Government Executive - Authors - Patrick Tucker

ODNI expected to shrink counterintelligence, counterterror centers

Patrick Tucker — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 13:15:00 -0400

Two intelligence-coordination centers would shrink or be closed under a reorganization plan that some observers say will hinder the U.S. ability to counter spies and terrorists.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is considering reductions to the National Counterintelligence and Security Center and the National Counterterrorism Center, according to two officials, several former senior intelligence officials, and others with direct knowledge of the plan.

It’s the latest move in a broad restructuring of the U.S. intelligence community. Certain elements of that restructuring, which spans ODNI, CISA, the FBI, NSA, CIA, and other agencies, are already harming information sharing with partner intelligence agencies around the world, multiple sources told Defense One. The changes, they say, are exposing the U.S. government, businesses, and civilians to a wide range of new espionage threats.

Established in 2004, the National Counterrorism Center houses Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which includes some of the government's most closely held and valuable intelligence. The center fuses information across intelligence agencies to produce insights into potential threats and strategies for preventing or deterring terrorism.

The National Counterintelligence and Security Center plays a key role in understanding of how spies are spying on us, as one source put it, and it coordinates the government's counterintelligence activities, ensuring that those who “run double agents against bad guys” are aligned and not working at cross-purposes, former senior intelligence officials said.

The NCSC also coordinates intelligence generated by the U.S. government and from foreign intelligence entities to build a broad picture of emerging espionage campaigns—for example, Chinese efforts to recruit scientists and technical workers in key industrial areas. The center has also revealed stealthy efforts to increase the Chinese government’s ownership or control of non-Chinese companies.

Officials said they expect severe budget cuts to the NCSC, on top of a dramatic diminishment in the office’s size from a few months ago, when it went from five directors to just one.

“They are downgrading,” one former senior official said.

Another former senior official confirmed that both NCSC and NCTC faced severe cuts in a second round of restructuring, following the first round of program cuts in August.

“They are making those cuts,” said a source on Capitol Hill with direct knowledge.

The Senate has confirmed George Wesley Street to serve as the next director of the center, and officials said it cannot officially be closed without congressional action. But it can still be effectively ended or severely curtailed, similar to Voice of America and other agencies or offices that were targeted by the administration and today exist only as shells of their former selves.

A “chilling effect”

Since the start of President Donald Trump’s current term, the administration has taken dozens of actions to close intelligence offices, reduce intelligence capabilities, and push out officers through early retirement offers or outright firing. Those terminations are “extraordinarily dangerous,” one former senior intelligence official said, and are likely to cause intelligence workers to downplay threats if they believe acknowledging them might anger the White House.

“It doesn’t matter how many assets they have at that point,” the official said. “They’re just essentially saluting to a message that has been predetermined.”

Current and former officials agreed that some reforms could be helpful to remove bureaucratic barriers and make intelligence sharing more effective. But they said the manner in which the administration has pursued “efficiency” has been destructive and will leave the intelligence community hobbled for years to come. They pointed in particular to the decision to end ODNI’s Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, or CTIIC, and the ODNI Foreign Malign Influence Center. Officials said CTIIC is critical for facilitating cyber information sharing across the U.S. government and other governments.

The Foreign Malign Influence Center, which was originally housed in the Counterintelligence Center, rose up in response to Russia’s foreign election interference efforts in the 2016 election. It was seen as one of the few remaining government centers that actually monitored how adversarial states might be trying to corrupt U.S. elections.

Another major misstep, they said, was a recent FBI decision to reassign agents who were specialists in foreign election interference and money laundering to other activities and departments.

The combination of these moves, they said, has greatly reduced the ability of the U.S. intelligence community to share information internally and with the public. But they are not sure why the changes have been made.

“There’s nobody who says that the foreign threats are diminishing. There’s nobody out there who says the risk of Chinese malicious activity, cyber activity, is going down or that the risk of Russian disinformation and cyber maliciousness is going down. It’s the exact opposite. Everyone agrees, across the board, across the political spectrum, that the foreign threats we face are on the increase—and a significant increase. So it’s perverse,” said one former senior official.

The Cyber Threat Intelligence Center, for instance, was able to synthesize information across agencies in order to reach high-confidence conclusions from all-source intelligence—conclusions that could then be presented to lawmakers and the public. The threat now, said several former officials, is that agencies will miss key trends or clues that could reveal future cyber attacks.

“Some things are just going to get left on the cutting room floor,” one official said.

That type of coordination that happened between the CTIIC, the Counterintelligence Center, the FBI, and other agencies is critical, former officials said. The recently disclosed Salt Typhoon attack, a Chinese state-backed data theft campaign targeting the personal information of millions of Americans, provides a vivid example of why. China has also launched a cyberespionage campaign targeting U.S. trade representatives, precisely the sort of broad foreign that the Counterintelligence Center and Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, working together with other entities, would have been responsible for predicting, stopping, or responding to, they said.

Additionally, several officials said they had been in touch with foreign intelligence partners, including from the Five Eyes alliance, who have pulled back from sharing information with the United States because of the recent changes. That information can be crucial, especially for understanding the cyber campaigns adversaries like China may plan to use against the United States.

One former senior official said China routinely tests cyber strategies in places like Australia and New Zealand before turning them against the United States: “They might see problems or trends before we would, but we had the capability to help them,” the official said.

Much of the pullback in information sharing was not the result of political animosity against Trump, officials said, so much as logistics: partners literally do not know who to call.

The same problem can affect Americans who have information on foreign money-laundering or influence campaigns. One former senior official recounted an anecdote about an acquaintance trying to contact the FBI regarding a counterintelligence investigation. The person was told, “The entire office is out patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C. We don’t know when we’re going to be back.”

Fallout

The consequences of diminished intelligence capability may not be felt right away, two former senior officials said. In fact, the entire point of campaigns like Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon is to collect information and pre-position malware in the event of “some contingency or crisis in the defense of Taiwan or the defense of Japan or the defense of Hawaii,” one former senior official said.

Eventually, they worry, the United States could struggle to maintain peace, and U.S. companies could be unable to outcompete foreign rivals.

“We’re just going to find, across the board, an overall weakening of our security posture and a reduction of our leverage in international affairs, because we won’t have that power and that stability,” one official said.

ODNI did not respond to request for comment.

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How Trump’s DC takeover could supercharge surveillance

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 16:53:00 -0400

President Trump’s declaration of a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., will further entwine the U.S. military—and its equipment and technology—in law-enforcement matters, and perhaps expose D.C. residents and visitors to unprecedented digital surveillance.

Brushing aside statistics that show violent crime in D.C. at a 30-year low, Trump on Monday described a new level of coordination between D.C. National Guard units and federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, ICE, and and the newly federalized D.C. police force.

“We will have full, seamless, integrated cooperation at all levels of law enforcement, and will deploy officers across the district with an overwhelming presence. You'll have more police, and you'll be so happy because you're being safe,” he said at a White House press conference.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, standing beside Trump, promised close collaboration between the Pentagon and domestic authorities. “We will work alongside all DC police and federal law enforcement to ensure this city is safe.”

What comes next? The June 2020 deployment of National Guard units to work alongside D.C. police offers a glimpse: citywide use of sophisticated intelligence-gathering technologies normally reserved for foreign war zones.

Some surveillance platforms will be relatively easy to spot, such as spy aircraft over D.C.'s closely guarded airspace. In 2020, authorities deployed an RC-26B, a military-intelligence aircraft, and MQ-9 Predator drones. The FBI contributed a Cessna 560 equipped with “dirtboxes”: devices that mimic cell towers to collect mobile data, long used by the U.S. military to track terrorist networks in the Middle East.

Other gear will be less obvious.The 2020 protests saw expanded use of Stingrays, another type of cellular interception device. Developed to enable the military to track militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, Stingrays were used by the U.S. Secret Service in 2020 and 2021 in ways that the DHS inspector general found broke the law and policies concerning privacy and warrants. Agency officials said “exigent” circumstances justified the illicit spying.

Now, with federal agencies and entities working with military personnel under declared-emergency circumstances, new gear could enter domestic use. And local officials or the civilian review boards that normally oversee police use of such technologies may lack the power to prevent or even monitor it. In 2021, the D.C. government ended a facial-recognition pilot program after police used it to identify a protester at Lafayette Square. But local prohibitions don’t apply to federalized or military forces.

Next up: AI-powered surveillance

How might new AI tools, and new White House measures to ease sharing across federal entities, enable surveillance targeting?

DHS and its sub-agencies already use AI. Some tools—such as monitoring trucks or cargo at the border for contraband, mapping human trafficking and drug networks, and watching the border—serve an obvious public-safety mission. Last year, DHS used AI and other tools to identify 311 victims of sexual exploitation and to arrest suspected perpetrators. They also helps DHS counter the flow of fentanyl; last October, the agency cited AI while reporting a 50 percent increase in seizures and an 8 percent increase in arrests.

TSA uses facial recognition across the country to match the faces and documents of airline passengers entering the United States in at least 26 airports, according to 2022 agency data. The accuracy has improved greatly in the past decade, and research suggests even better performance is possible: the National Institute of Standards and Technology has shown that some algorithms can achieve 99%-plus accuracy under ideal conditions.

But conditions are not always ideal, and mistakes can be costly. “There have been public reports of seven instances of mistaken arrests associated with the use of facial recognition technology, almost all involving Black individuals. The collection and use of biometric data also poses privacy risks, especially when it involves personal information that people have shared in unrelated contexts,” noted a Justice Department report in December.

On Monday, Trump promised that the increased federal activity would target “known gangs, drug dealers and criminal networks.” But network mapping—using digital information to identify who knows who and how—has other uses, and raises the risk of innocent people being misidentified.

Last week, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request concerning the use of two software tools by D.C.’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. Called Cobwebs and Tangles, the tools can reveal sensitive information about any person with just a name or email address, according to internal documents cited in the filing.

Cobwebs shows how AI can wring new insights from existing data sources, especially when there are no rules to prohibit the gathering of large stores of data. Long before the capability existed to do it effectively, this idea was at the center of what, a decade ago, was called predictive policing.

The concept has lost favor since the 2010s, but many law-enforcement agencies still pursue versions of it. Historically, the main obstacle has been too much data, fragmented across systems and structures. DHS has legal access to public video footage, social media posts, and border and airport entry records—but until recently, these datasets were difficult to analyze in real time, particularly within legal constraints.

That’s changing. The 2017 Modernizing Government Technology Act encouraged new software and cloud computing resources to help agencies use and share data more effectively, and in March, an executive order removed several barriers to interagency data sharing. The government has since awarded billions of dollars to private companies to improve access to internal data.

One of those companies is Palantir, whose work was characterized by the New York Times as an effort to compile a “master list” of data on U.S. citizens. The firm disputed that in a June 9 blog post: “Palantir is a software company and, in the context of our customer engagements, operates as a ‘data processor’—our software is used by customers to manage and make use of their data.”

In a 2019 article for the FBI training division, California sheriff Robert Davidson envisioned a scenario—now technologically feasible—in which AI analyzes body-camera imagery in real time: “Monitoring, facial recognition, gait analysis, weapons detection, and voice-stress analysis all would actively evaluate potential danger to the officer. After identification of a threat, the system could enact an automated response based on severity.”

The data DHS collects extends well beyond matching live images to photos in a database or detecting passengers’ emotional states. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, for instance, handles large volumes of multilingual email. DHS describes its email analytics program as using machine learning “for spam classification, translation, and entity extraction (such as names, organizations, or locations).”

Another DHS tool analyzes social-media posts to gather “open-source information on travelers who may be subject to further screening for potential violation of laws.” The tool can identify additional accounts and selectors, such as phone numbers or email addresses, according to DHS documentation.

Meanwhile, ICE’s operational scope has expanded. The White House has increased the agency’s authority to operate in hospitals and schools, collect employment data—including on non-imigrants, such as “sponsors” of unaccompanied minors—and impose higher penalties on individuals seen as “interfering” with ICE activities. Labor leaders say they’ve been targeted for their political activism. Protesters have been charged with assaulting ICE officers or employees. ICE has installed facial-recognition apps on officers’ phones, enabling on-the-spot identification of people protesting the agency’s tactics. DHS bulletins sent to local law enforcement encourage officers to consider a wide range of normal activity, such as filming police interactions, as potential precursors to violence.

Broad accessibility of even legally collected data raises concerns, especially in an era where AI tools can derive specific insights about people. But even before these developments, government watchdogs urged greater transparency around domestic AI use. A December report by the Government Accountability Office includes several open recommendations, mostly related to privacy protections and reporting transparency. The following month, DHS’s inspector general warned that the agency doesn’t have complete or well-resourced oversight frameworks.

In June, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and several co-signers wrote to the Trump White House, “In addition to these concerning uses of sentiment analysis for law enforcement purposes, federal agencies have also shown interest in affective computing and deception detection technologies that purportedly infer individuals’ mental states from measures of their facial expressions, body language, or physiological activity.”

The letter asks the GAO to investigate what DHS or Justice Department policies govern AI use and whether those are being followed. Markey’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Writing for the American Immigration Council in May, Steven Hubbard, the group’s senior data scientist, noted that of DHS’ 105 AI applications, 27 are “rights-impacting.”

“These are cases that the OMB, under the Biden administration, identified as impacting an individual’s rights, liberty, privacy, access to equal opportunity, or ability to apply for government benefits and services,” Hubbard said.

The White House recently replaced Biden-era guidance on AI with new rules meant to accelerate AI deployment across the federal government. While the updated guidelines retain many safety guardrails, they do include some changes, including merging “privacy-impacting” and “safety-impacting” uses of AI into a single category: “high impact.”

The new rules also eliminate a requirement for agencies to notify people when AI tools might affect them—and to offer an opt-out.

Precedents for this kind of techno-surveillance expansion can be found in countries rarely deemed models for U.S. policy. China and Russia have greatly expanded surveillance and policing under the auspices of security. China operates an extensive camera network in public spaces and centralizes its data to enable rapid AI analysis. Russia has followed a similar path through its “Safe Cities” program, integrating data feeds from a vast surveillance network to spot and stop crime, protests, and dissent.

So far, the U.S. has spent less than these near-peers, as a percent of GDP, on surveillance tools, which are operated under a framework, however strained, of rule-of-law and rights protections that can mitigate the most draconian uses.

But the distinction between the United States and China and Russia is shrinking, Nathan Wessler, deputy director with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in July. “There's the real nightmare scenario, which is pervasive tracking of live or recorded video, something that, by and large, we have kept at bay in the United States. It’s the kind of thing that authoritarian regimes have invested in heavily.”

Wessler noted that in May, the Washington Post reported that New Orleans authorities were applying facial recognition to live video feeds. “At that scale, that [threatens to] just erase our ability to go about our lives without being pervasively identified and tracked by the government.”

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Hegseth halves staff of Pentagon’s testing-oversight office

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 30 May 2025 10:03:01 -0400

The Pentagon office that oversees weapons testing will shrink by nearly half, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered on Wednesday, which will leave individual service branches to conduct testing with a smaller Defense Department watchdog.

The Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, or DOT&E, will cut its workforce from 94 employees to 30 civilians and 15 service members. In a Wednesday memo, Hegseth said that a "comprehensive internal review has identified redundant, non-essential, non-statutory functions within ODOT&E that do not support operational agility or resource efficiency." In a video released the same day, he described the reorganization as one that “will make testing and fielding weapons more efficient so that warfighters get what they need faster,” and said it would save $300 million annually. He did not provide further details about what functions would be cut or how they would save money.

The office oversees service efforts to test weapons and other systems and for issues independent assessments and policy recommendations.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told Bloomberg the move would “gut the office responsible for testing our equipment and making sure it’s safe for service members to use.”

A former senior defense official, however, noted that the services do the tests and write initial evaluations. DOT&E produces a separate assessment that may differ from the services’ findings or those of other Pentagon offices.the services’ findings or from other Pentagon findings. They also evaluate the services’ testing plans.

The former official said that shrinking DOT&E is unlikely to result in less-safe equipment, given the robust testing infrastructure that exists within the services. A more serious concern, they said, would be any change to the standards for testing and evaluation—something the current move does not appear to involve.

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Gabbard and Patel hearings display diverging views of reality, history along partisan lines

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 11:22:00 -0500

Senate confirmation hearings Thursday for two top intelligence jobs revealed a growing gap between Trump administration nominees and Democratic lawmakers, not just in terms of policy, but in perceptions of reality. Arguments about facts and history crowded out discussion of how the United States intelligence community should adapt to the threats posed by China, Russia, and other adversaries.

Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, nominated for director of the Office of National Intelligence, and former Trump official Kash Patel, nominated for FBI director, bristled at hearing their own statements read back to them—statements threatening or insulting the press, lawmakers and other public servants in Patel’s case, or justifying the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Gabbard’s.

One particular moment illustrated how Gabbard’s views of reality on intelligence matters have diverged from the community she would be leading. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., asked her to explain statements expressing doubt about U.S. intelligence assessments on the Syrian government’s chemical weapon attack in April 2017—an attack that killed nearly 90 Syrians, including as many as 30 children. The first Trump administration responded to that attack by targeting Syrian chemical weapons sites with U.S. missiles.

On Thursday, Gabbard defended her 2017 statement, saying, “There was conflicting information that came from the UN's office on the prohibition of chemical weapons inspectors as well as an MIT Professor Ted Postol.”

Kelly pointed out that Postol appeared on various Russian television broadcasts to push his theories—theories the U.S. intelligence community discredited.

“You started from a place of doubting the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community and then you sought out information that confirmed your viewpoint,” he said, and described as “concerning” the fact that Gabbard would “not apply the same skepticism to information that came from sympathizers of Russia and Assad.”

Senators also pressed Gabbard on policy actions she’s taken, such as her 2020 sponsoring of a resolution urging then-President Trump to pardon former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who stole millions of classified documents and then fled to Russia. At the hearing, Gabbard made no attempt to justify the resolution, and would not answer questions about it directly, though she described Snowden’s actions as illegal.

“I will be responsible for protecting our nation's secrets,” she said, promising to take steps to “prevent another Snowden-like leak.” However, she repeatedly refused to describe Snowden as a “traitor,” despite being urged to do so.

A more tense exchange occurred when Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., asked Gabbard to defend her February 2022 statements blaming Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine on NATO expansion—a view refuted by all NATO allies, Ukrainians, and the U.S. intelligence community. Putin himself even contradicted that idea at the time of the invasion, when he described his motivation as a need to correct the “historical mistake” of allowing Ukraine to gain independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Bennet’s voice was fiery: “You basically said that Putin was justified in rolling over the peaceful border of Ukraine, the first time since World War II that a free nation had been invaded by a totalitarian state! And you were there at 11:30 p.m. that night to say that you were with them, not us!”

Gabbard appeared annoyed and urged the senator to look at the statements in the “wider context” of her full remarks. She later expressed offense when asked whether Russia might get favorable treatment in U.S. intelligence assessments, and she promised to provide a “full intelligence picture so that you all can make the best informed policy decisions for the safety of the American people.”

Patel, in his hearing, also tried to distance himself from previous statements that have described the press, former Trump officials, and Democratic law makers as a malevolent “deep state.”

In one exchange, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., asked Patel about specific statements he made on podcasts and at public events. When he said he did not recall his specific words, she entered his recorded statements into the record.

But the Patel who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee today sounded very different from the man who made those remarks. “I have no interest, no desire, and will not, If confirmed, go backwards,” he said. “There will be no politicization at the FBI. There will be no retributive actions taken by any FBI.”

Patel did find support from Republican lawmakers on the judiciary committee for his role in attempting to discredit the FBI investigation into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., as he has done previously, referred to the premise of the investigation as a “hoax” and praised Patel for “exposing” it.

That reading of history stands in contrast to other facts. In December 2019, the FBI Inspector General determined that the bureau’s investigation was legitimate, despite errors FBI officials made in obtaining FISA warrants. And the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee and the Office of Director of National Intelligence both released reports detailing extensive efforts by the Russian government to influence U.S. presidential elections.

A special counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller found that Donald Trump “welcomed” Russian interference efforts and may have committed obstruction 10 times in refusing to answer questions—though Mueller ultimately decided against trying to prosecute a sitting U.S. president for obstruction.

Gabbard and Patel both calmly reassured senators that they would use their authorities and tools lawfully and support the intelligence and law enforcement officials working under them. But senators paid relatively little attention to Patel’s actual plans for the FBI, which include closing the FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. and relocating FBI officers there to other locations around the country. It was a pledge Patel repeated Thursday.

Both nominees expressed a desire to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which covers things like surveillance warrants for Americans caught up in investigations relating to foreign individuals.

“702 is a critical tool, and I'm proud of the reforms that have been implemented, and I'm proud to work with Congress moving forward to implement more reforms,” Patel said.

It’s not clear whether either nominee will be confirmed, but one Senate staffer told Defense One that Gabbard likely does not have enough Republican support to get the job.

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‘Extraordinarily dangerous’: Intelligence community insiders warn against Trump’s director of national intelligence pick

Patrick Tucker — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 08:00:00 -0500

Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, lacks experience, and her record of Russia-aligned public statements could undermine the ability of the United States to acquire intelligence from allies and partners, current and former intelligence officials say.

Trump on Wednesday announced his intention to put Gabbard, who served in Congress as a Democrat from Hawaii, in charge of the national intelligence office. The office coordinates intelligence efforts across the entire government, forges intelligence-sharing relationships with other countries, and shapes the way the public and the White House understand threats to U.S. interests. The office takes a leading role in assembling the daily brief for the president, which the White House uses to understand how adversaries are working against the United States, and in telling the public about threats Americans face.

Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran and lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, has military experience but not a deep background in intelligence. One former senior intelligence official told Defense One that such experience is vital to making sense of the wide variety of intelligence pieces that compose a picture of current or future threats.

“What people don't understand about intelligence is, if it's known, it's not intelligence. It's that assessment that you make. It has uncertainty, and the craft of understanding that uncertainty has nothing to do with opinion but rather has to do with trust, integrity and independence,” the former official said.

But intelligence community veterans are more concerned with her past actions and public statements—particularly those that aligned with Kremlin propaganda—than her resume.

In 2022, as Russian forces were launching an illegal expansion of their war against Ukraine, Gabbard said the U.S. was to blame, echoing a claim Russian President Vladimir Putin made to justify his invasion—but that NATO and the United Nations fully reject. Putin later said the war was actually a means to reconstitute the territorial empire of Catherine II.

Gabbard has echoed other Russian talking points as well, including one that came directly from Kremlin information operations.

Beyond Ukraine, Gabbard met with Syrian dictator and Russian ally Bashar Al-Assad in 2017. Assad continued to target civilians with chemical attacks after meeting Gabbard. But two years after the meeting, she refused to say whether he was a war criminal—despite clear evidence that he had killed some 1,400 people in Syria in a chemical weapons attack in 2013, among other crimes.

Gabbard’s pattern of publicly taking positions that are not supported by fact but do match up with narratives out of Moscow is going to hurt U.S. intelligence-sharing relationships with partner militaries and governments, the former senior official said. Many allies are already wary of Trump because of actions during his first term in the White House, such as abandoning Kurdish fighters in Syria in 2018—a move that prompted the resignation of several members of Trump’s first cabinet, including then-Defense Secretary James Mattis and anti-ISIS coalition envoy Brett McGurk.

“They're watching. Remember, there are a whole bunch of people that already, from [Trump’s] first term, are not comfortable with Trump because he was willing to throw allies and partners on a whim under the bus…So [allies] are already worried. And now this is a pertinent person who has basically said, ‘Hey, I think these bad guys are good guys.’”

Gabbard’s past public statements will also hurt her ability to earn trust among rank-and-file intelligence workers in the United States, said one current intelligence official.

“Tulsi's history of irresponsibly promoting misinformation and giving comfort to some of America's most aggressive adversaries is counter to the values of the intelligence community. If confirmed, she'll have a steep hill to climb to earn the trust and respect of the community,” the official told Defense One.

As DNI, Gabbard would be ultimately responsible for protecting U.S. intelligence operations and people from adversaries. She also would be the one to make the call on things like the 2022 decision to declassify intelligence analyses of Russia’s intentions in Ukraine, which helped marshal allies to Ukraine’s cause.

“That decision was an ODNI decision,” said the former senior intelligence official. “It is reflective of a new world order where we don't have absolute trust and you do need to be able to build coalitions… Alliances, friendships have always been one of the real elements of our strength. And it's imperiled.”

Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., a former CIA officer, echoed this sentiment on MSNBC on Thursday. “The idea that someone who has aligned herself with and defended Vladimir Putin could potentially have information related to the sources and methods of how it is that we knew that Russia was going to have invaded Ukraine…helps illuminate why this is so extraordinarily dangerous.”

Because of her past statements, intelligence professionals are also worried that she could alter analysis to fit a political narrative, which would leave the president or the public in the dark about key threats.

Said the current intelligence official: “Intelligence is conducted in the service of the nation, without regard for political parties or motives, and we are typically the bearers of bad news. Will she champion the professionalism and apolitical nature of what we gather and assess, and speak truth to power, or disregard our work to convey what power wants to hear?”

Gabbard may also face an additional challenge when building trust within the community: The Trump administration decided to forgo the traditional FBI vetting of nominees to top posts, including Gabbard, CNN reported Friday.

Frank Konkel contributed to this report.

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White House issues AI guidelines for national-security agencies

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 14:14:11 -0400

President Joe Biden will issue a new national security memorandum today on artificial intelligence, aimed at helping the U.S. government deploy AI and retain its advantage over China.

The United States must “ensure that our national security agencies are adopting this technology in ways that align with our values,” a senior White House official told reporters ahead of the unveiling, adding that a failure to do so “could put us at risk of a strategic surprise by our rivals, such as China."

The memorandum provides guidance—via a framework—on how to employ AI for national security missions. “These requirements require agencies to monitor, assess, and mitigate AI risks related to invasions of privacy, bias and discrimination, the safety of individuals and groups, and other human rights abuses,” according to a fact sheet from the White House.

The guidance will allow the government to take better advantage of the new AI tools coming out of Silicon Valley, the White House said.

“The innovation that's happened, particularly in this current wave of frontier artificial intelligence, has really been driven by the private sector, and it's critical that we continue to both foster that leadership,” the official said. “AI is rooted in the premise that capabilities generated by the transformer and large language model revolution in AI, often called frontier AI, are poised to shape geopolitical, military, and intelligence competition.”

There are still major concerns about applying those AI tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to high-stakes areas like national security, given the propensity of such models to hallucinate and produce false positives. And the publicly available data sets those models are largely trained on can contain personal (but legally obtainable) personal information on U.S. civilians, as Defense One has reported.

The national security community is “well aware” of the concerns, the official said. “We have to go through a process of accrediting systems. And that's not just for AI systems, but, you know, national security systems generally,” he said, pointing to Biden’s previous executive order on AI and the establishment of the AI Safety Institute as two steps the White House has taken to mitigate AI risks, particularly in government use.

The new memo designates the Commerce Department’s AI Safety Institute as “U.S. industry’s primary port of contact in the U.S. government,” according to the fact sheet. Those efforts join already existing Defense Department and Intelligence Community guidelines on AI development and deployment.

The official agreed that the availability of U.S. citizens’ data is a growing problem. “We have been very concerned about the ways in which Americans’ sensitive data can be sold, really through the front door, first collected in bulk, then sold through data brokers, and then end up in the hands of our adversaries. And so that's something that the President issued an executive order on [in February] to try to restrict adversary access to some of that data.”

But while the risks are real, the government still must establish a way for the national security community to “experiment” with AI through “pilots,” the official said.

“There are going to be challenges associated with adopting any new technology,” they said. “The framework…is one that's going to be continuously updated.”

And those updates may be subject to political disruption: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has vowed to repeal Biden’s executive order on AI safety.

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Air Force braces for new nuclear-war scenarios

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 13:10:01 -0400

The Air Force is planning a tabletop exercise to gauge U.S. readiness to react to a wide spectrum of nuclear-related scenarios, part of a larger effort to prepare for them, a service leader said on Wednesday.

“What if, God forbid, there was a low-yield [nuclear weapon] use in Europe tomorrow?” Lt. Gen. Andrew J. Gebara, deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, said at the Air & Space Forces Association conference outside Washington, D.C. “Or what if there was a demonstration of nuclear use, or a nuclear test? What if we had to adapt the INDOPACOM regional fight because a nuclear power had a red line [that meant] we couldn't fly in certain areas?

“These are the kind of things that our warfighters need to understand from the beginning. It doesn't need to be just at the presidential level with no other discussion,” Gebara said.

That represents a big change in the way the military has historically talked about the possibility of nuclear war. It used to be that intelligence or analysis about the effects of such weapons on a given conflict was held at the highest possible, “strategic” level. That was a reflection of the times, when two great powers were engaged in a largely conventional arms race with knowable “rules” or at least principles of play. That doesn’t represent the modern role of nuclear weapons in conflict, which may include far more players and means of delivery of nuclear effects.

“When I was younger, at the end of the Cold War, the biggest threat we had was no-notice-1,000 ICBMs just coming over the North Pole, and how would you handle that?” Gebara said. “That's horrific to even think about. But it's actually a pretty simple tactical problem. There's only a couple things you can do with something that bad.”

Today, ICBMs look quaint compared to new types of missiles and weapons that can deliver nuclear effects, including some that don’t even appear to be weapons at first. If the Soviet Union’s 100-megaton Tsar Bomba was the epitome of the Cold War arms race, the new race is best represented by the lower-yield “tactical” nuclear weapons that Russia has threatened to unleash on Ukraine or, possibly, in space.

Gerbera said weapons instructors at Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base are already teaching these kinds of lessons to more pilots.

“So what does it mean if you're flying through this area and there's a radiological threat? What's it mean for the airplane?” he said.

Now, Gebara said, he’s working to broaden training for such scenarios across the Air Force.

“I think at all levels we need to build that experience, not just at the tactical level and not just at the strategic,” he said.

The results of the tabletop exercise, which is slated for later this month, will be briefed at a CORONA commanders conference.

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Could an easy radio fix have prevented the Trump assassination attempt?

Patrick Tucker — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 14:59:00 -0400

An emerging picture indicates that better communications tech between agencies may have prevented the Trump shooting—and that getting the Secret Service, law enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security on the same page communications-wise could be instrumental in preventing future assassination attempts.

A congressional report from late last month notes that the Secret Service didn’t have the right radios to talk to Butler County police—because they forgot to pick them up before the event—and that likely played a key role in the poorly coordinated response.

“On [July] 12, the Butler County ESU Commander personally reminded the USSS counter-sniper teams to pick up their assigned radios at the ESU Command Post RV, which was positioned according to planning at the Butler Fairgrounds, the following morning before 1100 hrs. It didn’t happen,” notes the August 12 report from the office of U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La..

That failure speaks to a larger equipment problem: Secret Service, DHS, military, and police radios don’t all work together.

On July 30, days after the head of the U.S. Secret Service resigned, the acting director Ronald Rowe told lawmakers that a key communication gap contributed to the failure to prevent the shooting.

Local law enforcement spotted the attacker, Thomas Matthew Crooks, “scurrying” to position himself to take a shot from the roof of a nearby building. But the unified command on the ground relayed only part of what was going on to the Secret Service: namely that they were responding to an incident.

“Apparently, not having that real-time information is what really hindered us in being able to understand more than: it was just the locals working an issue at the three o'clock. There was actually a little bit something more urgent than that,” Rowe told lawmakers.

Because there were so many different varieties of communications equipment, local law enforcement and SWAT personnel couldn’t communicate directly with Secret Service officers. It is technically possible, Rowe said, “ But it would take a long time to get it done, and for a one-day or an eight-hour operation, it requires a lot, and it would be months of planning, of knowing that we are going to go to this particular jurisdiction and that we're going to need your frequencies, the keys, and we're going to need to load you into our radios.”

This is also a problem for the military, particularly those elements that often work with partner militaries, like special operations forces.

Ari Schuler, the CEO of goTenna, a company that provides mobile mesh network technology to the military, Customs and Border Protection, and others,, said the technical barriers to better-incorporated communications aren’t as big as the policy and training issues around getting interoperable equipment to agencies. Adopting new tools and tech like the Team Awareness Kit, plus the ubiquity of modern smartphones, means there are plenty of ways to collect and distribute a real-time information picture to everyone who needs it.

Mobile mesh networks that bridge the gaps between different communications systems, protocols, etc., could help link everything together in a single data web that could then be distributed to many different types of devices securely.

The problem is partly due to domestic agencies, including the Secret Service, just not getting the resources they need, he said.

“I was at CBP and DHS for close to a decade. When you look at both the resourcing and the training regimen of military versus law enforcement, it is very different. DOD had an order of magnitude or more overall resources than we did at DHS,” Schuler said.

But training and exercising is another barrier to wider adoption, he said. The military has a lot of time to conduct exercises to see what is and isn’t working in the field, whereas many law enforcement agencies and the Secret Service do not have time to take away from their regular duties for similar exercises.

“When you are in the military, most of your time is training, unless you're operating. When you're in law enforcement, you have very few contiguous weeks carved out, and a lot of it is for qualifying on your weapon and all the different—depending on what your role is—support things and things like that,” he said.

These are the sort of gaps lawmakers don’t spend much time thinking about until an incident occurs. But that’s started to change since the July assassination attempt.

During the hearing, Sen. Jon Ossof, D-Ga., asked Rowe: “The inability swiftly to link personnel from disparate jurisdictions at the local, state, and federal level, is a vulnerability for the nation, is it not?”

Rowe responded, “I would think, based on my experience, being able to talk to other agencies real-time certainly would assist in that response.”

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Pentagon budget request aims to balance congressional limits, foreign needs, and innovation

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 06:00:00 -0400

The Pentagon’s $849.8 billion funding request for fiscal 2025 comes as last year’s budget request remains unpassed, a new law has imposed limits on government growth, and the White House is pleading with Congress to pass a supplemental funding bill to replenish arms stockpiles sent to Ukraine and better arm Taiwan.

The irony of submitting a new funding request when Congress has not passed a full budget for the current fiscal year was not lost on Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks. Last year’s budget request represented “the most strategically-aligned budget in DOD history,” she told reporters Monday. “I want to highlight how devastating the failure to pass last year's budget request is to ensuring our national defense and global security.”

The fiscal 2025 budget total is capped by the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which forced the Defense Department to make tough decisions to stay under the $868.349 billion budget cap. Leaders chose to retire older weapons such as 56 A-10 Warthogs, and pull back on new orders for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and new Virginia-class submarines—down to just one in this year’s request.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told Defense One the hit to procurement was larger than he was anticipating, but also the inevitable result of the rising cost of maintaining the current force due to increasing compensation and maintenance costs—particularly on more expensive items like the F-35.

“So that means the thing that has to give is procurement,” he said.

But Clark said that isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the long term, as the caps seem to be forcing the department farther from programs that are expensive to maintain.

“This should be the wake-up call that tells us we need to be buying different stuff. It's not about continuing to buy the same things that we did in the past, because clearly they're too expensive,” he said. “We need to come up with less expensive, more scalable alternatives.”

For several months, the Pentagon has been trying to highlight efforts to build the sorts of weapons dominating battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East: cheap strike drones and long-range fires. To that end, the Pentagon is asking for an additional $500 million for the Replicator program, which seeks to quickly produce large numbers of cheap drones.

Clark called Replicator “a great example of the direction we need to go.”

Tara Murphy Dougherty, CEO of data analytics and decision science company Govini, told Defense One: “The Biden administration is making some hard choices with the FY25 budget, which isn't something we often see DOD do, or do well. Reductions on F-35s and Virginia-class [submarine], in addition to the recent [Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft] cut show that [Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin] and team are prepared to make tradeoffs in order to continue funding modernization.”

There are also signs that the Pentagon is starting to be able to keep track of the money it receives: last month, the Marine Corps became the first service to pass an internal audit. But Dougherty said the Defense Department still must overcome poor, outdated recordkeeping, which will hinder analysis and more effective cost-cutting—especially as the Pentagon faces continued spending caps.

“The Department of Defense still has a ways to go to manage its modernization programs effectively, particularly on the data side,” she said. “If its acquisition data continues to languish in spreadsheets, the DOD will remain behind the curve. Superior programs require a modern, data-driven approach to program management—visibility from production-line capacity to supply chains—to be cost-effective and ultimately operationally available for the warfighter."

This year’s budget request also includes money to shore up the defense industry. Hicks said it would make “an historic investment in the submarine industrial base to increase production and reduce backlogs.”

She also said “we’ll continue to work together to increase munitions investments.”

Hicks made an urgent plea for Congress to pass the President’ supplemental funding bill, which allocates more military aid for Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel, but also features $10 billion to allow the United States to replenish stockpiles of weapons sent to Ukraine.

Said Hicks, “If we don't get the $10 billion, we would have to find other means,” to replenish stocks that have gone elsewhere. She declined to identify what those means were.

“Right now, we're very much focused on the need for that supplemental,” she said.

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The Pentagon may never get to the bottom of that famous UFO video

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0400

The Pentagon’s office to explore unidentified aerial phenomena may never get to the bottom of some of the most famous sightings, due to a lack of data. But it hopes a new reporting mechanism will help.

The head of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, said Tuesday that the office has to focus on the newest sightings first, not necessarily the ones that are the most prevalent in the public mind.

“The way we investigate cases we really prioritize more of the operational ones from today than we do going backwards in time, and the reason for that is there is no supporting data to actually analyze,” Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the AARO office told reporters.

Kirkpatrick was referring toa now widely-seen 2004 video taken from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet flying off the coast of San Diego. The December 2017 New York Times article featuring the video represents the moment the public and the government went from treating UFOs like fringe conspiracy theory to describing them as an urgent concern requiring lawmaker oversight and a whole new Pentagon investigatory office.

In that article, U.S. Navy pilots describe witnessing and recording video of mysterious objects that seemed to behave in ways that defied the laws of physics. Shortly after publication, more troops came forward to report their own experiences with unidentified aerial phenomena. The public and lawmakers wanted to know what was behind the phenomena, and whether it poses a threat to pilots or the military. That led to the creating of the Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, which became the DOD Airborne Object Identification and Management Group and then, in 2022, AARO.

The office was looking at more than 650 cases as of this spring, Kirkpatrick testified in April. But most of them have a fairly easy explanation, he said, like balloons. And even with the more mysterious ones, Kirkpatrick said he still doesn’t see any sign of anything like extraterrestrial life.

As for that famous 2004 video, he said the AARO doesn’t know much more than anyone else.

“There's no other data behind it. So understanding what that is off of that one video is unlikely to occur—whereas today we have a lot of data where somebody sees something, there's gonna be a lot more data associated with it that we can pull out, radar data, and optical data, and [infrared] data.”

That’s one reason the Department of Defense issued new guidance to services and combatant commands about retaining data.

“The way data is handled on these platforms is they don't they don't retain them at all, ever. I mean, they retain them for 24 hours usually if there was an incident on the platform, like there was a malfunction,” Kirkpatrick said.

To overcome that data deficit, the announced Tuesday that it opened a secure online reporting mechanism, so former government and military employees with knowledge of previous programs that could be related to UAPs can report them to the office securely and not face retribution.

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Agencies get marching orders as White House issues AI-safety directive

Patrick Tucker — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 12:11:45 -0400

The White House hopes to guide how technologists develop artificial intelligence and how the government prompts and adopts AI tools, under a new executive order to be unveiled Monday.

The order lays out some basic safety rules to prevent AI-enabled consumer fraud, requires red-team testing of AI software for safety, and issues guidance on privacy protections. The White House will also pursue new multilateral agreements on AI safety with partner nations and accelerate AI adoption within the government, according to a fact sheet provided to reporters.

The order comes amid growing public concern about the effects of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence tools on public life, the future of employment, education, and more. Those concerns are at odds with warnings from key business leaders and others that China’s growing investment in AI could give it an economic, technological, and military advantage in the coming decades. The new executive order attempts to address concerns about the use of AI in dangerous settings and the misuse of AI while simultaneously encouraging its advancement and adoption.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed called the order “the next step in an aggressive strategy to do everything on all fronts to harness the benefits of AI and mitigate the risks.”

On safety, the order directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, to draft standards for red-team exercises to test the safety of AI tools before they’re released.

“The Department of Homeland Security will apply those standards to critical infrastructure sectors and establish the AI Safety and Security Board. The Departments of Energy and Homeland Security will also address AI systems’ threats to critical infrastructure, as well as chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and cybersecurity risks,” according to the White House fact sheet.

The order also stands up a new cyber security program to explore how AI could lead to attacks, requires that the developers of “the most powerful AI systems” share safety test results with the government, and it calls on the Department of Commerce to develop practices for detecting AI-generated content that could be used for fraud or disinformation.

It calls on the National Science Foundation to further develop cryptographic tools and other technologies to protect personal and private data that could be collected by AI tools, and it sets guidelines to prevent organizations and institutions from using AI in discriminatory ways. It also calls on the government to do more research on AI’s effects on the labor force.

Additionally, a large portion of the order looks at how the government can better embrace AI and form new bonds and working strategies with like-minded democratic nations to do so.

“The administration has already consulted widely on AI governance frameworks over the past several months—engaging with Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, the UAE, and the UK,” the fact sheet said. The order calls on the State and Commerce departments to “lead an effort to establish robust international frameworks for harnessing AI’s benefits and managing its risks and ensuring safety.”

Still, according to the fact sheet, “More action will be required, and the administration will continue to work with Congress to pursue bipartisan legislation to help America lead the way in responsible innovation.”

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Lawmakers, Army headed for a fight over cuts to special operations forces

Patrick Tucker — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 09:57:00 -0400

Lawmakers are worried that a U.S. Army plan to cut up to 3,000 people from its special operations forces will embolden China.

One defense official told Defense One that the Army is not looking to reduce the number of operators, but rather to eliminate redundant positions in headquarters, logistics, and support. But lawmakers say the Army hasn’t given them enough information about their plans and they won’t allow the service to make any cuts without their approval.

The public first learned about the Army's proposed SOF cuts last May during a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing. Four months later, a Senate staffer told Defense One that U.S. Special Operations Command head Gen. Bryan Fenton did not agree with the plan, and his objections were under consideration by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

“So the reason it's at Austin's level is because there was a non-concurrence from SOCOM to the Army's plan,” the staffer said.

Last week, Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., met with members of the SOF community and others on Capitol Hill and fretted that cutting SOF would embolden China.

“I'm very concerned about the pacing threat of China simultaneously with the reduction of SOF. When you look at the things that would deter China, SOF are on the tip of the spear. And so I think that the more we invest in our special operations, problems that ultimately could harm our nation over the next decade or two could be prevented,” he said. “It’s unclear that this administration understands the value of SOF. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be proposing cuts.”

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, an Army National Guard veteran who, like Budd, sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said, “Special operations forces are our nation’s premiere force during peacetime and war. In the face of recruiting challenges for our military and growing threats around the world, cuts to SOF are not the answer."

But the cuts may have limited impact on the Army, sources said, because they are intended to spare the highly specialized tactical operator teams that people associate with special operations forces. A senior defense official told Defense One that SOCOM will decide what to cut, but: “The Army does not recommend cutting ‘shooters.’ Army leadership believes in the SOF truth: special operations forces cannot be mass-produced.”

Only a small fraction of individuals in Special Operations Command count as "shooters," which leaves a lot of other people that do things like logistics or accounting. Over the years, particularly during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bureaucracy within Special Operations Command has grown to unsustainable levels, the official said.

“At some point, we have to recognize the excess size we grew to during the post 9/11 era,” the official said, pointing to the multiple Army SOF headquarters units as an example of bureaucratic bloat.

“The Ranger Regiment has more military intelligence than an entire Army division…There’s U.S. Army Special Operations Aviation Command and the U.S. Army Special Operations Command…These are not warfighting headquarters. When deployed, the operational units would be commanded and controlled by the combatant commands and theatre special operations command.”

The Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office had recommended cuts to support, logistics, and communications, the official said, and the office noted that many SOF support units spend more time at their home stations than other people in similar roles. Other services should also chip in more to support SOF teams, they said, since right now Army units support Navy SEAL teams.

Finally, while the Army is not considering cutting Operational Detachment Alphas, or A-Teams, those teams are only manned at 60% due to recruiting shortfalls, he said.

Still, cuts to SOF support and logistics mean that SOF would have to go to the services to fill roles in things like cyber, logistics, or support. Those people won’t have as much time to train or build relationships with their SOF teammates.

During a July hearing, Ernst mentioned a SOCOM effort to assess the impact of the cuts: “It says that SOF can only execute its assigned mission with SOF enablers, and cutting enablers increases risk to mission.”

Said Budd, “I just think we need to let more folks know, not just on the Senate side, but on the House side as well, about those potential cuts. Will the Army make some window dressing cuts to say that they did something, maybe? Even play politics? Perhaps. But I think it'd be devastating, especially when you look at the critical capabilities, like the access they provide for cyber, intelligence, and targeting."

The Senate staffer told Defense One: "We’ve heard cuts are likely to affect various headquarters positions and enablers, and that the intent was never to cut ODAs. The biggest problem, though, is that the department hasn’t actually briefed Congress yet on their plans … If some of the headquarters positions we’re hearing about are cut, those tasks and responsibilities are either not going to be done or pushed down to the operational units. That will reduce the operational capacity of those very specialized units. It doesn’t pass the smell test."

What happens from here? The House and Senate are currently working through two separate versions of the NDAA. While the House version prohibits the cuts, the Senate version requires the Army to report its reasons and the potential impact.

But the Army shouldn’t confuse that reporting requirement with a rubber stamp, the staffer said. In fact, the Senate is more likely to try and block the cuts rather than agree to them, at least until it understands them better.

“We have a reporting requirement and a sense of the Senate that those cuts should not occur…Given the ongoing recruiting crisis and that Army end strength is shrinking, SOF may very well have to take a cut, but the department needs to show Congress its math and how it arrived at its decision. It appears the Army has opted to make cuts to SOF to maintain conventional capabilities that not everyone is convinced will have the same impact in either competition or potential conflict.”

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A senator's holds on military nominations are hurting readiness against China, Defense official says

Patrick Tucker — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 17:20:00 -0400

FORT SHAFTER, Hawaii–Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s 9-months-and-counting hold on more than 250 Defense Department promotions is undermining the U.S. military in the Pacific, according to the Pentagon’s second-highest-ranking civilian official.

“One really good example of the challenge we're facing is…the third Marine Expeditionary Force. This is our primary force to do the naval expeditionary movements in any fight that could happen in the Western Pacific,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told reporters at a recent roundtable in Hawaii with representatives from INDOPACOM, U.S. Army Forces Pacific, and base officials at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.

“What we're seeing there right now is we've had a delay in that transition of that commanding general from [III MEF]. Really disrupting to the Marine Corps’ largest expeditionary standing force. And it's here in INDOPACOM. And that's a real challenge. That's one specific example. But it layers on to this overall problem where we have maybe up to 89% of our general flag officer positions that could be vacant" in the coming year. So no matter what one thinks about the number of general officers in the military, which I've heard come up before, I don't think anyone would argue we [only] need 11 percent of them,” she said.

Over the course of her two-day trip, Hicks spoke with INDOPACOM officials about their most pressing technology needs and how the Defense Department is looking to help them build new networking environments to better train with allies and scale up technology more quickly, including artificial intelligence solutions to match high-tech Chinese capabilities. Military officials and other experts worry that China could make a military play for Taiwan in 2027, the date by which Chinese President Xi Jinping has told his military to be ready for such a move.

But much of the work the Defense Department is doing to meet what they define as the pacing challenge is being undermined by efforts from some Republican lawmakers, Hicks said. Tuberville’s holds are one dramatic example, but there are others.

For instance, the House version of the 2024 NDAA includes amendments to roll back DOD climate initiatives. On Friday, Hicks visited Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, where the Defense Department is undertaking a $2.8 billion improvement and construction effort. Many of those improvements are aimed at making sure the base is better prepared for sea-level rise and other effects of climate change. “Any time we see challenges to the military just trying to be as resilient as possible, as effective as possible in the range of futures that we face, I think that’s destructive to the military’s capability and its readiness…So, yes, it’s a challenge,” Hicks said.

But of greater concern for Hicks and the Pentagon is the looming possibility of a government shutdown. House Republicans are pushing spending bills that dramatically cut spending levels that both parties had previously agreed to, raising the prospect of a shutdown later this year.

“By far, our most important priority is to make sure that we have on-time appropriations, and I am very worried about enough poison pills to create a shutdown scenario,” said Hicks. “As bad as it would be to have a [continuing resolution], which we always want to avoid, it would be even worse for the defense of the nation to have a shutdown. So getting the bills through the system is very, very important to us.”

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Air Force Lab Seeks Higher-Risk, Higher-Reward Breakthroughs

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 11:30:00 -0400

The United States is behind on hypersonics, and big science questions loom on delivery of supplies via rocket ships, but the government has finally adopted a risk-tolerant approach to science and technology experimentation that will allow big breakthroughs in the future, the chief technologist at the Air Force Research Lab said.

Speaking at the 8th annual Defense One Tech Summit, Timothy Bunning, chief technical officer for the AFRL, said the lab is using simulation and virtual environments to a great extent on advanced hypersonic weapons. But while the U.S. is making progress, it still lacks the testing ranges necessary to move as quickly as it wants to.

“We don't have what we need to maybe operate at a speed of relevance right now,” he said.

Bunning isn’t the first Defense Department science and technology official to mention the lack of adequate test ranges for development of hypersonics. Even after the United States inked a deal with Australia in 2019 to co-experiment, the range issue “is not solved. You know, we had a recent scientific advisory board examination of a hypersonics program and…they came back and said, that's the No. 1 threat right now to the portfolio.”

The U.S. is behind China and Russia in fielding advanced hypersonic weapons; Russia is actively using such weapons in Ukraine. At the same time, the U.S. has poured itself into various research efforts, some of which have panned out better than others.

But Bunning cautioned that reading too much into “failures” could put the U.S. back in the position it was in 2012, when it first pivoted away from hypersonic research and development following another “failure,” allowing that research gap with China and Russia to emerge.

“These are complex systems, and things go wrong. And we have to be tolerant of that failure. We certainly know the other side is doing lots of tests, and they fail all the time and maybe don't have the political pressure, public pressure, negative pressure, that comes along with the test.”

And, he said, military leaders and lawmakers are finally in a position to support ambitious experimentation. “I think there's a recognition, you know, that we're coming out of an…era where we could do what we wanted in permissive environments…therefore, we need to change the kit that we have. And it's gonna take some development of the concepts, evolvement of the technologies, and with that comes the need to do things with a risk posture that's maybe a little bit different than what we had, you know, say 10 years ago. So our interactions with Congress have been very, very positive.”

The lab is also moving efforts in aerial swams and networked warfare to the Air Force to become programs of record.

One of the lab’s initiatives that’s still in the earliest stages, dubbed Rocket Cargo, focuses on using hypersonic technology to move of key supplies, cutting the time it takes to move weapons and hardware from one point of the globe to another down from days to hours.

“We’ve broken the problem down into technical components, and we're really trying to do proof of concept experimentation of real world as well as in the computer,” he said.

The lab is partnering with SpaceX on the research effort, which has a way to go before it receives a green light—in large part because it seeks answers to questions that have never been asked before. “We can throw out a big cargo pack out the back of a C-130 flying at 10,000 feet with parachute, and it drops. Well, can I drop something out of a rocket that's traveling Mach, you know, five? Something that's a heck of a lot bigger 100 tons? … How would we go about reconstituting a landing pad that had the right performance specs in a short period of time? Is there new technology that can do that?”

The lab is still working to determine if the idea is truly feasible, he said. But asking those questions is a “high-risk, high-payoff activity.”

“What the teams are trying to do is, you know, ask the ‘what if?’ questions. Can this be done…with quantitative measures? As the teams come together at some point, we'll assess.”

Bunning’s session will air Wednesday at noon.

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US Military Now Has Voice-Controlled Bug Drones

Patrick Tucker — Thu, 11 May 2023 14:30:00 -0400

TAMPA—Tomorrow’s missions may take U.S. special operators into places where they’d rather not control drones by hand, so the maker of the popular Black Hornet nano-drone has added a way to steer it by simple voice commands.

U.S. operators began using the Black Hornet after seeing British forces flying them in Afghanistan in 2011. Years of experiments with optical and thermal cameras have turned the nano-drone into a key element of the U.S. Army’s soldier-borne sensor program. Now its manufacturer, Teledyne FLIR, has teamed up with AI startup Primordial Labs to add voice control.

At the Global SOF Foundation’s SOF Week event here, a drone operator used a book-sized computer and a few quick voice commands to send a drone to a series of locations in a noisy conference hall.

The software could be used for just about any kind of drone or system, said Mike Adkins, who runs product and business development for Primordial Labs. He said U.S. Special Operations Command had asked for a demo on seven types of drones, using “a whole inventory of discrete commands,” including “manipulating the sensor, looking at things, moving elevation, interacting with waypoints.”

The mission-level commands, the mission-type orders that we're supporting right now are things like route, area, and zone reconnaissance, searching between a point, orbiting a point, conducting different scan patterns within a given area. And we're actually on contract with [U.S. Army Special Operations Command] to add 100 autonomous behaviors this year,” he said.

Because ordering a flying bug drone around is potentially more complicated than steering it with a joystick, the Primordial Labs team worked to make sure the software could understand the user’s intention across a variety of different ways to order the drone to do something. That’s key as multiple operators may need to issue commands to the drone depending on the situation.

Primordial Labs CEO Lee Ritholtz previously worked with DARPA and Lockheed Martin on software for autonomous F-16s. He said that the company next hopes to enable the drone to talk back to its operator about what it sees—that is, what it detects using object-recognition software. So the software might tell the operator how many people, trucks, or enemy troops are in a particular area. Depending on the drone and the optics package, it might pick up things like a hidden firearm that the naked eye might miss. Ritholtz said that he hoped to debut that capability next year but cautioned, “It's a very hard problem and I would not take anyone seriously who says it's easily solved.”

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The Pentagon’s AI Chief Is ‘Scared to Death’ of ChatGPT

Patrick Tucker — Thu, 04 May 2023 10:57:00 -0400

Large language models and generative artificial intelligence agents like ChatGPT have captured the public’s attention, but the Defense Department’s chief digital and AI officer, said he worries about the profound havoc that such tools could wreak across society.

“I’m scared to death,” about how people might use ChatGPT and other consumer-facing AI agents, Craig Martell said Wednesday.

Such tools, which can respond to simple prompts with long text answers, have raised concerns about the end of academic essays and have even been floated as a better way to answer medical patient questions. But they don’t always produce factually sound content, since they pull from human-created sources. Martell, who comes to the job with experience in academia as well as managing machine learning at Lyft, didn’t mince words when asked his opinion on what large language models like ChatGPT mean for society and national security.

“My fear is that we trust it too much without the providers of that service building into it the right safeguards and the ability for us to validate” the information, Martell said. That could mean people rely on answers and content that such engines provide, even if it’s inaccurate. Moreover, he said, adversaries seeking to run influence campaigns targeting Americans could use such tools to great effect for disinformation. In fact, the content such tools produce is so expertly written that it lends itself to that purpose, he said. “This information triggers our own psychology to think ‘of course this thing is authoritative.’”

While using such tools can feel like an exchange with a human being, Martell warns they lack a human understanding of context, which is why reporter Aza Raskin was able to pose as a 13-year old and get an LLM to give him advice on how to seduce a 45 year-old man.

The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, which Martell heads, is primarily responsible for the Defense Department’s AI efforts and all the computer infrastructure and data organization that goes into those efforts. Martell made his comments during AFCEA’s TechNetCyber event in Baltimore to a room full of software vendors, many of whom were selling AI platforms, tools, and solutions.

“My call to action to industry is: don’t just sell us the generation. Work on detection,” so that users and consumers of content can more easily differentiate AI-generated content from humans, Martell said.

In terms of his own priorities for the Defense Department, Martell said the first is putting in place data sharing infrastructure and policies to allow the military to realize its aspirations for Joint All Domain Command and Control, or JADC2.

“It needs the appropriate infrastructure to allow data to flow in the right places. So if I can set the building of that infrastructure to allow the data to flow back and forth and up and down properly, correctly” across differing levels of classification, that would be a good first step in realizing the vision, he said. Part of that is helping combatant commands get a much better understanding of the data they have, the data they need, and the data they need to share.

Not everyone in the Defense Department shares Martell’s apprehension on AI and large language models. Just a day before, Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, the head of DISA, gave a speech that was partially written by ChatGPT. Speaking to reporters during a roundtable discussion on Wednesday, he said, “I'm not scared generally about it… I think it's gonna be a challenge,” for the Defense Department to use AI correctly, but the challenge is one the Defense Department can rise to. “What I'm cautious of is: this has to be a national-level issue.”

Steve Wallace, DISA’s chief technology officer, said “There’s a number of places…that we’re looking to possibly take advantage of [next-generation AI], from back office capabilities and contract generation, data labeling, right?”

But even here, Martell cautioned against being too enthusiastic about the promise of AI, particularly AI tools for labeling data. “They just don't work…What works is human beings who are experts in their field telling the machine this is A; this is B; this is A; this is B; and this is B; and then that's what gets fed into the algorithm generator…to generate a model for you.”

Martell isn’t necessarily opposed to deploying AI even in very high-stakes instances. His concern primarily is that the ease of use of such tools conveys the notion that the user doesn’t need to do the hard work of training and monitoring them. AI, in Martell’s view, is a highly human-driven asset.

“No model ever survives first contact with the world. Every model ever built is already stale, by the time you get it. It was trained on old data, historical data, because that's what they had to train…. We need to build tools that allow the systems to be monitored to make sure they're continuing to bring the value that they were paid for in the first place.”

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Why the Pentagon’s Response to the Discord Leaks Won’t Fix the Problem

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 11:28:00 -0400

Some steps the Pentagon is taking in the wake of the recent leak of classified documents are missing the point.

In response to the unauthorized disclosure of hundreds of pages of sensitive and secret material on a private Discord server, Defense Department officials will add restrictions on classified material and allow fewer people to access it. But that response misses the core problems that drive unauthorized disclosure: the Pentagon classifies too many documents, limits its own ability to detect when leaks occur, and greatly overestimates how long classified information can stay secret according to a senior Defense Department official that works in insider threat detection.

On Monday, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters that the Defense Department was “taking a close look at security protocols and procedures and assessing whether or not they need to be changed,” around classified information. Kirby said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, “has already restricted access to classified information” to fewer people. He added that U.S government protocols and practices “exist for a reason and they are never considered static. So if we need to implement changes, we will.”

One senior Defense Department official who has worked in insider threat detection told Defense One that so-called “unauthorized disclosures” of classified and sensitive information are incredibly common, though few of them make the press. That’s important because it shows that the government is failing to keep a lot of things secret, not just this case.

That’s partly because of the sheer number of secrets it has tasked itself with keeping. But the Pentagon also doesn’t have the right policies in place to allow for the rapid detection of unauthorized disclosures.

In recent years, Defense leaders have set up new systems and policies to predict who might be a leaker. But so-called continuous vetting only captures things like arrests, large purchases, suspicious trips or credit activity, and the like. It is unlikely to have spotted an IT guy who was posting secret documents for clout on a closed Discord messaging group.

What might have helped is monitoring social media. As the Pentagon’s recently leaked documents spread online, groups such as Bellingcat used public clues to identify the alleged leaker as Jack Teixeira. But DOD policy does not make clear how investigators and monitors should and should not scrutinize Americans’ social-media posts for hints of illegal behavior, the official said. The Pentagon has experimented with hiring surveillance companies to monitor public posts for hints of insider threats, but those pilots failed largely because DOD declined to give its contractors vital information, the official said. A clearer policy on the use of public information would be useful.

Another problem: the Defense Department isn’t using the most modern tools and techniques for managing classified data.

As an IT maintainer in the Air National Guard’s 102nd Intelligence Wing, Teixeira had the run of the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, a Pentagon intranet for secrets. Think of JWICS as a hotel, the official said: just having a clearance will get you access to some of the shared spaces in the hotel, like the lobby or bar or pool. Access to individual rooms is handed out on a need-to-know basis. However, someone running maintenance would need to be able to access virtually any room.

The official called that a very old-fashioned approach to housing data. The Defense Department basically asks for virtual versions of its own data centers. The material is hosted in the cloud but doesn’t have all the benefits of cloud computing. If the Defense Department were to adopt cloud-native data storage and computing, that would allow it to build applications like virtual private containers where classified information could be shared with key participants for only short windows and where maintainers like Teixeira would not need to have access to all material in every room just to maintain things, said the official.

But a potentially larger issue is simply that the government classifies far too much information with no clear policy for eventually de-classifying things. That’s unsustainable and virtually assures more unauthorized disclosures.

In his press conference, Kirby said that “None of this material belongs in the public domain,” implying that its release, per classification regulations, might “harm national security.” But the more secrets you have, the harder they all are to keep, and the government isn’t doing a good job prioritizing them.

That reflects a phenomenon that many top military and intelligence leaders have complained about for years: the U.S. government greatly overclassifies material. Moreover, while more than 1.3 million people have top secret clearances, many of them are older or retirees. There remains a massive backlog of workers needing clearance to handle that information. That imbalance suggests a big problem: the government has too many people with clearances that aren’t the people that it needs to have them. Add that to the very large number of items that are classified–many without good reason, by leaders’ own acknowledgement–and lots of unauthorized disclosure becomes inevitable.

Consider this 2016 paper from David Grimes, a cancer researcher and author of the books The Irrational Ape and Good Thinking.

Grimes’ paper looked at conspiracy theories—specifically, the idea that climate change is a government hoax. He showed that such a conspiracy would be impossible to maintain because of the number of people who would need to be in on it and how long they would have to keep their mouths shut. He demonstrates that with just a few pieces of information, i.e. the number of people who know the secret and the amount of time they have to keep it, it’s possible to predict when any piece of clandestine information might leak out.

That same formula is relevant to the challenge of leaks and predicting when they might happen and it’s particularly relevant to the recent Pentagon leaks, Grimes said.

“This does happen and happens every few years. And that's kind of what you expect. That's what I found in the formula. Even if I made the parameters as favorable as possible to the secret keepers, if I made a simulation where they were better secret keepers than the NSA, even then, when you start involving thousands of people, or even hundreds of people, or even tens of people things would fail. And they fail a lot quicker than you might expect.”

That’s because every new link increases the potential of failed secret keeping exponentially. By applying a formula to pieces of information that the government wanted to keep secret and entering in the number of people who might have access to that secret information, it should be possible to simulate when “classification” will fail and, thus, whether or not the secret in question should be classified at all and for how long.

The official said that the Department currently employs no formula or data-driven approach to classifying documents.

He called the idea: “brilliant.”

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A ‘ChatGPT’ For Satellite Photos Already Exists

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 10:00:00 -0400

Scene: A U.S. adversary is at work on a new type of drone, ship, or aircraft and it’s your job to find it, wherever it is.

Not long ago, that task would take a massive effort of human, signals, and open-source intelligence collection. But a researcher from AI company Synthetaic has created a tool that will allow users to find virtually any large object that exists in any satellite photo of the Earth within just one day. It’s also the sort of capability the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is also looking to develop, and it could radically shift strategic advantage on the battlefield.

Corey Jaskolski, founder and CEO of Synthetaic, dubbed his satellite image scanning tool Rapid Automatic Image Categorization, or RAIC. After the Chinese weather balloon incident caught the nation’s attention in January, Jaskolski applied RAIC to satellite photos of the Earth’s surface, as collected by geospatial satellite imaging company Planet. He was able to trace the balloon’s origins to China in just a matter of days.

Now, Jaskolski says, the company is using those lessons to further reduce the time. “Our goal is to be able to ingest the entire Planet daily take [of Earth images] and be able to process that all in less than 24 hours. So if you wanted to literally look for balloon launches around the entire world, we could give you a daily update of that every day. Let you know if there was a balloon launched anywhere.”

Interest around new publicly available AI tools has been spiking, thanks to new generative pretrained transformer—or GPT—tools that allow users to write essays, build business plans, and perform complex tasks with a simple prompt. The national security community has a similar need, but for AI applications for the vast expanse of satellite, surveillance, and other data that could help uncover adversary activities and new capabilities.

But it’s not necessarily a straightforward task, as Jaskolski learned when he attempted to find the origin of that Chinese balloon—a thing that had never been photographed in the open, much less labeled and inserted into a dataset readable by a machine-learning algorithm.

“Normally with an AI, you have to have a bunch of labeled examples for the AI to learn, so, and it's not a small amount of data. Like when Facebook and Google train an AI, they commonly train on a billion labeled images, not even, you know, thousands or millions, but literally a billion labeled images," Jaskolski said. "The thing that would normally stop an AI from finding this balloon is we don't have any data. We don't have any labels. We don't know what it looks like from space.”

The RAIC is part of a new class of AI tools that don’t require a massive, labeled dataset to generate what Jaskolski describes as an understanding of what to look for. He was able to teach it to look for the balloon based only on a single hand-made drawing.

“We started out with technologies that are used for generative AI transformers and GaNS. [But] instead of using that technology to generate images, we use that technology in order to basically understand the data domain,” he said.

In essence, by continuously looking at satellite images, the RAIC tool develops a familiarity that comes close to expertise. So when it scans satellite imagery, it has a rudimentary understanding of what’s unusual, and can look for specific unusual objects. And the input doesn’t have to be precise. Jaskolski says his drawing depicted what a balloon might look like in satellite data, and RAIC was able to find it. Then, once they found the actual balloon in one of the satellite datasets, RAIC was able to look for that in other images.

“After a couple days really searching for it in Alaska in Canada, we decided to just bite the bullet and ingest that massive amount of Earth across China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, and the ocean, open ocean and Aleutian islands,” he said. They also used wind modeling to narrow down where the balloon may have started its flight.

That brought them to islands 300 miles off the coast of China. “At that point we got really excited…And so from there, we find it five or six more times, all the way back to the hidden island.”

At last week’s Planet conference in Washington, Microsoft President Brad Smith described a future in which people could ask image-based search tools to find objects, just as we ask search engines for recommendations today. Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI, the best-known GPT platform.

“I do believe that this next era of AI, you know, with GPT based-technology, is a query-able Earth,” Smith said.

NGA has already taken control of Project Maven, the Pentagon’s flagship AI program for image analysis. At the Planet conference, NGA head Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said the agency is trying to turn Maven from an experimental effort into a program of record, “which means we will need to be very clear on the efficacy of every dollar.”

The agency is “experimenting with [geographical intelligence] AI programs that integrate large language models to allow analysts to ask and answer specific intelligence questions,” an NGA spokesperson told Defense One. “We see a future where these models can be trained with big spatial data to answer questions in space and time.”

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Treasury Sanctions Arms Dealer Who Attempted to Broker Deals Between North Korea and Russia

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 09:59:00 -0400

The Kremlin’s war on Ukraine has led Russia to seek weapons and supplies from a variety of sources under increasingly isolated conditions. That’s giving rise to opportunists in the mold of infamous and recently-freed arms dealer Viktor Bout. On Thursday, the Treasury Department issued sanctions against another such opportunist: Slovokian citizen Ashot Mkrtychev.

Mkrtychev is accused of trying to forge an arms deal between Russia and North Korea between the end of 2022 and early 2023.

“With the support of Russian officials, Mr. Mkrtychev has been attempting to broker a secret arms agreement between Russia and North Korea. As part of this proposed deal, Russia would receive over two dozen kinds of weapons and munitions from Pyongyang,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters Thursday.

Russia was also trying to send a delegation to North Korea, and was offering food to North Korea “in exchange for munitions,” he said, adding that “Any arms deal between North Korea and Russia would directly violate a series of UN Security Council resolutions.”

According to the statement from the Treasury Department, “Mkrtychev’s negotiations with {North Korean] and Russian officials detailed mutually beneficial cooperation” between the two countries, including payments and “barter arrangements. He confirmed Russia’s readiness to receive military equipment from the DPRK with senior Russian officials.”

The material included “commercial aircraft, raw materials and commodities to be sent to North Korea,” Kirby said. “We know that he worked with a Russian individual to locate commercial aircraft that was suitable for delivery to North Korea. And we know that he provided senior Russian officials with a list of goods that North Korea was interested in acquiring from Russia both via barter and financial payments.”

In the statement, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Russia “has lost over 9,000 pieces of heavy military equipment since the start of the war, and thanks in part to multilateral sanctions and export controls, Putin has become increasingly desperate to replace them…Schemes like the arms deal pursued by this individual show that Putin is turning to suppliers of last resort like Iran and the DPRK.”

Mkrtychev’s efforts were separate from the artillery shells North Korea was sending to Russia, said Kirby.

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Foreign Governments Are Still Targeting Americans on Social Media, NSA Says

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 13:48:00 -0500

China and other foreign governments are still working to weaponize information against Americans, despite efforts by the U.S. government and social-media companies, the head of the National Security Agency testified on Tuesday.

“We've seen it in the elections. We've seen it with Russia, Ukraine, we've seen it with Iran, the same actors that…interfere in our elections are the same actors that are doing influence operations,” Gen. Paul Nakasone told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. “We see the influence piece much more prevalent these days.”

But: “We go after them,” said Nakasone, who also leads U.S. Cyber Command.

That starts with identifying those actors overseas, he said. “We find them and we continue to ensure that we understand exactly what they're doing. We examine their tradecraft and then we share it with a series of different partners. This is only done effectively…with partners, so inside the United States, sharing signatures with the FBI, who share it with social media companies.”

These efforts have recently been painted as nefarious by, among others, Twitter CEO Elon Musk. In December, Musk gave various internal Twitter documents to independent journalists Matt Taibbi and two others, who argued that they show government entities essentially bribing social media companies to censor information. The insinuation, thus, was that the government’s efforts to curb foreign disinformation on sites like Twitter via mechanisms like the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force were innately corrupt and political in origin. (Taibbi’s methodology and conclusions are themselves controversial; nevertheless, he has been invited to testify later this week before the GOP-led House’s brand-new weaponization of the government committee.)

But Russian influence operations on Twitter are well-documented—including by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee in a 2020 report—though the overall effect of those efforts is still subject to some debate. Twitter, meanwhile, has become more susceptible to foreign disinformation due to Musk’s firing of key employees in charge of moderation and his extension of “verification” status on the basis of paid subscription. Twitter has also failed to submit its plan for halting disinformation, as required by the European Union’s Digital Services Act.

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White House Launches Effort to Examine Policy Choices for Shooting Down UFOs

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 10:19:00 -0500

The National Security Council will lead a team of experts to “study the broader policy implications for detection, analysis, and disposition of unidentified aerial objects,” White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters Monday.

“Every element of the government will redouble their efforts to understand and mitigate these events” he said. The news comes after U.S. military aircraft downed three unidentified objects over U.S. and Canadian airspace over the weekend, and just about a week after a U.S. F-22 took down a Chinese spy balloon off the South Carolina coast.

But while the circumstances of the three instances are similar, the Pentagon and White House have been addressing them individually. For example, the Pentagon was quick to publicly classify the Chinese balloon in terms of country of origin and intended use (surveillance of sensitive U.S. military sites.) But the government has yet to even describe the appearance of three smaller objects shot down over the weekend, much less offer a public theory as to where they came from or what they were doing over the United States and Canada. Kirby on Monday said only that they didn’t seem to have “self-propulsion,” and seemed to be moved primarily by the wind.

The U.S. military doesn’t “fully appreciate, understand exactly what we're seeing,” but a big part of the reason officials are seeing them is because of the decision to look for them, particularly following the first balloon incident, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown said Monday. The balloon was “something that got all of our attention,” which prompted the military to more closely scrutinize U.S. airspace and adjust radar, “which means we're seeing more things than we would normally see,” he said.”

Gen. Glen VanHerck, the head of U.S. NORTHCOM and NORAD, told reporters Sunday, “What we're seeing is very, very small objects that produce a very, very low radar cross section.” He described the objects as “going at the speed of the wind, essentially,” which adds to the difficulty of identifying them. “Our pilots are 100 miles per hour [and trying] to give us what I would consider a factual, scientific-based description of what [they] see.”

The Defense Department has only recently been able to detect these sorts of phenomena at all, he said.

“Radars essentially filter out information based on speed so you can set various gates—we call them velocity gates—that allow us to filter out low-speed clutter. So if you had radars on all the time…we're looking at anything from zero speed up to say 100, you would see a lot more information,” he said. NORTHCOM has “adjusted some of those gates to “give us better fidelity on seeing slower objects. You can also filter out by altitude and so, with some adjustments, we've been able to get a better categorization of radar tracks now. And that's what I think you're seeing with these overall, plus there's a heightened alert to look for this information.” VanHerck did not say precisely when that decision was made.

The Pentagon is hesitant to categorize the objects without more information since a “range of entities including countries, companies, research organizations, operate objects at these altitudes for purposes that are not serious, including legitimate research,” Melissa Dalton, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs told reporters Sunday,

One of the key goals of the new interagency effort led by the National Security Council will be to reach out to those entities, as well as allied governments to collect information on new types of unmanned aircraft that might explain the phenomena.

But those responses didn’t suffice for some members of Congress.

“These objects were identified after we basically opened the filters on radar and sensory equipment data. If true, we are potentially looking at one of the most staggering intelligence failures since 9/11. How long have these objects operated in our airspace with impunity? How long has the Pentagon been aware of them? Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., said in a statement. “Congress has urgent and vital oversight interests in all these questions, and most importantly, the American people deserve to know what’s going on in the skies above their homes. It’s time for answers.”

Brad Peniston contributed to this post.

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US Shoots Down ‘Objects’ Off Alaska Coast, Over Canada, Lake Huron

Patrick Tucker — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 10:40:00 -0500

On Friday, an F-22 Raptor used an AIM-9X missile to down what U.S. officials described as a flying “object” off the coast of Alaska the White House and the Pentagon said. It marked the second time within a week that the United States shot down an unmanned object that had entered U.S. airspace. Just one day later, a second F-22, accompanied by a Canadian CF-18 and CP-140, shot down a second object over Canadian airspace, under direction of U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The U.S. military reportedly shot down a fourth object over Lake Huron on Sunday.

North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, detected the first object Thursday evening, John Kirby, the coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, told reporters at the White House on Friday. Kirby described the object as much smaller than the Chinese spy balloon that NORTHCOM shot down last week. This new object was roughly the size of a car, smaller than the bus-sized balloon, he said. But neither he nor Defense Department spokesperson Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder were able to say where the second object came from, its intended purpose, or what sort of equipment it may have had on it.

President Joe Biden ordered the shoot-down on Friday because the object was flying at an altitude of around 40,000 feet, much lower and closer to the flight path of commercial aviation than the balloon, which flew half again as high.

“There was a reasonable concern that this could present a threat to or potential hazard to civilian air traffic,” Ryder told reporters at the Pentagon.

Because the takedown occurred over frozen ocean, the Pentagon is hopeful that recovery efforts will yield more information, he said.

Neither Kirby nor Ryder named the aircraft that spotted the airborne object before the two F-22s were deployed, but Alaska Beacon reporter James Brooks spotted an Air Force C-130 near a no-fly zone over Prudhoe Bay on Friday afternoon.

NORAD detected the second object late Friday evening, according to a DOD statement on Saturday. “Two F-22 aircraft from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska monitored the object over U.S. airspace with the assistance of Alaska Air National Guard refueling aircraft, tracking it closely and taking time to characterize the nature of the object,” it reads.

Trudeau on Saturday posted a statement to Twitter saying that he ordered the takedown of the object over the Yukon after consulting with Biden. “Canadian Forces will now recover and analyze the wreckage of the object,” he said.

On Sunday morning, NORAD detected a fourth object over Montana. “Based on its flight path and data, we can reasonably connect this object to the radar signal picked up over Montana, which flew in proximity to sensitive DOD sites,” the Pentagon said in a statement.

The command continued to monitor the object and briefly shut down airspace over portions of Michigan. The fourth object was flying at 20,000 feet, according to the statement. “Its path and altitude raised concerns, including that it could be a hazard to civil aviation,” the statement said. At 2:42 p.m., an F-16 fired an AIM-9X missile at the object and downed it, on orders from the president.

“The location chosen for this shoot down afforded us the opportunity to avoid impact to people on the ground while improving chances for debris recovery,” the military said.

Some U.S. lawmakers have criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the spy balloon earlier this month, which the president allowed to cross the United States before ordering its downing.

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, put out a statement on Friday afternoon.

“I appreciate the Biden administration learning from its prior inaction and acting quickly to address this latest airspace incursion, and I look forward to further updates about this incident,” Wicker said. “However, I still have many outstanding questions regarding last week’s incident. Today’s decisive action is a reminder that it is even more important that we understand fully why the first balloon was allowed to traverse the entirety of our sovereign airspace uncontested.”

Kirby denied that such criticism affected Friday’s decision.

“We knew for a fact that the PRC balloon that we shot down last week was…a surveillance asset and capable of surveillance over sensitive military sites and that it had self propulsion and loitering capabilities. No indication that this one did,” he said. “The first one was able to maneuver and loiter, slow down, speed up.”

The balloon also pursued a flight path over several sensitive U.S. military sites.

Kirby and Ryder reiterated that the Pentagon was able to take measures to limit the balloon’s collection capabilities and that the U.S. learned a lot more about the Chinese spy program because of the decision to observe the balloon rather than immediately shoot it down.

Said Kirby: “We are we are talking to dozens of nations who we know have had been overflown by Chinese surveillance balloons as a part of this program that the Chinese have invested…to share with [those countries] the context and information that we've learned by the forensics we've done since we came in office about this particular program.”

The balloon incident led Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel a trip to meet with Chinese counterparts. English writing was reportedly discovered on some of the recovered wreckage from the balloon’s payload. The Biden administration is considering new tech sanctions against Chinese companies and even U.S. companies looking to invest there.

“I think we are also looking at a pilot potentially on outbound investment as well of sensitive technologies,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman told lawmakers this week.

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China’s Balloon May Have Taught Pentagon More Than Beijing Learned From It, General Says

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 09:47:00 -0500

The recently-downed Chinese spy balloon may have sent more useful information to the Pentagon than to Beijing, U.S. military officials said Monday.

The weather balloon presented “a potential opportunity for us to collect intel where we had gaps on prior balloons,” and that could help NORAD more quickly detect future spy attempts, NORAD and NORTHCOM head Gen. Glen David VanHerck told reporters at the Pentagon.

Both the Pentagon and U.S. President Joe Biden drew much online outrage as they waited to fire on the balloon until it had safely passed over the United States and moved over open ocean.

On Monday, VanHerck reiterated what other officials said last week: the sensor package on the balloon offered China no better intelligence capabilities than their satellites and other means already possess.

“We did not assess that it presented a significant collection hazard beyond what already exists in actual technical means from the Chinese,” he said.

Simple physics explains why. Imaging satellites, whether hovering in geostationary orbit or zooming by in low earth orbit, can carry much larger telescopes than can a payload affixed to a balloon. While both a balloon and a satellite might be able to pick up radio transmissions from a sensitive military site, such as Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base, that communication would likely be encrypted anyway, James A. Flaten, an aerospace engineer at the University of Minnesota, told NPRs Geoff Brumfiel.

Since these sites are already visible to passing satellites and the balloon wasn’t able to stay overhead long enough to observe patterns of life, it’s hard to say what useful information it might have collected.

Still, VanHerck said, the Defense Department took “maximum protective measures while the balloon transited across the United States” to prevent intelligence collection.

That suggests the use of lasers or other forms of directed energy to essentially blind, or dazzle, the camera lens on the balloon. VanHerck said he would not comment on the “non-kinetic effects” they used to limit intelligence collection until he had spoken to Congress.

The decision to delay shooting down the balloon while it was crossing over the United States was met with anger from some lawmakers and right-wing pundits. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called it a “disastrous projection of weakness by the White House,” in a statement.

But VanHerck said the wait was worth it, not only for the sake of safety but also to gather more intelligence about the balloon itself.

“You always have to balance [the act of shooting down] with the intel-gain opportunity,” he said. “And so there was a potential opportunity for us to collect intel where we had gaps on prior balloons. And so I would defer to the intel community, but this gave us the opportunity to assess what [the Chinese] were actually doing, what kind of capabilities existed on the balloon, what kind of transmission capabilities exist on it and I think you'll see in the future that that timeframe was well worth its value to collect.”

The recovery mission now moves ahead off the U.S. coast—specifically, the vicinity of the splashdown near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. On station are the dock landing ship Carter Hall, the oceanographic survey ship Pathfinder, Coast Guard vessels, and several unmanned underwater vehicles. VanHerck said that the underwater debris field was perhaps 1,500 meters square. The balloon itself was 200 feet tall with a payload the size of a regional jet and weighing perhaps 2,000 pounds, but the vast majority of that payload was solar panels to power the equipment on board, he said.

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New Institute Will Study How the Defense Department Manages Itself

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 14:00:00 -0500

The Department of Defense and bureaucracy are considered nearly synonymous, but the Pentagon’s newly launched Defense Management Institute aims to speed up the pace of decision making by studying how leaders at various levels actually manage everything from acquisition to logistics to human resources.

In remarks at the launch Tuesday, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks framed the new institute as part of a broader push by the Biden Administration to incorporate data into decision-making as soon as it’s available, rather than months or years later.

“We simply cannot compete on today's global stage without reliable and ready-to-use data to inform our decision making,” she said. “To do this, we are updating our data capabilities and our performance metrics [and] leveraging the defense Business Council. We have built a truly strategic management plan focused around the [Defense Secretary’s] priorities and fully aligned with the National Defense Strategy.”

One of the core functions of the new institute will be to study and write reports for the Director of Administration and Management Michael Donley, but also to address management issues on behalf of other elements of the department. “These could be quick assessments or full-fledged studies,” DMI Director Peter Levine explained Tuesday. “We could not and would not try to supplant the many fine institutions that already support the department's efforts across a wide range of management-related issues…We view DMI as an effort to bring you all together and leverage your expertise, not to replace or supplant the work that you do.”

The institute will also build a network of management experts across the Defense Department, the private sector, and academia, and will serve as a digital repository for research on management issues. But that won’t necessarily include all the department’s data related to management, at least not yet, said Levine. The new institute will operate out of the Institute of Defense Analysis on a contract basis, rather than be a formal arm of the Defense Department itself.

The size of the management challenge for the Defense Department is difficult to fathom. Consider the wide variety of different pieces of IT across desks all over the globe—and that the DOD can simultaneously achieve new feats in physics and computation while having other people working on “legacy” computer systems between 8 and 51 years old.

That’s why DMI is so important, Hicks said. “Never before has there been an institute dedicated solely to performance improvement. Management reform advantages the entire department, including logistics, acquisition, technology, all of which are central to the department's mission. And it directly supports the warfighter.”

In her remarks, she highlighted other areas where she and other civilian Pentagon leaders in the Biden administration are working to reform Defense Department management. “Congress's dissolution of the chief management officer, which took place just before I came back to the Pentagon in 2021, meant that we had to look afresh at how to organize for business operations,” she said.

Some of those efforts include bulking up the authorities and powers of the director of administration and management, setting up a framework—with clear definitions—for evaluating management performance across the Defense Department, and using new data tools to “gain a far better view into the implementation of the National Defense Strategy than our predecessors were ever afforded,” she said.

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When May a Robot Kill? New Pentagon Policy Tries to Clarify

Patrick Tucker — Sun, 29 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

Did you think the Pentagon had a hard rule against using lethal autonomous weapons? It doesn’t. But it does have hoops to jump through before such a weapon might be deployed—and, as of Wednesday, a revised policy intended to clear up confusion.

The biggest change in the Defense Department’s new version of its 2012 doctrine on lethal autonomous weapons is a clearer statement that it is possible to build and deploy them safely and ethically but not without a lot of oversight.

That’s meant to clear up the popular perception that there’s some kind of a ban on such weapons. “No such requirement appears in [the 2012 policy] DODD 3000.09, nor any other DOD policy,” wrote Greg Allen, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Governance Project and a senior fellow in the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

What the 2012 doctrine actually says is that the military may make such weapons but only after a “senior level review process,” which no weapon has gone through yet, according to a 2019 Congressional Research Service report on the subject.

That’s led to a lot of confusion about the Defense Department’s policy on what it can and can’t build—confusion that has not been helped by military leaders and officers who insist that they are strictly prohibited from building lethal autonomous weapons. In April 2021, for example, then-Army Futures Command head Gen. John Murray said, “Where I draw the line—and this is, I think well within our current policies – if you’re talking about a lethal effect against another human, you have to have a human in that decision-making process.” But that’s not what the policy actually said.

The updated policy establishes guidelines to make sure that autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons function the way they are supposed to and establishes a working group.

“The directive now makes explicit the need for an autonomous weapon system, if it's approved, to be reviewed,” Michael Horowitz, the director of the emerging capabilities policy office in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, told reporters on Wednesday. “If it changes to a sufficient degree, that a new review would appear necessary. Or if a non-autonomous weapon system has autonomous capabilities added to it, it makes clear that it would have to go through the review process.”

Horowitz continued, “There are essentially a lot of things that were…maybe…not laid out explicitly in the original directive that may have contributed to some of the, maybe, perceptions of confusion…and we wanted to clear as much of that up as possible. By, for example, making sure that the list of exemptions was clearly a list of exemptions to the senior review process for autonomous weapon systems rather than a list of what you can or can't do.”

CSIS’ Allen told Defense One, “NATO released the summary of its Autonomy Implementation Plan last year. That plan states that ‘NATO and Allies will responsibly harness autonomous systems.’ This 3000.09 update shows that the DoD believes that there are ways to responsibly and ethically use autonomous systems, including AI-enabled autonomous weapons systems that use lethal force. The DoD believes that there should be a high bar both procedurally and technically for such systems, but not a ban. One of the DoD’s goals in openly publishing this document is an effort to be a transparent world leader on this topic.”

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