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The Pentagon has placed increasing emphasis on adopting commercial tech to accelerate the pace at which the U.S. military can put the latest and greatest tools in the hands of warfighters.
But that doesn’t mean it’s a perfect fit for every use case, a panel of Defense Department leaders said Thursday at the MongoDB Public Sector Summit, produced by FedScoop.

Since the war against Iran began on Feb. 28, the U.S. military has provided updates on how many targets have been struck, how many Iranian ships have been sunk, and how many combat sorties have been flown.
But no one in the U.S. government seems to be able to say how the war ends and what comes next.
We’ve been here before. U.S. troops routed the Taliban in 2001, but that wasn’t enough. They stayed for 20 years in a failed attempt to turn Afghanistan into a democracy, even though top U.S. officials knew the mission was hopeless. The U.S.

US AWACS destroyed on the ground in Saudi strik

The F-22 and F-35 Have What Might Be a Forward Basing Problem 
The United States built the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II to dominate contested airspace, and technically, both aircraft remain among the most capable fighters ever made. But the conditions they were designed for – secure forward bases and relatively short operating distances – are rapidly disappearing. In today’s evolving strategic environment, defined by long-range missile proliferation and vast operational theaters, the issue is no longer whether these aircraft can win in the air.

Healing through horses🐎
Soldiers in Woolwich

The UK’s defence plans have relied, for decad

France has delivered 39 armoured personnel carriers (VABs) to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) in a ceremony held at the Beirut Port, Lebanon.

To help realize its vision for a hybrid fleet operating in the Pacific theater, the Navy is pursuing new technology to remotely and realistically emulate signals on uncrewed systems.
In January, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle officially announced his “Hedge Strategy,” which includes investing in a variety of robotic and autonomous platforms to supplement and complement the main battle force of manned vessels.

Welcome to The Adversarial. Every other week, we’ll provide you with expert analysis on America’s greatest challengers: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and jihadists. Read more below.***IranAs the war with Iran extends into a second month, the White House is publicly bullish on both its military achievements and diplomatic prospects. The former are considerable, though not definitive.

An annual event honoring service members and veteran paratroopers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, has been cancelled after Pentagon officials confirmed that troops from the base are deploying to the Middle East.
All American Week is hosted every year at Fort Bragg, North Carolina — home to the 82nd Airborne Division. This year’s event, scheduled from May 18 to 21, has been cancelled, Army officials confirmed.
The event was “canceled due to competing requirements,” Maj. Joe Bush, a spokesperson for the 82nd Airborne Division, said in a statement to Task & Purpose.

Growing up on a farm in Minnesota, Charles Lindbergh often lay in the grass and looked up at the clouds.
The young boy wanted to be closer to them, and the only way he knew how was to learn to fly. His father was against the idea, but Lindbergh was determined. From his first time at the controls of an airplane in 1922, he was transfixed.
Related: This famous pilot flew 50 combat missions as a civilian
“My early flying seemed an experience beyond mortality,” Lindbergh recalled.

Welcome to the place known by the French Foreig

The Army has put a hold on a proposed wave of closures that would have shuttered more than 20 official museums on Army bases around the country. Instead, the service will fall in line with rules set down by Congress this year that direct each military service to establish a “museum system.”
The Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps each operate a handful of established formal museums, but the Army’s 45-facility museum network is by far the largest and least centralized, spread across nearly 100 buildings and warehouses on bases across the U.S. and overseas.

The US Department of State has authorised a potential Foreign Military Sale (FMS) to Singapore, covering the acquisition of Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System-Alternative Warhead (GMLRS-AW).

General Dynamics Land Systems UK informed Army Technology of its rigorous testing procedures for Ajax despite DE&S concerns.

The Armalite Rifle platform has been serving the United States military for more than 60 years, with its original adoption dating back to 1963. While the M16 was initially met with plenty of justified criticism, the platform and the 5.56 NATO ammunition it uses have come a long way.
When you look at what a frontline infantryman needs, it’s not surprising why it was adopted and why it’s stayed in service for so long. But, like anything else, it’s not without its flaws. In particular, there is one flaw with the M4 that, if fixed, could make it a near-perfect carbine.

S. Trimble, AvWeek
A new variant of a low-cost, air-launched cruise missile quietly entered development for the U.S.

John Hill, Airforce Tech.
Iran’s degraded air defence has allowed the U.S. to step up its bombing campaign.

J.D.

Mikayla Easley, DefenseScoop
Introduced in 2025, the Group 3 drone is an inexpensive, one-way attack platform that can drop smaller munitions and provide non-kinetic effects

This video describes the military situation in

On July 4, 2026, the United States turns 250. At Cogs of War, we plan to mark the occasion the way we know best: by examining how Americans have built, adapted, and fought with technology in war.From David Bushnell’s Turtle submarine to the Gatling gun, nuclear warhead, GPS, and AI, American defense innovation has always been more about people working at the edge of constraint to deliver advantage in war — improvising, scaling, and sometimes breaking institutions — than any singular invention.

This video describes the military situation in

While much ink has been spilled over how 3D printing has enabled intense drone-on-drone warfare in Ukraine, the U.S. defense and intelligence communities have overlooked a stealthier development: Additive manufacturing is revolutionizing how guns are produced, fielded, and sustained in armed conflicts, especially by non-state actors. What once required a web of smuggling networks, foreign sponsors, and captured stockpiles can now be made with digital files and off-the-shelf parts. Even ammunition production, once considered an insurmountable barrier, is increasingly possible.

How many energy crises will it take before we stop betting our economies on a fragile oil market?The U.S. and Israeli war with Iran quickly morphed from a regional conflict into a global energy shock. Oil and gas markets have been volatile since the start of the war, with Brent crude oil prices rising 59 percent since Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints. In the first half of 2025, about one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas passed through the strait.

The U.S. Department of War on March 31 announced a $1.356 billion contract modification for Lockheed Martin Space to finance the engineering, integration, tooling, and long-lead industrial effort needed to bring the Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) program from development into practical fielding in the Navy, providing a conventional hypersonic strike capability to the Zumwalt class destroyer fleet. Should the program not exceed allocated budgets, it will add $452 million to the cost of each of the three destroyers, bringing their costs up to approximately $9.5 billion each.

The United Kingdom, Japan and Italy are coordinating plans for the inclusion of Canada in the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), a next generation fighter program intended to deliver aircraft ready for active service by 2035. Canada has sought to join as an observer, which would allow the Canadian Defence Ministry to access selected classified program information without joining the development phase or sharing a similar burden of development costs.

The U.S. Army has deployed AH-64E Apache attack helicopters under the 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade to Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Romania, across the border from the ongoing war effort in Ukraine. The facility has increasingly served as a central node for the U.S. and other NATO members’ operations in the Black Sea, and has taken on growing significance following the outbreak of full scale hostilities in the Ukrainian theatre in February 2022. The deployment of Apaches closely follows the U.S.

Iranian ballistic missile striking Bahrain, reportedly targeting the headquarters of the U.S. 5th Fleet.
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Image by Fotoafdrukken Koninklijke Luchtmacht

DOW released the following press release today:
Department of War Forges Landmark Agreement to Triple PAC-3 Seeker Production, Bolstering the Arsenal of Freedom
The Department of War, in partnership with Boeing and Lockheed Martin, today announced a landmark framework agreement to triple the production capacity of seekers for the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3®) Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE).

Saronic Technologies filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to stop the Navy from awarding or moving forward with a solicitation issued in January that bundles work associated with the operation and sustainment of littoral combat ship mission modules and small unmanned surface vessels. 
In a 34-page redacted version of its bid protest, Saronic alleged that the Naval Sea Systems Command contracting opportunity violates federal statute and a Trump administration order to expedite certain government contracting, among other challenges.

Across military occupations, infantry troops had the highest number of suicides in 2024, according to the Pentagon’s latest suicide report.
The Annual Report on Suicide in the Military was released Tuesday and marks the first time that the Department of Defense has broken down suicide numbers by military occupation. The job-specific data was included as a new requirement set by Congress. 
In the 2024 calendar year, the report found, infantry troops had the highest number of suicides: 49 total across active and reserve forces.

This video describes the military situation in

The Army’s 101st Airborne Division incorporated Northrop Grumman’s new Lumberjack one-way attack drone into a recent training exercise, testing the platform’s autonomous target detection and strike capabilities.
The demonstration took place during the unit’s Operation Lethal Eagle exercise, a large-scale training event that focuses on air assault operations and testing new military capabilities. According to Northrop Grumman, Lumberjack successfully showcased its capacity to conduct missions autonomously and use artificial intelligence for adaptive targeting.

The US Military spends billions on weapons and

The Army is looking for sensors designed to assess the physiological effects of rapid, damaging shock waves caused by explosions, according to a recent government notice.
Officials are conducting market research on technologies that could give the military better data about troop health after decades of blast exposure and new impacts of lethal drones.
Blast overpressure, as the effect is called, is the sudden, volatile expansion of air from not only explosions, but weapon systems commonly used by ground troops.

Lyme Bay gets her upgrade🛠️
🇬🇮The R

Public Domain

Originally posted at Real Clear Defense
A service member can fight in Baghdad, return home to lose a house in a hurricane, and patrol the wreckage of his own neighborhood — and still be told trauma belongs only to combat.
The 256th Infantry Brigade Combat Team deployed to Iraq in 2004, conducting combat operations in and around Baghdad. Within months of returning home, Louisiana was struck by Hurricane Katrina. Guard members mobilized again — this time to stabilize shattered communities inside their own state. Some lost homes. Some lost neighborhoods.

On September 3, 1951, a 21-year-old Navy ensign walked onto the flight deck of the USS Essex.
The aircraft carrier was stationed off the coast of Korea, and as the young pilot prepared for his seventh combat mission, it was a beautiful, albeit cold, morning. Catapulted into the air, the pilot’s F9F Panther jet flew by Mount Fuji and over the Sea of Japan before crossing into Korea.
Related: The Space Force was fighting Iran before the first F-35 took off
Along with the rest of the group of fighters, the naval aviator dropped 500-pound bombs on their targets during a reconnaissance mission.

When a crisis erupts in the Caribbean, Middle East, or elsewhere, a Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU, is often tasked with responding. The units are self-sustaining combat forces that can quickly deploy around the world for combat operations or humanitarian missions.  
The 31st MEU recently arrived in the Middle East and the 11th MEU is headed to the region to support U.S. military operations against Iran. While their exact mission hasn’t been made clear, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.

In 2025, J.C. Ellis wrote, “Trump Needs a Plan on Ukraine’s Buried Treasure,” where he argued that Washington should enact a strategy for Ukraine that ensures Ukrainian control and allied access to its storehouse of critical minerals. A year later, after a critical minerals investment plan for Ukraine has been established, we asked J.C. to revisit his original argument.Image: MidjourneyIn your 2025 article, you argued that Washington should enact a strategy for Ukraine that ensures Ukrainian control and allied access to its massive storehouse of critical minerals.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces will be receiving new extended reality (XR) training systems as part of a Nordic defence technology initiative led by Norwegian company Fynd Reality, with Varjo selected as the XR technology provider.

103 and still inspiring🎂
D-Day veteran Harol

Someone will die in the future for this decision to lift pilot suspensions

As someone who voted for President Trump, is a former USAF Special Operations helicopter pilot, and member of the Pentagon Press Corp, I must say loudly that the decision by these aircrews to break regulations, and the Secretary of War’s decision to end the aircrew’s suspension, is wrong, will engender more of this type of activity, and will eventually lead to the death of military personnel or civilians on the ground.

Troops deployed for Operation Epic Fury can receive combat pay of up to $225 each month, a number that varies on their location and proximity to direct hostile fire, defense officials confirmed to Task & Purpose.
The Pentagon recently updated its list of countries and bodies of water across the Middle East where U.S. troops are engaged in combat operations against Iran. The list expands where troops can receive either Imminent Danger Pay or Hostile Fire Pay, depending on their location or exposure to a hostile event.

In October 1944, Beauford Anderson dodged enemy fire as he raced 50 yards to rescue two service members in the Philippines.
Anderson received a Bronze Star for his selfless and courageous act. Six months later, the Army technical sergeant’s heroism during World War II again was on full display at the Battle of Okinawa.
Related: A World War II POW who defied Nazis to protect Jewish soldiers will receive the Medal of HonorAfter single-handedly repelling a fierce Japanese attack and safeguarding his unit’s flank on April 13, 1945, Anderson received the Medal of Honor.

The war with Iran is into its fifth week, and despite much of its military power being destroyed by U.S. and Israeli strikes, Tehran has yet to give in or show any signs of external vulnerability or internal destabilization. If anything, it is increasingly convinced that whenever the guns fall silent, it will come out on top.The main source of Iran’s confidence is its upper hand in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints and aortic valves of globalized production.In response to U.S.

What will the UK look to replace its ageing Lan

Australian defence company NIOA and US firm General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems (GD-OTS) have entered into an agreement to jointly examine supplying 70mm rockets for the Australian Army’s AH-64E Apache helicopters.