Author Archives: Crawford Thompson

The Pentagon’s Chief Data and AI Office has launched a new series of experiments focused on improving data integration to allow operators to take better advantage of new command-and-control capabilities.

The office runs a regular experimentation event every 90 days called the Global Information Dominance Experiment, or GIDE, which is focused on taking capabilities designed to connect forces across domains and test them in an operational context. The events have been credited for helping the Defense Department turn a long-abstract concept called Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control into capabilities the military is now using in the field.

Coming out of an entire career in the operational Army, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, now the director of the Army’s command-and-control modernization, said it hasn’t been uncommon in the field to see critical data jotted down on a piece of cardboard in the back of a platoon sergeant’s tank.

“There’s probably a headquarter somewhere today at an exercise where an intel officer is going to write everything down on a piece of sticky note that came out of his intel system, walk across the [Tactical Operations Center], hand it over to the fires guy who has to type it into the fires system to make it work,” he said in a Monday press briefing at the Pentagon. “We realize this is just not the approach to speed that we need in the United States Army.”

President Donald Trump said his administration is preparing to approve a defense budget “in the vicinity” of $1 trillion, calling it the largest in U.S. history and necessary to ensure military strength amid rising global threats.

“We are very cost conscious but the military is something that we have to build and we have to be strong because you have a lot of bad forces out there now,” Trump said Monday during a meeting at the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “It will be the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military,” he added.

U.S. defense spending is undergoing a major transformation under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Launched in early 2025, DOGE aims to cut federal expenditures while improving military efficiency. With a goal of reducing excessive military spending, these reforms impact everything from contract structures to procurement policies.

PARIS—Two weeks after Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron descended 20 stories beneath Paris to send a message to Moscow.

He entered France’s nuclear bunker deep under his regal presidential palace to lead an exercise dubbed Poker. Officials had chosen that night, in March 2022, for its clear skies. They wanted to respond to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who days earlier had made a thinly veiled threat to the West by putting his country’s nuclear forces on high alert.

Defense Department leaders announced shipyards, depots and medical treatment facilities will be exempted from a department-wide hiring freeze because of their critical role in military readiness, in response to a growing outcry over the planned workforce reforms.

The issue of shipyard workers has become a rallying point for numerous advocates and lawmakers in recent days, especially after President Donald Trump vowed in his address to Congress earlier this month to establish a new office of shipbuilding within the White House in order to protect the industry.

The Republican leaders of the House and Senate appropriations committees have sent the Pentagon detailed plans for how they think it should spend fiscal 2025 funding, following the passage of a six-month stopgap spending bill that largely freezes funding at prior-year levels.

The 181-page document, obtained by Defense News, includes the standard funding tables attached to lawmakers’ annual defense spending legislation, which call for cuts to major service-led efforts like the Air Force’s drone wingmen program, Army missile procurement and the Space Force’s missile warning and tracking satellite architecture.

The Pentagon has awarded the long-awaited contract for the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance future fighter jet, known as NGAD, to Boeing, President Donald Trump announced Friday.

The sixth-generation fighter, which will replace the F-22 Raptor, will be designated the F-47, Trump said. It will have “state-of-the-art stealth technologies [making it] virtually unseeable,” and will fly alongside multiple autonomous drone wingmen, known as collaborative combat aircraft.

Last month roughly 10,000 NATO troops carried out drills just miles from Ukraine’s border to test a new quick-reaction force created after Russia’s large-scale invasion of its neighbor. The show of military muscle was unusual for who was absent: the U.S.

Now people in and around the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are wondering whether Europeans could handle more than just an exercise on their own. America’s commitment to NATO security guarantees is suddenly in doubt, even after the U.S. reinstated military support for Ukraine this week after Kyiv accepted a cease-fire and Moscow signaled it is in no hurry to end hostilities. American diplomatic outreach to Russia and the Trump administration’s frostiness toward Europe raise worries.

WASHINGTON — The Space Force’s primary acquisition command is reviewing a number of its high-dollar legacy programs to consider whether there are now alternative commercial options for achieving the missions — starting with a new satellite constellation for keeping tabs on the heavens, according to a senior Space Systems Command (SSC) official.

Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, military deputy at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, told the Washington Space Business Roundtable today that he signed off last week on an “acquisition decision memorandum (ADM)” instructing a team to undertake an analysis of commercial options for obtaining new space situational awareness capabilities to monitor geosynchronous orbit (GEO).

Further, he said that more ADMs are in the works, “hopefully” as soon as next week, on programs ranging from satellite communications to ground systems.