Author Archives: Crawford Thompson

The West Texas city of Abilene is better known for country music and rodeos than advanced nuclear physics. But that’s where scientists are entering the final stretch of a race to boot up the next generation of American atomic energy.

Amid a flurry of nuclear startups around the country, Abilene-based Natura Resources is one of just two companies with permits from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to construct a so-called “advanced” reactor. It will build its small, one megawatt molten salt reactor beneath a newly-completed laboratory at Abilene Christian University, in an underground trench 25 feet deep and 80 feet long, covered by a concrete lid and serviced by a 40-ton construction crane.

The Defense Department wants to reform how it sells weapons to foreign countries, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday.

The U.S. foreign military sales, or FMS, process involves years of back-and-forth between the U.S. and countries interested in buying American-made weapons before anything ends up on foreign soil. The process, which has been criticized for its slow pace, has been the focus of reform efforts prompted by the war in Ukraine.

U.S. leaders should invest at least $40 billion every year to grow and maintain the country’s fleet of battle force ships in preparation for long-term and large-scale wars, the nonprofit Navy League urged in a policy statement unveiled in early February.

The statement also called on Congress to increase funding for a Navy plan to revitalize public shipyards, add to the Coast Guard’s fleet of polar icebreakers and spend more on producing munitions to prepare for a “possible great power conflict.”

President Donald Trump’s executive order to develop a next-generation homeland missile defense shield marks a shift in the United States’ long-standing homeland missile defense strategy, which has focused on threats from rogue nations like North Korea and Iran rather than from peer adversaries like China or Russia.

The order — titled “The Iron Dome For America” in a nod to the successful, lowest tier of Israel’s multilayered air defense system of the same name — also addresses a broader array of complex threats from hypersonic weapons to cruise missiles.

WASHINGTON—The Pentagon on Friday readied more than 5,000 troops from high-profile warfighting units to deploy to the southwestern U.S., moving to fulfill President Trump’s order to escalate the military role along the border.

Armed infantry and support troops from the 82nd Airborne Division and the 10th Mountain Division—two of the Army’s most experienced combat formations—could be at the border within days, one defense official said, following Trump’s Jan. 20 declaration that what he called an “invasion” of migrants, drug cartels and smugglers would be met with a military response.

For the U.S. Navy to achieve a proposed plan to expand its fleet of battle force ships, the service would need to spend $40.1 billion on shipbuilding every year through 2054, for a total of more than $1 trillion, according to new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.

Over the next 30 years, the Navy wants to grow its fleet of battle force ships to 381 to face swelling global threats, according to the service’s most recent proposal. There are currently 295 in the fleet, and that number is expected to drop to 283 ships in 2027, when the Navy is planning to retire 13 more ships than it will commission.

York Space Systems and SpaceX, two companies building satellites for the Space Development Agency’s megaconstellation, recently demonstrated the ability to connect two of their on-orbit spacecraft through a laser link.

During the demonstration, York linked one of the communication satellites it built for the first iteration of SDA’s constellation with a SpaceX missile tracking satellite. The laser communication links the companies used allow the satellites to transmit information quickly and securely.

The Pentagon’s strategic capital office will focus its 2025 investments on 15 industry segments it thinks could most support U.S. national security needs, including spacecraft, microelectronics materials and manufacturing and biochemicals.

The office released its fiscal 2025 investment strategy Thursday, offering a snapshot of its priorities for the coming year.

“Investments will be prioritized based on their national security impacts, defined as those that provide the United States and/or its allies and partners with robust competitive advantage relative to strategic competitors,” the document states.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin established the Office of Strategic Capital in 2022 to help direct private sector capital to defense technologies. The following year, Congress gave the organization authority to offer loans and loan guarantees to companies.

Rising tensions with China are prompting Washington to revisit America’s roots as a trading nation of the seas.

Protecting merchant sailors and their cargo was what compelled Congress to commission the U.S. Navy’s first new warships. That was in 1794, targeting North African Barbary pirates. The young republic’s seaborne traders, a linchpin of economic growth, were vital to national security.

The Navy became a mighty global fighting force. America’s commercial cargo fleet has withered almost to nonexistence.

Now politicians are once again linking national security to a vibrant maritime sector—nonmilitary aspects of the seas—and the benefits it brings to everything from shipbuilding to logistics chains. Washington is seeking ways to reverse its collapse by tapping examples from other industries, encouraging links with shipbuilding allies and plumbing the writings of America’s greatest sea strategist.

The Air Force will set a new path for how it will fight air wars during the first year of the next Donald Trump presidency, which will have ramifications for decades to come.

The Air Force struggled for much of 2024 to figure out how — and even whether — to proceed with its planned sixth-generation fighter, known as Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD.

But NGAD’s original anticipated cost — which came in at about three times as much as an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, or in the neighborhood of $250 million to $300 million — derailed the Air Force’s plans to proceed. This summer, the service put the program’s planned contract award on hold and launched a review of NGAD, and its air superiority strategy as a whole, to find out if there is a way to achieve its goals more affordably.