Crooked Bough News Round-up

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

 

at 9/22/26 7:16pm

President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a rebranding of the term “artificial intelligence,” saying during the United Nations General Assembly that from now on, it will be called “super intelligence.”  “From this point forward, all of United States’ documents, and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use the much more accurate term, ‘super,’ as opposed to ‘artificial’,” he said. Though the rebrand may have been a surprise to many, superintelligence is already an established term in AI literature. It was popularized in philosopher Nick Bostrom’s 2014 bestseller Superintelligence, which defines the term as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.” Artificial superintelligence, or ASI, thus refers to future AI systems that could be much smarter than humans, and contrasts with the weaker forms of AI that exist today.  ASI is a step beyond AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which OpenAI defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” By this definition, today’s AI isn’t AGI yet, much less ASI, since we can’t yet hire AI as a reliable virtual employee. Some experts dislike the term superintelligence, or question whether it’s a coherent concept. In the influential 2025 paper “AI as Normal Technology,” authors Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan write, “We do not think there is a useful sense of the term ‘intelligence’ in which AI is more intelligent than people acting with the help of AI.” But others say the possible renaming contributes to an ongoing conversation about AI’s growing abilities.  “‘Super’ does align well with the fact that AI is exceeding human capabilities in a growing range of tasks and by increasing margins, which can have distinct national security implications beyond simply matching human performance,” said Caleb Withers, a research associate for the Technology and Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.  For example, in early September, OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem, one of the most important open problems in math. As AI becomes more capable, it has grown increasingly central to the U.S.-China relationship. Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping are slated to meet this week to discuss trade and AI issues. Bostrom, who has warned of the dangers of fully superintelligent AI systems, said an all-out AI race increases the risk that the technology gets out of control. “If competitors are convinced that coming second [in the AI race] means the total loss of everything they care about, they will take whatever risk necessary to bypass their rivals,” he said. Trump reportedly worries that an AI slowdown could cause a market crash, and sees “super intelligence” as a critical sector for America to stay ahead of China. “Whoever wins AI, you have to remember this, and now I say, whoever wins SI, whoever wins super intelligence, wins. That’s the group that wins.”  ]]

[Category: Science & Tech]

— Trump's FBI shut down investigation into defense contractor's alleged bribes

 

at 9/22/26 11:38am

In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C. For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising. Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation. Government contractors are banned from making political contributions. More consequentially, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery. But the company did have such a proposal: Navatek was hungry for more government contracts in Maine. If they cut a big check, the CEO told Reed, Navatek wanted Collins to guarantee tens of millions of dollars in additional federal funding. To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said — and that Navatek would get its government contracts. After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica. Three years later, Kao holed up in a conference room to recount the Corner Bakery meeting to a group of four FBI agents and federal prosecutors. The FBI had seen through his shell company ruse, and in 2022 a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. No one working for Collins was charged. Facing years in prison, Kao hoped to do less time by revealing the entire scheme. What he told them has never before become public. The Corner Bakery meeting, he asserted, was just one episode in a sprawling pay-to-play operation that embroiled some of the most powerful figures in Congress. Over three days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu, Kao laid out in devastating detail how his operation worked. He gave agents a 50-page document naming dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts. Kao and his close associates had donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with over $40 million a year in government funding. Most damningly, Kao told FBI agents and prosecutors, the company’s work for the government was of no real value. Navatek’s research under his stewardship never resulted in products the military wanted to buy, ProPublica found. Kao’s tell-all interviews with the FBI lasted into late 2024. His confessions opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation. Agents sifted through hundreds of thousands of records seized during Kao’s arrest and found that many were consistent with his account of widespread influence peddling. Kao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. And there were other challenges. Building a corruption case against elected officials requires extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement, in part because the Supreme Court has narrowed what counts as bribery. Even so, by the end of 2024, the agents had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties. They asked their supervisors to approve a new investigation and contemplated using undercover operatives to gather more evidence. Although their effort was in its early stages, and it was unclear where it would lead, FBI agents asked Kao extensive questions about his dealings with Collins and her office. Then Trump returned to the White House. Consumed by a campaign of vengeance, he stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers and demanded a purge of anyone who had ever investigated him. The specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated. One of the agents who had taken Kao’s confession was pushed out as retribution for her role in investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Dozens of agents and prosecutors quit amid the department’s destruction, including the career attorney assigned to Kao’s case. Trump’s Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said. The investigation sparked by Kao’s revelations is dead. And the government is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress. The White House referred ProPublica to the FBI. FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago “and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.” Williamson said the Trump administration has removed agents only “if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.” Williamson did not respond to questions about the new investigation launched in 2024 based on Kao’s previously unreported cooperation with the FBI. ProPublica is revealing the existence of the case for the first time. We reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI and thousands of pages of legal records, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations, and the FBI inquiry to conduct our own investigation. We independently corroborated much of Kao’s account. Whether or not Kao’s dealings with politicians amount to criminal bribery, the Trump Justice Department has little interest in finding out, and his sheer success reveals how easily influence is purchased in Washington today. This is the first in a series of stories drawn from our reporting. Of all the politicians Navatek courted under Kao’s leadership, Collins was its most important patron. The senator’s office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping Kao and his network for donations, according to emails seen by ProPublica. Sometimes they cut checks within 24 hours of the annual defense spending bill, which funds military contracts, clearing a key Senate hurdle. Collins’ office did not specifically address questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the senator’s relationship with Kao and the millions she helped appropriate for Navatek. Annie Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica in an email that Collins’ office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao, calling his claims “outlandish.” Collins’ campaign was not part of the discussions between Kao and the super PAC, and her office “fully cooperated” with the FBI investigation, Clark said. “The fact that the FBI and Biden-led Department of Justice thoroughly examined the Navatek matter demonstrates this,” Clark wrote. “These issues were resolved in 2021 and concluded when the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.” Collins is once again fighting to keep her seat, in a race that could determine control of the Senate. On the campaign trail, she spotlights the funding she directs to Maine while leading the appropriations committee, which she calls “the most powerful committee in the Senate.” She demonstrated that power with Navatek. After the budgets became law, Collins’ office pushed the Navy to award specific contracts to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show, even though awards are supposed to be competitive. “I spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M,” a naval official wrote in an email on Feb. 6, 2019. “The interested company is Navatek.” In a meeting with Collins and two campaign officials, Kao said, the officials told him the senator expected his ongoing support. Collins told him: “You’ve seen me deliver,” Kao said. Reed knew Kao was behind the $150,000 anonymous donation, emails showed, because Kao told Reed he planned to donate through a shell company. “Very smart,” Reed replied in an email viewed by ProPublica. Reed did not respond to detailed questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the $150,000 donation and Kao’s allegations. “I understand Martin Kao is now sitting in federal prison,” Reed wrote in a brief email. “I never had any communications with Senator Collins [or] her staff about Martin Kao and/or Navatek.” But an email seen by ProPublica suggests that someone must have relayed the news of Kao’s donation to Collins, just like Reed promised to do in Kao’s recounting of the Corner Bakery meeting. Seven days after the super PAC cashed the check from Kao’s shell company, one of Reed’s subordinates emailed a Navatek lobbyist asking for Kao’s phone number: “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.” The Navatek Method Before Kao’s doomed reign as CEO, Navatek was a sleepy Hawaiian engineering company with a few dozen employees. It was founded in 1978 by Steven Loui, a talented engineer and scion of a powerful Hawaiian shipping family. Navatek was not a profit center but a vehicle for Loui’s passion projects, like an experimental catamaran for navigating Hawaii’s choppy waters. The company benefited from the largesse of the legendary Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, multiple former Navatek executives and employees said, whose family had been close to the Loui family for generations. Inouye was a master of earmarks, a practice that allowed lawmakers to insert funding for specific companies by name in the federal budget. The self-styled “King of Pork” steered hundreds of millions in federal dollars to Hawaii. Former Navatek employees say he was affectionately referred to as “Uncle Dan.” “Before Inouye took an interest, Congress didn’t even know our companies existed,” a longtime Loui lieutenant wrote in a 1998 op-ed. In response to ProPublica questions, Loui said that money appropriated by Inouye made up “a minority” of Navatek’s revenue. Inouye’s death in 2012 made the company’s future uncertain. Not only was Navatek’s direct line to Capitol Hill gone, but Congress was doing away with the abuse-riddled earmark process. Now companies would nominally have to compete on the merits for government contracts. Kao joined Navatek in 2008 as its chief financial officer. Loui charged him with replacing Navatek’s rainmaker and eventually named Kao CEO. He sold Kao the company in return for a share of the profits. Kao was an unusual figure among the company’s low-key naval engineers and boat aficionados. He seemed to be aping a Wall Street tycoon, telling employees they could either be “a beast or a bitch,” a former executive said. He drove to work in a Ferrari and abruptly fired subordinates who displeased him — one time, in the middle of the night. “He had very little interest in the technology,” one former employee recalled. “Martin was only interested in dollar signs.” Kao also exaggerated and lied. He told different people he had stepbrothers whose parents died in a fishing accident or an avalanche, a former employee recalled. He lied to Loui about having law degrees from both the University of California, Los Angeles and New York University. He once told a lobbyist who raised quarter horses that he owned a herd of polo ponies, just to one-up him. Despite his erratic behavior, former employees agree Kao hit upon an effective way to replace the lost earmarks. If the company could not rely on a benefactor like Inouye, it would develop a stable of them. Navatek targeted the powerful members who sat on the House and Senate appropriations committees. These members could no longer earmark money for specific military contractors. But they retained the power to budget millions of dollars for equipment or bespoke research and development. Because Pentagon budgets run thousands of pages and are largely prepared in secret, it is easy for appropriators to add a line item intended for a contractor like Navatek without leaving any fingerprints. Soon, Kao had refined a playbook. Navatek would concoct a research project in partnership with a university in a member’s district or home state, and Kao would make a large initial campaign donation. Working with a team of pricey, well-connected lobbyists, Navatek would get meetings on Capitol Hill to pitch the research to congressional staff. Navatek kept spreadsheets, reviewed by ProPublica, that listed members of Congress as the “specialty” of certain lobbyists. Separately, Kao later told the FBI, there would be a meeting of just the key players. One engineer, who traveled with Kao to D.C. to explain the technical side of a project, recalled being sent out of the room once the subject of money came up. Sometimes in these smaller meetings, members of Congress directly asked Kao for donations, he told the FBI. In other cases, he said, Navatek’s lobbyists would relay a request from an intermediary for a specific dollar amount. Kao told the FBI that the lawmakers, lobbyists and Navatek brass understood these donations were bribes and that the payments were essential to the entire scheme. Kao believed he was buying Navatek’s way into the annual defense budget, not winning over members with innovative engineering proposals. “I’m not red or blue, I’m green,” he would tell congressional staffers, a former Navatek employee recalled. While a deal was being struck, Navatek and congressional staffers worked closely on the legislative process. Every year, Congress prefaces the defense budget with massive reports describing the purpose of inscrutable line items. Staffers would include a project description so specific that Navatek would be the only logical pick. Often, Navatek composed language that ended up, word for word, in Senate funding requests, former employees said. In 2019, for example, Navatek’s priorities were tucked into page 185 of the 307-page report released by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The committee set aside $21.5 million for “hybrid composite structures research for enhanced mobility,” “electric propulsion for military craft and advanced planing hulls” and a “test bed for autonomous ship systems.” Although Navatek’s name does not appear on the page, these were all projects the company requested, according to internal documents and interviews with former employees. Once the budget passed, lawmakers’ staff leaned on Navy officials to award Navatek the money. Former contracting officers told ProPublica they felt pressure to go along because money from those contracts funded their office — and because members of Congress had confronted dissenting naval officials in the past. “There’s only so many battles you can fight,” one said. So Congress sometimes got its way even when Navatek’s projects made little sense. Inside Navatek, employees referred to this strategy as “the method.” And it enabled the company to string together tens of millions of dollars in contracts. The result was the same as getting earmarks: a reliable, growing revenue stream bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers. “It was a simple enough play. Let’s find the small states that have complementary universities … [and] let’s get access to their senators,” Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, told ProPublica. “I’ve met Susan Collins. You can get access to Susan Collins. Once we got the first things working with Maine, then we said, ‘Well, let’s keep reaching.’ And so we did.” In a statement to ProPublica, Navatek founder Loui said Kao’s “unethical and illegal method of winning contracts” was a departure from how he operated the company prior to Kao’s ownership. Kao boosted Navatek’s annual revenue from $10 million around the time Loui sold him the company to almost $40 million when he was arrested in 2020. In the second half of 2019 alone, Navatek paid a roster of five lobbying shops more than $500,000. Even Navatek’s executives were surprised at how far their money went in D.C. “It was eye-opening for me, frankly. ‘Oh my God, all of it is for sale. It’s all for sale,’” Schiff said. The key players in Kao’s pay-to-play deals went to great lengths to meet in person and leave no trace of an actual quid pro quo, he told agents. “That is why I literally had to fly to D.C. almost every week,” Kao later told the FBI. “Sometimes for a 15-minute meeting.” But the FBI compiled emails, which ProPublica reviewed, that were suggestive of illegal bargains. Navatek executives and lobbyists spoke openly as if they were buying lawmakers’ assistance. In one back-and-forth, a lobbyist and a company executive described another senator as “fundamentally transactional” and having “a reputation as a pay-to-play office.” In another message, Andy Winer, who former executives said was Navatek’s chief strategist, reminded Kao to budget money for political contributions based on how much the company wanted in congressional funding the following year. Winer was his guide to the political underbelly, Kao said. A consummate insider, Winer had parlayed six years as chief of staff to Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii into a lucrative lobbying career with a firm called Strategies 360. One of Winer’s former colleagues compared him to the slick lobbyist on the Netflix show “House of Cards” who toggles between the political and corporate worlds. In another email exchange scrutinized by the FBI, Kao asked Winer about making a $5,600 donation to nudge along a senator who seemed keen to work with Navatek: “Would that ‘help?’” Winer, who had already donated himself, replied, “With my contribution, I think it sends the right message.” He suggested Kao split up his donation to be “less conspicuous.” The method didn’t always work. Once, Kao complained that a senator had reneged on a deal and he ought to get his donations back. “You should not feel aggrieved nor should you ever put that in writing,” Todd Webster, another lobbyist Navatek hired, replied. Webster did not respond to detailed questions. Winer said he stopped working with Navatek following Kao’s arrest. “The political contributions I discussed with Kao were understood by me to be lawful political contributions. I never participated in, witnessed, or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution, bribe, or agreement to exchange a political contribution for an appropriation, contract, or other official action,” Winer said in an email to ProPublica. “I never advised Kao to make a contribution in exchange for official action.” Strategies 360 has new ownership that did not oversee Winer while he represented Navatek, its CEO, John Oceguera, said. Navatek employees began to notice members of Congress visiting their East Coast offices. “You would be like, ‘Oh, there’s this senator walking around,’ and we would get a picture with them,” one engineer recalled. While some projects involved potentially meaningful research, Navatek’s bread and butter was R&D that went nowhere. As a slideshow prepared by an executive explained, “We thrive in the valley of death,” the term for the bureaucratic gap where research languishes without being developed into a product. The slideshow noted that none of the technology had ever actually been deployed. The Office of Naval Research did not respond to a request for comment. In Maine, Navatek was studying ways to modify small boats to reduce the “slamming” impact felt by passengers at high speeds. With the help of the University of Maine’s giant 3D printer, Navatek made a prototype and unveiled it at a press conference where a Guinness World Records representative declared it the world’s largest 3D-printed boat. But Navatek executives knew the Navy had no plans to use the new design, former employees said. “[The work] got rolled into a few PowerPoint slides and a white paper, and that was the deliverable,” recalled one who worked on the project. “The boats weren’t delivered to the Navy — the Navy didn’t even want them.” Kao to Collins: “Here to Help” The first time Kao came face-to-face with Collins, in 2018, he told the FBI, he had to pay for the privilege. Collins would not meet unless he agreed to donate to her campaign, he said. While it is not illegal for politicians to exchange face time for contributions — in this case, just a few thousand dollars — it was not the last time Collins would seek Kao’s support. Navatek had been eager to expand beyond Hawaii, and Maine was a perfect beachhead — a small, coastal state hungry for high-tech jobs that happened to be represented by a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Collins, more than most appropriators, likes to trumpet the dollars she brings home. To work with Collins, Navatek hired a lobbyist, Glen Mandigo, who also lobbied for the University of Maine and was tight with her office. Mandigo asked how much Navatek wanted in funding and how much Kao was willing to support Collins, Kao told the FBI. The University of Maine did not reply to a request for comment. In that first meeting with Collins and her staff, Kao pitched an $8 million boat hull research project for Navatek and the university. Collins seemed supportive. Not long after, Mandigo called Kao and said Collins wanted him to bundle tens of thousands of dollars for her reelection, suggesting Navatek throw a fundraiser, Kao said. In an email to ProPublica, Mandigo denied taking part in a pay-to-play arrangement. “I did not advise Navatek officials, nor would I advise any client, that support from Sen. Collins was contingent on campaign donations,” Mandigo wrote. He said that in his 25 years of working with Collins and the Maine delegation, “I never saw or heard of such behavior from the Senator or her staff.” Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica it was “wholly inaccurate” to say Mandigo was close to their office. FBI agents had collected voluminous corporate records and email correspondence between Navatek and Collins’ inner circle. Much of that evidence aligned with the story they were now getting directly from Kao. The FBI had spotted his out-of-the-blue donations in the summer of 2018, just before Collins included $8 million for Navatek’s proposal in the defense budget. Emails showed her staff made it clear to the Navy that it should send the money to Navatek. FBI agents also had evidence of Kao and Mandigo planning a fundraiser starting in April 2019. Their emails — with her scheduler and her campaign’s finance director — freely mixed talk of Navatek’s Collins-backed contract with plans to raise money for her. The principals settled on hosting Collins for a publicity event at Navatek’s Maine headquarters in August 2019, where she posed for pictures with Kao and a model of the company’s experimental boat. Behind the scenes, the FBI saw in emails and company records, Kao orchestrated over $40,000 in donations from extended family in advance of the event. To avoid the legal cap on individual campaign contributions, the emails show, he told Collins’ team to reallocate his excess contributions to his father — which an agent highlighted and noted is against election law in a presentation to prosecutors — and sent them his father’s full name and address. “This is perfect,” Amy Abbott, the reelection campaign finance director, emailed Kao after discussing his father’s contribution. “We are so grateful for ALL the Kao support!” Before the event, Kao said, Collins, Abbott and another staffer met with him in private. One of the staffers told Kao the campaign expected more donations. It was in this meeting that Collins said, “You’ve seen me deliver,” he told the FBI. Less than one month after the event, the Senate released a draft of the defense budget containing $21.5 million for Navatek’s pet projects in Maine. Kao emailed a Collins campaign fundraiser — who would in theory have nothing to do with a government contract — four days later, saying, “Thanks again for all the support from Sen Collins.” “I’ve been involved in many tight races in the past and understand last minute ‘needs’ come up,” he continued. “We are here to help anyway we can … financially or whatever.” Kao’s desire to donate even more money led to the fateful Corner Bakery meeting with the head of the Collins super PAC, called the 1820 PAC, Kao told the FBI. Unlike Collins’ campaign, which could accept only $5,600 per election from individuals, the super PAC could accept unlimited contributions. The super PAC emailed Kao a memo before the meeting stressing the need to raise money with “urgency.” At the meeting, Kao and Reed, the super PAC’s chair, hammered out a deal for a six-figure donation, Kao told the FBI. Over email, Kao informed Reed of his shell company scheme, saying he had cleared it with his lawyer. “They are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on,” Kao reassured him. “Thanks for doing this,” Reed replied. Emails Here are quotes from emails between Martin Kao and Scott Reed, discussing contributions to the Susan Collins Super PAC, 1820 PAC: “Hi Scott: Had a chance to discuss 1820 with my CFO and attorney last night. They are suggesting setting up a separate new LLC to make the donations. Name of new LLC: Society of Young Women Scientists and Engineers. In my personal real estate investments, we often use LLCs that can be set up to “facilitate” transactions. They are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on. Totally legal and typically used in real estate transactions to conceal the identity of buyer/seller. Wanted to get your thoughts/concerns.”—email from Martin Kao to Scott Reed, Nov. 22, 2019 “Very smart and glad your counsel understands. Thanks for doing this.”—email from Scott Reed to Martin Kao, Nov. 22, 2019 “Great! We will proceed on getting this set up ASAP. Have a nice weekend.”—email from Martin Kao to Scott Reed, Nov. 22, 2019 The FBI spoke to the other Navatek executives at Corner Bakery, who confirmed the meeting took place. One of them, David Kring, the company’s top scientist, told ProPublica he had no memory of what was discussed. The other, Duke Hartman, told an FBI agent it was just “a get-to-know-you meeting” with the chair of the super PAC and they did not discuss the “particulars of a donation.” Agents, records show, came to believe Hartman was lying about his role in Kao’s pay-to-play operation and would name him as a formal subject of a future investigation. Hartman was not charged. He did not respond to a detailed request for comment. A few weeks after the $150,000 check to the Collins super PAC cleared, in February 2020, Kao and his team met with Collins’ office and secured a new round of funding. “We were very warmly received,” Kao reported to his colleagues in an email obtained by the FBI. “Excellent meeting. Total of $32M will be supported.” Records show the Senate allocated at least $10 million that year based on Navatek’s proposals. Navatek’s ambitions peaked in mid-2020. As the company waited to see if Collins would survive her reelection campaign, executives prepared to ask their champion on the appropriations committee for even more funding the following spring, internal documents show. Other documents from that time show the company was courting senators from seven additional states and gunning for more than $200 million in new appropriations. Navatek expected to have offices in more than a dozen states by the end of the following year, including a new 15,000-square-foot facility in the Portland, Maine, harbor. Kao, meanwhile, closed on a $4.5 million beachside home in an exclusive Honolulu neighborhood; the backyard pool had a waterfall feature. He renamed the company Martin Defense Group after himself, joking that it would simplify his future takeover of Lockheed Martin. “It was working well, and it would have continued to work well,” said Schiff, the former executive. “Martin got greedy. Just got damn greedy.” Downfall, Cover-up In early 2020, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit good government group, noticed something strange in the public filings for the Collins super PAC. The PAC had received a $150,000 donation from a newly created LLC with a typo in its name: the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers, with no S at the end of “Scientist.” This was the $150,000 Kao donated after the Corner Bakery meeting. The money had come from Navatek’s account, not Kao’s, violating a ban on government contractors making donations. The center suspected the society was not a real group but a pass-through to hide the identity of a major political donor. It filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. It took only a few days for a Hawaii journalist to discover Kao’s wife’s name on the society’s paperwork, linking the shell company to Navatek. Inside Navatek, Kao shifted into damage control mode. He spoke to Reed and the super PAC’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and began to hatch a cover-up. In an email released in civil litigation, Mitchell suggested the society make charitable donations — preferably in Maine — which would make it seem like a legitimate nonprofit. “I want to be sure that the LLC proceeds with the ideas we discussed — giving scholarships and recognition to women in engineering, etc.,” wrote Mitchell. “That would help both of us, I think.” Mitchell added, “We should develop a plan and timetable, so there are some scholarships given over the next several months, and particularly, perhaps in Maine, where the bad press was.” Mitchell, who later played a major role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, did not respond to requests for comment. Kao and his team settled on donating scholarships to women in STEM. They offered between $5,000 and $25,000 apiece to state universities where they were angling to win government contracts — that way, the cover-up would benefit them politically, too. But Navatek’s and Kao’s problems were just beginning. Undeterred by scrutiny from the FEC, Kao defrauded the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program newly passed by Congress. He inflated Navatek’s payroll to amass loans of $13 million, according to a federal indictment. The Navatek founder, Loui, had long since soured on his chosen successor. This was the final straw. He reported Kao to federal authorities. “This is not how Navatek behaved or conducted business before I sold the company to Martin Kao,” Loui wrote to ProPublica. He said Navatek was successful before Kao’s ownership and had many sources of government funding. After Kao’s arrest, he added, the company fully cooperated with law enforcement. Loui has since regained control of the company and renamed it PacMar. He is dedicated to restoring its reputation and ability to execute government contracts, he continued. Loui said he fired employees hired during Kao’s tenure who were “not capable of performing quality, professional engineering and science tasks.” “The company received no Collins-supported funding after Martin Kao’s arrest, nor should it,” Loui added. “What Martin Kao and his cabal did was wrong.” On Sept. 30, 2020, law enforcement raided Navatek’s Honolulu offices and arrested Kao for fraud. Federal agents in windbreakers seized his laptop and ordered the company’s IT staff to copy the company’s internal servers. Navatek’s public flameout attracted the attention of Michelle Ball and Kevin Gounaud, two experienced agents in the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit. Gounaud was a 20-year FBI veteran who had worked on elaborate undercover operations. Ball had made a name for herself taking on politically sensitive cases. In 2018, she led the investigation into Maria Butina, the Russian agent convicted of infiltratingthe National Rifle Association in an attempt to influence the Trump campaign. The agents began digging through thousands of records for details of Navatek’s lobbying operation, donation strategy and ties to politicians. They zeroed in on Kao’s relationship with Collins. In a 60-slide presentation agents prepared for prosecutors, they highlighted contributions that Kao and his wife made to the senator in 2018, right before Collins placed the $8 million in research funding into the federal budget. Kao had also given Navatek money to various relatives to donate to Collins in 2019, sending her around $33,000 through these illegal straw donors, the indictment said. Kao’s wife and father did not reply to requests for comment. The government charged Kao in two separate cases: one for defrauding the loan program and another for his campaign finance crimes. His love of talking like a wheeler-dealer — including over email — was a gift to investigators. In one email, he all but admitted the scholarships to young women were a diversion. “Whatever… just a pack of bitches getting free $,” he wrote. In the face of overwhelming evidence, Kao pleaded guilty in both cases in the fall of 2022. Navatek by then was under court-ordered new management. Awaiting sentencing, Kao worked as a line cook at a Cheesecake Factory. He began meeting with the same FBI agents and prosecutors who brought him down. For the agents, he was a rare witness: a contractor with deep ties to elected officials saying he would speak candidly about how Washington works. Kao faced nearly a decade in prison. “My world and life imploded,” he would later recall in a letter to the Hawaii U.S. District Court. “I was fooled and foolish enough to believe that the power elected officials wielded, and [were] actively willing to sell to anyone wealthy enough to pay, was….‘smart business.’” Over the next two years, Kao sat with agents for at least three dayslong interviews. He told them that politicians, Collins in particular, had been willing participants in his scheme. “It takes two to tangle,” he told them. Taxpayers funded Navatek’s entire political operation, Kao said. “Most companies of our size do not have the resources to endlessly hire expensive lobbyists and make political donations,” he told the FBI. Navatek solved this by using money from government contracts to hire lobbyists and make campaign contributions, according to interviews, court testimony and internal company records. Diverting money from contracts for lobbying and political donations can be illegal. For their final meeting, in September 2024, Kao handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing Navatek’s dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff. It was not only a confession but a road map, with the email addresses and phone numbers of people Kao thought agents ought to subpoena. Last year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison. The judge in his case offered no leniency based on his cooperation with the FBI. Loui is battling Kao in court to recover the millions he contends Kao stole from the company. Both Scott Reed and Amy Abbott remain in Collins’ inner circle. Abbott is the finance director for her 2026 reelection effort, and Reed again chairs the main Collins super PAC. Abbott, who is married to Collins’ campaign manager, referred questions to the senator’s communications staff. Clark told ProPublica that Abbott and other campaign staff were interviewed by the FBI and that the campaign was never a target of the investigation. Earlier this year, Kao agreed to meet a ProPublica reporter at the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, South Dakota, where he is incarcerated. But on two occasions when guards summoned Kao over the intercom, he refused to enter the visitation room. Over email, he said he was no longer willing to meet, citing the ongoing litigation. He declined through his lawyer to respond to detailed questions. By late 2024, Ball and Gounaud, the FBI agents, had come to believe there was enough evidence to warrant a broader investigation into bribery of members of Congress, according to a memo seen by ProPublica. Before they could embark on their new mission, however, they became casualties of Trump’s retribution campaign. Ball and Gounaud worked for the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit known as CR-15, which specialized in investigating misconduct by elected officials. When Trump retook power, his new FBI director, Kash Patel, purged the unit agent by agent. Ball was targeted for her work on the special counsel investigation of Trump’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election. She was fired in October 2025 in a one-page letter stating she had “weaponized” the Justice Department. She is challenging her firing in a lawsuit. Gounaud was pushed out in early 2026. Both agents declined to comment through their attorney. Trump also targeted the Justice Department attorneys who worked with CR-15. The team, known as the Public Integrity Section, collapsed spectacularly in February 2025 after staff were ordered to drop a case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Trump ally. The unit’s leadership quit en masse. Trump appointees ordered the remaining prosecutors to halt new corruption cases, just months after Kao made his detailed confession. Before Ball was fired, however, she managed to take a key step forward. Based on all the evidence, she persuaded her supervisors to approve a new investigation. It centered on South Carolina, one of the states Navatek eyed for a rapid expansion. The FBI had questions about a steak dinner Kao shared with Sen. Lindsey Graham. ]]

[Category: Threats]

— Time, not capital, is the constraint on the defense industrial base

 

at 9/22/26 10:43am

The Pentagons industrial-base problem is no longer a shortage of capital. It is the time required to turn that capital into qualified suppliers, suppliers into parts, and parts into weapons in warfighters’ hands. Three changes would shorten that timeline more than the next hundred billion dollars in appropriations. First, let defense suppliers that have earned a qualification for one program—that is, proven through testing and quality review that they meet its requirements—keep that qualification when seeking work in another program with similar requirements. Second, fund qualification as its own budget line. And third, increase multiyear acquisition to create the kind of demand that lower-tier suppliers can use to secure financing. None of these require new authority. None lowers a standard. The Department began fiscal 2026 holding $382.4 billion in unexpired, unobligated appropriations, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act added $152.3 billion more, and in June the administration asked for another $67.1 billion. Unfortunately, appropriations don’t shorten lead time. Boeing builds the active radar seeker for every PAC-3 MSE interceptor in Huntsville, and in April the Pentagon signed a seven-year framework to triple that output. A finished interceptor takes about two years to build, but qualifying a new component supplier takes even longer. Consequently, rounds bought this year are unlikely to reach the field before 2028.  Capacity that cannot produce a qualified part for two or three years is not yet military capacity. It is potential capacity. The gap between the two is mobilization latency, and qualification has become one of its largest hidden components. Double demand for a critical munition tomorrow and Congress can appropriate the money within weeks, industry can buy equipment within months, but every new supplier then enters an 18- to 36-month qualification cycle. Appropriated capacity and combat capacity are not the same thing. I should say plainly where I sit. Seurat makes metal parts under contract using our own high-speed additive process, dubbed Area Printing, and we sell the parts rather than the printers. We are one of 25 awardees under JAQS-SQ, a $10.5-million Pentagon-funded America Makes project call. We would benefit directly if the government spent more on supplier qualification. My industry spent two decades promising more than it delivered. Additive manufacturing was going to replace machining, then reinvent the supply chain, and mostly it printed prototypes and low-volume parts. A program office skeptical of claims from the additive industry is applying a lesson we taught it. Program offices are where the first change happens. A supplier that passed an audit for one program generally starts from zero for the next. A program office is accountable for its own program, so accepting another offices audit means taking on a risk judgment it did not make. Every program manager is behaving rationally, and the result is a system optimized to minimize program-level risk rather than mobilization time and qualification costs. The fix is a doctrine of qualify once, use many. Part qualification stays program-specific; what becomes portable is the evidence about the factory, so no office re-proves the shop before it begins proving the part. JAQS-SQ is building that framework now. What is missing is a decision by acquisition leaders to accept each others’ results. Second, fund qualification as its own budget line. Inside industrial-base accounts, qualification competes against tooling and usually loses, because a machine tool can be bought and installed inside one budget cycle and a qualification package cannot. That line would cost about one percent of industrial base appropriations, or roughly $82 million against the $8.2 billion the Reconciliation Act routed through the Industrial Base Fund. Third, give the supplier layer—that is, the companies that supply prime contractors—demand it can borrow against. The Department estimates it has lost more than 40 percent of its small-business suppliers over the past decade, and survivors are running at capacity. That sounds like health but is not, because a shop with no idle capacity must pull engineering hours from paying work to qualify a part that may never be ordered. The government does not need to finance every expansion; private capital will fund defense capacity when it can see durable demand. Multiyear procurement is one of the few instruments that turns stated intent into a contract a small shop can take to a lender. The ask is not more grants but enough contractual certainty that banks and investors do the financing. The strongest argument against all of this is that qualification is rigorous for a reason. A motor case that fails in flight kills people, and additive processes deserve more scrutiny than conventional ones because a parts microstructure depends on parameters that vary by machine. That argument is correct, and I am not advocating faster approvals or looser standards. Instead, the infrastructure for running that standard rigorously, meaning trained auditors, shared process control documents, and material databases, is funded like an afterthought. There is a fourth change worth making, and it would cost us—that is, my company and others like it. There should be no additive-specific set-asides. Fund qualified production rather than technologies: define the outcome and the standard and let manufacturers compete to meet it. If a conventional manufacturer can hold the spec at the rate and schedule, it should win the work, and on many high-volume part numbers today, it will.  None of this addresses what happens to a qualified supplier that waits two years without an order, a harder problem deserving its own argument. In a protracted conflict, the decisive industrial question will be how quickly the United States can turn manufacturing capacity into qualified production because deterrence rests on an adversary believing the United States can replace what it expends. The next phase of rebuilding the arsenal should be measured not in dollars obligated or factories expanded, but in something much harder to game: how many additional qualified suppliers can produce critical parts, and how quickly they can begin delivering them. James DeMuth is CEO and co-founder of Seurat Technologies, a metal-parts contract manufacturer in Wilmington, Massachusetts ]]

[Category: Ideas]

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

 

at 9/22/26 9:47am

Amazon Web Services has become the first cloud provider cleared to handle sensitive information for all NATO members, underscoring that an increasingly independent Europe still relies on capabilities made in America, and suggesting that its not as hard for U.S. firms to compete there as the White House insists. The company announced on Tuesday that it has received alliance approval to handle information at the NATO RESTRICTED level, which is not classified but requires safeguarding. As European militaries fuse radar, satellite, and even acoustic information to more easily detect Russian drones and other threats, NATO-approved rapid data and information sharing is critical. AWS, which already handles sensitive military and intelligence data for many NATO members, beat its competitors—primarily from other U.S. cloud providers such as Microsoft—to win the alliance’s first blanket approval. That’s the result of “a sustained, multi-year effort,” David Appel, acting vice president of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS, said in the company’s Tuesday statement, AWS worked with Spain’s National Cryptographic Centre, or CCN, to test its services against NATO security directives; CCN then shared its findings to all member states.  The announcement also reflects a broad, evolving NATO digital transformation strategy. The alliance is eager to incorporate more commercial information technology into its coordination and planning. And AWS remains the biggest commercial cloud operator in Europe, with nine data-center clusters, or regions, across Europe, including the U.K. “Strengthening NATO’s ability to securely leverage commercial technology is key to building a more resilient and agile Alliance,” according to Dylan Browne, general manager of the NATO Communications and Information Agency, or NCIA, as quoted in Amazon’s statement. While NATO members and AWS cloud users across Europe will be able to share their data more easily, they will also be able to retain control over it. The 2024 European Union Data Act requires cloud providers to protect EU data from other governments, including the United States. Practically speaking, that means housing data on European soil beyond the reach of U.S. court orders, although  that’s not an explicit requirement of the Act. AWS, like Microsoft and other enterprise cloud providers, has been investing in European versions of its cloud stacks to meet those Data Act requirements. Tuesday’s announcement shows both that U.S. technology is still a core feature of NATO military capability and that it is central to NATO’s future plans. But it also shows that European Union regulations on data storage aren’t a challenge to the success of U.S. cloud companies across Europe, even though White House rhetoric and executive orders suggest otherwise. ]]

[Category: Science & Tech]

— Trump floats ‘AI Force’ to boost industry

 

at 9/21/26 7:00pm

President Donald Trump said over the weekend that he plans to create an "AI Force" and appoint a czar to boost artificial-intelligence companies. "We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows! However, we will also be looking for BAD, and we can do that, very easily, with our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System. For this purpose, I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term. To that end, I will be announcing, in the near future, the AI Czar — Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!" Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Saturday morning.  Trump blamed “Radical Left Dumocrats” for widespread concerns about data centers and the potential dangers of unchecked AI development.  The president’s announcement comes after weeks of high-profile warnings from leading tech executives about the potential harms that advanced AI models could cause unless officials step in to regulate the industry. Congressional lawmakers and state leaders have also floated proposals to institute so-called ‘kill switches’ to disable AI systems that go rogue. But Trump and others have pushed back on calls for across-the-board development slowdowns.  David Sacks, who served as the Trump administrations AI and crypto czar until March, shared Trump’s post on X and agreed that a pause on AI development “would not make America safer” and “would hand the frontier to China.” Trump’s newest proposal is light on details about what role the AI Force would have in overseeing advanced models, or what additional responsibilities it would be handed. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the role of the AI Force or its primary mission. Michael Kratsios, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, appeared on Fox News Sunday and said that Trump’s post describes “how important it is that we as an administration coordinate in order to make sure that this great technological innovation that’s transforming the country, that’s driving economic growth, continues to do so.” He added that “these implications of AI spread across so many different agencies, so being able to have someone at the White House to be able to work on all those issues across the agencies is really critical.” But stakeholders in the space have expressed confusion surrounding what, exactly, the AI Force would do.  “Poll after poll shows the American public is alarmed by recent warnings from AI developers and whistleblowers as well as the rogue AI incidents that took place this summer,” said a spokesperson for AI safety advocacy group Americans for Responsible Innovation. ”There’s pressure on the President to do something, and that’s what this announcement could be designed to address.” Earlier this month, the Institute for Security and Technology released a survey of current and former national security officials, one-third of whom believe that an AI model will operate outside human control within the next decade. Philip Reiner, the think tank’s CEO and co-founder, said Trump’s description of the AI Force being like Space Force was “the shape of an answer, but without the substance.” The service branch, which was established during Trump’s first term and aims to maintain and protect U.S. interests in space, was created through action by Congress, which directed its creation as part of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. “Space Force works because Congress can give it a doctrine, a budget, a personnel system, but theres no equivalent for AI,” Reiner said. “Its a capability that cuts across every domain.” He said that the AI Force might be akin to Space Force in terms of Pentagon oversight, saying that “this is more of an actual [Defense Department] lane, is the sense that you get.” ]]

[Category: Policy]

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

 

at 9/20/26 6:00am

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—As Air Force leaders prepare to hand AI more decision-making power in the years ahead, theyre also working to get airmen comfortable with that.   “A little bit scary, but we need to lean into it,” Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said at the Air and Space Association’s Air, Space & Cyber conference this week. “Autonomy is one of, if not the key technology enabling cost-effective combat power.” Although Meink didn’t say so explicitly, “leaning in” will require new thinking on building trust between human airmen and the AI assistants, chatbots, and autonomous drones that will surround them. But other parts of the Air Force have spent a lot of time thinking about it, especially as the service works to field 500 highly-autonomous collaborative combat aircraft, or CCAs, by 2032. “There’s a trust and autonomy question,” said Michael Gregg, director of aerospace systems at the Air Force Research Laboratory. “We have psychologists and behavioral scientists in our 711th Human Performance Wing that are actually studying this problem: How do you actually team machines with humans to make the human really really good at what they do and aid their decision-making? That is the future.” And for some missions, like protecting air bases from drone attacks, the Air Force is exploring the possibility of not augmenting but replacing human decision-making. The waves of drones striking Ukrainian cities and ravaging U.S. bases in the Middle East have service leaders exploring the use of agents—AI tools that can take action—to work the process of obtaining approvals to launch counter-attacks.  That will require humans to define acceptable risk for allowing AI agents to make decisions.  “There is an increased push on how we use agents and agentic workflow into everything from fires to our back-office activities, and like youll see a lot more of that coming this year,” said Ben Van Roo, the CEO of Legion Intelligence, a company that develops agentic AI agents for national-security purposes. The question of AI directing “fires” is controversial, as the term suggests allowing a software program to launch a missile, fire a gun, or launch a deadly weapon. While there are some exceptions, military doctrine states a strong preference for meaningful human control over potentially lethal effects. But cyber, directed energy, and other non-lethal technologies are giving the military more fires it might deploy without human oversight, said Mike Hiatt, the chief technology officer at Epirus, a company that makes microwave and other directed-energy counter-drone defenses.  “If you can have an option that has lower collateral effects and no collateral damage, you know, which is what the directed-energy weapons offer, you start to be able to change your risk calculation. You start to be able to make decisions where you say ‘OK, Im a little more comfortable with putting this part of the system on a fully autonomous mode,” Hiatt said. Van Roo said the decision processes to allow autonomous cyberattacks or nonlethal effects could eventually be accelerated with AI, or even automated completely.  “Were really still in the infancy right now of how we think about where were going to use agents, what are we going to allow them to decide on? How do they work their way into our tactics, techniques, and procedures, into our doctrine?” he said. Getting leaders and operators to be comfortable with AI agents will require new doctrine, training, and permissions, as well as a high degree of confidence that AI tools will perform in predictable ways.  “This is going to happen right now in front of us before AI and killer robots take over the world,” he said. This year’s conference occurred amid a national debate over the dangers of AI, how it should be regulated, and who should decide.  The summer’s disclosures by Anthropic and OpenAI of surprising and dangerous model behavior were followed on Sept. 9 by the high-profile resignation of an Anthropic engineer who claimed a 10-percent probability that AI “could kill all humans.” The following day, representatives of those companies and Google intensified efforts to create an industry-safety body while signaling openness to Congressional action. But regulation is opposed by President Donald Trump, who posted this week, “The only control or ‘guardrail’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Pentagon leaders’ willingness to accept AI may stem from the fact that their current systems failed to keep key U.S. bases safe. But it may also reflect several years of Defense Department efforts to grapple with concerns about intent, alignment, and safe use that frontier AI labs are just now grappling with. Since 2019, the military has had a list of ethical principles to guide AI development, experimentation and use. It also reviews processes, experiments, and testing procedures for new technology, including software and, of course, the most dangerous weapons on Earth. But the pace of AI advancement is quickly changing concepts of how to develop and test weapons. Ryan Tseng, president and co-founder of Shield AI, told the crowd at AFA that his company had worked with Ukrainians to improve the strike capability of one of the company’s drone weapons by 70 percent through “advanced autonomous behaviors.”  If autonomous drones are the signature feature of the war in Ukraine, many military officials expect the next conflict to be defined by rapid collaboration between agents, humans, and drones that will speed up strikes and counter-strikes. That will require continuous evolution on building trust between humans and AI entities as well.  “When we think about a future thats going to have very large-scale deployments of systems that need to interoperate with each other,” said Tseng. “Its a much larger decision space. A lot more things can happen.” ]]

[Category: Science & Tech]

— Cape Canaveral is building up its counter-drone defenses, Space Force says

 

at 9/18/26 4:51pm

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.— Cape Canaveral Space Force Station will get new defenses against small drones in coming weeks, part of a “whole-of-government” effort to better protect the nation’s spaceports as the White House pushes for hundreds more launches per year. The new gear will come from Joint Interagency Task Force 401, the Pentagon’s counterdrone task force, Space Force Col. Brian Chatman told Defense One on the sidelines of the annual Air, Space and Cyber Conference here. Chatman commands Space Launch Delta 45, which oversees all East Coast launch missions. Cape Canaveral is “top of their list” for “investing in additional capability,” Chatman said. “Were going to see an inject of new capability here in the very short term from JIATF 401, based on the latest and greatest in technology thats out there,” Chatman said. “Thatll be integrated in with everything we have today.” Cape Canaveral, the nation’s busiest launch facility, launched 109 rockets last year; its California counterpart at Vandenberg Space Force Base supported 66. Chatman said securing such facilities is a growing national-security priority as the U.S. military calls for more satellites and the White House pushes for 1,000 launches and re-entries by decade’s end.  Defense experts and wargame planners have warned about launchpads’ vulnerability to attacks from land or sea. In June, the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies described several potentially catastrophic scenarios. For example, mysterious explosions on the bridges that connect the cape to the mainland could put “East Coast launch operations at a halt,” the paper said. Chatman said Cape Canaveral is well-protected against aircraft, but not smaller drones. “Its great today that my radars can see a Cessna up to a 747,” Chatman said, but he needs to be able to detect a “747 down to a quadcopter.” Chatman and a Space Launch Delta 45 spokesperson did not say what technology was being provided by JIATF 401. The task force deploys defenses as prioritized by combatant commanders. “While I will not speak to specific capabilities at specific locations, our strategic installations are prioritized for c-UAS fielding,” Lt. Col. Adam Scher, a JIATF 401 spokesperson, wrote in an email. “In this capacity, we work in support of U.S. Northern Command and each of the Services to ensure their installations are protected from the illicit use of drones.”   “There is no silver bullet, and we remain focused on accelerating the delivery of innovative capabilities at speed and scale,” Scher said.  In a twist, private space companies are also interested in spending money to improve security at the Space Force base. Chatman said base security typically takes about 10 minutes to inspect and clear a truck coming onto Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. He said he’d heard from one company that said they’d be willing to spend their own money to make that more efficient. “One of the launch service providers came to us and said, ‘With the amount of construction we have going on, we want to pay to put some type of automated scan, like a rapid scan type system” in, Chatman said. “This particular solution were looking at, you can drive a vehicle through and in 30 seconds, it can give you a go/no go to reduce from a 10-minute timeline. And this particular launch service provider is looking to cut a check to put that capability in because it increases their commitment, but also increases everyone else that has to have that inspection on their trucks on the throughput side of the house.” But the Space Force needs more than new tech at its launch facilities; it also needs more people. In July, the Government Accountability Office reported  that one-quarter of the jobs Space Force leaders say they need went unfilled in fiscal 2025, largely because the service couldn’t track its personnel  An official at one Space Launch delta told GAO that “supporting increased space launch operations is becoming more challenging and unsustainable.” Another, at a Space Base delta said a lack of funded civil-engineering positions is “leading to a higher risk of mission failure, and that the Space Force is taking risk against wartime readiness requirements and Joint Force needs.” Manning shortfalls forced one delta to close one of its six fire stations in a squadron that could not “meet National Fire Protection Association safety standards.” The report said that “providing enough fire crew support for launches leaves the remainder of the base vulnerable in case of an emergency.”  Chatman told reporters during a roundtable earlier in the day that he doesn’t view the White House’s call for 1,000 launches per year as pressure, but rather as advocacy for his mission. He also said that will take more than Space Force personnel. “The Space Force cant do it alone. It requires heavily on a partnership with the Air Force for that base operations support personnel, and so we are advocating across the Air Force for additional bodies, whether its firefighters or security forces or civil engineers, to come in and continue support as we have this expansive growth,” Chatman said. “One big thing thats changed over time to where we are today is youre seeing a whole-of-government approach, and focus, on the launch industry.” ]]

[Category: Defense Systems]

— Pete Hegseth is rebuilding the military's ‘brass ceiling’

 

at 9/18/26 11:48am

Dan Driscoll resigned as secretary of the Army on Aug. 31, 2026. His departure leaves the Army without a Senate-confirmed civilian leader six months into the war with Iran, its busiest period since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Driscoll’s resignation was reportedly motivated, at least in part, by his frustration with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Earlier in August, Hegseth had blocked the promotions of four Army officers.  Since his appointment in January 2025, Hegseth has fired or blocked the promotions of more than 80 admirals and generals. Often, Hegseth has referenced “woke” diversity efforts in his reasoning. One officer who was blocked had written a paper while in graduate school about the impact of political polarization on recruiting. Another officer had his name pulled from the promotion list after officials incorrectly believed that he had allowed a mentorship group for female paratroopers to exist in his unit.  More than half of the officers removed have been women or Black in an officer corps that is 79% male and 74% white. Hegseth’s blocking of promotions and apparent targeting of women and Black people appear to violate military rules meant to protect against the politicization of the military’s officer corps and have undermined faith in the military’s promotion system, which is supposed to be merit-based. I’ve spent years studying the U.S. military and have written a book on diversity and military recruiting. In my assessment, Hegseth is building a military that fits a narrow ideological view at the cost of its service members’ safety and well-being. Recruiting isn’t ideological The Army exceeded its recruiting goal of 60,500 new enlistees in fiscal year 2025 and has already hit its targets for the 2026 fiscal year.  In fact, 2026 marks the third straight year that every active duty military service has met its recruiting goals. That the Army and other branches have been able to do this – despite the fact that they rely on women and people of color – would, at first glance, seem to indicate that the politicization of the military has not hurt recruiting. Hegseth has attributed the success to “the belief [recruits] have in civilian leadership and military leadership.” According to a Pentagon spokesperson, “Americans everywhere are prouder than ever to serve.”  What Hegseth and others fail to acknowledge, however, is that recruitment is driven not by ideology but by market factors and need.  Since the end of the draft in 1973, according to my research, the success of military recruiting has largely hinged on young people’s perceptions of their chances for upward mobility. Many young people join the military because they are in need of the opportunities military service provides. This past year’s recruitment numbers are likely more a result of young Americans seeking steady pay, job training and educational benefits than agreement with Hegseth’s vision of the military.  Market research studies conducted in the past year have found that making money, paying for education, travel, work experience and medical benefits are the top motivators guiding young people toward military service. Recruits are guided by what military sociologist Charles C. Moskos called occupational appeals that frame enlisting as a smart economic decision rather than by patriotism or nationalism. These kinds of appeals have historically been successful in attracting the diverse recruits – women and people of color – who have been critical to the military’s ability to meet its personnel needs. Recruiting data shows that Hegseth and other members of the Trump administration have little control over the composition of the enlisted ranks. However, Hegseth’s anti-woke campaign is changing what the military is like for those who serve.  The ‘brass ceiling’ Historically, women, Black service members and service members of color have faced discrimination and violence within the ranks.  Recent firings and blocked promotions have further shaped a military leadership that has historically been almost exclusively white and male. All five service chiefs and 9 in 10 combatant commanders are white men. This year the lowest percentage of women in 25 years have been nominated to the rank of general and admiral. This targeting of women and people of color has solidified the “brass ceiling” – a term used to describe the limited opportunities for promotion for women and Black service members – and is creating a military leadership that doesn’t reflect the service members they command or the nation they represent. The overwhelmingly white and male leadership commands an enlisted force in which 34% identify with a racial minority group and 17% are women. By purging military leadership of women, Black service members and those who have supported opportunities for service members other than white men, Hegseth is creating a culture ripe for racial, sexual and gender discrimination and harassment.  Hegseth has also sought to restore tributes to Confederate soldiers and has attacked military diversity. These actions further erase and invalidate the contributions of women, Black service members and other service members of color. Lessons from Vietnam The military’s need for more equitable representation was born of the demands and costs of combat.  During the Vietnam War, disproportionate numbers of Black and Latino service members served in combat and were killed while under the command of a largely white officer corps.  The Defense Race Relations Institute – now known as the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute – was formed in 1971 to provide race relations education to every member of the armed forces to quell rampant racial unrest, including racial violence and fragging incidents. Fragging incidents – the killing of a fellow service member, often using fragmentation grenades – were rampant in Vietnam. Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs were instituted at historically Black colleges and universities to increase the numbers of Black officers. The Department of Defense pushed for increased ROTC programs at HBCUs during the Vietnam war as a way to increase the size of the officer corps.  While HBCUs provided large numbers of Black officers during Vietnam, the success of diversifying the officer corps has been limited. Scholars have attributed this limited success, despite consistent efforts to recruit Black Americans, to educational inequalities and the conservative culture of the officer corps.  These efforts were based on the military adopting the idea that an efficient and lethal military should look like the nation it serves and that its leaders should look like the soldiers they command. Hegseth’s purging of the officer ranks means the Americans who serve in the military won’t see themselves reflected in leadership or see a path to the top ranks. But they will continue to bear the costs of war: About half of the 18 service members killed in the Iran war between February and August were women and people of color. ]]

[Category: Ideas]

— Space Force braces for stalled progress amid lack of full funding

 

at 9/17/26 5:33pm

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Space Force modernization efforts could slow if Congress doesn’t pass a full budget at the end of the year, the service’s leaders said.  “Were on this ramp-up, right, consistent with our overall strategy and the recognition that the space domain is a critical domain, in and of itself, but also for the joint force,” Erich Hernandez-Baquero, the Space Force’s top buyer, told reporters Tuesday. “Now were going to run into [fiscal year 2027]—and you saw that our budget request was to continue on that—and this [continuing resolution] is definitely going to put the brakes on that for a time period.” The Space Force has requested $71.1 billion for 2027, including $19.1 billion for procurement. But with little time remaining before fiscal 2027 begins on Oct. 1, Congress has passed stopgap legislation—a continuing resolution—to keep funding the Pentagon at 2026 levels through Dec. 11. The CR permits no new programs to begin. “We certainly appreciate at least not being shut down. So…thats a good thing, but on the CR, it really does pace us at a time where we really need to go faster. So we are obviously encouraging Congress to do what they can to help support the presidents budget on that,” Hernandez-Baquero said. “In the meantime, well just do what we always do: prioritize the things that will yield the most mission capability soonest, and make sure were executing on those.” Hernandez-Baquero, who was sworn into the chief space acquisition role last month, declined to specify which priorities could be most affected by a continuing resolution because things were “pre-decision at this point.” Gen. Doug Schiess, the chief of space operations, said about 10 percent of the service’s programs could be slowed down due continuing resolution.  “About 90 percent of the programs we have are programs from last year—so we can still get after those,” but there’s a remaining 10 percent of programs that require full budget funding, Schiess said. “Its going to slow us down, and the threat is not slowing down.” Amid a broader push for acquisition reform, Hernandez-Baquero said he’s focused on streamlining and speeding up military purchasing. And when it comes to technology initiatives, there will be a new senior leadership role dedicated to it.   The Air Force’s new program acquisition executives, or PAEs, are “establishing those pathways for onboarding new technology, but Im just conscious that that by itself is not going to support drawing in the right technologies,” he said. “I want somebody thats focused—100 percent—on looking at the most promising tech and driving the prototyping initiatives that are going to help mature it to the level where a PAE can say, ‘Ah, it meets my criteria for this onboard path, and I can go do that’.” That person is a technology portfolio executive, who “will have the most promising technology coming out of the [research and development] side, and…will work with industry to ensure that we have the right pathways to do that. Conceptually, there would be prototype efforts that get executed out of that to support the mission areas.” The technology portfolio executive office already exists but the role hasn’t yet been filled, he said.  “When I designate a TPE, for example, that person is going to report directly to me and represent my authority when it comes to the technology transition,” Hernandez-Baquero said. “I cannot do this without the buy-in of the PAEs that are executing the mission areas, and so my charter to them is going to be not only to deliver on those missionaries, but be part of the enterprise team thats going to deliver on those cross-cutting capabilities.”  ]]

[Category: Threats]

— Air Force contemplates unmanned tankers

 

at 9/17/26 5:20pm

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—With an eye on the Navy’s progress toward an unmanned aerial tanker, Air Force planners are asking questions about their own future tanker fleet. “Thinking beyond the current KC-46 buy and the program extension. Whatever that next tanker looks like—our advanced tanker system—its got to be connected. Its got to be able to defend itself. But it begs the question: Does it need to be manned? Could it be optionally manned, or could it be autonomous, or is there a family of solutions maybe that would answer that question?” Lt. Gen. Daniel Tulley, who leads Air Mobility Command, told reporters at the Air, Space, & Cyber 2026 conference. The Air Force is currently buying Boeing KC-46 Pegasus tankers and spent $12 million to explore buying a new tanker this year. But it zeroed out funding to continue those explorations in the 2027 budget request and is asking instead for $13 million for “advanced tanker systems.”  Tulley said the Navy’s work on the Boeing MQ-25 Stingray suggests that his own service might eventually not need manned tankers. The Navy announced on Thursday that the MQ-25, which first flew earlier this year, has received approval to enter low-rate production. The service also ordered three more aircraft, bringing its total to 14. “I do not believe that it has to be manned, a future air-refueling solution,” he said. “But then, how do we, the U.S. Air Force, bring that to bear in scope, scale, and range?”  A drone tanker for the Air Force would need to be a very large aircraft with the capacity for fuel and the ability to fly for a long time. The KC-46, for example, can fly nearly 7,400 miles and carry more than a thousand tons of fuel. The MQ-25 can fly about 500 miles and carry up to 7.5 tons of fuel.  “An optionally manned or an unmanned tanker at the ranges we need it to operate at is a very large aircraft. And were not yet to where were employing fully autonomous large aircraft,” Tulley said.   “Just about any large aircraft these days made by Boeing can take itself off with very little help, can fly on a programmed route and pretty much land itself on autopilot, bring itself to a stop on the runway. But we dont employ it that way with a system thats controlling it and then taxiing it in and making it a part of a more effective, broader system.” One maker of autonomous-aircraft control systems said the vision of autonomy for large aircraft was getting clearer. And while the technology isn’t there yet, there’s progress, said Matthew George, CEO of Merlin Labs. “We’re the furthest along in the world on making that real—in our opinion,” said Matthew George, CEO of Merlin Labs. “So were going to be implementing autonomy on the C-130J, which is the same general size class” as the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker.  “And the advantage with those aircraft is you can start to implement autonomy still with human crews aboard, and you can supplement those human crews in a way thats pretty helpful. Thats a way that you can start to chip away at that without actually going fully to the unmanned tanker right away,” George said. “The goal is that the unmanned tanker is ready, and the autonomy ends up being ready at the same time.”  George agreed with Tulley’s point that many aircraft can somewhat fly themselves, but there are instances, such as emergency situations, when a human needs to make a decision. “Whats really hard is those edge cases and those emergencies—or those things where there are decisions to be made. So, for instance, if youre going to a destination and then theres weather in between, how do you get around the weather?” he said.  And beyond technology, there are policy challenges.  “None of this matters unless its certified and safe. So for us, getting certification done is important, and thats what were working really closely with the Air Force on this year,” George said. “Were taking that [autonomous pilot] brain and putting it onto the C-130J. And as far as we know, thats going to be the first time autonomy fully takes control of an operational U.S. Air Force aircraft.” No date was provided for when that flight will occur, but the company’s technology completed a critical design review, George said.  ]]

[Category: Science & Tech]

— Defense Business Brief: Dispatch from AFA’s Air, Space, & Cyber 2026

 

at 9/17/26 1:58pm

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—The Air Force Test Center is prepared to keep up with the Pentagon’s calls to buy, develop, test, and field technology quickly—but safety remains the top priority, the center’s commander said.  “We always want to proceed safely forward. The work that we do, as Ive noted, is, can be dangerous. So we dont want to take risks that are unnecessary and unsafe. So thats always something that were on the lookout for,” Brig. Gen. Mark Massaro, who leads the Air Force Test Center, told reporters during this week’s Air, Space & Cyber conference hosted by the Air and Space Forces Association. Some context: Massaro’s comments come just three months after eight airmen died during a test flight of Boeing’s B-52 Stratofortress at Edwards Air Force Base in California. They also come nearly a year after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pushed for sweeping acquisition reform, which includes “being open to buying the 85 percent solution” while achieving the more perfect solution over time. Separately, the Pentagon has slashed staff and reorganized its weapons testing organization, which raised oversight concerns, according to a Government Accountability Office report released earlier this year.   “Theres a lot of capabilities out there today that might not be—from a technology perspective—exactly what it looks like in our minds at the end state. But its at least the same, if not better, than what might be out there today,” Massaro said. “So theres a risk calculus there from an operational and acquisition risk when you do your cost schedule performance and then overlay that on the effectiveness and employability for the combatant and for the operational warfighter.”  The Air Force is currently testing system upgrades for the B-52, one of the service’s oldest aircraft, that could keep it operational through the 2050s.  The center works with program acquisition executives and operators to “understand where those balances are, and design our test programs to accommodate for more rapid” testing and integration, Massaro said.  “A clear example was our rapid integration of Falco, the [Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System], on the F-15E. Our people, processes, and test assets were postured to respond through integrated developmental and operational testing,” he said.  “The Falco was a little bit over a year ago…We had F-15Es. We had the rockets. We just had never connected them together in that way. So we had one technical risk to really get through, and [it] allowed us to go very quickly. So thats balancing the risk of the programmatic side when an operational warfighter needs it really quick, and understanding where you can make those trades. And with safety always as a backdrop.” Welcome You’ve reached the Defense Business Brief, where we dig into what the Pentagon buys, who they’re buying from, and why. Send along your tips, feedback, and song recommendations to lwilliams@defenseone.com. Check out the Defense Business Brief archive here, and tell your friends to subscribe! Here come the MMAs. The Air Force wants Massed Modular Aircraft, or MMAs, to replace General Atomics’ storied MQ-9 Reaper drone, Troy Meink, the service’s secretary announced earlier this week. It’s a call that Swarm Aero has been waiting for—and building toward for the past four years. On Monday, the company unveiled its autonomous Gamera aircraft, a long-range strike aircraft that boasts seven connection points for payloads like missiles and sensors. The UAS is powered by the company’s Legion autonomy software.  “We thought there would be a need that ultimately…to carry a very large payload like the LRASM that we see here, a long distance, and do so as cost effectively as possible,” Peter Kalogiannis, Swarm Aero’s CEO, told Defense One. “The $10 million listed in the solicitation, that really enables those volumes. And again, weve designed from the very beginning for those volumes, and quite frankly, for that price point, were very very competitive against them.  The company is building “several” prototypes in its Oxnard, California, facility and expects the first flight by the end of 2027.  “This is something that makes the rest of the force—the bombers, the fighters, the B-21s, the F-47s—it makes them more lethal and more survivable. By being able to take some of the mission sets that they would otherwise potentially have to do, and freeing them up where they can be most effective,” Oliver Palmer, the company’s co-founder, told Defense One.  And while it’s early, the company is looking forward to what the Air Force has in store and the innovation it could spark.  “Frankly, we need competition in large aircraft production. There has historically been a monopoly structure of awarding programs that are intended to be around for 20-, 30-plus years,” Palmer said. “There have been a lot of really great reasons to do that, but increasingly we need competition because the cycle of technology competition with adversaries like China and others is changing so fast…and the model has to change. They started that with CCA. It sounds like theyre gonna do that again with MMA. We absolutely welcome this.” AI integration station. The technology has had a big week in national security, so it’s only natural that the topic surfaced in chatter throughout the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center.  The Space Force’s newly appointed top buyer, Erich Hernandez-Baquero, said the military has to “lean in” to the technology.  “We cannot afford to lose this race for artificial intelligence,” he said. “The answer is not to shy away from the technology, but to lean into it, understand it, and apply the right guardrails in place. And I think those AI experts have approaches for how to ensure those guardrails are in play, and we need to continue to support development of those guardrails in a way that supports our space missions.”  The Air Force Test Center is also keen to collaborate with the tech industry, and now has a dedicated senior leader role for AI. “We have an artificial intelligence expert with us on staff now at the Air Force Test Center. So we are stepping into that world. We are looking to build and maintain those partnerships with tech in that space,” AFTC’s Massaro said.  Air Mobility Command wants a more data-link connected fleet, which could allow for some AI use.  “The ability for air crews to communicate, to coordinate tanker orbits and rendezvous, to pass threat information, to save lives and save aircraft has been everything we expected it to be,” Lt. Gen. Daniel Tulley, who leads the command, told reporters.  The command is “well down the path” of having a quarter of its fleet data-link connected despite missing its original 2025 goal. But the strategy has “evolved.” The service is pursuing MAF NEXUS and “the goal is to have this on all mobility aircraft, whether theyre future builds and its incorporated, or its an add-on capability to existing aircraft.” The system “brings edge compute, the ability to then deploy AI and much more computing horsepower forward on the aircraft, and it does network with the rest of the joint force and the Air Forces battle management system.” One last, fun exercise: If you Google “Air Force MMA” you’re definitely going to get UFC-type content.  ]]

[Category: Business]

— The Pentagon must prepare for battles around the moon: Joint Chiefs chair

 

at 9/16/26 11:11am

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.— The U.S. military’s top uniformed leader says U.S. forces must be ready for war near or possibly even on the moon, a rhetorical leap that comes as service leaders are still wrestling with the legal frameworks surrounding its newly revealed orbital weapons. “Our task, my friends, is to adapt right now, so the Joint Force is prepared to fight, endure, and win, in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine told airmen, guardians, and industry figures during his keynote address at the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference. Caine later repeated the thought—“today’s modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space”—but he did not clarify whether he meant on the moon’s surface. U.S. law is ambiguous, defining cislunar space as “the region of space from the Earth out to and including the region around the surface of the moon.” At least one Harvard Law Journal article interprets the clause to mean on the moon itself, and the White House’s National Cislunar Science and Technology Action Plan explicitly said in late 2024 that it includes the lunar surface. But the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 2021 “Primer on Cislunar Space” appears to treat space and the moon’s surface as two different domains. Caine pointed to recent comments made about orbital weapons by the Air Force secretary and the Space Force’s chief of space operations. Top space force officials have been hesitant to provide more details on how they would operate in that domain and how they’d responsibly use space weapons in future conflicts. While top Space Force officials have provided few details about how U.S. forces would fight between the Earth and its moon, they have been vocal about adding sensors and capabilities to watch adversary movements there. Aaron Brynildson, a space law professor at the University of Mississippi said it’s understandable why the military would want to increase awareness within that region.  “There’s a fear that recent Chinese activity on the moon and in cislunar space might outpace the United States,” Brynildson said. “China has a relay satellite in cislunar space and is performing robotic missions on the far side of the moon.” The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which the U.S. signed, outlaws certain military behaviors on the Moon and states that it shall be used “exclusively for peaceful purposes.”  “The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited.” Space Force Lt. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, the head of Combat Forces Command, told reporters during a media roundtable that the 18th and 19th Space Defense Squadrons are now both sharing the cislunar mission among each other.  “Our adversaries, our potential adversaries, such as the PRC, are actively pursuing activities in the cislunar parts of space. So thats sort of the expansion, if you will, of I would say the end zone, if you will, in the football game,” he said. When asked if the Outer Space Treaty limits the military’s cislunar ambitions, Gagnon said it did not limit orbital operations. “The United States Space Force will continue to execute safe and responsible space operations in all regions of space and in all orbits,” he said. Brynildsonn said that while the treaty forbids the creation of military bases on the moon, “The U.S. needs better capabilities in cislunar space to ensure China complies with that obligation and doesn’t militarize the moon. There’s a real coverage gap by the U.S. that needs closing.” This week’s revelation by Air Force Secretary Troy Meink and Chief of Space Operations Gen. Douglas Schiess that the U.S. has on-orbit space-control weapons has raised legal questions about their responsible use. Experts have speculated that the weapons are likely non-kinetic, such as jammers and electronic warfare capabilities. When asked whether U.S. policy limits the use of a kinetic space weapon, meaning a destructive capability that would cause debris, Gagnon deferred to policy offices.  “So we have capabilities in the military because we are preparing to defend the nation. The reason we have capabilities is to help create deterrence,” he said. “When you go to war, you break things.” Brynildson said it’s not clear how current laws limit the use of space weapons. “It’s unclear what the legal restraints on the use of kinetic or non-kinetic weapons in space might be. The Outer Space Treaty doesn’t give us great answers to what factors a military action must consider,” he said. “The DoD Law of War Manual is also non-committal on the unique aspects of the space domain. At a minimum, general principles from the law of armed conflict would apply, such as only striking military-related satellites, avoiding collateral damage to civilians, etc.” U.S. lawmakers are also concerned by the lack of space-focused military legal knowledge. A provision inserted by the Senate Armed Service Committee in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act tasks the Defense Department with assessing its “space law requirements” to face rising threats and examine “options for establishing a dedicated legal organization within the Air Force, Space Force, or Space Command.” The amendment adds that senators are “concerned that current legal, policy, and institutional structures within the Department of Defense may not have kept pace with the complexity of space operations.” Those clarified legal norms may not emerge until it’s too late. “Ultimately, I think the first space conflict might be the time when most of these rules get written,” Brynildson said. ]]

[Category: Threats]

— How a MAGA influencer with ties to Russia became Trump’s Arctic adviser

 

at 9/15/26 4:51pm

For more than 40 years, the U.S. Arctic Research Commission has advised Congress and the president on what to study in the frigid and dynamic far north, from the environment to military security. It’s typically done so without making waves, led by people well-versed in science and public policy. That was until December, when President Donald Trump appointed a Texas venture capitalist and MAGA influencer with no formal background in science as the commission’s chair. Since then, Thomas Dans has traveled the globe generating headlines. Serving as the administration’s main voice on the Arctic, he’s advanced some of the president’s wildest ambitions, like a takeover of Greenland, and rankled NATO allies in the process. Yet as Dans holds forth in the U.S. and abroad, it’s not always clear where the administration’s agenda ends and his own begins. He has repeatedly said, for example, that the U.S. needs more icebreakers, ships that Trump has long viewed as critical to dominating the Arctic. In doing so, Dans has championed one shipbuilder in particular — Damen Shipyards, a Dutch company with which he had a business relationship. “They’re the largest builder of icebreakers and ice-class vessels in the world,” Dans said at an event in Anchorage, Alaska, in April. At the time, his consultancy was working to help Damen land an icebreaker contract with the federal government. As he’s spoken to audiences of government officials, diplomats, academics and journalists, Dans — who wears his Arctic commission lapel pin and exudes a professorial air — has also waded into foreign policy. In the media and at public events, he’s backed Trump’s push to take over Greenland. And he’s advocated enthusiastically for closer U.S. relations with Russia — even as a bipartisan group of lawmakers calls for tougher sanctions on the country and more aid to Ukraine. Dans and Damen have long done business in Russia, and Dans has regularly shared social media posts that reflect a pro-Kremlin viewpoint. “We want a peaceful Arctic, we want a peaceful world,” he said at an event a few days after he announced plans to travel to Moscow. “Russia and the United States gotta get along for that to happen.” Opining so broadly on foreign policy is “far beyond” the Arctic Research Commission’s scientific mandate, said Fran Ulmer, who served as commission chair for more than nine years before being replaced by Trump in 2020. “And certainly outside the bounds of what the U.S. Arctic Research Commission has done in the past.” Dans, whose consultancy Almiranta Strategies “advises investors and businesses working in the Arctic,” according to his profile on the Arctic commission’s website, is far from the first in the Trump administration to mingle public and personal interests. The finances of many senior officials and the industries they regulatehave drawn scrutiny as Trump has disarmed government safeguards against conflicts. “It’s become standard for people to pursue their personal financial interest,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen. Under the law, Dans’ position gives him access to government information from other federal agencies — an arrangement that could benefit his private interests. Such potential conflicts are typically governed by federal ethics rules. But the nature of Dans’ role affords him more leeway than other appointees. Commission members are not considered government employees and thus not required to file an ethics form disclosing conflicts. Indeed, a White House official told ProPublica that Dans’ consulting work did not constitute a conflict of interest for that very reason. “Tom Dans is doing a great job leading the Arctic Research Commission, and his shipbuilding expertise has helped him succeed in this role,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “The President appreciates all he is doing to advance American interests in the Arctic.” The White House official said Dans is one of two commission members the law designates as representatives of “the interests of industry.” Even so, Dans’ lack of research experience stands out. The other industry rep is a Ph.D. and former director of the United States Geological Survey. Dans declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this story and did not respond to written questions from ProPublica, but he told The New York Timesthis year that his post did not preclude him from working in private business. The Arctic commission has arguably never been more important. The region is warming at unprecedented rates, accelerating sea-level rise and causing severe weather in the U.S. and elsewhere. The melting ice also has geopolitical consequences. Russia and China are conducting joint military exercises in the far north. New shipping lanes have opened there. And mineral deposits are becoming potentially more accessible. At a public appearance in July, Dans cited the commission’s four priorities: military and national security, energy security, economic development in the Arctic and “what we’ll call ‘community security.’” He did not define the term. From Russia, With Love Dans has long been taken with Russia, the country that has by far the most Arctic coastline. His fondness dates back at least to seventh grade, when he says he was recruited to learn Russian in his Maryland public school. He later visited Moscow as an exchange student, then returned to work in finance in the mid-1990s. He worked at a private equity fund financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which aimed to grow the private sector after the Soviet Union’s breakup. In a LinkedIn post last year, he reminisced about how he and Kirill Dmitriev, a Harvard-educated banker who now serves as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intermediary with Trump officials, traveled in the same circles early in their finance careers. Decades later, in Trump’s first term as president, Dans landed a job in the Treasury Department as a senior policy adviser for international affairs. There, he served on a secret National Security Council task force on U.S. control of Greenland, a role first reported by The New Yorker. A former Trump administration official told ProPublica the group’s purpose was to strengthen the United States’ strategic position in Greenland and devise policies to bring the two closer. Perhaps because of that work, Trump named Dans to the Arctic Research Commission for the first time in late 2020. His tenure was short-lived. When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, the new administration fired Dans and three other Trump appointees. Dans was angry. “We were fired without notice and anonymously slandered by the White House for ‘lacking relevant expertise,’” he wrote in The Hill. “At the time, I was the first commissioner in the agency’s 37-year history to speak fluent Russian, the language of the world’s largest Arctic nation.” Dans launched an investment firm with two other former Trump Treasury officials, but it was short-lived, closing in late 2023. That year, Dans said on Substack that he was the “first American” to launch an effort to buy the Helsinki Shipyard in Finland, where about half the global icebreaker fleet was built. One of its Russian owners at the time was a business partner of a former Putin deputy minister. The effort failed. He traveled the world, talking with officials in places like Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Romania. He lobbied on behalf of the Kazakhstan Embassy and that country’s state-owned national oil and gas company, records show. He devised policy recommendations “for Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction” as a visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, his LinkedIn profile says. He also contributed to Heritage’s federal workforce-slashing Project 2025, of which his twin brother Paul was director. Then in May 2024, he launched a nonprofit called American Daybreak. Its goal was to foster ties between the U.S. and Greenland. After Trump’s victory, Dans promised in comments on Substack that “the next Trump Admin is going to Make America a Great Arctic (MAGA) nation!” In early January 2025, Dans and American Daybreak helped arrange a visit by Donald Trump Jr. and late conservative activist Charlie Kirk to the Arctic island. He then sought to bring Vice President JD Vance’s wife, Usha, to watch a popular dog sled race (the trip was scaled back after protests). Dans also enlisted Greenland’s most outspoken MAGA enthusiast, a bricklayer named Jørgen Boassen, whom Dans has called a “good friend,” to generate support for U.S. control of Greenland. “The Best Icebreakers in the World” Dans was not named to a new full-time post in the second Trump administration. But he remained in the Trump orbit. He was a frequent guest on conservative activist and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. He spoke for one episode from Romania, plugging far-right Romanian presidential candidate George Simion (who was later seen with Republicans at the Kennedy Center cutting up a cake shaped like Greenlandwith American flag frosting). “There’s a phenomenon here that’s the silent George Simion voter, kind of like your silent Trump voter,” Dans told Bannon. “And that’s significant.” (Simion lost and afterward unsuccessfully sought to have the election annulled.) By August of last year, Dans found another opportunity in the private sector. He posted on LinkedIn that he was “very excited to announce that I am working with Damen Shipyards Group, one of the world’s leading shipbuilders.” At the time, Dutch prosecutors were investigating the company for supplying Russia with equipment that they said could be used for military purposes, in violation of European sanctions. In his post, Dans shared a photo of himself arm-in-arm with three high-ranking company executives, including Rutger Dolk, who was later detained by Dutch authorities as part of the probe. The case is ongoing. (Dolk did not respond to a request for comment. In response to questions, Damen shared a press release that said it “has always acted in accordance with the applicable sanctions packages and that full transparency has been exercised about its activities.”) Dans said he was working with the shipbuilder “to bring some of the best icebreakers in the world to the United States” and noted that the U.S. Navy had recently chosen Damen “to help it fast-track a new fleet” of a different type of vessel: up to 35 medium-sized ships to move troops and supplies to shorelines. According to records, the Navy bought the designs for the ship from Damen for $3.3 million without going through the typical bidding process, saying it would save time and money to go with a “proven” design. (The Navy did not respond to requests for comment.) In December, Trump appointed Dans to head the Arctic Research Commission. The announcement said Dans’ primary focus as a businessman was “shipbuilding and transportation where, among other projects, he is leading an effort to develop icebreakers and ice-class vessels for the United States while helping restore America’s Maritime Base.” Since then, Dans has championed Damen in conversations and at a public appearance. In April, he said that “outside of the commission, I wear a hat working for one of the world’s largest shipbuilders, which is a group called Damen.” While ProPublica was reporting this story, Damen terminated its agreement with Dans, which would have paid him if the company got a contract to build an icebreaker. If Dans was seeking to advance Damen’s interests, he may have been required under the law to register either as a lobbyist or a foreign agent, said Josh Rosenstein, an attorney who is an expert on the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Documents show he’d done neither. “It certainly would raise questions, you know, in my mind about what sort of interactions he, on behalf of Damen, had with the U.S. government,” Rosenstein said. “And with whom.” The White House pushed back. “These so-called ‘experts’ have no idea what they are talking about,” said Kelly, the spokesperson. Whether Dans has other business ties that could impact his government job is unclear. When at the Treasury, he reported holding a stake in Global Restaurant Management LLC, the parent company of a firm that operated multiple Papa Johns restaurants in Russia at the time. The status of that investment — which Dans reported had a value of between $250,000 and $500,000 — isn’t publicly known today because he’s no longer required to disclose his financial interests. Christopher Wynne, who headed Global Restaurant Management, said he could not discuss another person’s investments. Unlike most high-level presidential appointees, the Arctic commission chair — who is eligible only for a stipend of up to about $55,000 a year — is not a federal employee under the law. And while the commission has a policy seeking to prevent conflicts of interest, there are no penalties for violating it. Dans’ outside commitments could be problematic if he used his access to the federal government to improperly benefit another employer or country, said Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House and other agencies during Republican and Democratic presidencies. “The fact that he has foreign entanglements and access to government-wide information,” she said, “it should raise national security concerns.” ProPublica asked the White House about Canter’s comments but it did not respond. A Chilly Reception in Greenland Tensions over Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, have flared since Dans returned to the Arctic commission. A month into Dans’ tenure as commission chair, Trump said he would take Greenland “one way or the other.” He initially refused to rule out military force. Dans echoed Trump, telling the BBC that month that “everything’s on the table.” While Dans is a minor player in the federal government, “when he speaks, international audiences and officials see him as representing U.S. policy,” said Heather Conley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In his first five months as chair, Dans spoke often to the foreign press and traveled to locales that included Denmark, Norway, Italy and Canada — as well as Mar-a-Lago in Florida and the Explorer’s Club in New York City, records show. The commission spent about $87,000 on his travel expenses. He did not return to Greenland. But the administration’s rhetoric put Denmark on a war footing. The country sent soldiers to Greenland armed with explosives and plans to blow up airfields in the event of an American invasion. At one point, a Greenlandic politician told ProPublica, some schoolchildren were instructed to practice hiding under their desks in case of such an event. Greenlanders have repeated a refrain: Open for business, not for sale. Dans’ remarks only seem to have further deepened divisions. In February, while at a conference in Norway, he was caught on a hot mic telling a Greenlandic politician that “the check’s in the mail.” A former chairman of the Arctic Research Commission, Michael Sfraga, was at the same conference and publicly told the politician to “rip the check up.” Trump has continued to press the cause. In mid-July, he posted a picture on Truth Social of a map that included Greenland with the American flag superimposed on it. The rhetoric has had consequences for Arctic research. Several Danish researchers said they will no longer participate in research with the U.S. One noted that her colleagues avoided Dans at a recent conference. Dans’ current role in Greenland is unclear. He said at a recent conference he is not involved in talks among negotiators for the U.S., Greenland and Denmark that began earlier this year. In May, Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, and the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, Ken Howery, attended a business conference in the capital of Nuuk without Dans. Landry and Howery appeared for photo ops and opened a new, bigger consulate building, as protesters shouted outside. A White House official told ProPublica that Greenland is “critical from the standpoint of U.S. national security” and “we are very optimistic that we’re on a good trajectory” in the diplomatic talks. The official did not address Dans’ role. Reposting Russian Propaganda Official visits to Russia have been exceedingly rare since the U.S. and its European allies froze ties with the country after it invaded Ukraine in 2022, yet at his appearance in Anchorage in April Dans announced that he was planning to go to Moscow “probably in the next month” to discuss research cooperation. The trip never happened; the State Department’s official guidance on Russia is “Do Not Travel for Any Reason.” Asked about Dans’ push for reestablishing ties and travel plans, a State Department spokesperson referred questions to Dans. His social media feed on X is filled with foreign news accounts, sometimes from outlets sympathetic to the Kremlin. He reposted a story last October from Kazakh media on Putin’s warning that the U.S. would fracture relations with Russia if it supplied Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles. In May, he wrote of his grandfather’s participation in the perilous Murmansk Run to supply the Soviet Union during World War II. “Happy Victory Day,” Dans wrote in Russian and English, reposting a video of Putin from Russian state media laying flowers at a soldiers’ memorial. The original poster of the video has been called a source of Russian propaganda by the Ukrainian government. “Everyone obviously needs to be incredibly cautious when you’re reposting Russian information,” Conley said, because such posts could promote a narrative that is “against U.S. national interests.” Posting “Happy Victory Day” in Russian may sound innocuous, but it is “a super-loaded thing to do right now,” she added. Putin has conjured Russia’s World War II victory when talking about Ukraine, even equating Ukrainians to Nazis in Germany. The White House did not respond to questions about Dans’ Russia-related posts. Under Putin, Russia has tied its future to the Arctic and the region’s natural resources, including liquefied natural gas. U.S. sanctions, which targeted the country’s energy sector, have set those efforts back — something that Russia has sought to reverse in ongoing talks with the Trump administration. Dans has remarked on the developments on social meda, calling Dmitriev, the Russian who now serves as a key Putin negotiator with the Trump administration, “the Kremlin’s ace in the hole.” “We’re older now and have some grey hair, but it’s neat to see who the Trump Administration is negotiating with,” Dans wrote of Dmitriev, who rose to head one of Russia’s sovereign wealth funds before being sanctioned by the Biden Treasury Department in 2022 for his ties to Putin and work raising funds from the U.S. Asked about Dans’ calls for cooperation, Kelly, the White House spokesperson, said: “President Trump and his entire administration are willing to work with anyone in order to advance American interests, including peace in the Russia-Ukraine War. This approach has helped the United States bring both sides of the conflict together for historic peace talks.” Dans seemed to downplay any differences with the Trump administration over Russia in one recent appearance, where he told an audience that included State Department officials, Russian Embassy personnel and Greenlandic diplomats that “getting Russia-Ukraine war ended, I think, is a priority. Stopping the killing.” But the following month, in July, Dans opened and closed his remarks at a conference in Aspen by calling Russia a “neighbor.” He again urged that the U.S. repair its relationship. “We need to be able to communicate with the Russians,” he said. “We’ve got some very important things to clear up with them with Ukraine, absolutely, but we have to work towards peace in the Arctic.” Kelly said there was “nothing controversial about Mr. Dans’ remarks calling for an end to years of bloodshed and expanded dialogue.” Doris Burke, Lynn Dombek and Alex Mierjeski contributed research. Joel Jacobs contributed data reporting. ]]

[Category: Ideas]

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

 

at 9/15/26 4:18pm

The federal government spent nearly $10 billion placing more than 100,000 federal workers on paid administrative leave for extended periods last year, a sixfold increase from two years prior driven largely by the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program aimed at encouraging feds to quit public service. A new report from the Government Accountability Office found that around 70% of that money, or $6.7 billion went to feds who opted into the DRP, a program by which agencies paid employees to stay home, in exchange for their resignation by September 2025—or December of that year, for retirement-eligible workers. While federal employees took 4 million workdays worth of leave in 2023 and 4.4 million in 2024, that number ballooned to 21.6 million workdays last year. “Paid administrative leave usage peaked in July 2025 at nearly 3 million workdays; approximately 2.5 million of those workdays were associated with the deferred resignation program,” GAO wrote. “In 2023 and 2024, fewer than 600 federal employees took more than 90 workdays of paid administrative leave; in 2025, almost 100,000 employees took more than 90 days of paid administrative leave.” The deferred resignation program came shortly after the Office of Personnel Management issued long-awaited regulations implementing the 2016 Administrative Leave Act, a law aimed at curbing the use of paid administrative leave. OPM told agencies that those regulations would not take effect until September 2025, and later proposed a new rule codifying workforce realignment as a valid use of paid leave. OPM’s current guidance for agencies considering a deferred resignation program is to cap the period of paid administrative leave at 12 weeks. GAO noted that its estimates regarding the costs of leave approved in connection with the deferred resignation program and other workforce restructuring efforts are likely a modest overcount. That’s because employees commonly misreport similar forms of paid time off, such as for a federal holiday or a doctor’s appointment, as well as the fact that OPM has not set up a dedicated leave category for leave connected to a workforce restructuring effort. That means policymakers can’t know whether the Trump administration’s workforce reductions are actually reducing the cost of government, the report found. OPM Director Scott Kupor has previously said the DRP would save taxpayers $20 billion each year.  “To calculate the long-term government-wide savings of workforce reduction efforts, OPM needs to know the short-term costs of using paid administrative leave,” GAO wrote. “[Without] an accurate understanding of how much paid administrative leave costs the federal government, there is no way to accurately determine to what extent the government-wide cost-savings goal is being met. OPM officials stated that they have no plans to create an additional subcategory of paid administrative leave associated with workforce reductions.” GAO recommended the OPM acknowledge the data reliability issues inherent in its public-facing paid leave data, as well as create a new category in federal payroll systems to report workforce-reduction related paid leave. In its response, the dedicated HR agency reversed course and said it would begin the process of creating a new leave category to better track the usage of and reasoning for paid leave. “OPM agrees that a dedicated administrative leave data element for workforce reduction efforts would enable more timely reporting on its use and simplify future analysis,” Kupor wrote. “OPM will begin the process of developing a new paid administrative leave category focused on workforce reduction efforts, in coordination with agencies and payroll service providers.” ]]

[Category: Policy]

— NGA official takes top AI job at Cyber Command

 

at 9/15/26 4:00pm

U.S. Cyber Command, the Pentagon’s combatant command responsible for planning and conducting military cyberspace operations, has a new artificial intelligence lead, a spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday.  “U.S. Cyber Command welcomes Rear Adm. Ronzelle Green as the Command’s new Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer and thanks Brig. Gen. Reid Novotny for his leadership and service,” a representative for the combatant command told Nextgov/FCW. Green, who has worked at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for roughly three years — most recently as its director of geospatial intelligence innovation and research — is Cyber Command’s second-ever AI head. Novotny was the first official tapped for the position last November and served in a dual role as CAIO and as cyber force generation lead for the Pentagon. The Record first reported the news of Green’s new role. In a LinkedIn post last year announcing his new position, Novotny said “part of my role is embracing AI because like anything new, it is not the technology but yet the culture that is difficult to change.” Novotny further outlined his approach to adopting AI during an April conversation with Axios, saying that he was solely focused on providing Cyber Command’s personnel with the best AI capabilities, regardless of their origin. "To survive anywhere, just in case our operators want an open-source, made-in-China model or something very boutique, we have to create the infrastructure and that ability to be agile — no politics,” he said at the time. In addition to his prior work at NGA, Green also brings more than 30 years of IT experience in the private sector and within intelligence community agencies to his new role as Cyber Command’s CAIO. He previously served as the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency’s chief information officer from 2020 until 2022, and has held roles within the Pentagon and National Counterterrorism Center throughout his career. Green is also a senior officer with the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve.  Cyber Command is led by Gen. Joshua Rudd, who also serves as head of the National Security Agency in a dual-hatted leadership role. NSA and Cyber Command, however, have taken somewhat differing approaches in their adoption of and focus on AI.  Under Rudd’s watch, NSA is in the process of a major reorganization that would establish five mission centers focused on AI, China, cybersecurity, combat support and global intelligence. The planned creation of the AI-focused center comes after NSA officials have voiced support in recent months for the use of more AI tools to bolster the agencys cyber and intelligence analysis operations. ]]

[Category: Science & Tech]

— ‘It was time’ to admit US has weapons in orbit, Space Force’s new leader says

 

at 9/15/26 11:58am

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland—The advance of Chinese and Russian anti-satellite capabilities led the United States to admit it has weapons in space, the Space Forces top officer said on Tuesday, adding context to Monday’s bombshell revelation by the Air Force secretary. Deterrence remains the Space Force’s goal, but the service will pursue it from a “position of strength,” Gen. Douglas Schiess said during a keynote address at the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference here.  On Monday, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink revealed the U.S. military has “on orbit, space-control weapons.” Schiess, who took over as chief of space operations less than two weeks ago, spoke to reporters after his keynote on Tuesday. “Weve talked about you know them being able to grapple a satellite and move it to a different orbit,” he said. “So, I think at this point, we are trying to say that we also need capabilities to not only defend the joint force from space-enabled attack, but defend our assets. And so, I think it was time that within the Department of War we talked about it, and its time to talk about that we have the capabilities to make sure that we can do what the joint force needs.” During his keynote, Schiess said the U.S. military relies on space assets for operations like the current war on Iran, that guardians are already prepared for orbital warfare, and that more money is needed for current and future operations. “The Joint Force made it clear: without the Space Forces capabilities, the Joint Force could not and would not move forward,” Schiess said. “During Operation Epic Fury, our components, notably at U.S. Central Command and Space Command, with support from our components at European Command and Pacific Command, demonstrated that guardians are not supporting from the sidelines as a nice-to-have, but we are delivering space power directly into the fight as a need-to-have.” Schiess highlighted one guardian in U.S. Central Command with the 42nd Electronic Warfare Detachment who “waged electromagnetic warfare against a determined adversary” during Operation Epic Fury.  “Even as alarm red sirens were blaring and incoming missiles targeted her site, she courageously held the line, protecting forces, denying adversary capability, and delivering space effects until her commander had to literally pull her from the console to safety,” Schiess said. The CSO said the Space Force has been flexing its capabilities in outer space as well. He highlighted the service’s recent Victus Haze exercise, in which Rocket Lab quickly launched a space vehicle whose  satellite chased after True Anomalys spacecraft. “This particular Victus Haze mission earlier this year demonstrated the ability to launch and respond to an on-demand, on-orbit threat in just 17 hours,” the general said. “Space Systems Command, our industry partners, and Combat Forces Command proved to the world that if an adversary targets the United States Space Force, we have the capability to deliver a swift response, and we are going to continue to work on getting faster and faster.” Schiess said those current and future fights highlight the need for more resources. “So, looking ahead, we must expand that advantage. We must build a sustained pipeline of guardian talent, equipped with the appropriate training and the kit and advanced capabilities, to ensure our joint force is fully powered by space expertise.” he said. “We must ensure today, tomorrow, and for as long as we have the pleasure to serve, that our joint force can execute because guardians are there, both at home and abroad, and in harms way.” Space Force has grown quickly since its founding in 2019, but this year, the Pentagon is asking Congress to allocate $71.3 billion for the service for the fiscal year that began more than two weeks ago. It would be the biggest single-year funding increase for a service branch, by percentage, since 1952, according to the Aerospace Corporation. “Space is both a battlefield and the backbone of our joint force. We face determined and credible adversaries who are building and building counter-space systems at incredible speeds to target directly the United States states space advantage,” Schiess said. “So that is why we dont just monitor the domain; we stand ready to defend it. So let me be crystal clear: today, Guardians operate on-orbit weapons that can defend the joint force against space-enabled attacks, and in the coming years, with the resources entrusted to us, by the way, we need your help, Congress-we will make disciplined and responsible choices about how we build and sustain our combat advantage, which means scaling our ability to respond to threats.” It’s not clear whether Congress will grant the request. The White House wants $1.15 trillion through the normal defense-budget process and an additional $350 billion through reconciliation—a controversial and partisan budget maneuver never used for defense funding before last year. The Trump administration is pressing the GOP-led Congress to relent by proposing to use reconciliation to fund some major Space Force programs, such as the Air Moving Target Indicator and the space data network, and the vast majority of funds for the Golden Dome missile defense program. In the meantime, 10 percent of the service’s programs are on hold because Congress hasn’t passed a fiscal 2027 defense spending bill, Schiess told reporters. The federal government is currently operating under a stopgap funding measure that will elapse on Dec. 11. ]]

[Category: Threats]

— Iran strikes exposed gaps in medical evacuation ops across Middle East: IG

 

at 9/15/26 2:43am

The military abandoned plans to use Army helicopters to evacuate wounded troops involved in the war with Iran, and instead resorted to slower ground-based evacuations, in part due to the threat of drone strikes, according to a Defense Department Office of the Inspector General report released Monday. The shift illustrates a problem medical officials had  warned about for years. At the start of the operation, the U.S. used Army helicopters in Kuwait and Iraq for medical evacuation, but then moved them due to concerns about Iranian drone and missile strikes.  “Most evacuations during [Operation Epic Fury] were ultimately conducted by ground,” according to the report. In addition to the drone threat, the United States had the additional hurdle of relying on host country hospitals for what’s called “advanced, hospital level care” for particularly severe injuries, since establishing such hospitals on U.S. bases would require a large and more targetable footprint. The move follows warnings from medical officials that future conflicts would be more dangerous for U.S. troops, as adversaries develop more advanced weapons—particularly drones. A 2022 Army University Press article by Lt. Col. Matthew Marsh and Capt. Ryan Hampton eerily forecasts the situation described in the inspector general report: “Medical personnel will experience intermittent air and ground evacuation with medical logistics constraints,” it reads. Just as new technology has allowed some adversaries to become more dangerous and inflict higher casualties, other pressures led to cutbacks in medical evacuation capability, particularly in the Middle East. A July 2025 Pulse of Army Medicine article by Sgt. Maj. Sandra Johnson describes how, across U.S. Central Command, “Due to competing requirements, many of these bases only have one medic on post and no medical provider. A medic may have to care for a patient for several hours until they arrive at a local national hospital.”  She noted specifically the problem of “no Medical Evacuation (MEDEVAC) by flight or ground capability, or only ground Casualty Evacuation (CASEVAC) options,” across CENTCOM. An April U.S. Naval Institute report explains: “Drone warfare [in Ukraine] has disrupted casualty movement from the point of injury throughout the combat casualty continuum of care.” The IG report acknowledges that CENTCOM officials worked to rapidly develop new plans and strategies when faced with Iranian drone capabilities, moving troops and materiel.. “During OEF, USCENTCOM shifted personnel, assets, and storage facilities as locations came under Iranian and proxy attacks,” it reads. The report carries a strong recommendation: To find and fix “the gaps in [Department of Defense counter-drone] interoperability, and the corrective actions needed to standardize” those capabilities.  ]]

[Category: Threats]

— US military has ‘on-orbit’ space weapons, Air Force Secretary reveals

 

at 9/14/26 8:58am

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Air Force Secretary Troy Meink acknowledged that the U.S. has space weapons, a public revelation that some experts said could accelerate an arms race in orbit. “Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist,” Mink said during his Monday morning speech at the Air, Space, Cyber conference here. “This is why the United States now has, on orbit, space-control weapons, capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversaries.” Top service officials have typically been cagey when asked about U.S. space weapons, often citing national-security concerns. It also marks a major change in rhetoric. John Raymond, the service’s first chief of space operations, proclaimed in 2022 that “our primary purpose is to deter war.”  Defense experts were shocked by Meink’s admission on Monday morning, and said it will likely push the U.S. military’s main adversaries in space to acknowledge their capabilities, too. “Well, thats huge, because I dont think any US government official has ever said that before,” said Victoria Samson, the Secure World Foundations chief director of space security and stability. “The US also now has to accept the Chinese and Russians doing/saying the same. I dont think that this is going to be in the interest of US national security.” Meink did not provide additional details on what type of on-orbit weapons the U.S. possesses.  Kinetic weapons, such as missiles, can create debris by destroying a target. Numerous top military officials have warned against using such weapons. “Our commitment to responsible space operations is fundamental to our mission assurance and our role as stewards of the space environment,” Maj. Gen. Chris Povak, deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, said earlier this year. Samson said that narrows her guess about what Meink was talking about. “Im going to guess what hes talking about is not a kinetic space-control weapon due to multiple comments government officials have said about avoiding debris causing counter space,” she said. “So Im going to go with my first guess: space-based jammers, electronic warfare.” Meink also made several other space-related announcements in his speech. The Air Force secretary said prototypes for the space-based Airborne Moving Target Indicator satellite constellation will be launched this month.  Meink also said that space-based interceptors, the cornerstone technology of President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense system, are now “flight ready.”  Last month, Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, Golden Dome’s direct-reporting program manager, warned that the missile defense project would be in dire straits if Congress can’t prioritize additional funding for the effort. The four-star general also said that initial development on space-based interceptors is underway and that the service has executed two “phenomenally successful” tests. “All of the providers that are part of the competition are progressing exceptionally well,” Guetlein told reporters at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “As everybody knows, there have been many who are developing capabilities to take those away from us, to threaten those things,” Meink said. “So, it is critically important that we maintain our dominance not only in the air but in space, and so that weve had to take steps to make sure that when were threatened, we can take care of that.” ]]

[Category: Defense Systems]

— Lockheed’s Skunk Works plans to build four more of its multirole combat drones

 

at 9/14/26 4:00am

Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin’s secretive research arm, plans to build four more of its experimental, multipurpose drones as the firm attempts to sell its futuristic platform to the U.S. military. Last year, Skunk Works unveiled Vectis—a concept for a group 5 drone that’s capable of a wide range of missions. Now, on the first day of the Air & Space Force Association’s defense conference near Washington, D.C., company officials announced they’re making significant progress on the prototype and are already planning to expand the fleet for more tests. “We are moving forward with a plan to build an additional four vehicles, bringing a total of five to include the original prototype,” said Ron Fehlen, Skunk Works’ vice president and general manager. “Development work on those additional aircraft is already underway, and well have more specifics to share soon.” Company officials shared new images of the Skunk Works combat drone with reporters ahead of this week’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference. Vectis will be roughly 34 feet long and have a 38-foot wingspan, and will feature a submerged engine inlet and a tail-less body to reduce drag and mission flexibility,” Fehlen said. While Lockheed was eager to talk about the aircraft’s design, the Skunk Works vice president was tight-lipped about who the specific customer for the new aircraft could be, and didn’t provide details on the weapons loadout, propulsion system, or estimated cost of the platform. The Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy are all aiming to field collaborative combat aircraft.  “From an affordability standpoint, which were always looking at, and, of course, are targeting to be the CCA competitive price. So were very cognizant of it and make trades associated with that, Fehlen said. “Its obviously, I think, focused more on the CCA side of the house, and obviously the price points that are highly relevant in that regime.” Fehlen said the company remains on track to fly Vectis by “the end of 2027.” He said Skunk Works feels confident in that timeline, due in part, to the use of digital designs and “minimal tooling determinant assembly”—which the Skunk Works vice president likened to ready-to-assemble furniture with pre-drilled holes. “Its a technique that really enables an increased level of affordability and speed through really reducing the amount of touch labor required and increasing the first pass yield,” Fehlen said. “Weve seen in many cases an 80 percent reduction in labor hours to build up the aircraft itself.” While Fehlen wouldn’t specify one specific U.S. program or customer Vectis is geared toward, he did say it could work with any of Lockheed Martin’s fighter jets, which are also flown by other nation’s militaries. “Ill point to the fact that we have a long history in crewed tactical systems that, you know, Vectus is going to need to integrate with, in addition to other fighter aircraft that are produced around the world,” Fehlen said. “So, from our perspective, this is in line with our heritage and what were producing today and delivering to the field. It has incredible capability, and now were going to be able to add this to it.” ]]

[Category: Business]

— Cold comfort

 

at 9/12/26 1:50pm

The arrival of new weapons has often been followed closely by their use against civilian populations for strategic effects. Submarines, bombers, rockets; The Lusitania, Dresden, London. This 20th-century history portends that the emerging capabilities of the 21st century—cyber attacks, information warfare—will be similarly used against civilian targets. The challenge will be all the greater as extreme weather becomes more common. This month’s Fictional Intelligence narrative, set in the late 2030s, explores how adversaries could exploit the combination to raise existential questions about political, military, and societal resiliency.  An empty bar is a terrible thing to waste. Tomec took in the Loui Bar at Steigenberger Icon Wiltcher’s grand hotel in Brussels and set himself in a plush leather club chair. The young sergeant in Poland’s JW FORMOZA naval commando unit was a large man, meaning he found most chairs uncomfortable. And he enjoyed his quiet, now more than ever. It was half an hour before a driver would pick him up, but he wanted to be sure not to miss them.  His military service had taken him to three continents, but he had never been to NATO’s headquarters, let alone imagined he would go for an awards ceremony, albeit a discreet one held after hours. He assumed it was a hushed matter due to the sensitivity of his wartime missions. The war had been officially over for four months, but a great deal of it remained clouded. With so much disinformation and outright damage to computer systems and cloud networks, people were still trying to piece together what had happened. Tomec took a sip from his highball glass, careful not to get the cocktail’s muddled basil on his chin. He pulled out a paperback novel he had picked up at the airport, no longer trusting his old digital book reader after all the hacks. But as he tried to lose himself in the story, he found his solitude disturbed by a man and a woman entering the bar. The woman was taller than Tomec’s nearly two meters; her black suit contrasted with her short platinum-and-purple-streaked hair. The man, shorter and bald, wore a loose-fitting gray suit, a white shirt, and a squadron tie in maroon polyester.  Tomac’s hearing wasn’t as good as it had been before the war, so it was hard to make out what they were saying on the other side of the room. But it was just loud enough to break the silence he had so welcomed. Then they collected their drinks, looked around at him, and walked over. The pair seemed entirely comfortable, which put him on edge. He put his book down, ran a hand through his thick brown hair, and started to stand. The woman motioned for him to sit and did so herself, in a plush chair that faced his. “You have good taste,” she said, in what Tomac took for a Dutch accent. “The bartender said we’re having what you’re having.” “Gin Basil Smash,” Tomec said. “Exactly. Less bevvy, more salad,” said the man, who spoke with a carefully neutral British accent. He was bald and significantly shorter than the woman. He wore a loose-fitting gray suit, a white shirt, and a polyester maroon squadron tie. “I’m Aniek, and this is Wing Commander James Crick, 617 Squadron RAF,” the woman said. “You’re Sgt. Tomec Majka, Polish Navy special forces? We’re going with you to the awards ceremony.” She pulled out her phone and showed Tomec a message from the staff officer who was coordinating the ceremony and reception.  “Bona fides,” said the man, offering a white-toothed grin. “Call me Jim.” The bartender brought their drinks over and set them down on the low table between them, carefully placing a coaster with the hotel’s “W” logo oriented vertically in front of each. “And this is Aniek Rasmussen of the Dutch Joint Sigint Cyber Unit, the real star of the show,” James said, toasting her with his glass.  “Not so much,” said Aniek. “I sat at my desk during the entire war.” James and Aniek each took a sip. Tomec leaned back in his chair. “Delicious,” James said. “How quickly we can take for granted something like a bunch of fresh basil and proper tonic water.” Tomec thought he sounded like a BBC announcer from the last world war.  “What kind of aircraft do you fly?” Tomec asked. “F-35Bs,” James said. “Always thought when we went to war, I’d be doing close-air support or battling other 5th-gen fighters. Instead, they had us sucking up electronic emissions to track those sub-swarm motherships. That’s why I’m here. Led a few of those missions, made it back. Seemed to be enough.” He took a longer sip. “How about you?” Tomec sighed. Sometimes what appeared simple was far more complicated to say. He was being decorated for defending the fiber-optic cable taps that ran through the Baltic Sea. A microsecond advantage in transmission time had produced a vital edge for NATO’s artificial intelligence-driven campaign. Some of the war’s most important battles had been fought hand-to-hand in the icy waters above glass threads carrying petabytes of data across the bottom of the sea. Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc, he thought, the place where the devil says goodnight. “Badly paid undersea fiber-optic cable technician,” Tomec said. Aniek laughed softly and started fiddling with her phone. “How about you, Major?” Tomec asked. “Cyber defense,” said Aniek. “Civilian infrastructure, mostly.” “You remember the heat disaster last summer?” said James.  “Of course. We joked that seafloor was only cool place,” said Tomec. “Yes, we should have wargamed not just what climate change would do to our weather, but how an enemy would take advantage of it. A cyberattack taking advantage of a heat wave. Diabolical,” said James. “Not just the power grid, but the aircon systems for care homes and hospitals and schools, let alone our MoD and government facilities.” Tomec thought back to a video call with his parents that August. It was 41 degrees Celsius in Krakow. They had been panting and red-faced like they were running for their lives, and yet they were just sitting in their small apartment’s living room, gasping out wishes that he would stay safe. Aniek put her phone down and leaned forward. “It was more than just hacking, like all good operations,” she said. “We were subjected to an info-op campaign during the heat wave. They wanted to cause societal unrest, if not collapse.”  “People get angry at everyone when it’s too hot,” said James, fishing an ice cube from his glass. “What did you do?” Tomec asked. “We had lots of meetings,” said Aniek.  Tomec looked at her dubiously, as if she was also trying to keep her operation secret.  “Really, we did,” she said, with a smile. “We coordinated with private-sector companies and public institutions and allied intelligence agencies and hacker collectives. We shared data on everything. Absolutely everything, from incoming threats to best practices. We sent teams of experts to work on-site at targeted networks. “That was our advantage in the end. The enemy had to keep their operations behind the veil, while we could pool all our information, ideas, and resources—as long as we broke down the bureaucratic and organizational culture barriers. And there is nothing like a good crisis to force that.”  “Well, however boring you want to paint what you did, if the attack had gone on a few more days, I’m pretty certain the alliance would have collapsed,” said James. “A toast, then, to the real hero of the war.” Tomec nodded in agreement and lifted his glass in salute.  Aniek smiled in thanks, evidently embarrassed at the praise.  The Polish sergeant took a sip, rattling the ice in his glass, savoring the cool drink. It was true what James had said about how quickly we could take things for granted. Even something as simple as ice in a glass.  “Another round?” he said. “I think we have time.” ]]

[Category: Ideas]

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

 

at 9/11/26 4:53pm

Kremlin-backed actors used Anthropic’s Claude AI to program autonomous lethal drones, improve hacking and influence operations, and avoid detection, the company said Thursday. The report from the U.S.-based AI company is only the latest warning from firms, think tanks, and others that Russia, China, Iran and others are using made-in-America tools to attack targets around the world. Anthropic reports that a Russian “freelance” group known as GTG-27005 used Claude to build an AI model small enough to work on single-board computers but powerful enough to enable a drone to “select targets (including a ‘person’ target class) and issue detonation commands without a human in the loop.” The group also used Claude to create software to allow autonomous drones to communicate with one another to improve targeting, Anthropic’s report says. While the Russian group had not yet deployed the model to the field, they were “using real hardware-in-loop testing within their sessions,” according to the report. The company banned the group, incorporated the findings of the investigation into its safeguards, and shared details with industry groups.  Anthropic also said it had spotted Chinese and Yemeni groups trying to use Claude to design conventional weapons, efforts that Anthropic said it disrupted. The report also detailed how foreign groups were using Claude in elaborate data theft and disinformation campaigns. It said its tools had been used to dig up information about targets, find vulnerabilities in their online accounts, create malware to bypass security and steal data, cover their tracks, and spread disinformation. “We’ve seen groups of actors use Claude to build networks of fake social media profiles and entire news sites,” the report said. [[Related Posts]] The campaigns bear the hallmarks of Russian influence campaigns, such as the use of fake news sites and journalist profiles to spread lies about NATO activity in the Baltics. But the U.S.-built AI tools helped streamline the process, boosting the amount of disinformation and  creating fake reporters that were much more believable to local audiences. Russian-linked groups “automated much of their operations from development, infrastructure acquisition, phishing, persistence through command and control, to data exfiltration,” the report said. The group even used AI to forge documents from the Central African Republic Gendarmerie and Ministry of Defense. Another group, GTG-84005, used AI to steal census and public information that allowed its agents to tailor their messaging campaigns to specific audiences in Malaysia, where the Turkish group “laundered Russian and Chinese state media as independent reporting.” Thursday’s Anthropic report comes two weeks after rival frontier lab OpenAI revealed that Russian actors used ChatGPT to create a fake “expert community”—the “International Burke Institute”—to push talking points to international audiences. While Anthropic and OpenAI were able to disrupt the schemes they discovered, such operations are likely to continue as Russia uses AI to “scale production of content that aligns with Kremlin narratives,” according to an August report from the Institute for the Study of War, or ISW. Russia is also using young people’s curiosity about AI to grow the number of humans spreading Russian disinformation, offering young people around the world “AI media internships and training” through university donations and related programs. Where is the US pushback? A recent article from New America notes that AI is giving authoritarian regimes a powerful new tool to distort global understanding of geopolitical events. “Authoritarian regimes are early adopters in using AI to bend the arc of reality in their favor,” write Daniel Kimmage, the former acting coordinator and principal deputy coordinator of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, and Darjan Vujica.  It’s the kind of thing the U.S government used to establish and run organizations to push back on, they note. But such efforts have been undermined or brought to a halt under the second Trump administration. Less than a month after taking office, Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the unit dedicated to investigating foreign disinformation and influence campaigns. Two months later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shuttered the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub, known as R/Fimi. And: “The 2025 White House AI Action Plan calls explicitly for removing any references to misinformation,” note Kimmage and Vujica.  At least when it’s made by foreigners. “The Trump administration has enthusiastically embraced AI-generated imagery in politically divisive posts,” they write. ]]

[Category: Science & Tech]

As of 9/23/26 2:39pm. Last new 9/22/26 12:43pm.