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Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth announced on Monday a plan aimed at making the U.S. a global leader in artificial intelligence, drones and space technology, arguing that a risk-averse culture has slowed innovation and prevented the Pentagon from providing the best resources to its service members.
Hegseth was speaking alongside SpaceX CEO Elon Musk at the company’s facility in Brownsville, Texas, where he unveiled a strategy to advance the Pentagon’s technology.
“Today is about how we supercharge innovation at the War Department for the era ahead,” Hegseth said in his remarks. “Innovation is happening at a pace we can’t even foresee, and we need the entire enterprise, our enterprise, to embrace the urgency required for this moment. Since the end of the Cold War, the defense industrial base in our country has consolidated. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for new creators of technical innovations to win business in our department.”
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“The result is a risk-averse culture that prevents us from providing our warfighters with the best resources that America has to offer,” he continued. “That ends today. Simply put, the United States must win the strategic competition for 21st century technological supremacy, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, quantum hypersonics and long range drones. If you talk to Elon Musk long enough, he will tell you how important hypersonics and long-range drones are. And he’s 100% correct. Space capabilities, directed energy and biotechnology are the new areas of global competition.”
Hegseth announced an “AI acceleration strategy” that he said will extend the U.S. lead in military AI established during President Donald Trump’s first administration.
“This strategy will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus on investments and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI and that it grows more dominant into the future,” he said. “In short, we will win this race by becoming an AI-first warfighting force across all domains, from the back offices of the Pentagon to the tactical edge on the front lines.”
The secretary added that the “catalyst for this acceleration will be seven pace-setting projects focused on mission threads across warfighting, intelligence and enterprise missions, each with a single, accountable leader, aggressive timelines and measurable outcomes.”
He also said that the consolidation of the U.S. defense industrial base that he says “created a closed innovation ecosystem dominated by just a handful of prime contractors” will be brought to an end amid efforts to boost tech startups.
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“Today, that old era comes to an end,” he said. “The Department of War is reopening to the disruptive energy and agile creativity of our nation’s tech startups, funded by our world’s leading capital markets.”
“For too long, we organized our ecosystem around stages in silos, labs over here, so-called rapid units over there, commercial outreach in a different building or on another coast altogether, and warfare fighters somewhere at the end, almost an afterthought. The result is duplication, drift and confusion,” Hegseth continued.
