The Defense Department and White House have secure ways to communicate across countries and timezones, Axios' Colin Demarest reports, and it's unorthodox to have leaders simultaneously depart their stations. The gathering that Trump is framing as a sort of military pep rally came after months of high-profile retirements and removals that wiped away decades of the country's national security experience and a historic rebrand to the "Department of War."
CEO Jim Taiclet said on Thursday that there is "a very active engagement at an extremely high level with the Department of Defense" about the upgraded F-35, and that "I expect it will be taken to the White House sometime soon, hopefully, to consider this kind of concept." Speaking at Morgan Stanley's Laguna Conference, he said there is no contract yet, but that if the jet is kept under the Pentagon's current approved plan, the souped-up F-35 would, over time, get near sixth-generation capability.
Different officials within the Pentagon have reported various figures for savings attributed to DOGE, creating discrepancies and uncertainty about the exact amount of taxpayer dollars saved.
On Monday, xAI announced Grok for Government as a suite of products designed to provide frontier AI models to United States Government customers, including the Defense Department.
The Department of Defense faced a copyright issue after posting a video highlighting drone capabilities set to 'Enter Sandman' by Metallica, requiring the video to be removed.
Concerns have arisen over the potential conflicts of interest regarding tech executives who joined the Army Reserve while holding lucrative AI contracts with the Department of Defense.
The President's FY '26 National Defense Budget requests $1.01 trillion, which is a 13 percent increase from FY '25 enacted levels. This includes $848.3 billion for DoD's discretionary budget and $113.3 billion in mandatory funding for DoD.
Harvard is currently the top performing team on the AMPHORA program. Inadequate knowledge of the biological threat landscape poses grave and immediate harm to national security.
