Government Executive - Defense

The next counterintelligence threat may be hiding in federal hiring

Lindy Kyzer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 05:00:00 -0400

The federal government spends considerable time determining who can be trusted with sensitive information. But a recent report from the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) suggests agencies should be paying closer attention to what happens before an individual ever enters the personnel vetting process.

Foreign intelligence services are exploiting the very activities government agencies and defense contractors rely on to build their workforces: resume submissions, recruiting outreach, professional networking and expert consultations.

In its latest report, Targeting U.S. Technologies: A Report of Threats to Cleared Industry, DCSA identified approximately 2,900 incidents involving foreign entities seeking sensitive information or technology during fiscal 2025. The agency received more than 22,000 suspicious contact reports during the same period.

While the report focuses on cleared industry, its findings have implications for the federal government, particularly as agencies work to recruit specialized talent, modernize hiring practices and compete for expertise in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, engineering and other mission-critical fields.

The takeaway isn't that federal hiring needs more bureaucracy. It's that agencies need to recognize hiring and professional engagement as potential counterintelligence vulnerabilities and equip the people managing those processes to identify threats.

From resumes to relationships

One of the more interesting findings in DCSA's report is how foreign collection methods are evolving. In the agency's previous annual report, resume submissions accounted for 28% of reported collection attempts, making them the most common method of operation. Exploitation of experts accounted for 21%.

In the latest report, exploitation of experts has moved into the top position, accounting for 28% of reported incidents. Academic resume submissions remain a significant method of contact, accounting for 15%, while email continues to dominate at 30%.

The distinction between a method of operation and a method of contact is important, but so is the broader trend. Foreign intelligence entities are not simply trying to gain access to organizations through job applications. They are increasingly seeking out individuals whose professional knowledge, relationships and technical expertise make them valuable intelligence targets. That should concern anyone responsible for managing the federal workforce.

A federal employee with specialized expertise in acquisition, intelligence analysis, artificial intelligence or weapons systems may be valuable to an adversary even without access to classified information. Knowledge of government priorities, technical challenges, program requirements and organizational relationships can provide significant intelligence value.

The federal resume is an intelligence roadmap

Consider the professional information available through resumes, conference biographies, public profiles and professional networking platforms.

An adversary looking for insight into a particular defense capability doesn't necessarily need to penetrate a classified network to begin identifying relevant experts. Publicly available professional information can help establish who works in a particular technical field, what organizations they support and where they may have developed specialized expertise.

The objective should not be to discourage applicants from demonstrating their qualifications. It should be to encourage relevant, skills-based descriptions rather than unnecessary disclosures about sensitive programs, customers or operational environments.

It should also be to recognize that the federal hiring process isn't just essential to accomplishing the mission. It's a key element of the government's counterintelligence and security posture.

HR is part of the security perimeter

When federal agencies discuss counterintelligence threats, the conversation typically centers on cybersecurity, insider threats, classified information and personnel security. Human resources and recruiting rarely receive the same attention or a similar budget.

The current threat environment and the prevalence of professional credentials and resumes as counterintelligence risks demand a more deliberate relationship between human resources, hiring managers, personnel security and counterintelligence teams.

A security clearance doesn't solve the entire problem

The federal government has invested significant resources in modernizing personnel vetting through Trusted Workforce 2.0, continuous vetting and improvements to investigative and adjudicative processes. Those efforts are important. But they address a different part of the risk equation.

A security clearance determination assesses whether an individual is eligible for access to classified information. Continuous vetting provides ongoing assessment of individuals within covered populations. Neither process eliminates the risk of foreign intelligence entities approaching government employees, contractors, researchers or prospective hires through professional channels.

And we know not every federal employee holds a clearance.

Agencies employ thousands of individuals whose work may involve sensitive but unclassified information, acquisition strategies, proprietary technology, critical infrastructure or specialized technical expertise.

The DCSA findings underscore the importance of treating counterintelligence awareness as a workforce-wide responsibility, tailored to the sensitivity of an employee's role.

That doesn't require subjecting every federal applicant to an intelligence investigation. But it does highlight the importance of a principle emphasized through Trusted Workforce 2.0: considering every vetted worker's role in national security and the risks posed by foreign adversaries.

The government can't afford to make hiring harder

There is a risk in responding to reports like this by adding another layer of screening, another compliance requirement or another reason to delay an already lengthy federal hiring process. That would be the wrong lesson.

The federal government is competing for highly skilled workers in a labor market where speed, transparency and candidate experience matter. After a year of significant cuts and reductions in force, many federal agencies are highlighting significant staffing shortages, specifically in highly specialized skill sets — the exact ones most at risk of foreign targeting.

For agencies struggling to recruit cyber professionals, engineers, data scientists and other specialized talent, a hiring process that becomes more suspicious of applicants rather than more effective at identifying risks could make existing workforce challenges worse.

Agencies can start by giving HR professionals practical guidance on suspicious contacts and reporting procedures. Hiring managers should understand what information can appropriately be shared during recruitment. Employees should receive guidance on unsolicited consulting opportunities and requests for technical expertise.

Protect the talent, not just the technology

Another important implication of DCSA's report is what it says about the value of the federal workforce itself. Foreign intelligence services aren't simply targeting technologies. They're targeting the people who understand those technologies.

The shift from resume submissions toward exploitation of experts suggests that adversaries understand something federal workforce leaders should recognize as well: Institutional knowledge, professional relationships and technical expertise are strategic assets.

The answer isn't to make federal workers harder to find or federal jobs harder to obtain. It's to make the government's hiring and workforce practices smarter about the threats surrounding them.

Because in today's national security environment, the most valuable target may not be a classified document or a sensitive technology, but the person who knows how it works.

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The Pentagon gave $350 million in contracts to a firm closely tied to a senior Defense Department official

Aaron C. Davis and Robert Faturechi, ProPublica — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:16:32 -0400

Among a cadre of Wall Street executives brought into the Pentagon during President Donald Trump’s second term, George K. Kollitides II has emerged as a powerbroker with a broad mandate to improve procurement of weapons and critical minerals.

The longtime partner at the private equity firm Alvarez & Marsal Capital has framed his tour of duty in government as a service to the country. But the work he’s leading has also been a boon to his old friends in the private sector, government procurement records show.

In April, months after Kollitides had started work at the Pentagon, he was listed on a securities filing as continuing to work for his old company as a senior adviser. Two months later, the Defense Department finalized a $281 million no-bid consulting contract with an affiliate firm, Alvarez & Marsal Federal, to advise Kollitides’ new Pentagon office, the records show.

That contract, large for consulting work even by Defense Department standards, is the second in a pair of deals that since December have awarded almost $350 million in military spending to the firm — about five times more than Alvarez & Marsal entities had received from all U.S. agencies combined in the two decades before Trump returned to office, according to federal spending data. Both of those contracts have been for work connected to Pentagon offices where Kollitides is the head or has a senior role.

The deals remain shrouded in secrecy, records show, because they were signed under an unusual contracting method the Defense Department uses to fund experimental weapons — work A&M has never claimed to do. They have begun to send unprecedented sums of taxpayer money to a company that boasts helping government agencies create a “customer-centric culture” and that is deeply intertwined with the private equity firm where Kollitides was a partner for almost 10 years. The two partner firms tag-team investment deals and share back-office support, company documents and federal filings show.

Kollitides was still working with A&M Capital when the deals were signed. It’s unclear if he will benefit financially from the windfall of military spending on A&M consulting. His employment at the Pentagon is under a special classification that allows him to keep his financial disclosures confidential.

Ethics experts said it’s generally illegal for executive branch officials to play a role in awarding contracts that would have a direct impact on their own finances, unless they were granted a waiver.

“It looks way too cozy to be legitimate. I think taxpayers should be appalled,” said Virginia Canter, a former federal government ethics lawyer. “There are a million consulting firms in D.C. and New York. Why would you sole source this contract? They’re not sending replacement parts for a ship that is sinking.”

After ProPublica sent questions to the Pentagon, Kollitides and both A&M entities early this week, A&M Capital said Kollitides had just stopped working there days earlier.

In a statement, A&M Capital said it is a “separately capitalized and separately managed firm from the Alvarez & Marsal consulting business” and its “management and employees have no involvement in the day-to-day operations of the consulting business, and vice versa.” The firm said that none of Kollitides’ work for it related to the “defense industry, the Department of War or Mr. Kollitides’ government service.”

The Alvarez & Marsal consulting business did not answer any of ProPublica’s questions, including how it became aware of the possibility that it could seek the $281 million no-bid contract and what services it is providing to Kollitides’ Pentagon team. The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported the existence of some of the Alvarez & Marsal contracting.

“We are proud to serve clients across all industries, and all levels of government,” the company said in a statement. “The common denominator is always the same: we help solve difficult problems.”

“It looks way too cozy to be legitimate. I think taxpayers should be appalled.”
Virginia Canter, former federal government ethics lawyer

Kollitides did not respond to questions about whether he played a role in A&M securing contracts to work for his office, but a Pentagon spokesperson replied for the department and on Kollitides’ behalf saying they both followed all applicable rules.

“The Department of War maintains a rigorous, multi-layered ethics framework that includes financial disclosure reviews, divestitures where appropriate, and screening to prevent conflicts of interest,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Jacob Bliss wrote in an email. Kollitides, he added, “is in full compliance with all ethical laws and regulations. Any claims otherwise are false.”

There is widespread bipartisan agreement that the Pentagon’s procurement systems are in need of radical reform and private-sector know-how could help the country better secure supply lines and accelerate the development of new weapons to ensure the military is prepared to fight future wars.

But current and former defense officials say the massive spending for connected consultants is a reflection of a changed Defense Department under Trump. They say a clubby and politicized culture has taken hold in a wing of the Pentagon controlled by Kollitides and other former Wall Street executives recruited by Steve Feinberg, the billionaire private-equity titan who is now the deputy defense secretary. It’s an operation, they say, that favors people and companies that have close ties to the administration.

This year, ProPublica reported that the Office of Strategic Capital, a unit at the Pentagon that Kollitides helps lead, granted a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr. a $620 million loan after a top aide to the president intervened on the company’s behalf. A group of Democratic lawmakers accused the office of “a staggering level of corruption and influence peddling.”

ProPublica also reported that the same Pentagon unit was considering a loan to Unusual Machines, a second company connected to the president’s son. A defense official told ProPublica recently that the unit is now in the late stages of a $220 million loan for the Florida drone parts maker, where Trump Jr. sits on the advisory board and was granted a stake.

The Pentagon did not respond to a question about the advancing loan process for Unusual Machines and if Trump Jr.’s connections were playing a part. After the earlier loan to a Trump-connected company, the Pentagon said “no company receives preferential treatment” and “political connections play absolutely no role in the Department’s funding decisions.” Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson pushed back on criticism, saying the Defense Department is conducting extensive due diligence on potential lending.

That Pentagon lending unit was launched during the Biden administration with an open application process for interested companies. Current and former officials and people who have interacted with the office say Kollitides and other leaders now rely more on their own personal networks to choose companies to fund — as well as the consultants to vet those deals.

Multiple Pentagon Hats

That reliance on personal networks is how Kollitides got to the Pentagon.

Feinberg first hired Kollitides more than two decades ago.

Then a rising private-equity star who had graduated from Columbia Business School, Kollitides moved up the ranks at Cerberus, Feinberg’s firm, taking the reins of its aerospace, defense and government groups. In 2012, Kollitides took on an especially sensitive and more public job for the private-equity giant. Kollitides was named chief executive of a Cerberus company combining Remington, the nation’s oldest gun maker, with more than a dozen other firearms and parts companies, eliminating hundreds of jobs from New York to Georgia to Montana.

After three years with the Cerberus-owned gunmaker, Kollitides left and became a partner at Alvarez & Marsal Capital, an offshoot of A&M consulting, whose co-founder also had long-standing business ties to Feinberg.

Some former business associates said they were not surprised that Kollitides jumped at the chance to rejoin Feinberg at the Pentagon. The two share a love for firearms and defense industry investments. They have also both described their work addressing the military’s most vexing supply chain issues as a patriotic calling.

“Americans need us at the Pentagon and our civilians and our contractors to do better,” Feinberg said last year. “We can’t fail, we can’t make excuses, we must succeed.”

On social media, Kollitides has shown the kind of partisanship long taboo in the Pentagon but now fostered in its ranks by Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Kollitides has decried the “Democrat Party,” warned of the ills of socialism and posted that “the government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.”

Over the last year, Feinberg has continued to heap responsibility on Kollitides: naming him his co-chief of staff and senior adviser; vice chairman of the Office of Strategic Capital’s investment committee; and director of two other new offices, the Economic Defense Unit and the Business Operators for National Defense, or BOND — the office with the $281 million no-bid contract.

His employment status allowing him to hold any of those roles at the Pentagon is somewhat of a mystery.

Unlike Feinberg, who was confirmed to his post by the Senate, Kollitides was reportedly first brought onto the federal government last year as a special government employee, or SGE, a designation that allows someone to work in government for no more than 130 days a year. Kollitides seemingly exceeded that cap several months ago.

But in the Pentagon’s email system, Kollitides’ name now carries an abbreviation signifying he has been designated an HQE, or highly qualified expert. His employment classification, which the Pentagon confirmed, is designed to hire people who bring “enlightened thinking and innovation” to Defense Department roles that can last up to six years.

That distinction brings a unique benefit for Kollitides. Financial disclosures filed by HQEs are generally confidential, while those of high-ranking SGEs are often subject to release once a person fills a government role for more than 60 days. It’s unclear if Pentagon ethics officials granted Kollitides a waiver to keep any disclosures confidential.

(ProPublica requested Kollitides’ financial disclosure forms in August, but the Pentagon has not yet responded.)

Kollitides’ continued tie to Alvarez & Marsal Capital surfaced in April in a securities filing by a second company with which the defense official was taking a leadership post.

Days after Feinberg named him the head of BOND, granting Kollitides deep visibility into weapons production rates of U.S. military contractors, Kollitides took a seat on the board of D. Boral Acquisition I, an offshore shell company whose affiliate D. Boral Capital has partnered with defense-related businesses. Bloomberg Government first reported the filing in July, and that Kollitides stepped down from the position at the end of September.

Kollitides’ biography in the filing described his current roles at the Pentagon, then added that “he is also a Senior Advisor” to Alvarez & Marsal Capital and that he previously was a partner and co-head of one the firm’s funds.

The A&M entity that Kollitides is described as still advising in the filing is essentially the private-equity partner of the sprawling Alvarez & Marsal firm that includes A&M Federal, which is now providing consulting services for his offices at the Pentagon.

Though the private-equity and consulting businesses are distinct, they work together, share back-office staff for human resources and tech support, and have overlapping ownership, according to company documents. The private-equity arm describes itself as having a “strategic relationship” with the consulting side of A&M. The firm boosts its investment decision-making by working with the consulting firm’s thousands of employees around the globe to assess particular companies. And after the fund takes a stake in a company, it deploys the consulting arm’s employees to improve that firm’s operations and make the company more valuable.

In other words, the fund’s success hinges on the consulting firm’s.

Whether Kollitides violated government ethics rules hinges on details that he and the Pentagon have declined to provide.

A Defense Department official told ProPublica that Kollitides “does not and has never had” any investments or financial relations with A&M consulting. The official said Kollitides is also “recused on any conflicted matters related to A&M Capital,” which could be referring to Defense Department decisions related to companies A&M Capital has a financial stake in.

Ethics experts said that without a written waiver, executive branch officials are generally barred from participating in decisions, such as the awarding of a contract, that would have a direct impact on their financial interests. That law, the experts said, could apply even if the official doesn’t have a stake in a company but just draws a salary — the rationale being that they’ve improved the odds that the company will be able to continue paying them.

The Pentagon official did not answer specific questions about whether Kollitides was being compensated by A&M Capital when the contracts were signed, if he played any role in the contract decision-making process or if he sought or received an exemption to do so.

A “Blank Sheet of Paper” Contract

A&M’s first contract with the Pentagon was signed in December, months after Kollitides joined the government. That $67.6 million deal was awarded to Alvarez & Marsal Federal through a Defense Department entity focused on efforts to strengthen the nation’s industrial base.

The full scope of work that A&M provided is unclear. But documents reviewed by ProPublica show that by late last year, the firm had begun helping to vet possible loan deals for the Office of Strategic Capital, the lending unit then run in part by Kollitides.

Like that first contract, the larger, $281 million deal that followed to advise Kollitides’ BOND office came in the form of what is called an OTA, or other transaction agreement, which allows agencies to bypass regular federal contracting rules on public disclosure and oversight.

Congress first authorized the Defense Department to use the contracting method in the 1980s to fund breakthrough technologies without publicly disclosing much about the work. The Pentagon has increasingly turned to OTA contracts over the last decade to quickly fund a broader range of one-time costs, including prototype weapons and urgent production needs, even as government auditors have lamented OTAs as a “blank sheet of paper” arrangement with little oversight or accountability.

Still, experts said an OTA contract for consulting work was extraordinary. That’s because consulting is one of the simplest services the military can buy, and it has a long history of doing so through competitive bidding. Firms often publish the hourly costs for their associates, managers and other work before solicitations are posted.

But like black-box OTA contracts for secret weapons systems, the funding mechanism has hidden from public view details of what taxpayers are getting for the money.

The sheer size of the A&M contract stunned experts.

At $281,089,206.65, the consulting contract is among the largest OTAs funded through the Defense Department’s main support division in the last decade, including for top secret semiconductor projects and underwater drones, records show.

The Pentagon has said little about the impact of BOND since Hegseth claimed in February that the new entity would revolutionize military purchasing.

The defense secretary said that under the program, the military would embed former corporate executives, or, as he put it, “elite, private-sector patriots” to help optimize and accelerate the manufacturing of critical munitions. Hegseth said he thought the exercise would help the Pentagon increase resiliency in supply chains. The “era of managed decline is over,” he said.

In private recruitment materials for those executives, as well as for candidates to fill posts in other Kollitides-run units, the stakes and the mission for BOND were described in even starker terms: Neoliberalism and trade deals have left the U.S. as a country that “can no longer manufacture ships, munitions or planes in a timely manner.”

The recruiting materials cast the job of fixing that systemic problem as part-time work: “Recently retired Fortune 100 executives spend five days per month solving public- and private-sector operational challenges,” read pages viewed by ProPublica.

Two people familiar with A&M’s work for BOND said the firm’s consultants have accompanied former executives on trips to review work at major defense contractors such as Lockheed, Boeing, RTX and BAE Systems. BAE acknowledged a visit by BOND representatives but declined to comment further. Lockheed, Boeing, RTX and other companies contacted by ProPublica did not respond to requests for comment.

Contracting experts said that A&M is likely not guaranteed the full amount, and that contracts like these typically span several years, but records show A&M has already been paid about $31 million.

Not everyone, however, is welcome to participate.

One former military officer who worked in the defense industry told ProPublica he was contacted by an outside recruiter for Kollitides’ new BOND office. The recruiter, he said, told him that all applicants would be asked who they voted for.

The former military officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, said he expressed discomfort with that line of questioning. He received an email shortly after from the recruiter telling him he was no longer under consideration. The Pentagon did not respond to a question about the officer’s account.

“Getting more effective and efficient is not a political question,” the former officer said.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.

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Pentagon update on National Defense Strategy cites progress, omits key threats

Patrick Tucker — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:41:40 -0400

The Pentagon’s latest report about its implementation of the National Defense Strategy notes progress on accelerating weapons production, cutting red tape, and persuading European governments to boost defense spending—but is light on problems such as Russia’s increasing aggression in Europe and the high cost of U.S. wars in the Middle East.

The report to Congress, dated Sept. 22 but pushed out on Defense Department social media on Tuesday, argues that the Trump administration has made “significant progress implementing the 2026 National Defense Strategy’s guidance” in several areas. It cites a historically large budget request that includes funding for undersea forces, long-range air forces, long-range ground fires, and satellites for communication and intelligence; and $53 billion to accelerate the development of munitions.

The report arrives one day before Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s scheduled “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. He is likely to talk about some of the update’s key themes, according to one person familiar with the matter.

The update cites progress made in the Golden Dome for America, or GDA, effort to build a continental defense against drones and missiles. “DoW has already conducted our first live-fire event, during which we successfully demonstrated key aspects of GDA command-and-control (C2) as well as integration of other key capabilities,” it says.

The update says the Pentagon has worked with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission to ease the development and testing of counter-drone defenses. “We have created a first-of-its-kind process for the rapid coordination and safe incorporation of next generation C-UAS technology” into the National Airspace System, it says.

The update touts the administration’s effort to persuade European allies to spend more on their militaries and contribute more to plans for the continent’s defense. At least one alliance defense leader—Paweł Ksawery Zalewski, secretary of state at Poland’s Ministry of National Defence—has said the NATO 3.0 concept should not be misunderstood as a harbinger of a U.S. retreat from the alliance. “Polish armed forces and American armed forces have never been so close and so good and so deep as today,” Zalewski told a U.S. audience last week.

But the report glosses over conditions that have worsened since the National Defense Strategy was published in January—in part, because of President Trump’s decision to start a war on Iran.

For instance, while the NDS holds as a goal the replenishment of the U.S. arsenal, the new report doesn’t mention that Operation Epic Fury and other Middle East operations have set back that goal by “'months and years,” as a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it in May. Nor does the report mention the NDS’ warning against “endless wars, regime change, and nation building”—the latter two being among the many justifications given by the Trump administration for its war on Iran.

It skips the fact that the NDS said regional allies should deter Iran and that it said further military action to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon would be unnecessary in the wake of June 2025’s “Midnight Hammer” bombing.

Instead, the update asserts that the Defense Department “anticipated that such a need [for strikes against Iran’s nuclear program] might be forthcoming.”

But perhaps the report’s most significant omission, which it shares with the NDS itself, concerns Russian actions: hybrid and kinetic action against NATO members, military assistance to Iran, and intensifying the war on Ukraine.

Instead, the update notes that the United States reduced the number of manned brigade combat teams in Europe from “five to three, returning us to the level of BCTs in Europe in 2021.”

Max Bergmann and Otto Svendsen, writing for the Heinrich Böll Foundation on Sept. 24, say that “a potential U.S. force posture reduction in Europe will leave the continent vulnerable to further Russian aggression.”

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The Army gave General Dynamics $533M to build an artillery plant that produced nothing

Jesse Coburn, ProPublica — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:37:09 -0400

A robot was on fire. Again.

It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week.

Only weeks earlier, defense officials and executives had touted the factory’s innovative new machinery, imported from Turkey, at a gala opening ceremony. But employees were already used to spectacular mishaps, fiery and otherwise. “After the second, third, fourth time, it just became almost normal,” one former worker said. “It got to the point where I was not surprised by anything that happened there.”

Instead of producing shells in an efficient and streamlined fashion, the pricey machines kept failing in bizarre ways. The robot arms would swing out of control, smashing into carefully calibrated equipment, and sometimes they would unexpectedly drop hunks of steel 5 feet down to the floor. The factory’s signature device, meant to precisely stretch the steel for the artillery shells, instead often cracked it beyond repair. Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell. “We really didn’t have any standardized practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.” To workers, even the factory buildings themselves came to feel doomed, with acrid smoke hanging in 100-degree heat over foundations seemingly sinking into the earth.

The situation never improved. The U.S. Army, which funded the factory, ordered work halted on two of its three production lines in August 2025. By then, General Dynamics had blown eight deadlines. Work on the third production line continued, but the facility never produced a single usable shell, according to a report from the Department of Defense’s inspector general in July.

The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor — which provided the factory’s much-hyped but little-proven equipment — publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back.

Just the opposite: General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest defense companies, has been showered with new contracts, continuing its track record as one of the greatest beneficiaries of Pentagon spending. The company is still in charge of the factory. It recently announced that it will fix things there by bringing in another much-hyped but little-proven technology.

“It’s an absolute disaster,” said one former official in an Army office supervising the project. “The Army should’ve gone after recovering money from General Dynamics,” added the official, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Publicly, the Army has been tight-lipped about what, exactly, went wrong at the factory, located in a sprawling suburb called Mesquite. The inspector general report described the failure but offered few specifics. It didn’t name the companies involved, much less any of the individuals responsible. The report’s recommendations were tepid: The Army should determine whether the contract was “appropriately issued,” how “the money was spent” and whether it can recoup any of it. It should also “identify and implement a solution” for producing more artillery. Army officials deflected blame, telling the inspector general that they didn’t do anything wrong.

In a detailed statement to ProPublica, the Army said it will recover funding for the project by getting unspecified discounts from General Dynamics on production orders. “The Army is exercising rigorous oversight to ensure every dollar invested delivers capability to the warfighter,” the statement read. “Where vendors fail to meet contract specifications, as seen at the Mesquite facility, we are evaluating contract performance, seeking recoupment of funds, and pivoting resources.”

As for General Dynamics, it has given no public explanation whatsoever. The company has said that it “met or exceeded requirements,” according to the inspector general report. General Dynamics declined an interview request from ProPublica. Company spokesperson Jeff Davis said ProPublica’s reporting “fundamentally mischaracterizes the circumstances and falsely impugns our record of employee safety and truthfulness with our customer.” He continued: “An article based on this foundation would be a materially false and misleading hit piece.” Davis did not respond to ProPublica’s request that he specify the alleged errors.

ProPublica reconstructed how the project went awry through interviews with 36 current and former employees of General Dynamics, the Army, the Pentagon and the White House. ProPublica also reviewed internal company documents as well as photographs and videos taken inside the factory.

Those involved described a project that was rushed and ill considered from the start. Congress paved the way, removing government contracting guardrails — meant to ensure taxpayer money isn’t wasted — so that Ukraine-related defense projects could be funded quickly. The Army took advantage, handing General Dynamics lucrative no-bid awards without knowing whether the machines it planned to use could perform the desired work. The Army’s due diligence was inadequate, four former Army and General Dynamics officials told ProPublica.

Compared to the multibillion-dollar budgets of other DOD projects, the financial cost of the Texas debacle is small. But the lack of consequences for the companies involved, in the view of defense-spending critics, is symptomatic of a larger problem: a deep-rooted culture at the Pentagon and in Congress in which expensive failures lead only to more spending. Such critics fear that extreme cases like this one could become more common if the Trump administration succeeds in boosting the defense budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. The administration is also seeking tens of billions of dollars for its war against Iran and pressuring defense companies to quickly ramp up weapons production.

“Too often the contractors have no accountability for their mistakes,” defense budget researcher William Hartung said. The Texas failure, he said, “is a foreshadow of what’s to come if the Trump administration gets the budget it asked for.”

The Pitch

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 felt like an emergency to the Biden administration. For General Dynamics, it was an opportunity. And Firat Gezen was ready with a pitch.

In six years running General Dynamics’ Ordnance and Tactical Systems business, Gezen had earned a reputation as a deft strategist and salesman. At 50, he wasn’t an engineer, and he had no experience running factories. He had spent decades working on the financial side of the weapons business. With a ready smile and a delivery as smooth as his perfectly bald head, he knew how to woo corporate leaders and Pentagon arms buyers alike.

Gezen was also shrewd. In 2020, after the Army sought to diversify its artillery supplier base by contracting with a small Pennsylvania company, Gezen swooped in and bought that company. That allowed General Dynamics to maintain its stranglehold over the production of metal bodies for the standard American artillery shell, referred to by its caliber: 155 mm. “Firat throws his arm around you and talks to you nicely,” one former Army official said. “But he’s got, like, five things that he’s the sole provider of, and it’s exclusive. He’s got you locked up forever.”

Firat Gezen, former president of General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems U.S. Army photo by PFC Brandon L. Perry

That put General Dynamics in an ideal position. Russia and Ukraine were firing thousands of shells back and forth each day. The United States was a key supplier to Ukraine, but decades of disinvestment had left the U.S. artillery industry emaciated. In March 2022, Congress passed the first in a series of bills allocating billions of dollars for Ukraine-related causes, including boosting artillery production. The next month, President Joe Biden pledged to send shells to Ukraine, and he wanted to move fast. But first someone had to make them.

The 155 mm shell has been a military workhorse for a century, owing to its simple, lethal power. Packed with TNT, the 33-inch cylinder can travel 10 miles when shot out of the barrel of a howitzer and send fragments flying hundreds of feet upon impact. But decades of asymmetric warfare in the Middle East, in which the United States relied largely on drones and bombs, had led some to believe the days of artillery battles were waning. By 2022, General Dynamics was the only producer of 155 mm metal shell bodies in the country, mainly in a century-old facility in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Given that, the company was an obvious candidate to meet the sudden new demand. General Dynamics could simply replicate Scranton’s traditional manufacturing method, which dated back to the time of the Korean War. But in meetings with Pentagon officials in the fall of 2022, Gezen proposed an alternative: What if the Army funded a state-of-the-art production line that used a promising new technique?

A soldier attends to 155 mm shells in Ukraine in March 2025. Dmytro Smolienko/Urinform/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Central to this proposal was a virtual unknown in the world of American defense: Repkon. The company had been operating in its home country of Turkey for decades, providing “turnkey production facilities in the metal forming industry.” (Coincidentally, Gezen himself was born to Turkish parents in the United States.)

But Repkon had never received a Pentagon contract, and certainly not for its signature metalworking process called “flow-forming.” Whereas the Scranton method mainly involves molding ultrahot steel in giant forging presses, Repkon added a step in which a fast-spinning machine squeezes and rolls out the metal like clay on a potter’s wheel. The advantage, Gezen told defense officials, is that the same equipment could produce shells of various calibers. Most important, Repkon had a production line already available, meaning General Dynamics could start making shells faster than if it had to procure traditional equipment piece by piece.

Warning signs abounded. Army officials learned that the production line that Repkon wanted to sell had been designed to produce an older, simpler model of 155 mm shells, which was made with different steel. It wasn’t clear that the Turkish equipment could even work with the steel used to make the newer 155 mm model, as the equipment had never actually produced it, according to four former General Dynamics and Army officials. Repkon said other countries were using the machines to produce the older model. But the Army and General Dynamics could not inspect those active production lines, Repkon told them, citing customer privacy.

The Army could have balked at all of this and insisted on learning more about the capacity of the Repkon machines to perform the desired work. But learning more would’ve taken time, and time seemed in short supply. “There was incredible pressure to go fast,” a former Army official said. Everybody moved forward.

In November 2022, the Army raced to give General Dynamics the first in a series of contract awards for the project that would ultimately be worth nearly $600 million if carried to completion. The next month, Congress granted the DOD extraordinary powers to award money for Ukraine-related causes without the usual contracting safeguards, dropping competitive bidding requirements and restrictions on so-called undefinitized contracting actions. UCAs allow a company to begin work even before finalizing the terms of its contract with the government. One defense executive compared them to “building the airplane as you’re flying it.”

The Army made the most of its expanded powers, awarding General Dynamics a number of UCAs without considering alternate proposals in a competitive bidding process. (The Army told ProPublica it selected the company because of its unique artillery production experience.)

In fact, the Army was so enamored with the proposal that it decided to order even more than Gezen had pitched. Instead of contracting for one Repkon production line, the Army signed up to buy three. Without knowing whether any of them would work.

Gezen had never overseen a project this ambitious. Until then, he had mainly presided over smaller expansions of existing factories that used traditional methods. But he was optimistic it would work. “He’s extremely aggressive, willing to take risks,” one former colleague said.

Some of the Army’s scrutiny of the proposal occurred only after it began awarding contracts for it. The service and General Dynamics sent staffers to Turkey to inspect Repkon’s machinery, but they never inspected a full production line in action and there weren’t enough experts who could spot potential defects in the equipment, four former General Dynamics and Army officials said. Crucially, before greenlighting the deal, the Army did not require General Dynamics to demonstrate that it could use the Repkon equipment to complete the entire production process and make shells that met the Army’s specifications. (The Army told ProPublica that “formal testing could not occur prior to full machinery installation.”)

If the typical contracting safeguards had been in place, perhaps everything that followed could have been prevented. If the Pentagon had been forced to open the project to competitive bidding, it would have had to consider other proposals in a painstaking review process. If restrictions on UCAs had been in effect, the Pentagon would have had to slow down and finalize the terms of the deal before allowing it to proceed, which might have surfaced its fatal flaws.

But one man’s due diligence is another man’s red tape. Soon, Repkon’s flow-forming machines were sailing across the Atlantic, heading eventually for Mesquite.

“This Is Actually Hell”

On May 29, 2024, the mood in Mesquite was triumphant. After two short years of planning, the factory was opening, and defense officials and executives gathered there to celebrate.

Former Army Secretary Christine Wormuth at the opening of General Dynamics’ artillery factory Sgt.1st Class Nicole Mejia/U.S. Army

“Our nation’s defense relies not only on our soldiers and other servicemembers in uniform but on production facilities like this one,” then-Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told seated dignitaries. She stood at a podium branded with the General Dynamics logo, with two howitzers posed behind her. She thanked the company’s CEO, Phebe Novakovic, and Gezen by name. “It’s a pleasure to highlight the fantastic work you all have done,” she said.

But everything was not as fantastic as it appeared. Artillery shells displayed around the plant that day had been shipped in from elsewhere, three former workers told ProPublica. A worker picked one up and was startled to discover it was fake — seemingly made of plastic. General Dynamics had already failed to perform a scheduled first article test, meant to demonstrate the facility could produce shells that met the Army’s specifications. The facility was supposed to start cranking out shells soon, but machines were barely functioning.

Soon problems seemed to explode out of every corner, according to interviews with 12 former factory workers. For one thing, the flaming robot arms also kept smashing into things. They slammed into computer numerical control machines, breaking their windows and bending their doors. They knocked over shells. They bashed into safety fences. Workers talked about the arms going “rogue” and began calling one of them “Johnny 5” after a sentient military robot from a 1980s movie.

Even simple equipment failed with slapstick regularity, six workers said. Conveyor belts broke down. Automated carts got lost. Safety gates meant to shut down machines when workers approached did not shut down machines when workers approached. A pipe exploded, spraying water up to the ceiling. Parts on Repkon machines deformed, leading a worker to discover that they were made with Chinese steel, possibly in violation of federal regulations. (The Army said it has no evidence of such violations.)

Smoke hung in the air; it rolled off the press machines when robots sprayed them with lubricant. Workers could feel the smoke in their lungs. When they blew their noses after shifts, their mucus was black. A worker complained to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about a “respirable hazard” at the factory, according to an OSHA record and spokesperson. The agency opened an investigation in October 2024, and an inspector visited the facility. The smoke-spewing press machines were scheduled to be operating on the day of the visit, but for some reason they weren’t running during the inspection, according to four former workers. OSHA issued no penalties, the agency told ProPublica. Staffers started to think it wasn’t just Repkon’s faulty equipment to blame for problems at the factory — it was General Dynamics’ management, too.

The plant could reach Sahara Desert temperatures when the furnaces or presses were on. “This is actually hell,” one worker thought to himself. It was hotter still inside cabinets containing drives that controlled critical machines, where it was regularly 140 degrees, two former workers told ProPublica. An outside inspector warned in an email reviewed by ProPublica that, at that temperature, “you would not only have drives failing but also human lives failing.”

Every day seemed to bring more of the same: another machine broken, another frantic effort to repair it, another batch of misshapen shells tossed into the discard pile. As 2024 became 2025, little seemed to get better.

With so few shells passing inspection stations along the production line, many workers had nothing to do. A cat-and-mouse game ensued. Bored staffers spent endless hours gazing at their phones, leading supervisors to restrict phone use. So workers began bringing crossword books. Managers nixed those. Some workers were seen sleeping, so supervisors took away chairs.

“We sat around twiddling our thumbs, trying to find work, trying to figure out what was going on,” said Natashia Passmore, a former production technician in the plant. “It was a waste of government money, and it was a waste of our time.”

The Dumpster Fire

Tension rose between the Americans hired by General Dynamics and Turkish workers sent over by Repkon. The Repkon team was there to install the equipment, but it seemed equally flummoxed by the problems. General Dynamics workers found them evasive. They would give curt responses to questions in English but then be seen holding long, animated conversations in Turkish outside during frequent smoking breaks. A carelessly discarded cigarette butt sparked a real-life dumpster fire, three former workers said.

Repkon was especially secretive about the flow-forming machines, refusing to answer most questions about their operations. General Dynamics workers could tell when Repkon was testing one of them, because they would find metal shards scattered on the floor around it later. The shards looked like alligator teeth. “Oh, the tooth fairy was here,” one worker would think to himself.

Paranoia set in. Repkon refused to share passwords needed to control important equipment, according to five former General Dynamics employees. Sometimes workers would be startled by the sight of a machine moving by itself and realize it was being controlled by someone in Turkey. Spooked, General Dynamics workers tore out hardware to cut off remote access to the machines, two former workers said.

Rumors swirled among the Americans that the Turks were purposefully sabotaging machinery — or perhaps even engaged in some convoluted form of espionage. “It was astonishing how little progress we would make, month after month, year after year,” one former General Dynamics worker said. “People started speculating, ‘I wonder if they’re spying on us.’” General Dynamics assigned someone to shadow the Repkon workers in the factory, two former staffers said. (The Army said it has no evidence of sabotage or spying.)

Even the buildings themselves — a trio of vast, anonymous boxes tucked into the crook of two freeways — were plagued with problems. Walls cracked, and daylight became visible around window frames. Doors began dragging on concrete floors. When it rained, water would flood in — “like a tsunami,” one former worker said. The foundations appeared to be shifting or sinking, six former employees said. It was as if the whole dysfunctional factory — its fires and smoke, its idle workers and haywire machines — was being slowly sucked down into the earth.

Faced with the kaleidoscopic array of problems, the response from General Dynamics managers always seemed to be to plow forward. “Every single time they opened their mouths, it was: ‘We need to get into production,’” one former worker said. “Production is the only thing that mattered.”

“Nobody Wins”

As the situation at the factory deteriorated, General Dynamics and the Army told a very different story to the public.

In April 2024, General Dynamics CEO Novakovic told investors: “In the U.S., we are rapidly increasing ammunition production with the opening of our Texas facility.” General Dynamics failed to conduct a scheduled first article test in Mesquite that same month.

That July, two months after the opening ceremony, Novakovic told investors that “the first line is running and producing as we anticipated.” In fact, the first line was not producing any usable shells, six former plant workers told ProPublica.

In September Doug Bush, then the Army’s acquisition czar and a key figure overseeing the project, said “there have been no major delays” to the Army’s goal of producing 100,000 artillery shells each month — a goal for which the Mesquite factory was critical. “Any delays you’ve had have been measured in, I would call them weeks, not months, certainly not years,” Bush told reporters. He downplayed the problems, describing them as merely a matter of adjusting a machine “so that it puts out shells just so, versus a little bit off.”

The next day, a laborer in Mesquite photographed the work of a machine meant to begin giving the shells perfectly smooth noses; it had instead mangled the metal into something that resembled the swirl of soft-serve ice cream.

A machine at the factory sometimes mangled artillery shells, meant to be perfectly smooth, into swirls that looked like soft serve. Obtained by ProPublica

Also in September, Secretary Wormuth touted the Army’s artillery ramp-up at a conference, saying, “part of what’s enabling that are things like the brand-new plant that we opened up in Mesquite.” One month later, an Army contracting officer sent General Dynamics a letter of concern about its performance at the facility. The company missed the Army’s deadline for completing the first production line one month after that. (Wormuth declined to comment.)

Despite it all, Gezen remained optimistic through the fall of 2024. The issues in Mesquite were mere delays, he thought, and there were plans in place to fix them, according to a person familiar with his thinking. “If Firat’s guilty of something, it’s not wanting to see the truth in the matter,” a former colleague said. He “has a tendency to not want to listen to bad news.” General Dynamics announcedGezen’s retirement in January 2025. Some industry insiders believe he was pushed out in part over Mesquite. (Gezen denied that but declined to sit for an on-the-record interview.)

The split screen of blown deadlines and rosy public comments continued into the second administration of President Donald Trump. In April 2025, General Dynamics missed the completion date for the second production line. That same month, Novakovic told investors, once again: “We are rapidly increasing munitions capacity and production with the opening of our projectile facility in Texas.” The company missed another first article test two months later.

As the failures mounted, a sinking feeling took hold in Army offices. The service assembled a team to assess the situation in the factory, which produced a report that gave little confidence the problems could be fixed. Finally, in June 2025, the Army told General Dynamics it was considering terminating the contract awards for the plant, a defense trade publication reported at the time. Two months later, the service ordered work halted on two of the factory’s three production lines.

But the Army did not unilaterally terminate the contract awards. “A termination for default would’ve taken years through the legal system, because General Dynamics wasn’t going to accept that,” a former Army official told ProPublica. “Nobody wins except the lawyers.”

This would not be the last act of generosity from the Trump administration to General Dynamics. In December 2025, according to the inspector general’s report, the government paid the company $26.3 million in “progress payments” for the second and third production lines in Mesquite, although neither line had ever produced a usable shell.

General Dynamics’ factory in Mesquite, photographed in August Desiree Rios for ProPublica

A Novel Solution

Two months ago, General Dynamics made an announcement that conjured a sense of déjà vu. To fix the problems at the factory, the company would team up with yet another unheard-of partner promising technological innovation. The solution this time? Artificial intelligence.

A news release from General Dynamics and the new company, Deterrence, was filled with techno-business jargon. “AI-enabled capabilities” and “intelligence and connectivity” would be added at Mesquite and other General Dynamics factories, the companies wrote. “AI transforms production facilities into strategic assets,” Deterrence’s CEO said in the release. “We’re building autonomous manufacturing systems that learn, adapt, and scale in real time.”

These pronouncements have baffled former Mesquite workers. “What are they talking about? There’s nothing to learn or adapt or scale,” one said. “It’s all broken.”

General Dynamics is doing this even as it replaces most of the Repkon equipment with traditional machines like those used in Scranton. How AI will wrest miracles from decades-old technology is unclear. But General Dynamics told investors it expects to be in production next year, and the Army told the inspector general that’ll amount to 20,000 shells a month.

Compared with Repkon, Deterrence is perhaps an even less conventional choice. Deterrence was established just three years ago and has never received a DOD contract. Its website gives no indication it has ever helped to manufacture anything. Its three founders have no prior defense experience. One of them worked at Tesla; the other two created a startup that enabled people to lock and unlock buildings with smartphones. Deterrence did not respond to a request for comment.

General Dynamics also pledged to put $200 million into the project. That’s a small sum for a company that generated more than $50 billion in revenue last year and gave CEO Novakovic a compensation package worth more than $25 million. (Meanwhile, the company furloughed or laid off most of the Mesquite workers.)

The Army says it won’t spend any more money on the project, but it has hardly blackballed General Dynamics. Since the Army shut down work on two production lines in Mesquite one year ago, General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems has received contract awards totaling $2.5 billion, the Army told ProPublica. (The service said this was for “distinct production lines and critical national defense requirements” unrelated to Mesquite.)

Repkon’s American offshoot is now at work setting up a TNT factory after receiving a no-bid contract from the Army worth $435 million. TNT is the primary explosive fill in 155 mm shells. Repkon Turkey’s CEO co-founded the American company, which was originally named Repkon USA. In March, it changed its name to Paligen Technologies. Some interpreted this as an effort to create distance from the Mesquite disaster. Paligen told ProPublica that it and Repkon are “different and wholly separate companies.” Repkon Turkey did not respond to requests for comment.

The one thing that key decision-makers appear to agree on is that they are absolutely not to blame. Gezen, the former General Dynamics executive, told ProPublica that the company and the Army did nothing wrong. In a brief conversation at his apartment door in a ritzy section of Washington, D.C., in May, Gezen maintained his sunny optimism. The Repkon equipment was a good option, and it may still be a good option, he said, holding an iced coffee in one hand and restraining a large dog with his other. In any case, he added, “it was the fastest option available.”

Bush, the Army’s former acquisition chief who had assured reporters there were “no major delays” to increasing artillery production, also declined to be interviewed. In a terse conversation in May, peering out from his half-closed front door in Northern Virginia, he told ProPublica: “All of this was done through appropriate procedures.”

Others who were involved, speaking on the condition of anonymity, engaged in mutual finger-pointing: The White House demanded too much too fast, Repkon and General Dynamics overpromised, the Army didn’t perform due diligence and Congress underwrote the whole thing.

The United States still is not close to producing the promised 100,000 shells per month, a former Army official told ProPublica in June, although other investments to increase 155 mm production have turned out better. Ukraine still needs those shells, the official said, but attention has once again shifted. In the Middle East, it’s other munitions that the Trump administration has rapidly burned through during its war with Iran. Trump officials are now calling for ramping up production in those areas — and fast.

“Conventional ammo is back on the back burner,” the official said. “Everything now is about interceptors, missiles.”

General Dynamics makes components for those too.

Alex Mierjeski and Jeff Ernsthausen contributed research.

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

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How Congress is reshaping the administration's FY27 defense budget

Shaun McDougall, Forecast International — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:55:32 -0400

The start of the 2027 fiscal year is less than two months away, and in typical fashion, the annual defense budget is in limbo. Three out of Congress' four defense committees have released markups that adhere to the Trump administration’s $1.1 trillion topline request. None has addressed the White House's proposal to spend another $350 billion through the unusual use of reconciliation funding, though discussions are underway for a smaller reconciliation package that could include money sought in a supplemental request for operations in Iran and other priorities.

The administration's decision to seek funding for many of its top priorities through the reconciliation process—until last year, it had never been used for defense appropriations—creates a "terrible risk," as Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, put it earlier this year. Congressional resistance to the idea of using novel funding mechanisms could mean that various programs get far less money than the adminstration wants.

Per Forecast International's U.S. Defense Budget Spotlight dashboard, the biggest drops would be seen in defense industrial base and equipment investments contained in the Defense-Wide accounts, such as:

$54.6 billion for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group
$40.6 billion for Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment
$30.5 billion for equipment funded through the Office of the Secretary of Defense
$30 billion for Defense Production Act purchases
$20 billion for the Office of Strategic Capital Loan Program
$17.1 billion for the Golden Dome missile defense initiative

Infographic by Jorge Morejon

The White House also sought to buy many munitions through reconciliation, a choice rendered fraught by the subsequent decision to launch the war on Iran and expend much of the Pentagon's stockpile. For example, the reconciliation portion of the request contained $10.9 billion for Patriot interceptors and $10.5 billion for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors. The administration also aims to use reconciliation to backfill other programs, such as the F-35, KC-130J, and several shipbuilding programs.

Acquisition adjustments

Dzens of programs across the services would see their funding adjusted under the legislation released by the House and Senate armed services committee and the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) legislation. The Senate Appropriations Committee has not released its markup. House appropriators recommended the biggest variance from the administration request: a 10 billion cut for procurement programs and a $2.2 billion plus-up for research, development, test and evaluation.

Discretionary research budgets came out ahead in all the defense bills so far: proposed increases of $2.2 billion by the HAC, $1.1 billion by the SASC, and $687.2 million by the HASC. All three committees recommended additional funding for Army and Navy research, to varying degrees, while the adjustments for the Air Force’s account were mixed. The HAC and SASC proposed to add $1.7 billion and $1.6 billion, respectively, while the HASC recommended a net reduction of $480.9 million. Meanwhile, every committee cut the Space Force’s research budget, from as little as $201.4 million by the HASC to as much as $3.1 billion by the HAC. Defense-Wide research was also cut by nearly $1 billion by the HAC and SASC, while the HASC proposed to add $558.1 million. The Air Force’s E-7, the Navy’s F/A-XX fighter, and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) are poised to benefit from congressional adjustments, while efforts like the hypersonic Conventional Prompt Strike and the Space Force’s Automate Sat C2 effort may lose funds.

The graphic below shows total procurement and RDT&E funding adjustments by branch across the three defense bills that have been released so far.

Infographic by Jorge Morejon

On the procurement side, one of the standout performers is Army aviation, which did not benefit from the overall influx of money in the FY27 request. Despite the record size of the request, Army aviation funding declined in FY27 compared to FY26 levels and was $1 billion less than originally planned by the previous administration. Driven by ongoing transformation efforts, the request reduced funding for key programs, including the UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47 Chinook. The HASC and HAC aimed to reverse some of those cuts, recommending increases of 27 percent and 47 percent, respectively, for Army aircraft procurement. However, the SASC recommended further reductions, trimming the service’s aircraft account by 7 percent. Following the initial release of the FY27 request, the Pentagon said it was open to revisiting its proposed aircraft reductions for the Army, and additional funding is expected to appear in the final version of the defense spending bill. Outyear spending plans may also be more favorable to Army aircraft.

The SASC pushed for a 12 percent increase in Air Force missile spending, a move the other committees did not match. That adjustment stems from an additional $845 million for the service’s Family of Affordable Mass Missiles (FAMM) program, which aims to field a range of new low-cost cruise missiles. House appropriators did recommend an extra $300 million for FAMM, which would offset a lack of reconciliation funding for the program. However, the committees reduced discretionary Army and Navy missile funding across the board.

The White House asked for a boost for Navy shipbuilding this year, but lawmakers demurred. The SASC and HAC proposed reducing the shipbuilding account by 5.1 percent and 5.8 percent, respectively. The SASC removed $1 billion requested for the BBG(X) battleship, as well as $2.4 billion for CVN refueling overhauls. The submarine tender program was also cut by up to half. House appropriators recommended stripping $2.2 billion for the service’s P-8A maritime patrol aircraft.

Topline with caveats

Even without reconciliation, all the budget proposals released by congressional defense committees so far sign off on a $1.1 trillion discretionary budget request, which is around $242 billion more than the FY26 base budget and $91 billion more than the total FY26 enacted level. The latter included around $152 billion from the initial reconciliation bill signed in July 2025. The result is that many of the appropriation accounts that faced discretionary cuts in the congressional markups are still funded at higher levels than in previous years, and the administration expects future base budgets to to exceed $1 trillion.

At the same time, the administration’s efforts to quickly increase production of munitions, drones, and missile defenses, among other priorities, may have to be tempered. Reconciliation requires only a simple majority in both chambers, several Republican lawmakers said they do not see enough support to pass a $350 billion reconciliation bill. Meanwhile, the defense industry is already struggling to keep up with growing demand.

The GOP has been working on a smaller reconciliation bill that includes $60 billion for the Pentagon. If adopted, that funding would primarily support initiatives contained in the Iran war supplemental request, particularly munitions replenishment. At the same time, the House and Senate have drafted continuing resolution proposals with the understanding that a final discretionary defense budget will not be passed until after the mid-term elections, meaning the FY27 budget process is far from over.

Editor's note: This post has been updated to correct a data discrepancy in the underlying legislative text. The HAC's topline procurement cut is $10 billion, with a P-8A reduction of approximately $2.2 billion.

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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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