Just like old times.
"Defense contractors have been notified and made aware that today marks the start of an extended review period in which we will make noncompliance determinations," Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell wrote in a statement Monday. "We are engaged in detailed negotiations with many companies and going into great depth to analyze their performance."
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The review was completed in response to an executive order from January that also limited stock buy backs and executive compensation for defense contractors. That order set a 30-day deadline that expired this week for the Pentagon to determine who is coming up short. Meanwhile, on Friday, the DoW put a call out for experts "to help the department better work with the defense industrial base, eliminate bureaucratic bloat in the acquisition process and more quickly field weapons to warfighters." And in additional release Friday, the department sought input from industry on the second phase of overhauling the FAR.
The department's broad reach, including TSA, cybersecurity threats and emergency disaster relief, means the consequences of a partial shutdown could extend far beyond immigration enforcement.
An unexpected airspace closure over El Paso Tuesday night led to conflicting accounts throughout Wednesday of what prompted the action, highlighting a major communication breakdown between parts of the U.S. government.
The panel, known as the Director's Initiative Group, was formed in April to look at big changes to the U.S. Intelligence Community. Gabbard said the effort was always intended to be temporary.
American policymakers are telling European leaders not to expect major U.S. troop drawdowns anytime soon, calming widespread fears across the continent's capitals. Instead, they should expect targeted changes and small pullbacks of rotational forces.
During a White House event on Tuesday, Pentagon CTO Emil Michael told tech executives that the military is aiming to make AI models available on both unclassified and classified domains.
A new round of reductions in force that had been paused by a federal judge and, later, statutorily blocked by Congress during the end-of-year shutdown might resume after the moratorium expired Friday.
The cloud environment—which is not a single product, but a set of umbrella services—will consist of three main on ramps: classic, private and commercial hosting.
The SBA sent letters to companies based on their answers to a data call the agency initiated in December. In a release, the organization said some companies have "exceeded statutory net worth limits, adjusted gross income caps, or total asset limits."
Deterring a Russian attack depends not just on NATO's military forces, but on proof that alliance members can bring new technology to the fight as quickly as Moscow.
Implementation of these requirements could affect some companies' eligibility to perform GSA contracts or otherwise impose new security burdens on contractors.
U.S. Special Operations Command's Science and Technology Directorate and the CIA's S&T organization are collaborating with the SOFWERX and ICWERX innovation hubs to host the upcoming "Rapid Capability Assessment," slated for April.
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Earlier this week, Nextgov reported the CIA is overhauling how it procures technology from the private sector, with DARPA alum Efstathia Fragogiannis—its new procurement chief who started in November—spearheading the effort.
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Spring & Forge is a go-to-market and non-dilutive funding accelerator for hard-tech, defense, aerospace, and dual-use companies. We work with founders, operators, and investors to bridge the gap between breakthrough technology and real-world adoption, whether that’s commercial traction, government customers, or capital that actually understands regulated markets. Our work sits at the intersection of GTM strategy, government procurement, and funding strategy. We help companies move faster without cutting corners in markets where credibility, compliance, and execution matter. A core part of how we do this is WayRaise, our proprietary ...
Feature Commentaries
Recent initiatives are a step in the right direction, but they share a structural weakness: By failing to define clear benchmarking standards, specify durable ownership, and reduce policy volatility, they risk increasing uncertainty, argues Madeline Field, assistant editor for Cogs of War.
As Iran's blackout has shown, the first casualty of conflict is often connectivity. The real question is who stays online when everything else goes dark, ask Lisya Manoah and Yaniv Shnieder of Elron Ventures.
To lead the agentic AI revolution in 2026, the United States must sustain export controls, scale its tech stack globally, and promote adoption of U.S.-aligned agentic AI, argues Brandon Williams.
Tyler Sweatt sits down with Brian MacCarthy to talk about why defense innovation keeps getting stuck between good ideas and real delivery.
Mission Cultivate managing principal Robert Fehlen talks about connecting and communities with a more secure ecosystem for networking.
Editor's Notes
Last week was a big week in the world of AI news. Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 on the same day OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, causing a fresh round of discussion about their rivalry and about the exponentially increasing capabilities of AI that are coinciding with it. You might have seen one such article making the rounds on social media—especially Reddit and X—that got quite a bit of attention and discussion. Matt Shumer, CEO of OthersideAI, wrote a blog post titled Something Big Is Happening, and in it, he really grabs you with a juicy intro:
“I've spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I'm writing this for the people in my life who don't ... my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me "so what's the deal with AI?" and getting an answer that doesn't do justice to what's actually happening. I keep giving them the polite version. The cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I've lost my mind.”
He then goes on to write five thousand words on what I think we all intuitively know: AI is getting better faster, and it can now or will soon be able to do most intellectual tasks at or beyond human pace. It has a generous dose of hysteria with a side of self-promotion at the end of the article as his advice is, of all things, to make sure you’re paying for the latest AI models to stay ahead (hardly the panicked ending the lede promised). But the point is taken that for those in the knowledge, thinking and creative economies, it’s a matter of when, not if your output at work will be obsolete.
The article got me thinking, as I suppose it was intended to. So, when I encountered the first of Defense One’s new series you can read in this week’s ‘Continue Reading’ section that employs fictional writing mixed with real-world research to talk about defense tech, I had a layered response. My first reaction was about the content. I find the technology and the way it's described fascinating but wish the authors had taken the story further. I wanted to see them lean into the human side of the story! Isn’t that the compelling part of fiction? Of course I mean that with due respect to Defense One and the authors, and I’m excited to see where they take this project. But my second reaction (coming back to it after reading Shumer’s blog post) was more a meditation on the act of writing and creating itself.
For all its current capabilities, AI struggles with long form creative writing. At this point, it can mimic the patterns of prose and even craft beautiful sentences and paragraphs, but over distance the illusion atrophies. There’s an uncanny valley it has yet to cross. I certainly expect it will, and sooner than people in my profession would probably like. But the reason I think it struggles is that writing is a socially complex and uniquely human endeavor, the purpose of which is endogenous. It originates first from the person doing the writing, not from the intended audience. C.S. Lewis captured this when explaining why he writes:
“I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
Writing is a form of thinking, of ordering thoughts and exploring arguments. One of the small joys of writing is finishing a sentence, realizing it doesn’t contribute to your work, and holding the backspace key as it disappears forever—its value now only in that it contributed to your understanding of the topic. I promise I’ve done that even in writing this short essay. I think as AI grows and the output of its content becomes indistinguishable from human-created content, we will start to see more like Defense One’s fictional series. Writing that explores, not necessarily explains. I recommend reading it, and if you like it, you can catch the next episode in March.
Also, this week we rolled out a small business highlight to feature some of the amazing Mission Cultivate businesses doing great work in the DIB. Huge thanks to Mollie Jahner for a great conversation about Spring & Forge for the first one of these!
Happy reading this week,
| Beau Downey, Editor
More In Depth
This research shows that by making targeted improvements to existing U.S. defense industrial base operations, manufacturers could cut production ramp-up times in half and double new capital efficiency.
Paul Lushenko, chief strategist for JIATF-401, and his colleague, Joseph Amoroso, explain that the challenge of protecting against drones in the homeland goes beyond hardware—it requires a whole-of-government approach.
The study identified 74 acquisition security challenges spanning areas such as entity eligibility, foreign ownership, safeguarding of classified information, cybersecurity, and the integration of security into acquisition and contracting workflows.
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In an executive order Wednesday the president ordered the Pentagon to secure long-term power purchase agreements with coal plants for military installations.
Both the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and the Defense Technology Security Administration will now fall under the Office of the Undersecretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment.
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The announcement is a realization of changes announced in November to fundamentally reshape the weapons buying process. Last week, President Trump also signed an executive order favoring key allies for weapons sales, according to Fox News.
Even as low-cost, AI-infused constellations proliferate, the center of gravity for modern space warfare remains the terrestrial networks that bind them. This "useful fiction" is the first of a monthly series that explores the future through short stories.
Small and medium-sized companies are becoming the "backbone for long-term national readiness," according to the governor for the General Authority for Military Industries.
The first-of-its-kind defense conference brought together senior military leaders from 34 nations to discuss security concerns in Washington this week.
A new report warns drone developers and advanced weapons suppliers are becoming prime cyber targets as espionage campaigns expand across Europe's defense industrial base.
A new solicitation from the Defense Innovation Unit asks for unmanned systems capable of carrying 1,000-pound class munitions that can fly in a 600 nautical mile radius.
The department made the announcement Monday, surely to the welcomed reception of those who had previously been annoyed to be told to stop using the popular large language model from OpenAI.
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