Technology & Innovation5

The Air Force is turning Collaborative Combat Aircraft into more than a new class of uncrewed fighter. By procuring competing airframes, mission-autonomy software, and open interfaces separately, the service is testing a different model of military acquisition—one in which hardware, software, payloads, and operational concepts can evolve at different speeds while remaining part of the same combat system. Bottom line:…

The Navy’s Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel marketplace is testing more than seven competing autonomous vessels. It is testing a new force-development model: mature commercial technology enters quickly, platforms prove themselves at sea, successful designs become eligible for production, and competition can continue as autonomy, payloads, manufacturing, and operational requirements evolve. The real strategic asset may be the marketplace—and the architecture…

Artificial intelligence may be software, but military AI advantage increasingly depends on physical infrastructure: GPUs, hardened data centers, trusted data, secure networks, power, cooling, classified environments, and compute at the tactical edge. The Pentagon’s emerging AI Arsenal proposal makes that shift explicit. The next phase of defense AI is not only a model race—it is a race to build, secure,…

Golden Dome is accelerating investment in missile tracking, space sensors, interceptors, and command-and-control. But its hardest problem may be architectural rather than kinetic: combining legacy and new sensors, networks, decision systems, and effectors into one trusted kill chain that can operate at missile-defense speed. The decisive capability may be the integration layer that allows the United States to use what…

Two multibillion-dollar enterprise software agreements show the Pentagon using its purchasing power to consolidate the digital foundation of the Joint Force. But enterprise licensing is only the first layer. The larger modernization challenge is whether common platforms can reduce application sprawl, improve data interoperability, accelerate secure software delivery, simplify identity and cyber operations, and retire legacy systems fast enough to…