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FAA awards software and AI contract as part of air traffic control modernization

Edward Graham — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:53:00 -0400

The Federal Aviation Administration announced on Monday that it awarded Air Space Intelligence a 12-year, $875 million contract for new software and artificial intelligence capabilities, part of the agency’s ambitious effort to modernize the nation’s outdated air traffic control system.

The software company will provide “two complementary, cutting-edge technologies that will improve how flights are scheduled and managed throughout the National Airspace System,” according to the FAA.

These include Flow Management Data and Services, which the agency said will serve as “the new technological backbone” of a modernized Air Traffic Control System Command Center. ASI is also tasked with delivering a Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories — or SMART — system.

In a fact sheet, the agency said “Using AI, SMART analyzes airline schedules, weather, airport capacity, airspace conditions, and operational constraints to predict traffic flows and identify potential conflicts before they occur.”

The FAA said it is hoping to begin initial deployments of SMART as soon as this fall. ASI said it expects both systems to be rolled out over the next 12 to 24 months.

“Every day, our air traffic professionals knowingly manage thousands of scheduling conflicts across the National Airspace System, which ultimately end up as delays for the traveling public,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in a statement. “FMDS with the SMART capabilities will help us address that challenge by improving how we manage airspace before flights depart, reducing congestion, easing controller workload, and directly cutting down delays across the system.”

The contract is a part of the FAA and the Transportation Department’s broader push to upgrade the nation’s air traffic control system.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the launch of the ambitious effort in May 2025, saying at the time that it would entail some brick-and-mortar upgrades but that “everything else that controls the airspace is going to be brand new.” A key part of this effort, he said, will be replacing legacy systems and antiquated technologies with new capabilities, such as a modernized flight management system and updated ground radar systems at U.S. airports.

The initiative’s launch came on the heels of several high-profile air traffic control outages in the last few years, as well as the crash of an Army Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial airliner near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in January 2025 that killed all 67 people on both aircraft.

During an April event held just shy of the modernization effort’s one-year anniversary, Duffy said a few project workstreams were a “little behind,” but added that “for the most part, we’re on track to have this project completed before President [Donald] Trump leaves office.”

The FAA announced in December that it had selected Peraton as the project’s prime integrator to oversee the new Air Traffic Control System contract.

The One Big Beautiful Bill, which Trump signed into law in July 2025, allocated $12.5 billion for the air traffic control modernization effort, although the agency in December called that amount a “down payment” and said at the time that it would need an additional $20 billion for the initiative.

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30 days to shape the biggest FAR overhaul in 40 years

Nick Wakeman — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:15:20 -0400

Sharpen your pens and pencils industry, because the clock is ticking on the comment period for the proposed new Federal Acquisition Regulation rules released on Tuesday.

While we reported their pre-release, the specific end date for the 30-day comment period was left blank.

But based on the June 23 publish date, comments are due July 23.

The 30-day comment period is the bare minimum set in the Administrative Procedure Act.

In going with 30 days, the government also is going against recommendations sent out in Executive Order 12866 that President Bill Clinton signed in 1993. That order was amended and expanded by subsequent presidents, including President Trump during his first and second terms.

The 1993 order recommends a comment period of at least 60 days for “significant regulatory actions.” Given its scope, the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul qualifies as such.

The proposed rules touch essentially every aspect of federal contracting as 21 different parts of the FAR are being amended in this first group.

Industry can request an extension. But with eight more proposed rules in the works, the FAR Council may be reluctant to issue an extension. The council also wants to adopt the rules before the end of the year.

The Revolutionary FAR Overhaul started off at a breakneck speed, with the General Services Administration issuing 49 master deviations during 2025. Phase one was completed before the end of federal fiscal year 2025.

Expectations were that these draft rules would come out early in calendar 2026, but they were delayed as the Office of Management and Budget reviewed the proposed rules.

The next set of proposed rules likely will also come with a 30-day comment period. The most significant of these proposed rules is Part 19, which governs small business contracting.

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GSA unveils new AI-specific acquisition rule

Ross Wilkers — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:11:46 -0400

The General Services Administration has unveiled a set of proposed changes to acquisition regulations that include new language governing how agencies buy artificial intelligence products and services.

If finalized, the new rule would create new requirements for data protection and intellectual property on contractors that use large language models to process government data.

GSA Regulation clause 552.239-7001, Basic Safeguarding of Data within Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence Systems (LLMs), was posted to the Federal Register on June 17 for industry to weigh in on.

The proposed rule applies to GSA’s government-wide contracts such as the Federal Supply Schedule, government-wide acquisition contracts and the OASIS+ professional services vehicle.

GSA is also seeking to clarify contractor responsibilities for LLMs in the proposed rule, which also highlights flow-down requirements and attestations as core to its implementation and enforcement.

The proposal breaks out contractors into four roles regarding AI development and implementation: LLM developers, LLM system operators, LLM systems integrators and LLM service providers.

Developers are the creators of the LLM models. Service providers are responsible for deploying, operating and monitoring the models. Systems integrators configure and adapt the LLM systems for government environments. System operators provide hosting and other access capabilities.

Each role has a specific flow-down clause in the proposed rule, so prime contractors must determine which role or roles their vendors hold to apply the clauses.

As our colleagues at NextGov/FCW reported ahead of that posting, GSA sought to balance its desires to encourage market growth and foster competition while also benefitting agencies and taxpayers.

The proposed rule defines government data as covering inputs and outputs generated by LLMs in the performance of the contract.

Contractors would have to disclose all LLMs used or made available in the performance of a contract or task/delivery order within 120 days of commencing work, unless another date is specified in the contract or order. All entities filling different LLM roles would have to be disclosed as well.

Contracting officers and all other government-provided points of contact must be notified within 72 hours of the discovery of incidents related to LLMs and the handling of government data.

GSA’s proposal has five specific questions it wants industry and other stakeholder communities to respond to:

Does the change in clause prescription adequately address previous concerns about the broadness of the scope of the clause?
Are the requirements, such as government data ownership and protection and contractor accountability, clearly defined?
Are the roles and responsibilities of the contractor, LLM developer, LLM system operator, LLM system integrator, and LLM service provider clearly defined and are flow-down paragraphs accurately presented?
Do you understand how to implement the flow-down clauses?
Does the clause adequately address risks related to foreign ownership or control of LLMs, where changes to the LLM could covertly affect government data, outputs, or decisions without changing the contracting entity?

All comments and answers to GSA’s questions and the proposed rule are due by Aug. 3, 2026. GSA will also hold a public listening session on July 14. Registration for that event closes on July 3.

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NASA names 2,100 winners for SEWP VI

Nick Wakeman — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 10:58:39 -0400

NASA has kicked off the process of making awards for its massive SEWP VI IT vehicle with 2,115 winners that are spread across three categories.

The biggest group of winners – 1,059 – is in the new contract category of program level services. Category A has 364 winners to provide IT solutions and Category B has 692 winners for enterprise-wide solutions.

The current SEWP V contract has 147 holders that have been obligated $79.7 billion in task order volume, according to GovTribe data.

SEWP V is set to expire Sept. 30, but NASA can extend the contract to April 30, 2027 if needed. SEWP VI's ordering period would open on Nov. 1.

The expansion of SEWP VI has been in the works for sometime with NASA hiring more staff to manage the larger number of contracts.

SEWP VI has a $60 billion ceiling. NASA has also expanded the number of contract types beyond firm-fixed price orders. Agencies can now award task orders that are time-and-material, labor-hour, fixed-price award fee and fixed-price incentive fee.

However, the biggest change in SEWP VI is the addition of standalone services to let agencies customize solutions at the mission and program level. These services will support agency IT infrastructure.

NASA also added Category B for enterprise-wide solutions.

In making the awards, NASA did not evaluate price. Price instead will be determined at the task order level.

With the SEWP VI awards finalized, one more major milestone lies ahead – the General Services Administration’s take over of the SEWP program.

GSA officials have talked about absorbing SEWP as part of the Trump administration’s mandate to consolidate procurements of common goods and services like IT.

Long-time SEWP program director Joanne Woytek will retire Oct. 17. She has run the program since 1999.

When Woytek announced her retirement in March, she said she wanted to stay through awards and getting SEWP VI up and running.

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NDAA provisions would reshape Pentagon’s use of ownership stakes in private companies

Lauren C. Williams — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -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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Revolutionary FAR Overhaul moves to formal rulemaking with first batch of proposed rules

Nick Wakeman — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:57:01 -0400

The government is finally dropping a large batch of proposed rules on Tuesday to formalize changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation.

Over a year in the making, the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul aims to strip out regulations not mandated by statute and give acquisition teams greater control and flexibility in how they develop, award and manage contracts.

This first set of proposed rules cover four groups of FAR parts. Several more proposed rules remain under review and one of them is FAR Part 19, which governs small business acquisition.

The first proposed rule includes FAR Parts 1, 2, 4, 33, 39, 40, 52, and 53. A second covers parts 5, 24, 29, and 52.

The third covers Parts 3, 49, and 52. A fourth covers Parts 6, 7, 10, 18, 26, 37, 41, and 52. Part 52 is in all four proposed rules because it essentially is the FAR’s clause library.

The government has set a comment window of 30 days, the bare minimum time period. The clock will start ticking when the proposed rules are published.

The FAR parts covered in these four proposed rules span topics including protests, contract terminations, and audits. Many of the changes give contracting officers more discretion by converting mandatory requirements to actions where COs have the option to act or not.

A second example is that agencies will not be required to publicly announce contract awards worth more than $5.5 million. Agencies were previously required to report awards exceeding $4.5 million.

They “may” announce these awards, but are not required to. This will raise concerns about transparency in government operations.

Formerly a blank and reserved section, Part 40 will now house security requirements. The government is consolidating security requirements from other FAR parts into Part 40.

The rule proposes to reorganize security requirements into three subparts in Part 40: processing supply chain risk information, security prohibitions and exclusions, and safeguarding information.

These include controlled, unclassified information and the government’s "Do Not Buy" list that details companies and products that agencies cannot purchase from.

Part 40 also is an attempt to harmonize security requirements.

Another change is the consolidation of market research, formerly Part 10, into Part 7, which governs acquisition planning. A-76 public-private clauses are being deleted completely from Part 7 because Congress placed a moratorium on them in 2008.

Several more proposed rules are expected in the coming months covering the parts of the FAR that most directly shape how contracts are competed and won.

This includes:

Part 8, which governs required sources including the GSA Schedules
Part 12, commercial item acquisitions
Part 13, simplified acquisition procedures
Part 15, the rules governing competitive proposals and source selection
Part 19, small business acquisition

With tight deadlines for the first set of proposed rules, it promises to be a busy summer and fall.

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CACI hires former Lockheed space exec Young as COO

Ross Wilkers — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:48:11 -0400

CACI International has hired a new chief operating officer in Dr. Dave Young, a 25-year defense industry veteran and most recently general manager for national security space at Lockheed Martin.

CACI said Monday that Young will also hold an executive vice president title, in addition to the COO role. Young will report to and work with CEO John Mengucci on carrying out the company’s strategy and vision.

Space has featured prominently in CACI's strategy over recent years as the company has pushed to grow its tech product portfolio, highlighted by its $2.6 billion acquisition of Arka in December.

"This is a newly created position within CACI. CACI is a fundamentally different company today than it was even five years ago," a CACI spokesperson told WT via email. "As we continue to grow into a much larger, technology‑first company, we’re bringing in talent with the experience and qualifications to drive our business forward and execute our long‑term growth strategy."

One of those key hires took place in May, when CACI brought in former L3Harris Technologies executive Christopher Monoski as EVP of manufacturing to oversee production activities.

At Lockheed, Young oversaw profit-and-loss functions for a $7 billion-annual revenue business that includes the company’s satellite and ground systems portfolio. Lockheed’s national security space unit employs 10,000 people that work on 250 defense and intelligence community programs.

Prior to that GM role at Lockheed, Young worked as chief operating officer and senior vice president at CAES for three years. Young has held other leadership roles at Lockheed and Northrop Grumman over the course of his career.

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Battelle challenges KBR’s $8B Antarctica contract win

Nick Wakeman — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:31:46 -0400

Battelle is challenging an $8 billion award that KBR won to manage the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic research operations.

The 20-year contract covers the operations of three year-round stations, two research vessels and several other research camps at the bottom of the planet.

The NSF picked KBR in a competition with three other bidders. KBR will take over the contract from Leidos, which decided not to compete for the contract again.

Battelle was one of three companies that competed with KBR for the contract. In its protest, the company argues that NSF did not take into consideration KBR’s plan to spin off its government business into a new entity.

Battelle claims NSF's evaluation of the KBR bid apparently did not weigh the impact of the spinoff on the company’s ability to manage the massive contract. Battelle is also arguing NSF made errors in how it evaluated proposals.

The Antarctic Science and Engineering Support Contract is massive and includes running the stations and research facilities. NSF also uses the contract to ensure the health, safety and security of researchers, workers and visitors to Antarctica.

The NSF-led U.S. Antarctic Program has been active since 1959 in operating three year-round stations, two research vessels and several other research camps across the region.

GAO is expected to rule on the protest by Sept. 21.

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Thales' North American subsidiary hires Geckle as CEO

Ross Wilkers — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:17:25 -0400

Thales Group's North American subsidiary has hired a new chief executive in Robert Geckle, a two-decade Airbus veteran who most recently was CEO of the latter’s U.S. defense and space business.

Geckle will start at the Thales organization on July 1 and succeed the retiring Alan Pellegrini, a two-decade company veteran who has been Thales North America’s CEO since 2017. Pellegrini will remain a key executive through the end of this year to support the transition, Thales said Monday.

Pellegrini’s tenure as Thales North America’s CEO was highlighted by the company’s push to expand its footprint across aerospace, defense, cybersecurity and digital identity.

In March 2025, Pellegrini appeared on our WT 360 podcast to overview how Thales North America aligns its priorities with those of its France-headquartered parent Thales Group and its approach to dual-use technologies.

Geckle previously led the Airbus U.S. Space and Defense business for nearly four-and-a-half years. His overall tenure at Airbus spanned two decades, including roles in both the U.S. and Europe.

Thales Group has recorded $104.7 million in unclassified prime contract revenue over the trailing 12 months with the Navy representing 55% of that spend and Army at 29%, according to USASpending.gov data. The Defense Logistics Agency and Federal Aviation Administration make up the remaining 16%.

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Booz Allen to acquire Ultra defense tech unit for $720M

Ross Wilkers — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:16:29 -0400

Booz Allen Hamilton has agreed to acquire a business unit of Ultra Intelligence & Communications for $720 million to further build out a defense technology portfolio with artificial intelligence being a key piece.

Ultra Mission Solutions specializes in software, encryption and edge-compute products that are designed for use in contested and other environments where connections are likely degraded. Command-and-control and secure data movement also are key areas of focus for Ultra Mission Solutions.

All parties involved expect to close the transaction in the second quarter of Booz Allen’s 2027 fiscal year, which started on April 1. Ultra Mission Solutions employs 220 people and will initially operate as a subsidiary of Booz Allen, the companies said Monday.

“We are investing in reliable, scalable solutions that help unite the defense technology ecosystem. This combination provides a foundation for our continued investment to harness advantage from commercial technology innovation,” Steve Escaravage, president of Booz Allen’s defense technology business, said in a release.

Booz Allen is eyeing this move as part of its push to ramp up product integration efforts and increase the number of commercially-available offerings through outcome-based procurements, Foreign Military Sales pacts and other channels.

Booz Allen retained Jefferies LLC as exclusive financial adviser, PwC as accounting and tax advisor, King & Spalding LLP as legal adviser, and Renaissance Strategic Advisors as strategic industry adviser. Ultra Mission Solutions and Advent retained Baird as exclusive financial adviser, KPMG as accounting and tax adviser, and Latham & Watkins LLP as legal adviser.

Ultra I&C is a division of the U.K.-headquartered Cobham, which has been owned by the private investment firm Advent International since 2019.

The bulk of Booz Allen’s current strategy and vision centers around software-centric technologies that can be quickly developed and fielded more in-line with how commercial markets functions.

In the summer of 2024, Booz Allen purchased the PAR Government Systems business to incorporate that unit’s rapid prototyping facilities into the overall tech development approach.

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WT 360: Our breakdown of the 2026 Top 100 and everything it illustrates

Nick Wakeman and Ross Wilkers — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0400

The 2026 Washington Technology Top 100 rankings are now live for everyone to use in their own research of the federal market’s largest technology and services contractors, plus the industry’s major overarching themes.

For this episode, Nick and Ross huddle up to overview edition number 32 of WT’s flagship project that certainly does have an element of “Who’s Up and Who’s Down” to it.

One question we posed in our breakdown of 2025’s rankings was whether 2026 would look noticeably different in light of the Trump administration’s cuts to contract spending and the federal workforce. The Department of Government Efficiency’s impact to the industry is real, but quantifying it is only part of the discussion about DOGE.

Here are the other items for this episode’s discussion agenda:

Consulting firms and resellers in today’s market
Small businesses and their prospects
True blue newcomers to the ranking, including Amazon
SpaceX and its new era as a public company

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The Genesis Mission has a security problem

Ian Lee — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:15:50 -0400

The Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission is one of the most ambitious federal artificial intelligence initiatives in decades. It’s designed to connect sovereign high performance computing infrastructure — the systems running at national laboratories such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory— with commercial cloud platforms, industry partners, and a dramatically expanded research population.

The goal is to accelerate scientific discovery and AI model development at national scale. On paper, it’s exactly the kind of forward-leaning initiative the federal government should be pursuing.

Here’s the problem: the security architecture that governs these HPC systems was never designed for this connectivity model to systems external to the HPC itself. And in the rush to stand up federated compute capability, the security architecture hasn’t kept pace with the program’s ambitions. That needs to change, before adversaries make the decision for us.

HPC Security Has Always Run Second to Performance

Federal HPC has historically operated under a different set of assumptions than enterprise IT. These systems were dedicated enclaves or air gapped by default, accessed by a small population of vetted researchers, and optimized almost entirely for computational throughput. Security controls that would cripple an exaflop simulation job simply weren’t acceptable — and in that context, the tradeoffs made sense.

That model held for decades because the threat surface was manageable. The labs built perimeter-heavy architectures, tightly controlled user onboarding, and relied on physical and procedural controls as much as technical ones. Security was real, but it was calibrated for a different era — one where the machine didn’t need to talk to Amazon Web Services or cloud-hosted AI models and interact with autonomous agents.

The Genesis Mission breaks every one of those assumptions simultaneously.

The Risk Landscape Has Changed. The Security Posture Hasn’t.

Let’s be specific about what Genesis Mission actually introduces from a threat perspective, because the generic “cyber risk” framing doesn’t capture it.

First, federated identity and access management across trust domains is a solved problem in enterprise IT and an almost entirely unsolved problem in federal HPC. When a researcher at a national lab can run a job that spans on-premises HPC, a commercial cloud burst environment, and a shared data repository with external collaborators, you now have credential federation, data path complexity, and privilege escalation risk at a scale these environments have never had to handle. The traditional model of “we know who’s on this machine” no longer holds.

Second, the software supply chain risk in AI/HPC workloads is severe and poorly understood in the federal context. Open-source ML frameworks, containerized model serving stacks, and community-maintained scientific software libraries are the backbone of this ecosystem. They are also vectors. SolarWinds demonstrated what a supply chain compromise looks like at scale in enterprise IT. The equivalent in federated AI compute — a compromised container image that executes on sensitive federal HPC infrastructure — is a threat scenario that deserves the same level of national attention.

Third, the user population problem is real. One of the design goals of the Genesis Mission is broader access — bringing more researchers, more institutions, and more industry partners into contact with these resources. That’s scientifically valuable and operationally necessary. It’s also a user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and insider threat challenge that current HPC security tooling is not equipped to address. HPC environments have historically underinvested in behavioral analytics relative to the scale of the emerging threat. They don’t have the telemetry pipelines, the baseline models, or the analyst capacity to detect anomalous patterns in dynamic, large-scale user environments. That gap is significant.

Finally, frameworks like NIST SP 800-53 and Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification provide a critical foundation, but implementation guidance hasn’t yet caught up to the realities of exascale AI workloads. The protection levels framework — PL2 through PL3, which define access and data controls for open and restricted science environments respectively — gets at some of this but still falls short of operational reality. When you’re running AI training jobs at exascale across hybrid infrastructure, “configure your firewall rules” is not a security strategy. This community needs controls calibrated to the actual workload, the actual data flows, and the actual adversary objectives — not enterprise IT frameworks with HPC labels bolted on.

What Federal HPC Stakeholders Need to Do Now

None of this is an argument against the Genesis Mission. Federated AI compute capability at national scale is a strategic imperative, and the DOE is right to push for it. But the security architecture has to keep pace with the ambition, and right now it isn’t.

Federal HPC programs should be doing three things in parallel with the Genesis Mission buildout: conducting honest HPC cyber assessments that are scoped to the actual risk landscape — not generic FISMA compliance checklists; investing in the telemetry and analytics infrastructure necessary to run behavioral detection at HPC scale; and establishing security governance structures that actually include security practitioners at the design table, not just as a downstream review function.

The cross-agency coordination piece matters, too. Genesis Mission spans federal and commercial partners. Shared compute means shared risk. That requires shared security standards, shared incident visibility, and clear lines of responsibility that currently don’t exist in most of these federated architectures. The community forums that have been doing this work — the practitioner-level exchanges, like the HPC Security Technical Exchange, where security engineers from different labs compare notes on what’s actually working — are more valuable right now than any formal policy document. Fund them. Support them. Show up to them.

The Window Is Closing

The Genesis Mission is going to happen. The question is whether it happens with a security posture that matches its ambition, or whether it creates a federated attack surface that adversaries exploit before operators understand the exposure. The labs have the talent. The community has the knowledge. What’s needed now is the organizational will to treat HPC security as a first-order design requirement — not a compliance checkbox applied after the architecture is already set. There is still time to get this right. But not much.

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DOD excels at prototyping. Getting to production is another story.

Nick Wakeman — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:56:47 -0400

The Defense Department is skilled at developing prototypes to test innovations, but speakers at the Defense One Tech Summit told attendees on Tuesday that getting the tech into production remains a challenge.

“We’ve gotten really good at prototyping innovation, however you want to define it. But the challenge is what does it lead to,” said Jerry McGinn, senior fellow of the defense-industrial initiatives group at Center for Strategic and International Studies.

McGinn was joined on a panel at the summit by Kedar Pavgi, director of commercial strategy and operations at the Defense Innovation Unit; and Veronica Daigle, president of the national security practice at investment firm Red Cell Partners.

But McGinn expressed some optimism given the emphasis the Trump administration has put on getting innovation into the hands of warfighters more quickly.

Many of the ideas are not new, but McGinn said they are coalescing in this administration.

“There have been a lot of really exciting changes on acquisition reform,” Daigle said. “Another reason for excitement is we are seeing a lot of additional funding right now.”

Daigle said that while the pieces are in place, the execution needs to move further downstream into the lower levels of the Defense Department.

“When I think about the startup community and new entrants, there are still barriers. There are a lot of compliance challenges,” Daigle said.

Companies do still need authority to operate for software, systems for handling classified information and other certifications for working with DOD.

“Those are very real steps that you have to go through,” she said.

DOD has gotten better at giving off demand signals for where it has gaps that need to be filled, Pavgi said.

“What we really need is to lean forward and take acquisition risk and push projects forward in such a way that we find the best capability and get it to the field as quickly as possible,” Pavgi said.

Part of DIU's role is bridging that gap for companies that have gotten an initial contract but do not know where to go next, Pavgi said.

DIU works with program offices to help promising technologies find a path to production, rather than stalling after the prototype phase.

Still missing from the equation is a way to measure whether innovation is actually taking hold.

“The challenge is what does it lead to?” McGinn asked.

There is no data on how many Other Transaction Authority contracts or Small Business Innovation Research grants convert into actual programs, McGinn.

The market wants to see prototypes move into production

“Demand signal is what we are looking for,” Daigle said. “That gives the market confidence that there is going to be growth.”

Industry wants to bring innovation into DOD.

“They want to help the government harness all of the innovation, but we have to see that you are giving it a chance to grow,” she said.

DOD has a powerful tool for making that happen and the attention on acquisition reform should fuel that movement.

“If the government wants different outcomes, the government has to change how it buys, and that is why the focus on acquisition reform is so exciting for me,” McGinn said.

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Twenty closes $100M Series B round for offensive cyber tech development

Ross Wilkers — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:48:47 -0400

Twenty, a developer of offensive cyber software that leans on automation techniques, has collected $100 million in Series B capital from investors to aid further development work on those tools.

Twenty opened for business in 2024 to build artificial intelligence-enabled systems for U.S. military and intelligence community operators. Several members of its co-founders worked in senior positions at Palo Alto Networks, where Twenty’s CEO Joe Lin was also a vice president.

Accel led the Series B round announced Wednesday, which values Twenty at a touted $1 billion. Friends & Family Capital, Point72 Ventures and Caffeinated Capital also participated. General Catalyst and In-Q-Tel were among Twenty’s early backers.

Twenty designs the tools to pair operators with AI and automation capabilities that still require human judgment. A bulk of the new investment will go toward research-and-development initiatives.

AI models and technology are increasingly becoming core to cyber efforts, including defensive and offensive missions. Anthropic describes its Claude Mythos Preview model as having the ability to both identify software vulnerabilities and exploit them for cyberattacks, a capability federal agencies have keen interest in.

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Concurrent Technologies hires Parsons vet Hamilton as CEO

Ross Wilkers — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:46:12 -0400

Concurrent Technologies Corp. has hired its next chief executive in Christopher Hamilton, a three-decade defense industry veteran and formerly an executive at Parsons Corp.

Hamilton will join CTC on June 29 and succeed Ed Sheehan Jr., who has led the nonprofit science and research firm for 18 years and announced his retirement plan in January.

Following this leadership transition announced Wednesday, Hamilton will lead CTC’s new 10-year strategic plan for the firm itself and its Enterprise Ventures Corp. affiliate focused on technology transition efforts.

Hamilton most recently worked as a partner for strategy and growth at the cyber and data services contractor AnaVation.

At Parsons, Hamilton oversaw a portfolio of technologies and solutions focused on protecting people and critical infrastructure. He also led the establishment of a counter-unmanned aerial systems center of excellence in West Virginia.

“(Hamilton’s) experience, vision, and understanding of the opportunities for operational transformations driven, in part, by Artificial Intelligence will be instrumental to improving customer mission success,” Jeffrey Harris, chairman of CTC’s board of directors, said in a release.

Hamilton joined Parsons in 2023 through its acquisition of Xator Corp., where his most recent role was senior vice president of technology solutions. He joined Xator in 2014 through its purchase of CMX Technologies, where he was president and chief operating officer at the time of that transaction.

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Nearly 7 out of 10 Top 100 firms have no Black execs in the C-suite

Nick Wakeman — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:22:02 -0400

Six years into tracking diversity in the C-suite of Top 100 companies, one thing is clear:

Progress has stalled for women and reversed for Black executives.

We first analyzed the racial and gender makeup of the executives leading the Top 100 in 2020, when we found Black executives accounted for 5.6% of the 680 roles we identified. Today, the percentage stands at 4.3% of 1,093 positions.

Women held executive positions at 22.6% in 2020, but since then the percentage has been 29% and never cracked 30%. That plateau has held steady for three years.

The picture is not uniformly bleak. The number of female CEOs among the Top 100 rose from 16 last year to 20 this year. The number of Black female executives also ticked up from 19 to 24.

But those gains are outweighed by what is moving in the opposite direction. The number of companies with no women in their C-suite increased from seven last year to nine this year.

The overall minority representation (people identified as Black or non-white) slipped from 13.1% last year to 11.8% this year.

The number of companies with no Black executives rose to 68 this year compared to 59 in 2025, another sign of the challenges Black executives have in rising up the ranks of their companies. In other words, nearly seven in 10 companies in the Top 100 have no Black executives visible among their senior leaders.

None of this happens in a vacuum. The past year has seen a significant rollback of federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs as multiple executive orders have targeted DEI initiatives across the government.

That pressure has rippled through the contractor community as well. Several large companies have stepped back from public diversity commitments they made just a few years ago.

The longer-term concern is the pipeline. The DEI programs among the Top 100 companies weren’t about optics but were meant to build a bench of future leaders from underrepresented groups.

As those programs are scaled back or eliminated, the damage will eventually show up in an even whiter C-suite.

We cannot draw a straight line from policy to personnel data — leadership rosters change slowly and for many reasons. But this is the first year that the effects of the DEI rollback could plausibly show up in the numbers.

The next few years will tell us whether this is a temporary dip or the beginning of even more declines. Based on what we have seen so far, there is little reason for optimism.

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Army unveils first sketch of commercial tech contract for test, evaluation

Ross Wilkers — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:57:30 -0400

The Army has started its process of creating a new multiple-award contract vehicle that would function as a pathway for rapidly acquiring commercial technologies and services to aid in test and evaluation efforts.

Currently being called Orchestra, Army officials are envisioning a contract to operate alongside existing acquisition portfolios and work under Part 12 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation. This FAR portion governs how agencies acquire commercial products or services with an emphasis on streamlined procedures.

The Army is currently contemplating a two-pool structure for Orchestra with one focused on services and a second focused on products, the service branch said in a sources sought notice posted Monday.

Engineering services, computer systems design, IT services, instrumentation, electronic components, and other technologies are in the scope of work for Orchestra.

The request for information breaks out Orchestra’s four primary areas into enterprise test infrastructure, commercial tech integration and sustainment, commercial engineering and technical services, and agile execution and program support.

Given Orchestra’s labeling as a commercial contract, the Army is emphasizing speed and agility in what it wants from industry as the service branch looks to support its current and future modernization requirements.

Some of the key tech areas of interest include networking modernization, sensors and instrumentation systems, data collection systems, test environments, and refresh activities.

The RFI’s list of questions asks respondents to say whether or not a proposal turnaround of less than 7 days is a standard practice for their organization, as well as details on internal processes or structures for making those happen.

Responses should not exceed 8 pages and be submitted in PDF format only.

Comments on the RFI are due by 9 a.m. Eastern time on June 26.

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Navy preps science-and-tech strategy built for speed and focus

Bradley Peniston — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400

A new Navy science-and-tech strategy will push technology to the fleet faster and concentrate limited research funds on problems that industry won't solve on its own, the service’s research chief said Tuesday.

The Office of Naval Research strategy, called "Feed S&T at Speed to the Fleet and Force," is in final production, Chief of Naval Research Rachel Riley said Tuesday at the Defense One Tech Summit in Arlington, Virginia.

"Speed is, of course, the word of the year in our business," she said during a panel discussion that included Jarred Conley, principal director for maritime efforts at the Defense Innovation Unit.

Riley said the document urges closer collaboration with DIU, warfighters, and other stakeholders. She said it also aims to explain "in plain English" what ONR does and what the Navy wants from industry. ONR is working to "de-layer and simplify" its bureaucracy, so that the limiting factor on technology development is "the physical science and not the processes and the policies around it," she added.

"Speed is, of course, the word of the year in our business.”

The strategy also aims to push ONR to identify the problems that only it can solve, so the office can make best use of its roughly $3 billion budget. But Riley said this isn’t as difficult as it may seem.

“I have 1,100 Ph.Ds who work for me, almost all in STEM. They're brilliant Americans who dedicated their lives to serving. And so many of them, when I showed up and asked them, you know, “How do we make sure that what we're investing in isn't duplicative with industry?” They said, “Well, it's just so hard to know what industry will and won't do.” And I said, “no, it's actually quite simple. If there is profit to be made, then it is something where industry capital will flow. Perhaps not perfectly, but eventually.”

Riley said ONR must focus on technology that’s far from ready, or that no one but the U.S. military needs.

“My favorite example, because it immediately resonates with everyone, is currently there's really no commercial need for very quiet tubes that move through the water for a very long time”—that is, submarines, she said. ONR must keep investing to keep the submarine force "the most lethal in the world."

Riley said she wants the office to do what it must so it can pass useful technology off to industry. She is pushing her program officers to serve as a “thought partner” to defense contractors—talking about, say, the Sea Hunter medium unmanned surface vessel that ONR has been experimenting with since 2017 and is now deployed with a carrier strike group.

What’s next in maritime automation

The recent rescue of two Army helicopter pilots by an uncrewed boat made it a “great week at the Defense Innovation Unit,” Conley said, referring to the recovery of Apache aircrew using a 24-foot Saronic Corsair unmanned surface vessel—a system he said went "from first splash to success in four months."

Now, Conley said, DIU’s maritime unit is working on contested logistics, including an autonomous resupply vessel effort, and clearing naval mines of the sort that Iran has used—or possibly just threatened to use—to close the Strait of Hormuz.

Conley called mine-warfare one of the Navy's most underfunded domains, despite being "a huge problem for the global economy." Neutralizing mines still requires humans, either flying aboard an MH-60 helicopter or deploying in explosive ordnance disposal teams.

But that may soon become less true. Last month, DIU launched an MCM Modernization Prize Challenge to find ways to increase the role of machines. Candidate systems are to deploy by September, he said.

Riley said another grand challenge in uncrewed systems is moving from one-to-one control by a human to one human controlling many platforms. So far, too many approaches look like "little kids playing soccer," which is "not good enough for our American warfighters," she said.

She also noted that controlling undersea robots is more difficult than aerial ones.

"Folks think that if you can fly a UAV, you can fly a UUV," but it is "a different game," she said.

ONR is funding academic research into how insects and birds swarm, she said, to model that coordination mathematically and scale it to unmanned vehicles.

"Mass matters," Conley said, adding that going from zero to one is achievable, but going from one to 100 is hard. But commanders’ willingness to accept an "80% solution," provide feedback, and help iterate quickly is growing, he said.

Conley also expressed support for a Capitol Hill proposal to create a combatant command for robots and automation.

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Jim Flyzik helped transform government IT from back-office function to mission enabler

Nick Wakeman — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:47:04 -0400

The federal government went through tremendous changes in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The Clinton Administration’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government to streamline processes and cut bureaucracy was one of them. Then there was the Y2K threat and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

These were large momentous events that became watershed moments and elevated the role of information technology from a back-office function to a mission-enabler.

Jim Flyzik, who died on June 4 at age 72, played a critical role in this transformation as a long-time IT executive at the Treasury Department and one of the government's first chief information officers. He helped stand up the infrastructure for the launch of Homeland Security Department.

Flyzik is being remembered by colleagues and friends for his many accolades and accomplishments and for his character and integrity.

“Jim Flyzik was the rare kind of colleague who quietly made everyone around him better,” said Ira Hobbs, a long-time government executive and former Treasury CIO. “He possessed a beautiful combination of selflessness and dedication.”

Charles Armstrong, another former government CIO, described how Flyzik built his career around hard work, determination, and relationship building.

“During the 1990s, Jim pushed for adoption of the internet in government. He helped leaders from the vice president to the rank-and-file program leader under the value of new technology in terms they could understand,” Armstrong said.

Flyzik’s career also intersected with the passage of the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act, which created the CIO position across the agencies. That law also led to the formation of the Federal CIO Council and more governmentwide cooperation.

Flyzik was one of the early leaders of the council and was recognized as a proponent of finding common solutions across agencies.

His accolades included being selected for the Federal 100 and Eagle awards given by FCW, now part of NextGov and GovExec.

It is hard to imagine how disconnected government IT was then, but Flyzik was a driving force at the CIO Council that he served as vice chair for.

Flyzik came into his own with the passage of the Clinger-Cohen Act, former Veterans Affairs Department Ed Meagher said.

“Many of us post Clinger Cohen CIOs were zealots who wanted to storm the bastions of entrenched resistance to change,” Meagher said. “But Jim was the ultimate pragmatic tactician. He knew how to calm us down and work methodically to get every CIO reporting directly to the secretary of their department.”

Flyzik's ability to speak in a non-threatening way to those entrenched bureaucrats was a key to his success, Meagher said.

“One could count on the monthly council meetings having a packed agenda, be high energy and sprinkled with zingers and humor. And then Jim summing up, "Okay, so this is how things will go down,” said Alan Balutis, a long-time government official and a former senior director and distinguished fellow at Cisco Systems.

“He was a leader in getting the CIO Council up and running, especially making the link between the newly created agency CIOs and the Office of Management and Budget,” said Mark Forman, a former federal CIO. “He was always positive, a person with humor and class.”

Meagher said that it was Flyzik who lured him back into government service to take VA CIO post.

“He was the master of the soft sell,” Meagher said.

While Flyzik was a leader who saw the value of IT and how it can contribute to the mission of government, many of his former colleagues talked about what he meant to them as a person.

“He cared about people both personally and professionally. He taught many of us to think beyond the boundaries that we set for ourselves,” Armstrong said.

Rob Guerra, another former government executive, shared how Flyzik liked to mentor young people. After Flyzik retired from government, he joined a consulting firm that Guerra formed with Phil Kiviat.

“Jim was a very talented and impactful guy,” Guerra said.

“One of our brightest stars went out,” said Bob Woods, a former General Services Administration official. “He was open-minded and a collaborative kind of guy. He knew that you got a better product when you had more people involved.”

After his retirement, Flyzik also joined Tom Trezza as part of the Federal Executive Forum radio program to showcase government leaders who make an impact. Flyzik became the host and moderator.

“I can’t remember a single person who would ever refuse him because of his reputation and the respect for what he accomplished while in government,” Trezza said.

Flyzik’s obituary speaks about his love for his family. His wife Candace and a daughter were by his side when he died June 4 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, his wife.

A celebration of Flyzik’s life will take place Friday, June 19 at the Tower Club in Vienna, Virginia from 3-6 p.m. Remarks will start at 4:30 pm.

A second celebration of life is set for July 25 in Flyzik’s hometown of Lansdale, Pennsylvania at the Cannoneers Sports Club. That event will run from 3-6 p.m.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in his name to the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation at pulmonaryfibrosis.org or March of Dimes at marchofdimes.org/dmv.

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OpenAI’s ChatGPT to debut on GenAI.mil in ‘early July’

Frank Konkel and Alexandra Kelley — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:30:00 -0400

Speaking during the Defense One Tech Summit in Virginia on Tuesday, Mohammed Husain — the Strategic Delivery Lead for Cyber at OpenAI — said the company is poised in early July to unveil its flagship chatbot model ChatGPT to defense civilian and military personnel through GenAI.mil, the Pentagon’s enterprise-wide generative AI platform.

Through GenAI.mil, ChatGPT will be available to more than 3 million defense personnel and certified for controlled unclassified information and Impact Level 5. Husain said OpenAI is still working closely with the Department of Defense’s Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office to launch ChatGPT across the military apparatus.

The Defense Department launched the platform in December with initial plans to integrate Gemini for Government, and later announced plans to incorporate AI models from OpenAI and xAI. In late April, senior defense officials said more than 1.3 million users were regularly using the platform, having developed more than 100,000 AI agents.

Husain forecasted the customized version of the chatbot will make its debut in “the coming weeks.”

“I think we're going live extremely soon, and excited to make a broader announcement about that in early July,” he said.

Federal agencies have been using ChatGPT since at least January 2025, and the company offered its model at a significant discount through a OneGov deal with the General Services Administration in August. OpenAI’s latest model, ChatGPT 5.4, was made available to the federal workforce on Amazon’s Bedrock and overarching GovCloud platforms as of earlier this month.

Husain forecasted demand for both higher volumes of and more efficient tokens, which are converted data able to be interpreted and processed by an AI system.

“These models consume a ton of tokens, and it turns out that if you want to complete the most valuable work, it's going to take more tokens,” Husain said. “And so one thing I think will become much more a part of the conversation … is this concept of token efficiency.”

Husain likened token efficiency to being less about compute processing speed, but more about cost effectiveness per completed task. He referenced the news from early June, in which OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4 and Codex were made available on Amazon Bedrock, saying that this enables further deployment of more intelligent, token-heavy models.

“I think deploying these models, they're going to be much more intelligent, they're going to consume more tokens,” Husain said. “So I think cost efficiency is going to become a really interesting part of the story.”

Compute infrastructure is still a consistent topic for partners in the government space, Husain said, for both multicloud and on-prem environments, a void companies like AWS are hurrying to fill.

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US counterintelligence agency looks to AI to accelerate background checks

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 07:30:00 -0400

The nation’s largest counterintelligence unit aims to use artificial intelligence tools to speed security clearance reviews for people and companies seeking to do sensitive work on behalf of the government.

The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency can use AI to reduce parts of the vetting process from “months to hours,” said Mark Nehmer, an agency analytics and innovation chief who spoke Tuesday on a panel at the Defense One Tech Summit in Virginia.

DCSA is the Defense Department’s main agency for conducting background investigations and vetting personnel for access to classified information, and serves as a key determinant for whether companies are eligible to work with military and intelligence agencies.

A recent congressionally-approved acquisition overhaul, which encourages defense officials to prioritize goods and services from the commercial market, means that the counterintelligence agency will have to process some 43,000 clearance requests per year, he estimated.

“We’re trying to use AI exquisitely, use AI to make these little tiny decisions, and then bring that up to a human, so they can actually have a package of evidence to say, ‘I asked, and this is exactly the conclusion I will come to as a senior analyst that has to make those decisions day-in and day-out,’” Nehmer said.

He did not specify what AI systems would be used for the efforts.

The remarks are significant because they highlight how the government is applying AI to a key national security function that determines who has access to clearances, and they add another case to a long list of examples showing how the federal enterprise is using AI to speed operations.

DCSA has led the government’s background check process since 2019, when the Office of Personnel Management handed off its National Background Investigations Bureau to the Pentagon.

DCSA’s use of AI builds on a years-long effort to automate and overhaul the federal background-check system. The agency has enrolled millions of clearance holders in continuous vetting under an initiative known as Trusted Workforce 2.0, though the broader modernization effort has faced repeated delays, cost overruns and congressional scrutiny.

Over the weekend, the U.S. invoked an export control mechanism to essentially ban two major Anthropic frontier models, escalating debates over how Washington could exert itself over AI usage in the government. The decision has been widely criticized.

GovExec Editor-in-Chief Frank Konkel contributed to this report.

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DISA starts to craft $850M Army-focused cyber recompete

Ross Wilkers — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:33:34 -0400

The Defense Information Systems Agency has started its work to create the recompete of an Army-focused cybersecurity and modernization contract that prioritizes the protection of network endpoints.

DISA is working with the Army on setting up the new contract to support the service branch's unified network and Zero Trust architecture initiatives. The Army is looking to rely on the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Elastic Defend products as foundational for its security ecosystem, which will also include hybrid cloud capabilities.

DISA anticipates the new contract to have an $850 million ceiling over up to 10 years and combine requirements from two existing contracts into this single procurement, according to a sources sought notice posted Monday. The period of performance breaks out to an initial two-year base period and up to eight individual option years.

Everforth ECS (formerly ECS Federal) is the incumbent contractor via a pair of task orders, having won the work in 2022. This includes an award through the Alliant 2 vehicle and a separate order won by a bid from Enterprise Resource Performance Inc., which ECS acquired in 2021.

ECS has received roughly $275 million in task order volume to-date ahead of the September 2027 sunset date, according to GovTribe data.

For the new contract, DISA is seeking to hire a company that can manage endpoint detection and response technologies across Army networks that enforce “default-deny” application controls. These protocols kick in when a data packet arrives that does not match an established connection, which results in an immediate traffic drop.

DISA is interested in hearing from contractors with experience in managing large-scale cyber environments and implementing Zero Trust architectures. The agency also wants responses to detail prior work in integrating technologies such as Microsoft Defender, Elastic Stack, Forescout and the Microsoft Azure cloud environment.

Responses to the RFI are due to DISA by 12:30 p.m. Eastern time on June 29.

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Empower AI books $255M DISA enterprise IT recompete

Ross Wilkers — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:20:25 -0400

Empower AI has secured a potential five-year, $255.4 million task order that extends its role as a primary provider of enterprise IT service delivery support to the Defense Information Systems Agency.

DISA’s J6 organization is responsible for providing IT products, services, solutions and other user support to the defense secretary’s office and all Pentagon “Fourth Estate’ agencies outside of the service branches. DISA-J6 oversees all engineering work on the military’s global IT infrastructure and networks to ensure the systems are interoperable.

The new task order emphasizes targeted automation to reduce manual work and speed up resolution times for users, Empower AI said Tuesday.

"We will apply AI-enabled automation where it measurably improves outcomes for DISA J6 mission partners, while maintaining the reliability and security that DISA J6 Service Delivery operations require” Empower AI chief executive Jeff Bohling said in a release.

Work will take place over one base year and up to four individual option years. DISA made this award through the General Services Administration’s Multiple Award Schedule program, which gives agencies access to commercial solutions at pre-negotiated prices.

Empower AI’s capture of this recompete means the company will continue work it first won in the fall of 2019, when it was known as NCI. DISA also emphasized artificial intelligence in that $269.9 million contract.

DISA has obligated $329.4 million in task order volume to-date against current contract ahead of its scheduled June 29 sunset date, according to GovTribe data.

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Shaped charges from coffee grounds? Pentagon science chief describes future of war

Bradley Peniston — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:21:19 -0400

When the Pentagon’s science and technology chief looks at Ukraine, he sees a war fought with weapons invented, produced, and fielded since the conflict erupted.

“The fact that you can bring relevant capability to the fight, as the Ukrainians and allies have done in the conflict with Russia, that essentially didn't exist at the beginning of the fight,” Joseph Jewell, assistant defense secretary for science and technology, said Tuesday at the Defense One Tech Summit in Arlington, Virginia. “That's the new thing here.”

It’s a thing the United States must learn to do, Jewell said.

Ukraine’s homegrown drone industry “to a large extent, sprung up almost overnight because of urgency. I think with our industrial resources, we certainly could do things at that scale and even in a more sophisticated way. And we need to do it,” he said.

Jewell noted that Ukraine has taken the Russian Navy out of the fight without much of a navy of its own.

“The way they were able to do that, well, there are several things. First of all, their weapon systems were small, relatively undetectable. Second of all, they had a lot of them,” he said.

There is still a need for expensive, highly capable weapons, Jewell said, “But the exquisite effect may be helped along by leveraging a hundred or a thousand drones controlled by AI. And I think that's what we're starting to see modern warfare evolve into. Now, of course, the model is a lot of people in Ukraine who are actually manually controlling these first-person drones. I think the natural evolution of that is AI-controlled or AI-enabled.”

Patent holiday

One way the Pentagon is trying to speed up innovation is by making it easier for defense companies to use government-held technological patents.

The Defense Department holds tens of thousands of patents, but only takes in about $20 million a year from them. In January, Jewell’s boss, Defense Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael, announced a “patent holiday” under which private companies can license some of those patents—about 500, Jewell said—free of charge.

He said the first no-fee patent license was granted last month. As of mid-June, 14 patents have been “signed out” for commercial use, one has been licensed for a fee by a company that wanted exclusivity, 36 more are pending, and 145 more applications have come in, he said.

Biotech

Jewell lauded the promise of biotech combined with AI. He cited a new bioengineered thermal coating that may help drones obscure their heat signatures, developed through BioMADE, a DOD-sponsored Manufacturing Innovation Institute.

He also described an experiment in which Marines in the Pacific used 3D printers and other tools to field-produce shaped charges with local materials: plastic water bottles, crushed volcanic rock, coconut husks, and coffee grounds.

“They all detonated, actually; the volcanic rocks were most effective,” he said. “The thing that's amazing to me is this was 3D-printed. You effectively have 99% reduced the time to point-of-use, because you could make it in the field from materials that are endemic in the Indo-Pacific.”

What’s more, the Marines’ shaped charge “had 25% better focusing characteristics than conventionally manufactured high explosives,” he said. “So we envision a future where you have a containerized production facility for potentially the ingredients for that, potentially including the 3D printer to pump out the shaped charges. And then you can drop, say, a CONEX box in the field where you need, so it can produce biodiesel, it can produce jet fuel.”

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Industry and academia call on administration to free Anthropic’s AI model

Alexandra Kelley — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 10:23:00 -0400

Signatories across industry, academia and expert groups issued a public letter Monday asking the Trump administration to roll back new restrictions imposed on Anthropic’s Fable 5 model.

Featured on a new “Free Fable” website, the letter — signed by representatives from companies like Adobe, NVIDIA and Zoom, along with academics from Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, Baltimore College — asks Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross to reverse the suspension of Anthropic’s latest model.

The White House’s Friday decision to suspend access to Fable 5, which is a consumer-safe variation of Anthropic’s cybersecurity-focused Mythos model, initially only applied to foreign nationals both within and outside of the U.S. Given the challenges surrounding cutting off access to specific IP addresses for specific users, Anthropic announced it would disable access to Fable 5 for all users.

The decision comes as Anthropic and elements of the U.S. government are still in litigation over the Trump administration designating the company a supply chain risk following a dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon over barring use of the company’s AI products in autonomous weaponry and surveillance operations.

In the letter released Monday, the signatories protested the government’s export controls, saying that it “has taken the best models away from defenders, created market uncertainty, and risked America’s AI leadership without any real risk to justify it.”

The signatories said the inherent protections built into Fable to prevent its use for cyber offenses and identify the ongoing race to AI dominance with adversarial nations like China were reasons to unleash Fable for use by the cyberdefense community.

“Anthropic has built multiple protections into the Fable model to prevent its use for cyber offensive uses. These protections were so aggressive as to be the source of humor in the cyber community on launch day,” the letter said. “It is essential to provide AI to coders and security teams so they can find and fix flaws in their own newly-written as well as decades of legacy code faster than our adversaries.”

The signatories recommended four approaches that the administration should take on AI policy going forward, starting with public sector regulators collaborating with industry and academia for input and using a democratic rule-making process for new AI policy.

The letter also recommended transparent enforcement with “appropriate time given to remediate” and using the “minimal extent necessary” to ensure the safety of the American public are the.

Other private sector organizations who did not sign the letter have also expressed confusion following the administration’s export controls and are trying to ensure clear communication with the White House.

“Many people are closely monitoring this situation to see whether Anthropic and the White House can overcome their differences, establish a better rapport, and quickly resolve this situation,” an industry source told Nextgov/FCW. “At the same time, there’s some general unease about the use of export controls to gain leverage over the AI companies because of some of the unintended consequences it might initiate.”

TJ Marlin, the CEO of Guardrail Technologies, an AI-powered enterprise security platform that works to detect risks in other AI systems, underscored the need for cyberdefenders to have the best tools to consistently be able to monitor, detect and patch network vulnerabilities.

“The question is not whether a given model's protections can be bypassed,” Marlin told Nextgov/FCW. “The question is who finds the weakness first, the defender or the attacker, and whether the organization is built to keep finding them on a schedule that never ends.”

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