In a short statement, the Defense Commissary Agency said only that the change took effect Wednesday and applied to commissaries worldwide. Commissaries in states or localities that mandate bags fees would still have to comply with those laws.

“The policy, introduced on April 6, which required commissary patrons to pay for single-use plastic and paper bags, has been rescinded,” the statement reads.

In a separate statement, Rep. Jen Kiggans, R-Va., a former Navy helicopter pilot, took credit for the reversal, saying the commissary agency’s decision followed months of advocacy.

Kiggans penned a letter to Anthony Tata, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, and she spoke about the issue directly with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee last week, she said.

“I was deeply frustrated when DeCA announced it would impose a charge for paper and plastic bags — an added cost that complicates a benefit intended to support our service members, retirees and their families," Kiggans said in a statement. “I appreciate Secretary Hegseth for listening to my concerns and taking swift action to eliminate this fee.”

The policy required commissary customers to pay 5 cents each for plastic bags and 10 cents for paper bags.

Providing the single-use bags costs the commissary agency $17 million per year, spokesperson Keith Desbois said when the agency announced the policy in March.

The commissary agency receives about $1.5 billion per year in taxpayer dollars to operate these discounted grocery stores as a benefit for the military community.

The Defense Department’s goal is an overall savings of 25% compared to commercial stores outside the gate.

Military Times reporter Karen Jowers contributed to this story.

The U.S. military is once again pursuing flying directed energy weapons to counter threats to American airspace, according to the Defense Department’s missile defense boss.

Speaking to members of Congress during a House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces hearing on April 15 on the Pentagon’s planned missile defense activities for fiscal year 2027, U.S. Missile Defense Agency director Air Force Lt. Gen. Heath Collins stated that his organization was “all in” on “bringing directed energy to the fight,” including integrating such weapons into unmanned platforms for domestic air defense against hostile missiles and drones.

“We are certainly putting more attention into bringing potentially game-changing directed energy capabilities to bear in an unmanned platform,” Collins stated in response to a question from Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-New Mexico) regarding the MDA’s adoption of directed energy weapons.

“[An] air platform is what we’re focused on, so we can bring that capability to the edge of the fight and thin the herd on [unmanned aerial vehicles], potentially air threats and the like.”

While Collins did not identify specific directed energy capabilities of interest to the MDA, his written statement to the subcommittee notes that the agency is “accelerating the operational use of high-energy lasers on various platforms” to add a “critical, non-kinetic layer” to the existing U.S. missile defense architecture.

It’s unclear how much the MDA plans on spending on these efforts. While the “skinny” version at the Pentagon’s historic $1.5 trillion fiscal year 2027 budget request published in early April includes a significant boost to directed energy research and development for homeland missile defense under the Trump administration’s “Golden Dome for America” initiative, the documents do not contain any R&D or procurement efforts explicitly tied to the agency.

As Laser Wars readers likely already know, the Pentagon has been examining airborne laser weapons for missile defense since the 1970s, when the U.S. Air Force established its Airborne Laser Laboratory (ALL) program to explore the development of a laser-armed “aerial battleship” to protect strategic bombers from incoming interceptors.

In 2010, the service’s Boeing 747-based YAL-1 Airborne Laser Test Bed successfully destroyed several ballistic missiles in flight during testing but was subsequently canceled the following year due to “significant affordability and technology problems,” as then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it at the time.

As military laser weapons have evolved from bulky chemical-based systems to more compact and efficient solid-state designs in recent decades, U.S. military planners have increasingly explored integrating them into unmanned airborne platforms.

The High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) effort, initiated in 2003 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, sought to develop a 150-kW system to integrate into both manned and unmanned aircraft before grinding to a halt in 2015.

The MDA itself pursued outfitting drones with laser weapons for ballistic missile defense for more than a decade through its Low Power Laser Demonstrator (LPLD) initiative before then-Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin threw cold water on the effort in 2020, citing the unique technical and environmental challenges inherent to mounting lasers on aircraft.

“I think it can be done as an experiment, but as a weapon system to equip an airplane with the kinds of lasers we think necessary — in terms of their power level, and all their support requirements, getting the airplane to altitudes where atmospheric turbulence can be mitigated appropriately — that combination of things doesn’t go on one platform,” Griffin told reporters in May 2020, per Breaking Defense. “So, I’m just extremely skeptical of that.”

Griffin isn’t wrong. Despite advances in laser technology, engineering a directed energy weapon that’s both powerful enough to destroy an incoming target and compact enough to integrate onto a relatively small airframe like a multirole combat aircraft or drone is a significant challenge.

Even if an integration were technically simple, operational feasibility is an major question: atmospheric conditions are limiting factors for laser weapons in any domain, but turbulence is a particularly thorny one for fast-moving airborne platforms tasked with maintaining a coherent beam long enough to successfully neutralize targets moving at equally high speeds.

Despite this skepticism, the dream of laser-armed drones appears alive and well. As recently as 2024, the MDA was gearing up for another run at airborne lasers, albeit with an initial focus on low-powered systems for tracking before ramping up to high-energy weapons.

In January 2025, the U.S. Navy released a slick vision of future naval operations that included notional drone wingmen outfitted with directed energy weapons running interference for manned aircraft. And in the last year, defense contractor General Atomics has released multiple renderings of its MQ-9B SkyGuardian and MQ-20 Avenger drones outfitted with laser weapons, although a company spokesman cautioned reporters that the systems were not designed for “any specific government program or contract.”

Directed energy weapons offer an alluring alternative to traditional missile-based air defenses, with low cost-per-shot, deep magazines and the ability to engage targets at the speed of light.

But the Pentagon has been here before: airborne laser concepts have repeatedly surged on waves of optimism, only to collapse under the weight of technical complexities and ballooning costs.

Indeed, the Air Force’s Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) and Self-Protect High-Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) efforts, which respectively sought to mount laser weapons on an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship and F-15 Eagle fighter jet, proved too challenging to even advance to airborne tests. (Undeterred, the service is poised to restart airborne laser efforts in fiscal year 2027 amid a surge in broad institutional support for directed energy. Time is a flat circle.)

Whether the MDA is barreling towards a genuine directed energy inflection point or just another familiar R&D cycle remains an open question.

For now, the message from Collins is clear: when it comes to determining whether airborne laser weapons are a viable missile defense capability, the U.S. military is once again willing to find out the hard way.

The move has stakeholders urging not to lean too hard on algorithms to distinguish, for instance, a scientist-spy sharing secret nano-energy plans with China from a Chinese professor publishing AI safety studies. Hanging in the balance lies troops’ technological edge, veteran intelligence officials and academics say.

AI’s confusion over the timing and nature of research partnerships may obscure real espionage if humans are not the ultimate judge of foreign influence, they warn, with some academics fearing an AI-work slop redux of the “China Initiative,” where the first Trump administration charged dozens of ethnic Chinese scientists with fraud, only to drop nearly all charges.

“Automated vetting tools are extremely useful for vetting large datasets and identifying patterns of concern. But those tools are for decision support to help the people, the human analysts, assess context and intent,” said David Cattler, who, until September, led the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, which screens personnel seeking security clearances.

The renewed focus on academic research security comes as tensions between the U.S. and China over AI intensify, with China ramping up both the development of low-cost AI models and its alleged exploitation of U.S. models.

The U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment reports that China “aims to displace the U.S. as the global AI leader by 2030,” in part, “by using its sizeable talent pool, extensive datasets, government funding and burgeoning global partnerships.”

Partnership is a complicated term in military “fundamental research” — studies that are publishable, rather than proprietary or classified, with potential defense applications.

For instance, mere co-authorship with a China-based scientist does not suffice to deny a U.S. researcher money, according to evolving academic research rules targeting foreign influence. Rather, to make the call, the Pentagon must assess each academic’s disclosures of external funding sources and affiliations.

According to a recently-declassified May 2025 inspector general report, such disclosures went unchecked because the Pentagon had not “requested additional government full-time equivalent employees to thoroughly review… and to conduct oversight of over 27,000 academic research awards.”

Defense News first obtained the report and the Pentagon’s response to a draft version through an open records request.

When asked about additional staffing, a Pentagon official pointed to orders in a January research security directive for the Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) to identify “automated vetting and continuous monitoring capabilities” and create a common research grant database.

The mandate also calls for a year-long “damage assessment” of selected research transactions, including cases that the House Select Committee on China flagged, in part, using AI tools.

A September GOP-led Committee report alleged that the Pentagon subsidized 1,400 academic papers published between June 2023 and June 2025 involving partnerships with the Chinese government.

The Pentagon said in an emailed statement on Thursday that the department “is committed to protecting the integrity of U.S. research while fostering international collaboration. Our approach leverages advanced analytical tools to augment human expertise, ensuring a rigorous and fair review process.”

Machines Make the Same Mistakes

Several university representatives, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of policy discussions, note that AI-assisted risk assessments have, in the past, drawn false assumptions about U.S.-China research collaborations.

For instance, the AI-aided GOP House report mislabeled the state-backed Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics as the sponsor of a collection of nine essays, whereas the Wuhan lab supported only one essay that involved no U.S. authors or federal funding.

The report also mistook a Chinese military-affiliated author’s publication on single-electron transistors for a DOD-funded project, when it merely referenced work funded by the U.S. military.

House Select Committee officials declined to comment on the cases.

Averting foreign interference “is not as easy as just having better AI capacities, because we know that some of those AI mistakes were the same human mistakes that led to inaccurate charges brought against researchers under the China Initiative,” Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities, said after learning of the AI gaffes.

About 30% of the China Initiative’s 77 cases involved academics not disclosing Chinese partnerships or funding sources, though disclosure was often not required, or no such partners or funding existed.

A jury found only one professor, Harvard nanochemist Charles Lieber, guilty, after he lied to Pentagon investigators about his participation in a Chinese talent recruitment program and made other false statements.

Smith said that relying on proxies — such as co-authorship, affiliation or nationality — to deduce security concerns led investigators to confuse co-authorship with direct interaction or shared data access, and to misinterpret historical ties as active partnerships.

“AI systems trained on bibliometric data,” or citation analytics, “and affiliation records can inherit the same flawed assumptions that underpinned the China Initiative,” he said. “The core lesson from the China Initiative is that identifying genuine research security risk requires judgment, context and proportionality — qualities that automated systems should support, not replace.”

Gisela Perez Kusakawa, executive director of the Asian-American Scholar Forum, said that the Pentagon has not communicated the types of data that the new AI tools will collect, use and share, nor sought community feedback, heightening concerns about ethnic profiling.

In an emailed statement, the Pentagon responded, “It is the standard practice of the department to not provide specifics regarding the criteria and weighting for threat assessments conducted, whether by manual or automated process.”

Kusakawa said, “We should be making sure that our research environment is welcoming, that we are encouraging these talents, especially in AI, to come to the United States and, frankly, have family in the United States, and make this a country that they contribute to and invest their and their children’s future in.”

Increasingly, that AI talent is not coming. Statistics suggest that Chinese AI experts are staying in China, even as America has managed to keep earlier expats.

Of about 100 Chinese-origin AI scholars who were researching at U.S. institutions in 2019 — when their papers were accepted at the world’s most elite AI conference, NeurIPS — 87% remained stateside as of 2025, according to Carnegie Endowment for International Peace figures.

At the same time, the share of Chinese home-grown talent not moving abroad has skyrocketed since 2019, based on an Economist tally of similar data. In 2019, about 30% of NeurIPS authors educated in China were still in China. By 2022, that population had jumped to 58%, and up to 68% in 2025.

‘Key’ Financial Disclosures Were Missing

To ensure that no country has a stranglehold on general knowledge, “the goal cannot be to close the U.S. research system altogether,” said Cattler, the former Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency director and now founder of consultancy Ironhelm Works. “The goal must be to ensure that collaboration strengthens national security rather than inadvertently weakening it.”

Last year’s inspector general report concluded that Pentagon agencies that partner with academic institutions “could be at an increased risk of exposure to foreign influence” because military units were “missing key documents” that can help discern scientists’ foreign financial sources, outside employers and other details related to potential conflicts.

For instance, about 80% of Air Force funding transactions sampled in the report were missing documents that can reveal problematic relationships. Also, the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — which bankrolled the Internet’s inventors — told evaluators that they had not, as required, annually checked that researchers named in progress reports were not involved in banned talent recruitment programs.

In response to questions about the screening lapses, the Pentagon said in an emailed statement that the department “is aware of the OIG’s findings in the report and the impacted directorates are working with [the Office of the Undersecretary for Defense and Engineering] to address the items identified.”

Jeffrey Stoff, a Chinese linguist and intelligence community analyst for 18 years who resigned in 2021 due to frustration with research security, maintains that DOD still needs more human expertise in language, culture and the minutiae of research restrictions.

“AI can and should be used for unsophisticated, labor-intensive tasks,” such as cross-referencing foreign organizations in financial disclosure forms against the names of blacklisted parties, but humans still need to inspect AI’s work, as not all nefarious ties are machine-readable, said Stoff, who now advocates for tighter safeguards as head of the nonprofit Center for Research Security and Integrity.

Cattler, giving more credit to AI, said that the scale of research collaboration demands that the Pentagon upgrade its approach to clocking potential spies.

With such a large population of research institutions and affiliated scientists, as well as a bombardment of often duplicative alerts, automation “improves the signal within that noise and can help orient the humans on really important matters,” he said.

“Sometimes people are deliberately deceptive when they are processed, and that could happen in a human exchange just as much as it could happen in something that a computer can see, but together, a human review and a computer review are incredibly powerful.”

The letter, sent April 1 to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Appropriations committees and their defense subcommittees, calls on Congress to legislate multiyear procurement of F-35A Lightning IIs and F-15EX Eagle IIs at a baseline of 48 F-35As and 24 F-15EXs per year, with a desired end state of 72 F-35As and 36 F-15EXs, totaling 108 aircraft annually.

“The United States Air Force is the oldest, the smallest and the least ready in its 78-year history,” the letter states. “We must build a fighting force that will win.”

The letter, which was first reported by Air & Space Forces Magazine, marks the first time the Adjutants General Association of the United States has collected signatures from all 22 adjutants general commanding states with Guard fighter units.

Even at 100 new fighters per year, full recapitalization of the total force could still take 10 to 15 years given the existing backlog of legacy aircraft.

“When all 22 adjutants general with fighter missions speak with one voice, it’s not advocacy, it’s operational feedback from the commanders generating combat airpower every day,” Maj. Gen. Mark R. Morrell, adjutant general of the South Dakota National Guard, said in an emailed statement.

“It signals to Congress that this is not a regional or parochial concern, but a clear, consistent demand signal from the field that the fighter recapitalization gap is real, growing and must be addressed.”

The Air Force requested 48 F-35As in fiscal 2024, 42 in fiscal 2025, 24 in fiscal 2026 and 38 in fiscal 2027. For the F-15EX, it sought 24, 18, 21 and 24 over the same years, respectively, according to budget documents.

The fiscal 2027 request totals 62 combined, still below the 72-aircraft threshold the Air Force has long said is needed just to prevent the fleet from shrinking. The last time the service acquired more than 72 fighters in a single year was 1998.

The readiness cost of that shortfall is already visible at the unit level, the generals said.

“Our airmen are doing a heroic job keeping these 40-year-old airframes in the air, but they are paying the price for decades of deferred modernization,” Brig. Gen. Shannon Smith, commander of the Idaho Air National Guard, told Military Times.

“In the interim, we are enduring risk by asking exceedingly more from our maintenance professionals, cannibalizing parts from already broken aircraft to keep others flying, and by our pilots losing their critical warfighting edge because they cannot get enough flight hours in mission-capable jets.”

Of the Air Guard’s 24 fighter squadrons, 13 currently lack a recapitalization plan commensurate with the 2026 National Defense Strategy, according to NGAUS.

The August 2025 Department of the Air Force Long-Term USAF Fighter Force Structure Report to Congress independently confirmed the need, identifying all 24 ANG fighter squadrons as required to meet the objective force of 1,369 combat-coded total aircraft needed for acceptable military risk.

The letter draws a sharp line on how that modernization must be structured.

“Cascading legacy aircraft does not recapitalize the force, it redistributes risk,” Maj. Gen. Timothy J. Donnellan, adjutant general of the Idaho National Guard, said in an emailed statement.

“Operationally, it will result in reduced survivability in contested environments, higher maintenance burdens and lower aircraft availability rates. For Guard units, it creates a structural mismatch — the Guard is an operationally ready force expected to meet the same combatant commander demands but with less capable and less reliable aircraft. To meet the 2026 National Defense Strategy the USAF must field a fighting force indistinguishable in lethality and survivability across all components, active, guard and reserve.”

With the fiscal 2027 budget request falling 10 fighters short of even the minimum threshold, the generals have a direct message for appropriators.

“Funding below 72 aircraft per year means the Air Force is not even sustaining current fighter capacity,” Smith said. “It’s actively shrinking.

“If the requirement is to meet the National Defense Strategy, then in our best military advice, 72 aircraft per year is the absolute minimum to hold the line. Anything less means accepting greater risk.”

The National Guard Association of the United States has listed ANG fighter recapitalization as a top legislative priority for fiscal 2027 defense deliberations.

A global outage across Elon Musk’s satellite network affecting millions of Starlink users had left two dozen unmanned surface vessels bobbing off the California coast, disrupting communications and halting operations for almost an hour.

The incident, which involved drones intended to bolster U.S. military options in a conflict with China, was one of several Navy test disruptions linked to SpaceX’s Starlink that left operators unable to connect with autonomous boats, according to internal Navy documents reviewed by Reuters and a person familiar with the matter.

As SpaceX rockets toward a $2 trillion public offering this summer – expected to be the largest ever – the company has secured its position as the world’s most valuable space company in part by being indispensable to the U.S. government with an array of technologies spanning satellite communications to space launches and military AI.

Starlink, in particular, has proved key to crucial programs - from drones to missile tracking - with a low-earth orbit constellation of close to 10,000 satellites, a scale that provides the military with a network resilient against potential adversary attacks.

But the Navy’s mishaps with Starlink for its autonomous drone program, which have not been previously reported, highlight the challenges of the U.S. military’s growing reliance on SpaceX and the risks it brings to the Pentagon.

“If there was no Starlink, the U.S. government wouldn’t have access to a global constellation of low earth orbit communications,” said Clayton Swope, a deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Pentagon did not respond to questions about the drone test or SpaceX’s work with the Navy. The Pentagon’s chief information officer, Kirsten Davies, said the “Department leverages multiple, robust, resilient systems for its broad network.”

The Navy and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite facing growing competition from Amazon.com, which announced an $11.6 billion agreement this week to acquire satellite maker Globalstar, SpaceX remains far ahead in low-earth orbit communications.

Beyond drones, SpaceX has cemented a near-monopoly for space launches and provides satellite communications with Starlink and its national security-focused constellation, Starshield, generating billions of dollars for the company.

Last month, U.S. Space Force said it had reassigned its upcoming GPS launch to a SpaceX rocket for the fourth time, due to a glitch in the Vulcan rocket made by the Boeing and Lockheed Martin joint venture United Launch Alliance.

WARNINGS ABOUT RELYING ON SPACEX

Democratic lawmakers have warned the Pentagon about the risks of its reliance on a single company led by the world’s richest man to deliver crucial national security capabilities. More recently, the Defense Department’s disagreements and blacklisting of AI startup Anthropic quickly revealed how an over-reliance on one AI vendor could create problems should that vendor be dropped.

Reuters reported last year that Musk unexpectedly switched off Starlink access to Ukrainian troops as they sought to retake territory from Russia, denting allies’ trust in the billionaire.

In Taiwan, SpaceX faced criticism over concerns it was withholding satellite communications to U.S. service members based there, “possibly in breach of SpaceX’s contractual obligations with the U.S. government,” according to a 2024 letter sent by then-U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher to Musk, reported by Forbes at the time. SpaceX disputed the claim in a post on X.

Reuters could not determine whether SpaceX has since provided Starlink service in Taiwan to U.S. service members. The Pentagon and SpaceX did not respond to questions about Taiwan.

“As a matter of operational security, we do not comment on or discuss plans, operations capabilities or effects,” an official said in a statement.

STARLINK ‘EXPOSED LIMITATIONS’

SpaceX’s Starlink broadband has been crucial to the Pentagon’s drone program, providing connection to small unmanned maritime vessels that look like speedboats without seats, and include those made by Maryland-based BlackSea and Austin, Texas-based Saronic.

In April 2025, during a series of Navy tests in California involving unmanned boats and flying drones, officials reported that Starlink struggled to provide a solid network connection due to the high data usage needed to control multiple systems, according to a Navy safety report of the tests reviewed by Reuters.

“Starlink reliance exposed limitations under multiple-vehicle load,” the report stated. The report also faulted issues linked to radios provided by Silvus and a network system provided by Viasat.

In the weeks leading up to the global Starlink outage in August, another series of Navy tests was disrupted by intermittent connection issues with the Starlink network, Navy documents reviewed by Reuters show. The causes of the network losses were not immediately clear.

Despite the setbacks, the upside of Starlink – a cheap and commercially available service – outweighs the risk of a potential outage disrupting future military operations, said Bryan Clark, an autonomous warfare expert at the Hudson Institute.

“You accept those vulnerabilities because of the benefits you get from the ubiquity it provides,” he said.

The contract, which follows a framework agreement announced in January, will allow Lockheed to “deliver record numbers of combat-proven interceptors for American and allied forces this year,” the company announced Friday.

“Our investments in our facilities, workforce and supply chain ensure we can deliver at scale and with speed,” Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, said in a release. “With the right tools, proven processes and skilled employees in place, we are positioned to deliver a record number of munitions in support of the warfighter and our allies.”

The PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement works by identifying and tracking a range of threats — using Boeing-made PAC-3 seekers — from ballistic missiles and hypersonics to hostile air platforms.

Once the seeker identifies the target, the highly maneuverable all-up interceptor round, which uses a two-pulse solid rocket motor, engages and eliminates threats via direct body-to-body contact.

Boeing earlier this month announced it had reached a framework agreement with the Defense Department to triple production of its PAC-3 seekers.

Lockheed’s framework agreement announced in January included a target of increasing annual PAC-3 interceptor production from approximately 600 to 2,000 over a span of seven years.

Recent contract announcements come as the U.S. military’s reliance on costly interceptors against cheap munitions, particularly those deployed by Iran during Operation Epic Fury, has come under increased scrutiny.

Contrast the $35,000 average cost of an Iranian Shahed drone with an estimated $4 million price tag of a PAC-3, and the cost exchange, if successfully engaged, is 114-1 in favor of Iran.

Despite the lopsided cost exchange, the Pentagon in March also announced a deal with BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin to quadruple production of infrared seekers for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptor.

That deal aligns with a contract agreement in January between the Pentagon and Lockheed to quadruple the company’s annual production of THAAD interceptors from 96 to 400.

In the weeks since the Department of Defense’s troubled relationship with Anthropic burst into public view and led to the company being kicked out of the U.S. military, new defense-focused AI companies like Smack Technologies and EdgeRunner AI say they have experienced a shift in interest that would have been unimaginable just months ago. They have received a surge of overtures about possible contracts and meeting requests and been approached by investors who previously showed no interest.

The Pentagon’s growing animosity toward its top AI provider, Anthropic, has opened up opportunities for smaller rivals, who have long sought a foot in the door to the most lucrative government contractor in the world. A defense contract can lead to more business with other branches of the U.S. government, and is a useful signal of trust and safety for potential commercial clients.

“We’ve seen a massive increase in demand from customers and the government to get AI solutions fielded since Anthropic was declared a supply-chain risk,” said Tyler Sweatt, CEO of Second Front, a company that helps technology firms meet the requirements needed to operate on secure Pentagon networks. “Our customers are turning to us as the Pentagon turns to them to deploy quickly in the wake of the Anthropic blowup.”

Since the Pentagon deemed Anthropic’s products a “supply-chain risk” in March and the two sides became embroiled in a lawsuit, the military has expressed increasing interest in AI startups like Smack Technologies, saying, “We want more, we want demos, let’s talk about how we can move faster,” said Andrew Markoff, co-founder and chief executive of the 19-person startup based in El Segundo, California. In late March, a judge temporarily blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic.

Tyler Saltsman, co-founder and chief executive of EdgeRunner AI, described a similar experience. His company had been waiting more than a year for a Space Force contract to clear the Pentagon’s procurement machinery. It was signed within weeks of the Anthropic situation breaking into the open. “I can’t prove that the Anthropic drama sped this up,” Saltsman said, “but I have a sneaky suspicion it did.”

“The Pentagon will continue to rapidly deploy frontier AI capabilities to the warfighter through strong industry partnerships across all classification levels,” a Pentagon official said.

One Pentagon technologist has previously told Reuters that the falling-out with Anthropic, and the realization that the Defense Department was heavily dependent on one AI provider, forced the department to diversify AI providers.

Smack’s Marine Corps contract speeds up

For Smack, the clearest example of the post-Anthropic acceleration involves the Marine Corps. The company won a contract with the Marine Corps in March 2025 and delivered a successful prototype by October — software that compresses what is normally a months-long operational planning process into roughly 15 minutes.

Despite the successful prototype, momentum stalled. Full production had been budgeted for fiscal year 2027 — meaning October 2027 at the earliest. Through the 2025 holiday period and into early 2026, there was no clear direction.

Hegseth wants Pentagon to dump Claude, but military users say it’s not so easy

Then the Anthropic uproar occurred. Within weeks, Smack was invited to multiple meetings with the Marine Corps focused on a single question: how fast can this move into production this year? Markoff said there was “very specific guidance and movement and energy” toward getting the prototype ready for combat operations in 2026 — an acceleration of more than a year.

The shift extended beyond the Marines. Smack holds contracts with the Navy and Air Force, and Markoff said interest came in nearly immediately from U.S. Special Operations Command, and others.

EdgeRunner, which is deploying with the Army Special Forces groups and has received a contract with the Space Force, said the Navy has also dramatically sped up engagement. Meetings that had been biweekly or monthly are now happening multiple times a week.

Both EdgeRunner and Smack are now racing to get their systems operating at higher security classification levels — the gateway to the most operationally significant use cases and the largest military contracts.

EdgeRunner said the military has told the company it can get to IL-6, a security designation enabling access to secret and top-secret data, within three months — a timeline Saltsman described as remarkable, given that the process normally takes 18 months or longer. The acceleration, he said, is being driven partly by pressure from Pentagon leadership to cut through procurement bureaucracy, and partly by the urgency the Anthropic situation has injected into the department’s AI strategy.

According to budget documents released this week by the Trump administration, the VA would receive a record $488 billion, including $205.6 billion in discretionary funding for programs and operations and $282.6 billion for mandatory spending — the column that covers disability benefits, pensions, insurance and other requirements.

Highlights in the discretionary spending proposal include $500 million to build permanent facilities for homeless veterans at the new National Center for Warrior Independence in West Los Angeles, $1.3 billion to construct a VA medical center in Manchester, New Hampshire, nearly $2 billion to replace the VA medical center in Indianapolis and $30 million to buy land for a new medical center in San Antonio.

The budget supports the VA’s proposed redesign of its community care contracts and programs and planned changes to the management structure at the Veterans Health Administration. It also funds the restart of the VA’s electronic medical record system program that has been on hold since 2022. The VA plans to restart the initiative this month at four facilities, with an additional nine joining later this year.

The VA estimates that the fiscal 2027 budget would provide disability compensation to more than 7.4 million veterans and support 9.2 million veterans enrolled in VA health care.

According to the VA’s Budget in Brief documents, the proposal would support 443,327 full-time VA employees — roughly 9,000 fewer than in 2025 but up nearly 6,200 from fiscal 2026.

In a statement laid out in the documents, VA Secretary Doug Collins said the proposal will enable the department to deliver timely care and benefits for all beneficiaries.

“This budget request reflects VA’s efforts to find more effective and efficient ways to serve our mission and maximize our resources,” the document states. “The days of measuring VA’s progress by how much money we spend and how many people we employ, instead of how successfully we serve Veterans, are over.”

President Donald Trump’s $2.2 trillion budget proposal for fiscal 2027 includes nearly $1.5 trillion in spending for the Defense Department — up 44% from fiscal 2026 levels — and increases for the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security.

It trims several domestic programs, including education, food and energy assistance, housing, the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others.

The proposed VA budget increases spending for VA medical care provided in VA facilities but also increases the budget for community care, the VA’s program for covering the health treatment received by veterans in non-VA facilities.

The budget, which also includes a request for advanced funding for fiscal 2028, ensures that veterans benefits and services are never affected by a government shutdown. In addition, it increases medical care funding, with $96.2 billion requested for care provided in the VA medical system and $42 billion for community care.

As with fiscal 2026, VA officials asked to shift the mandatory funds designated to cover the costs associated with injuries or illnesses related to toxic exposures to the discretionary budget. The request of $52 billion from the Cost of War Toxic Exposures Fund is likely to raise concerns among Democratic lawmakers, who have argued that the continued use of the funds could jeopardize monies set aside for a specific purpose.

The proposal also seeks to cut what White House officials referred to as “divisive and wasteful diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.” The budget documents did not specify which diversity programs the budget will defund, but officials said the reductions would ensure that “VA funding is used for critical VA missions: providing healthcare; benefits; and cemetery services for America’s veterans.”

The president’s proposed budget represents Trump’s vision for the federal government. It serves as a blueprint for Congress to consider as it starts its fiscal 2027 appropriations process.

In the last 25 years, the VA’s budget has ballooned significantly to address the needs of older veterans as well as the millions who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget proposal represents a 10-fold increase for the VA since fiscal 2001, when the VA’s budget was $45 billion.

The NYSE Arca Defense index, which includes 34 small and large-cap U.S. companies, fell nearly 8% in March, compared with the broader S&P 500’s 5% drop. In contrast, it had gained about 12% in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.

The sluggish performance, strategists said, signaled investors were unwinding positions after a strong run this year and does not reflect fading demand or doubts about longer-term defense spending.

“A lot of conflict premium was in their valuations,” said David Bianco, Americas chief investment officer at German asset manager DWS.

“We saw gold and oil and defense rally, part of the reason was messages from the administration, when Trump was sending the armada to the Middle East. Nobody knew anything, but they saw chances of a conflict.”

Bianco said he began reducing his “overweight” position on defense stocks before the Middle East conflict began.

There were signs well before the U.S.-Israeli bombing began in late February that Washington was preparing for a confrontation with Tehran.

Reuters reported in the weeks leading up to the war that the U.S. was building up forces in the Middle East and preparing for a weeks-long operation if diplomacy failed.

Similarly, the European defense sector fell 11% in March, marking its biggest monthly loss since the pandemic amid a broad selloff on worries of a potential energy shock due to the war. Defense shares had rallied for weeks as European governments announced sweeping rearmament plans following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Earlier this year, Trump proposed a $1.5 trillion U.S. military budget for 2027, well above the $901 billion approved for 2026, but uncertainty remains over whether Congress will pass such an increase.

“Nothing that has happened so far suggests that a $1.5 trillion 2027 defense budget could be exceeded. For these reasons, one should not expect upside to come from the current conflict,” Bernstein analyst Douglas Harned said in a recent note.

The defense index has surged more than 150% between 2020 and 2025, leaving the sector at historically elevated valuations.

The S&P 500 Aerospace & Defense sub-index trades at about 32 times 12-month forward earnings, well above the broader S&P 500’s multiple of roughly 20 times, according to LSEG data.

Earnings expectations muted despite war

Market reaction has also been subdued to the Pentagon’s attempts to boost production to replenish depleted missile and ammunition stockpiles.

Any revenue gains will take time to materialize as long production cycles and capacity constraints limit how quickly output can ramp up, analysts say.

Expectations for 2026 earnings growth hovered around 12% at the end of March versus about 15% at the start of 2026 for General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris and RTX, according to Tajinder Dhillon, head of earnings and equity research at LSEG Data & Analytics.

“The conflict would need to last longer, or expand materially, for (earnings) estimates to move higher,” said Sameer Samana, head of global equities at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

Supply constraints, policy pressure

Beyond valuations, investors pointed to limited production flexibility.

Richard Safran, senior analyst and managing director of aerospace and defense at Seaport Research Partners, said funding of defense firms gets diverted to immediate operational needs rather than modernization or development needs during conflicts.

The Trump administration is also pressuring defense firms to prioritize production over shareholder payouts, exacerbating uncertainty around capital returns.

The sector’s medium-term outlook depends heavily on U.S. budget decisions, with key spending details expected on April 21, Bloomberg News reported.

In the announcement, Brian Hoffman, chief engineer of NSWC Crane’s Man-Portable Weapons, explained that the ammo works much like a shotshell in that it disperses a cluster of projectiles, but it’s designed to be fired from a service rifle or machine gun instead of a shotgun.

“The intent with our ammunition was to simply give operators a better chance of killing drones with cost-effective products that can be used in existing weapons,” Hoffman said in the release. “If you aren’t the world’s best shot or don’t have a lot of experience engaging aerial targets, your odds go up immediately with DKC.”

The cartridge’s design, coupled with the range and velocity of typical centerfire rifle ammo, increases the probability of “hit and kill” against drones, Hoffman said.

In a recent demonstration at Indiana’s Camp Atterbury, DKC achieved a 92% success rate.

Hoffman explained that the DKC product line is “already mature” and applicable for not just killing drones but also “home defense, personal protection and hunting.”

And if it sounds like he’s pitching the product line, that’s because he is. The other part of NSWC Crane’s announcement is that it’s looking for partners to manufacture DKC ammo.

The tech link

Hoffman explained that the Navy typically relies on the Army for small-caliber ammunition under the Single Manager for Conventional Ammunition directive. However, it procures ammo through government contracts with industry partners if not supported by the SMCA.

For that reason, NSWC Crane’s announcement was also featured on TechLink, a Defense Department-funded organization run by Montana State University that helps businesses license technology from federal laboratories.

Using the website, manufacturers can license and commercialize products, like DKC ammo, which have been fully developed and patented by the federal government. The intent behind the project is to help veterans, the military and small businesses.

As small drones are now seen as a common weapon on the battlefield, military and other agency leaders project needing millions of DKC rounds, Hoffman said.

“Ongoing conflicts abroad and operational requirements along the U.S. southern border highlight the immediate utility of DKC and its enhanced yet cost-effective capabilities,” he said in the release.

Exactly who is going to manufacture the ammo has not yet been announced. However, Hoffman added that NSWC Crane recently hosted a DKC-licensing event attended by several U.S. ammo makers, and they received even more interest because of the announcement.

Still, Hoffman said DKC ammo production will evolve in the not-too-distant future.

“Given projected requirements, meeting total DKC quantities will likely involve a combination of (Government‑Owned, Contractor‑Operated) production and licensed industry partners operating in parallel,” he said.

John Windom, who served as a program manager on the Defense Department’s adoption of the Cerner electronic health records platform before moving to the VA to manage its health records modernization program, was indicted for allegedly failing to report more than $16,000 worth of gifts.

According to a grand jury indictment filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Windom allegedly accepted cash and other items from at least seven people and companies supporting the VA’s Cerner Oracle health records contract. He met them regularly at a Maryland casino resort to mentor as part of a self-developed mentorship program on building government contracting businesses, the indictment said.

Court records say Windom allegedly accepted an $8,200 Louis Vuitton gift card, $2,000 in cash, $1,800 worth of casino chips, a $1,000 gift card, $2,000 in cash or casino chips and a $631 high-efficiency particulate air filter.

“As alleged, the defendant exploited his senior position for personal gain and concealed gifts and financial relationships that created serious conflicts of interest in the health care of our nation’s veterans,” U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro said in a statement Wednesday.

“Such conduct is not only a betrayal of the public trust—it undermines confidence in the institutions dedicated to serving those who have sacrificed for this country,” Pirro added.

The VA’s health records modernization program began in 2017 under President Donald Trump’s first term, a sole-source $10 billion contract that followed the DOD’s award to Cerner for a new electronic medical records system.

The project was originally scheduled to take 10 years and cost $16 billion. But nearly nine years later, just six of the VA’s 170-plus medical sites use the program, which was paused in April 2023 following issues regarding safety and usability.

The VA plans to resume adoption this year, announcing last March that it would roll it out to 13 additional sites.

Windom served as executive director of the Office of Electronic Health Record Modernization from 2017 to 2022. In 2022, he was reassigned to the position of deputy director of the Federal Electronic Health Management Office. He is a retired Navy captain with acquisition experience.

He allegedly accepted the gifts between June 2020 and November 2020, according to the indictment.

According to the indictment, Windom allegedly concealed from his leadership and ethics officials that he was “accepting, and sometimes demanding, extravagant gifts” from contractors and subcontractors working on the electronic health records system project.

Windom is charged with concealment of material facts, false statements and falsification of a record or document in relation to his failure to report his receipt of gifts, which he was legally obligated to do.

If found guilty of all charges, he faces more than 20 years in prison, as well as financial penalties.

The Justice Department noted that Windom is presumed innocent until he is proven guilty by the court.

A message left with Windom from Military Times was not answered by publication.

There’s not enough data to determine the risk of long-term health effects caused by exposure to that kerosene-based aviation fuel, known as JP-5, according to the report, which was based on research conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The authors did find “limited, suggestive evidence linking jet fuel exposure to short-term respiratory, gastrointestinal, skin and mental health symptoms,” which many military families experienced early on after the fuel leak.

The researchers cited the dearth of information and data about the detection, treatment and long-term effects of exposure to jet fuel in the 282-page report, titled “Clinical Follow-up and Care for Those Impacted by the JP-5 Releases at Red Hill.”

The research was sponsored by the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

In a Thursday webinar, researchers said the limitation of data needs to be addressed so that long-term health effects can be better understood. They recommended various long-term research efforts.

Meanwhile, medical providers caring for people who were potentially exposed to the contaminated water should document exposure history, carefully evaluate and document symptoms and ensure continuity of primary care, the researchers recommended.

About 93,000 people were affected by the Navy’s two accidental releases of JP-5 in 2021. The fuel releases contaminated the drinking water supply for Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and the Aliamanu Military Reservation.

Immediately after the contamination, Navy officials told families it was OK to drink and bathe in the water. Some families experienced severe rashes, diarrhea and other gastrointestinal problems, as well as respiratory problems, mental health symptoms and other issues.

Military officials later gave families the choice of moving to hotels while the fuel was being flushed from the water distribution system and paid their expenses.

'Why weren't you there to protect us?' Hawaii families grill Navy leaders about toxic water

More than four years later, families continue to be concerned about their long-term health, including their children. Many babies were bathed in the contaminated water. Some people have had persistent, continuing symptoms. About 2,000 military families have filed lawsuits against the government alleging negligence and harm to their health.

There are no diagnostic or screening tests to determine past exposure, and there are no specific laboratory tests for detecting JP-5 in blood or urine. The report recommended research to develop and validate biological markers of petroleum associated with exposure to jet fuel, supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, DOD and VA.

There are no known medical procedures that can detox or neutralize the effects of JP-5, the researchers stated.

In addition to their extensive review of available scientific evidence, the researchers visited Red Hill and the Honolulu Board of Water Supply and held 15 meetings with those affected in the community, including service members, military families, civilians and other Oahu residents. They also held additional in-person and virtual listening sessions.

A central theme that emerged from these community interactions was the breakdown of trust between residents and the medical system, researchers found. Families reported repeatedly trying to seek help for themselves and their children, while their conditions worsened.

Those individuals who were affected by the fuel leaks have been encouraged to sign up for registries, including the University of Hawaii Red Hill Independent Health Registry and, for the DOD population, the Red Hill Defense Occupational and Environmental Health Readiness System (DOEHRS) Registry.

But the researchers recommended that DOD link their Red Hill registry with patients’ electronic health records and claims data. Many in the mobile military community who were affected have relocated, and their electronic health record follows them.

Researchers recommended that DOD maintain this registry and expand it to include all individuals who lived or worked at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam or Aliamanu from May 6, 2021 to March 18, 2022.

Based on their review, the Academies researchers recommended other actions that could make a positive impact on the lives of people who are affected by these incidents in the future, such as developing a standardized environmental sampling and chemical analysis methods to test for petroleum contamination in drinking water.

“For military families, the event was experienced as a breach of trust, while for many civilians and Native Hawaiians, it confirmed enduring concerns about military activities and their impact on land and water,” the report stated.

“The contamination of drinking water at Red Hill stands as a defining environmental health event for Hawaii and for the nation,” the report continued. “It reveals how deeply the safety of water, the health of communities and the integrity of institutions are intertwined.

“For thousands of families the crisis raises serious questions about drinking water safety and breached trust with institutions.”

The department persists in attempts to recruit its civilian employees to volunteer and support DHS operations, according to a Thursday email sent to DOD civilian employees that circulated on social media.

“I am renewing the call for additional dedicated civil servant volunteers to meet continued mission-critical roles in support of DHS,” the email reads.

The email, sent by the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, first circulated on the unofficial Air Force amn/nco/sno Facebook page. A Pentagon official declined to confirm or deny the authenticity of the email to Military Times on Thursday.

DOD’s encouragement of civilian employees’ interagency collaboration when it comes to DHS is nothing new. Since August 2025, the department has tried recruiting civilian employees for up to six-month details in support of the southern border mission at participating DHS agencies.

Last week DOD issued a release urging civilian employees to consider volunteering. Any civilian can volunteer regardless of their job or skills and no resume is required, according to the release, which states 1,000 civilians have been “added to the roster to assist DHS” and 200 have already been deployed.

The Pentagon official declined to comment on whether civilian volunteers approved undergo any additional training.

Details typically last 60 days, but volunteers can opt to complete three 60-day details for a total of 180 days, according to the release.

The email, meanwhile, states that many personnel have already “answered the call to defend the homeland,” claiming that 900 individuals have already submitted applications.

Detailees, which is how the email referred to the individuals, will directly support Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, according to the email.

The email states that participants have assisted ICE and CBP in developing “concepts of operations, provide logistics support, and managed informant tiplines that led to the arrests of human smugglers, drug dealers and other criminals.”

The Pentagon official declined to comment on how many applicants have been approved and deployed already out of the 900 or on what the application process looks like exactly.

Amid President Donald Trump’s push for immigration enforcement operations across the country, ICE has offered large signing bonuses and reduced their age requirements in an effort to expand its workforce.

Despite claims that ICE has exceeded its recruitment goals, National Guard troops have been mobilized in the past to offer the department support on top of Federal Emergency Management Agency employees being temporarily reassigned to ICE, according to The Washington Post’s reporting.

According to an August 2025 Defense Department memo, the agreement between DOD and DHS agencies lasts until Sept. 30, 2026.

With the U.S. and Israel attacks against Iran in their third week, Americans’ thoughts and actions have been turning toward sending care packages with various hygiene products, snacks and a host of other items.

But according to the U.S. Postal Service, there are currently 28 ZIP codes where mail services have been temporarily suspended, all of which appear to be Army or Air Force post offices. No ships are currently listed, although mail service is sporadic in many locations because of operational needs and restrictions. There are also 17 Diplomatic Post Office (DPO) suspensions.

The U.S. Postal Service doesn’t share exact locations associated with APO, FPO or DPO ZIP codes with the public, said David P. Coleman, a spokesman for the Postal Service. The decisions about suspensions of service to military and diplomatic post offices are made by the Military Postal Service Agency and the Department of State.

The Military Postal Service Agency serves as an extension of the U.S. Postal Service and provides postal services to Defense Department personnel and their families at locations around the world.

What happens to those care packages if they can’t be delivered?

Packages that were accepted before their particular ZIP code suspension took effect are held for future delivery after the suspension is lifted, Coleman said.

“No packages are being returned to sender at this time,” he said.

If a customer takes a package to a postal counter for mailing, the automated system will inform the postal employee that mail services have been suspended for that ZIP code, and the representative will hand the package back to the customer. If the customer drops off the package in a receptacle, the package will be held for future delivery after the suspension is lifted.

Scott Raab, director of operations for Troopathon, a nonprofit charity that has sent over 1,000 tons of hand-packed boxes of items to troops over the past two decades, said he sent 1,000 boxes to the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford on March 12, and another 2,000 boxes to troops elsewhere that week.

The organization always checks to make sure service members’ ZIP codes are not on the suspension list, he told Military Times. He urges others to check the U.S. Postal Service’s suspension list, which is updated frequently, and has been updated daily this week.

While Troopathon primarily uses the Postal Service, they also have contacts within units, where they can find additional ways to get boxes to troops to fulfill their needs. There’s a form for requesting a care package at Troopathon.org. Troops can request the packages, and families can request them for their deployed service members.

The Troopathon boxes are always free to the troops or their families who request them, and they contain a couple hundred dollars’ worth of items, Raab said. Troopathon also raises money for postage, which is generally about $15 to $20 for each 12X12x6 box. Popular items include basic hygiene products, snacks, cookies, coffee and socks.

One military mother posted on social media about the needs of her son’s squadron at his base in the Middle East after their military exchange had to close. That post quickly spread to other spouse groups, and Amazon found out about it — and contacted her about sending items.

“Now all of these people from all over the world are sending his base thousands of dollars of goodies like protein bars, cans of coffee, energy drinks, tampons, toilet paper, body wipes and toothbrushes,” she told Military Times.

“I don’t know when they’re ever going to get it because they’re not delivering mail, because they have more important things to deliver, but when they do deliver, they’re going to have a whole lot of goodies coming their way,” added the Air Force mother, who asked to remain anonymous.

“I told my son, ‘I understand that you guys aren’t getting any mail, but there’s going to come a time when your people get tired and they’re going to need some care packages just for morale.’”

Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., kicked off a series of hearings Wednesday on legislation that would reauthorize several significant VA programs and said he wants to create a comprehensive authorization process — an omnibus-style procedure — that would ensure a yearly legislative review of all VA programs, some of which have not been reauthorized for 30 years.

Bost said such oversight is needed to ensure that the VA remains accountable to its customers, taxpayers and Congress.

“When programs fall short, it is the duty of this committee to ask questions, demand answers and make the legislative changes necessary to fix the problem,” Bost said. “Reauthorization is not simply a procedural exercise. It is how Congress evaluates whether programs are working as intended and whether the department is using its authorities responsibly.”

Last year, the Congressional Budget Office identified more than $122 billion in expenditures at the department with lapsed authorizations. According to the office, Congress has allowed 18 authorization laws — those that set policy and recommend funding levels — for the VA to expire.

Bost said the committee needs to tackle reauthorization to ensure that Congress has “the means to modernize [the] VA.”

“[These bills] are designed to restore accountability, improve transparency and ensure that VA remains focused on veterans,” Bost said.

Since the start of the second Trump administration, members of Congress have complained that the VA has become significantly less responsive to congressional inquiries and oversight. During a hearing in January, Bost scolded VA officials for repeated delays in providing responses and testimony to Congress, saying he considered preventing the department from testifying given its lack of timeliness.

Likewise, at the same hearing, the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Mark Takano of California, said the delays showed “enormous disrespect.”

“It is inexcusable. This should never happen again,” Takano said. “Get your testimony here on time, especially when we’re reviewing $1 trillion [in spending].”

Bost has discussed creating a single authorization bill for the VA since last year, sharing his vision first with Politico Pro.

While none of the 27 bills considered Wednesday was a comprehensive authorization proposal, the collection featured several prioritized by House Republicans for review, including bills that address the VA’s restructuring of its health care system, evaluation of the VA’s national drug formulary and reforms of its leasing and construction and contracting and procurement process.

“The goal is simple: better coordination, stronger accountability and better outcomes for veterans,” Bost said.

For the NDAA, House and Senate Armed Services subcommittee members draft portions of the separate bills for their areas of interest, then vote and move their section along to the full committee for consideration. At each step, lawmakers can propose amendments, which are then voted on by committee and either rolled into the bill or rejected. Eventually, the bills are voted on by the respective chambers, and the versions are reconciled in conference before both are passed again. The final bill is then sent to the president’s desk for signing.

For the VA, the authorization process has been piecemeal, with lawmakers proposing policy bills as they see need. For example, other bills proposed Wednesday included legislation that would expand dental care to all veterans in the VA health system and create a Toxic Exposure Advisory Committee to support implementation of the PACT Act.

VA officials at the hearing said that while they “strongly support congressional oversight and engagement,” the department has concerns on comprehensive legislation, saying it “could cause serious disruption to VA benefits and services.”

“VA believes that a clear accounting of programs and services could be achieved through additional avenues such as additional requests for information, briefing request, additional oversight hearings or requiring additional justification materials,” said Phil Christy, the VA’s chief acquisition officer.

During the hearing, Takano said he wasn’t sure that the NDAA strategy would work but added that he is “certainly willing to try.”

“I welcome an effort by this chamber by our House and by this committee to reclaim its authorities and reaffirm our Article I powers by doing the real oversight the VA so desperately needs,” said Takano, referring to the portion of the Constitution that established Congress and gave it the powers to create laws, raise revenue and declare war.

Bost noted that committee oversight is a constitutional responsibility and VA must be accountable.

“It is a task … not an ask,” Bost said.

For decades, the U.S. military’s dream of high-energy laser weapons has been perpetually “five years away.”

Now, the Pentagon says it wants to finally make them an operational reality within the next three.

Speaking on a panel at the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual Pacific Operational Science and Technology conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, on March 9, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies Michael Dodd stated that the Defense Department plans on fielding directed energy weapons such as lasers and high-powered microwaves at scale within the next 36 months to defend service members from the threat of hostile drones, National Defense magazine reports.

While the Pentagon has deployed a handful of laser weapons overseas in recent years for operational testing and officially designated “scaled directed energy” as a critical technology area in November, this accelerated push for widespread fielding comes as U.S. forces engaged in the Operation Epic Fury struggle to counter waves of Iranian Shahed drones raining down across the Middle East, according to fellow panelist Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering James Mazol.

“We need to be able to deal with mass, and we need to be able to defeat mass that’s coming at us,” Mazol said, per National Defense.

These ambitions appear to have support at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Speaking at a White House press conference on Epic Fury on March 9, President Donald Trump touted the potential of laser weapons as a cheaper alternative to the pricey interceptor missiles U.S. forces currently rely on to counter drones and other aerial threats.

“The laser technology that we have now is incredible,” Trump, who previously declared laser weapons a key feature of his proposed “Trump-class” battleship, said. “It’s coming out pretty soon. Where literally lasers will do the work of, at a lot less cost, what the Patriots are doing and what other things are doing.”

Trump: "The laser technology that we have now is incredible. It's coming out pretty soon. Where literally lasers will do the work of, at a lot less cost, what the Patriots are doing and what other things are doing." pic.twitter.com/ugxLmwZ2c7

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 9, 2026

That cost difference is at the heart of the Pentagon’s growing interest in directed energy. A single Patriot PAC-3 interceptor can cost more than $3 million, while the Iranian Shahed drones pummeling battlefields across the Middle East often runs between $20,000 and $50,000 — a punishing asymmetry for conventional militaries.

Directed energy weapons like high-energy lasers promise to invert this equation, with each shot requiring little more than the electricity required to generate the beam. And while laser weapons have clear limitations, they offer a potentially attractive complement to traditional missiles and other kinetic interceptors for countering the threat of low-cost weaponized drones.

This Pentagon-level push to field directed energy weapons comes as the military services have accelerated their own laser programs. Senior U.S. Navy leaders recently trumpeted their vision of “a laser on every ship” in the surface fleet, a notable shift from the caution that previously defined the service’s approach to directed energy.

The U.S. Army has laid out draft requirements to “produce and rapidly field” up to 24 new Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) systems in what might finally become the service’s first program of record. The Air Force is taking another run at both airborne laser weapons and ground-based systems for base defense after years of disappointment. The Marine Corps says it plans on investing in a “more deliberate program of record” for laser weapons, as a service spokesman previously told Laser Wars.

The Army and Navy are even teaming up on a brand new laser weapon system as part of Trump’s ambitious “Golden Dome for America” missile shield. All of this is occurring against the backdrop of $250 million infusion of funding for directed energy research and development included in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” reconciliation package the president signed into law in July 2025.

Taken together, these efforts may represent the Pentagon’s most serious attempt to transition laser weapons from experimental prototypes to routine military capabilities since President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983.

But while the R&D breakthroughs required for the orbital laser weapons envisioned by Reagan’s “Star Wars” never materialized, the technology has now advanced to the point where they are burning drones out of the sky in active conflict zones — and, occasionally, at home. Adaptive optics, more efficient power systems, improved thermal management and AI-assisted targeting have now converged to make laser weapons reliable and compact enough for real-world operations.

Transitioning laser weapons into fully funded military programs is as much a matter of institutional will as technological maturity. Many next-generation defense technologies end up languishing in the “valley of death” between R&D and acquisition because of shifting priorities or a lack of political support from stakeholders in the Pentagon or Congress; just look at the Navy’s experience with its electromagnetic railgun, which the service abandoned in 2021 after spending nearly $1 billion over two decades.

With senior military leaders, service secretaries and the commander-in-chief extolling the virtues of laser weapons, the chances of these systems actually watching over combat formations downrange have rarely been higher.

The most significant challenge facing the Pentagon’s scaled directed energy ambitions is the “scale” part. As Laser Wars previously reported, the essential components of laser weapons require rare earth elements and other critical minerals, the global production and processing of which China dominates.

And even if those inputs were abundant, advanced manufacturing capacity is not: U.S. defense contractors like AV and nLight, as well as Australia’s Electro Optic Systems (EOS), have all announced plans to boost production of laser weapons in recent months, but those manufacturing expansions will take months to ramp up and outputs will likely remain modest at perhaps a handful of systems a year (five to 10 annually at EOS’s new hub in Singapore, for example).

This pales in comparison to, say, the hundreds of FIM-91 Stinger missiles and Coyote interceptors that defense prime Raytheon can churn out in the same period. Scaling laser weapons from prototypes to scores of systems will require a defense industrial base that largely does not yet exist.

Scaled directed energy is not a standalone solution for the U.S. military’s air defense woes. Laser weapons, after all, aren’t magic: They can be extremely effective against drones and other targets, but they still require precious seconds of dwell time to inflict catastrophic damage and their performance can degrade depending on atmospheric conditions.

This makes them best suited as one segment of a broader layered air defense architecture rather than a wholesale replacement for missiles and guns. In practice, this means pairing lasers with kinetic interceptors, electronic warfare systems and other specialized countermeasures, all coordinated through a unified command-and-control system that can assign the right weapon to the right target at the right moment. Lasers and other exotic directed energy systems may help solve the cost problem posed by drone attacks, but only by working as part of a larger air defense ecosystem designed to handle the full spectrum of aerial threats.

After decades of laser weapons promises, the Pentagon has given itself a deadline. Now it has to prove that it can deliver — fast.

The sea service reached an agreement with the Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics, the company confirmed Tuesday, to deploy tech capable of streamlining repairs and reducing maintenance delays for a surface fleet that continues to be stretched thin.

The contract will begin as a 5-year, $54 million indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity deal that will soon see Gecko begin work on 18 ships assigned to the Navy’s U.S. Pacific Fleet.

To expedite what has in recent years become a headache for naval readiness, Gecko uses drones, wall-climbing robots and fixed sensors to gather data on components, decks, welds and hulls.

That information, paired with AI tools, is used to identify current and potential structural issues that may remain hidden to the naked eye.

“A single robotic evaluation and digital rendering of a flight deck eliminated over three months of potential maintenance delay days,” the company release stated about one such procedure.

These measures have expedited maintenance “up to 50 times faster and more accurately than manual methods,” the company added.

“Readiness isn’t just a metric, it’s all that matters,” Jake Loosararian, co-founder and CEO of Gecko, said in the release. “This growing partnership is about unfair advantages Gecko is deploying to our Navy; and how prediction, through our robotics and AI products, ensure our brave men and women are the most advantaged in the world in their fight to defend freedom.”

In fall 2024, then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti unveiled a goal of having 80% of the Navy’s fleet ready to deploy at any given time by 2027.

Obstacles to reaching that goal materialized quickly, however, with a Government Accountability Office report in December 2024 highlighting a readiness rate among the Navy’s amphibious warfare ships of just 46% between 2011 and 2020. This rate, in turn, significantly hindered Marine Corps deployment and training plans.

In August 2025, that rate reportedly dipped to just 41%, resulting in a more than five-month gap in Marine Expeditionary Unit deployments that year and further straining resources amid the Trump administration’s push to counter the illicit drug trade in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The 80% plan, meanwhile, was picked up by Franchetti’s successor, Adm. Daryl Caudle, who called the rate “an ambitious but essential readiness goal.”

“Achieving this requires shorter maintenance cycles, increased spare-parts availability, improved training pipelines and targeted upgrades across the fleet,” Caudle wrote for Military Times in December.

“Readiness is not a budget line — it is a promise to the American people that their Navy will never arrive late to a fight."

Those civilians, who aren’t eligible beneficiaries of military medical care, include a variety of people, from Department of Defense civilian employees to other civilians who received emergency and trauma treatment at any military treatment or clinic, both overseas and stateside, since June 21, 2023.

Military medical facilities can provide care to individuals who aren’t eligible beneficiaries in certain circumstances, by law, usually on a reimbursable basis. But the high cost of medical care was putting some of these civilians in financial distress. So Congress passed a provision in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act that gave DOD the authority to protect patients from financial harm, to apply a sliding fee scale and catastrophic fee waiver.

The billing was paused in June 2023 in order for DOD to develop the new Military Health System Modified Payment and Waiver Program, to help these civilians who face financial difficulty.

Once the patient receives a medical bill, if they face financial harm, they are encouraged to apply for the program, officials stated in an email response to questions.

“We encourage all non-beneficiary civilians who received treatment in an MTF or clinic after June 21, 2023 to take full advantage of this program to see how much financial relief they may qualify for when they receive their bill,” officials stated.

While officials did not provide a timeline for the bills, a Feb. 6 Federal Register final rule implementing the program stated it became effective March 9. Information was not available about the estimated total amount of the billing. Each individual bill will vary and is determined by the length and type of treatment.

According to the Military Health System, if patients have other health insurance, the military hospital or clinic where they received care will file medical claims on their behalf. The patient will be responsible for copays, coinsurance, deductibles, nominal fees and non-covered services.

Those without health insurance will get a bill from the military hospital or clinic where they received care.

Each bill will include instructions on how to apply for financial relief through the program.

All complete applications will be evaluated based on the standards outlined in the final rule, applying a sliding fee scale and catastrophic waiver benefits, officials said. The final rule also guarantees flexible installment plans to allow patients to spread out their payments over up to 72 months.

The Federal Register rule outlines an initial process for determining the sliding fee discount and catastrophic fee waiver, using the Federal Poverty Guidelines. Those whose annual household income is at or below 100% of that year’s Federal Poverty Guidelines may receive a full discount on their bill; others receive discounts based on the sliding scale. Those federal guidelines are based on annual household income and family size.

For example, for those in the U.S., except for Alaska and Hawaii, a household of four people with an annual income of $32,150 would be at 100% of the federal poverty level in 2026.

Instructions for applying for financial relief are also available at the MPWP web page. Patients can also contact the Defense Health Agency’s Debt Adjudication office for assistance, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central Standard Time at 210-295-3344, or by email at DHA-MPWP-Inquiries@health.mil.

The Ground Truth Symposium will be hosted on March 25 by the Peace Through Strength Institute, a foreign policy and defense think tank based in Washington.

The event promises to translate “Ukraine’s frontline reality into clearer congressional understanding of the war, the capabilities shaping it and the conditions required to help bring it to an end on terms consistent with both Ukraine’s survival and United States strategic interests,” according to a release.

Representatives from several Ukrainian drone units will participate in the symposium, including soldiers from the country’s most effective UAV squads like Lazar Group, the 12th Special Forces Brigade and the 414th UAV Brigade “Magyar’s Birds.”

Discussions are expected to focus on Ukraine’s expertise in drone tactics and technology, along with the best practices for integrating the newer class of weapons into countries’ existing air defense systems.

The heavy use of several types of drones by multiple countries since the start of the recent conflict in the Middle East, currently involving about a dozen countries, will be a major talking point.

“Ukraine’s experience offers critical lessons for the United States and its allies — lessons the United States and our allies need now in the Iranian conflict,” the event’s press release stated.

Ukraine first made the shift to cheap interceptors not by choice, but because Russia’s nightly Shahed waves were burning through Western-provided missiles faster than allies could resupply them.

Last month, Ukrainian interceptors destroyed more than 70% of incoming Shaheds over Kyiv, freeing scarce Patriot missiles for the ballistic threats they were designed to stop.

Interceptor drones are small, fast, semi-autonomous unmanned aircraft — often costing between $1,000 and $2,500 each — designed to hunt and destroy incoming drones by ramming into them or detonating alongside them at altitude.

Compact enough to fit inside a duffel bag and fast enough to chase a Shahed in the dark, Ukraine’s interceptors can fly at speeds between 195 and 280 miles per hour, depending on the model.

Most combine thermal imaging with radar tracking and AI-assisted guidance, with a human operator taking manual control for the final seconds of the intercept.

“You don’t have time,” Andrii Hrytseniuk, the CEO of Brave1, recalled telling officials in recent years. “Shahed [drones] will come not only to Ukraine, but to other countries. You need to use your time not to stick to previous conventional warfare, but to work on the new era.”

Brave1 was established in 2023 as Ukraine’s state-backed defense innovation hub, which funds, tests, and fast-tracks new military technology from hundreds of Ukrainian startups.

Three years after Brave1’s formation, the Iran war has made Hrytseniuk’s warning prescient.

In the first week alone, the U.S. and Israel struck more than 3,000 targets across Iran while Tehran fired over 500 ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones at U.S. bases and Israeli cities across 12 countries, burning through over 800 Patriot interceptor missiles in three days — more than Ukraine received from allies throughout four years of war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pointed out on Thursday.

“And we are not slowing down,” U.S. Central Command posted on X the next day.

The conflict has since drawn in at least a dozen countries and put Ukraine’s counter-drone expertise at the center of a global scramble, with the Pentagon and at least one Gulf state now in active talks to buy Ukrainian-made interceptor drones, according to Financial Times. An EU envoy, meanwhile, is reportedly brokering introductions between Gulf governments and Kyiv’s manufacturers.

“They are really asking for some help with interceptor drones specifically,” Hrytseniuk told Military Times on Friday.

Ukraine first made the shift to cheap interceptors not by choice, but because Russia’s nightly Shahed waves were burning through Western-provided missiles faster than allies could resupply them.

Last month, Ukrainian interceptors destroyed more than 70% of incoming Shaheds over Kyiv, freeing scarce Patriot missiles for the ballistic threats they were designed to stop.

The irony is hard to ignore: the besieged country that spent four years begging for Patriot batteries to combat a nuclear power 10 times its size has quietly built a new layer of air defense at a fraction of the cost, according to The New York Times — and now Washington, which spent roughly $4 billion on missile defense interceptors in the first week of the Iran war alone, is calling Kyiv for help.

Interceptor drones are small, fast, semi-autonomous unmanned aircraft — often costing between $1,000 and $2,500 each — designed to hunt and destroy incoming drones by ramming into them or detonating alongside them at altitude.

Compact enough to fit inside a duffel bag and fast enough to chase a Shahed in the dark, Ukraine’s interceptors can fly at speeds between 195 and 280 miles per hour, depending on the model.

Most combine thermal imaging with radar tracking and AI-assisted guidance, with a human operator taking manual control for the final seconds of the intercept.

Ukraine now has more than 20 companies producing interceptor drones, the National Security and Defense Council announced in January.

“The most impressive thing is how far we have technically advanced,” Roman Yeremenko, a director at Aero Center, a Ukrainian full-cycle manufacturer that builds both drones and their ammunition, told Military Times earlier this week.

Modern Ukrainian interceptors started with Mavic scouts dropping jerry-rigged grenades — simple, improvised.

Then came FPV drones: first 7-inch frames, then 10, then 12. Aero Center’s first munition, Malyuk (“Baby”), weighed just 450 grams — enough for one or two Mavic drops.

“But the troops kept asking for more capabilities,” Yeremenko said.

Then came “1 kg payloads, 1.5 kg, even bigger,” he said.

Engineers working long into the night learned to wire warheads directly to flight controllers, built initiation systems and moved into producing kamikaze FPVs.

What’s getting developed now? Heavy bombers carry 5–10 kg of ammunition and fly 25–35 miles regularly, according to Yeremenko.

“This is a war of technology,” he said. “And the one who is ahead will win this war.”

Several Ukrainian companies are now fielding systems with combat records no Western manufacturer can match.

Wild Hornets' Sting has been in combat longer than any other Ukrainian interceptor.

A spokesman for the group told CBS News last week that the $2,500 FPV drone has downed 3,900 drones since May 2025 — including, the company says, the first confirmed downing of Russia’s jet-powered Geran-3 and a Shahed fitted with an air-to-air missile.

Reaching 195 mph with a thermal camera and AI-assisted terminal guidance, it can engage targets up to 15 miles away and fits in a standard duffel bag.

At the lowest price point is SkyFall’s P1-SUN, a fiber-optic Shahed hunter on a 3D-printed modular airframe that costs Ukrainian units just $1,000 a pop.

A company representative recently told Reuters that the drone, which SkyFall says has been upgraded to 280-mph capabilities with computer vision and thermal imaging, has downed more than 1,500 Shaheds and 1,000 other drones in four months — and is a hot ticket item internationally since Iran came under fire.

Then there is Ukrspecsystems' Octopus, now built under license by more than 15 Ukrainian manufacturers and, since November, at a new factory in the United Kingdom.

It flies at night, cuts through electronic jamming at up to 4,500 meters, and locks onto targets autonomously — the kind of all-conditions reliability that made it the MoD’s pick for mass production.

The UK deal marked the first time a Western government licensed a Ukrainian-designed interceptor for domestic production, a model that five NATO countries — Germany, France, Italy, Poland and the UK — have since agreed to build on by jointly developing affordable interceptor drones of their own, per Militarnyi.

Not every system follows the same blueprint. Aero Center is teaming up with Dwarf Engineering, a software company focused on creating multiplatform mission control systems for UAVs, to build a comprehensive interceptor drone package for Ukrainian units and international partners that includes the drone, payload and software needed to integrate it into current air defense systems.

It’s a different approach to development entirely, Ihor Matviyuk, who heads Aero Center Drones, Aero Center’s subsidiary UAV division, told Military Times.

“An extra 100 grams [on a combat drone] can mean minus two kilometers range,” Vladyslav Piotrovskyi, Dwarf Engineering’s CEO, told Military Times on Friday.

Piotrovskyi added that the trade-off only works if all three components are optimized as one.

But every groundbreaking interceptor system in Ukraine’s arsenal faces the same expiration window.

Russia’s latest strike drone, the feared Geran-5, can reach speeds up to 370 mph — technically fast enough to outrun every Ukrainian interceptor currently in service, according to Business Insider — and they grow deadlier every day.

“The Russians are trying. They are not as stupid as they look,” Yeremenko told Military Times. “They are adapting to our means of destruction.”

Ukrainian and Russian tech becomes outdated every six weeks on average, the drone experts explained, so Ukraine cannot stand still.

Aero Center is now building medium-class drones with payloads up to 10 kilograms and ranges of roughly 25 kilometers — “middle-sized drones, but with the functions and features of big bombers” — designed for a battlefield where the threat evolves faster than any single airframe can answer, the company’s UAV expert said.

Ukraine has already learned how to build and integrate an entirely new air defense system in an asymmetric war. Now, it’s offering the playbook to allies — in exchange for the kind of help Kyiv still cannot produce on its own.

“We are ready to help. We are suggesting help,” Brave1’s CEO told Military Times. “For us, it’s important to have an alliance that is strong — to stop the war and prevent the start of new wars.”

Alongside an image of a burning Shahed posted Friday on X, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense spelled out its current offer to the West:

“We can help you fight against Shaheds. Help us fight against ballistic missiles.”

The newly announced testing was being carried out to “specifically address FAA safety concerns,” the military said Friday in a statement. It was to take place Saturday and Sunday at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Lawmakers were concerned about an apparent lack of coordination after the Pentagon allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to use an anti-drone laser in early February without notifying the FAA. The federal agency that ensures safety in the skies decided to close the airspace over El Paso for a few hours, stranding many travelers.

The Trump administration said it was working to halt an incursion by Mexican cartel drones, which are not uncommon along the southern border.

On Feb. 26 the U.S. military used the laser to shoot down a “seemingly threatening” drone flying near the U.S.-Mexico border. It turned out the drone belonged to Customs and Border Protection, lawmakers said.

The incident led the FAA to close the airspace around Fort Hancock, about 50 miles southeast of El Paso.

“We appreciate the coordination with the Department of War to help ensure public safety,” the FAA said of the testing, in a separate statement. “The FAA and DOW are working with interagency partners to address emerging threats posed by unmanned aircraft systems while maintaining the safety of the National Airspace System.”

The military is required to formally notify the FAA when it takes any counter-drone action inside U.S. airspace.

Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth, the ranking member on the Senate’s Aviation Subcommittee, called previously for an independent investigation after the two February incidents.

Both the House and Senate, where the president’s Republican Party has a slim majority, had already drafted such resolutions long before the strikes Saturday. Now they are ready to plunge into a rare war powers debate next week that will serve as a referendum on Trump’s decision to go it alone on military action without formal authorization from Congress.

“Has President Trump learned nothing from decades of U.S. meddling in Iran and forever wars in the Middle East?” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a leader in the bipartisan effort. He said the strikes on Iran were “a colossal mistake.”

In the House, Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., are demanding Congress go on record with a public vote on their own bipartisan measure. “Congress must convene on Monday to vote,” Khanna said, “to stop this.”

Massie blasted Trump’s own presidential campaign slogan and said: “This is not ‘America First.’”

But most Republicans, particularly their leaders, welcomed Trump’s move against Iran. Many cited the longtime U.S. adversary’s nuclear programs and missile capabilities as requiring a military response.

“Well done, Mr. President,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. “As I watch and monitor this historic operation, I’m in awe of President Trump’s determination to be a man of peace but at the end of the day, evil’s worst nightmare.”

War powers debate tests Congress

The administration’s decision to launch, with Israel, what appears to be an open-ended joint military operation aimed at changing the government in Tehran is testing the Constitution’s separation of powers in deep and dramatic ways. Nearly two months earlier, Trump ordered U.S. strikes that toppled Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

While presidents have the authority as the commander in chief to conduct certain strategic military operations on their own, the Constitution vests Congress with the power to wage war. Before the Iraq War began in March 2003, Republican President George W. Bush made a monthslong push to secure congressional authorization. No such vote was attempted on Iran, and an earlier Senate effort to halt Trump’s actions after last summer’s strike on Iran failed.

The congressional debate over war powers would mostly be symbolic. Even if a resolution were to pass the narrowly split Congress, Trump likely would veto it and Congress would not have the two-thirds majority needed to overturn that rejection. Congress has often failed to block other U.S. military actions, including in a Senate vote on Venezuela, but the roll calls stand as a public record.

Republican leaders back Trump’s action

The response by House Speaker Mike Johnson reflected the party’s long-standing views. Iran, he said, is facing “the severe consequences of its evil actions.”

Johnson, R-La., said the leaders of the House and Senate and the respective intelligence committees had been briefed in detail earlier in the week that military action “may become necessary” to protect U.S. troops and citizens in Iran. He said he received updates from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and will stay in “close contact” with Trump and the Defense Department “as this operation proceeds.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., commended Trump “for taking action to thwart these threats.”

Thune said he looked forward to administration officials briefing all senators — a signal that lawmakers are seeking more answers to their questions about Trump’s plans ahead.

Democrats warn strikes are illegal

Many Democrats are calling the operation illegal, saying the Constitution gives Congress alone the power to declare war. To them, the administration has failed to lay out its rationale or plan for the military strikes, and the aftermath.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the president has undertaken “illegal, regime-change war against Iran.”

“This is not making us safer & only damages the US & our interests,” Van Hollen, D-Md., said in a social media post. “The Senate must immediately vote on the War Powers Resolution to stop it.”

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said while Iran is a “bad actor and must be aggressively confronted” for its human rights abuses and the threat it poses to the U.S. and allies, the administration ”must seek authorization for the preemptive use of military force that constitutes an act of war.”

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, demanded that Congress be briefed immediately on the administration’s plans.

“Iran must never be allowed to attain a nuclear weapon but the American people do not want another endless and costly war in the Middle East when there are so many problems at home,” he said.

Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Matt Brown contributed to this report.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he was designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk, a move that could prevent U.S. military vendors from working with the company.

Hegseth’s remarks, delivered in a social media post, came shortly after the Pentagon’s deadline for Anthropic to allow unrestricted military use of its AI technology or face consequences — and nearly 24 hours after CEO Dario Amodei said his company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Defense Department’s demands.

Anthropic ‘cannot in good conscience accede’ to Pentagon’s demands, CEO says

Calling the company “Leftwing nut jobs,” President Donald Trump said Anthropic made a mistake trying to strong-arm the Pentagon. Trump wrote on Truth Social that most agencies must immediately stop using Anthropic’s AI but gave the Pentagon a six-month period to phase out the technology that is already embedded in military platforms.

At issue in the defense contract was a clash over AI’s role in national security. Anthropic had said it sought narrow assurances from the Pentagon that Claude won’t be used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. But after months of private talks exploded into public debate, it said in a Thursday statement that new contract language “framed as compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will.”

Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, could afford to lose the contract. But an ultimatum this week from Hegseth posed broader risks at the peak of the company’s meteoric rise from a little-known computer science research lab in San Francisco to one of the world’s most valuable startups. Military officials had warned Anthropic earlier in the week they could deem it “a supply chain risk,” a designation typically stamped on foreign adversaries that could derail the company’s critical partnerships with other businesses.

Trump also said Anthropic could face “major civil and criminal consequences” if it’s not helpful in the phase-out period. Anthropic didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on the new developments.

The president’s decision was preceded by hours of top Trump appointees from the Pentagon and the State Department taking to social media to criticize Anthropic and slam their reluctance to acquiesce to the administration’s demands.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the penalties on Anthropic “combined with inflammatory rhetoric attacking that company, raises serious concerns about whether national security decisions are being driven by careful analysis or political considerations.”

The dispute stunned AI developers in Silicon Valley, where a growing number of workers from Anthropic’s top rivals, OpenAI and Google, voiced support for Amodei’s stand in open letters and other forums.

The move is likely to benefit Elon Musk’s competing chatbot, Grok, which the Pentagon plans to give access to classified military networks, and could serve as a warning to two other competitors, Google and OpenAI, that also have contracts to supply their AI tools to the military.

Musk sided with Trump’s administration on Friday, saying on his social media platform X that “Anthropic hates Western Civilization.”

But one of Amodei’s fiercest rivals, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, sided with Anthropic and questioned the Pentagon’s “threatening” move in a CNBC interview, suggesting that OpenAI and most of the AI field share the same red lines. Amodei once worked for OpenAI before he and other OpenAI leaders quit to form Anthropic in 2021.

“For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company, and I think they really do care about safety,” Altman told CNBC.

Retired Air Force Gen. Jack Shanahan wrote on a social media that “painting a bullseye on Anthropic garners spicy headlines, but everyone loses in the end.”

Shanahan said Claude is already being widely used across the government, including in classified settings, and Anthropic’s red lines are “reasonable.” He said the AI large language models that power chatbots like Claude are also “not ready for prime time in national security settings,” particularly not for fully autonomous weapons.

“They’re not trying to play cute here,” he wrote Thursday on LinkedIn.

O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

Defense officials in the Trump administration also warned they could designate Anthropic, which makes the AI chatbot Claude, as a supply chain risk — or invoke a Cold War-era law called the Defense Production Act to give the military more sweeping authority to use its products, even if the company doesn’t approve.

Some experts say that using the law this way would be unprecedented, and could bring future legal challenges. The government’s efforts to essentially force Anthropic’s hand also underscore a wider, contentious debate over AI’s role in national security.

Here’s what we know.

What is the Defense Production Act?

The Defense Production Act gives the federal government broad authority to direct private companies to meet the needs of national defense.

The act was signed by President Harry S. Truman in 1950, amid concerns about supplies and equipment during the Korean War. But over its now decades-long history, the law’s powers have been invoked not only in times of war but also for domestic emergency preparedness as well as recovery from terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

One of the act’s provisions allows the president to require companies to prioritize government contracts and orders deemed necessary for national defense, with the goal of ensuring the private sector is producing enough goods needed to meet a war effort or other national emergency.

Other provisions give the president the ability to use loans and additional incentives to increase production of critical goods, and authorize the government to establish voluntary agreements with private industry.

The DPA is “one of the government’s most powerful and adaptable industrial policy tools,” said Joel Dodge, an attorney and the director of industrial policy and economic security at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator.

Anthropic is the last of its AI peers to not supply its technology to a new U.S. military internal network. Its CEO Dario Amodei repeatedly has made clear his ethical concerns about unchecked government use of AI, including the dangers of fully autonomous armed drones and of AI-assisted mass surveillance that could track dissent.

The Defense Department is considering invoking the DPA to give the military more authority to use Anthropic’s products, even if the company doesn’t approve of how, according to a person familiar with the matter and a senior Pentagon official.

That could mean forcing Anthropic to adapt its model to the Pentagon’s needs without built-in safety limits, or remove certain ethical restrictions from the company’s contract language.

Experts like Dodge say both would be “without precedent under the history of the DPA.”

“It’s a powerful law,” he said. ”(But) it has never been used to compel a company to produce a product that it’s deemed unsafe, or to dictate its terms of service.”

How has this law been used in the past?

Trump in his first term and former President Joe Biden invoked the DPA to boost supplies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. And during 2022’s nationwide baby formula shortage, Biden used the law to speed production of formula and authorize flights to import supply from overseas.

Biden also invoked the DPA in a 2023 executive order on AI, notably in efforts to require that companies share safety test results and other information with the government. Trump repealed the order at the start of his second term.

Decades ago, the administrations of both President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush used the DPA to ensure that electricity and natural gas shippers continued supplying California utilities amid an energy crisis.

And the law was used after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017 to prioritize contracts for food, bottled water, manufactured housing units and the restoration of electrical systems.

The DPA requires periodic reauthorization to remain in effect, which can expand or refine the scope of the law. According to congressional documents, its next expiration date is slated for Sept. 30 of this year. And depending on how the Defense Department’s reported demands unfold, Anthropic could be at the top of lawmakers’ minds.

Possible next steps for Anthropic

If the Defense Department uses the DPA provision aimed at prioritizing government contracts and ordering production of certain goods — which the Anthropic case suggests it will — a company can push back if the requested product isn’t something it already produces, Dodge and others say, or if it deems the terms to be unreasonable.

But the government may try and overrule that, notes Charlie Bullock, senior research fellow at the Institute for Law & AI.

“If neither side backs down, it seems realistic that there would be litigation between Anthropic and the government,” Bullock said.

Some have also noted tension between the Pentagon’s warning that it could designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk while also indicating that its products are so important to national defense that it needs to invoke the DPA — two assertions that seem at odds with each other.

“There are a lot of forces that I think the administration’s counting on that would lead Anthropic to just give in on Friday and agree with its terms,” Dodge said.

If there’s future litigation over a potential DPA order, Dodge doesn’t expect the government to prevail because “it seems very out of bounds under the text of the law.”

But if the administration is successful, or Anthropic simply agrees to new terms, that could open up “a Pandora’s box of what the government could do to assert power and control over private companies,” he added.

According to an advanced Federal Register notice, the rescission will be effective immediately on publication, expected early Friday morning.

In the notice, VA officials said that while the rule was meant to clarify existing policy, “stakeholders have expressed uncertainty” about its impact on claims and leaving the rule in place during the codification process “could undermine confidence in the benefits system.”

“VA always takes veterans’ concerns seriously and recognizes that many commenters construed the interim final rule as something that could result in adverse consequences,” the notice read.

The rule, published Feb. 17, generated significant backlash from veterans, advocacy groups and lawmakers who said the proposal could have financially penalized veterans who adhere to medical treatment or encourage those seeking a disability rating to forego medications prior to a compensation and pension exam, putting their health at risk.

The VA said the regulation simply formalized a practice that has been in place since 1958. Officials said it was needed because a 2025 court ruling, Ingram v. Collins, decided the VA must discount the positive impact of medication when issuing a disability rating.

The rule stated that the methodology dictated by the courts set a standard that was “unquantifiable, hypothetical [and] unwarranted.”

The major veterans groups, including Disabled American Veterans, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion strongly objected to ruling, which they said was crafted without any input from veterans outside the VA.

Nearly 20,000 veterans and advocates have flooded the Federal Register’s comment section on the rule, saying it would hurt veterans.

“As a former Army nurse, it seems this rule change could have unforeseen and harmful downstream effects for veterans, which is why it demands serious public scrutiny and possible legislative clarification from Capitol Hill,” VFW National Commander Carol Whitmore said in a statement shortly after the rule was published. “While VA has authority to amend the rating schedule, it must do so without adversely affecting veterans.”

Collins announced two days after publication that the rule would not be enforced. But it remained on the books, raising concerns among veterans.

At least one lawsuit was filed against the VA seeking to stop implementation and on Tuesday, 20 Democrat and independent lawmakers from the House and Senate wrote Collins asking the rule be revoked.

They said that leaving the rule on the books was causing veterans to “confront the unnecessary dilemma of continuing life-improving treatment for their conditions.”

“This rule forces veterans into an impossible choice: follow their prescribed treatment plan or risk losing their benefits,” wrote the lawmakers, including the ranking Democrats on the House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committees, Rep. Mark Takano of California and Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

In letter, the lawmakers said enforcement of the rule could have resulted in an estimated $23 billion in savings and objected to what they said was a “political maneuver aimed at cutting costs.”

The VA has filed an appeal to the Ingram v. Collins ruling, and the rescission does not resolve that court case which continues.

In the notice to be published Friday, officials said the department is “committed to its mission of ensuring that every claimant applying for benefits — especially veterans who have earned disability compensation through their honorable service to the Nation — receives all benefits to which they are entitled under the law as expeditiously as possible.”