipped with AI and machine-learning tech, including computer vision and tested maritime domain awareness technologies. It was the first time the company’s product was tested at sea.

Logistics delays, including a hurricane, kept the devices from processing much of the exercise data, but nevertheless provided “an excellent proof of concept,” the Navy spokesperson said. “The team engineered electrical and data connectivity in record time, and the ship transported the DDC on the next leg of its deployment, providing edge computing power at sea.”

Lawmakers have proposed to spend $10 million for “deployable data centers that deliver remote and resilient edge computing” under Navy experiments and demonstrations in a draft 2027 defense policy bill.

During the exercise, the Cooperstown launched four aerial drones, including a medium-sized Group 3 UAV whose collection could be used to train AI targeting models in a crowded maritime environment.

“The UAV launched from the [robotic and autonomous systems] mothership and captured imagery of [more than 20] naval vessels during the multinational exercise,” the Fourth Fleet spokesperson said. “With very few global opportunities to capture data on dozens of different classes of ship in close formation, the traffic density helped train and improve the AI model significantly more quickly than multiple individual flights in less complex environments.”

Each aerial drone flew at least once and flights were planned around known and weather-related limitations—an incoming hurricane shortened the exercise. But the hope is to increase that in the future.

“There were limitations on when UAVs could fly in order to maintain safety of flight. Exercise event schedules, ship maneuvering, manned aircraft flights, gunnery exercises, and competing demands for flight deck space all impacted planned UAV operations,” the spokesperson said, noting that some flights were cut short for safety reasons revolving around drones operating near manned aircraft.

“The commander prioritized safety and successful exercise execution and temporarily paused most UAV flights for a few days, pending engineering analysis of a particular suspected communications interference issue.”

Overall, the Navy said, the robot mothership was a success, particularly with the pre-planning for how the systems would be used and the infrastructure, such as battery power and hangar space.

But there’s always room for improvement, including more ship connectivity and someone to lead the robots. There wasn’t an onboard robotics specialist during the exercise—something that could change.

“For future mothership deployments, a dedicated robotics officer in charge or liaison could be beneficial,” the spokesperson said. “Although each team knew their individual [tasks], we will mandate more comprehensive mission briefs with the ship’s operations staff.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Defense Business Brief: Defense cyber champs?; HASC mark; Navy IW

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:29:10 -0400

Cyber threats are an increasingly persistent national security concern supercharged by AI—and so is the industry built to help hospitals, financial institutions, and the Pentagon secure their networks. But unlike the defense industrial base overall, there’s no clear prime. Could that change with venture capital?

Joe Lin, co-founder and CEO of the VC-backed cyber firm Twenty, said private capital isn’t pouring into cybersecurity at the same rate as other defense tech areas in part because it’s unclear whether “true winners” will emerge.

”This was an ecosystem [that was] very, very hard for outsiders to come in and join. So that barrier has gone down. That's the good news,” Lin said during Second Front’s Offset Symposium earlier this month. “I think the question is still out as to whether or not a company that is able to take a lot of money invested into private R&D is able to actually be successful in the space where, historically, there's been a lot of peanut-butter spreading in terms of awards—funding awards, contract awards—and whether or not there will actually be true winners that will come out of this.”

Make it work, make it malleable

The winners will make versatile technology that works as the customer needs, said Brian Carbaugh, ex-CIA turned co-founder and CEO of Andesite, a VC-backed defensive cyber data analytics startup.

“There is a tremendous amount of noise. There are a lot of marketing dollars being spent,” Carbaugh told Defense One. “From a customer, from a buyer standpoint, you can see some elements of fatigue because they're having to sift through just so many vendors and pitches that oftentimes don't materialize.”

Buyers’ expectations for cyber tools and services are extremely high, Carbaugh said, and companies must deliver products that can “do all the things, all the time. Because, I think, what most of us in this space thought would be sort of innovative in terms of features and functionality—increasingly it's becoming table stakes.”

That’s not a warning shot for nascent companies, it’s an opportunity, he said.

“The warning lights are blinking red in a lot of these [security] operations centers. The work that CISOs and their teams put in are, it's nothing short of heroic on a daily basis,” Carbaugh said. There’s technology now that can "optimize” and level up analysts “by wrapping this tech around them” and are auditable with a “very, very high security compliance.”

But as cyber threats and industry grow, the Pentagon may need a more tightly coupled relationship with the cyber industrial base.

“There's an assortment of different companies that provide tools or services that are the ones that build and operate the domain on which we fight. They build our battlefield. We need to start partnering together so that they don't build the battlefield and we operate on it in a very disjointed way,” said Katie Sutton, the Pentagon’s cyber policy chief, during the symposium.

That relationship must also leave room for tweaks and changes to cyber tools, said Maria Barrett, former commanding general of U.S. Army Cyber Command.

“It's also got to be about the vendor being willing to work with us, and right side the operator, or whoever the user is, to tweak it. Because, I think, that quality of adaptability by the industry partner and the willingness to be able to do that and deliver it quickly…that's the new normal,” she said on the panel.

Welcome

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HASC’s NDAA mark. The House Armed Services Committee dropped its draft of the annual defense policy bill this week. Two things that caught my eye are related to supply chains:

One provision seeks to boost the solid rocket motor industrial base by creating a Pentagon working group that “would require that certain covered munitions have more than one solid rocket motor supplier.”
Lawmakers urge the defense secretary to “obligate and expend funding that has been appropriated by Congress for this explicit effort”
They also worry about the Pentagon’s use of direct equity investments in an established industry, such as solid rocket motors. “The committee also remains concerned with the sole use of equity investments with regards to expanding solid rocket motor industrial base when there are other tools that could be used in a more expeditious manner given the importance of increasing munition production," the draft said.

Another provision would require the Pentagon's industrial policy shop create a “Defense Supply Chain Risk and Response Program” to “develop a common framework across the Department of Defense and with contractors to enable a holistic and coordinated approach for identifying managing risks,” including cyber vulnerabilities, foreign investments, financial distress, and supply chain disruptions.

Around the horn

The Navy has created new leadership roles for information warfare: Jennifer Edgin has been appointed assistant deputy chief of naval operations for IW requirements and capabilities; and Rear Adm. Susan Bryer Joyner as IW director.
Deloitte landed a $249 million contract to support implementation of the Army’s organic industrial base modernization plan. It was the only bidder.
The Justice Department arrested two defense contractors for bribery and fraud related to Army Pacific Command’s innovation hub in Hawaii.
Someone robbed the SEC.
SpaceX just landed a more-than-$2 billion satellite communications contract.
One more cyber thing: The Pentagon is updating its three-year-old cybersecurity strategy and implementation plan, which cyber policy chief Sutton said will “set a very definitive vision of where we need to go” with “a very detailed action plan” for attacking persistent challenges, such as building a skilled workforce and making sure cyber operators have the most current tools.

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House draft of defense policy bill leaves some of Trump admin’s top priorities unfunded

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 27 May 2026 16:46:58 -0400

An initial draft of the annual defense policy bill shows the House is still banking on billions of yet-to-be-approved funds for the Trump administration’s top military priorities.

The HASC chairman’s mark of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act released on Tuesday detailed $1.15 trillion in baseline defense spending. But the Pentagon has asked for $1.5 trillion. To fully fund administration efforts like Golden Dome, shipbuilding, and a crucial munitions build-up, Congress would have to approve an additional $350 billion. But one senior committee staffer said HASC Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., is confident Congress will approve those reconciliation funds.

“I think you know the chairman is, as I said before, relatively confident that we'll be able to achieve reconciliation this year,” the staffer told reporters Tuesday. “But in the event we're not, we will have those discussions with our appropriators and with the administration later in the year about how we cover those priority items, and munitions is at the very top of that list.”

The Pentagon’s $350 billion reconciliation funding request includes $47 billion to “accelerate the delivery and drive” of munitions investment, roughly $17 billion for Golden Dome, and $7 billion for shipbuilding efforts.

Rogers told attendees at Space Symposium last month that the House would “try” to fund those priorities through reconciliation—a funding process for “mandatory” spending that only requires a simple majority to pass, unlike annual discretionary budget appropriations.

Despite last year’s reconciliation squabbles and the large amount of defense priorities tied to yet-to-be-approved funding, the committee did not reconfigure the discretionary budget to account for the possibility of the additional measure failing.

“We did not secret squirrel money away, we did not pad lines in the discretionary to account for those things that are in the mandatory column,” the senior staffer said.

The chairman’s mark of the House NDAA has 646 total items in it, 362 bill language amendments, and 284 reporting requirements, the staffer said. It’s the initial agreement between Rogers and Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash. HASC members plan to markup and add more amendments to the bill on June 4, according to the committee’s website.

“The chairman would obviously like to see us pursue a reconciliation bill that addresses that mandatory column, and so we are going to move ahead with the assumption that at some point the House and the Senate will attempt to do that,” one senior staffer said. “We will make a later determination about how successful that attempt is and address a reconciliation between those two columns at a later time.”

White House budget projections predict that baseline defense spending will increase from $1.15 trillion to $1.36 trillion through 2036. They do not anticipate asking for reconciliation funding past fiscal year 2027.

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Iran’s hackers are coordinating more closely: Israeli cyber leader

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:42:00 -0400

Iran’s state-backed hackers are sharing more cyber tools and using AI to polish disinformation and recruitment messages since the U.S. and Israel launched their war on the country, Israel’s top cyberdefense official said in an interview with Nextgov.

Yossi Karadi, who leads Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, also said on Tuesday that he is pressing major AI labs for controlled access to powerful models like Anthropic’s Mythos, arguing that governments need the same tools attackers are seeking to adopt.

In the last year, Tehran's hacking units have increasingly “begun to talk to each other, and then collaborate with each other, and then even sometimes exchange information” among themselves, he said. “Of course, when they work together, they can work more efficiently and better.”

Since the war began in February, Iran has sent hundreds of thousands of text messages to Israelis as part of a deception and influence campaign, he said.

“In some cases, they’d send messages like, ‘Don’t go to the bomb shelters because they are closed,’” Karadi said. Other messages sought to recruit Israelis for intelligence-sharing.

For a while, those messaging campaigns were in “very bad Hebrew, so you understand, ‘okay, it’s nonsense,’” Karadi said. But more recently, AI has helped Tehran improve their messages.

In March, Israel said it bombed a key Iranian cyberwarfare operation center. Asked how that attack and similar ones affected Iran's hacking, Karadi replied that cyberactivity largely fluctuated according to the intensity of the conflict.

When bombing campaigns against Iran intensified, hacking activity tended to decrease because it was harder for state operatives to access physical assets like computers and other equipment needed for cyberattacks, he said. When strikes slowed, state hacking groups would have more room to reorganize and collaborate again.

Karadi said there is little expectation that cyber activity from either side will stop even if a peace agreement is agreed, because parties can deny involvement in a cyberattack, unlike a physical strike with missiles or bombs.

“There is no ceasefire in cyber,” he said. “You cannot force any agreement on cyber.”

Over the last few months, pro-Iran hackers have compromised a swath of smaller Israeli organizations and a handful of American targets. They have targeted U.S. industrial control systems, federal officials said early last month. One group, likely state-affiliated, also claimed to have compromised medical-technology giant Stryker. And just last week, researchers said Iran-linked hackers had deployed a slew of cyberespionage techniques against the U.S. and Middle East nations including Israel and the UAE.

Asked if the cybersecurity community underestimated the strength of Iran’s hacking ecosystem, Karadi said he would only speak for Israel, and asserted they “obviously did not underestimate” Tehran. Since the 12-Day War last year, “we were in an 100%-alert situation, and we have been preparing ourselves for high-scale cyber war,” he said.

The remarks provide a window into how Israeli officials believe Iran’s cyber apparatus has adapted under wartime pressure and amid negotiations now underway between the U.S. and Tehran that could end the war, which began in late February.

Karadi conducted the interview as part of a visit to Washington this week, where he said he has planned meetings with the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, U.S. Cyber Command and representatives from industry.

In those meetings, he said, officials have been discussing advanced cyber-focused AI models like Anthropic’s Mythos, which have quickly become central to global cyber policy talks. Asked whether Israeli institutions have been given access to those systems, he said the effort is a work in progress.

“I haven’t succeeded in it now, but hopefully I will,” he said, adding that he is trying to access such models to scan Israeli government organizations for vulnerabilities. He declined to name specific AI companies he is engaging with.

In early April, Anthropic launched Project Glasswing, an initiative with major companies designed to secure critical software across the globe using its Mythos model. It’s been withheld from public release amid concerns over its highly skilled hacking capabilities. About a month later, OpenAI unveiled GPT-5.5-Cyber, a similarly advanced model that was also reserved for verified organizations to prevent the acceleration of offensive cyber tools.

The White House and the federal government swiftly responded and worked to craft an executive order focused on AI and cybersecurity, but its signing was postponed last week amid overregulation concerns from industry.

Representing a government cyberdefense organization, Karadi said such models worry him.

“When you give [an attacker] a new tool, he needs to only use it at one time and one place. But I need to implement this tool at all the places and all the time,” he said.

He expects more of these models to proliferate in the coming months, and he considers them to now be the “main threat” in the cybersecurity world.

“I think that our world is getting more and more digital, AI-based and cloud-based,” he said. “It will take us to a permanent state of cyber warfare, some of the time against enemies that you know. But most of the time — against ghosts.”

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HASC still waiting for updated E-7 Wedgetail funding request

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:23:38 -0400

The House Armed Services Committee has not received a budget amendment to fund the E-7 Wedgetail, though the Defense Department recently reversed course and promised to support the next-generation radar plane.

Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told House lawmakers that the Pentagon would amend its $1.5 trillion budget request to include Wedgetail—which had been zeroed out in favor of space-based systems. Last week, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told House lawmakers the estimated $1.5 billion amendment is “working its way” to Congress. But the initial draft of the HASC chairman’s 2027 National Defense Authorization Act released on Tuesday did not include funding for the E-7.

“The administration has indicated that they intend to send us a budget amendment to address Wedgetail, E-7, procurement in ‘27,” one senior HASC staffer told reporters Tuesday. “We haven't received it yet, so I don't know how much they're seeking, and I don't know if they're seeking it in discretionary or mandatory, and I don't know what they're intending to use as an offset.”

Hesgeth told lawmakers the Pentagon’s past disregard for the E-7 resembled a “divest-to-invest mindset,” and emphasized that it has a “future” on the battlefield. The promise to renew funding followed the damage of an E-3 Sentry aircraft in the Iran war, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report. Damage to the E-3 and other support aircraft during Operation Epic Fury has led former military leaders to call for more funding for battlespace awareness upgrades and AWACS replacements, Defense One reported.

HASC said it would add the E-7 funding once they received the amendment. A White House Office Management and Budget spokesperson told Defense One it will send the updated funding request along soon.

“OMB will be sending a budget amendment to Congress in short order so it can be considered in the NDAA,” the spokesperson said. “We look forward to continuing our work with Congress to fund the President’s defense priorities.”

An Air Force spokesperson previously said the service is “evaluating options to resource the E-7 program in FY 2027 to deliver Rapid Prototyping aircraft and continue Engineering and Manufacturing Development activities.”

Meink told lawmakers in April that the service plans to buy five additional Wedgetails in addition to two prototypes already under contract.

While there is no procurement or research and development funds for the aircraft in the House’s 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, the committee’s initial draft added an $55 million outside of the Pentagon’s budget request for a E–7 AWACS Squadron Operations Facility at Oklahoma’s Tinker Air Force Base.

“We do support the E-7 program,” the staffer said. “We would like to see that budget amendment.”

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OPM proposes requiring all feds to sign an NDA

Erich Wagner — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:56:33 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management is set to propose requiring all federal employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement barring them from divulging “confidential” information in most cases, a move that experts warn violate workers’ First Amendment rights and statutes aimed at protecting whistleblowers from retaliation.

OPM announced its plan in a filing set for publication in the Federal Register Wednesday. In justifying the requirement, officials cited reporting in Government Executive and other news outlets disclosing controversial proposals to overhaul federal layoff and performance management rules—and internal warnings against their implementation—prior to their formal publication.

“Unauthorized disclosures of confidential government information disrupt agency operations and erode public trust,” OPM wrote. “In recent months, unauthorized disclosures have included internal government materials not intended for public release such as pre-decisional documents and interagency comments exchanged during internal coordination processes . . . Such disclosures risk chilling candid interagency feedback, disrupting orderly decision-making and weakening trust within and among federal agencies.”

According to a draft copy of the proposed NDA, feds would be required to sign a document barring them from disclosing information related to internal agency operations, personnel and procurement matters and “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material” and vowing to inform their agency if they learn of others making such a disclosure.

The draft NDA includes language stating that it does not conflict with the Whistleblower Protection Act, and that whistleblowers may continue to disclose information either to Congress or their agency’s inspector general’s office. But Kevin Owen, a partner at Gilbert Employment Law, a firm that specializes in federal employment issues, described those exceptions as mere “lip service.”

“Time and time again, we see circumstances where whistleblowers try to go through internal channels—either through an IG or agencies like the Office of Special Counsel—and for one reason or another, either they’re overburdened with work, or with this administration particularly, politically captured and therefore don’t do the necessary work,” Owen said. “So a lot of those channels are ineffective. Only once wrongdoing becomes more widely known is there an appropriate remedy to the waste, fraud and abuse going on. Simply having OPM pick and choose the channels for whistleblowers is not in accordance with the Whistleblower Protection Act.”

Michael Fallings, managing partner at Tully Rinckey, another federal employment law firm, said it will be hard to gauge the NDA’s true impact until a final draft is released, likely after OPM’s 30-day comment period. As things stand now, much of the document’s language is “over-broad,” he said.

“When you’re dealing with NDAs, you have to be careful about impacting somebody’s rights to engage in protected activity,” he said. “Even in the private sector, they still have the right to disclose waste, fraud and abuse, and with government entities, you have to be careful of employees’ First Amendment rights as well. That’s the fear of a lot of the employee rights organizations and attorneys right now, especially given what has happened with this administration and the sense that it is trying to prevent employees from speaking out.”

Owen noted that federal agencies already have longstanding rules governing the unauthorized disclosure of internal government information. OPM’s proposed NDA, which the agency explicitly tied to its effort to assert governmentwide firing power through suitability determinations, could create a new class of federal firings, shielded from Merit Systems Protection Board oversight. An employee deemed unsuitable not only would lose their job but also could be barred from being rehired into government for up to five years.

“The impact of this is, coupled with other recent changes to its regulations, OPM could become the sole arbiter of whether it is abiding by these rules,” he said. “OPM is now trying to become this super personnel office that centralizes its authority over all federal employees, ostensibly at the direction of the White House. By now controlling how federal employees are even able to communicate about matters of political concern, it’s one further step toward enacting a spoils system and making the civil service a political arm of the White House.”

Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, blasted the proposal as an effort to “silence” federal workers.

“This proposed NDA is another attempt by the administration to purge the civil service of nonpartisan career employees and replace them with loyalists who won’t speak out against waste, fraud and abuse,” he said. “Federal employees do not surrender their First Amendment rights when they accept federal employment, and the public has a right to know about this administration’s abuses.”

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The military says it’s ready to ‘fight tonight’ in the Pacific. Can it sustain that fight?

Jennifer Hlad — Sun, 24 May 2026 18:41:21 -0400

WAIKIKI, Hawaii—Having the “right stuff at the right place at the right time” in the Pacific theater is “a little bit of a maths problem,” says U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s strategy director for logistics and engineering.

“Hawaii is 3,000 miles from the West Coast. Guam is 5,000 miles from Hawaii, and the first island chain”—which includes Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines—“is 1,500 miles from Guam,” Brig. Gen. Jim Bliss of the New Zealand Army said this month during the Indo-Pacific Security Forum.

It’s “a vast ocean,” with “very, very little in the way of logistics nodes on land forward available to be used,” Bliss said.

If troops and materiel aren’t “forward when the fighting starts,” it will be difficult to get them there in time, he said.

It’s a problem that preoccupied many U.S. military leaders in the region.

“Here in the Indo-Pacific, a robust domestic base is a hollow shell if we cannot project that power across the tyranny of distance,” said Gen. Xavier Brunson, the commander of U.S. Forces Korea, during a keynote speech at AUSA’s Land Forces Pacific conference. “We cannot win if our supply lines are 5,000 miles long.”The U.S. Army’s “delivers foundational sustainment capabilities to the entire joint force. And I’m fervent in my belief that nobody knows or senses or feels viscerally the scale of sustainment than our nation’s Army,” Indo-Pacific commander leader Adm. Samuel Paparo said at LANPAC.

Maj. Gen. Gavin Gardner, commander of the Army’s 8th Theater Sustainment Command, reiterated that point later in the conference. Pre-positioning equipment forward, with partners like the Defense Logistics Agency and Army Materiel Command, and building what the Army calls joint interior lines, “quite frankly, demonstrates our ability to overcome that 7,000-mile distance” from the continental United States to “where we think we need to operate.”

Noting that he’d “rather get a root canal” than have to import things into Australia, Gardner said the Army has been prepositioning equipment there on a significant scale.

Still, he said, the issue is not just “storage and distribution,” it’s also about the ability to repair things when they break—without sending them back to the continental United States.

“We don’t want to” send it back, Gardner said. “We want to repair it forward. We want to repair it forward now, in what I call ‘competition’” so it’s ready when a conflict or crisis emerges.

In the past, he said, the unit had to send a broken Army watercraft to the U.S. West Coast. But because of expanded contracts, “now, I can fix it in South Korea. I could fix it in Japan. I could fix it in the Philippines. I could fix it in Australia. I could fix it in Singapore.

“That may sound like a small thing, but you know, that towing of a ship—two years in a row—all the way back from Australia—two years in a row—it takes a long time. That’s a 30-day sail in order to get it back,” he said, referring to the annual Talisman Sabre exercise.

Such a delay is untenable, USFK’s Brunson said.

“We cannot shuttle broken equipment across an ocean for repair while an adversary evolves on our doorstep,” he said.

On the Korean peninsula, Brunson said, “we’re already fixing forward and improving the concept.” Korean dry docks have “successfully overhauled” three U.S. ships, with two more in the queue. And by “leveraging special repair authority and weaponizing advanced manufacturing, we’re transforming our theater blueprint into a permanent deterrent.”

Resilience “is no longer a support function, but has to be a warfighting function,” said Marine Maj. Gen. George Rowell, INDOPACOM’s director of strategic planning and policy. “It means sustaining combat power, command and control, and logistics, and being able to take hits in a degraded environment.”

The way forward, Rowell said, is to “supercharge our defense industrial base,” and “innovate with non-traditional primes.”

“China possesses over 50 percent of the global commercial shipbuilding capacity, while the U.S. has about 0.1 percent, making it imperative that we accelerate capacity through both established and emerging industrial partners.”

A day after Rowell’s keynote at the Indo-Pacific Security Forum, Paparo told the audience at LANPAC that Allied forces won World War II “because industry built combat power at scale, a scale that the Axis powers could never match. And American sustainment delivered, from the factory floor to the fighting positions across the globe.”

Now, Paparo said, “we set the theater,” by posturing forces and pre-positioning sustainment, and creating “a network of distribution centers” throughout the Indo-Pacific.

But, he said, “we’ve got to be smart about how and where you’re pre-positioning ammunition stocks, because in this 21st-century warfare environment, you must [protect] those things that can’t be moved, and you must always be moving the things that you can.”

Marine Maj. Gen. Matthew Mowery, deputy commander of Marine Corps Forces Pacific, said the Marines set a goal of being able to sustain their own forces for 45 days within the first island chain. But he can’t build up an “iron mountain” of equipment and supplies.

And ultimately, Mowery said, “If we think that…if and when deterrence fails, and a crisis goes to conflict, we think we’re going to have 45 days to bring in, you know, all of our equipment sets and bring those forces in—we have not been kidding ourselves, but we would be kidding ourselves. If you don’t have those forces here when the shooting starts, you’d better plan to live without them.”

Maj. Gen. Ash Collingburn, commander of the Australian army’s 1st Division, echoed Mowery later that week.

“If it’s not forward when the fighting starts, then it’s really hard to get” needed supplies and people forward, he said. “I see sustainment as the key challenge in the theater—across time, across distance, across contested lines of communication. If we want to campaign at the edge, we need to be able to sustain.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Space Force needs to prepare for an ‘in-person’ moon conflict with China, new report argues

Thomas Novelly — Sat, 23 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The Space Force should prepare to put active-duty troops on the moon and on space stations to counter China’s lunar and military ambitions, a new research paper argues.

The Mitchell Institute’s paper, published Thursday, calls for the Space Force to prioritize the creation of a “human spaceflight” program and redefine federal, active-duty Title 10 orders to compete against China’s military-focused space initiatives—such as the reported goal of putting its Taikonauts on the moon by 2030. Although Chinese officials as recently as last month have said the country believes in the “peaceful use” of space, the paper claims future “competition for control of lunar resources and territory will likely reach a tipping point” and the U.S. military must be prepared.

“With a potential ‘in person’ lunar conflict with China as the contextual touchstone, the U.S. must begin a pragmatic multi-decade effort, leveraging its Space Test Course (STC), as well as partnerships with NASA and commercial space companies, to deliver the skills, tools, and concepts needed for future Title 10 activities to enforce U.S. spacepower-enabling norms and standards,” the report said. “These efforts will require additional funding from Congress for both U.S. Space Force human spaceflight opportunities and residencies at commercial space stations.”

The 22-page policy report calls for blurring the long-standing boundaries between space exploration and militarized operations by allowing Title 10 active-duty federal orders to include “space and lunar habitation” and “warfighting authorities and a national defense mindset in the advancement of human spaceflight.” The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which the U.S. and China are parties to, calls for the governments to use the moon and other planets for “peaceful purposes” and forbids military bases, testing, and maneuvers. Kyle Pumroy, a retired Space Force colonel and the paper’s author, called for pushing back against those norms.

“Although The 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) prohibits claims of lunar sovereignty and militarizing the moon, China’s habitation plans are closely aligned with their military and are inconsistent with the provisions,” the report said. “Moreover, China’s record of territorial aggression and ignoring treaty agreements must drive a strategic vision unconstrained by the OST. While upholding the OST should be the United States’ desire and priority, pragmatically, it must prepare otherwise.”

Pumory said during a webinar Wednesday that guardians on the moon wouldn’t be “necessarily a violation of outer space treaty” if they weren’t conducting maneuvers, but he also recognized that the treaty would need to be updated.

“I think at that point, once we have military members on the moon. Again, the treaty would need to be updated, because if one side does it and we say ‘well, you're violating the treaty, and we're not going to do that’ we're just setting ourselves up for disappointment,” Pumroy said. “So I don't think it's a violation to send them there, but whether we're violating the Outer Space Treaty or not is an important fact, but the greater need is for a modernized Outer Space Treaty that appreciates a lunar economy and mining resources from the moon, and mining ice from the moon, and using the moon as a launch pad to get to Mars and other locations.”

Victoria Samson, the Secure World Foundation’s chief director of space security and stability, said the Mitchell Institute’s report is an example of how the norms of space exploration and militarized operations are being challenged.

“It used to almost be a separation of church and state between the two,” Samson said. “Now, that line is being blurred, and I think it’s more a matter of, we have an administration that is supportive of a very active and expanding Space Force.”

The Mitchell Institute teased the idea of putting guardians in space last year. In a report titled “A Broader Look at Dynamic Space Operations,” the authors pitched the idea of putting troops on critical Space Force assets, to raise the stakes if an enemy decides to strike and to allow for flexibility and responsiveness in high-stakes situations.

The Space Force hasn’t sent any of its uniformed personnel into space for active-duty operations, but it has loaned its officers to NASA’s exploration missions. In 2020, astronaut Mike Hopkins transferred from the Air Force into the Space Force while aboard the International Space Station. In 2024, Space Force Col. Nick Hague commanded NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission, which lasted 171 days. He was the first active-duty guardian to ever launch into space.

The report also calls for Congress to fund future commercial space station residencies, or even the purchase of “a Space Force-dedicated space station” in future national defense authorization act legislation to help build guardian training and skills on orbit.

“Space station-based operations provide Guardians a trailblazing opportunity for the realistic testing and experimentation of future military concepts,” the report said. “Nothing compares to in-domain, first-hand experience to inform the development of future military requirements. Furthermore, taking this decisive step will send a strong message about the commitment of the United States to maintain space superiority.”

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The Pentagon’s $54 billion bet on autonomous warfare

Anna Miskelley — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:59:41 -0400

The Pentagon announced the Replicator Initiative with fanfare in 2023, aiming to field vast numbers of affordable, expendable drones as a strategic counter to China. However, by 2025, the program was limping along due to congressional criticism over stalled progress and the absence of a permanent institutional home or consistent funding.

The Pentagon officially dissolved Replicator in late 2025, absorbing it into the newly minted Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, or DAWG. Originally allocated a modest $225.9 million in the fiscal year 2026 budget, DAWG was widely expected to be just another iterative defense working group.

But the Trump administration’s FY27 budget request has shattered those expectations. The White House is requesting a staggering $54.6 billion for DAWG—a near 24,000 percent increase in a single fiscal year. Reflecting on the scale of the surge, retired general and former CIA Director David Petraeus noted that DAWG represents the “largest single commitment to autonomous warfare in history.”

This is no longer a pilot program. The Pentagon has stopped treating autonomous warfare like a startup project and is now funding it like a permanent branch of the American military apparatus.

Why did Replicator fail?

The unprecedented scale of DAWG’s budget is a direct response to the limitations that stalled its predecessor.

The Replicator Initiative rushed to procure specific, ready-built drone platforms. However, Replicator’s chosen drones suffered from persistent technical issues, struggled to integrate with existing military command-and-control systems, and were far too expensive and slow to manufacture in the quantity needed.

Furthermore, the Pentagon was paralyzed by its own procurement process. It struggled with up-front vetting, finding that many systems were entirely unfinished or purely conceptual. Perhaps most critically, Replicator failed to procure software able to orchestrate and command massive swarms of different drones.

Compounding these technological hurdles was an institutional homelessness. Because Replicator never possessed its own dedicated line-item budget, defense officials were forced to constantly reprogram. Frustrated by the lack of transparency regarding long-term lifecycle costs, Congress increasingly pushed back.

Managing the $54 billion operational whiplash

DAWG is designed to rectify the past mistakes of the Replicator Initiative, but its sudden financial windfall has only introduced more questions. How does an office that managed $225 million last year suddenly oversee $54.6 billion?

Pushing this massive sum through traditional Pentagon procurement pipelines risks a bottleneck. DAWG simply does not possess the infrastructure (contracting officers, lawyers, program managers etc.) to obligate that volume of capital in a twelve-month cycle. To prevent this, the Pentagon divided DAWG’s funds.

Of the $54.6 billion request, only $1 billion sits in the standard, highly restricted base budget. The remaining $53 billion has been tucked away into a flexible future reconciliation pot. This gives DAWG up to five years to obligate the funds. Instead of being forced to frantically dump billions into obsolete hardware before the fiscal clock runs out, DAWG can instead dole out cash incrementally as autonomous technology matures. To ensure long-term viability, DAWG will emphasize procurement, operations, maintenance, training, and sustainment over the first few years before scaling back to ensure active manufacturing lines while avoiding the risk of overproduction.

Will DAWG be different?

There are some early signs that the institutional shift to DAWG will be different from the Replicator experience. Unlike Replicator, which sat precariously under the Defense Innovation Unit as a pilot program, DAWG is getting more permanent institutional teeth. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently announced the impending creation of a dedicated Sub-Unified Command for Autonomous Warfare. Simultaneously, U.S. Southern Command has established its own autonomous warfare command, which will work closely with DAWG to identify available expertise and capabilities required for operations.

Architecturally, the focus has shifted from hardware to software. Acting Pentagon Comptroller Jules Hurst describes DAWG as a “pathfinder,” embedded with private tech firms, live-testing “orchestration tools for autonomy” and providing real-time combat feedback. This software-focused mentality is demonstrated by the recent announcement that Shield AI has been tapped to integrate its Hivemind AI pilot software into the military’s new Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System, or LUCAS. Unlike Replicator, DAWG has introduced a new divergent priority to develop sophisticated software that can be flashed onto any cheap drone frame.

Yet, lawmakers are starting to raise major red flags. There is a growing anxiety in Congress that the Pentagon’s foundational policy on AI weapons, DoD Directive 3000.09, is completely unequipped for this scale of deployment. The directive mandates “appropriate levels of human judgement,” but when orchestrating thousands of autonomous systems simultaneously, human-in-the-loop oversight becomes a mathematical impossibility. An uncomfortable reality is beginning to emerge: the Pentagon is throwing a military-branch-sized budget at autonomous swarms before deciding on the rules of engagement.

Ultimately, the creation of DAWG represents a structural shift rather than a guaranteed technological revolution. By shifting the ad-hoc, hardware-first approach of the Replicator Initiative to a permanent, software-focused funding line, the Pentagon is attempting to fix a broken acquisition pipeline that has historically been unable to move at the speed of commercial technology.

However, funding and execution are different. DAWG’s ambitious plans still heavily rely on a congressional reconciliation process that faces a complicated and uncertain political path. Even if the $54.6 billion request is approved, the Pentagon must still solve the immense logistical challenge of integrating thousands of autonomous systems into a joint force that lacks established doctrine for swarm warfare.

The Pentagon has clearly signaled where it believes the future of warfare lies. But as DAWG moves from a budget proposal to an operational reality, its success will not be measured by the size of its funding pot, but by whether the military can safely and effectively integrate these algorithmic tools into the reality of modern combat.

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Gabbard to resign as director of national intelligence, citing husband’s health

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:08:00 -0400

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard will resign from her role in the coming weeks, her office confirmed to Nextgov/FCW on Friday.

Gabbard’s husband, Abraham Williams, was “diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer, and she is stepping away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle,” Olivia Coleman, a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in an email.

In a Truth Social post that included Gabbard’s resignation note, President Donald Trump said she would be leaving June 30. It marks the fourth major cabinet departure of his second term.

During Gabbard’s roughly 16-month tenure overseeing the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies, the former Democratic congresswoman and 2020 presidential candidate sought to reshape ODNI around Trump’s priorities while facing persistent scrutiny over her past comments on Russia, Syria, Edward Snowden and surveillance authorities. She was narrowly confirmed to the position in February 2025.

In office, Gabbard launched a sweeping restructuring effort aimed at shrinking ODNI, including plans to cut staffing and consolidate or eliminate several offices tied to cyber, foreign influence and intelligence integration functions. Supporters framed the moves as long-overdue reforms, while critics warned they could weaken coordination across the intelligence community.

Gabbard also became a central figure in Trump’s efforts to target former intelligence officials viewed as political adversaries. Last year, she revoked security clearances for dozens of current and former national security officials, accusing some of politicizing intelligence and leaking classified information, which drew sharp criticism from Democrats and former intelligence leaders.

Her tenure was additionally marked by renewed disputes over U.S. intelligence assessments, including intelligence findings involving Venezuela.

Gabbard’s political rise was built in part around opposition to U.S. interventionism and what she called “regime change wars,” a posture that at times appeared increasingly at odds with White House actions involving military operations in Iran and Venezuela.

In March, a Senate hearing highlighted growing tensions between intelligence community assessments of the war in Iran and the administration’s framing of the conflict. It also came a day after the departure of then-aide and National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, who said he could not agree with the Trump administration’s premise for the war, which was launched alongside Israel in February.

In the hearing, Gabbard told senators that it’s “not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat” and that the president has authority to make such conclusions.

In a Friday statement, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his thoughts were with Gabbard and her family.

“Anyone who has watched a loved one go through a serious illness understands the toll it takes, and I wish him strength and hope for a full recovery in the difficult days ahead. I also appreciate her willingness to serve her country in a variety of different roles,” he said.

“The Director of National Intelligence is entrusted with one of the most serious responsibilities in government: providing objective, fact-based intelligence to policymakers and the American people, regardless of politics or pressure from the White House,” added Warner, who often sparred with Gabbard over issues involving her office.

“At a time when the boundaries between verified intelligence and politically convenient claims have too often been blurred, it is critical that the office remain grounded in facts, independence, and the rule of law,” he said.

“I thank Tulsi Gabbard for her service in this administration and in uniform, and I wish her the very best as she supports her husband Abe in his battle with cancer. Please join me in sending them prayers for a full and fast recovery,” said Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., the intelligence committee chairman.

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General Atomics resumes drone-wingman flights after mishap

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:55:15 -0400

Nearly seven weeks after an autopilot problem crashed a General Atomics collaborative combat aircraft, the company announced Thursday that its drone wingmen are back in the skies.

On April 6, a YFQ-42A “Dark Merlin" crashed at the company airport in California, prompting a joint investigation by the company and the Air Force. General Atomics spokesperson C. Mark Brinkley said flight testing resumed on Wednesday. The company continued ground testing and other evaluations while flight testing was paused. A software problem identified during the investigation has been fixed.

“A thorough safety review isolated the cause to an autopilot miscalculation for the weight and center of gravity of the aircraft, prompting a software remediation,” General Atomics said in a news release. “Following a stringent evaluation, technical authorities endorsed the software changes and YFQ-42A has returned to the air.”

No one was injured in the April 6 crash, but the company said the aircraft was a “total loss”.

It was one of several production-representative CCAs being made for the Air Force’s drone wingman competition. General Atomics is going head-to-head against Anduril and Northrop Grumman for the service’s business. An Increment 1 production decision is expected before the end of September, and the Air Force is requesting nearly $1 billion to buy its first CCAs, 2027 budget documents released last month show.

“It’s been said that you learn more from your setbacks than your successes,” General Atomics President David R. Alexander said in the news release. “We are applying what we’ve learned to our growing fleet of CCAs, as we continue building the most dependable and cost-efficient unmanned fighters in the world.”

Air Force Col. Timothy Helfrich, portfolio acquisition executive for fighters and advanced aircraft, said the incident showed the service’s new willingness to accept risks.

“The USAF and General Atomics response to the YFQ-42 mishap validates our approach to accept acquisition/test risk instead of operational risk allowing us to accelerate the program towards fielding,” he said in an emailed statement. “We pushed the envelope, identified a risk, learned from the data, and have cleared the YFQ-42A to return to flight.”

Helfrich stressed that the crash didn’t pause progress on the CCA program. He said the service’s Experimental Operations Unit at Edwards Air Force Base in California flew several sorties with Anduril’s YFQ-44A Fury aircraft the same week General Atomics paused test flights.

“Despite the pause on one platform, we executed this critical exercise that same week using the YFQ-44A to validate core operational and deployment concepts,” Helfrich said in the statement. “Because of this momentum and our resilient, multi-vendor approach, overall CCA progress never missed a beat as we drive toward delivering advanced capability to the fleet."

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Key Army efforts pinned to lawmakers’ taste for a new reconciliation bill

Meghann Myers — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:30:07 -0400

The White House decision to seek about one-quarter of its gargantuan $1.5 trillion defense-spending request as reconciliation funding leaves some of the military’s top priorities—munitions, industrial-base upgrades—up to lawmakers’ appetite for another precedent-breaking budget maneuver.

The Army, for example, is asking for $24.5 billion to fund purchases through DOD’s Munitions Acceleration Council, according to budget documents. The service is also asking for $206 million to expand and upgrade its own weapons factories—ten times the amount requested in last year’s reconciliation bill.

“We have all of these incredible things that we're trying to do and move forward, but acceleration is only as good as our counterparts on the Hill are able to push it forward as well, right?” Maj. Gen. Rebecca McElwain, the Army’s budget director, said Thursday during an Association of the United States Army event. “So, if we get our funding halfway through a fiscal year, that could complicate things.”

Last year’s reconciliation bill is a case in point. After months of back and forth, the bill finally passed in July, with just weeks left in the fiscal year. Then it took the Pentagon another seven months to produce its plan to spend the money, including $2.6 billion for Army procurement.

And there is no guarantee that Congress—which broke precedents to pass last year’s reconciliation bill—will approve the administration’s request for a new one worth twice as much to the Pentagon.

“When we're looking at reconciliation, you can see very clearly what will not be accelerated, and a lot of that is in our munitions and our industrial base,” McElwain said. “I would say that would slow it down, especially some of the multi-year programs that we have that are vested in there with the munitions.”

The Army doesn’t decide which parts of its funding request will go into which bill, and the administration hasn’t been open about its strategy to fund so much of the government through reconciliation.

The difference in funding types means that an appropriations bill has line-by-line mandates for how each dollar is spent, while a reconciliation bill is a big check that the department can ultimately divvy up as it sees fit, though Congress makes recommendations and agencies report back their spending plans.

“Mr. Secretary, the administration is taking an enormous risk by asking for $350 billion in priorities through reconciliation,” Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth earlier this month. “As we told you in our last meeting, reconciliation is not the best way to fund the department. Last year, reconciliation created broken glass—funding holds for vital programs that the appropriators had to fix. And that's why we need the information in a timely fashion.”

Her concern is a bipartisan one. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who chairs the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, railed against the reconciliation bill last year and recently lamented the administration’s request for a new one.

“The distinction between base and reconciliation really matters,” McConnell said during a hearing earlier this month. “Base funding is what creates budget stability for the services and sends consistent demand signals to industry, and base funding is what gets extended by short-term continuing resolutions when work on full-year appropriations is unfinished.”

McConnell cautioned against a Republican administration relying on a Republican majority to get its budget requests funded, especially for money that goes toward longer-term investments.

“As I said last year, reconciliation should be a supplement to, not a substitute for,” he said. “Political realities will not always allow for party line, budget reconciliation, and if the department's top priorities aren't built into annual appropriations. We're actually taking a big risk.”

There are also concerns about the timing of how separate pots of money are distributed, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., SAC-D’s ranking member, said at the same hearing.

“Last year, $150 billion was provided to the department, but the mismatch between base year and one-year, between long-term and short-term, caused tens of billions of dollars in errors,” he said. “Errors in how shipbuilding was handled, errors in how new munitions are being acquired. And working together on a bipartisan basis, we fixed many of those problems.”

Coons warned that this year’s near-tripling of that amount could result in even more of those errors.

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Defense Business Brief: Hybrid sky drones; Amphibs; Mobile data centers and a bit more

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 21 May 2026 05:23:19 -0400

Hybrid engines are in the news as consumers seek relief from gas prices boosted by the war on Iran, but military customers are also looking beyond internal combustion.

“There's a lot of interest in battery-operated, electric-driven drones…but there's also a lot of interest in heavy, fuel-based drones” that use JP-8, says Greg Thompson, president of Survice Engineering. “Batteries are great, they're very clean, they're very efficient. But transporting them, maintaining them, storing them, charging them—all that can be a little bit of a growth phase…and so there's still this hunger for a fuel-based drone, and so we're trying to marry that together. Think of it like a hybrid car, like a Prius.”

For the past year, Survice Engineering has been developing a hybrid-powered drone that it hopes to show defense customers later this year. The plan is to have a suite of electric only, fuel-based hybrid, and fuel-only drones in the Group 3 and above category.

“We are looking at maybe late summer, early fall timeframe to be able to demonstrate to our customers at least a concept of what we can bring to market,” Thompson said of the hybrid option. “That hybrid gen set is part of what's next for us…and also continuing to develop the next higher-level platform that gives them the next class up in terms of lift, something that does hundreds of pounds and gives them more, more mission capability in terms of things like [casualty evacuation] and bigger payloads.”

Hybrid-powered drones are quieter and can have a longer flying range compared to gas-only ones.. And their military use could be beneficial for surveillance operations or ferrying cargo long distances, such as across the Indo-Pacific. They could also serve as an alternative for purely battery-powered drones, which can lose precious energy capacity in different temperatures.

And drone companies are increasingly spending capital to build hybrid offerings, said Michael Robbins, president and CEO of the drone trade group AUVSI.

“You are seeing a lot of companies investing in research and innovation in hybrid propulsion, particularly as the focus increasingly shifts, at least in theory, to the Indo-Pacon region, where “In the Indo-Pacom theater, range is always a challenge. With the exception of maybe some very niche use cases like pre-positioned assets on Taiwan, virtually every other use case is going to not rely upon battery technology alone. And it's going to be some combination of jet-powered or some sort of hybrid propulsion,” Robbins said.

“Drones grew primarily as a commercial technology. And for a long time because of FAA regulations, the drones were limited to a fairly narrow operation area, typically within line of sight of the operator. So range wasn't a top consideration in the same way it is for military missions. And now the Pentagon is getting very serious about drone acquisition and different use cases…I think there is a growing market for companies to enter into that space.”

Welcome

More amphibs please. The Marine Corps needs at least 40 amphibious ships—nine more than statutorily required, Navy officials told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. And if funded, it’ll take six years to get there.

That figure came out of an internal Amphibious Forces Readiness Board report that Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao recommended to the defense secretary ahead of Tuesday’s hearing. The vice chief of naval operations and assistant commandant of the Marine Corps lead the board.
The report has “two courses of action and the course of action that we would like to pursue would be able to extend the [Optimized Fleet Response Plan] up to 56 months, allowing us to have two work up cycles, two integrated training cycles, as well as two deployments for every ship,” Cao testified. “So, for that, we would require 40 amphibious ships. Right now, we're at 31.”
Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, said, “Forty just makes a lot of sense. It's going to take that to give me the friction in there necessary to have a persistent 3.0”—that is, to have three ARGs ready at any time. Caudle echoed Gen. Eric Smith, Marine Corps commandant, who argued the same in Defense One, and Lt. Gen. Jay Bargeron, deputy commandant for plans, policies, and operations, speaking at this year’s Modern Day Marine conference.
Background: Just about half of the Navy’s 32 amphibious ships are in deployable shape, the Government Accountability Office found in 2024.

The 2026 procurement budget for amphibs is about $4.6 billion, according to budget documents. The request for 2027 is about $8.3 billion for two amphibious ships and six Medium Landing Ships or LSMs.
Over the next five years, the Navy plans to spend $29.3 billion for five LPDs, two LHAs, and 23 LSMs, according to the Navy’s latest 30-year shipbuilding plan released last week.

Making mobile data centers. Armada, which makes mobile data centers in shipping containers, secured $230 million in a series B funding round, which will be used to expand manufacturing in its Arizona facility. The company’s valuation now sits around $2 billion.

“This is really how we need to go about winning this AI race,” CEO Dan Wright told reporters. “First and foremost, it's a manufacturing and infrastructure production problem: we have to be able to deploy AI both domestically and with allies faster than our adversaries or potential adversaries.”
The company plans to increase production in its Arizona facility of its largest offering, the Leviathan data center, which is configured with three shipping containers. “We're going to start with two units per month, scaling up to six units per month,” Wright said.
The company is currently “producing dozens of Galleons a year,” which are what Armada calls its ruggedized data center modules. The goal is to multiply that and make hundreds by the end of the year, “then next year to thousands and then to tens of thousands,” Wright said.

Lightning round

The Space Development Agency has a permanent director, Gurpartap Sandhoo, who has been acting in the role since September. Sandhoo is also the Space Force Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Missile Warning and Tracking.
Firefly Aerospace added a new lab and is doubling its Texas manufacturing facility to support its aim of multiple moon landings.
James Mingus, retired general and former Army vice chief of staff, joins the board of directors for cyber defense company REDLattice.
Acma, which develops defense and aerospace components, landed a $300 million Series B funding round led by Caffeinated Capital. The round puts the company at unicorn status after just 18 months in the business.

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F-35, F-15 may take A-10’s combat-search-and-rescue role: USAF chief

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:30:53 -0400

F-15 Eagles and F-35 Lightning II fighters may take on future combat search and rescue missions, as the Air Force aims to retire the last A-10 Thunderbolt IIs by 2030, service officials told lawmakers Wednesday.

The A-10 “Warthog” has been the cornerstone close air support aircraft of the military’s combat search and rescue formations, or “sandy package,” for decades. Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, the Air Force’s top uniformed leader, faced questions from several lawmakers during a House Armed Services Committee hearing about how the service will maintain that capability.

“The reason why the A-10 is really good at that is because it's a core mission of that platform, and as we transition with putting the A-10 in the retirement phase, there will be other platforms that it will become their core mission,” Wilsbach said. “So F-35s, F-15s, other platforms have the capability."

Warthogs have been used heavily in the Iran war, from strafing boats in the Strait of Hormuz to the daring rescue operation of a downed F-15 airman. Last month, the Air Force announced it will keep three squadrons flying: one through 2029 and the other two through 2030. But as the service eyes replacement platforms, other pilots will have to be trained on how to do the combat search and rescue mission.

"The A-10 pilots are specifically trained for combat search and rescue,” said Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga.. “Are we going to specifically train F-35 and other pilots for combat search and rescue?”

“We’ll have to,” Wilsbach said. “It’s our mission.”

In response to similar questions from Rep. Sarah Elfreth, D-Md., Wilsbach said the fiscal year 2027 budget asks for $10 billion in flying hours, which would cover additional combat search and rescue training for the service’s pilots.

“The mission of the A-10 is close air support, but part of that subset of close air support is combat search and rescue,” Wilsbach said. “And we can do close air support, and we can do combat search and rescue support from other platforms, and it's unacceptable to have a gap if you have somebody down behind enemy lines, like you saw with Dude 44 Bravo, you have to go get them.”

The White House, Congress, and Defense Secretary’s work to extend the A-10’s retirement to 2030 “allows us to make sure that we don't have a break in that capability,” said Air Force Secretary Troy Meink.

Dan Grazier, a Stimson Center senior fellow and the director of the nonprofit's national-security reform program, is skeptical.

"Firstly, it is highly doubtful that neither the F-35 or the F-15 will ever be able to match the A-10's capabilities,” Grazier said. “Secondly, Gen. Wilsbach said the quiet part out loud. He admitted that the F-35, even though it was sold as a replacement for the A-10, still isn't a viable replacement."

The F-35 was first pitched as a substitute for the A-10’s close air support mission. Internal tests involving the two aircraft raised concerns about whether it could be an effective replacement, according to a report obtained by the Project on Government Oversight. Additionally, during the F-15’s development, the phrase “not a pound for air-to-ground” was used to describe the program’s pivot away from bombing missions. But both platforms have been significantly upgraded and have been branded as multirole fighters capable of numerous missions, including close-air support, ISR, and air-to-air operations.

Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., pointed out that the F-35’s price tag, loiter time, and flight hour costs are all significantly higher than the A-10.

“So having been on the ground as a United States Naval SEAL in combat, loiter time matters,” Van Orden said. “We cannot have a gap in close air support, a close air support platform, that will be able to kill the enemy that is in that hallway, vice dropping something from an F-35.”

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‘Everybody is going underground’: CENTCOM head calls for new tech to hit buried targets

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:02:48 -0400

More money to counter drones and attack underground targets is necessary for future fights, the head of U.S. Central Command said on Thursday, as lawmakers praised and grilled the four-star admiral about the war in Iran.

In his first House Armed Services Committee appearance since the Iran war began, Adm. Brad Cooper said the U.S. military has changed even in the past eight weeks, leaning on LUCAS drones as well as land-attack missiles and finding cheaper ways to fight off Iranian drones and other weapons.

But when asked by Rep. John McGuire, R-Va., what additional support was needed, the four-star admiral had a wish list ready.

“I’d put three things: more electronic warfare, keep counter-UAS on the leading edge—tactics change very quickly—and we need to invest more in hard and deeply buried targets,” Cooper said. “Everybody is going underground.”

A CENTCOM spokesperson later told Defense One the CENTCOM commander was referring to munitions that can destroy more hidden and hardened targets.

Cooper’s HASC appearance followed his testimony before the Senate last week, when some members criticized the administration’s shifting justifications for the war. Nor wereHouse Democrats reticent to criticize the conflict’s launch and conduct by the White House.

Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., criticized Cooper and Daniel Zimmerman, the Pentagon’s assistant international security affairs secretary, for the Trump administration’s continued military operations despite an avowed May 5 ceasefire and the legal limits on wars without Congressional approval. Garamendi said that U.S. forces fired on Iranian tankers after the administration said it halted military actions.

“It's incredible to me that this department has such disregard for the Congress and the U.S. Constitution, that the U.S. military forces are not still engaged in hostilities and still deployed against the war and ignoring the War Powers Act and the Constitution,” Garamendi said. “The fact of the matter is that hostilities continue.”

In one exchange, Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., peppered Cooper with rapid-fire questions—including whether the military’s war plan had anticipatedrising gas and oil prices, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the lack of a nuclear deal.

“We achieved all our military objectives, we're presently in a ceasefire, we're executing a blockade, and we're prepared for a broad range of contingencies,” Cooper said.

“Well, it doesn't seem to be going well,” Moulton replied. “And I would like to know, how many more Americans have to ask to die for this mistake?”

“I think it's an entirely inappropriate statement from you, sir,” Cooper said. “With all due respect.”

Other members, such as Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., praised the admiral’s leadership and the “remarkable” military achievements.

Lawmakers also asked for updates regarding the investigation into the Feb. 28 airstrike on an Iranian girl’s school, which preliminary inquiries reportedly show the U.S. was responsible.

Cooper said that investigation “is coming to the end” and said he was committed to releasing an unclassified version to the public.

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