Decades-old defense contractors are leaning into the Pentagon’s new focus on startups, entwining themselves with emerging companies that have the technologies or even the contracts they seek. “We’re making bets in advance on specific capabilities and then going back to the market to say, ‘Who are the founders, and who are taking novel approaches to building something that is unique and different and can be applied within a military context?’” said Brian MacCarthy, Booz Allen Hamilton’s managing partner of ventures.
The trend reflects the Pentagon’s new urgency to expand the military’s industrial base and bring in more tech companies. A series of recent directives from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other administration officials have prodded the Pentagon to more aggressively pursue commercial technologies, enable lower-level commanders to make their own purchases, and to use simpler contracting methods that are friendlier to would-be contractors. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has more, here.
Pentagon CTO wants AI on every desktop in 6 to 9 months. “We want to have an AI capability on every desktop—3 million desktops—in six or nine months,” Emil Michael, defense undersecretary for research and engineering, said at a Politico event on Tuesday. “We want to have it focus on applications for corporate use cases like efficiency, like you would use in your own company…for intelligence and for warfighting.”
Michael was handed oversight of the Pentagon’s main AI body—the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office—in August, after it was demoted from reporting to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg. (Michael was also appointed acting DIU chief after that office’s chief resigned a few weeks ago.)
CDAO will become a research body like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Missile Defense Agency, Michael said Tuesday. “To add AI to that portfolio means it gets a lot of muscle to it,” he said. “So I’m spending at least a third of my time—maybe half—rethinking how the AI-deployment strategy is going to be at DOD.” Nextgov’s Alexandra Kelley has more, here.
Nov. 10 is the start date for implementing the Defense Department’s new cyber and supply-chain security standard for the entire industrial base. That’s when Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification 2.0 standard will begin to appear in DOD solicitations, almost six years after Pentagon leaders began talking about it. Washington Technology has a bit more, here.
Additional reading:
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Around the world
Developing: The Trump administration could soon send the first batch of weapons for Ukraine that have been paid for by NATO allies, Reuters reported Tuesday.
The shipments fall under what’s called a Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, or PURL. And so far, there are only two shipments cleared, which are worth about $500 million each and reportedly include air defense equipment to help Ukraine defend against the constant onslaught of Russian drones and missiles.
New: Taiwan showed off the first missile to be jointly manufactured with Anduril, Reuters reported Wednesday from Taipei. It’s called the Barracuda-500, which Anduril says has a range of more than 500 nautical miles and can carry a payload weighing more than 100 pounds. Reuters calls it “an autonomous, low-cost cruise missile.”
Bigger picture: “Taiwan has set a goal of spending 5% of its GDP on defence by 2030, up from a target of 3.3% next year, and is keen for greater international support aside from the United States,” Reuters adds.
Additional reading:
Trump 2.0
There has been “a fundamental, though little-discussed, change in the administration’s national security focus,” veteran White House reporter David Sanger reported Wednesday for the New York Times. To build his case, he points to the administration’s lack of an updated national-security strategy, which Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported in mid-August.
At its core, the alleged shift concerns the administration’s draft NDS, which focuses on “defending the homeland” above any great-power threats from China or Russia.
“What’s now playing out is the administration’s interpretation of domestic defense,” which started in February with an increase in troops deployed to the southern border, followed by the creation of a militarized border zone in April, Myers reported in August. Less than two months later, Trump ordered the military to support immigration enforcement in Los Angeles—a move that a judge this month declared a violation of law. And just last month, Trump ordered the National Guard to Washington, D.C., ostensibly to “fight crime,” but they’ve since been relegated to spreading mulch and picking up trash around the city as residents have stayed home and businesses have suffered.
By the way, Senate Democrats want a congressional hearing on Trump’s deployment of the military to American cities like Washington, Los Angeles and Memphis. Dems on the Senate Armed Services Committee submitted their request to SASC Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi, Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth said Wednesday.
“The American people deserve clarity on the short- and long-term implications for national security and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars of this new focus on a mission usually reserved for law enforcement professionals,” the senators wrote to Wicker. They also note that “in many public statements since his confirmation, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has regularly prioritized the southern border over the Indo-Pacific, despite a bipartisan consensus that U.S. defense policy should focus on the complex security challenges in that region.”
“We call on the Department to explain to Congress and the American people how it plans to resource, execute and justify such a campaign,” the senators write, “and how doing so will impact military readiness, the U.S. military’s execution of core missions of deterring and preparing for war, public trust in our military, implications for servicemembers and their families across the United States and the safety of the American people.”
In addition, the administration has also greenlit a campaign of naval-based attacks in the waters around Latin America. Trump claims he’s so far authorized the military to destroy three boats transporting alleged drug traffickers, though the administration has not offered evidence to back up its claims—and some of those claims took on a different, suspect form when shared with lawmakers—and Pentagon officials have declined to elaborate on the alleged third destroyed boat.
Second opinion: “No president can secretly wage war or carry out unjustified killings—that is authoritarianism, not democracy,” Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Monday. “These reckless, unauthorized operations not only put American lives at risk, they threaten to ignite a war with Venezuela that would drag our nation into a conflict we did not choose. The American people deserve to know what is being done in their name and why. Congress must demand answers, force transparency, and hold this administration accountable before it plunges us into another needless war,” he added.
Expert reax: Trump “likes shooting at targets that can’t shoot back,” Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, told Sanger. Put simply, the president “sees the threat to the homeland as greater than the threat from China.”
For your radar: “The mystery now is whether Mr. Trump will take the next step,” Sanger writes. And that would include, as he threatened this week after the shooting that killed Charlie Kirk, “using the investigatory powers of the Justice Department, the F.B.I. and other agencies—to implicate nongovernmental organizations and political groups for supporting those he calls ‘leftist radicals,’ and leverage the findings to designate some of them as domestic terrorists.”
Indeed, Trump said Monday he wants to designate several U.S.-based groups as domestic terrorist organizations. “We have some pretty radical groups, and they got away with murder,” Trump told reporters Monday at the White House, without elaborating or fielding any questions for clarification. His Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has been pointing a finger at Democrats for several weeks, claiming in late August that it is “not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”
Even “The threats of a crackdown have already taken a toll,” the Times reported Tuesday, citing “A culture of fear among prominent Democratic donors and groups concerned about retribution.” Meanwhile, “Liberal foundation leaders have been in close touch with one another in recent days, beefing up security and discussing a letter of solidarity as they await any Trump administration action.”
Additional reading: “Prosecutors already have dropped nearly a dozen cases from Trump’s DC crime surge, judge says,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
Developing: House GOP lawmakers want $30 million for increased personal security, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday “as many lawmakers say they have canceled events or changed routines” after Kirk’s death last week in Utah.
One complication: “Party leaders such as [House Speaker Mike Johnson] currently have personal security details. That has fueled criticism from some colleagues that leaders don’t understand their fears,” the Journal writes.
“Somebody’s going to get killed” if lawmakers don’t get a larger ensemble of protective officers following closely while they travel, Tennessee GOP Rep. Tim Burchett said. “Leadership’s got their protective bubble around them. They’re not accosted when they cross the street, and there’s no Capitol Police to be seen. They don’t see that. And it’s falling on deaf ears,” he said.
For what it’s worth, Democratic Sen. Jon Fetterman was not terribly concerned about the issue when speaking to reporters Monday. “If somebody wants to take me out, it would be easy to just pop me,” the Pennsylvania lawmaker said. Read more, here.
And lastly, in case you missed it: “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists,” according to a study published by researchers at the U.S. Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice in June 2024. The authors tallied 227 such far-right attacks that killed more than 520 people. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives,” the researchers said.
Trump’s Justice Department has removed the report from its website. Investigative reporter Jason Paladino noticed the omission and wrote about it on Friday. “Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States,” the authors warned in the report. “In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”
Fortunately, the study was archived, and can be found (PDF) here.
Correction: An earlier version of this report misspelled Brian MacCarthy’s name.
Read the full article here
