Defense news

Follow @Defense_news_us

• What will quantum computing actually look like?

  03-04-2025 23:18 via defenseone.com
  
  The field of quantum computing, like qubits themselves, exists in a state of indeterminacy, with multiple companies making big claims about wildly different approaches. On Thursday, DARPA—the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency—launched its latest effort to sort practical approaches from chimeras, handing contracts to 15 companies that will attempt to benchmark their work. So little is known about the field that there is no way—at least, not yet—to predict what
  
  Read more

• Trump directs military to control federal land along southern border

  12-04-2025 20:21 via defenseone.com
  
  President Donald Trump late Friday signed a memorandum directing several agencies to start militarizing a stretch of the southern border, an escalation of the administration's use of the U.S. military amid its immigration crackdown.The move, which The Washington Post first reported last month, could put U.S. military members in direct contact with migrants, a possible violation of federal law.The memo directs the Interior Department to allow the Defense Department to have jurisdiction over porti
  
  Read more

• The state of naval autonomy

  12-04-2025 14:00 via defenseone.com
  
  NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Dozens of onlookers gathered on a pier overlooking the Potomac River, shivering in the cold wind to see a small, 24-foot long vessel speed around without a captain.  It was Corsair, the smallest offering from robot-boat startup company Saronic, demonstrating how well it could maneuver in choppy waters with other craft passing by. And while it drew the largest crowd of the day, it wasn’t the only autonomous or semi-crewed vessel docked just outside of th
  
  Read more

• Canceled: Pentagon terminates IT service contracts

  12-04-2025 01:05 via defenseone.com
  
  The Pentagon wants to cut several IT contracts with tech consulting firms in an effort to reduce duplicative spending and increase efficiency by relying on the defense civilian workforce, according to an April 10 memo. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the termination of several IT services contracts with the Defense Health Agency, Air Force, and Navy, saying the work could be “performed by our civilian workforce” or fulfilled with “existing procurement resources.&rdq
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Space Force picks up pace of on-orbit refueling experiments

  11-04-2025 18:43 via breakingdefense.com
  
  Space Systems Command is moving out with a trio of projects — contracting with Northrop Grumman for two separate experiments, and with Astroscale US for the first on-orbit refueling operation involving a military satellite.
  
  Read more

• Hegseth slashes $5.1B in Pentagon contracts for IT consulting, ‘non-essential’ activities

  11-04-2025 18:18 via breakingdefense.com
  
  A memo from the secretary of defense also directs the Pentagon’s Chief Information Officer to prepare to negotiate more favorable cloud computing service deals.
  
  Read more

• Reporter’s Notebook: A lack of clear Navy messaging at Sea Air Space

  11-04-2025 17:59 via breakingdefense.com
  
  The changeover at the White House and the firing of senior officers could be felt at this year’s Sea Air Space exposition.
  
  Read more

• Save the Minerva Research Initiative — Again

  11-04-2025 17:27 via breakingdefense.com
  
  Nicholas Evans in this op-ed explains the historic importance of the Minerva Research Initiative, and the implications of the initiative being shut down.
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• The D Brief: New CJCS; Contracts, cancelled; Europe pledges Ukraine aid; Report: China avows Volt Typhoon; And a bit more.

  11-04-2025 17:18 via defenseone.com
  
  After a two-month vacancy, President Trump has secured his preferred top military advisor. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan Caine was confirmed as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a 60-25 late-night Senate vote. Caine has extensive F-16 piloting experience, and he served as a counterterrorism advisor under President George W. Bush as well as a special operations commander in Iraq after Bush’s 2003 invasion.The president fired Caine’s predecessor, Air Force Gen. Charles
  
  Read more

• Indonesia eyes joining Turkish 5th-generation fighter jet program KAAN

  11-04-2025 16:55 via breakingdefense.com
  
  “Indonesia wants to participate in the development of the ‘KAAN’ 5th-generation fighter jet and submarine development with the Turkish industry,” the Indonesian president said at a press conference with his Turkish counterpart.
  
  Read more

• Ukraine Defense Contact Group pledges ‘record’ $23 billion-plus military aid boost

  11-04-2025 15:57 via breakingdefense.com
  
  In parallel with the German military aid uplift, the UK said it is “surging” military support to Ukraine by leading on a £450 million ($583 million) package co-funded by Norway, featuring “hundreds of thousands” of drones, radar systems and anti-tank mines.
  
  Read more

• Caine confirmed as Joint Chiefs chairman, becoming Trump’s top military adviser

  11-04-2025 14:35 via breakingdefense.com
  
  Lt. Gen. Dan Caine has promised to give the president his best military advice “even when the president may have different feelings about it,” he told lawmakers previously.
  
  Read more

• Beyond ‘branding’: AUKUS nations look to outside partners for Pillar II tech

  11-04-2025 11:05 via breakingdefense.com
  
  “The reality is, we’re already doing AUKUS Pillar II stuff with many of our allies and partners,” Vice Adm. Rob Gaucher, the US Navy’s top submariner, said.
  
  Read more

• Long-sought goal of better Pentagon buying may finally be within reach

  11-04-2025 08:05 via defenseone.com
  
  Calls to overhaul the Pentagon’s buying process go back decades—to the Revolutionary War, one former congressman joked—from defense secretaries from William Perry to Donald Rumsfeld to Robert Gates to Ash Carter. An executive order signed late Wednesday evening is the latest, perhaps the most ambitious—and just maybe, the one with the best chance for success. President Donald Trump’s order calls upon the Defense Department to “rapidly reform our antiquate
  
  Read more

• Space Force's intelligence ‘marketplace’ gets funds to expand

  11-04-2025 01:38 via defenseone.com
  
  COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—A Space Force program that buys commercial satellite imagery and analytics has seen success across combatant commands—and with a plus-up from Congress, the service hopes to give commands more information and new tools.Called Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance, and Tracking, or TacSRT, the program began as a pilot in 2023. It provides a “marketplace” where military customers seeking timely intelligence can ask a question and then industry compete
  
  Read more

• Space Force takes ownership of first Meadowlands satellite jammer

  10-04-2025 22:53 via breakingdefense.com
  
  The program was designed to both to increase mobility and improve the jamming capabilities of the Space Force’s legacy Counter Communications System, to include providing multi-frequency jamming in S-band and X-band.
  
  Read more

• Western ‘coalition of the willing’ stumbles on reassurance force troop numbers, timeline

  10-04-2025 21:22 via breakingdefense.com
  
  “We are stepping up as one ready to secure Ukraine’s future following any peace deal, we advance the momentum of that planning here today, planning to put Ukraine in [the] strongest possible position to protect its sovereignty and to deter any future Russian aggression,” John Healey, UK defense secretary, said.
  
  Read more

• Zeitenwende reloaded: Cash is good, but can Germany reform its procurement processes?

  10-04-2025 20:10 via breakingdefense.com
  
  Philipp Rombach lays out steps the new German government should take in order to better support the Bundeswehr.
  
  Read more

• Acting CYBERCOM chief says dual-hat NSA role key to ‘speed’ in cyberspace

  10-04-2025 19:18 via breakingdefense.com
  
  Lt. Gen. William Hartman took over for Lt. Gen.Timothy Haugh last week after Haugh was controversially ousted by the Trump administration.
  
  Read more

• Trump’s defense-acquisition executive order hits the right notes

  10-04-2025 19:14 via defenseone.com
  
  President Trump’s April 9 executive order, “Modernizing Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base,” hits the right notes and endorses the right approaches. After decades of ever-new studies, commissions, and legislation to streamline the defense acquisitions process—followed by halting and sporadic Defense Department implementation—it is encouraging to see a commander-in-chief directly tell the Pentagon to get on with it.The executive order
  
  Read more

• Congress approved a budget blueprint with up to $150B extra for defense. Now comes the hard part.

  10-04-2025 17:50 via breakingdefense.com
  
  The House and Senate armed services committees have been directed to figure out how to spend extra defense funding, but have been given different monetary targets.
  
  Read more

• Contracts for SSC’s next iteration of MEO missile tracking satellites delayed

  10-04-2025 17:22 via breakingdefense.com
  
  “Unfortunately, we were, we were slowed down a bit by uncertainty in our budget,” said SSC’s Col. Rob Davis, delaying awards for Epoch 2 of the Resilient Missile Warning/Missile Tracking — MEO program by about three months.
  
  Read more

• The D Brief: New defense EOs; Somalia concerns; Ukrainian’s advice for US; Spies target fired feds; And a bit more.

  10-04-2025 17:18 via defenseone.com
  
  Trio of executive orders seek to improve defense acquisition, exports, and shipbuilding. On Wednesday, President Trump released a flurry of ten EOs and memos, including one to modify his market-tanking tariff scheme and another about showerheads. Three defense-related orders focus on:Acquisition: Aims to “reform our antiquated defense acquisition processes with an emphasis on speed, flexibility, and execution” and to “modernize the duties and composition of the defense acquisit
  
  Read more

• Leidos unveils ‘low-cost’ unmanned undersea vessel ‘Sea Dart’

  10-04-2025 16:01 via breakingdefense.com
  
  The Sea Dart starts at around $150,000, a Leidos official told Breaking Defense, and works with various payloads and software packages.
  
  Read more

• How drones, data, and AI transformed our military—and why the US must follow suit

  10-04-2025 15:00 via defenseone.com
  
  ValeriiUkraine’s tactical drones are “inflicting roughly two-thirds of Russian losses,” making them “twice as effective as every other weapon in the Ukrainian arsenal,” says a recent study by the Royal United Services Institute. This is a remarkable development for weapons considered relatively unimportant just three years ago—but it exemplifies how Ukraine is changing how the West will fight its wars.At the risk of oversimplification, wars have always been ab
  
  Read more

• Defense acquisition, exports, and shipbuilding figure in trio of new executive orders

  10-04-2025 03:14 via defenseone.com
  
  The White House on Wednesday released three defense-related executive orders: One to overhaul Pentagon acquisition, one to reform arms exports, and one to “restore American maritime dominance.” The acquisition order aims to “reform our antiquated defense acquisition processes with an emphasis on speed, flexibility, and execution,” to “modernize the duties and composition of the defense acquisition workforce” and encourage them to take risks, the White Hou
  
  Read more

• Space Force preps ‘international space strategy’ as US-ally ties fray

  10-04-2025 00:50 via defenseone.com
  
  COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Space Force leaders aim to increase their collaboration with allies, saying military-to-military relationships remain strong—despite White House policies that have deeply strained relations with U.S. security partners.   The service plans to unveil the "International Space Strategy” in the coming weeks, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman announced Wednesday at Space Symposium, touting the document as a crucial step to build a m
  
  Read more

• Confronted with ‘eye-opening’ costs, SecNav vows to root out waste

  09-04-2025 21:33 via defenseone.com
  
  NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Two weeks into the Navy’s top job, John Phelan is wrestling with eye-popping program costs and “unacceptable” shipbuilding delays. “Every missed milestone in shipbuilding and maintenance is a risk to our national security. The need to rebuild and modernize our fleet is now more urgent than ever and has become, in my mind, a national emergency,” said Navy Secretary John Phelan during a keynote speech at the Sea-Air-Space conference on
  
  Read more

• Marine Corps to field counter-drone systems to dismounted units

  09-04-2025 20:26 via defenseone.com
  
  The Marine Corps is about to start experimenting with handheld counter-unmanned aerial systems to outfit deployed Marines, the deputy commandant for combat development and integration said Tuesday at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference.The effort has been in the works for more than a year, with a competition held in September to help the Corps decide which systems to buy. “One of the things that is apparent to all of us is that unmanned aerial systems are a threat not jus
  
  Read more

• DOD, other agencies may once again fire probationary employees en masse, court rules

  09-04-2025 20:05 via defenseone.com
  
  The Trump administration can once again fire all probationary employees after a second court ruling in as many days found those challenging the dismissals did not have standing to sue. Most recently hired, or in some cases recently promoted, employees the Trump administration fired across government in February were been reinstated back into their jobs after two courts found the terminations were conducted unlawfully.On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit paused one
  
  Read more

Follow @Defense_news_us on Twitter!