Author: alaysia.mckenzie

BY BRANDI VINCENT December 8, 2025

Undersecretary of Defense Emil Michael shared details about the DOD's forthcoming pursuits to accelerate AI for in-office functions and modern warfare.

The Trump administration is gearing up to launch an ambitious new plan to spur the military’s near-term adoption of artificial intelligence assets by supplying commercial options directly to users on the ground across three categories that reflect real-world operational needs, according to the Pentagon’s chief technology officer.

Questions have been circulating about the Defense Department’s path ahead for AI since August, when the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering assumed the authority, direction, and control of the Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) via a major workforce and organizational reshuffle.

Pentagon CTO and R&E leader Emil Michael shared new details about the DOD’s latest pursuits to reform and accelerate AI integration for in-office functions and modern warfare, during a roundtable with reporters on Monday hosted by the Defense Writers Group.  

“My idea is in the next [forthcoming] weeks — so a timeframe of days or weeks — where we’re going to start pushing the deployment of these [AI] capabilities directly to some portion, if not all, of the 3 million users at the Pentagon at different classification levels,” Michael told DefenseScoop. “And once you get it in front of them, people start to learn how to use it.”

The Pentagon has a storied and complex history with AI. Although DOD officials across multiple presidential administrations have prioritized it as a critical emerging technology area in recent years, the department’s AI efforts have simultaneously been hindered by procurement, ethics and personnel challenges.

Its internal AI-pushing hub, the CDAO, achieved full operational capability in 2022. Its creation officially merged several earlier technology-focused organizations at the Pentagon — including the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Defense Digital Service (DDS), Office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Advana and Maven programs — under the deputy secretary of defense.

Earlier this year, the office was consolidated and moved into Michael’s directorate.

Noting that the CDAO’s approach and mission has shape-shifted a number of times since its early days, he said the “new regime” will be primarily focused on building stronger relationships with major AI companies to quickly deliver models and tools that are tailored for Pentagon-specific use cases.

When the office was initially created, Michael said, AI was not as commercially available for average consumers as it is today.

“Now you have four giant companies: Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI and Google, right? So, you have four investing hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure, in research and development, data centers, power cooling chips — you name it. So the explosion of capabilities has been enormous, and we’re just catching up to that. And now that there’s so much money being invested in it, and it’s so proliferated. People are using it on their phones or desktops every day. The familiarity is increasing, and there’s less fear and more excitement about it,” he said. “And now we can take the CDAO and actually try to use it to push the capability into the department for actual use cases.” 

Michael didn’t define how the office’s existing deals with those companies will support DOD’s new AI strategy. But under the plan, those use cases will likely be divided into three separate categories. 

“One is enterprise, or corporate. So we’re a large organization. How would any large organization use AI for efficiency, to just make the worker more efficient and more productive? Then there’s the intelligence use cases. How do you use it to analyze more intelligence? We have a lot of intelligence that we get from satellites and so on. We don’t analyze all this. A computer probably could do that, because it just needs power and capability to do that. And, [the third is] for warfighting,” Michael said. “For warfighting, it’s logistics, planning, modeling and simulation.”

The vision includes forward-deployed engineers, and other training and resources from the CDAO to propel AI applications.

Michael notably acknowledged that he’s having to “rebuild talent” inside the office to ensure the forthcoming use cases will be successful. He told DefenseScoop that he’s been on a “recruiting binge” to staff the CDAO, which has endured an exodus of senior leaders and other technical employees associated with President Donald Trump’s drastic federal workforce reduction campaign. 

The undersecretary dedicates timeslots weekly — during what he calls “recruiting Tuesdays” — for he and his team to email, call and interview potential candidates to join the CDAO, as well as the broader R&E directorate.

At Monday’s media roundtable, Michael emphasized that he is sharply “focused on creating a new environment where Research and Engineering can accelerate our pace and meet the demands of the changing nature of warfare.”

“We’re seeing the weapons and systems needed are dramatically different than they were for the Global War on Terror, where the adversary was an irregular army with sort of crude improvised explosive devices and these sorts of things. Now, you have very sophisticated adversaries in China and a sophisticated war happening in Ukraine and Russia, where you’re having a real change in what the battlefield looks like. You have a robot-on-robot front line now, we’ve never seen before, and that’s why you see this explosion of drone technology,” Michael said. 

He continued: “So those changes — combined with the rise of AI and how AI is going to be used for decision superiority for extending human capability beyond what a human analyst can do in any one capacity — all [of these] are new sorts of concepts that are ready for the department to start thinking about in a real way.” 

By: Cybele Mayes-Osterman  Dec. 3, 2025

The United States' 20-year attempt to stand up democracy in Afghanistandescended into a cesspool of corruption and squandered as much as $29.2 billion in waste, fraud and abuse in pursuit of unrealistic goals, according to a government watchdog report released on Dec. 3.

The scathing report is the culmination of a 17-year investigation by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, which Congress created in 2008 to investigate and oversee the United States' occupation.

Its conclusion: The American occupation was a failure, doomed from the start by unrealistic and uninformed goals, and run through with corruption and abuse of taxpayer dollars.

Former President Joe Biden announced he would withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2021. More than a week before the final American troops left the country that August, the Taliban had already overtaken the capital, the Afghan president had fled and the government collapsed.

The failures of the occupation of Afghanistan resurfaced in recent weeks since a 29-year-old Afghan man who immigrated to the United States in the wake of the withdrawal was charged in the shooting of two National Guardsmen blocks from the White House, killing one. The suspect worked for years in Afghanistan with top secret, CIA-led units of Afghan fighters known for their brutality and disregard for human rights, and showed signs of severe depression and psychological stress stemming from the experience.

The shooting prompted President Donald Trump to further crack down on refugees from Afghanistan and other countries seeking asylum in the United States, a move criticized by advocates and some veterans who worked with Afghan allies.

US-backed government was a 'white collar criminal enterprise'

Congress spent about $144.7 billion on Afghanistan reconstruction – much more than the United States spent on the Marshall Plan, the push to help Europe recuperate after World War II, accounting for inflation, according to the report. That money, investigators found, stood up an Afghan government and military plagued by corruption and inefficiency, which collapsed within days when the United States withdrew its forces in 2021.

"The government we created over there ... was essentially a white collar criminal enterprise," Gene Aloise, SIGAR's acting inspector general, told reporters at a Defense Writers Group briefing.

For the first 10 or 12 years of the occupation, the United States "just ignored corruption," Aloise said. SIGAR investigators issued four reports on the issue, generating "window dressing improvements" but no significant change, he said.

Investigators identified 1,327 instances of waste, fraud and abuse, totaling up to $29.2 billion, according to the report. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on aircraft, power plants and buildings that were barely or never used.

Contractors, both Afghan and American, siphoned off billions of dollars in kickbacks and embezzled from U.S. funds, according to the report. An Afghan businessman paid $1.25 million in bribes to American servicemembers, stealing oil from the U.S. military to sell on the black market, in one case investigated by SIGAR. In another case, an American defense contractor and his wife evaded taxes on hundreds of millions of dollars in income from reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan.

SIGAR investigations resulted in 171 criminal convictions and recovered $167 billion in funds, according to the report. But some corrupt Afghan officials and contractors were off limits, Aloise said.

"We would identify guys who were bad guys who earned kickbacks, bribes, whatever, but they could have been working for the CIA or another agency, so we were told, 'hands off,'" said Aloise.

"We did what we could do," he added.

The United States spent $38.6 billion on military and civilian infrastructure and weapons for the Afghan army, including 96,000 ground vehicles, 427,300 weapons, 162 aircraft and 17,400 pairs of night-vision goggles, the report found.

When the United States withdrew, about $7.1 billion of weapons were left behind. Facilities Americans built for the army that were not destroyed "can be assumed to be under Taliban control," the report concluded.

In addition, the report found that the U.S. military worked with Afghan warlords accused of human rights atrocities. It maintained a "tacit acceptance of sexual violence by Afghan allies," including "tolerating" the practice of "boy play," or the widespread sexual abuse of young boys, according to the report.

Investigators were stonewalled by Biden administration

Throughout the inspector general's investigations, Aloise said, investigators faced a "general lack of cooperation" from U.S. officials. It was worst during the Biden administration, which "just shut us down for a year," he said.

"They wouldn't talk to us; they wouldn't work with our people," he said.

In interviews with SIGAR, senior U.S. officials said they felt the effort was doomed years before the Afghan government's 2021 collapse.

"Even in my early days, at least I had a sense that we were kidding ourselves," William Wood, the ambassador to Afghanistan from 2007 to 2009, told investigators in the report.

In the 20-year war, more than 2,320 U.S. servicemembers, 69,000 Afghan military and police, and 46,000 civilians were killed, according to Brown University's "Costs of War" project.

"The cost was much higher than just money," Aloise said.

Sept. 18, 2025 | By Shaun Waterman

The Pentagon needs a Digital Command and a Digital Warfare Corps, along with other changes, to take advantage of critical new technologies, according to a think tank founded by former Google CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt. 

How the U.S. military takes advantage of innovation in three fields in particular—sensors, AI and autonomy—will determine if it can maintain its technological advantage over China and other potential adversaries and offset their greater numbers of personnel and equipment, leaders from the Special Competitive Studies Project argue in a new report titled “Offset X Evolved.” 

Key to SCSP’s proposed strategy is recognizing that these technologies each play off and feed into the others, said James Ryseff, defense director at SCSP and one of the lead authors of the report, published Sept. 18.

“People talk about sensors and data, AI, and autonomy in silos,” Ryseff said at a launch event hosted by the Defense Writers’ Group. Better data from more effective sensors like synthetic aperture radar satellites, which can see through rain and fog, creates an information advantage. Artificial intelligence can organize and analyze that data and present commanders with options more quickly than any human staff team, meaning decisions can be made faster and better. And autonomous weapons platforms can execute those decisions at a speed and scale no conventional force can match: The prized lethality advantage. 

“We have to think of these three things as sort of interconnected gears that each turns the others, as opposed to isolated silos that we can pursue independently,” said Ryseff. 

Such an approach would let the U.S. “counter People’s Liberation Army’s strengths without engaging in a costly and risky attempt at a symmetrical arms race or escalation,” states the report. “Rather than trying to overmatch China ship-for-ship or missile-for-missile, the U.S. can invest in capabilities that undermine the foundation of China’s anti-access/area denial and information dominance strategies.”  

To execute that strategy and truly treat the sensors, AI, and autonomy as a whole, the report authors argue the Pentagon needs to establish new organizations: 

• U.S. Digital Command, to take over the role of U.S. Cyber Command and also take charge of information and influence operations and electronic warfare—helping control the flow of data through sensors and AI systems and onto autonomous systems. 
• U.S. Digital Warfare Corps, essentially a new service branch with its own command structure to staff Digital Command and provide technological capabilities to other commands. SCSP Vice President for Policy Ylber Bajraktari compared the arrangement to how the U.S. Space Force military service presents forces to U.S. Space Command, the operational command, though Bajraktari noted that “the analogy is imperfect.” 
• Joint Warfighting and Innovation Command, responsible for modernizing and transforming the joint force to fight the wars of today and tomorrow and bringing together “concept development, resourcing, and innovation under one roof, with a singular focus on winning the next war.” 

SCSP also recommends one percent of U.S. defense spending be set aside for a special innovation fund, initially controlled by the Secretary of Defense in close consultation with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but later to make up the budget for the Joint Warfighting and Innovation Command. 

The strategy is designed to echo that pursued by the U.S. during the Cold War, when it countered a large manpower disadvantage with Warsaw Pact troops in Europe through precision guided weapons and superior airpower. 

Yet the strategic context is also different now, said Bajraktari, and it’s even changed since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “We have a new era that’s much more confrontational, rather than competitive” between the U.S. and its great power rivals, Russia and China, he said. The situation is complicated because of the emergence of a “coalescing axis of disruptors” including Iran and North Korea alongside Russia and China. “We don’t argue that this is an alliance in the traditional sense,” he said, but there was “cooperation on capabilities, sharing of resources and other assistance that they provide to each other, diplomatically, informationally and militarily.” 

Importantly, the fulcrum of strategic power is shifting, the authors argue, tilting away from the side with the largest weapons stockpiles and towards the side best able to “evolve and adapt its military equipment and its ability to quickly scale up” the production and deployment of innovative systems. “The weapons a nation can produce before the conflict ends have as much value as the weapons they possess at its start. This is now the decisive measurement of a country’s strategic depth,” the report states. 

For the Air Force in particular, the proposed strategy would have big implications, Ryseff told Air & Space Forces Magazine by email.  

“Mass matters—not only in the form of more manned fighters and bombers, but in scalable fleets of drones and autonomous systems that can overwhelm adversary defenses, and preserve precious human pilots for critical missions,” he said, calling on DOD to “adopt a production mindset: prioritizing speed, cost efficiency, and scale in building evolving technologies, rather than assuming platforms will remain relevant for decades.” 

In the three transformative technologies the report highlights, he said, “the ability to produce quickly, update constantly, and replace rapidly will prove far more decisive than long-term sustainment of exquisite systems.” 

He said the report “also highlights the urgent need for the Air Force to build tighter feedback loops between operators and engineers so that lessons from the field translate into software and hardware updates within days, not years.” 

By Mike Glenn August 29, 2025

Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un are among more than two dozen foreign leaders expected to be in Beijing next week for China’s massive military parade marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II.

Despite the high-ranking foreign guest list, China experts at the RAND Corporation think tank say the highly choreographed spectacle featuring thousands of marching troops and hundreds of tanks and aircraft rolling through Tiananmen Square is primarily aimed at a domestic audience.

The last “Victory Day” parade was held in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the war’s end.

“At that time, [Chinese President] Xi Jinping was consolidating power and the Chinese Communist Party acknowledged serious problems with corruption,” said Timothy Heath, a senior defense analyst at RAND. “Their popularity was plummeting, and there were a host of problems eroding public support.”

After the 2015 parade, Mr. Xi launched a widespread anti-corruption campaign to bolster his credibility with the Chinese public. Beijing sees the parade as part of a patriotic push, Mr. Heath said Thursday at the D.C.-based Defense Writers Group.

The secondary audience for the Sept. 3 parade is the “Global South” and essentially any other country not called the United States or Taiwan, Mr. Heath said.

“When the first parade was announced, China was making a push to be a major actor on the global stage,” he said. “The parade came out with a message that China was opposing unilateralism and standing up for countries that felt bullied.”

China is sending a message to other countries through the parade that they are ready to assist any country willing to align itself with them. But Mr. Xi’s message to Taiwan and its main benefactor, the United States, is more ominous.

“Be careful antagonizing China. China has a lot of ways to hurt you,” Mr. Heath said.

Beijing refers to World War II as the “Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression” and said Tokyo’s surrender was a “victory for the Chinese people.”

“Now the international situation is going through changes and turbulence. Peace deficit is rising,” Assistant Foreign Minister Hong Lei said at a press conference. “We all have a formidable task in safeguarding world peace.”

He said China and the former Soviet Union provided the backdrop for the fiercest fighting in Asian and Europe during World War II.

“Both have made enormous national sacrifices. The people of the two countries fought side by side and extended each other support, saving their respective nations and the future of humanity,” Mr. Hong said.

This year’s military parade will have a heavy anti-Japan focus and demonstrate the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership over the military, analysts said.

“Xi Jinping has made institutional modernization and institutional reform a major emphasis for his tenure,” as chairman of the CCP, said Mark Cozad, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official now with RAND. “The parade plays to where the [People’s Liberation Army] has been very successful — technological modernization. They get to show their wares, and they get to show them to an international community.”

China appears to be using the World War II victory parade to make none-too-subtle comparisons between wartime Japan and the United States.

“This is a message they are promoting: There is currently a tyrannical power trying to declare hegemony around the world,” Mr. Heath said. “It was up to China and Russia and other friends to stand up to [Japan], and we can do it again if we work together.”

A major difference between the 2015 Chinese victory parade and next month’s is the deteriorating state of the relationship between Beijing and Washington, Mr. Cozad said.

“There is not a lot of confidence in China that it is going to improve anytime soon,” he said. “China’srelationship with a lot of the world has worsened due to its trade policies.”

LYDIA ANTONIO-VILA

MAY 30, 2025

Strider Technologies and Special Competitive Studies Project report warns that China is rapidly expanding its AI infrastructure in a state-led effort to dominate the global tech landscape.

A new report developed by Strider Technologies and the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) warns that China is executing a state-directed campaign to dominate global artificial intelligence (AI) and suggests that to safeguard technological leadership, the United States must match the urgency of China’s AI strategy with a coherent, whole-of-nation response. 

The report, titled “China’s AI Infrastructure Surge: How PRC Data Centers and AI Models Bridge Military Ambitions and Global Connections,” outlines China’s AI policy and recommendations for U.S. policymakers. 

During a virtual Defense Writers Group meeting on May 29, Greg Levesque, CEO and co-founder of Strider Technologies, explained that China is investing heavily in its infrastructure base, and that they’re ahead of stated policy goals when it comes to AI. 

“It’s very clear they view this as an existential race, and they are hell-bent on being number one,” said Levesque. 

“Like in every other emerging technology, and specifically AI, China has not been standing still,” said Ylli Bajraktari, president and CEO of the SCSP. “They've had a clear vision about what they want to do, they've had clear investments, and obviously, in today's world, we wanted to look at how are they doing in building this digital infrastructure when it really comes down to data centers and the compute power.”

The report states that as of mid-2024, China has built or announced plans to build more than 250 AI data centers across all regions of the country. The report also found a massive uptick in Chinese government recruitment of AI scientists in the United States. 

“That's a core part of their broader AI strategy. And I would argue that the U.S. government has no real clear mission or strategy around mitigating that,” said Levesque. 

The report states that the implications of the People's Republic of China’s (PRC's) AI infrastructure buildout for the United States and its allies are profound. The strategy detailed in the report aims to be a state-driven, globally networked campaign to gain an enduring asymmetric advantage against China. 

On China’s AI strategy, Bajraktari explained that this is a zero-sum game. 

“Whoever ends up being the first will set the rules of the road for the rest of the world,” he said. “I think in the Chinese mindset, this is a zero-sum game as well, because I don’t think they will accept any kind of scenario in which they'll end up being the second when it comes to technology competition.” 

The report outlines the following recommendations for policymakers: 

1. Restrict Security-Relevant AI Infrastructure Developers 
2. Leverage PRC Dependence on Foreign Software to Apply Strategic Pressure 
3. Strengthen International Collaboration to Monitor and Counter PRC AI Infrastructure Expansion 

The report also includes a call to action for industry leaders. 

“My fundamental view is [that] industry has to be a part of the national security solution and strategy. There's no other way around it,” said Levesque. 

The report outlines the following recommendations for industry leaders and investors: 

1. Understand the Competitive Landscape  
2. Monitor PRC Activity  
3. Eliminate Vectors of
Technology Transfer  
4. Enhance Awareness

By Frank Wolfe 

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said on Tuesday that despite rumblings about the future U.S. Golden Dome missile shield being under construction, the program is still in its early stages and that he will try to prevent the $25 billion for the program in the $113 billion DoD reconciliation bill from becoming a “slush fund.”

Golden Dome is “conceptual at the moment, frankly,” Reed, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told a Defense Writers Group breakfast. “I suspect that the DoD money in the reconciliation, which is highly unusual, about $113 billion, I think there will be a category called ‘Golden Dome,’ but that’s just potentially a slush fund. They have to identify the technologies. They have to go ahead and design an integrated plan. In my view, from what I’ve heard, unclassified, it’s more of a warning system than a firing system, although it [Golden Dome] will develop firing units to complement it. But the key now is to identify hypersonics as soon as they launch so we can engage them, but that’s still a work in progress.”

A Jan. 27 executive order from President Trump directed the development of the U.S. missile defense shield, to include space-based interceptors–a project analysts have estimated could cost trillions of dollars.

A group of five Democratic senators and 37 Democratic representatives on May 1 asked Acting DoD Inspector General Steven Stebbins to investigate the lawmakers’ conflict of interest concerns related to top Trump adviser, Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, and SpaceX’s position as a front-runner for Golden Dome contracts (Defense Daily, May 1).

“Every time I read about it [Golden Dome], there’s a paragraph about Elon Musk’s participation with Starlink as the communication link; etc.,” he said. “We have to be very careful of this because this is essentially a kill chain from observation to execution, and we typically don’t have non-military contractors in the middle of something like that. We have to think very seriously about how do we legally do this. Do we lease with the right to retain [data rights] or the right to prevent it from being leased to any other entity–these types of communications systems and weapons systems, and they’re doing that right now. Space Force is very much involved in that and trying to think out how do we put together a communications system and link it to the firing system.”

“The biggest part of Golden Dome, while I’m not the expert, is really the detection and communications systems,” Reed said. “The firing systems, if we can identify the target early, the easier part–and it’s not easy–will be to get the kill vehicle developed.”

By Courtney Albon

In the two weeks since Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a directive requiring the use of rapid procurement methods and contracting tools for all software acquisition, military officials and industry executives have expressed a mix of optimism and angst about the mandate, while also calling for more sweeping reforms to how the Pentagon develops, tests and funds software-heavy programs.

The March 6 memo directs all Defense Department components to use DOD’s Software Acquisition Pathway, along with other authorities designed to speed up the buying process and better leverage commercial providers. The tools singled out in Hegseth’s order have existed for years, but a relatively small number of programs actually use them.

“The Department of Defense has been slow to recognize that software-defined warfare is not a future construct, but the reality we find ourselves operating in today,” Hegseth said in the memo. “When it comes to software acquisition, we are overdue in pivoting to a performance-based outcome and, as such, it is the warfighter who pays the price.”

Officials have attributed the Pentagon’s slow adoption of these processes to several causes but have primarily pointed to cultural inertia and risk aversion, both from DOD leaders and within military program offices. In interviews with Defense News and at events around the Washington, D.C., region in recent weeks, industry and Pentagon leaders said they were hopeful that Hegseth’s mandate could lead to change — if it’s enforced.

They also said they view the acquisition guidance as a first step toward broader reforms to how software is funded, tested and priced, as well as how acquisition officers and program managers are trained to manage software-heavy development efforts.

Steve Morani, the Pentagon’s acting acquisition executive, said Hegseth’s order sends a clear mandate for rapid transformation.

“That’s Secretary Hegseth’s way of, just six weeks into his tenure, introducing some change,” Morani said last week at the annual McAleese Defense Programs Conference. “It’s a sign that he’s determined to drive the system to operate differently. I think we’re all on notice that, again, we’re not going to do things business as usual.”

Adjusting to cultural change

In the immediate aftermath of Hegseth’s mandate, Morani said his phone was “blowing up,” as many in the defense acquisition world were concerned about how this new way of buying software could impact their programs.

“I think there was a lot angst up front,” Morani said.

That angst is indicative of the culture change that will be required to implement Hegseth’s direction, as well as the sense that there are more changes still to come, he added.

“This is not the exception,” Morani said of the software memo. “This is going to be the standard way of doing things.”

The Software Acquisition Pathway, created in 2020, has been regarded by the department as the recommended approach for buying software. The pathway offers a tailored acquisition mechanism, recognizing that software can’t, and shouldn’t, be procured under the same process as an aircraft or ship.

Today, around 82 programs representing each of the military services are using the pathway to buy a range of capabilities — from command-and-control systems to cyber. The problem, according to one official who recently spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity, is that the pathway hasn’t been combined with other authorities designed to attract and take advantage of commercial capabilities.

Those authorities include an approach championed by the Defense Innovation Unitcalled a Commercial Solutions Opening, a type of solicitation that allows startups and non-traditional defense companies to sell products and services to DOD without navigating arduous requirements documents. DIU also leverages a contracting tool called Other Transaction awards, which isn’t subject to the same regulations as a standard contract.

When combined, these authorities allow DOD to award software contracts much faster than in the past.

Justin Fanelli, the Navy’s chief technology officer, said this shift may be jarring for some acquisition officers who are used to dealing with a rigorous source selection process that can include thousands of pages of meticulous requirements. For example, the need statement for a Commercial Solutions Opening, or CSO, can sometimes be as succinct as a paragraph.

“As you can image, not everyone’s comfortable with that, even inside the building,” Fanelli said March 19 during an Emerging Technology Demo Day in Reston, Virginia. “We’re saying, ‘Here are three sentences that are user-sponsored,’ and those serve as what we used to know as 3,000 pages of requirements.”

Speaking with Defense News after his presentation, Fanelli said the Navy is working to break down some of those barriers by offering examples of programs that have successfully used these tools and reaped the benefits.

“We are, right now, just using this opportunity to stockpile big success stories so that we can get more adoption and change our focus from risk avoidance when it comes to procurement to a focus on impact and outcomes and value-per-dollar,” he said.

Kori McNabb, a senior procurement analyst for the Air Force, told Defense News at the same event that while the shift to commercial-like buying is uncomfortable for some of the acquisition officials she works with, she’s noticed there’s been a greater sense of urgency to learn how to use these tools since Hegseth issued his directive.

McNabb highlighted the Air Force’s CSO Center of Excellence, which offers training opportunities for program officers who may have less experience with the source selection tool. In recent weeks, use of the center’s app has increased from around 200 users at a given time to close to 3,000, she said, adding that her team has upped its training webinar offerings since the memo’s release.

“We just slowly grab them and pull them along with us,” she said. “We’re like, ‘You have to come along because we’re all moving to this.’”

A new report from the Atlantic Council’s Software-Defined Warfare Commissionidentified workforce expertise — and the training required to achieve it — as a top need for DOD as it looks to better leverage software.

The report proposes DOD develop an “extensive, connected, layered and modular software-centric training program” that both raises awareness about the importance of software and establishes a foundational understanding of commercial best practices.

“While the DoD has taken steps to upskill its existing workforce for the digital age, a widely acknowledged software proficiency shortfall remains,” the commission found. “While the United States is the world leader in software talent and solutions, the DoD lacks the expertise to effectively acquire, integrate, and use software tools that are central to mission success.”

More reforms to come?

As acquisition officials prepare their workforces to implement the secretary’s software guidance, others in the defense community are looking ahead to further reforms — hoping that Hegseth’s initial memo is just the beginning of more sweeping changes.

Jason Brown, general manager of defense programs at software firm Applied Intuition, said he’s hopeful DOD is serious about enforcing the software directive, calling it a “long overdue” policy. But more reform is needed, he told Defense News in an interview.

Brown pointed to software pricing, workforce expertise and testing processes as areas that need further attention if the department wants to make progress in this area.

“Test and evaluation needs to be completely reworked,” he said. “It’s not feasible for the current, very bureaucratic, slow, cumbersome test and evaluation methodologies to also be applied to software. I think everybody recognizes that — even the test and evaluation community — the question is, what are they going to do about it and how do we get there?”

The Atlantic Council’s report offered a similar assessment of the software testing enterprise, pointing to lagging simulation capabilities and digital infrastructure.

Authored by a group of former U.S. military officials and defense experts, the report recommends the Pentagon empower and provide funding to the Test Resource Management Center to improve its digital testing capabilities.

Speaking with reporters Wednesday at a Defense Writers Group event in Washington, D.C., former acting Deputy Defense Secretary Christine Fox identified testing infrastructure as a key, near-term focus area for the department.

“The thing that the department has to grapple with is, in addition to buying the software, they need to provide the infrastructure to, particularly, the operating forces,” she said.

Along with those investments, the report suggests the department explore letting more mature software vendors self-certify some capabilities as a way to speed up software fielding and reduce bottlenecks in the testing enterprise.

The commission also recommends the Defense Department take a commercial-first approach to development and procurement, arguing that DOD too often chooses to develop software on its own when private-sector solutions already exist.

“When the DoD decides to develop custom software, this often results in higher costs, longer schedules, and increased risks,” the report states. “Commercial software is often updated continuously across a broad customer base, of which the DoD could take advantage. Instead, updating software to address threats and bugs or add functionality takes considerable time and funding.”

By Mike Glenn - The Washington Times - Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Washington is stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of budgetary and appropriations dysfunction that directly threatens the country’s military, economic and technological superiority, according to an in-depth survey released this week.

Despite the dynamism of the American private sector, inefficiencies in the public sector are hindering progress toward technological superiority, according to the study by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute.

On Tuesday, the Reagan Institute released its third annual National Security Innovation Base [NSIB] report card, which measures the health and resiliency of the nation’s security system. It gave the U.S. government mixed grades across 10 categories, including defense modernization, manufacturing capacity and the industrial base.

“Innovation leadership” received an A- grade, the highest on the report card. The nation’s manufacturing capacity and industrial base received a D, the lowest mark.

“There has long been agreement that America’s adversaries are cooperating to undermine U.S. interests, security and prosperity. Yet, flagrant shortcomings in the NSIB ecosystem remain unaddressed,” the Reagan Institute analysts wrote.

Reagan Institute Policy Director Rachel Hoff told a meeting of the D.C.-based Defense Writers Group that the American leadership on innovation has received the top mark in the survey for three years in a row.

“This is where we assess that America is really maintaining its global leadership in innovation … and in the excellence in research on the global stage, particularly in” artificial intelligence, Ms. Hoff said.

She noted positive trends in the “innovation capital” category that present opportunities to enhance the government’s investment efficiency. Government-backed innovation funding is growing and can improve a return on investment by streamlining nonfinancial barriers, according to the report.

The Defense Department provides “significant” funding for top players and innovators to forge productive partnerships across the board, the survey said, nurturing successful defense companies like SpaceX or Palantir. However, the businesses represent a small share of total contract dollars, highlighting the need for broader outreach, Reagan Institute officials said.

“We think that this is the indicator that matters in terms of measuring the actual progress, not simply activity aimed at driving progress on the input side,” Ms. Hoff said. “There’s certainly a disconnect with a downward trend in our first couple of years and now a flat trend on defense modernization.”

One of the two D grades on the report analyzes manufacturing capacity and the industrial base. The Reagan Institute analysts said the U.S. has made “targeted” improvements in production capacity and adaptability with the establishment of new production facilities.

“Fragility persists deeper in the supply chain [for example, rare earth minerals] while stockpiles of critical weapons remain dangerously low,” according to the report. “Meanwhile, China is widening its lead, producing twice the manufacturing output of the U.S.”

President Trump said he would address at least one glaring defense industrial base shortcoming during his address to Congress on Tuesday night. He announced the creation of a White House office to promote the domestic shipbuilding industry, which has lagged badly behind both allies such as South Korea and adversaries such as China in capacity.

The Reagan Institute analysts said the trends analyzed in the latest report are not immutable.

“The United States has everything it needs to secure its military, economic and technological superiority: a free and open political system that empowers its best and brightest to innovate, a prosperous economic base, and a military that is the envy of the world,” according to the report.

“But, the trends identified in this report card highlight glaring areas of weakness that whittle away at America’s advantage and provide openings for its adversaries,” the report stated.

The Army, Defense Logistics Agency, and Pentagon are working to make data-sharing easier and improve supply-chain woes.

BY LAUREN C. WILLIAMS

JANUARY 17, 2025

Virtually all of the Army’s weapons are affected by delayed or backordered parts—and mismatched computer systems are largely to blame. And it’s only been a month since a new digital tool has started to replicate that. 

“Our supply chain is huge. The Army doesn't buy all of its own parts. In fact, 90 percent of our parts—mostly low-dollar, high-volume expendables, things that go pretty quick, consumable-type stuff—we actually rely on the Defense Logistics Agency to buy them,” Richard Martin, Army Materiel Command’s director for supply chain management, told reporters on Wednesday.

“Using a Black Hawk helicopter as an example, the Army has the lion's share. The Navy also flies a similar aircraft. The Air Force flies a similar aircraft. The Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, they all have similar-type aircraft,” Martin said, at a media event following the Association of the U.S. Army’s industrial-base readiness event on Wednesday. 

But each of those entities has their own business systems. And just over a year ago, the Army realized that DLA’s systems weren’t showing data from the service’s maintenance and supply systems—and what they did get was unreadable. 

Over the last year, the service developed a tool—Army Materiel Command Predictive Analysis Suite, or APAS—that allows them to share information back and forth with DLA. They started using it in December.

“There's still some bugs in it, if you will. But it's definitely allowing them to see…the depth [of detail] that we're trying to get to and lets DLA make that procurement decision,” he said. 

“It lets DLA recognize what we are ultimately consuming,” he said. Before the systems were properly connected, the Army would need 20 of a particular part for a weapon every month, for example, but DLA would receive that data as needing 20 every few months. This created a backlog. 

“They would see, ‘hey, I need 100 [of this part]’ and the reality was I not only needed 100 immediately, because there are weapon systems down for that part, I actually needed another 200 to replenish my stocks,” he said. 

APAS also lets the Army see DLA’s lead times for part delivery and how much the agency is buying, enabling the service to manage the parts needed to make weapons operational and replenish stockpiles.

The Defense Logistics Agency handles about 5 million national stock numbers—that is, individual parts—across the military services. 

“We've started with DLA and the Army because we found that all the services we're doing forecasting separately and differently and managing their systems differently, and we needed to have a way to share the data so we could see what they were consuming and have predictive analytics we could look at where we need to have parts bought ahead of need,” Kristin French, DLA’s deputy director for logistics operations, told reporters on Wednesday. 

This accountability is crucial for industry to have enough time to configure and startup manufacturing lines, French said. 

“It takes them, sometimes a year, 18 months—in munitions, two years or more—to get parts or items,” she said. 

The DLA and the Army started a data-sharing working group, and now uses a system with API interfaces that allows the two organizations to see supply needs and availability. 

“We have to do it through protocols, because the systems are different, but we do it through API Interfaces where we can talk to each other and see what they're consuming so we can predict what we will need to procure the future requirements,” French said.

Sharing data is one of the biggest challenges in sustainment and logistics, said Steven Morani, the acting secretary of defense for sustainment. The Pentagon has been using its main data analytics platform, ADVANA, for logistics data from across the services. 

“And that actually accelerated our ability to get the weapons systems performance data into a shared environment. And it allowed us to make progress on an area that we had been quite honestly struggling to get agreements on, and that was performance metrics,” which details the health and status of various platforms, Morani told reporters during a Defense Writers Group event on Friday.  

Today, all services are putting in that data in the same way thanks to guidance issued last year. “We’re using that data to see ourselves better,” Morani said. In 2025, the Pentagon plans to add supply data metrics in hopes that it will “move us from this pool system, where the units are having to send that demand signal, for us to see the demand signal through data, understand consumption rates, and now push materiel there before you know a unit runs out. And that's really the goal of what we're trying to do.”

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said that plans to move 4,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam will put those forces far from where they are needed.

JEFF SCHOGOL


Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith cautioned on Wednesday that ongoing efforts to relocate Marines from Okinawa to Guam will move those forces away from where they are most needed.

“Frankly, Guam puts us going the wrong way,” Smith told reporters at a Defense Writers Group Breakfast in Washington, D.C. “Guam puts us on the other side of the International Date Line, but it puts us a long way from the crisis theater, from the priority theater.”

About 19,000 Marines are currently stationed in Okinawa. The United States and Japan agreed in 2012 to move about 9,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam and other locations in the Pacific, including Hawaii. About 4,000 Marines are expected to be stationed on Guam, where Camp Biaz will serve as their primary installation.

Although the Marine Corps is committed to drawing down to about 10,000 Marines on Okinawa, the move to Guam is a “challenge,” Smith told reporters on Wednesday.

For example, the Army also expects to deploy forces to Guam, and that would limit the space available for the Marines, Smith said. Apra Harbor, where aircraft carriers and other Navy ships can dock, is also undergoing infrastructure updates. In April 2023, a $106.9 million contract was awarded for an embarkation and debarkation facility for Marines.

“So, I’m not sure that is in the best strategic interests of America, to be honest with you,” Smith told reporters on Wednesday. “But it is a treaty obligation we have with Japan, which we’re going to comply with unless, and until, it changes.”

Roughly 100 logistics support Marines with III Marine Expeditionary Force began moving from Okinawa to Guam in December.

The Marine Corps supports the 2012 agreement between Japan and the United States and the planned relocation of forces to Guam or Hawaii, a spokesperson for the service told Task & Purpose on Wednesday.

“The Marine Corps will continue to explore options for the best location for the future force in the region,” they said. “The realignment of Japan-based Marines is the result of nearly 20 years of bilateral policy negotiation reflected in multiple international agreements and arrangements. This laydown honors an international agreement with the [Japanese government].”

Okinawa is part of the “first island chain,” which refers to a chain of islands in the Pacific that includes Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia, which would be the front line in a war with China. U.S. military leaders have speculated that China could attempt to invade Taiwan by 2027. Although the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 is vague about how the United States would respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, President Joe Biden has repeatedly vowed to defend the island nation.

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, testified during his confirmation on Tuesday that the incoming administration will make deterring China a top priority.

“We’re going to start by ensuring the institution understands that as far as threats abroad, the [Chinese Communist Party] is front and center — also, obviously defending our homeland as well,” Hegseth said.

China’s aggressive claims that it controls waters administered by other countries in the Western Pacific and the Defense Department’s focus on the Indo-Pacific region provide an argument to possibly consider relooking at the agreement to move Marines from Okinawa to Guam, Smith said.

“That’s obviously a domestic issue for the Japanese government to decide,” Smith said. “But what I do know is every time you give China a foot, they take a mile. They only understand one thing, which is a credible deterrent force. And that credible deterrent force has to be present to win, which to me means being in the first island chain.”