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Hegseth plans ‘Autonomous Warfare Command’

Bradley Peniston — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:01:05 -0400

The Pentagon will create a combatant command to lead its efforts to develop and deploy robotic weapons, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday in a speech peppered with Bible verses and insults to the press.

The new Autonomous Warfare Command, or AUTOWARCOM, will be “a new four-star combatant command with service-like authorities built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force,” Hegseth said. It is to stand up by Oct. 1, 2027, according to a memo released after his speech.

The secretary seemed to say that planning for the new command would flow from the three-month-old direct reporting portfolio manager for unmanned offensive and defensive systems, whose “culminating mission” will “take place over the course of months, clearing the path for Autonomous Warfare Command.” In the meantime, the office is being given a new task: to “prototype a new construct called warfighting acquisition” that “fuses operators with entrepreneurs in rapid adaptation cycles while distributing decisions and dollars closer to frontline units, to combatant commands.” He said the office would henceforth be led by Owen West, who currently runs the Defense Innovation Unit, and a Navy senior chief petty officer who is both a SEAL and a test pilot. It will also be renamed “Project Agincourt,” the secretary said, miming a bow and arrow.

To further speed the adoption of unmanned technologies, Hegseth said, the Army, Navy, and Air Force Departments will create “new MOS frameworks”—a reference to the job classifications of the Army and Marine Corps—”to support our shift to autonomy. We need institutional knowledge and career paths for a new generation of autonomous warfighters.”

The secretary also announced a committee with a four-month deadline “to creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer and capabilities we must master.” The committee, dubbed Project Meridian, will be led by defense contractors Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich, the 83-year-old former Speaker of the House whose mixed scientific legacy includes dissolving Congress’ non-partisan scientific advisory office.

‘FORTRESS America’

Hegseth said that the U.S. military has become “Dependent on foreign mines for rare earths, on overseas factories for microchips, on foreign supply chains for weapons, and on a civilian power grid to keep the lights on at our bases.” So, he said, he is launching an effort to ensure that every U.S. military base will eventually generate its own electrical power; he gave no timeline or cost estimate. He also said the military will increase its stockpiles of munitions and critical supply-chain materials. It will also stockpile medicine and blood, part of what Hegseth called “a national insurance policy for the American homeland.”

As part of this “FORTRESS America” effort, Hegseth said, the U.S. military will build a new base in the state that makes the best pitch for it. A DOD statement said the base will “serve as a foundational hub for integrated defense operations, distributed command-and-control, and resilient cyber and technological capabilities.” The secretary said the base will cover “hundreds of thousands of acres,” house 15,000 to 25,000 troops, and have structures of “timeless classical architecture” to comply with an August executive order.

Other new initiatives include a planned Office of Religious Affairs that will report to Hegseth personally. “ORA will ensure religious affairs are no longer dispersed across distant bureaucratic layers, giving senior leaders a dedicated capability to protect free exercise, remove policy barriers, identify unmet requirements, and secure the support needed for the Service chaplaincies to succeed,” a DOD statement said.

Hegseth continued a pattern of espousing conservative evangelical religious beliefs in official speeches. He quoted the Bible several times, called children “precious souls made in the image and likeness of God,” and said that “America's military must understand the difference” between God and evil.

The defense secretary also took pains, beginning with the second sentence of his speech and continuing at intervals until his closing thoughts, to lambaste what he called the “hyperventilating” and “delusional” media for, among other things, reporting on the swift depletion of key munitions in the war on Iran. He said that “partisan activism that intentionally smears the troops” amounts to “treason, actually.” He cited no evidence of smears or activism, nor any basis for telling the assembled troops that “it's your movements and bases that they reveal to the enemy.”

Hegseth prompted and drew light applause on a few occasions, a change from the resolute silence at his high-profile speech a year ago; the video feed did not reveal whether the clapping came from the carefully selected junior officers and senior enlisted leaders, or from others in the audience. “This is decidedly not a trifling matter of decorum or politeness," Peter Feaver, a noted expert on civil-military affairs, wrote a day before the speech. "The safety of the American republic and the constitutional order depend on elected political leaders trusting that the military they have inherited from previous administrations will serve in a nonpartisan fashion.”

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Defense Business Brief: End-of-fiscal-year advice for founders; Navy drone boats; Powerus to go public

Lauren C. Williams — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:21:03 -0400

WASHINGTON—The Pentagon’s comptroller has a bit of advice for tech makers and founders who want to do business with the military: Make tech that troops like, find out who can buy it for them, and hire someone who knows how things work. .

“Having the users like your products is incredibly necessary. That's a given. But it's the program offices and the [portfolio acquisition executives, or] PAEs who really have the power to make you successful,” Jules Hurst, the Defense Department’s chief financial officer, said at Y Combinator’s Startup Industrial Base event Wednesday. “You have to provide the solution to them. Again, they’ve made their budget. They made it a year and a half ago. They've made a plan to execute that budget. So anything you're bringing in is, at times, disruptive to them if they have an established program. So you've got to figure out how you can fit in.”

Fitting in could mean being a subcontractor for an existing program or helping program managers “shape requirements for a future capability,” but it has to be more than just a good idea, he said.

“You've got to fit into the cycle—and I know that's not what a lot of you want to hear. And we're working on changing that by doing acquisition reform, but it's still the case in a lot of programs across the department,” Hurst said.

Hiring someone familiar with doing business with the government “will help you immensely,” he said, as will finding the right Defense Department program offices.

“Shop for the program offices and program managers that are really interested in change, and you align yourself with that person and you start to help try to solve their problems with your team. If you find the right program office or program manager, they can do immense good for you. They can open up lots of opportunities across the department. They can introduce you to people, even if you're not a good fit for their program. So part of it is also personality shopping and finding somebody who really wants to make change and isn’t fixated on just compliance.”

And once in the door, companies must be able to make the tech in large quantities.

“The best thing is to show that you can make stuff. A lot of startups right now, sometimes they're paper deep—and that's kind of a risky bet for the government. Not that we shouldn't take it, right? Because sometimes our alternative is a company that does manufacture things, but doesn't produce in the timetable we want, or the capabilities we need, or the cost schedule we want,” Hurst said.

“So again, my best advice to you is: show that you can manufacture things. And if you are not manufacturing things, hire people who have experience manufacturing things, so you can show the government that you're bringing on the talent necessary to scale your product and capability if they decide to buy it.”

Welcome

You’ve reached the Defense Business Brief, where we dig into what the Pentagon buys, who they’re buying from, and why. Send along your tips, feedback, and song recommendations to lwilliams@defenseone.com. Check out the Defense Business Brief archive here, and tell your friends to subscribe!

USVs wading in. The Navy will buy 30 medium-sized unmanned surface vessels at about $40 million each from three companies: Galliano Marine Services, HII, and Saronic. Each company will build 10, the first of which are expected to be delivered in the last quarter of 2027.

A little more: Six out of seven companies successfully completed sea trials for phase one of the Navy’s MUSV program. The three that didn’t get production contracts but had successful trials—Leidos, PacMar Technologies, and Sea Machines—“will automatically transfer into the marketplace and be eligible as part of phase two,” which will have broader requirements, Christopher Miller, the Navy’s acting direct reporting portfolio manager for robotic and autonomous systems, told reporters. Birdon participated in the trials and did not meet the program requirements but has a “viable path” to joining the drone marketplace in the future, he said.
Pulling up: The MUSV program has been through a lot of changes in the last year (including a lawsuit.) But the more interesting part for me is what could come out of phase two, where other services, like the Army, can share requirements they have. This could have big implications for the Indo-Pacom region, and is something USARPAC commander Gen. Ronald Clark highlighted earlier this year.
- “The Army has a mission, and they actually operate a number of ships. And I think there's a great opportunity here…and we're just trying to make sure everybody sees the state of the market in terms of the capability, what the performance is. And then we'll obviously work closely on the requirements,” Miller told reporters. “But I'm excited about that because I do think there's opportunity for a close collaboration and partnering with the other services as they think about their future programs.”
- Phase 2 is expected to start testing evaluations as early as Nov. 16 and continue over the next five years.
Related tangent: Defense tech darling Saronic broke ground on its much-anticipated Port Alpha facility in Brownsville, Texas, today. Vice President JD Vance attended the event. Also, earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the company’s Austin facility, praising the company’s USVs for aiding in the rescue of downed Apache pilots.

Making moves + other news

Michael Brasseur joined Booz Allen Hamilton as an executive vice president. Brasseur was previously Saab, Inc.’s chief strategy officer and led the Navy’s Task Force 59.
Dronemaker Powerus is expected to go public Oct. 1 as it finalizes its merger with Aureus Greenway Holdings, a publicly traded company on NASDAQ. The new company name will be Powerus Corporation.
The FBI shut down an investigation into defense contractors’ alleged bribes to lawmakers, ProPublica reports.
Time is the real constraint the defense industrial base has to contend with, Seurat Technologies’ CEO James Demuth writes in Defense One.
Boeing snags a multibillion-dollar deal to build the Navy’s next generation fighter, F/A-XX.
The Navy partially accepted the future USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier.
SpaceX launched a really big rocket and ended the flight test early.

One last thing: Happy New Fiscal Year’s Eve to all who celebrate! Out with the old and in with the new—err, continuing resolution.

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Pentagon update on National Defense Strategy cites progress, omits key threats

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:41:40 -0400

The Pentagon’s latest report about its implementation of the National Defense Strategy notes progress on accelerating weapons production, cutting red tape, and persuading European governments to boost defense spending—but is light on problems such as Russia’s increasing aggression in Europe and the high cost of U.S. wars in the Middle East.

The report to Congress, dated Sept. 22 but pushed out on Defense Department social media on Tuesday, argues that the Trump administration has made “significant progress implementing the 2026 National Defense Strategy’s guidance” in several areas. It cites a historically large budget request that includes funding for undersea forces, long-range air forces, long-range ground fires, and satellites for communication and intelligence; and $53 billion to accelerate the development of munitions.

The report arrives one day before Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s scheduled “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. He is likely to talk about some of the update’s key themes, according to one person familiar with the matter.

The update cites progress made in the Golden Dome for America, or GDA, effort to build a continental defense against drones and missiles. “DoW has already conducted our first live-fire event, during which we successfully demonstrated key aspects of GDA command-and-control (C2) as well as integration of other key capabilities,” it says.

The update says the Pentagon has worked with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission to ease the development and testing of counter-drone defenses. “We have created a first-of-its-kind process for the rapid coordination and safe incorporation of next generation C-UAS technology” into the National Airspace System, it says.

The update touts the administration’s effort to persuade European allies to spend more on their militaries and contribute more to plans for the continent’s defense. At least one alliance defense leader—Paweł Ksawery Zalewski, secretary of state at Poland’s Ministry of National Defence—has said the NATO 3.0 concept should not be misunderstood as a harbinger of a U.S. retreat from the alliance. “Polish armed forces and American armed forces have never been so close and so good and so deep as today,” Zalewski told a U.S. audience last week.

But the report glosses over conditions that have worsened since the National Defense Strategy was published in January—in part, because of President Trump’s decision to start a war on Iran.

For instance, while the NDS holds as a goal the replenishment of the U.S. arsenal, the new report doesn’t mention that Operation Epic Fury and other Middle East operations have set back that goal by “'months and years,” as a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it in May. Nor does the report mention the NDS’ warning against “endless wars, regime change, and nation building”—the latter two being among the many justifications given by the Trump administration for its war on Iran.

It skips the fact that the NDS said regional allies should deter Iran and that it said further military action to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon would be unnecessary in the wake of June 2025’s “Midnight Hammer” bombing.

Instead, the update asserts that the Defense Department “anticipated that such a need [for strikes against Iran’s nuclear program] might be forthcoming.”

But perhaps the report’s most significant omission, which it shares with the NDS itself, concerns Russian actions: hybrid and kinetic action against NATO members, military assistance to Iran, and intensifying the war on Ukraine.

Instead, the update notes that the United States reduced the number of manned brigade combat teams in Europe from “five to three, returning us to the level of BCTs in Europe in 2021.”

Max Bergmann and Otto Svendsen, writing for the Heinrich Böll Foundation on Sept. 24, say that “a potential U.S. force posture reduction in Europe will leave the continent vulnerable to further Russian aggression.”

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Army awards counterdrone contracts worth more than $4B

Lauren C. Williams — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:10:47 -0400

Military drone and counterdrone demand is booming amid a rush to spend funds before the end of the fiscal year—but the Pentagon’s drone marketplace is making it a little easier, defense officials said.

“These contracts are available to everybody. And so what we've seen across the department is a surge of end-of-year requests for procurement,” Brig. Gen. Matthew Ross, who leads the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401, told reporters Tuesday. “End-of-year spending is nothing new inside of the department, but when you have an available contract vehicle, it makes it really easy to execute. And so, we've seen that from across the services.”

The Army issued 10 indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts Tuesday with a total ceiling of $4.15 billion for systems to disable or destroy unmanned aerial drones, including command-and-control systems, sensors, and weapons.

Seven companies received $500 million awards: Allen Control Systems, Digital Force Technologies, DroneShield, L3Harris WESCAM, Napatree Technology, RADA Technologies, and SRC.

Echodyne and PVP Advanced EO Systems received $250 million contracts, and SmartShooter received a $150 million contract. Only about $50 million was obligated at the time of award, the Army said.

But there’s room for more—up to $7 billion.

"As of today we have awarded over $5 billion, which includes previous contracts with [Aerovironment] and CACI, these 10 new IDIQs and others that we expect to sign before the end of next month. The $7 billion ceiling is in full effect today, and additional contracts will be pursued to get us to that point," Col. Tony Lindh, JIATF-401’s lead for rapid acquisitions, told reporters.

The new enterprise contracts reflect a new way of doing business for the Army, providing buyers more flexibility over time.

“These platforms are software-defined, hardware-enabled systems…so we have to be able to partner with industry and then hold them accountable over time,” said Ross, JIATF 401’s director.

The Army’s unmanned aerial systems marketplace has done about $800 million in transactions since it opened earlier this year, and the expectation is for counterdrone demand to follow a similar path—especially with allies and partners, said Brent Ingraham, who leads Army acquisitions.

“About 10 days ago, Australia successfully procured, in this case, it was a UAS off the drones.mil marketplace,” Ingraham told reporters. “We still have to use the [foreign military sales] process as we go through this marketplace. But…we've automated the tools on the back end.”

That means it now takes days from request to purchase instead of months or longer when an ally or partner nation wants to buy a system the U.S. has.

“When they see the U.S. military buying certain products, they're all in,” Ingraham said. “And so this is a way to share those technologies, share what we're doing,” and help smaller businesses “scale.”

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The military may be top-heavy. Don't make things worse with hasty cuts.

James Jacobson — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:31:00 -0400

News broke Tuesday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is planning to order the elimination of one-fifth of the U.S. military’s general and flag billets. There is a legitimate case for examining whether the Armed Forces have have become too top-heavy. There is also a legitimate reason to be concerned about how reductions in the senior officer corps are carried out.

For more than 20 years, I worked as a federal contractor operating mission-critical facilities supporting the Defense Department, State Department, and federal law-enforcement agencies. That experience gave me an appreciation for something that can be difficult to quantify on an organizational chart: institutional knowledge.

Large organizations accumulate layers of management. The military is not immune. Headquarters expand, responsibilities overlap, and positions created to meet one requirement sometimes remain long after circumstances change.

Congress recognized this issue well before the current administration. In 2017, lawmakers reduced the authorized number of active-duty general and flag officer positions by about 11 percent. They also ordered a comprehensive look at whether another 10 percent of flag jobs might be cut, and if so, which ones.

This is important context for today's debate: concern about “rank creep” did not suddenly appear in 2025, nor is questioning the number of generals and admirals inherently an attack on military leadership. It is a legitimate management and national-security question.

But it is only the beginning of the analysis.

In May 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed a minimum 20 percent reduction in active-component four-star positions, a minimum 20 percent reduction in National Guard general officers, and an additional minimum 10 percent reduction in general and flag officers associated with restructuring the Unified Command Plan. That order came amid broader cuts to the defense civilian workforce, a campaign noted for a lack of planning and consequent disruption.

Hegseth’s new order to cut 20 percent of general and flag billets reportedly comes with a similarly tight deadline: Jan. 1.

The question Congress and the American public should be asking is not simply, "How many generals can we eliminate?" It should be: Which positions does the military need to accomplish its mission, and what happens when those positions and the officers who fill them disappear?

There is an enormous difference between eliminating an unnecessary headquarters position and losing an experienced operational commander. There is a difference between removing a redundant layer of administration and disrupting the succession of officers being prepared for increasingly demanding commands. And there is a difference between making an organization leaner and simply making it smaller.

The men and women who reach the senior ranks of our Armed Forces generally arrive there after decades of increasingly demanding assignments. The combined operational, technical, and institutional experience represented by those officers is an asset that cannot quickly or easily be replaced.

That does not mean every general or admiral billet should be preserved. If a headquarters is unnecessary, eliminate it. If two commands unnecessarily duplicate one another, consolidate them. If a position no longer requires a general or flag officer, downgrade it. If layers of bureaucracy interfere with getting resources and authority to the people actually performing the mission, remove those layers.

But make those decisions based upon the requirements of the mission—not simply the desire to achieve a predetermined percentage reduction.

The same principle should apply farther down the ranks. A serious examination of military "rank creep" should not stop with four-star generals. Congress should examine the entire personnel structure and determine whether the balance among general and flag officers, field-grade officers, senior noncommissioned officers, and the junior enlisted personnel who perform much of the military's day-to-day operational work remains appropriate for today's force.

The answer may differ considerably among the services. A Navy built around technologically complex ships, submarines and aviation cannot necessarily be evaluated using the same personnel ratios as an Army ground formation. Cyber, space, intelligence and nuclear missions also require experienced technical personnel. That is precisely why percentage reductions alone are an inadequate substitute for manpower analysis.

There is another consequence that deserves attention: the effect on the officers who remain. If capable and deserving officers come to believe that opportunities for advancement are disappearing for reasons unrelated to their performance, qualifications or the needs of the service, the consequences can extend far beyond the officers whose promotions are affected. It can influence retention, morale and the willingness of talented younger officers to commit their careers to military service.

Promotion and command decisions should be based upon merit and military requirements, without regard to sex, ethnicity or orientation. The objective should be straightforward: identify and advance the most capable people required to defend the country.

Congress therefore has an important oversight responsibility. It should determine which senior positions are actually being eliminated, which are merely being left vacant or reassigned, whether the positions involve administrative or operational responsibilities, what effect the changes have on succession and readiness, and how today's reductions compare with the reforms Congress itself initiated nearly a decade ago.

Lawmakers should also ask a deceptively simple question: Did the FY2017 reforms work?

If Congress previously ordered substantial reductions and today's Defense Department again concludes that the senior ranks are excessive, policymakers should understand why. Were the earlier reductions implemented as intended? Did new headquarters and billets subsequently replace those eliminated? Did missions change? Or does the underlying personnel system itself encourage rank growth? Those answers matter.

We should streamline the military where the evidence supports doing so. Every dollar and every billet consumed by unnecessary overhead is a resource unavailable to the warfighter. But efficiency cannot be measured simply by counting how many stars have disappeared from an organizational chart. We should not endeavor to achieve a managerial statistic by dulling the point of the spear and sacrificing the careers of dedicated members of our Armed Forces.

James Jacobson spent more than 20 years as a federal contractor operating mission-critical facilities supporting the Department of Defense, Department of State, and federal law-enforcement agencies. He lives in Naples, Florida.

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After 40 days of combat, Navy destroyer returns home

Jennifer Hlad — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:38:00 -0400

JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii—Some 300 days after leaving Hawaii, the guided-missile destroyer Frank E. Petersen Jr. was welcomed home Monday with delighted cheers, jangling cowbells, handmade posters, and fresh flower leis.

The ship—part of the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group—did 40 days of combat operations and spent six months in an active combat zone. It started its deployment in December with operations in the South China Sea, but in late January was redirected to the Middle East, shortly before President Donald Trump launched Operation Epic Fury.

The Petersen took part in the war’s initial strikes on Iran, firing Tomahawk missiles at land targets on Feb. 28. Then, as the strike group’s air and missile defense commander, the destroyer warded off more than 100 Iranian missiles and drones launched against its group and other ships in the region.

We made sure that we kept dozens of ships safe against a variety of different attacks—missile attacks, drone attacks,” said Capt. Casey Mahon, the ship’s commander.

The destroyer, commissioned in 2022, sailed more than 85,000 nautical miles during the deployment and conducted 45 replenishments at sea. At one point, the ship spent 106 days at sea between port calls, Mahon said.

It also was the first ship to enter the Strait of Hormuz after the end of major combat operations, he said, which was “quite a voyage.”

“Obviously there was stress we had to face when we did that…on the sea, under the sea, and in the air.”

Though some of the adversary technology the crew faced was new, he said, “air defense really hasn’t changed a lot of ways since World War II: You have a radar, you find the thing, you’ve got to track it.” Still, “how these things fly, how they do their missions are very different, and so the crew showed a lot of adaptability to that,” and the ship’s systems were also “very effective in that adaptability.”

The Petersen learned lessons both in “how to stay at sea for a long time” and in how to defend against new tactics, Mahon said, and has passed on those lessons to other ships that are in the region now.

“Like any good Navy ship, you know, you’re ready for that next mission,” Mahon said. “It wasn’t what we expected to happen on deployment, but for the crew, you know, whether you’re in the north Arabian Sea or the South China Sea, you’re at sea, and so we do the operations that we’re directed to do.”

Clutching ti leaf lei as she waited on the pier with her two children, Alysha Nishikawa said she was worried at times during the deployment, but she tried to “throw out positive energy” to her husband and reassure him that they were OK so he could continue to do his job.

Petty Officer 1st Class Ryhean Tucker, who was one of the first sailors to reunite with his family as the recipient of the “first kiss,” said the deployment was “stressful” and challenging. His wife, Taylor Tucker, said it was also challenging for her, taking care of their two children and moving from Virginia to Hawaii.

“It was a big job, but we did it,” she said.

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Hegseth orders cyber, intelligence agencies to prioritize election defense

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:15:00 -0400

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed U.S. Cyber Command and military intelligence agencies to prioritize countering foreign threats to the upcoming elections, ordering intelligence collection and coordination with the Department of Homeland Security.

The Sept. 22 memorandum was released publicly Monday and instructs the defense intelligence enterprise to gather and analyze information on foreign election threats. It separately directs Cyber Command to use its existing authorities and capabilities to counter potential cyberattacks by foreign actors targeting the elections.

“I am therefore directing the entire [Defense Intelligence Enterprise] to mobilize every authorized asset, capability, and partnership under your command to defend our election infrastructure from foreign malign influence,” Hegseth wrote.

The memo is addressed to the leaders of Cyber Command, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. It calls protecting elections a “no-fail mission,” but does not identify particular adversaries or operations, specify additional staffing or funding, or set implementation deadlines.

The directive notably comes amid a broader retreat from dedicated federal efforts to track foreign influence and disinformation. The second Trump administration has dismantled the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, reorganized the intelligence community’s coordination of that work and reduced election security support at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

At the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an overhaul shifted many responsibilities of the Foreign Malign Influence Center to other offices. ODNI has subsequently assigned two officials to coordinate election threat intelligence.

Foreign election threats can range from attacks on voting-related computer systems to campaigns intended to manipulate public opinion.

The NSA collects foreign signals intelligence, including intercepted communications, to understand adversaries’ plans and capabilities, while also helping protect sensitive U.S. systems. Cyber Command conducts military cyber operations, including missions to disrupt foreign hackers and the infrastructure they use.

The organizations have previously combined those capabilities through a joint Election Security Group. In a description of its work during the 2022 midterms, NSA explained that intelligence about an attack originating abroad could be shared with domestic agencies to help them defend against it, while Cyber Command could use offensive operations to disrupt the foreign attacker.

Hegseth’s memo does not specify whether the same organizational model will be used this year. It directs intelligence work to comply with applicable laws and policies and tells Cyber Command to operate under its existing authorities.

The directive also emphasizes cooperation with DHS as that agency’s civilian cyberdefense agency outlines how it will assist election officials following staffing and program reductions.

Two days after Hegseth signed the memo, CISA—housed within DHS—released an election security plan identifying its 10 regional directors as election security advisers and describing a free threat-sharing platform connecting election officials, state intelligence hubs and federal partners. That plan followed warnings from state officials that earlier cuts had weakened their access to federal security expertise.

The 2026 elections come as rapid advances in AI allow foreign influence operators to automate more of their work. Such capabilities could let adversaries run larger campaigns with fewer people, adding to the challenge of identifying coordinated manipulation ahead of the midterms.

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Treat operational feedback as a strategic resource, new paper argues

Jennifer Hlad — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:56:43 -0400

As the Pentagon overhauls its acquisition system, it should take lessons from recent and ongoing wars, a new report argues.

From Israel, the U.S. should learn that “operational feedback should be treated as a strategic resource.” writes Barak Seener, an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, in a report released Monday. And from Ukraine, the U.S. can learn “the strategic value of competition, decentralization, and commercial innovation.”

Additionally, Seener writes, “software-defined warfare requires software-defined acquisition.” In the future, acquisition models should “treat software as a continuously developing capability, rather than a completed product.”

These changes and more are necessary, he writes, because: “Future military advantage will belong to organizations that can learn, adapt, and integrate faster than their adversaries.”

Acknowledging the reforms the Pentagon began in 2025, Seener writes that the main challenge facing the American defense acquisition process “is not simply one of speed. It is the ability to align authority, responsibility, and operational outcomes within a single decision-making structure.”

Introducing portfolio acquisition executives is a good step, he writes, but “the effectiveness of the reform will ultimately depend upon the degree to which portfolio managers are able to exercise genuine authority over requirements, resources, capability trade-offs and program termination.”

In an interview, Seener pointed to the ways militiaries are using adaptation to outflank exquisite weaponry.

“We used to think that you needed very expensive platforms that took a decade to create, like the F-35, to create strategic impact on the battlefield,” he said. “But look what Ukraine is doing in Russia. Look what the Houthis are doing, just by deploying mass.”

“Technology is evolving much faster than traditional defense acquisition timelines,” he said, “so expensive platforms that take years to develop can leave capabilities outdated by a rapidly changing battlefield landscape before they are fielded.”

Instead of developing bespoke technologies from scratch, “the Pentagon can increase its flexibility by tapping into technologies already developed by the commercial sector—particularly AI, software, cloud computing, autonomy, sensors, and data analytics,” he said.

The need for further reform is clear, Seener said, when you look at how existing systems “have failed to make a strategic impact in Iran.

“You know, in the first couple of days, America and Israel together were able to decapitate the regime, eliminate their command and control, with this rapid tempo, this high velocity of strikes against a huge number of targets, which was unprecedented. And yet it made no strategic impact. Everybody was dazzled; they were awe-inspired at the impact it made…but look, the regime remains intact. Their missile capability remains intact. So this operational wowing effect that it has is not the same as having the strategic impact.”

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Polish defense official says US has decided to establish a base in Poland

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:03:57 -0400

Poland will fulfill a longtime goal of hosting a permanent U.S. military base, a Polish defense leader said Friday, adding that the two countries are nearing an agreement to jointly develop weapons.

“We understand that decision has been made,” Paweł Ksawery Zalewski, secretary of state at Poland’s Ministry of National Defence, told an audience in Washington, D.C.

Asked for comment, a Pentagon spokesman said, “We have nothing to announce at this time.”

The Polish government first sought a U.S. military base within its borders in 2018, when it offered to name it after President Donald Trump. Trump, at the time, said that he was “looking at it.”

Since returning to office, Trump has moved to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Europe even as Russian President Vladimir Putin has increased missile and drone strikes against Ukraine and escalated a hybrid warfare campaign against NATO allies. Trump has also made overtures to the Russian leader, such as inviting Putin to attend an upcoming meeting of the G-20 in Miami, Florida.

Zalewski argued that, despite appearances, Trump remains committed to a stronger NATO under the NATO 3.0 concept, and said his discussions with U.S. military officials were as productive and meaningful as ever.

He couldn’t say how many U.S. troops would be stationed at the new base but acknowledged that the Trump administration has not yet fulfilled its May promise to put an additional 5,000 troops in his country.

“I'm always very hesitant to discuss the numbers, because it is not the numbers which matters, because, you know, what matters is capabilities, " he said.

Zalewski said the details of the basing agreement are still under discussion between Polish and U.S. military officials.“We are just talking how to execute it in the right way, because, you know, it's a very important decision in terms of logistic financing. You know we are offering financing of the whole infrastructure. We are contributing to financing [for the] stay of each American soldier on the level of $15,000 per year,” he said.

The two countries have also agreed on the outlines of an agreement to jointly produce new military capabilities by allowing more joint ventures between U.S. and Polish defense producers.

“We understand the decision on the American side has been made,” he said.

But the agreement must contend with U.S. laws and regulations regarding defense exports.

“What is needed to do is first to cut the red tape,” he said.

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Anthropic loses legal fight to shed DOD's designation as a 'supply-chain risk'

John Croxton — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:57:36 -0400

Anthropic will remain a Pentagon-designated supply-chain risk, thanks to federal judges who ruled that the Defense Department can prohibit its employees and contractors from using the AI company's products for DOD business.

The designation has been in force since March, when the department sought to alter its contract with Anthropic to replace prohibitions on using its tools for domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons with allowances for “all lawful use."

The department has used two statutory justifications for labeling Anthropic a supply-chain risk, a designation typically applied to firms suspected to be working for adversarial governments. Anthropic beat back one of the justifications in an August ruling in the Northern District of California, but did not prevail in a lawsuit heard by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Friday's ruling was issued by Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both appointed during the first Trump administration, with a dissent by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, who was appointed by the first President Bush.

“This was not an unexpected outcome given the composition of the panel that heard the case” said Charlie Bullock, senior research fellow at the Institute for Law & AI think tank. “Historically, both Katsas and Rao have shown a great deal of deference to the Trump administration's assertions of executive authority on matters of national security. If Anthropic had drawn almost any other two judges from the D.C. Circuit for that panel they would have stood a good chance of winning, because I think their legal position is overwhelmingly strong.”

“I think Anthropic’s chances on appeal if they get to appeal either to the en banc D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court are good. But they’re not guaranteed to be heard, because the appeals process is discretionary,” Bullock said.

In a statement to The Washington Sun, an Anthropic spokesperson said, “We respectfully disagree with the court’s decision. Another federal court has already held the government’s parallel designation unlawful.”

Anthropic added, “We remain confident in our position and are considering all options, including further review.”

Defense Undersecretary Emil Michael wrote in a statement on X, “The hammer of justice has smashed @AnthropicAI arguments. They are a supply-chain risk to the defense industrial base serving the @DeptofWar. Warfighters will sleep better knowing that no private company will insert their opinions in the chain of command. @SecWar was right!”

The ruling will likely keep the Pentagon and its other contractors reducing their use of Anthropic's products, such as its Claude tools. Overall, however, the company's revenue is growing about tenfold per year, and plans an IPO in November that some expect to value the company at a record $2 trillion.

Michael and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been critical of Anthropic in public statements. In January, Hegseth stated in remarks at a SpaceX event, “Department of War AI will not be woke. It will work for us. We're building war-ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge.”

DOD issued an ultimatum on Feb. 24 demanding the company permit its AI to be used for all legal purposes by Feb. 27, which Anthropic refused. Hegseth announced his direction that DOD designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk Feb. 27, and it was formally announced on March 3.

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The Navy’s public shipyards will take more decades to repair, GAO says

Lauren C. Williams — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:51:52 -0400

The Navy's effort to fix and improve its shipyards will take decades longer and cost billions more than initially planned—and Congress has not been systematically kept apprised of the growing complexity of the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program, the Government Accountability Office has found.

“Without a full picture of how much has been spent, what remains to be funded, and what risks may affect SIOP progress, Congress could make consequential decisions for SIOP based on incomplete information, thus risking billions in taxpayer dollars and a lack of program oversight for the decades to come,” the GAO wrote in a report released Friday.

The Navy must already submit reports related to its shipyard construction efforts to comply with nearly a dozen legislative provisions. But the watchdog agency suggested that Congress should require the service to “annually report consolidated, standardized status updates,” including revised cost and schedule estimates for the entire plan.

The Navy’s public shipyards—Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and Puget Sound Naval Shipyard— maintain and update the service’s nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers. The service has struggled for years with maintenance backlogs that have, in at least one case, led a submarine to be retired early rather than fixed up.

Planning for the shipyard upgrades started in 2018 and has taken several years longer than anticipated because the Navy “underestimated the time needed” and “did not fully account for the many challenges, uncertainties, and complex analyses needed to sufficiently plan for an endeavor of SIOP’s magnitude,” the report states.

New projects and costs were also discovered during design and planning.

For example, the Navy found at least $1 billion would be needed for “facility retrofits and new construction to mitigate newly assessed seismic risks at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard” since 2023, the report states. “In 2023, the Navy completed emergency drydock retrofits and repairs. The Navy also requested $830 million to conduct seismic upgrades for Dry Dock 4…in its fiscal year 2026 budget request.”

The GAO’s analysis ran from September 2024 through September 2026.

Earthquake risks were included in SIOP’s original 2018 assessment, the GAO noted.

Many shipyards and their facilities were built close to a century ago, with problems seen today compounded on top of “long-deferred maintenance and worsening decrepitude during that time. As a result, unexpected facility and construction site conditions led to new projects being identified or additional work added to projects during construction,” the report states.

Navy leaders are expected to consider the SIOP plan and cost estimate by this month.

The GAO made three other recommendations, including reviewing future program needs in the oversight framework and documenting the SIOP’s role and duties to improve project risk management.

The Navy hasn’t “fully documented” SIOP’s roles and responsibilities despite creating multiple organizations to manage the program’s projects.

“Doing so would formalize their new SIOP roles and help to ensure not only their ability to effectively implement SIOP’s essential projects but also the continuity of the critical shipyard operations to maintain and modernize the U.S. naval fleet now and throughout SIOP’s extended timeline,” the GAO wrote.

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Defense Business Brief: Here comes the quantum boom; GDIT’s perspective; and Sec. 889

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 06:15:00 -0400

The benefits of quantum technology could hit the mainstream sooner than you think—at least that’s what one company is aiming for.

“We’re actually really hoping in the next year or two [to] release these as products that people can buy and integrate into their cybersecurity protocols,” said Mehdi Namazi, co-founder and chief science officer of the quantum networking company Qunnect. But the products aren’t “that futuristic.”

Quantum is usually discussed as being able to one day break encryption and help discover new drugs. But Qunnect is betting that commercial quantum technologies for telecommunications networks could be ready sooner rather than later, according to newly released research.

Several focus on authentication, including a quantum position verification process that allows you to verify the position and time of a transaction, providing a physical receipt, Namazi told Defense One ahead of the Quantum World Congress event outside of Washington, D.C.

That could unveil the true source of a phishing call that is pretending to be your bank, for example.

Another example is quantum channel protection, where “entanglement networks can supplement post-quantum encryption to perfectly protect and monitor the communication networks to make sure no one is eavesdropping, no one is harvesting the data,” he said. It also protects against redirecting traffic on the network.

Qunnect counts In-Q-Tel, an investment firm focused on intelligence and national security needs, as one of its backers.

Background: DARPA has previously explored entanglement networks through its Quantum Augmented Networks effort, but has recently become more vocal about it. Following a White House executive order, the Pentagon released its quantum strategy, which focuses on network modernization, such as integrating secure commercial products and using quantum-resistant devices. It also named 2030 as the deadline for all Pentagon systems to support post-quantum cryptography.

That method of using entangled photons or particles, known as quantum entanglement, can also aid in precise time synchronization, which could be used for future telecommunications networks, including 6G. Precision would drill down to one trillionth of a second, “which you usually need for financial transactions, defensive systems—places that you really, really care about the security and the accuracy of your network,” Namazi said.

But there are challenges, particularly in making sure the technology is compatible with existing telecommunications infrastructure.

“These are hardware-based technologies. So, as much as we build everything to be compatible with the telecommunications infrastructure—which they are—this still means that you do need to go and add devices to different locations,” Namazi said. “And when it [comes] to devices that you use for your cybersecurity, you usually want them to be manufactured [domestically]…in very large quantities, in form factors that make sense. That's definitely still a challenge.”

Welcome

Bigs v. littles: quantum edition. Last week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Amy Gilliland, president of GDIT, onstage at NDIA’s Women in Defense conference. When I asked her how GDIT was navigating a changing dense industrial base with startups getting more interest, in some cases, than primes, she said: “It is our job to go out and find these companies and to show them how we can bring them to the mission.”

Gilliland, who received a “Service to the Flag” award at the event, named the quantum company IonQ as an example.
“These are companies with great ideas. A lot of times they have no certification or accreditation, but they have really great ideas,” she said. “They have a lab at the University of Maryland…They have a big clock in there that’s ticking down to when they think Q-Day is,” the day quantum technology would be able to crack the encryption protecting some of the world’s most secure systems.
“They’re making great progress. And it is our job to bring the big brains that are in this quantum company to bear on programs.”
That includes an intelligence contract in which GDIT is using quantum computing to look through imagery and “detect the tiniest of changes…so we can see what the enemy is doing in ways that conventional computers can’t today,” she said.

Remember the Huawei ban? The Pentagon and General Services developed processes and tools to comply with Section 889 of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, including a search function for contracting officers to find out how companies “represent their compliance,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in a report released Tuesday. But they don’t routinely share those insights with the rest of the federal government.

“GSA and DOD do not broadly share their insights from implementing Section 889 prohibitions with other government agencies,” the report states. “For example, based on its experience with Section 889 prohibitions, GSA has plans to expand its use of customs data to identify the origin of goods, which GAO previously reported is difficult to do. By sharing information about their experience with current prohibitions, GSA and DOD could help other agencies address additional upcoming statutory prohibitions, such as on semiconductors. Sharing information could also help improve compliance.”
The GAO issued four recommendations, two for DOD: to share “subsidiary and affiliate information it collects with relevant federal agencies,” including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; and coordinate with federal agencies on Sec. 889 implementation.

Making moves + other news

AEVEX has a new jet-powered drone called Scepter.
Holland & Knight added Ike Blanton to its national security team. He previously led global investment and economic security out of the Pentagon’s acquisition and sustainment office.
John Roche, Accenture’s managing director for defense, joined the Professional Services Council’s board.
The Space Force awarded Impulse Space a $28 million contract for space domain awareness.
BAE Systems delivered two prototype combat vehicles to the Army. The “Infantry Fighting Vehicles” are based on the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle chassis and are designed to combat drone threats.
The Special Competitive Studies Project released its tech scorecard on biotechnology and the U.S. competition with China.

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Stolen FBI data reveals employees’ roles in intelligence and surveillance

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 23:33:00 -0400

Data stolen in a major hacking group’s alleged intrusion into FBI systems is believed to contain personal information on hundreds of FBI intelligence analysts and other employees involved in clandestine intelligence-gathering and surveillance, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The analysts focus on myriad subject areas like Russia, China, Hezbollah, and cartel-related intelligence, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the exposures are sensitive. The employees’ roles only offer a small picture of their duties, but may still help outsiders identify people working in sensitive parts of the bureau.

ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach Monday, threatening to release what it described as two to three terabytes of FBI employee data unless the bureau retracted a public warning about its tactics within a week.

On Tuesday, the group sent Nextgov/FCW and other news outlets an apparent sample of that data containing roughly 5,000 entries listing employees’ names, home addresses, phone numbers and information about their spouses and siblings.

Multiple individuals also work on human intelligence-gathering, as well as roles involving electronic surveillance activities that make use of telecom interception techniques and other covert access mechanisms. Some employees work in the FBI’s Remote Operations Unit, which builds specialized tools to target computers and networks.

One person works in the bureau’s FISA Management Unit, which handles the processing of applications and renewals under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that governs surveillance and search standards used to collect foreign intelligence.

The FBI said it was aware of “a cyber-criminal enterprise group claiming a compromise of the FBIJobs.gov portal and alleged impact to FBI employee personally identifiable information” and added that it is investigating the matter.

The agency said the cause of the breach was still undetermined. ShinyHunters previously said it exploited vulnerabilities in Amazon and Oracle services to access the bureau data. Neither company has returned a request for comment.

Reuters and 404 Media previously reported details regarding the intelligence roles and the ROU staff.

The language ShinyHunters wants removed appears in a May 15 FBI public service announcement that describes practices the hacking group contests. The group has built a global reputation for various hacking achievements. In May, it claimed responsibility for accessing Canvas, the popular education tech platform used by thousands of U.S. institutions.

The direct claim of an FBI breach is “an unusually provocative move” and should be taken seriously, said Etay Maor, the vice president of threat intelligence at Cato Networks.

Exposure of sensitive bureau staffing data could pose profound counterintelligence risks. For employees who do not publicly identify themselves as working for the FBI, the exposure could reveal both their jobs and how to reach them outside secure work environments. Linking that information to home addresses and relatives’ details could make it easier for nation-state groups and cyber criminals to target employees and their families with harassment, scams or threats.

The breach would be “troubling news” for both FBI employees and applicants, said Doc McConnell, a former cyber policy official at the White House and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

McConnell, who now heads policy and compliance at Finite State, compared the incident to the OPM hack a decade ago.

“The breach of OPM’s personnel records in 2015 resulted in a decade of credit monitoring for millions of affected individuals, and the full counterintelligence impact will likely never be known. This breach appears to contain similar data, creating potential security concerns for the victims if it is made publicly available,” he said.

The bureau will likely work more assertively to crack down on ShinyHunters. When any group directly targets the agency, “they should expect that the FBI is going to marshal additional resources to bring them more quickly to justice,” said Cynthia Kaiser, the SVP of Halcyon’s Ransomware Research Center and former deputy director of the FBI’s Cyber Division.

The incident follows other cyberattacks involving the bureau and its leadership this year. In March, pro-Iran hacking group Handala published material from FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email account, which the bureau said contained historical information unrelated to government business. Separately, a suspected China-linked intrusion into an FBI system exposed surveillance targets’ phone numbers.

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GenAI.mil saw more than 2 million users in one week, top DOD official says

Edward Graham — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 22:00:00 -0400

The Pentagon’s enterprise-wide generative artificial intelligence platform is continuing to see high levels of use across the department, with millions of civilians, contractors and military personnel taking advantage of the service.

In a discussion with Punchbowl News on Wednesday, Defense Department Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer Cameron Stanley said “as of last week, we've had over 2 million people in a week across all three models log in and use AI.”

GenAI.mil, which DOD launched in December, currently hosts three AI models: Google Cloud's Gemini for Government, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Mil and xAI’s Grok for Government. The service provides vetted, internal AI tools to help users with unclassified tasks, such as analyzing information and creating and refining documents.

The department employees roughly 3 million total personnel who can access GenAI.mil.

Stanley called the platform “a huge, a huge win for the department,” adding that he initially thought AI use across the Pentagon “was going to be a harder sell.”

“Before GenAI.mil was rolled out, we had a total of maybe 80,000 folks that were using AI across the entire department in similar deployments,” he said. “The first week that GenAI.mil was released last year, we had over 300,000 people log on.”

Stanley said users were also quick to take advantage of Google Gemini for Government’s Agent Designer tool, which was rolled out on the platform in March and allows approved civilians, contractors and military personnel to create custom AI agents that can help them automate rote tasks.

“Within two weeks [of its deployment], we had over 50,000 agents that people are using,” he said. These aren't complex, robust agents; they're helping people with their daily workflows.”

The latest figures continue to show a rising uptick in DOD use of tools available through GenAI.mil. During an event in July, Stanley said the platform had reached a then-record of 1.7 million users, who had created more than 100,000 custom agents.

Wednesday’s discussion about the Pentagon’s uses of AI comes amid growing concerns from some lawmakers and tech executives about the dangers posed by advanced models, as well as how the capabilities will be utilized moving forward. During a speech at the UN on Tuesday, President Donald Trump voiced his continued opposition to slowing AI development, saying “we’re going to encourage it, not rein it in.”

Stanley similarly argued that “unilateral disarmament is the wrong approach.”

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'Super Intelligence': the president’s new term for AI, explained

John Croxton — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:16:27 -0400

President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a rebranding of the term “artificial intelligence,” saying during the United Nations General Assembly that from now on, it will be called “super intelligence.”

“From this point forward, all of United States’ documents, and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use the much more accurate term, ‘super,’ as opposed to ‘artificial’,” he said.

Though the rebrand may have been a surprise to many, superintelligence is already an established term in AI literature. It was popularized in philosopher Nick Bostrom’s 2014 bestseller Superintelligence, which defines the term as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.” Artificial superintelligence, or ASI, thus refers to future AI systems that could be much smarter than humans, and contrasts with the weaker forms of AI that exist today.

ASI is a step beyond AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which OpenAI defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” By this definition, today’s AI isn’t AGI yet, much less ASI, since we can’t yet hire AI as a reliable virtual employee.

Some experts dislike the term superintelligence, or question whether it’s a coherent concept. In the influential 2025 paper “AI as Normal Technology,” authors Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan write, “We do not think there is a useful sense of the term ‘intelligence’ in which AI is more intelligent than people acting with the help of AI.”

But others say the possible renaming contributes to an ongoing conversation about AI’s growing abilities.

“‘Super’ does align well with the fact that AI is exceeding human capabilities in a growing range of tasks and by increasing margins, which can have distinct national security implications beyond simply matching human performance,” said Caleb Withers, a research associate for the Technology and Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

For example, in early September, OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem, one of the most important open problems in math.

As AI becomes more capable, it has grown increasingly central to the U.S.-China relationship. Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping are slated to meet this week to discuss trade and AI issues. Bostrom, who has warned of the dangers of fully superintelligent AI systems, said an all-out AI race increases the risk that the technology gets out of control. “If competitors are convinced that coming second [in the AI race] means the total loss of everything they care about, they will take whatever risk necessary to bypass their rivals,” he said.

Trump reportedly worries that an AI slowdown could cause a market crash, and sees “super intelligence” as a critical sector for America to stay ahead of China. “Whoever wins AI, you have to remember this, and now I say, whoever wins SI, whoever wins super intelligence, wins. That’s the group that wins.”

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Trump's FBI shut down investigation into defense contractor's alleged bribes

Kirsten Berg, Molly Redden, Avi Asher-Schapiro, and William Turton, ProPublica — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:38:39 -0400

In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.

For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.

Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.

Government contractors are banned from making political contributions. More consequentially, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.

But the company did have such a proposal: Navatek was hungry for more government contracts in Maine. If they cut a big check, the CEO told Reed, Navatek wanted Collins to guarantee tens of millions of dollars in additional federal funding.

To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said — and that Navatek would get its government contracts.

After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.

Three years later, Kao holed up in a conference room to recount the Corner Bakery meeting to a group of four FBI agents and federal prosecutors. The FBI had seen through his shell company ruse, and in 2022 a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. No one working for Collins was charged.

Facing years in prison, Kao hoped to do less time by revealing the entire scheme.

What he told them has never before become public. The Corner Bakery meeting, he asserted, was just one episode in a sprawling pay-to-play operation that embroiled some of the most powerful figures in Congress.

Over three days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu, Kao laid out in devastating detail how his operation worked. He gave agents a 50-page document naming dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts. Kao and his close associates had donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with over $40 million a year in government funding.

Most damningly, Kao told FBI agents and prosecutors, the company’s work for the government was of no real value. Navatek’s research under his stewardship never resulted in products the military wanted to buy, ProPublica found.

Kao’s tell-all interviews with the FBI lasted into late 2024. His confessions opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation. Agents sifted through hundreds of thousands of records seized during Kao’s arrest and found that many were consistent with his account of widespread influence peddling.

Kao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. And there were other challenges. Building a corruption case against elected officials requires extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement, in part because the Supreme Court has narrowed what counts as bribery.

Even so, by the end of 2024, the agents had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties. They asked their supervisors to approve a new investigation and contemplated using undercover operatives to gather more evidence. Although their effort was in its early stages, and it was unclear where it would lead, FBI agents asked Kao extensive questions about his dealings with Collins and her office.

Then Trump returned to the White House. Consumed by a campaign of vengeance, he stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers and demanded a purge of anyone who had ever investigated him.

The specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated. One of the agents who had taken Kao’s confession was pushed out as retribution for her role in investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Dozens of agents and prosecutors quit amid the department’s destruction, including the career attorney assigned to Kao’s case.

Trump’s Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said. The investigation sparked by Kao’s revelations is dead. And the government is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress.

The White House referred ProPublica to the FBI.

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago “and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.” Williamson said the Trump administration has removed agents only “if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.”

Williamson did not respond to questions about the new investigation launched in 2024 based on Kao’s previously unreported cooperation with the FBI.

ProPublica is revealing the existence of the case for the first time. We reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI and thousands of pages of legal records, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations, and the FBI inquiry to conduct our own investigation. We independently corroborated much of Kao’s account. Whether or not Kao’s dealings with politicians amount to criminal bribery, the Trump Justice Department has little interest in finding out, and his sheer success reveals how easily influence is purchased in Washington today. This is the first in a series of stories drawn from our reporting.

Of all the politicians Navatek courted under Kao’s leadership, Collins was its most important patron. The senator’s office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping Kao and his network for donations, according to emails seen by ProPublica. Sometimes they cut checks within 24 hours of the annual defense spending bill, which funds military contracts, clearing a key Senate hurdle.

Collins’ office did not specifically address questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the senator’s relationship with Kao and the millions she helped appropriate for Navatek.

Annie Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica in an email that Collins’ office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao, calling his claims “outlandish.” Collins’ campaign was not part of the discussions between Kao and the super PAC, and her office “fully cooperated” with the FBI investigation, Clark said.

“The fact that the FBI and Biden-led Department of Justice thoroughly examined the Navatek matter demonstrates this,” Clark wrote. “These issues were resolved in 2021 and concluded when the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.”

Collins is once again fighting to keep her seat, in a race that could determine control of the Senate. On the campaign trail, she spotlights the funding she directs to Maine while leading the appropriations committee, which she calls “the most powerful committee in the Senate.”

She demonstrated that power with Navatek. After the budgets became law, Collins’ office pushed the Navy to award specific contracts to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show, even though awards are supposed to be competitive.

“I spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M,” a naval official wrote in an email on Feb. 6, 2019. “The interested company is Navatek.”

In a meeting with Collins and two campaign officials, Kao said, the officials told him the senator expected his ongoing support. Collins told him: “You’ve seen me deliver,” Kao said.

Reed knew Kao was behind the $150,000 anonymous donation, emails showed, because Kao told Reed he planned to donate through a shell company. “Very smart,” Reed replied in an email viewed by ProPublica.

Reed did not respond to detailed questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the $150,000 donation and Kao’s allegations. “I understand Martin Kao is now sitting in federal prison,” Reed wrote in a brief email. “I never had any communications with Senator Collins [or] her staff about Martin Kao and/or Navatek.”

But an email seen by ProPublica suggests that someone must have relayed the news of Kao’s donation to Collins, just like Reed promised to do in Kao’s recounting of the Corner Bakery meeting.

Seven days after the super PAC cashed the check from Kao’s shell company, one of Reed’s subordinates emailed a Navatek lobbyist asking for Kao’s phone number: “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.”

The Navatek Method

Before Kao’s doomed reign as CEO, Navatek was a sleepy Hawaiian engineering company with a few dozen employees. It was founded in 1978 by Steven Loui, a talented engineer and scion of a powerful Hawaiian shipping family. Navatek was not a profit center but a vehicle for Loui’s passion projects, like an experimental catamaran for navigating Hawaii’s choppy waters.

The company benefited from the largesse of the legendary Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, multiple former Navatek executives and employees said, whose family had been close to the Loui family for generations. Inouye was a master of earmarks, a practice that allowed lawmakers to insert funding for specific companies by name in the federal budget. The self-styled “King of Pork” steered hundreds of millions in federal dollars to Hawaii. Former Navatek employees say he was affectionately referred to as “Uncle Dan.” “Before Inouye took an interest, Congress didn’t even know our companies existed,” a longtime Loui lieutenant wrote in a 1998 op-ed.

In response to ProPublica questions, Loui said that money appropriated by Inouye made up “a minority” of Navatek’s revenue.

Inouye’s death in 2012 made the company’s future uncertain. Not only was Navatek’s direct line to Capitol Hill gone, but Congress was doing away with the abuse-riddled earmark process. Now companies would nominally have to compete on the merits for government contracts.

Kao joined Navatek in 2008 as its chief financial officer. Loui charged him with replacing Navatek’s rainmaker and eventually named Kao CEO. He sold Kao the company in return for a share of the profits.

Kao was an unusual figure among the company’s low-key naval engineers and boat aficionados. He seemed to be aping a Wall Street tycoon, telling employees they could either be “a beast or a bitch,” a former executive said. He drove to work in a Ferrari and abruptly fired subordinates who displeased him — one time, in the middle of the night. “He had very little interest in the technology,” one former employee recalled. “Martin was only interested in dollar signs.”

Kao also exaggerated and lied. He told different people he had stepbrothers whose parents died in a fishing accident or an avalanche, a former employee recalled. He lied to Loui about having law degrees from both the University of California, Los Angeles and New York University. He once told a lobbyist who raised quarter horses that he owned a herd of polo ponies, just to one-up him.

Despite his erratic behavior, former employees agree Kao hit upon an effective way to replace the lost earmarks. If the company could not rely on a benefactor like Inouye, it would develop a stable of them.

Navatek targeted the powerful members who sat on the House and Senate appropriations committees. These members could no longer earmark money for specific military contractors. But they retained the power to budget millions of dollars for equipment or bespoke research and development. Because Pentagon budgets run thousands of pages and are largely prepared in secret, it is easy for appropriators to add a line item intended for a contractor like Navatek without leaving any fingerprints.

Soon, Kao had refined a playbook. Navatek would concoct a research project in partnership with a university in a member’s district or home state, and Kao would make a large initial campaign donation. Working with a team of pricey, well-connected lobbyists, Navatek would get meetings on Capitol Hill to pitch the research to congressional staff. Navatek kept spreadsheets, reviewed by ProPublica, that listed members of Congress as the “specialty” of certain lobbyists.

Separately, Kao later told the FBI, there would be a meeting of just the key players. One engineer, who traveled with Kao to D.C. to explain the technical side of a project, recalled being sent out of the room once the subject of money came up. Sometimes in these smaller meetings, members of Congress directly asked Kao for donations, he told the FBI. In other cases, he said, Navatek’s lobbyists would relay a request from an intermediary for a specific dollar amount.

Kao told the FBI that the lawmakers, lobbyists and Navatek brass understood these donations were bribes and that the payments were essential to the entire scheme. Kao believed he was buying Navatek’s way into the annual defense budget, not winning over members with innovative engineering proposals.

“I’m not red or blue, I’m green,” he would tell congressional staffers, a former Navatek employee recalled.

While a deal was being struck, Navatek and congressional staffers worked closely on the legislative process. Every year, Congress prefaces the defense budget with massive reports describing the purpose of inscrutable line items. Staffers would include a project description so specific that Navatek would be the only logical pick.

Often, Navatek composed language that ended up, word for word, in Senate funding requests, former employees said. In 2019, for example, Navatek’s priorities were tucked into page 185 of the 307-page report released by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The committee set aside $21.5 million for “hybrid composite structures research for enhanced mobility,” “electric propulsion for military craft and advanced planing hulls” and a “test bed for autonomous ship systems.” Although Navatek’s name does not appear on the page, these were all projects the company requested, according to internal documents and interviews with former employees.

Once the budget passed, lawmakers’ staff leaned on Navy officials to award Navatek the money. Former contracting officers told ProPublica they felt pressure to go along because money from those contracts funded their office — and because members of Congress had confronted dissenting naval officials in the past. “There’s only so many battles you can fight,” one said. So Congress sometimes got its way even when Navatek’s projects made little sense.

Inside Navatek, employees referred to this strategy as “the method.” And it enabled the company to string together tens of millions of dollars in contracts. The result was the same as getting earmarks: a reliable, growing revenue stream bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers.

“It was a simple enough play. Let’s find the small states that have complementary universities … [and] let’s get access to their senators,” Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, told ProPublica. “I’ve met Susan Collins. You can get access to Susan Collins. Once we got the first things working with Maine, then we said, ‘Well, let’s keep reaching.’ And so we did.”

In a statement to ProPublica, Navatek founder Loui said Kao’s “unethical and illegal method of winning contracts” was a departure from how he operated the company prior to Kao’s ownership.

Kao boosted Navatek’s annual revenue from $10 million around the time Loui sold him the company to almost $40 million when he was arrested in 2020. In the second half of 2019 alone, Navatek paid a roster of five lobbying shops more than $500,000.

Even Navatek’s executives were surprised at how far their money went in D.C. “It was eye-opening for me, frankly. ‘Oh my God, all of it is for sale. It’s all for sale,’” Schiff said.

The key players in Kao’s pay-to-play deals went to great lengths to meet in person and leave no trace of an actual quid pro quo, he told agents. “That is why I literally had to fly to D.C. almost every week,” Kao later told the FBI. “Sometimes for a 15-minute meeting.”

But the FBI compiled emails, which ProPublica reviewed, that were suggestive of illegal bargains. Navatek executives and lobbyists spoke openly as if they were buying lawmakers’ assistance. In one back-and-forth, a lobbyist and a company executive described another senator as “fundamentally transactional” and having “a reputation as a pay-to-play office.”

In another message, Andy Winer, who former executives said was Navatek’s chief strategist, reminded Kao to budget money for political contributions based on how much the company wanted in congressional funding the following year.

Winer was his guide to the political underbelly, Kao said. A consummate insider, Winer had parlayed six years as chief of staff to Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii into a lucrative lobbying career with a firm called Strategies 360. One of Winer’s former colleagues compared him to the slick lobbyist on the Netflix show “House of Cards” who toggles between the political and corporate worlds.

In another email exchange scrutinized by the FBI, Kao asked Winer about making a $5,600 donation to nudge along a senator who seemed keen to work with Navatek: “Would that ‘help?’”

Winer, who had already donated himself, replied, “With my contribution, I think it sends the right message.” He suggested Kao split up his donation to be “less conspicuous.”

The method didn’t always work. Once, Kao complained that a senator had reneged on a deal and he ought to get his donations back.

“You should not feel aggrieved nor should you ever put that in writing,” Todd Webster, another lobbyist Navatek hired, replied. Webster did not respond to detailed questions.

Winer said he stopped working with Navatek following Kao’s arrest. “The political contributions I discussed with Kao were understood by me to be lawful political contributions. I never participated in, witnessed, or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution, bribe, or agreement to exchange a political contribution for an appropriation, contract, or other official action,” Winer said in an email to ProPublica. “I never advised Kao to make a contribution in exchange for official action.”

Strategies 360 has new ownership that did not oversee Winer while he represented Navatek, its CEO, John Oceguera, said.

Navatek employees began to notice members of Congress visiting their East Coast offices. “You would be like, ‘Oh, there’s this senator walking around,’ and we would get a picture with them,” one engineer recalled.

While some projects involved potentially meaningful research, Navatek’s bread and butter was R&D that went nowhere. As a slideshow prepared by an executive explained, “We thrive in the valley of death,” the term for the bureaucratic gap where research languishes without being developed into a product. The slideshow noted that none of the technology had ever actually been deployed.

The Office of Naval Research did not respond to a request for comment.

In Maine, Navatek was studying ways to modify small boats to reduce the “slamming” impact felt by passengers at high speeds. With the help of the University of Maine’s giant 3D printer, Navatek made a prototype and unveiled it at a press conference where a Guinness World Records representative declared it the world’s largest 3D-printed boat. But Navatek executives knew the Navy had no plans to use the new design, former employees said.

“[The work] got rolled into a few PowerPoint slides and a white paper, and that was the deliverable,” recalled one who worked on the project. “The boats weren’t delivered to the Navy — the Navy didn’t even want them.”

Kao to Collins: “Here to Help”

The first time Kao came face-to-face with Collins, in 2018, he told the FBI, he had to pay for the privilege.

Collins would not meet unless he agreed to donate to her campaign, he said. While it is not illegal for politicians to exchange face time for contributions — in this case, just a few thousand dollars — it was not the last time Collins would seek Kao’s support.

Navatek had been eager to expand beyond Hawaii, and Maine was a perfect beachhead — a small, coastal state hungry for high-tech jobs that happened to be represented by a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Collins, more than most appropriators, likes to trumpet the dollars she brings home.

To work with Collins, Navatek hired a lobbyist, Glen Mandigo, who also lobbied for the University of Maine and was tight with her office. Mandigo asked how much Navatek wanted in funding and how much Kao was willing to support Collins, Kao told the FBI. The University of Maine did not reply to a request for comment.

In that first meeting with Collins and her staff, Kao pitched an $8 million boat hull research project for Navatek and the university. Collins seemed supportive. Not long after, Mandigo called Kao and said Collins wanted him to bundle tens of thousands of dollars for her reelection, suggesting Navatek throw a fundraiser, Kao said.

In an email to ProPublica, Mandigo denied taking part in a pay-to-play arrangement.

“I did not advise Navatek officials, nor would I advise any client, that support from Sen. Collins was contingent on campaign donations,” Mandigo wrote. He said that in his 25 years of working with Collins and the Maine delegation, “I never saw or heard of such behavior from the Senator or her staff.” Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica it was “wholly inaccurate” to say Mandigo was close to their office.

FBI agents had collected voluminous corporate records and email correspondence between Navatek and Collins’ inner circle. Much of that evidence aligned with the story they were now getting directly from Kao.

The FBI had spotted his out-of-the-blue donations in the summer of 2018, just before Collins included $8 million for Navatek’s proposal in the defense budget. Emails showed her staff made it clear to the Navy that it should send the money to Navatek. FBI agents also had evidence of Kao and Mandigo planning a fundraiser starting in April 2019. Their emails — with her scheduler and her campaign’s finance director — freely mixed talk of Navatek’s Collins-backed contract with plans to raise money for her.

The principals settled on hosting Collins for a publicity event at Navatek’s Maine headquarters in August 2019, where she posed for pictures with Kao and a model of the company’s experimental boat. Behind the scenes, the FBI saw in emails and company records, Kao orchestrated over $40,000 in donations from extended family in advance of the event. To avoid the legal cap on individual campaign contributions, the emails show, he told Collins’ team to reallocate his excess contributions to his father — which an agent highlighted and noted is against election law in a presentation to prosecutors — and sent them his father’s full name and address.

“This is perfect,” Amy Abbott, the reelection campaign finance director, emailed Kao after discussing his father’s contribution. “We are so grateful for ALL the Kao support!”

Before the event, Kao said, Collins, Abbott and another staffer met with him in private. One of the staffers told Kao the campaign expected more donations. It was in this meeting that Collins said, “You’ve seen me deliver,” he told the FBI.

Less than one month after the event, the Senate released a draft of the defense budget containing $21.5 million for Navatek’s pet projects in Maine. Kao emailed a Collins campaign fundraiser — who would in theory have nothing to do with a government contract — four days later, saying, “Thanks again for all the support from Sen Collins.”

“I’ve been involved in many tight races in the past and understand last minute ‘needs’ come up,” he continued. “We are here to help anyway we can … financially or whatever.”

Kao’s desire to donate even more money led to the fateful Corner Bakery meeting with the head of the Collins super PAC, called the 1820 PAC, Kao told the FBI. Unlike Collins’ campaign, which could accept only $5,600 per election from individuals, the super PAC could accept unlimited contributions.

The super PAC emailed Kao a memo before the meeting stressing the need to raise money with “urgency.” At the meeting, Kao and Reed, the super PAC’s chair, hammered out a deal for a six-figure donation, Kao told the FBI. Over email, Kao informed Reed of his shell company scheme, saying he had cleared it with his lawyer. “They are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on,” Kao reassured him. “Thanks for doing this,” Reed replied.

Emails

Here are quotes from emails between Martin Kao and Scott Reed, discussing contributions to the Susan Collins Super PAC, 1820 PAC:

“Hi Scott: Had a chance to discuss 1820 with my CFO and attorney last night. They are suggesting setting up a separate new LLC to make the donations. Name of new LLC: Society of Young Women Scientists and Engineers. In my personal real estate investments, we often use LLCs that can be set up to “facilitate” transactions. They are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on. Totally legal and typically used in real estate transactions to conceal the identity of buyer/seller. Wanted to get your thoughts/concerns.”—email from Martin Kao to Scott Reed, Nov. 22, 2019

“Very smart and glad your counsel understands. Thanks for doing this.”—email from Scott Reed to Martin Kao, Nov. 22, 2019

“Great! We will proceed on getting this set up ASAP. Have a nice weekend.”—email from Martin Kao to Scott Reed, Nov. 22, 2019

The FBI spoke to the other Navatek executives at Corner Bakery, who confirmed the meeting took place. One of them, David Kring, the company’s top scientist, told ProPublica he had no memory of what was discussed.

The other, Duke Hartman, told an FBI agent it was just “a get-to-know-you meeting” with the chair of the super PAC and they did not discuss the “particulars of a donation.” Agents, records show, came to believe Hartman was lying about his role in Kao’s pay-to-play operation and would name him as a formal subject of a future investigation. Hartman was not charged. He did not respond to a detailed request for comment.

A few weeks after the $150,000 check to the Collins super PAC cleared, in February 2020, Kao and his team met with Collins’ office and secured a new round of funding.

“We were very warmly received,” Kao reported to his colleagues in an email obtained by the FBI. “Excellent meeting. Total of $32M will be supported.” Records show the Senate allocated at least $10 million that year based on Navatek’s proposals.

Navatek’s ambitions peaked in mid-2020. As the company waited to see if Collins would survive her reelection campaign, executives prepared to ask their champion on the appropriations committee for even more funding the following spring, internal documents show.

Other documents from that time show the company was courting senators from seven additional states and gunning for more than $200 million in new appropriations. Navatek expected to have offices in more than a dozen states by the end of the following year, including a new 15,000-square-foot facility in the Portland, Maine, harbor.

Kao, meanwhile, closed on a $4.5 million beachside home in an exclusive Honolulu neighborhood; the backyard pool had a waterfall feature. He renamed the company Martin Defense Group after himself, joking that it would simplify his future takeover of Lockheed Martin.

“It was working well, and it would have continued to work well,” said Schiff, the former executive. “Martin got greedy. Just got damn greedy.”

Downfall, Cover-up

In early 2020, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit good government group, noticed something strange in the public filings for the Collins super PAC. The PAC had received a $150,000 donation from a newly created LLC with a typo in its name: the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers, with no S at the end of “Scientist.”

This was the $150,000 Kao donated after the Corner Bakery meeting. The money had come from Navatek’s account, not Kao’s, violating a ban on government contractors making donations.

The center suspected the society was not a real group but a pass-through to hide the identity of a major political donor. It filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. It took only a few days for a Hawaii journalist to discover Kao’s wife’s name on the society’s paperwork, linking the shell company to Navatek.

Inside Navatek, Kao shifted into damage control mode. He spoke to Reed and the super PAC’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and began to hatch a cover-up. In an email released in civil litigation, Mitchell suggested the society make charitable donations — preferably in Maine — which would make it seem like a legitimate nonprofit. “I want to be sure that the LLC proceeds with the ideas we discussed — giving scholarships and recognition to women in engineering, etc.,” wrote Mitchell. “That would help both of us, I think.”

Mitchell added, “We should develop a plan and timetable, so there are some scholarships given over the next several months, and particularly, perhaps in Maine, where the bad press was.”

Mitchell, who later played a major role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, did not respond to requests for comment.

Kao and his team settled on donating scholarships to women in STEM. They offered between $5,000 and $25,000 apiece to state universities where they were angling to win government contracts — that way, the cover-up would benefit them politically, too.

But Navatek’s and Kao’s problems were just beginning. Undeterred by scrutiny from the FEC, Kao defrauded the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program newly passed by Congress. He inflated Navatek’s payroll to amass loans of $13 million, according to a federal indictment. The Navatek founder, Loui, had long since soured on his chosen successor. This was the final straw. He reported Kao to federal authorities.

“This is not how Navatek behaved or conducted business before I sold the company to Martin Kao,” Loui wrote to ProPublica. He said Navatek was successful before Kao’s ownership and had many sources of government funding. After Kao’s arrest, he added, the company fully cooperated with law enforcement.

Loui has since regained control of the company and renamed it PacMar. He is dedicated to restoring its reputation and ability to execute government contracts, he continued. Loui said he fired employees hired during Kao’s tenure who were “not capable of performing quality, professional engineering and science tasks.”

“The company received no Collins-supported funding after Martin Kao’s arrest, nor should it,” Loui added. “What Martin Kao and his cabal did was wrong.”

On Sept. 30, 2020, law enforcement raided Navatek’s Honolulu offices and arrested Kao for fraud. Federal agents in windbreakers seized his laptop and ordered the company’s IT staff to copy the company’s internal servers.

Navatek’s public flameout attracted the attention of Michelle Ball and Kevin Gounaud, two experienced agents in the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit. Gounaud was a 20-year FBI veteran who had worked on elaborate undercover operations. Ball had made a name for herself taking on politically sensitive cases. In 2018, she led the investigation into Maria Butina, the Russian agent convicted of infiltratingthe National Rifle Association in an attempt to influence the Trump campaign.

The agents began digging through thousands of records for details of Navatek’s lobbying operation, donation strategy and ties to politicians.

They zeroed in on Kao’s relationship with Collins. In a 60-slide presentation agents prepared for prosecutors, they highlighted contributions that Kao and his wife made to the senator in 2018, right before Collins placed the $8 million in research funding into the federal budget. Kao had also given Navatek money to various relatives to donate to Collins in 2019, sending her around $33,000 through these illegal straw donors, the indictment said. Kao’s wife and father did not reply to requests for comment.

The government charged Kao in two separate cases: one for defrauding the loan program and another for his campaign finance crimes. His love of talking like a wheeler-dealer — including over email — was a gift to investigators. In one email, he all but admitted the scholarships to young women were a diversion. “Whatever… just a pack of bitches getting free $,” he wrote.

In the face of overwhelming evidence, Kao pleaded guilty in both cases in the fall of 2022. Navatek by then was under court-ordered new management. Awaiting sentencing, Kao worked as a line cook at a Cheesecake Factory.

He began meeting with the same FBI agents and prosecutors who brought him down. For the agents, he was a rare witness: a contractor with deep ties to elected officials saying he would speak candidly about how Washington works.

Kao faced nearly a decade in prison. “My world and life imploded,” he would later recall in a letter to the Hawaii U.S. District Court. “I was fooled and foolish enough to believe that the power elected officials wielded, and [were] actively willing to sell to anyone wealthy enough to pay, was….‘smart business.’”

Over the next two years, Kao sat with agents for at least three dayslong interviews. He told them that politicians, Collins in particular, had been willing participants in his scheme. “It takes two to tangle,” he told them.

Taxpayers funded Navatek’s entire political operation, Kao said. “Most companies of our size do not have the resources to endlessly hire expensive lobbyists and make political donations,” he told the FBI. Navatek solved this by using money from government contracts to hire lobbyists and make campaign contributions, according to interviews, court testimony and internal company records. Diverting money from contracts for lobbying and political donations can be illegal.

For their final meeting, in September 2024, Kao handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing Navatek’s dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff. It was not only a confession but a road map, with the email addresses and phone numbers of people Kao thought agents ought to subpoena.

Last year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison. The judge in his case offered no leniency based on his cooperation with the FBI. Loui is battling Kao in court to recover the millions he contends Kao stole from the company.

Both Scott Reed and Amy Abbott remain in Collins’ inner circle. Abbott is the finance director for her 2026 reelection effort, and Reed again chairs the main Collins super PAC. Abbott, who is married to Collins’ campaign manager, referred questions to the senator’s communications staff. Clark told ProPublica that Abbott and other campaign staff were interviewed by the FBI and that the campaign was never a target of the investigation.

Earlier this year, Kao agreed to meet a ProPublica reporter at the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, South Dakota, where he is incarcerated. But on two occasions when guards summoned Kao over the intercom, he refused to enter the visitation room. Over email, he said he was no longer willing to meet, citing the ongoing litigation. He declined through his lawyer to respond to detailed questions.

By late 2024, Ball and Gounaud, the FBI agents, had come to believe there was enough evidence to warrant a broader investigation into bribery of members of Congress, according to a memo seen by ProPublica.

Before they could embark on their new mission, however, they became casualties of Trump’s retribution campaign.

Ball and Gounaud worked for the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit known as CR-15, which specialized in investigating misconduct by elected officials. When Trump retook power, his new FBI director, Kash Patel, purged the unit agent by agent.

Ball was targeted for her work on the special counsel investigation of Trump’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election. She was fired in October 2025 in a one-page letter stating she had “weaponized” the Justice Department. She is challenging her firing in a lawsuit. Gounaud was pushed out in early 2026. Both agents declined to comment through their attorney.

Trump also targeted the Justice Department attorneys who worked with CR-15. The team, known as the Public Integrity Section, collapsed spectacularly in February 2025 after staff were ordered to drop a case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Trump ally. The unit’s leadership quit en masse. Trump appointees ordered the remaining prosecutors to halt new corruption cases, just months after Kao made his detailed confession.

Before Ball was fired, however, she managed to take a key step forward.

Based on all the evidence, she persuaded her supervisors to approve a new investigation. It centered on South Carolina, one of the states Navatek eyed for a rapid expansion. The FBI had questions about a steak dinner Kao shared with Sen. Lindsey Graham.

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Time, not capital, is the constraint on the defense industrial base

James DeMuth — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:43:53 -0400

The Pentagon's industrial-base problem is no longer a shortage of capital. It is the time required to turn that capital into qualified suppliers, suppliers into parts, and parts into weapons in warfighters’ hands.

Three changes would shorten that timeline more than the next hundred billion dollars in appropriations. First, let defense suppliers that have earned a qualification for one program—that is, proven through testing and quality review that they meet its requirements—keep that qualification when seeking work in another program with similar requirements. Second, fund qualification as its own budget line. And third, increase multiyear acquisition to create the kind of demand that lower-tier suppliers can use to secure financing. None of these require new authority. None lowers a standard.

The Department began fiscal 2026 holding $382.4 billion in unexpired, unobligated appropriations, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act added $152.3 billion more, and in June the administration asked for another $67.1 billion. Unfortunately, appropriations don’t shorten lead time. Boeing builds the active radar seeker for every PAC-3 MSE interceptor in Huntsville, and in April the Pentagon signed a seven-year framework to triple that output. A finished interceptor takes about two years to build, but qualifying a new component supplier takes even longer. Consequently, rounds bought this year are unlikely to reach the field before 2028.

Capacity that cannot produce a qualified part for two or three years is not yet military capacity. It is potential capacity. The gap between the two is mobilization latency, and qualification has become one of its largest hidden components. Double demand for a critical munition tomorrow and Congress can appropriate the money within weeks, industry can buy equipment within months, but every new supplier then enters an 18- to 36-month qualification cycle. Appropriated capacity and combat capacity are not the same thing.

I should say plainly where I sit. Seurat makes metal parts under contract using our own high-speed additive process, dubbed Area Printing, and we sell the parts rather than the printers. We are one of 25 awardees under JAQS-SQ, a $10.5-million Pentagon-funded America Makes project call. We would benefit directly if the government spent more on supplier qualification. My industry spent two decades promising more than it delivered. Additive manufacturing was going to replace machining, then reinvent the supply chain, and mostly it printed prototypes and low-volume parts. A program office skeptical of claims from the additive industry is applying a lesson we taught it.

Program offices are where the first change happens. A supplier that passed an audit for one program generally starts from zero for the next. A program office is accountable for its own program, so accepting another office's audit means taking on a risk judgment it did not make. Every program manager is behaving rationally, and the result is a system optimized to minimize program-level risk rather than mobilization time and qualification costs. The fix is a doctrine of qualify once, use many. Part qualification stays program-specific; what becomes portable is the evidence about the factory, so no office re-proves the shop before it begins proving the part. JAQS-SQ is building that framework now. What is missing is a decision by acquisition leaders to accept each others’ results.

Second, fund qualification as its own budget line. Inside industrial-base accounts, qualification competes against tooling and usually loses, because a machine tool can be bought and installed inside one budget cycle and a qualification package cannot. That line would cost about one percent of industrial base appropriations, or roughly $82 million against the $8.2 billion the Reconciliation Act routed through the Industrial Base Fund.

Third, give the supplier layer—that is, the companies that supply prime contractors—demand it can borrow against. The Department estimates it has lost more than 40 percent of its small-business suppliers over the past decade, and survivors are running at capacity. That sounds like health but is not, because a shop with no idle capacity must pull engineering hours from paying work to qualify a part that may never be ordered. The government does not need to finance every expansion; private capital will fund defense capacity when it can see durable demand. Multiyear procurement is one of the few instruments that turns stated intent into a contract a small shop can take to a lender. The ask is not more grants but enough contractual certainty that banks and investors do the financing.

The strongest argument against all of this is that qualification is rigorous for a reason. A motor case that fails in flight kills people, and additive processes deserve more scrutiny than conventional ones because a part's microstructure depends on parameters that vary by machine. That argument is correct, and I am not advocating faster approvals or looser standards. Instead, the infrastructure for running that standard rigorously, meaning trained auditors, shared process control documents, and material databases, is funded like an afterthought.

There is a fourth change worth making, and it would cost us—that is, my company and others like it. There should be no additive-specific set-asides. Fund qualified production rather than technologies: define the outcome and the standard and let manufacturers compete to meet it. If a conventional manufacturer can hold the spec at the rate and schedule, it should win the work, and on many high-volume part numbers today, it will.

None of this addresses what happens to a qualified supplier that waits two years without an order, a harder problem deserving its own argument. In a protracted conflict, the decisive industrial question will be how quickly the United States can turn manufacturing capacity into qualified production because deterrence rests on an adversary believing the United States can replace what it expends. The next phase of rebuilding the arsenal should be measured not in dollars obligated or factories expanded, but in something much harder to game: how many additional qualified suppliers can produce critical parts, and how quickly they can begin delivering them.

James DeMuth is CEO and co-founder of Seurat Technologies, a metal-parts contract manufacturer in Wilmington, Massachusetts

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NATO’s thumbs-up for AWS shows Europe still needs America

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:47:35 -0400

Amazon Web Services has become the first cloud provider cleared to handle sensitive information for all NATO members, underscoring that an increasingly independent Europe still relies on capabilities made in America, and suggesting that it's not as hard for U.S. firms to compete there as the White House insists.

The company announced on Tuesday that it has received alliance approval to handle information at the NATO RESTRICTED level, which is not classified but requires safeguarding.

As European militaries fuse radar, satellite, and even acoustic information to more easily detect Russian drones and other threats, NATO-approved rapid data and information sharing is critical.

AWS, which already handles sensitive military and intelligence data for many NATO members, beat its competitors—primarily from other U.S. cloud providers such as Microsoft—to win the alliance’s first blanket approval. That’s the result of “a sustained, multi-year effort,” David Appel, acting vice president of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS, said in the company’s Tuesday statement, AWS worked with Spain’s National Cryptographic Centre, or CCN, to test its services against NATO security directives; CCN then shared its findings to all member states.

The announcement also reflects a broad, evolving NATO digital transformation strategy. The alliance is eager to incorporate more commercial information technology into its coordination and planning. And AWS remains the biggest commercial cloud operator in Europe, with nine data-center clusters, or regions, across Europe, including the U.K.

“Strengthening NATO’s ability to securely leverage commercial technology is key to building a more resilient and agile Alliance,” according to Dylan Browne, general manager of the NATO Communications and Information Agency, or NCIA, as quoted in Amazon’s statement.

While NATO members and AWS cloud users across Europe will be able to share their data more easily, they will also be able to retain control over it. The 2024 European Union Data Act requires cloud providers to protect EU data from other governments, including the United States. Practically speaking, that means housing data on European soil beyond the reach of U.S. court orders, although that’s not an explicit requirement of the Act. AWS, like Microsoft and other enterprise cloud providers, has been investing in European versions of its cloud stacks to meet those Data Act requirements.

Tuesday’s announcement shows both that U.S. technology is still a core feature of NATO military capability and that it is central to NATO’s future plans. But it also shows that European Union regulations on data storage aren’t a challenge to the success of U.S. cloud companies across Europe, even though White House rhetoric and executive orders suggest otherwise.

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