Just like old times.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on his return from China, President Trump said he and President Xi "talked a lot about Taiwan" but added that he did not believe there was conflict over the issue. He said he made no commitments to Xi regarding Taiwan.
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While President Trump kept a traditionally vague stance on whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan, President Xi delivered an "unusually harsh admonition" warning the U.S. against intervention. Read more from AP. Despite reporting Thursday that the U.S. had approved the sale of Nvidia H200 chips to China, CNBC reported there was no talk of chip export controls during the summit.
Top Headlines
A Congressional Budget Office estimate that pegs the 20-year cost of the Pentagon's Golden Dome program at $1.2 trillion dollars is based on inaccurate assumptions about the advanced missile shield's architecture, according to the general in charge of the project.
Republicans in the House and Senate used back-to-back hearings to press Sec. Hegseth on the Iran war, spending priorities and America's dwindling supply of munitions. In his comments, he pushed back on the idea that the executive branch would need to seek permission to recommence hostilities with Iran.
According to reports, advanced personnel from the unit were already in Europe to coordinate with the brigade they were set to replace, and equipment was already in transit for what was expected to be a nine-month rotation, when the Pentagon halted the deployment through a War Department memo issued May 1.
The Army is grappling with a sudden budget crunch and scrambling to slash training costs across broad swaths of the force, according to internal documents reviewed by ABC News and multiple U.S. officials.
The agreements with Anduril, CoAspire, Leidos and Zone 5 commence the launch of the new Low Cost Containerization Munitions Program (LCCMP). The new framework deals are part of a broader strategy to dramatically bolster America's stockpiles of standoff strike munitions and prime the industrial base to sustain those inventories going forward.
"There is no 'silver bullet' to address this challenge," said the Task Force 401 director in a press release. "And this pilot program integrates cutting-edge technology into the department's broader counter-drone toolkit." Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and Fort Bliss, Texas (two Army bases); Naval Base Kitsap, Washington; Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota; and Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, were all selected for the pilot program.
The governments of the U.S. and Ukraine have drafted a memorandum outlining the terms of a potential new defense deal between the countries, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
Navy Adm. Brad Cooper, Centcom commander, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday as part of hearings related to force posture in the region and the command's portion of the fiscal year 2027 presidential budget request.
Using data on global defense budgets collected annually by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the London-based weekly calculated that American allies in the North Atlantic and Indo-Pacific spent 111 percent of what the U.S. did on its own defense in 2025.
Under a March memo, certain chief information officers are required to update OMB each month on contracts they or their subordinates have approved. That same memo also mandates data collection about pricing and agency use of services from vendors themselves.
The NSA, the spy community's premiere hacking, codebreaking and foreign eavesdropping giant, has been testing Mythos, a major Anthropic model that's been held back from full public release due to its substantial cyber capabilities, multiple people familiar with the matter said.
Sec. Hegseth announced last Friday that a group of "elite private sector businessmen" is taking on the Pentagon bureaucracy in a coyly named task force that was originally stood up in April. The group will try to modernize contracting and take a carrot-stick approach to industry parters.
Dig Deeper
Sec. Hegseth released the first of what will be several videos on X detailing the effort, saying "We now move at the speed of business, not bureaucracy" and adding that the government will do better to give longer-term signals to manufacturers. Also, the secretive Strategic Capabilities Office gave industry a glimpse into its portfolio priorities this week, which include long-range fires, autonomy and AI, and "special and enabling capabilities."Read more from Defense Scoop.
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Feature Opinions
Former Obama Administration chief of staff and Chicago mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, argued in a recent op-ed that more resources alone will not prepare the military for the future fight and seemed to find common ground with the current administration in taking major contractors to task for their long procurement timelines.
Michael Crosby, the CEO of Leadership Connect, offers 10 observations about how the federal contracting environment is changing based on direct interviews with senior federal procurement leaders across civilian, defense and oversight agencies.
When a mandatory digital system structures how officials reason through a case, who decides what reasoning is allowed, asks Eli Talbert, a U.S. Army officer and data scientist supporting U.S. Special Operations Command.
Worth a listen
If you ask Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor how he thinks about the role of AI in his agency's mission, he'll tell you he sees two different prevailing perspectives: one with a "big OPM" mission and another for "little OPM."
Editor's Notes
You'll see an article here this week referencing the recent GAO annual savings report (which is actually called the "Opportunities to Reduce Duplication, Overlap, and Fragmentation and Achieve an Additional One Hundred Billion Dollars or More in Future Financial Benefits" report, a name so long it changes font toward the end). But I thought two weeks of notes about dense government accountability reports might be too much for the casual reader, so I'll just say the report is a meta version of the problem that pervades government and government-adjacent systems: namely, lack of visibility. If you didn't catch Katrin Mayrhofer's article for The MC Post last week, "Visibility, Not Technology, Is The Hidden Bottleneck In Transatlantic Defense Collaboration," I recommend checking it out. Mayrhofer reminds us that the problem of visibility, especially among the government-industry relationship channels, is fraught with challenges on both sides of the pond. You might have seen clips from the House Natural Resource Committee hearing earlier this week in which Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado pressed Interior Sec. Doug Burgum on the much-discussed effort to paint the Lincoln Memorial's reflecting pool. The hastily arranged process was awarded as a "no-bid" contract, which the two sparred over. Neguse questioned whether the impending celebrations for America's 250th anniversary — what the secretary pointed to as the extenuating circumstance — meets the emergency regulatory requirement. Specifically, the FAR categorizes it as an "unusual or compelling urgency." The stakes laid out in the FAR are this: "the Government would be seriously injured unless the agency is permitted to limit the number of sources from which it solicits bids or proposals." I am not here to comment on the propriety of this decision, but I think it's clear this administration has a much lower threshold for when to invoke emergency-type powers. In the first few months of the second Trump Administration, the Associated Press found 20 percent of its executive orders issued reference some sort of emergency. The attitude seems to be that if there is a power available, use it and let someone tell you later whether it was appropriate. I think it's reasonable to ask, if waiting the reflecting pool justifies urgent contracting authority, doesn't the broken demand signal problem between the Pentagon and industry deserve the same? What about the host of modernization challenges that ail offices across the government? [Insert your favorite perennial government challenge here.] As the Pentagon has pushed expansive and, yes, even "urgent" reforms, the challenge of the intractable bureaucracy — what we unlovingly refer to as the "frozen middle" — is where the rubber meets the road. Without a motivated critical mass of change agents, this experiment in reform will fail. My simple observation is that the temper being communicated from the top implies that every tool is on the table if you're willing to use it. Trust me, I've navigated the mid-level. I've been an action officer. I know the rules are different there than at the top. But now may be the best chance in a very long time to try to change that culture based on the mood in the White House.
The views represented in this commentary are my own and do not constitute endorsement by the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
In the Weeds
Countries around the world are rapidly deploying laser weapons for air defense and counter-drone operations. The real challenge now is producing enough systems to withstand modern saturation attacks. This is the state of the global laser weapons race: a competitive, proliferating market where systems from rival powers increasingly coexist in the same inventory and even the same operational theaters.
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The war game scenario was this: One of NATO's newest members, Sweden, was under threat by an unnamed country that was building up troops along the military alliance's eastern border. And in an unusual twist, non-NATO member Ukraine was there to advise on drone warfare.
"We've already shown that these recommendations can deliver real results—hundreds of billions in savings and improved services," acting Comptroller General Orice W. Brown said. "What this work makes clear is that even more is within reach if additional recommendations are implemented."
Users tore through 20 billion tokens a day as Palantir's Maven Smart System was "leveraged" to help plan and coordinate Operation Epic Fury's 13,000 airstrikes on Iran, officials said.
When Jessica Serrato's boyfriend called a few hours into her morning, she was finally able to breathe. His call meant the internet at his military base wasn't disrupted by any Iranian strikes. It meant that his unit wasn't relocating for their safety like they have before. Most importantly, it meant that he's still alive.
House lawmakers and government watchdogs expressed skepticism this week about the Pentagon's ability to produce a clean financial audit by the upcoming Dec. 31, 2028, statutory deadline after a years-long struggle to meet the requirement.
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