An unprecedented flood of outrage from veterans groups, lawmakers, and individual veterans led the Department of Veterans Affairs to reverse course Thursday on a controversial regulation that would have based disability ratings on how well veterans function while medicated, instead of considering the severity of the actual condition they suffer from.
It’s a victory for veterans and advocates who mounted a quick and decisive public campaign against the policy. VA Secretary Doug Collins announced the agency would halt enforcement of the rule just two days after it took effect.
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The Pentagon will adhere to existing laws and regulations associated with surveillance, security and democratic processes as it fast-tracks the military’s frontier AI adoption, but it won’t permit companies supplying the technology to determine its rules for operation, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael told DefenseScoop.
His comments come as the Defense Department is locked in a high-stakes dispute with Anthropic about the U.S. military’s use of the startup’s Claude AI model in real-world operations.
“We want guardrails.
The Air Force has initiated a new effort to upgrade its central command-and-control systems with new capabilities, including artificial intelligence and enhanced data fusion.
The service’s software factory, known as Kessel Run, will soon kick off the Next-Generation Air Operations Center (AOC) Weapon System program to modernize command centers. According to an announcement posted Wednesday, Kessel Run expects to release the first request for information before the end of February and wants to award a contract by June 2027.
On Saturday, Air Force Maj. Johnny Cruz Buckingham plans to set a new world record for sand skiing by swooshing down a sand dune in Peru at 76 miles per hour.
“I’ll be in shorts and a T-shirt and just skiing down a big old sand dune,” Buckingham told Task & Purpose.
Buckingham has already set 17 Guinness World Records and has five other recent attempts under review. He has set world records that circled the globe (the fastest time to travel to all seven continents) and records that circled him with fire (the most flaming-knife spins on a balance board in one minute).
China’s top military leadership has been shaken by a new round of purges at the highest level, raising urgent questions about loyalty, corruption, and combat readiness. What do these removals, and especially the purge of Zhang Youxia, signal about Xi Jinping’s grip on power, the health of the People’s Liberation Army, and Beijing’s appetite for risk abroad? We are joined by four seasoned analysts of China and its military, three of whom worked at the Central Intelligence Agency, to parse these questions and more. This episode is brought to you by Onebrief.
L Todd Wood and former Special Mission Unit Commander Pete Blaber discuss the continuing lies coming out of Europe on the Ukraine conflict.
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The Department of Veterans Affairs is “halting the enforcement” of a controversial new rule that could lower veterans’ disability ratings if their prescribed medications or treatment improves their illness or injuries, VA Secretary Doug Collins announced on Thursday.
“VA issued the rule to clarify existing policy and protect Veterans’ benefits in the wake of an ongoing court action,” Collins wrote in a Thursday X post. “But many interpreted the rule as something that could result in adverse consequences.
Okay, Curtis LeMay wasn’t a judo champion in the sense that he was winning awards for tossing people around. He did, however, popularize the martial art for the postwar world, bringing it into the U.S. Air Force, and through the military, to the rest of America.
Time has not been kind to LeMay. He’s remembered for firebombing cities across Japan, especially Tokyo, an attack that killed 100,000 Japanese civilians in a single night. He also built the Strategic Air Command into a nuclear powerhouse with the belief that he would one day nuke the Soviet Union “back into the Stone Age.
Top Defense Department officials focused on combating cybercrime said Thursday that artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency are making it easier for nefarious actors to threaten national security and circumvent traditional financial tracking systems.
The warning comes amid what the officials described as a rapidly changing threat environment, one that allows for low-level criminals to adopt sophisticated cyber exploitation methods and adversarial countries to obscure their actions, often in tandem.
“Cyber threats are no longer theoretical, episodic or isolated.
On Feb. 13 to 15, leaders and specialists from around the world — especially Europe and the United States — attended the 62nd Munich Security Conference. This year’s conference highlighted an ongoing European interest in maintaining the trans-Atlantic relationship, an emphasis on European “derisking” from reliance on the United States, and general agreement — tinged with grief or celebration, depending on who you ask — that the post-World War II liberal, rules-based world order is gone. U.S.