Retired Army Special Forces officer Mike Nelson criticized Hegseth's rhetoric, stating, 'That's a necessary end to achieve goals through military force - you have to kill people to achieve them. That's not the end. It's a weird obsession with death for the sake of it.'
When civilian banks, logistics platforms, and payment processors share physical data center infrastructure with military AI systems, those facilities become legitimate military targets under international humanitarian law - and the civilian services housed inside lose their legal protection.
The economics are hard to ignore. Shooting down a drone with AeroVironment's LOCUST laser system costs less than $10, using just two to five seconds of laser energy. Compare that to the interceptor missiles currently used against Iranian drone swarms, which cost orders of magnitude more and are in short supply across allied arsenals.
We've got no shortage of munitions. Our stockpiles of defensive and offensive weapons allow us to sustain this campaign as long as we need. Iran is hoping that we cannot sustain this, which is a really bad miscalculation.
Asgard will help it realise the ambitions of the government's 2025 Strategic defence review, which promised to 'deliver a tenfold increase in lethality over the next 10 years' via a combination of enhanced 'firepower, surveillance technology, autonomy, digital connectivity and data'.
Our war fighters are leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools. These systems help us sift through vast amounts of data in seconds so our leaders can cut through the noise and make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react. Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot, but advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds.
Number one is speed takes priority over perfection. We can iterate to get to operational capability. And the second is that early soldier feedback is critical in order to make sure we're getting the right technology for the future fight, and then we want to be able to prove the demand signal before we spend big dollars on programs.
In military service, reliability is priceless, at least until the bill comes due. Some vehicles earned legendary status because they rarely failed in combat and delivered results under pressure. The problem was what it took to keep them that way. Heavy fuel use, maintenance-intensive systems, specialized parts, and recovery demands typically followed these platforms wherever they deployed. Here, 24/7 Wall St. is taking a closer look at reliable military vehicles that were logistically expensive.
With the fight evolving quickly, arms companies in Ukraine and Europe say that they can't afford to start from scratch and completely redesign entire systems each time conditions shift. Instead, companies making aerial drones and ground robots told Business Insider that their focus is now on creating weapons that can be upgraded by simply changing parts or software rather than overhauling the whole system. Designs are modular, like Lego pieces, with parts being easily swapped out as new mission demands arise.
Germany's military, the Bundeswehr, is currently on a spending spree: it has more than 108 billion ($129 billion) at its disposal this year a gigantic, unprecedented sum. This is being financed both by the official federal budget and special funds, for which the state is taking out loans. This money is intended to make the Bundeswehr, which has been subject to decades of cutbacks, more powerful and modern. There is also time pressure.
According to the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's memorandum on the Strategy, this AI-first status is to be achieved through four broad aims: Incentivizing internal DOD experimentation with AI models. Identifying and eliminating bureaucratic obstacles in the way of model integration. Focusing the U.S.'s military investment to shore up the U.S.'s "asymmetric advantages" in areas including AI computing, model innovation, entrepreneurial dynamism, capital markets, and operational data.