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SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — The looming Capitol Hill vote on the annual defense authorization will be a test of whether Congress is ready to deliver on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s push for major reforms to accelerate the Pentagon’s process for acquiring new advanced tech weaponry for American warfighters.
A key Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee told The Washington Times in an exclusive interview that the moment is ripe for massive technological change in the U.S. military.
“There’s all of these new capabilities that are out there,” said Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota. “It will accelerate the decision-making process, and it will accelerate the gathering of data like we’ve never seen before.”
Mr. Rounds made the comments over the weekend at the 2025 Reagan National Defense Forum, an event that featured a full range of back-channel discussions among lawmakers, senior American military officials and defense industry executives about funding issues tied to the coming tech transformation.
“Our adversaries are doing it,” Mr. Rounds said of the wave of tech advancement and incorporation of intelligence. “The question is do we want to fall behind and give them the opportunities to put us at risk, our families at risk by having weapon systems that move faster and are more capable than ours?”
The armed services committees in both the House and Senate have indicated this year’s National Defense Authorization Act will encourage military modernization and changes in the atrophied procurement process.
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The final text of the major defense bill was published by congressional leadership Sunday night and is scheduled to make its way onto the House floor later this week. Many of the companies and military leaders in attendance at the Reagan forum directly impacted the creation of the bill and were eager to talk about the future of technology in defense.
Emil Michael, the under secretary for research and engineering at the Department of Defense, said during a panel discussion that the integration of artificial intelligence on multiple levels will be his “number one priority for the rest of my term.”
This year’s NDAA includes an increase of $8 billion in top-line spending, with nearly $1.5 billion focused on burgeoning tech for soldiers, according to Republican lawmakers. But the bill also included language to maintain congressional control of spending on new programs.
A provision of the bill will place significant Next Generation Command and Control, NGC2, funds on hold pending a report to Congress.
“Not more than 50% may be obligated or expended” until a report comes from Secretary of the Army Daniel P. Driscoll on the progress of the program that was initially funded with a generally more flexible contract with Anduril, an industry insurgent bringing new tech to the defense sector, to develop the system. NGC2 will go through its third round of testing later this week.
The flexibility to “fail forward,” as sources in the new defense tech community describe the current testing process, is a critical aspect of continuing to compete with China, according to multiple panel speakers at the 2025 Reagan National Defense Forum.
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A key part of changing the current procurement process, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said, was actively “undoing the last supper” — a reference to the intentional consolidation of military defense contractors in the early 1990s by then Secretary of Defense Les Aspin.
“The way to do that, in my view, is to make the defense and aerospace industry as much like the tech sector as we can,” James Taiclet, CEO of Lockheed Martin, said during an AI and tech modernization panel with Gen. George.
The wide-ranging discussion of emerging tech included everything from retrofitting Blackhawk helicopters as autonomous drones to integrating AI “agents” into the decision-making process for the U.S. military.
Throughout the weekend, companies such as Palantir, a headline sponsor of the event, where companies paid as much as half a million dollars to advertise, discussed partnerships and deals they have across the defense industry and with political leadership.
“They also want to know ‘What are the needs that are out there?’” Mr. Rounds told The Times. “So you try to share with them the direction that you see things going in terms of the defense of our country.”
The potential upside for the new injection of funding and more flexible spending models is one that current and upstart defense firms are betting on. The push to adopt more of a commercial business model, where the companies themselves are investing upfront in the products that they want to offer the military, is already in motion.
Vantor, a geo-spatial and imagery intelligence company, is beginning to integrate AI in the government products it already provides.
“We’re taking this foundational data [that is] both a 2D and 3D digital twin of the entire world, but as you drive more advanced analytics, it requires additional sensor data that you have to fuse together,” said Dan Smoot, the CEO of Vantor, in an interview with The Times. “Now, you can actually give real-time updates of things that are happening in the world, and it really does help our warfighter moving forward.”
Vantor is using different machine learning and AI models to conduct real-time monitoring of the geo-spatial and imagery data that they’ve provided the government for years.
The application of AI and other processing, ensuring that the information is accurate, is critical because of the size and volume of intelligence the company is taking in. Mistakes fed into a model can quickly compound into larger issues.
“Any of these models, you really have to focus on the cleanliness of the data,” Mr. Smoot said. “That’s one of the most important things that we want to make sure we’re doing is driving that data that is very clean to be able to run the models off of.”
That same data will make its way all the way down to soldiers.
Mr. Smoot told The Times that the partnership with Anduril to collaborate on the Soldier Borne Mission Command system will make its way into the new Eagle Eye product, the futuristic augmented reality helmet Anduril founder Palmer Luckey has shown off in recent months, including on the Joe Rogan podcast.
“We’re bringing the 3D, or the foundational data, into that,” Mr. Smoot said.
The tech is quickly approaching a point of being able to recreate the environment from anywhere in the world, via augmented reality, that soldiers would be deployed to. It would allow troops to train in a way that is as close to an exact replica of their objectives as possible.
“You’re basically simulating a warfighting game with the soldiers, with the goggles, and allow them to kind of see a reality, and it’s actually amazing. We saw some of the demos, and it feels very real,” Mr. Smoot said.
Other companies at the Reagan National Defense Forum are working on what would seem like sci-fi tech as well. A partnership in development and discussed during the weekend is researching technology to turn any radio into an intelligence sensor, according to industry sources.
Upgrading and developing new technology for warfighters, while possible, currently isn’t a very fast process.
“Typically that goes over, you give it to the acquisition, then it goes over to contracting, and it takes five to seven years to go through this process, and then it takes that long to produce things.” Gen. George said on the panel.
Mr. Taiclet argued that capabilities “as a service” would allow tech to develop at a faster pace, leveraging the model that Silicon Valley traditionally built companies off of.
“The problem is that there’s no system in the acquisitions organization to buy that service,” Mr. Taiclet said. “That’s something that really has to change in the acquisition system.”
This year’s NDAA, according to lawmakers, has language that directly addresses that in its more than 3,000 pages released Sunday night.
• John T. Seward can be reached at jseward@washingtontimes.com.
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