Government Executive - Defense

How a little-known Trump directive reshaped the government's counterterrorism approach

Melinda Haas, The Conversation — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:37:33 -0400

A little-noticed presidential national security directive is now the legal engine behind a wave of terrorism prosecutions against left-wing protesters.

That domestic campaign now has an international dimension, one that American officials had been planning for months, culminating on July 16, 2026, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism drew representatives from more than 65 countries to Washington. The gathering was informally called the “Antifa summit.”

Rubio described antifa-aligned networks as sharing infrastructure across borders and accused Iran and Cuba of helping bankroll the movement, without offering evidence. The White House declared the summit the start of an “unprecedented global offensive” against what it calls “radical left terrorism.”

This offensive is built on the same domestic legal architecture that has now sent American activists to prison for decades.

That architecture is National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, issued on Sept. 25, 2025, which for the first time appeared to authorize preemptive law-enforcement measures against Americans based not on whether they are planning to commit violence but for their political or ideological beliefs.

Nearly a year later, that blueprint has moved from paper into practice.

The Justice Department has built task forces staffed by counterterrorism prosecutors. The FBI has set up its own NSPM-7 mission center to oversee investigations into left-wing movements, including a joint effort with the IRS to investigate nonprofit groups.

The Justice Department has used this machinery to convict activists and send some of them to prison for decades.

NSPM-7 was not passed by Congress. It’s a lesser-known tool of executive power: a presidential memorandum.

As an international relations scholar who has studied U.S. foreign policy decision-making and national security legislation, I recognize that presidents can take several types of executive actions without legislative involvement: executive orders, memoranda and proclamations.

This structure allows the president to direct law enforcement and national security agencies, with little opportunity for congressional oversight.

Presidential national security powers

Executive memorandums direct agencies to prepare reports, implement policies, or align programs with the administration’s priorities. Unlike executive orders, they aren’t required to be published. When they relate to national security, like NSPM-7, they’re called national security directives – many of which stay classified and may not be declassified for years or decades.

The stated purpose of NSPM-7 is to counter domestic terrorism and organized political violence, focusing mainly on perceived threats from the political left. The memorandum identifies “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalism” or “anti-American” views as potential indicators that a group or person will commit domestic terrorism.

The memorandum claims that political violence originates with “anti-fascist” groups that hold the following views: “support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The strategy includes preemptive measures to disrupt groups before they engage in violent political acts, empowering multiagency task forces to investigate potential federal crimes related to radicalization and the groups’ funders. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 2025 implementation memo went further, ordering a five-year review of agency files on antifa. A task force staffed with counterterrorism and organized-crime prosecutors is carrying out these investigations.

‘Domestic terrorist organizations’

The memorandum directs the Department of Justice to focus FBI resources from approximately 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces on investigating “acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons” for the purpose of “political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights; and the violent deprivation of any citizen’s rights.”

NSPM-7 also allows the attorney general to propose groups for designation as “domestic terrorist organizations.” That includes groups that engage in “organized doxxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.”

Existing laws allow the secretary of state to designate groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” that are then subject to financial sanctions.

But these laws do not permit the president to label domestic groups this way.

That gap hasn’t stopped prosecutions. In Texas, eight defendants tied to a “North Texas Antifa Cell” were sentenced in June 2026 for a 2025 armed confrontation at the Prairieland immigration detention center. One man received 100 years, and others who never fired a weapon still drew decades in prison under terrorism sentencing guidelines.

In Minnesota, 15 members and associates of a group called Direct Action Minnesota were indicted in June 2026 on conspiracy and assault charges. A 94-page indictment cited behavior such as wearing an “I’m Antifa!” sweatshirt, possessing a bullhorn or including a devil emoji in a Signal message.

NSPM-7 marks a major conceptual shift in U.S. counterterrorism policy, departing from approaches that primarily targeted foreign threats.

Earlier directives, dating to Ronald Reagan’s presidency, treated terrorism as a global menace countered through military power and diplomacy. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration reframed it as a domestic challenge after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

After 9/11, the Bush administration fused counterterrorism with national defense through the global war on terrorism. The Obama administration later tried to narrow those powers, asking whether targeted individuals “pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons” — a standard focused on tactics and capture feasibility, not ideology.

The first Trump administration used a “travel ban” against several “terror-prone”countries, while President Joe Biden redirected focus toward weapons of mass destruction.

Notably, the “domestic terrorist” label itself has rarely produced actual charges. The State Department designated four antifa-aligned groups as foreign terrorist organizations. But antifa is a decentralized movement, not a formal group with a roster.

This designation lacks any real legal weight because U.S. law has no formal domestic terrorist organization category. Creating one risks infringing on First Amendment protected speech. Domestic terrorism itself is not a chargeable offense.

Prosecutors have instead leaned on older statutes such as material support for terrorism and conspiracy laws, tools originally built for cases like the ones above, not protest movements.

First Amendment rights at risk

There is no single official definition of terrorism in U.S. law; definitions vary by purpose – criminal law, intelligence collection, civil liability.

Definitions in all those areas typically focus on identifying violent or dangerous acts done with the intent to intimidate or coerce civilians or influence government policy.

But more than redefining terrorism, NSPM-7 reorients the machinery of national security toward the policing of belief.

The First Amendment generally prevents the government from punishing people for unpopular opinions. It also protects the ability for people to associate to advance public and private ideas in pursuit of political, economic, religious or cultural goals.

The directive’s emphasis on ideological orientations – “anti-Christianity,” “anti-capitalism” and “anti-American” views – as indicators of domestic terrorism potentially jeopardizes First Amendment rights.

Thirty-one members of Congress sent a letter to Trump in October 2025expressing “serious concerns” about NSPM-7, warning that it poses “serious constitutional, statutory and civil liberties risks, especially if used to target political dissent, protest or ideological speech.”

As the ACLU warns, any definition of terrorism that includes ideological components risks criminalizing people or groups based on belief rather than based on violence or other criminal conduct.

Congress has declined to create a domestic complement to the foreign terrorist designation in large part because of the potential for impinging on First Amendment–protected association and speech.

But I fear that chilling speech may be the point.

Silencing dissent

NSPM-7 does not criminalize previously legal conduct.

Rather, it states that the Trump administration will focus investigations around the identity and ideology of supposed perpetrators. Prioritizing investigations into this broad swath of ideologies serves to instill fear, silencing anti-fascist and other messages in opposition to the Trump administration.

Law professor Steve Vladeck frames this chill as “obeying in advance,” in which organizations self-censor rather than risk investigation, prosecution or defending against the “domestic terrorist” label. Federal judges in the Prairieland case have shown little sympathy for that distinction: One judge described the protest itself as “an assault on democracy,” even for defendants who never touched a weapon.

Although left-wing violence has risen in the past decade, empirical evidenceshows it remains far below historical levels of right-wing or jihadist violence.

Most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, accounting for the vast majority of domestic terrorism fatalities.

Yet NSPM-7 focuses disproportionately on left-wing ideologies. NSPM-7 departs from prior U.S. counterterrorism frameworks by prioritizing the suppression of ideologically motivated dissent, even where, as in Minnesota, judges have already dismissed roughly half of similar federal cases for lack of evidence.

This is an updated version of a story originally published December 3, 2025.

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Iran War supplemental deepens FY27 budget uncertainty

Shaun McDougall — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:26:59 -0400

A recent $87.6 billion supplemental funding request from the White House to pay for the Iran war and other expenses complicates an already tense budget process in Washington. The supplemental follows the release of a record $1.5 trillion defense budget request in April, putting additional pressure on Congress to sort out what has become a complex three-part defense budget comprising a $1.1 trillion base budget request, a $350 billion reconciliation request, and the new supplemental request.

Most of the new supplemental funding, $67.1 billion, or 77% of the total, would go to the Pentagon. Other investments outside of the Pentagon include $11 billion for the Department of Agriculture, $3.4 billion for the Department of State, and $2 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, among others.

Within the defense portion of the supplemental, most of the funding is allocated toward direct costs of the war in Iran. The single biggest item in the entire supplemental is $21 billion for munitions, which would help rebuild stockpiles after thousands of offensive and defensive missiles and bombs were expended during the opening months of the war. The rapidly growing demand for munitions was already highlighted in the FY27 defense budget request, which sought $76.3 billion for munitions, up 185%over the $26.8 billion allocated in FY26. Combined with the supplemental, the administration has now asked for $97.3 billion for munitions across multiple military services this year. For context, that figure is more than three times the size of the Army's entire FY26 procurement budget of $30.5 billion.

The next largest item requested by the White House is $17.3 billion for operational costs of the war. The initial campaign against Iran included a wide array of aircraft, ships, and ground assets that require fuel, maintenance, and repairs. The subsequent naval blockade sustained many of these logistics expenses, which were exacerbated as fuel costs rose due to Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. In May, military leaders warned that they would have to begin curtailing some regular training exercises and operations this summer if Congress didn't backfill the operations budget with supplemental funding.

Infographic by Jorge Morejon

The White House is also asking Congress for an additional $2.4 billion for drones, which could be used to replace one-way attack and interceptor drones used during the war, as well as at least two dozen MQ-9A Reapers lost in combat. The Air Force faces a problem with the Reaper, however. The MQ-9A is no longer in production, leaving the service with a capability gap. The Air Force could try to accelerate a follow-on capability, but that could take longer than desired to meet immediate replenishment needs. Alternatively, the service could procure the larger MQ-9B, which features a 79-foot wingspan compared to the 66-foot wingspan of the older MQ-9A. It's also possible that some of this funding could be used for other emerging drone programs.

The fragile state of the conflict also raises questions about ongoing war costs. A fragile ceasefire has been interrupted by sporadic skirmishes, and the recent Memorandum of Understanding intended to help end the war lacks substance and relies on further negotiations that have already faced several roadblocks. For the time being, the cost of the Iran war will continue to escalate slowly upwards if the status quo remains unchanged, but the shortfalls and need for additional resources could spike if all-out hostilities resume. A true lasting peace agreement would avoid additional war costs down the road, but that outlook is far from certain.

Beyond the War

The defense supplemental is more than just an Iran war request. While most of the defense portion of the request does support items like operational costs and equipment replenishment related to the war, it also includes other priorities that aren't directly related to the conflict. For example, the White House wants $4 billion for Airborne Moving Target Indication (AMTI) and the Space Data Network (SDN) Backbone, which are related to the president's Golden Dome homeland air and missile defense effort.

The Space Force is pursuing a space-based AMTI capability that would allow satellites to track airborne threats. This program would complement the Air Force's future E-7 Wedgetail fleet, which is replacing the legacy E-3 AWACS. The service requested $7.1 billion in FY27 to begin procurement of a space-based AMTI system, but all the funding was allocated in the reconciliation portion of the request. The Air Force did lose one of its E-3 AWACS to an Iranian strike at an airbase in Saudi Arabia, but this AMTI funding is more of a long-term follow-on than a direct replacement for a particular E-3 aircraft.

Meanwhile, the Space Data Network Backbone represents part of the communications layer of the planned Golden Dome architecture. The SDN, formerly known as MILNET, is being pursued in place of Transport Layer Tranche 3 satellites, which would have been competed among several contractors. SpaceX is working on both of these programs, and in May the company was awarded a $2.3 billion SDN contract and a $4.2 billion AMTI contract. The Space Force requested around $3 billion for the SDN through the FY27 reconciliation request. Other vendors will continue working on earlier Transport Layer tranches, which will be integrated with SDN. Officials have also said that additional AMTI awards to multiple vendors are planned later in the year.

The supplemental also sets aside $12.1 billion for classified programs. The original FY27 request included $98.7 billion in classified funding, split between $61.5 billion for research and $37.2 billion for procurement, according to Forecast International's U.S. Defense Budget Forecast database. If approved by Congress, the supplemental would increase the classified topline by more than 12%, which is a sizeable change. Naturally, we're unable to determine how much, if any, of that classified funding is directly related to the war.

The administration also wants $5.1 billion to support cybersecurity and autonomy, which appears to be a request for emerging tech rather than direct war costs, but the supplemental lacks transparency and doesn't allocate funding to individual line items in the budget.

A Complicated Budget Outlook

Even before considering the new supplemental, the administration's approach to mixing base and reconciliation funding in its FY27 request creates risk and uncertainty for the Pentagon. The defense budget process involves four defense committees (the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and the House and Senate Appropriations Committees) releasing markups of the budget request that contain line-item adjustments that add or remove funding at the program level. So far, three defense committees have released markups of the FY27 defense budget, and none of them have addressed the $350 billion reconciliation portion of the request. That funding will have to be considered during a separate process, but some GOP lawmakers have expressed doubt about passage of another reconciliation bill.

Adding the supplemental bill to the mix further complicates an already fraught legislative landscape. The supplemental has faced resistance in Congress. Democrats largely oppose the bill, arguing it pays for a war that Congress did not authorize. This position is bolstered by passage of resolutions against the war in both chambers. While mostly symbolic, the resolutions underscore the difficulty of getting a controversial war spending bill through both chambers. Rep. Mark Harris, R-NC, suggested Republicans may have to use the reconciliation process to pass a war supplemental in the face of Democratic opposition, but that approach won't necessarily guarantee success.

The Pentagon would still be left with a $1 trillion budget even without the $350 billion reconciliation package and the new supplemental, but it would still face challenges. The most immediate impact would be the reduced training and operations this summer. New efforts to dramatically scale up munitions procurement, which are heavily reliant on supplemental funds, would also be significantly curtailed. Other key initiatives, such as Golden Dome and new investments in autonomous systems, would similarly be affected. These programs would have to be slowed or reduced in scope in the near-term in the absence of reconciliation or supplemental funding.

Several legacy programs would also be negatively impacted due to how the administration structured its request. For example, 53 out of 85 F-35 fighters requested in FY27 were allocated to the reconciliation portion of the budget, while nearly one-third of the Navy's KC-130J request is tied to the reconciliation package.

The administration has set high expectations for its FY27 budget request and its new supplemental proposal, but the complex realities of the budget process could result in a final spending plan that looks very different from the original request.

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DOD's CIO says it's time to rethink the Pentagon's technology playbook

Edward Graham — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:55:58 -0400

Federal officials are increasingly seeking to adopt new technologies to enhance agency operations. At the Pentagon, the Office of the Chief Information Officer is looking beyond IT transformation to ways it can more effectively get digital capabilities into the hands of warfighters.

Pentagon CIO Kirsten Davies recently spoke with Nextgov/FCW about her digital transformation strategy, efforts to refine the department’s acquisition process and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Nextgov/FCW: What are some of your office’s priorities under the current administration?

Kirsten Davies: President Donald Trump and Secretary Pete Hegseth have given us a tremendous opportunity with a mandate for change. What you're seeing out of the Department of War now is enormous enthusiasm and momentum around that.

For example, the secretary has been very clear that we will take acquisition risk today in order to reduce operational risk tomorrow. Operational risk, in this case, means that at the core of everything we do is our work to enable and empower our warfighters. When I came into this role, I really wanted to bring the cause of the warfighter straight into the DNA of the Office of the CIO.

We're shifting gears tremendously away from being just a policy shop. Policy work is extraordinarily important, but operational effectiveness, warfighter readiness and empowerment from a digital perspective are critical. Through the work of the Office of the CIO, what we're able to do is really shift gears and transform how we think about that.

It's not IT for the sake of that “T.” It's developing a technology footprint that enables and empowers our warfighters from the core all the way to the edge.

Nextgov/FCW: How are you going about transforming the Office of the CIO’s operations to meet that mandate for change?

Davies: We have four pillars for the transformation we are undertaking. The first is establishing an enduring digital foundation, so thinking of all the things we do when it comes to network transport and data centers. We are modernizing our data transport ability across this space and transforming the way we think about it from undersea to celestial, so satellites and everything in between. We obviously have a lot of work we're doing to build out the infrastructure for artificial intelligence and modernize the way in which we think about that.

Pillar two is the agile digital capabilities. I say agile very specifically because we are not going to do fast waterfall. We are going to get after agile delivery and agile development, so truly get into industry best practices when it comes to the software development life cycle and when it comes to the totality of the agility we need to get digital capabilities to the warfighters faster, more securely and more resiliently.

The third pillar is cybersecurity of the warfighting ecosystem. What you will be seeing out of my office is a much more holistic and transformative approach to cybersecurity, and that includes operational technology and the internet of things. When it comes to OT, we can’t treat it like IT, and we can’t neglect it as if it doesn't exist. So you're going to see a lot more focus on OT out of my shop as well.

And then pillar four is upskilling, cross-skilling and partnering. We can talk about people all day long, and we can talk about the fact that everyone owns security. We need to embrace that as an ethos for us and work across our defense industrial base and across our allies and our partners internationally as well. And then also work with our interagency partners at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, FBI and the National Security Agency.

Nextgov/FCW: Can you talk more about the work you’re doing on the operational technology front?

Davies: Everything is connected, so the digitization of our industrial base is critical for us. The secretary has talked about reinvigorating our industrial base. From a cybersecurity perspective and from a technology perspective, all these devices are connected. There's more than automation involved. Now it's machine learning and also AI that are being more and more deliberately rolled out and leveraged in industry and in government.

When we talk about the OT aspect of these things, that's everything from building management systems to the critical infrastructure that supports our installations here in America and abroad. It is working with our defense industrial base partners.

All of this is foundational operational technology. We must have appropriate availability, resiliency and security in order to ensure our warfighters have what they need when they need it. And this is underpinned by our technology footprint that goes from the core all the way to the edge.

What we're working through now is setting up an OT council. The notion of this is to have industry expertise, department use cases and defense industrial base partners come to the table and say, “How do we get after this better?”

Nextgov/FCW: How are you outlining your strategic vision in a way that enhances private-sector engagement and drives technology modernization?

Davies: We are transforming from what has been a back-office IT function into a forward-leaning strategic department function that includes, by necessity, very strong collaboration across the building.

I’ve got great partnerships with Emil Michael, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, where the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office is, and with Undersecretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment Mike Duffey’s shop, where he is radically transforming the way in which we approach acquisition and procurement.

You'll see there’s no daylight among us as a leadership team as we move forward with the secretary's vision to enable and empower our warfighters and to ensure the lethality, resilience and readiness of our warfighters from a very specific perspective.

Acquisition at the department has historically been a very long process and was often focused on massive capital investments like ships. We have to shift gears when it comes to technology, when it comes to software, when it comes to cloud, when it comes to infrastructure buildout. Technology changes at a much more rapid cycle than planes and ships and all those things.

What we're working on inside the building and across the leadership is how do we drive not only a more agile approach to developing and delivering capabilities, but how do we drive a more agile approach to acquisition for things that can shift every six months? Infusing that kind of methodology into our thinking is what we're getting after.

Nextgov/FCW: How are you trying to speed up the department’s acquisition and procurement processes?

Davies: We're underway right now on a refinement of our risk management framework. The RMF and the authority to operate are legal frameworks for the ways in which industry partners can work with us. Right now, if we are testing software in one part of the department, that approval, we’ll call it, doesn't necessarily transfer over to another part of the department. And that doesn't make common sense.

We’re not just going to digitize a piece of paper to a PDF; we are actually going to refine the totality of the process itself, including moving to more automation and moving to inheritance of one ATO to another ATO. We want to actually overhaul the whole ATO process in and of itself.

I think that's a very specific example of how we are getting after what the secretary's vision is, which is to reduce barriers to entry. It's to reignite our defense industrial base and really reduce these compliancy and check-the-box exercises to get at meaningful outcomes.

Nextgov/FCW: How is a platform like GenAI.mil helping enhance AI comfortability across the department?

Davies: GenAI.mil is such a brilliant example of the first of many initiatives that are to come out of the department. The adoption and usage rates have been extraordinary. We have 1.3 million users right now, which is amazing. We have over 100,000 agents that have been built by users to support their tasks and their work cycles. In some cases, they have been able to take a two-week task and complete it in two hours.

This is such a beneficial and helpful tool when it comes to day-to-day tasks that our employees and our warfighters can do much more rapidly now. What I love seeing about this is it saves our people for meaningful work. When we can leverage automation, machine learning, supervised machine learning and AI, that frees up time for people to apply their critical thinking, their analytical thinking, their skill sets, their experience and their expertise. From the warfighters to the civilians to the contractors, it frees them up to focus on work that really adds tremendous strategic value to the department, ultimately enabling our warfighters to have greater capabilities at their fingertips.

We recently announced partnerships with eight AI companies to deploy their tools on our classified networks. What you're seeing is this acquisition reform in motion.

The other thing you're seeing is the tremendous leadership from President Trump when he said he wants America to be tops in technology, in AI and in cybersecurity, and you are seeing that worked out at the Department of War. We are implementing that vision.

Nextgov/FCW: How do these efforts fit into DOD’s overall modernization strategy?

Davies: Traditional modernization can be like evolution. It can be an incremental change and take a really, really long time. True transformation goes at speed, and we are working at the speed of warfighters. We need data supremacy for decision dominance.

We have modernized the architecture to be deployed. We are getting after the defense business systems rationalization. In the midst of all that, in parallel, we’re seeing great advancements not only in the core enterprise technology aspects that I oversee, but also the edge use cases that are worked out by our service members and our joint forces and supported by our Office of Research and Engineering and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

You're seeing that change at pace. And one of the things I’ve been really vocal about across the department and especially with our defense industrial base is that their innovation is our warfighter innovation. Their strength is our warfighter strength. Their security is our warfighter security. So we are really getting after these things in a partnership way that is with speed. It is with agility. When we find barriers, we are breaking them down. When we find unnecessary burdensome check-the-box exercises, we're tackling them at pace.

Nextgov/FCW: How are you expanding the department’s future IT and cyber workforce?

Davies: We are working on an extended plan rollout to build on the great work this office has already done. The president and the secretary have given us a mandate to really get after skills-based training, which is what we’re pursuing.

Throughout my entire career, I have been trying to eliminate the requirement for degrees before people can get a job because if threat actors can be script kiddies and teenagers, then we need to be employing great skills where the skills are and figuring out how to incorporate them. You’re going to see a full life cycle approach out of my office, which is also working with Katie Sutton, who is the assistant secretary of war for cyber policy.

We are working on a full life cycle approach to skills-based hiring, cross-skilling and upskilling. We're looking at how we can develop a much more fulsome model for our warfighters who go into veteran status to ensure they are well trained to continue to support the national security mission wherever they go next. You're going to see a lot more of that coming out of my office.

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Pentagon's growing role as an investor draws new scrutiny on Capitol Hill

Lauren C. Williams — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

The Pentagon office that lends money to weapons developers would be allowed to take equity stakes in private companies deemed critical to national security under draft provisions of the 2027 defense policy bill.

“We have allowed them to take equity in certain sectors. We have, what I think, is a very robust reporting regime and ethics regime, and we are working to reorganize or rationalize equity at the department by co-locating it with the loan authority at the Office of Strategic Capital and leaving the industrial-based fund, IBAS, as a tool for smaller dollar grants…as it's traditionally been used,” a congressional staffer with the Senate Armed Services Committee told reporters last week.

Meanwhile, the defense spending bill passed out of the House Appropriations Committee’s defense panel would give the Office of Strategic Capital $2.16 billion in loan authority and $216 million “to carry out the capital assistance program, including loans, loan guarantees, and technical assistance,” according to legislative language and the bill summary.

The Senate Armed Services Committee passed its version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act earlier this week to be considered on the Senate floor. It included provisions regarding the Pentagon’s ability to take financial stakes in defense contractors.

Using existing authorities, the Pentagon has already taken equity stakes worth more than a billion dollars in defense-related companies. High-profile examples include taking a $400 million stake in a rare-earths producer last July and a $1 billion stake in L3Harris’ solid rocket motor business in April. The latter drew congressional scrutiny.

The SASC bill does several things with respect to equity investments, according to the bill summary:

Explicitly bestows that power to the Office of Strategic Capital, which facilitates private investment in critical technologies through loans, and creates a “defense equity investment account” in the U.S. Treasury;
Requires congressional notification of debt and equity investments
Mandates the defense secretary to conduct ownership reviews, including “any conflicts of interest before obligating or disbursing any funds for an equity investment;” and
Bars the use of the Pentagon’s industrial-base fund, which is used to address supply chain vulnerabilities, assess and expand the defense industrial base, for equity stakes.

The bill also limits use of the direct equity investment account to fund “critical minerals, materials, and chemicals; and batteries,” and direct equity investments would be limited to 40 percent “of the total amount of all equity investments made to the entity,” according to the text. Investments would also be capped at $500 million.

The bill would also create an Economic Defense Unit, which would meet quarterly and enforce briefing requirements, including the defense secretary’s “ownership review of all companies in which the Department of Defense holds equity” and certification the Pentagon “does not hold, and does not have the option to hold, any seat on the board of directors or any other form of voting representation or control in any entity in which the Department holds equity,” according to the bill’s executive summary.

“We can see some value in this tool. We have differing opinions about how much value,” the SASC staffer said.

Senators on the committee are aiming for a long-lasting solution to match the yearslong challenge of reshoring supply chains and sectors to the U.S.

“Because whether you're talking about critical minerals, batteries, some of these other fundamental sectors where the Chinese have domination—this is going to be a decade-plus long project,” the staffer said.

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Congress wants answers on Pentagon’s use of military lawyers in civilian jobs

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:52:42 -0400

The Trump administration’s use of military lawyers for civilian roles would be probed by Congress’ watchdog agency under language added to the 2027 defense policy bill.

The provision was added to the Senate Armed Service Committee’s version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. It orders the Government Accountability Office to review the Pentagon’s use of judge advocate generals to support the Justice Department’s operations, “including their use as immigration judges and special prosecutors, and its impact on morale and readiness,” Warren’s office said.

“Pete Hegseth is treating our independent military lawyers like pawns in Trump’s cruel immigration agenda and it’s hurting our military readiness and morale,” Warren said in an emailed statement to Defense One. “This independent investigation is an important step to support our service members and hold this administration accountable.”

Warren’s office said the amendment ordering up the probe had "bipartisan support” and would not be cut during debate in the Senate or in conference with the House. Her statement did not say how the SASC voted on her provision, and committee spokespeople did not return a request for comment.

Earlier this month, Republicans axed a House effort to amend U.S. law to limit JAGs to military-related matters.

The Congressional interest in the morale of judge advocate generals follows Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s high-level firings, harsh criticisms, and wide-ranging reforms targeted at the military’s lawyers. During his 18 months in office, Hegseth has fired the military’s top uniformed lawyers, reduced the civilian legal staff, and overseen the assignment of JAGs to civilian work, including as immigration judges and as special U.S. attorneys in Democratic-run cities during National Guard deployments.

Warren’s provision drew praise from Steve Lepper, a former Air Force JAG and a member of a group of former JAGs who have criticized the administration’s use of military lawyers.

“I agree with Senator Warren. I agree with the rationale, and, quite frankly, anything that gets into the NDAA that requires the Pentagon to justify his use of judge advocates in those roles, I think, is a good thing,” Lepper said.

Last year, about 600 JAGs were assigned to work for the Justice Department as immigration judges. Earlier this year, Defense One reported that dozens of uniformed lawyers were sent to cities to work as special U.S. attorneys as part of National Guard surges in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Memphis, Tennessee; and Washington, D.C.

Military legal experts have told Defense One that those JAGs often lack the necessary experience to work those cases. In December, one Army lawyer working as a special U.S. attorney in Minnesota was reportedly held in contempt of court when an Immigrations and Custom Enforcement detainee was released from custody without his identification paperwork.

Lepper said he believes the move to push JAGs into those civilian roles has harmed the morale of the military’s lawyers.

“The rank-and-file judge advocates don't think this is a good idea,” he said. “Americans are on the receiving end of the cases that are being prosecuted by judge advocates and immigrants are being subjected to, I believe, the lack of due process by having military officers serving as immigration judges sitting in judgment on their immigration cases.”

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Senate rejects Cyber Force push as debate over cyber structure continues

Thomas Novelly — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:40:12 -0400

An effort to create a new cyber-focused military service under the Army narrowly failed in the Senate, but the lawmaker who proposed it isn’t backing down.

Last month, Defense One exclusively reported that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., was spearheading a markup amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would create a Cyber Force. The effort ultimately failed by a vote of 14-13, with four Democrats and 10 Republicans swatting the amendment down. Nine Democrats and four Republicans voted in favor.

“We remain optimistic about Cyber Force and the Senator will continue to push for its creation,” a Gillibrand spokesperson said.

While the Senate Armed Service Committee’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act sidelined the creation of a Cyber Force, it does scrutinize various Pentagon policy changes meant to strengthen U.S. Cyber Command, the current cyber-focused combatant command.

The committee’s version of the NDAA “directs an independent review of whether CYBERCOM is adequately organized and resourced to meet its expanding authorities and responsibilities” and also calls for “an independent study on the roles, responsibilities, authorities, and resourcing of the Principal Cyber Advisors of the military departments.”

The push to establish a Cyber Force under the Army, similar to how the the Space Force and Marine Corps sit under the Air Force and Navy, was in tandem with a new think tank report examining the perceived cost, time, and benefits of setting up a new cyber-focused service branch.

Joshua Stiefel, a former House Armed Services Committee staffer, co-chaired the Center For Strategic and International Studies and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Commission on Cyber Force Generation. The findings, released earlier this month, said the creation of the service “would address longstanding structural challenges and build the Cyber Force the United States needs for this critical domain of warfare.”

Stiefel told reporters earlier this month that the findings were released at a pivotal moment where it seems CYBERCOM has been given a significant amount of authority, but concerns over how the military handles its cyber-focused troops still persist.

“What's interesting is that as someone who was in the legislative process for almost seven years, we tried, I tried, my colleagues tried everything and it seems as if we've reached that breaking point where there isn't any more authority to give to address this problem that doesn't start to begin to chip away or take away from the service chiefs,” Stiefel said. “And that dilemma means we're at this precipice.”

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Lawmakers aim to force the Army to detail its transformation plans

Meghann Myers — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:34:21 -0400

When the Army launched its “transformation initiative” a year ago, lawmakers immediately implored service leaders to show their work as they made plans to buy new things and get rid of old ones, including the cost tradeoffs and a timeline. They didn’t get those answers, so House lawmakers have inserted a requirement for an annual report and briefing into this year’s defense authorization bill.

On Thursday, the House Armed Services Committee completed its markup on the bill, adding detailed instructions for an annual update on the Army Transformation Initiative—and also the Army’s Transformation-in-Contact/Continuous Transformation efforts, requiring specifics on new capabilities and ones that have been phased out.

The goal of the Initiative “was to position the Army for future fights, streamline force structure, and eliminate wasteful spending,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said during a May 15 hearing of the HASC, which he chairs. “Congress shares those goals, but as questions arose, it became clear that the Army hadn't done all of its homework.”

The provision in the House’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act would require the Army to provide an annual report, on or by Feb. 15, “detailing the programmatic choices made to implement.”

By March 15, the service would also have to brief the committee on:

How any changes to the National Defense Strategy, or other DOD planning document, informed the Army’s choices.
An “inventory and assessment” of all exercises related to Army transformation since 2023.
An inventory of all capabilities or capacity phased out as part of Army transformation, with a timeline and assessment of how they have affected readiness.
An inventory of planned investments with an assessment of how they will contribute to the joint force.

The service did send experts for closed-door briefings to lawmakers over the past year, a U.S. official told Defense One, in an attempt to provide details and explain the rationale for its plans.

“We initially saw a ton of support from members of Congress, until it potentially impacted a parochial interest,” said the official, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record about the matter. “That's when they got all sticky about it.”

The Army’s helicopter purchases were of particular concern to House members both last year and this year, as the service’s budget request included funding to buy just one UH-60 Black Hawk and five MH-47 Chinooks. Army officials said it made sense to buy fewer older aircraft as the MV-75 Cheyenne II approaches.

In hearings, lawmakers expressed concern that reducing purchases would undermine the helicopters’ supply chains.

In May, the House’s first NDAA mark-up bumped up procurement to seven Black Hawks and 12 Chinooks.

“Nobody's saying we don't need Chinooks or Black Hawks or Apaches, we don't need to modernize, etc.,” the official said. “But we have so many more, based on the force-structure side, than we think is required to fight a conflict.”

The question went to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during his May 12 testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, where he announced that the Defense Department would be taking a second look at the initiative.

“There are some very good things in the Army Transformation Initiative, and there are some things that we needed to get another look at,” Hegseth said. “And so I think you'll see a review of some of those things, and we’ll get back to you.”

The Pentagon refused to provide any details on what that review looked like or whether Hegseth had his eye on other updates. A few days later, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll testified before HASC, apparently unaware of Hegseth’s concerns.

“I don't know all the depth of what was implied, but I absolutely agree that we will take a hard look with the Office of Secretary of War and make sure that we are synced with their strategy and their plans as they look across the joint force and balance their requirements and needs of the military as a whole,” he said.

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House panel rejects bid to keep military lawyers focused on military work

Thomas Novelly — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 11:36:51 -0400

House Republicans axed a provision to the annual defense policy bill that would have ended the Trump administration’s practice of using the military’s uniformed lawyers from serving as immigration judges and special U.S. attorneys in Democrat-run cities.

Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo, proposed the amendment during the House Armed Service Committee's markup of the National Defense Authorization Act on Thursday afternoon. The provision would have amended U.S. law to clarify that the judge advocate generals corps could only be assigned to military-related duties. Republican lawmakers, including HASC Chairman Mike Rogers, ultimately batted down the provision in a 31-26 vote, according to the committee’s website. It’s not clear if a similar provision is being debated in the Senate.

“Our JAGs advise commanders in some of the most consequential decisions our military makes, from combat operations, to targeting authorities, to rules of engagement, military justice, personnel matters, and international law,” Crow said. “They are a limited and specialized resource. Their time should be focused on matters that directly affect military operations, unit cohesion, command authority, and mission effectiveness. Assigning them elsewhere takes them away from this critical military work, especially in a time as is as much conflict as we are seeing right now.”

Former uniformed attorneys told Defense One that the amendment would’ve relieved overworked military lawyers. Under the Trump administration, JAGs have been assigned to oversee immigration courts, appointed as special U.S. attorneys to investigate “fraud and abuse” in Minneapolis, and prosecuted violent crimes during domestic National Guard deployments. This year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has scrutinized the JAG corps with a series of wide-ranging reforms and has fired the military's top lawyers and trimmed the civilian legal staff.

Rogers, R-Ala., defended the administration’s unprecedented use of the military’s lawyers.

“This is a direct attack on the administration, which has used judge advocates in multiple ways to protect national security priorities for the president. Judge advocates have served as special assistants to U.S. attorneys for years,” he said. “That role has been expanded in the current administration to assist other agencies in defense of the homeland national security priority, and great experience and training for our uniformed officers. I trust that the Secretary of Defense, with the help of the Joint Staff, may deploy judge advocates across the United States and the world to ensure the rule of law is followed.”

Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, also criticized the provision, saying Hegseth “has determined that the homeland mission is essential” and that the extra lawyers are crucial to it.

“The National Security Strategy places a great deal of emphasis on homeland defense, and in order to meet these needs, an increase in attorneys has been needed to litigate in U.S. courts and aid in the administrative hearings across the Department of Justice and Homeland,” Fallon said. “Our uniformed attorneys have the ability to surge into positions when the country needs them.”

Military legal experts have previously told Defense One that there is precedent for uniformed lawyers to prosecute U.S. citizens, but the Trump administration’s wide-spread use of the JAGs has raised fears that it could violate the Posse Comitatus Act which forbids the military to be used for federal law enforcement.

Steve Lepper, a retired Air Force lawyer and a member of a group of former JAGs that has spoken out about the administration’s legal actions, said he wasn’t surprised that the amendment wasn’t passed by the committee.

“I think it's basically restoration of the limits that posse comitatus places on the military,” Lepper said. “When you come right down to it, using the military in a prosecutorial or judicial capacity for cases that have nothing to do with the military is basically a violation of posse comitatus.”

Aaron Brynildson, a University of Mississippi law professor and retired Air Force JAG, also said that uniformed lawyers should be focused on military-related missions when serving as special U.S. attorneys

“Having been previously appointed as a SAUSA while on active duty, the sole reason JAGs should be detailed to these positions is to prosecute civilians committing criminal offenses on military bases. JAGs should not be used to prosecute immigration crimes or as fill-ins for overburdened federal prosecutors.”

Brynildson and Lepper said that the wide-ranging use of the JAGs appears to be at odds with Hegseth’s complaint in March that “military lawyers are sometimes stuck doing civilian side work.”

“What Mr. Crow offered was basically a way to achieve what Hegseth said he wants, which is JAGs to do JAG jobs,” Lepper said. “In this case, I guess the majority in the House Armed Services Committee felt that JAGs should be used for things other than what they are in the military to do.”

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Ready, fire, aim: Pentagon cut workforce with little analysis before or since, GAO finds

Meghann Myers — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Pentagon leaders cut their department’s workforce by more than 10% with little regard for the effects—and still has no plans to assess them, according to a congressional watchdog report released on Friday.

The department shed 78,000 civilian employees in 2025 through a mix of voluntary resignations, involuntary layoffs, and a hiring freeze that resulted in nearly 60,000 fewer new hires than in recent years, the report found.

“But we found that DOD didn’t consistently analyze the impacts of these reductions, either in 2025 or in prior years,” according to the report. “DOD also doesn’t have a plan to assess lessons learned from its 2025 workforce reductions.”

In their response to the report, Defense officials agreed that they should “develop and implement a plan for collecting and sharing lessons learned from the Department's implementation of workforce reduction efforts.”

The officials did not indicate whether that would happen.

Soon after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took office, the Pentagon announced it would cut 5 to 8 percent of its civilian workforce. Within a year, the number swelled to about 110,000—about 14% of DOD civilians—including laid-off probationary employees, deferred resignations, and voluntary early retirements. Some 30,000 people were hired for a short list of jobs exempted from the hiring freeze, putting the net loss at just over 10%.

Of the 28 Defense agencies, offices, and other organizations targeted for workforce cuts by the Trump administration’s fiscal 2026 budget request, at least three did not give the required explanation to Congress about why and how the cuts would be made, GAO found.

Those were the Joint Staff, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the Defense Contract Audit Agency, according to the report.

“According to component officials, DOD had not provided guidance for when and how to conduct and document this analysis,” the GAO found.

And further, the GAO found, the Pentagon didn’t plan to assess how the cuts affected productivity.

In March, the Partnership for Public Service published a survey that found morale among DOD employees has tanked during the current administration.

Only 9% of Army Department employees agreed that “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s political leadership team generates high levels of motivation in the workforce,” the survey found, the most satisfied of any of the large government agencies surveyed.

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

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:08:46 -0400

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Army’s transformation efforts are under fire 1 year in

Meghann Myers — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:21:00 -0400

A year after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Army to take on a long list of tasks—including jettisoning unwanted vehicles and aircraft and re-focusing on unmanned systems—the Army Transformation Initiative is on uncertain ground.

Hegseth has said he’s giving the document “another look,” but has declined to be more specific, frustrating lawmakers who want a detailed roadmap and timeline they can fund—or not.

“We'd like to see a concrete plan on how the Army intends to modernize, where it invests, where the investments will be made, what risks to readiness will be absorbed, and what impact it will have on the industrial base,” Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., told the Army secretary and acting chief of staff on Friday during a House Armed Services Committee.

Those comments came three days after the defense secretary acknowledged that ATI might need a revamp.

The Army always intended ATI to be a living document, a U.S. official told Defense One, but the defense secretary’s office hasn’t reached out to the service to discuss any changes.

“No plan is designed to survive first contact with the enemy, and as conditions evolve, as things change, we must be willing and able to transform and change quickly with it,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to comment because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

The Pentagon refused to answer a query from Defense One about which parts of ATI Hegseth would like to revisit, or whether his office had discussed them with the Army.

Officials instead pointed to the secretary’s May 13 remarks, which included a response to a question from Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., about the Army’s proposal to slash helicopter procurement. DeLauro’s district includes the Sikorsky factory that manufactures the UH-60 Black Hawk.

The conciliatory tone of the response was a departure from Hegseth’s customary ripostes to lawmakers’ questions, especially Democrats’.

Though many of ATI’s items include initiatives the Army had been pursuing for months or years, Hegseth took ownership of the plan by unveiling it in a memo issued last April. The plan quickly drew questions from lawmakers during the Army’s budget hearings last year.

Many of the questions appear to remain unanswered, as Driscoll and acting Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve make the rounds of the armed services and appropriations committees this month. LaNeve is on track to replace the ousted Gen. Randy George, who had relentlessly promoted the Army’s many “transformation” efforts.

“We want to make sure the Army has done a careful analysis of how transformation will affect our capabilities and force structure,” Rogers said Friday. “We want to understand how the Army intends to sustain the legacy capabilities our service members still need and use. We want to avoid spending this historic influx of money ineffectively and wasting the opportunity to bolster the [defense industrial base].”

Lawmakers’ questions reflected particular concern about how the Army’s plans to buy fewer aircraft might throttle production lines and supply chains, which can’t necessarily rebound a year or two later if the Army decides it wants to start buying again.

“Nobody's saying we don't need Chinooks or Black Hawks or Apaches,” the U.S. official said. “We need to modernize them, etc. But we have so many, based on the force structure side, that we think it’s what is required to fight a conflict.”

Instead, service leaders have been told to “tighten their belts,” the official said. So they are making trade-offs, spending that helicopter money to refill munitions stockpiles and buy, attritable drones, new weapons and cyber capabilities.

That appears to contradict Hegseth’s congressional testimony May 13, when he announced he wants to restore funding for the Air Force’s E-7 Wedgetail, which was not in the original fiscal year 2027 Pentagon budget request.

“I think that mindset was indicative of a mindset that we’ve shed, which is the divest-to-invest mindset,” the secretary said.

Ultimately, final budget decisions go through the White House’s Office of Budget and Management, so the U.S. official couldn’t comment on why the Army is making these specific tradeoffs.

The service has sent many experts to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers on ATI, the official said, and will continue to do so.

Still, Congress wants more.

“What exactly is it that you intend to do? What are the top three or five parts of that initiative?” Rep. Jim Garamendi, D-Calif., asked Friday. “We're going to have to give you the authority—or maybe we disagree and don't want you to go in that direction—but what we're seeing here is enormous inconsistency in direction, and that is not going to suffice as we put together the future direction and laws that the Army is going to have to carry out.”

A spokesperson for the House Armed Services Committee declined to provide a more detailed example of what lawmakers would like to see on ATI.

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Hegseth rethinking Army reforms, cuts to aviation

Meghann Myers — Wed, 13 May 2026 06:00:00 -0400

A year ago, Pete Hegseth handed the Army a to-do list that has reshaped the service’s capabilities and how it acquires new ones. But now he’s rethinking some of those changes.

That includes the makeup of the Army’s aviation assets, the defense secretary suggested Tuesday during a House Armed Services Committee defense panel hearing into the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion defense-budget request.

“I actually think it's something we're taking another look at,” he said in response to questioning from Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., whose district includes the Sikorsky factory that makes UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.

The Army’s portion of the Pentagon proposal would slash aircraft procurement, in line with efforts to phase out AH-64D Apaches and cut back on Black Hawk procurement as the service prepares to bring the MV-75 Cheyenne II online.

“Your department's budget request cuts over $5 billion from the industrial base in the aviation sector alone, effectively shutting down all current Army aviation platforms,” DeLauro said. “How did the department arrive at the conclusion that reducing procurement for these Army aviation platforms strengthens rather than weakens the aviation industrial base?”

While the Army requested less money for helicopters this year, leaders have said consistently that the Black Hawk will be in service for decades. So, too, will Apaches, though the Army wants to focus on the E variant.

Reduced funding means slowed production lines, though, at a time when Hegseth has been pushing to get the Defense Department on a “wartime footing,” including major investments in the defense industrial base.

The Army, for its part, believes that foreign military sales will sustain production lines while the service finds the right mix of aircraft, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said on Tuesday.

“What we are trying to do is get out in advance of the number that we will have at total, as we start to bring on things like [Cheyenne II]—what does that ideal balance look like?” Driscoll told the Senate Armed Services Committee during a hearing. “And so that's what you see reflected in the current budget.”

The Army appears to be reconsidering some of ATI’s other mandates as well. The service had planned to stop buying Humvees and transfer its remaining ones to the reserve component, but Driscoll suggested the vehicle may get new life.

“The Humvee has been an incredible asset for the U.S. Army for decades, and what we are not trying to say is that it will no longer have a role.”

The service is working to balance its missions with the newer infantry squad vehicle, experimenting with the possibility of an autonomous Humvee, Driscoll added.

“Humvee is going to be able to help us on the border. It's going to be able to help us with natural disasters. It's going to be able to help us in a lot of theaters, where it may still have a lot of relevance, even if it's not the one-stop solution anymore,” he said.

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Army small business office pulls the plug on LinkedIn posts

Nick Wakeman — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:41:16 -0400

In an era when government leaders routinely use social media to make significant policy announcements, the decision by the Army Office of Small Business Programs to pull the plug on its LinkedIn feed seems counterintuitive.

The LinkedIn page for the office has 25,000 followers and the office has used it to make a wide range of announcements.

The page contains small business questions about CMMC, links to register for events and promotions of programs such as the mentor-protégé portal. All of that is just in the last two weeks.

But in a post Wednesday, the office said that it will no longer actively update its LinkedIn social media account.

“Moving forward, all announcements, resources, and opportunities will be posted exclusively on our official website,” the organization wrote.

Instead, the office directs small businesses to visit its website for the latest news and information.

Commenters expressed dismay.

“This doesn’t make sense as LinkedIn is the social connectivity for the [Defense Industrial Base. ALL the other [Department of Defense] offices have pages to follow and stay connected,” wrote one person.

To prove that point, directly below his comment, the Army Pathway for Innovation and Technology posted an invitation to follow their LinkedIn page for the latest news and updates on their programs.

The Army PIT manages Small Business Innovation Research grants, among other programs to get leading edge technologies into the hands of operators.

Other comments lamented the Army’s decision.

“How unfortunate for the American small business community,” wrote one.

“This is a big loss. This page brings a lot of awareness and information to the [small business] community,” another commenter said.

One commenter was very succinct in his comment, which likely reflects the thoughts of many. “Why?”

Why, indeed.

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The Army wants to reinvent how it feeds soldiers in the field

Nick Wakeman — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:32:13 -0400

The Army wants to reinvent the field ration and is looking to the alternative protein industry for ideas.

In a source sought notice posted Monday, the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command is asking for information on alternative proteins that can have a long shelf-life and be palatable.

The Army has several objectives including enhancing food supply chain resilience, enabling biomanufacturing foodstuffs in combat-forward environments, and providing tailored, high-quality nutrition.

The notice mentions specific technologies the Army is interested in such as “fermentation, precision fermentation, or other novel biomanufacturing methods.” One goal is lightweight and nutrient-dense rations that can lower logistical burdens and physical payload.

The Army also wants to hear from respondents who can conduct consumer research such as focus groups, sensory panels, and field testing to evaluate acceptability and consumption within a military population.

For all the talk in the notice about alternative proteins and “meat-alternative products,” the Army is not interested in laboratory-grown meats or insect protein.

The notice mentions that the Army wants ideas for biomanufacturing food in forward-deployed areas, which would shorten the supply chain.

Domestic sourcing is a requirement and must comply with the Berry Amendment, which requires that the Defense Department give preference to U.S.-made products. For forward-deployed biomanufacturing, the ingredients would need to be sourced from the U.S.

The Army has a very tight turnaround time for concept papers, which are due Friday.

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When does federal service really end? DOD case challenges retirees’ speech rights

Jennifer Shutt, States Newsroom — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:37:24 -0400

Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly’s legal team is urging a federal appeals court to uphold a ruling that allows the former Navy captain to keep his retirement rank and pay while his First Amendment case against the Pentagon moves forward.

Benjamin C. Mizer, partner at Arnold & Porter, wrote in a brief filed April 15 that the Defense Department violated Kelly’s constitutional rights when it tried to punish him for appearing alongside other Democrats in the “Don’t Give Up The Ship” video.

The Trump administration’s appeal of the district court’s ruling, he wrote, does not cite “a single case” that has expanded the limited speech rights of active-duty military members to “retirees like Senator Kelly.”

The legal precedent the Trump administration did reference, Parker v. Levy, “involved an active-duty officer directly urging soldiers at his wartime military post to refuse specific orders to deploy and fight,” Mizer wrote.

“Senator Kelly, by contrast, is a retired officer and legislator who publicly called, alongside other members of Congress, for adherence to settled law, not defiance of it,” Mizer wrote.

Illegal orders video posted in November

Kelly, Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, New Hampshire Rep. Maggie Goodlander and Pennsylvania Reps. Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan, all Democrats with backgrounds in the military or national security, posted the video at the center of the case on Nov. 18.

They said that Americans in those institutions “can” and “must refuse illegal orders.”

“No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution. We know this is hard and that it’s a difficult time to be a public servant,” they said. “But whether you’re serving in the CIA, in the Army, or Navy, or the Air Force, your vigilance is critical.”

Mizer wrote in his legal brief that “Kelly never told members of the armed forces to refuse any particular military orders. The video did not even identify any specific military orders or operations.”

Mizer added the obligation to refuse clearly illegal orders “is a bedrock of the law of armed conflict.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in January that he would attempt to downgrade Kelly’s retirement rank and pay for his participation in the video, leading the senator to file a lawsuit.

Senior Judge Richard J. Leon of the District of Columbia District Court issued a preliminary injunction in February, blocking that from taking effect while the case progresses through the legal system.

The Trump administration appealed the preliminary injunction to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which has scheduled oral arguments for May 7.

Karen LeCraft Henderson, nominated by President George H.W. Bush in 1990; Cornelia T.L. Pillard, nominated by President Barack Obama in 2013; and Florence Y. Pan, nominated by President Joe Biden in 2022, make up the three-judge panel that will decide whether to uphold the district court’s preliminary injunction or overturn it.

DOJ argues discipline at risk

Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate wrote in a 71-page brief filed March 20 that the district court judge’s ruling “was gravely wrong and sweeps far beyond Kelly’s suit, calling into question the military’s ability to maintain discipline among service members.”

Shumate added later in the filing that “while retired officers may well have greater speech rights than active-duty service members in some respects, the district court erred in holding that they are indistinguishable from civilians for purposes of First Amendment analysis.

“The court reasoned that retired officers cannot undermine discipline as significantly as active-duty service members, but that conclusion is unsupportable.”

Shumate contended that the “district court also erred insofar as it suggested that Kelly is entitled to heightened First Amendment protection because he is a member of Congress. Whatever enhanced speech rights Kelly has in that capacity, they come from other constitutional provisions, not the First Amendment.”

“If anything, Kelly’s role in Congress provides more, not less, reason to hold him as accountable as other service members for counseling disobedience to lawful orders, given that his ‘leadership position’ as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee gives him ‘unique sway over the military,’” Shumate wrote.

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Trump vows to find ‘leaker’ who publicized search for second downed airman in Iran

Meghann Myers — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:00:00 -0400

President Donald Trump said his administration is going after the news outlet that first reported a second Air Force officer was missing after an F-15E Strike Eagle went down over Iran, he said during a press conference Monday. The officer was rescued Saturday.

Trump said Iran wasn’t aware until the news report that the fighter jet’s weapons systems officer was still in hiding after U.S. special operations forces quickly recovered the pilot following a crash on Friday. He did not specify which outlet he was speaking of, though both Channel 12 news in Israel and The Associated Press reported Friday that one crew member had been recovered and another was missing.

“We think we'll be able to find it out, because we're going to go to the media company that released it, and we're going to say ‘national security, give it up or go to jail,’” Trump said, suggesting the Justice Department will subpoena for the identity of a reporter’s source. “Because when they did that, all of a sudden, the entire country of Iran knew that there was a pilot that was somewhere on their land that was fighting for his life, and it also made it much more difficult for the pilots and for the people going in to search for him.”

The downed airman spent more than a day “scaling rugged ridges while hunted by the enemy,” before he was able to activate his emergency transponder to let his chain of command know he was still alive, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at the briefing.

A team flew seven hours into Iranian air space to rescue the weapons system officer, Hegseth said, one day after an earlier mission rescued the pilot.

“We control the sky,” the secretary said. “Iran did nothing about it.”

But during the pilot's rescue, Iran shot down one of the A-10 Warthogs that was supporting the mission, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the briefing. The A-10 pilot ejected over Kuwait, Caine said.

“This pilot continued to fight, continued the mission, and then upon exit, flew his aircraft into another country and determined that the airplane was not landable,” Caine said.

Hegseth said the U.S. on Monday launched the largest volume of strikes since day one of the war, back on Feb. 28.

“Tomorrow, even more than today,” he said. “And then Iran has a choice.”

The briefing took place one day after Trump threatened to target civilian infrastructure in Iran, via Truth Social post on Sunday, if the country doesn’t agree by Tuesday to stop firing on ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

Asked during the press conference whether he stands behind his recent statements that the war is winding down, or equally recent statements that he intends to escalate it, Trump left things up in the air.

“I can’t tell you. I don’t know,” he said. “Depends what they do.”

Trump then asserted that the Iranian people would be fine with the U.S. striking their bridges and power plants, even saying that he’s gotten “numerous intercepts” from Iranians begging the U.S. to continue bombing them.

“They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom,” he said. He did not offer details of how the war would secure freedom for Iranians.

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Nearly 200 employees could move to Alabama this year under a Space Command plan

Lauren C. Williams — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:07:29 -0400

Space Command aims to move about 200 people from Colorado to its new headquarters in Alabama by year's end.

“I'm happy at the progress that we're making, and that progress will continue over the next couple of years as we work to get a significant portion of our staff there, even while the permanent headquarters is being built,” Gen. Stephen Whiting, who leads U.S. Space Command, told senators during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday.

The command’s move has been a matter of hot political debate. In his first term President Donald Trump pushed to move the command to a 60-acre site in Huntsville, Alabama. The Biden administration in 2023 reversed the original decision to move the headquarters to Alabama, but Trump reversed it again in 2025.

Right now, Space Command has a small, 20-person office in Redstone Arsenal, with plans to increase that number tenfold by year's end.

“By the end of this year, we are targeting that number to be closer to 200 people that will be working from Redstone, from our headquarters, of course. That will be paced with the delivery of interim facilities that are appropriate to the security classification level we need, and that we have all of the appropriate IT networks,” Whiting testified.

The command is updating existing facilities, with plans to open a top-secret facility that can accommodate up to 80 people in April, Whiting said. Then the plan is to start moving people who work at that classification level.

To hit that 200-person target, the command is offering workers incentives.

“We are offering relocation incentives for our workforce in Colorado to consider moving to Alabama,” Whiting said. “We also are offering retention incentives, because I need my workforce to stay with me in Colorado until their function is ready to move.”

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The Pentagon built a blueprint to avoid civilian war casualties. Trump officials scrapped it

Hannah Allam, ProPublica — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.

Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.

Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.

Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.

Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.

Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.

Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”

Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several news outlets have concluded that the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, told reportersMarch 7 that it was “done by Iran.” Hegseth, standing next to the president aboard Air Force One, said the matter was under investigation.

The next day, the open-source research outfit Bellingcat said it had authenticated a video showing a Tomahawk missile strike next to the school in Minab. Iranian state media later showed fragments of a U.S.-made Tomahawk, as identified by Bellingcat and others, at the site. The United States is the only party to the conflict known to possess Tomahawks. U.N. human rights experts have called for an investigation into whether the attack violated international law.

The Department of Defense and White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive U.S. administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials eager to shed the legacy of the “forever wars” have periodically called for better protections for civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work that had begun under the first Trump presidency.

Formalized in a 2022 action plan and in a Defense Department instruction, the initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often shortened to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 personnel were assigned to the mission, including roughly 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination hub near the Pentagon.

The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of the civilian presence in an area and in-depth analysis of the risks. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would prompt an assessment or investigation to figure out what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.

By the time Trump returned to power, harm-mitigation teams were embedded with regional commands and special operations leadership. During Senate confirmation hearings, several Trump nominees for top defense posts voiced support for the mission. Once in office, however, they stood by as the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.

Around 90% of the CHMR mission is gone, former personnel said, with no more than a single adviser now at most commands. At Central Command, where a 10-person team was cut to one, “a handful” of the eliminated positions were backfilled to help with the Iran campaign. Defense officials can’t formally close the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.

“It has no mission or mandate or budget,” Bryant said.

Spike in Strikes

Global conflict monitors have since recorded a dramatic increase in deadly U.S. military operations. Even before the Iran campaign, the number of strikes worldwide since Trump returned to office had surpassed the total from all four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Had the Defense Department’s harm-reduction mission continued apace, current and former officials say, the policies almost certainly would’ve reduced the number of noncombatants harmed over the past year.

Beyond the moral considerations, they added, civilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.

U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based group that verifies casualties through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds more deaths are under review, a difficult process given Iran’s internet blackout and dangerous conditions.

A mourner holds a portrait of students during a funeral held after a school in Iran’s Hormozgan province was bombed. Thousands attended the ceremony. Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images

Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the Iran campaign, on top of dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens dark chapters from the “war on terror” that had prompted reforms in the first place.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government a few months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ — every day we’re just killing people and making more enemies.”

In 2015, two dozen patients and 14 staff members were killed when a heavily armed U.S. gunship fired for over an hour on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan, a disaster that has become a cautionary tale for military planners.

“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building,” the international aid group said in a report about the destruction of its trauma center in Kunduz.

A U.S. military investigation found that multiple human and systems errors had resulted in the strike team mistaking the building for a Taliban target. The Obama administration apologized and offered payouts of $6,000 to families of the dead.

Human rights advocates had hoped the Kunduz debacle would force the U.S. military into taking concrete steps to protect civilians during U.S. combat operations. Within a couple years, however, the issue came roaring back with high civilian casualties in U.S.-led efforts to dislodge Islamic State extremists from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

The aftermath of the U.S. airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed 42 people. Najim Rahim/AP Images

In a single week in March 2017, U.S. operations resulted in three incidents of mass civilian casualties: A drone attack on a mosque in Syria killed around 50; a strike in another part of Syria killed 40 in a school filled with displaced families; and bombing in the Iraqi city of Mosul led to a building collapse that killed more than 100 people taking shelter inside.

In heavy U.S. fighting to break Islamic State control over the Syrian city of Raqqa, “military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground; too often waved off reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong,” according to an analysis by the Pentagon-adjacent Rand Corp. think tank.

“Do It Right Now”

Under pressure from lawmakers, Trump’s then-Defense Secretary James Mattis ordered a review of civilian casualty protocols.

Released in 2019, the review Mattis launched was seen by some advocacy groups as narrow in scope but still a step in the right direction. Yet the issue soon dropped from national discourse, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and landmark racial justice protests.

During the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized and said the department would “endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”

That incident, along with a New York Times investigative series into deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred the adoption of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response action plan in 2022. When they established the new Civilian Protection Center of Excellence the next year, defense officials tapped Michael McNerney— the lead author of the blunt RAND report — to be its director.

“The strike against the aid worker and his family in Kabul pushed Austin to say, ‘Do it right now,’” Bryant said.

The first harm-mitigation teams were assigned to leaders in charge of some of the military’s most sensitive counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations: Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida; the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.

A former CHMR adviser who joined in 2024 after a career in international conflict work said he was reassured to find a serious campaign with a $7 million budget and deep expertise. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Only a few years before, he recalled, he’d had to plead with the Pentagon to pay attention. “It was like a back-of-the-envelope thing — the cost of a Hellfire missile and the cost of hiring people to work on this.”

Bryant became the de facto liaison between the harm-mitigation team and special operations commanders. In December, he described the experience in detail in a private briefing for aides of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who had sought information on civilian casualty protocols involving boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea.

Bryant’s notes from the briefing, reviewed by ProPublica, describe an embrace of the CHMR mission by Adm. Frank Bradley, who at the time was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In October, Bradley was promoted to lead Special Operations Command.

At the end of 2024 and into early 2025, Bryant worked closely with the commander’s staff. The notes describe Bradley as “incredibly supportive” of the three-person CHMR team embedded in his command.

Bradley, Bryant wrote, directed “comprehensive lookbacks” on civilian casualties in errant strikes and used the findings to mandate changes. He also introduced training on how to integrate harm prevention and international law into operations against high-value targets. “We viewed Bradley as a model,” Bryant said.

Still, the military remained slow to offer compensation to victims and some of the new policies were difficult to independently monitor, according to a report by the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank. The CHMR program also faced opposition from critics who say civilian protections are already baked into laws of war and targeting protocols; the argument is that extra oversight “could have a chilling effect” on commanders’ abilities to quickly tailor operations.

To keep reforms on track, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would have to break through a culture of denial among leaders who pride themselves on precision and moral authority.

“The initial gut response of all commands,” Bryant said, “is: ‘No, we didn’t kill civilians.’”

Reforms Unraveled

As the Trump administration returned to the White House pledging deep cuts across the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response framework.

At first, CHMR advisers were heartened by Senate confirmation hearings where Trump’s nominees for senior defense posts affirmed support for civilian protections.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote during his confirmation that commanders “see positive impacts from the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote that it’s in the national interest to “seek to reduce civilian harm to the degree possible.”

When questioned about cuts to the CHMR mission at a hearing last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating the ideas as “part of our culture.”

Despite the top-level support, current and former officials say, the CHMR mission didn’t stand a chance under Hegseth’s signature lethality doctrine.

The former Fox News personality, who served as an Army National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disdains rules of engagement and other guardrails as constraining to the “warrior ethos.” He has defended U.S. troops accused of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL charged with stabbing an imprisoned teenage militant to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.

A month after taking charge, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, who provide guidance to keep operations in line with U.S. or international law. Hegseth has described the attorneys as “roadblocks” and used the term “jagoff.”

At the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the staff tried in vain to save the program. At one point, Bryant said, he even floated the idea of renaming it the “Center for Precision Warfare” to put the mission in terms Hegseth wouldn’t consider “woke.”

By late February 2025, the CHMR mission was imploding, say current and former defense personnel.

Shortly before his job was eliminated, Bryant openly spoke out against the cuts in The Washington Post and Boston Globe, which he said landed him in deep trouble at the Pentagon. He was placed on leave in March, his security clearance at risk of revocation.

Bryant formally resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of the administration’s defense policies. In columns and on TV, he warns that Hegseth’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and civilian protections is corroding military professionalism.

Bryant said it was hard to watch Bradley, the special operations commander and enthusiastic adopter of CHMR, defending a controversial “double-tap” on an alleged drug boat in which survivors of a first strike were killed in a follow-up hit. Legal experts have said such strikes could violate laws of warfare. Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.

“Everything else starts slipping when you have this culture of higher tolerance for civilian casualties,” Bryant said.

Concerns were renewed in early 2025 with the Trump administration’s revived counterterrorism campaign against Islamist militants regrouping in parts of Africa and the Middle East.

Last April, a U.S. air strike hit a migrant detention center in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 61 African migrants and injuring dozens of others in what Amnesty International says “qualifies as an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”

Operations in Somalia also have become more lethal. In 2024, Biden’s last year in office, conflict monitors recorded 21 strikes in Somalia, with a combined death toll of 189. In year one of Trump’s second term, the U.S. carried out at least 125 strikes, with reported fatalities as high as 359, according to the New America think tank, which monitors counterterrorism operations.

“It is a strategy focused primarily on killing people,” said Alexander Palmer, a terrorism researcher at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Last September, the U.S. military announced an attack in northeastern Somalia targeting a weapons dealer for the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. On the ground, however, villagers said the missile strike incinerated Omar Abdullahi, a respected elder nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker” for his role as a clan mediator.

After the death, the U.S. military released no details, citing operational security.

“The U.S. killed an innocent man without proof or remorse,” Abdullahi’s brother, Ali, told Somali news outlets. “He preached peace, not war. Now his blood stains our soil.”

In Iran, former personnel say, the CHMR mission could have made a difference.

Under the scrapped harm-prevention framework, they said, plans for civilian protection would’ve begun months ago, when orders to draw up a potential Iran campaign likely came down from the White House and Pentagon.

CHMR personnel across commands would immediately begin a detailed mapping of what planners call “the civilian environment,” in this case a picture of the infrastructure and movements of ordinary Iranians. They would also check and update the “no-strike list,” which names civilian targets such as schools and hospitals that are strictly off-limits.

One key question is whether the school was on the no-strike list. It sits a few yards from a naval base for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The building was formerly part of the base, though it has been marked on maps as a school since at least 2013, according to visual forensics investigations.

“Whoever ‘hits the button’ on a Tomahawk — they’re part of a system,” the former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they hit that button, they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”

If the guardrails failed and the Defense Department faced a disaster like the school strike, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would’ve jumped in to help with transparent public statements and an immediate inquiry.

Instead, he called the Trump administration’s response to the attack “shameful.”

“It’s back to where we were years ago,” Bryant said. If confirmed, “this will go down as one of the most egregious failures in targeting and civilian harm-mitigation in modern U.S. history.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

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Record-smashing $1.5-trillion spending proposal will fund only the ‘most essential things’: comptroller

Lauren C. Williams — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:23:56 -0400

Virtually all of the giant reconciliation fund has been doled out, the Pentagon’s acting chief financial officer said Tuesday.

“Everything except for $1.3 billion in the $153 billion that's been given to the Department of Defense by the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act has been apportioned and [has] been released to the services and program managers. And so that money is all starting to flow,” Jules Hurst, who is performing the duties of Pentagon comptroller and chief financial officer, said at the McAleese annual defense programs conference in Arlington, Va.

As Hurst spoke, lawmakers are mulling a $50 billion supplemental to pay for U.S. strikes on Iran and Trump-administration officials were finishing its 2027 budget proposal.

Asked about reports that some offices hadn’t received reconciliation funds yet, he said, “It's all been released to the services of the program offices. Sometimes it takes time for money to trickle down.”

Hurst declined to preview any details on the upcoming White House budget request, which will reportedly ask for $1.5 trillion in defense spending—half again as much as the current year’s record budget.

But he did say the entity known as DOGE, was still “alive and well” in the Pentagon.

“They've been a great partner for comptroller, in particular, as we just try to figure out where we have fat,” Hurst said. “We have robust [operations and maintenance] accounts in the FY27 budget, but they're focused on readiness. And so wherever we could, we looked through accounts and services inside the department and we tried to get rid of things that are no longer really necessary…and DOGE is very helpful for that.”

When asked if the Pentagon could feasibly spend $1.5 trillion in one year, Hurst said yes and that a lot of things were left out to keep the number down.

“We had to cut down significantly to get to [$1.5 trillion]. We had more ideas and more concepts on how to spend the money, and then we had to deal with. And so we took a long time to trim that down to the most essential things,” he said.

Hurst declined to provide specifics on how the budget would be broken down but said the proportions would mimic the Reagan administration, including “a massive investment in procurement and research development.”

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Hegseth orders ‘ruthless’ review of JAGs. Some see an attempt to evade accountability

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:36:00 -0400

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday ordered an overhaul of the military’s civilian and uniformed legal offices, raising fears among current and former members of the judge advocate general corps that he will gut legal oversight of the administration’s actions.

“I'm directing the service secretaries, the Army, Navy, and Air Force through their general counsels and JAGs and the [staff judge advocate] to the commandant to execute a ruthless, no-excuses review,” Hegseth said in a video posted on Wednesday. “Scrub it clean, cut duplication and bureaucracy, clarify roles, and reporting. No more moral ambiguity.”

Members of the military’s legal community who spoke to Defense One said they are as skeptical of Hegseth’s message as they are of his timing.

The call to reorder the “current allocation of legal resources and functions” of the Defense Department’s civilian and uniformed lawyers comes as the U.S. is fighting a war with Iran—a conflict some experts have claimed is illegal, and which has involved an airstrike on an Iranian elementary school that left 175 people dead. The investigation into that airstrike is going on now, and early evidence reportedly points to the U.S. as the responsible party.

Hegseth posted his latest video a little more than a year after he fired the Army, Navy, and Air Force’s top lawyers, claiming they were “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”

Steve Lepper, a retired Air Force lawyer and a member of a group of former JAGs that has spoken out about the administration’s military actions, said Hegseth’s words on Wednesday were at odds with his actions as secretary.

“I think it’s probably one of the most hypocritical messages he’s communicated in his tenure at DOD,” Lepper said. When Hegseth fired the top JAGs, he said, “His message was clear: ‘The law and lawyers should have little influence over the military and its operations’.”

A defense legal insider said there was talk of potential changes among lawyers on Tuesday, but many had expected a memo, not a video, outlining the reforms. As of late Wednesday evening, no formal memo outlining the effort had been widely circulated, sources told Defense One.

On Thursday, Defense One reviewed a copy of the memo, dated March 11 and addressed to the service secretaries, JAG corps, and general counsels, which it said “are best positioned to enhance the war fight, and that our general counsel personnel are best positioned to execute non-operational, supporting functions of the Military Departments.”

The memo included a suggested split of duties between the JAGs and the general counsel offices. Civilian general counsels were advised to take on business, acquisition, real estate, patent, medical, and “litigation before non-military administrative boards and federal courts and coordination with the Department of Justice,” among other areas.

The memo suggested JAGs remain in the realm of military justice, national security, operational, military administrative, claims related to military operations, and procurement and fiscal law in operation settings.

Both the uniformed and civilian lawyers must also cover “any other legal subject area prescribed by the respective Secretary concerned or otherwise required by law or regulation.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how Hegseth’s reforms may affect the many civilian employees who answer directly to each service’s top judge advocate general, or TJAG, nor the general counsels of each service.

The memo set a deadline of 45 days for reports on any overlap between the service’s civilian and military legal departments to the Defense Department’s General Counsel with full changes expected within six months.

A Defense Department spokesperson declined to answer questions about the memo and its intent. “We have nothing additional to provide beyond the Secretary’s video,” they said.

The insider said leaders of the department’s various legal offices had spoken in various ways about Hegseth’s latest action. Some said it would be an opportunity for civilian general-counsel lawyers to detangle any functions that may overlap with uniformed Judge Advocate General work.

But: “Some of them made it clear it could be a seismic shift in how things are done,” the insider said. “Subtext-wise, I think myself, and a few of the people that I've talked to, we're pretty sure this is just a way to reduce accountability” for Hegseth and other Pentagon leaders.

The general counsel for each of the military services is a political appointee chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate. While the TJAGs are similarly chosen, they must also be “recommended by a board of officers,” and the Defense Department must not interfere with “independent legal advice” given to service secretaries, according to U.S. law.

“I think it's probably a way to put more legal decisions on the [general counsel] side, because I think they think that's probably more responsive to a direct civilian political nominee rather than a uniform TJAG, who's gonna have had quite a bit of experience,” the insider said.

Overworked and stretched thin

Hegseth claimed in his Wednesday video that “legal shops across the services have grown bloated, duplicative” and are in need of reform.

“They've muddied lines of authority and pulled critical judge advocates away from what matters most: advising commanders in the fight on operations in deployed environments where seconds and minutes count,” the secretary said. “But right now, military lawyers are sometimes stuck doing civilian side work that belongs to general counsels instead, and that drains readiness and leaves gaps where we can't afford to have them.”

Ever since Hegseth fired the Army and Air Force’s most experienced TJAGs, military lawyers have been thrown at some of the administration’s largest legal hurdles—including taking on civilian duties.

Last year, the Trump administration approved the temporary assignment of more than 600 JAGs to work for the Justice Department as immigration judges. And in January, Defense One reported that dozens of military lawyers had been temporarily assigned as federal prosecutors to support law-enforcement surges in Minneapolis and other cities.

Assigning those often-inexperienced military lawyers as special assistant U.S. attorneys has been met with legal criticism. An Army lawyer serving as a federal prosecutor was held in contempt of court last month when a man was released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody without his identification documents.

On Monday, former JAG officers called for an end to the practice in an amicus brief filed in federal court in Minnesota, writing that they were “deeply concerned that deploying JAGs to prosecute civilians in federal court in cases without a substantial military nexus erodes vital democratic norms, harms military readiness, and impermissibly inserts the military into civilian law enforcement’s core functions.”

Lepper, who joined the amicus brief, said Hegseth’s message is also at odds with these frequent civilian tasks.

“If he’s so concerned about JAGs doing their jobs, why does he continue to detail them to the Department of Justice to perform immigration judge roles for which they are not qualified and special assistant U.S. attorney roles in cases that have absolutely no military nexus,” Lepper said.

By the numbers

In December, Defense One asked the Army, Air Force, and Navy how many uniformed lawyers and civilian employees were assigned to their respective JAG corps.

The Air Force reported that it had 1,236 JAGs, about nine more than it had the previous year, while civilian staffing had been cut to 996 from 1,022, an Air Force spokesperson told Defense One.

The Navy said it had about 1,030 JAGs as of November, up from about one thousand the previous year, but that its civilian staffing had been cut from some 700 people to roughly 550, a spokesperson said.

The Army did not return multiple phone calls and emailed requests from Defense One seeking staffing figures.

Last year, Hegseth ordered his department to shrink its civilian workforce. About 110,000 of the department’s roughly 795,000 civilians quit, retired, or were laid off, although some 30,000 jobs deemed essential to national security were subsequently re-filled. Many workers across the department said have since reported their offices have seen lowered productivity and performance, Defense One reported this week.

The legal insider said due to the administration’s heavy reliance on JAGs after the workforce cuts, many offices were authorized to rehire for key jobs.

“For the last year now, we've been bleeding people and the work hasn't slowed down,” the insider said. “Lots of offices were getting crushed, and they've been able to make their case and get approval to hire back and fill those positions.”

Aaron Brynildson, a former judge advocate and a law professor at the University of Mississippi, said some deconfliction of JAGs and general counsels could be beneficial.

“I agree with Secretary Hegseth’s sentiment that JAGs sometimes perform work better handled by civilian attorneys and that more clear lines of responsibility with the service Offices of General Counsel are needed,” Brynildson said. “I hope we do not reduce the number of JAGs, but place them closer to commanders.”

He also suggested that more JAGs be trained to provide legal guidance for space and cyber domains.

Members of the former-JAG working group, which was formed after the firing of the TJAGs last year, have continued to speak out against the administration’s actions, including the continued strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and the ongoing war in Iran—both of which they claim violate U.S. and international law.

Lepper and the other former military lawyers in the group have said that if proper legal guardrails were in place, many of the administration’s actions wouldn’t have taken place.

“If Secretary Hegseth is truly concerned about the law, he should try following it. If he’s concerned about letting judge advocates provide legal advice, he should listen to them,” Lepper said.

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Senator eyes updating NDAA with AI use guidance

Alexandra Kelley — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:50:01 -0400

Lawmakers are considering updating the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act to address how artificial intelligence systems are used in military operations following the fallout between Anthropic and the Department of Defense, one elected official said this week.

Speaking on Wednesday morning during a conversation at the Brookings Institution, Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., said he and fellow elected officials have been examining how effectively current legal operating frameworks are governing advanced AI technologies and how AI should be safely used alongside warfighters. The results of this analysis could potentially update governance provisions in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act.

“For this next NDAA, I've been working with some of my colleagues already on this and how do we address this issue within Anthropic,” Kelly said. “Obviously, rules of engagement is something every military has, they change over time.”

Kelly’s office further confirmed to Nextgov/FCW that he is working on solutions to address AI usage in military operations in this year’s defense bill. His office declined to comment further.

Kelly acknowledged that combat demands flexibility and speed, and said, “We're going to have to make exceptions” to having a human in the loop for autonomous offensive systems. He also said contractors and agencies looking to use advanced sensitive technologies should be having discussions “up front” on how both parties intend to use the technology.

“I think it is a reasonable thing to expect from any contractor that there are things we should and shouldn't be doing within the U.S. military,” Kelly said. “We’re not Russia, we're not China or North Korea. We have to have a certain level of standard. And I think those standards actually help us. It helps us with our allies, and at the end of the day, I do really think it makes us stronger and more effective as a military.”

Kelly’s comments come amid an ongoing dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon following the company’s refusal to relax its safety standards for defense operations that could include surveillance of U.S. citizens and using AI in autonomous lethal weapons. The situation further escalated when President Donald Trump ordered all federal agencies to shed their contracts, resulting in Anthropic suing multiple federal agencies alleging illegal retaliation.

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Hegseth leaves Iran war’s timeline in Trump’s hands

Meghann Myers — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:52:00 -0400

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has narrowed the U.S.’s objectives in Iran to three, scrapping President Donald Trump’s recent calls for “unconditional surrender” and a “great and acceptable leader” to replace the assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The U.S. military is entering day 11 of its campaign to destroy Iranian missile capabilities, destroy the Iranian navy and “permanently deny Iran nuclear weapons forever,” Hegseth said at a Tuesday press briefing at the Pentagon.

Asked about the White House’s quickly shifting timelines—Trump said on Monday that “the war is very complete”—his defense secretary hedged.

“So it’s not for me to posit whether it's the beginning, the middle, or the end,” Hegseth said. “That's his, and he'll continue to communicate that.”

The war isn’t “endless, not protracted, we’re not allowing mission creep,” he said, adding that Tuesday will be the “most intense” day of strikes inside Iran yet.

So far, the U.S. has hit more than 5,000 targets, including dozens of 2,000-pound bombs dropped on underground missile launchers, said Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“We also have struck several one-way drone factories to get at the heart of their autonomous capability,” Caine said at the press conference. “And of course, alongside our regional partners along the southern flank, continue to execute intercepts against one way attack drones using fighters and attack helicopters.”

Iranian ballistic missile attacks are down 90 percent and drone attacks down 83 percent, Caine said, giving same figures as U.S. Central Command boss Adm. Brad Cooper gave at a press conference last Thursday.

Asked about Israel’s strikes on Iranian oil facilities, Hegseth said, “that wasn't our necessary objective,” but added that Israel is not leading the U.S. deeper into war.

“The president has made clear to those concerns that we're not getting pulled in any direction,” Hegseth said. “We're leading. The president is leading. He's determining where we want to go, what the outcome will be, what the end state is, with a very keen eye.”

After Trump accused the Iranian military Monday of using a Tomahawk missile to strike a girl’s school on Feb. 28, Hegseth reiterated that the U.S. is investigating the incident.

“No nation takes more precautions to ensure there's never targeting of civilians than the United States of America,” he said.

However, Hegseth last year gutted a congressionally-mandated Pentagon office that sought to reduce civilian harm in U.S. air strikes, created in response to thousands of civilian deaths during the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

“From the boat strikes in the Caribbean, where every single strike is assessed, to this campaign here, no nation in history of warfare has ever attempted in every way possible to avoid civilian casualties, and frankly, that's a point that just isn't appreciated enough,” Hegseth said.

However, experts have questioned the legality of the administration’s attacks on suspected drug smuggling boats, determining that the people on board are indeed civilians until Congress authorizes military action against suspected drug cartel activity.

Asked what the administration’s next steps will be after achieving its goals in Iran, Hegseth offered no specifics about Iran’s future leadership or any future deals that would control its ability to rebuild its conventional or nuclear weapons capabilities.

“Ultimately, the aftermath is going to be in America’s interests,” he said.

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A year into Hegseth’s cuts, Defense civilians report ‘degraded performance’ and low morale

Meghann Myers — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:30:00 -0400

A year after Secretary Pete Hegseth launched a hasty effort to reduce the Defense Department’s civilian workforce by up to 61,000 people, employees are reporting gutted offices, lower productivity, and pervasive uncertainty.

“The climate, at least in my immediate organization, has shifted from fear to stress,” said an Air Force civilian who spoke with Defense One. “The fear of imminent [reductions-in-force] is not something we talk about much anymore because, while the threat of it persistently looms in the air, it is not in our best interest to constantly worry about it. Frankly, I'm too exhausted to keep thinking about it.”

All of the DoD civilians who shared their thoughts for this story requested anonymity to prevent retaliation by their employer.

Within weeks of taking office last January, Hegseth ordered voluntary and involuntary cuts, along with a partial hiring freeze that forced managers to rescind untold numbers of job offers—untold because Pentagon officials have refused to say how many of those positions disappeared in the process. The freeze has also blocked the movement of thousands of employees to new roles, although some are now moving via a cumbersome exemption process.

In total, nearly 110,000 of the department’s roughly 795,000 civilians departed last year, about 80 percent more than Hegseth’s goal. Some 30,000 jobs deemed essential to national security were subsequently re-filled.

Those numbers come from a Daily Wire story that Pentagon spokesman Jacob Bliss forwarded as a response to eight questions about the cuts and their effects. Bliss and other spokespeople did not respond to follow-up requests to answer the remaining questions.

The Office of Personnel Management’s workforce data confirms that DoD’s civilian workforce sits at just above 694,000.

Bliss declined to say whether there is a planned end to the hiring freeze; to provide examples of job titles that have been downgraded or merged in accordance with Hegseth’s March 28 directive; and to explain what, if anything, the department has done to address loss of productivity.

According to Pentagon data obtained by the Daily Wire, 14,606 of last year’s departures were involuntary. One of the department’s first moves was to dismiss 5,400 probationary employees—generally, people on the job for less than a year—for purported “performance issues.” Lawsuits delayed but ultimately did not block these firings, although a judge compelled Pentagon leaders to admit that the “performance” rationale was a lie.

In September, Hegseth signed another memo laying out a path for the quick firing of “low performers.” Bliss declined to say how many employees have been pushed out under that framework.

Then there were the voluntary resignations: 94,835 in total, according to the Daily Wire. That included 49,991 through the Deferred Resignation Program, which allowed employees to leave their jobs while being paid through the end of the fiscal year. This number is several thousand below the 55,000 figure provided to Defense One at the end of September.

Another 6,600 long-serving employees took an early-retirement offer: some 6,100 by August and the rest later in the year.

‘Beginning to drop primary functions’

“I would say overall the DoD civilian policies over the past year have resulted in degraded performance and capability downgrade overall due to the loss of critical skill sets,” one department civilian said of the resignations, adding that the vacated jobs in his shop have largely remained unfilled or been converted to dual-status Title 32 National Guard jobs.

That has increased wait times and decreased IT services to the Pentagon organizations that depend on his shop, the civilian said

With the hiring freeze now entering its second year, the civilian held out little hope that any of the lost capability will be restored.

“There are a lot of unfilled positions that will remain vacant for the foreseeable future. For the most part, managers know not to ask for new staff,” the civilian said. “I would not say processes are becoming more efficient. Probably the reverse, with a lot of offices reducing hours and services.”

The Air Force civilian described his office’s manning shortfall as “severe,” with just one in three civilian core-operations staff remaining.

“My small organization has been hit disproportionately hard and is beginning to drop primary functions because we can no longer support them,” he said.

His organization’s leaders have asked for exemptions to replace lost workers, but they’ve gone unanswered or been denied.

“Morale is as low as I can remember in the three-plus years that I've been there, primarily due to being overworked with just a 1 percent raise in salary for FY2026,” the civilian said. “The end-of-January bonuses announced by Hegseth have not materialized.”

Trapped overseas

For civilians working overseas, the ongoing hiring freeze has added another wrinkle: They largely can’t return to the U.S. unless they take a demotion or leave their jobs.

Every permanent change-of-station move, which is treated as a new hire, requires an exception-to-policy signed off by a military department head or equivalent leader, meaning that department civilians who may have signed on to take a promotion overseas with the intent to return stateside in a few years are effectively trapped.

The Pentagon is only hiring for specific positions, which include jobs related to public safety, immigration enforcement, and technicians at shipyards and depots. The department has hired 29,347 people who fall into those categories, according to the data provided to the Daily Wire, but an overseas civilian who wants to move back stateside for one of those exempted positions still has to have an exception-to-policy approved.

“I only know of one that was approved and it took nine months just to approve the ETP,” an Army civilian told Defense One.

The Army has created a sort of workaround for this problem. The Department of the Army Voluntary Reassignment Program is a repository of resumes posted by civilians who are interested in a transfer. Offices with open positions can search them for a possible candidate, but only if it would be a lateral move—no promotions are allowed, and they still require the Army secretary to approve an exception to policy.

The only other option is to exercise one’s return rights, an emergency out for employees who began their careers stateside before taking a position overseas. But that means reverting to their previous job, even if it’s a demotion and a lower pay grade.

“Part of Russ Vought's plan to make federal employees miserable as a whole, it seems,” the Army civilian said, alluding to the Office of Management and Budget director who, during the Biden administration, made speeches about his desire to put federal workers “in trauma.”

One in three federal employees works for the Defense Department—as of Thursday, 707,378 of the 2,074,649-strong federal workforce. Even so, DOD bore an outsized share of last year’s Trump-administration cuts, losing two of every five federal jobs eliminated, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.

That means forty percent of the departed workers had been directly supporting the military.

“We are all collectively stereotyped as the proverbial lazy admin assistant at the local DMV, without realizing a large chunk of DOD civilians are in remote locations, in harm’s way, part of the intelligence apparatus—or in my case, 20 kilometers from the [Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea] undergoing the exact same challenges and living conditions as our uniformed counterparts,” the Army civilian said.

Still, the Army civilian said, there is some optimism—that the Pentagon’s trajectory will become unsustainable and require a correction, whether it’s during this administration or the next.

“I believe in time the machine will break and then the situation will improve, but until then, we work with what we have and hope our servicemen and women do not pay the price because we cannot support them sufficiently,” he said.

The Trump administration has sent mixed signals. Continuing to reduce the size of the federal government and its workforce remains “priority number one,” Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director for Management Eric Ueland said March 5 at a government efficiency conference in Washington. But: “We probably have some skills that we now need to hire back, quite frankly,” Scott Kupor, the head of the Office of Personnel Management, told the Washington Post, which adds that the new hiring push “is unfolding under new rules designed to give the White House greater influence over the government’s 2 million-person civilian workforce.”

The question also remains whether Hegseth’s cuts have actually streamlined department processes. Pentagon officials have declined to say what came out of the secretary’s March order giving his senior leaders less than two weeks to submit proposals to shrink and reorganize their commands, agencies, and departments.

And last May, when the acting Pentagon personnel chief withdrew the much-derided requirement that civilian employees submit a weekly list of five things they did, he told everyone to send him a suggestion to “improve Department efficiency or root out waste.”

Bliss declined to say which, if any, of those suggestions have been implemented.

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The Pentagon’s investment deals draw congressional scrutiny

Lauren C. Williams — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Lawmakers have questions about the Pentagon’s increased keenness to take partial ownership stakes in companies, demanding details from defense officials while they weigh the need for legislation.

Government equity investment adds pressure on companies to “stimulate growth” and production without “pursuing control,” Michael Duffey, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, said Wednesday during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the defense industrial base. “We view equity investment as an important tool—amongst a range of tools—that we can apply to build resilience and reduce fragility within the defense industrial base,” Duffey said.

Those other tools include grants and loans, he said, but taking a financial stake in a company has extra benefits, including encouraging companies to put up more of their own funds. Those taxpayer funds can also be returned, unlike grants, which Duffey called a “sunk” cost.

“It creates a partnership with industry, an opportunity not only for the government to provide capital to lead to the kind of growth that we need, such as in the [L3Harris solid rocket motor] deal, but it also crowds in additional private capital. Part of that deal was for L3 to put their own billions of dollars against what we saw as a very high demand for growth within the solid rocket motor industrial base,” Duffey said.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon announced it would put $1 billion into L3Harris’s solid-rocket-motor business to spur production. L3Harris will spend money alongside the government, Duffey said of the deal. The more “skin in the game” vendors have, he said, the more likely they are to increase production capacity.

“We haven't seen the kind of investment that we need in terms of modernizing manufacturing, developing the workforce. We believe [that] equity investment, in some cases—in many cases—in partnership with additional private capital, creates that incentive for better attention to how those dollars are deployed to expand our industry partners’ capability,” Duffey said.

Additionally, each deal “comes with clear milestones” and timelines to “ensure that investment is stimulating the growth that is required,” Duffey said. “We are looking at this as an economic stake in the company. We are not pursuing control.”

Many of the equity investments the Pentagon has made recently relate to critical minerals production. So far, the second Trump administration has invested $2.3 billion on critical minerals supply chain deals since Jan. 20, 2025, buttressed by the Defense Production Act, Duffey testified.

“The Defense Production Act, DPA, is a key component of this investment strategy. The DPA provides the President with the authority to ensure the availability of industrial resources to meet our national defense requirements,” Duffey said in prepared remarks. “We have recently used DPA authorities to make significant investments in critical sectors. For instance, we awarded $29.9 million in September 2025 to develop a domestic supply of gallium and scandium, and we have also used DPA authorities to invest $36.6 [million] in late 2025 in germanium production and $43.4 [million] in September 2025 to establish domestic capability for antimony trisulfide, addressing two of the most pressing critical mineral shortfalls facing the defense industrial base today.”

Duffey also noted that $149 million in DPA Title III funds have gone to eight entities to expand the solid-rocket-motor industrial base.

But lawmakers in both chambers, and across party lines, questioned exactly how the Pentagon was going to monitor and execute equity investments.

“The department's making significant equity investments in companies to ramp up their capability to manufacture. Not a new concept. It's been around, I think, forever," Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., said. "How are you monitoring the use of that investment? And ultimately, what will you, will the department be doing with the equity that it has acquired as a result of those investments?”

In opening remarks, HASC Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., welcomed the Pentagon’s use of new financing tools to strengthen supply chain resilience,” because “the status quo was not working. However, Congress needs clearer answers on when equity investments are the right approach.”

During a Feb. 24 hearing on critical minerals supply chains, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi, praised the Pentagon’s “use of innovative financial tools,” but noted that “little law currently exists” with respect to equity investments.

“I believe these equity-based investments make good strategic sense in many cases, particularly where no free market exists and where we've seen aggressive Chinese economic warfare. However, opinions range [widely] between and within our two political parties,” Wicker said in February, adding the committees have been mulling legislation on the matter.

“While not public, Ranking Member Reed and I had a long series of discussions with our House counterparts, last year, about legislation regarding equity investments. I anticipate that conversation will continue in earnest this year. This legislation is both important and urgent because rebuilding America's critical mineral supply chains will take more than a decade.”

In that same hearing, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said the Defense Production Act doesn’t explicitly name equity investments.

“I have questions about the legal basis, financial terms and strategic rationale for these transactions. The legal basis, in particular, appears questionable,” Reed said. “The department has argued that the Defense Production Act provides the authority for these investments. However, while the Defense Production Act does authorize the purchase of industrial resources for government use, it does not mention equity investments at all. The fact that the Trump administration's Office of Management and Budget has subsequently requested a legislative proposal to explicitly authorize equity investment suggests that the administration, itself, recognizes the current authority is uncertain. And that should give us pause.”

Michael Cadenazzi, the Pentagon’s head of industrial base policy, fielded those questions and others, saying the deals are designed to provide “performance outcomes” for companies and that equity stakes will be used as an “alternative to other financing mechanisms,” such as direct grants.

Equity investments prove the department’s commitment to “solving these problems, which are outsized relative to our normal focus on it” and “equity is a necessary tool for us to make that commitment,” he said.

“Our goal is not economic returns. We're not trying to excise long-term ownership of these companies. The goal is not to have a stake forever. The goal is to achieve our outcome, execute some sort of exit strategy as appropriate to the moment, and then continue on with the next set of problems,” Cadenazzi said. “Ideally, we wouldn't be spending much time on minerals.

We feel compelled to do so as a result of the situation in the market.”

Duffey and Cadenazzi left their hearings with a little homework at lawmakers’ request: submit details of the equity deals and legal justifications, respectively.

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Why the US went to war without a plan to evacuate DOD civilians, contractors, and others

Donald Heflin, The Conversation — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:00:00 -0500

As the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, American citizens living in or visiting the Middle East found themselves stranded in countries facing bombing attacks by Iran. The State Department on March 2, 2026, urged Americans in 14 Middle Eastern countries to leave via “available commercial transportation, due to serious safety risks.” But commercial air travel and airports were shut down in many of those places and the U.S. wasn’t offering to evacuate its citizens.

Media reports featuring frustrated and frightened Americans stuck in places where danger was mounting, as well as growing criticism that the U.S. hadn’t handled the situation well or according to normal procedure, led the State Department to scramble and send charter flights to evacuate U.S. nationals from a handful of countries.

The Conversation’s politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed former ambassador Donald Heflin, a veteran diplomat who now teaches at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, to understand how such situations are normally handled – and how the current situation diverged from longstanding practices.

What is the customary way that the United States and the State Department deal with U.S. nationals who are abroad in an area that becomes dangerous?

Over my 35-year career, I was ambassador to a small country and I worked a lot on African affairs. But most of my time was spent in consular affairs, which is the part of the State Department that does this work. And over the last 20 or 30 years, we’ve made a lot of progress. We’ve developed a model that works pretty well.

When you’re in a country with instability, what you want to do is to get the population of Americans down as small as you can. So the first thing that happens is you have some instability, and you tell Americans, “Listen, we advise against traveling here.” See if you can discourage everybody except missionaries or people whose employers really want them to go there to make money or people visiting family members, but get rid of the casual tourist.

Then, a little more time goes by and things start to get bad, and you say, “You should consider leaving.” And then, a little while later, the embassy gives its own employees and their families what they call “authorized departure,” which is, “It’s OK for you to go back to the U.S., and in fact we’ll help pay for it.” And we tell the public that, and we hope that that’ll help spur more people to leave.

And the step after that?

Next step: We order departure, where we tell parts of the embassy, “You’ve got to go home. You can’t make the decision to stay here, you and your kids go home.” And we tell the public that, and hopefully that makes the number of Americans remaining in the country smaller and smaller.

Then – and it doesn’t always happen – the last step is we evacuate. We say, “We’re getting our people out of here on planes, we’ve got space for you on the planes, you should have listened to us before.”

That’s the standard model. Unfortunately, it didn’t get followed very well this week.

What did you see this week, and how did it diverge from the normal procedure?

We went from zero to 60 very quickly. Look, the Mideast is unstable on a good day, but there had not been a new instability where people should be getting scared and going home. And then what happened was we launched the attack, and all of a sudden there was that instability.

Logically, you would think, there were two places that Americans should be getting out of. One was Iran, where we’ve told people not to be for many years. The other was Israel, because Israel is going to be attacked.

But no, the Iranians attacked over half a dozen countries. So now, all of a sudden, you’ve got Americans who feel unsafe in places that have never really been considered unsafe, like Oman, Cyprus or Turkey.

So now you have a long list of countries where you want to encourage Americans to leave and where they want to leave. There’s some demand, and you haven’t got that drawdown, where it makes things smaller, and also you haven’t done anything about arranging charter flights or military flights to get them out. So they’re going to have to stay where they are and feel unsafe for X number of days.

That’s when this started generating news stories.

This led to lot of people calling a member of Congress, a lot of people talking to the press, saying, “We got to get us out of here.” That’ll continue until the evacuation is arranged. There’s a bit of an analogy to COVID. When COVID first took off, we had a lot of Americans stuck overseas. They wanted to get home to their families. They figured U.S. health care to be the best that’s available, and it took us awhile to arrange charter flights. It was a very expensive process to get everybody home. They just kind of had to hunker down. That’s where we are right now.

Do you think this problem that’s being faced by Americans in the Middle East now should have been anticipated by the State Department?

Yes and no. I think a big part of the problem here was that the Trump administration kept the knowledge of the impending attack to a very small circle of people for operational security reasons. You can’t launch a surprise attack if half of Washington knows about it.

You can see a scenario by which a very trusted State Department officer has to eventually talk to a charter plane company about chartering a whole bunch of planes. They’re going to figure out pretty quickly what’s going to happen, and then you’ve got a security leak.

At the same time, I think going back weeks and months, maybe people should have been arranging charter flights and military flights, kind of on spec so that you could flip the switch and get that going right away. They’re kind of starting from scratch this week.

You’ve got people who are stranded, afraid and can’t get on with their lives. What should happen next?

All these Iranian strikes, the casualty numbers aren’t high. So objectively speaking, I think that very few of the Americans over there are in actual, real danger.

But casual tourists do get afraid, and they don’t travel overseas that much. This may be their first time in the Mideast, and all of a sudden this is happening. They want out bad. They’re scared, whether, objectively speaking, they have a good reason to be scared or not. And it’s better for everybody – the U.S. embassy, the host country, for people in Washington – if we get them out of there and get them home.

This will sort itself out. There will be planes, we’ll get all the people out who want to get out, but it’s going to take at least a few days, maybe a week.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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