That is, at least, the proper terminology in this great American age of rebrands, one that has borne witness to such seismic overhauls as the Gulf of Mexico becoming the Gulf of America, Lake Ontario becoming Lake America, and a push to call New Mexico … New America.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Sept. 29 the term “artificial intelligence” would henceforth be retired in favor of “super intelligence.”

“As these capabilities continue to improve, they increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of Super Intelligence,” the executive order stated.

The president followed that “SI” declaration up with an Oct. 8 Truth Social post asserting that anyone who uses the previous moniker would be branded “THE ENEMY!”

The U.S. Navy this week became one of the first services to avoid that traitorous designation, cementing the super initiative and calling on “all Navy echelons, commands, activities, and personnel [to] use ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI,’” a service memo stated.

“This policy applies effective immediately across all official Navy correspondence, flag letters, OPORDs, wargame documentation, instructional material, fleet advisories, public communications, official websites, strategic assessments, congressional reports, and non-statutory internal and external policy documents,” the memo continued.

As part of the super overhaul, echelon II commanders, type commanders and systems commanders will be required to review all “public releases, intranet portals, and external presentations for compliance” no later than 30 days after the release of the super memo. These personnel will then be required to submit a super report on completing the task.

The directive does not require retroactively amending previously published documentation or contracts, the message noted, while existing laws and statutes “will continue to be cited as statutorily required until conforming congressional amendments are enacted.”

A Military Times request for comment from the sea service regarding what consequences might result should “artificial intelligence” be used was not returned as of press time.

Gecko Robotics announced Tuesday that the Navy is increasing the value of its initial contract to up to $300 million — just six months after the company reached an initial agreement with the sea service.

“Gecko’s AI and robotic technology can save the U.S. Navy up to $8 million in repair costs per ship and return vessels to sea quicker by identifying structural issues up to 50 times faster than traditional methods — reducing inspections from months to days,” Gecko Robotics said in a release.

The initial contract began as a 5-year, $54 million indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity deal for Gecko to work on 18 ships assigned to the Navy’s U.S. Pacific Fleet.

The company uses drones, wall-climbing robots and fixed sensors to gather data on components, decks, welds and hulls.

That information, paired with AI tools, is used to identify current and potential structural issues that may remain hidden to the naked eye.

A key part of the new contract investment is Gecko Robotics’ Komodo machine system, which analyzes the health of deck coatings by scanning — eliminating the need to physically dig into them.

This allows the Navy to plan repairs and map out damaged areas before the ship enters dry dock, something that previously only occurred after the maintenance cycle began.

The Navy has consistently stated its goal of reaching 80% fleet readiness by 2027, despite criticisms of the service’s deployment capabilities.

The Government Accountability Office reported in December 2024 that readiness rates among the Navy’s amphibious warfare ships fell to 46% between 2011 and 2020, hindering Marine Corps deployment and training plans.

In August 2025, that rate reportedly dipped to just 41%, resulting in a more than five-month gap in Marine Expeditionary Unit deployments that year and further straining resources amid the Trump administration’s push to counter the illicit drug trade in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle, who adopted the 80% goal from his predecessor Adm. Lisa Franchetti, laid out the major tenets for achieving the ambitious milestone.

“Achieving this requires shorter maintenance cycles, increased spare-parts availability, improved training pipelines and targeted upgrades across the fleet,” Caudle wrote for Military Times in December.

Survival in Alaska’s vast wilderness, where any hint of complacency can indeed kill, presents a colossal difficulty. Training service members to fight in these environs is an undertaking even more daunting.

For the soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 11th Airborne Division, this task rests, ultimately, on the shoulders of Maj. Gen. John Cogbill and the capable leaders he advises.

And the commanding general of the Arctic Angels would not trade it for anything.

“We have a saying that everything breaks at 40 below,” Cogbill says when asked about these challenges.

Everything, except morale.

From the outside, the soldiers of the 11th Airborne appear to be built differently. But Cogbill insists that’s not the case.

Perhaps it’s the frigid air, wilderness that stretches beyond the horizon or a sky that unleashes snow without end, but troops reporting to Alaska for the first time often do so with “trepidation in their eyes,” he says.

“But when I see them six months later, after they’ve been through their cold-weather indoctrination course and gone out to the field, they realize their team leader, their squad leader, their platoon sergeant — they’re being taken care of,” he says.

“We’re not going to give them something they can’t handle. Then they start to build that trust in their leaders and trust in themselves. That’s when they truly become Arctic-tough.”

Achieving that rare brand of toughness requires both sound leadership and reliable equipment, Cogbill says. Nestled in a region that places the 11th Airborne at a crucial convergence of three combatant commands — U.S. Pacific Command, U.S. Northern Command and U.S. European Command — a soldier’s ability to trust in both is the difference between success and failure.

Cogbill spoke to Military Times about what goes into earning that trust, and how a relentless pursuit of innovation is critical to keeping abreast of distant developments that would be reduced to ruin in the far North.

For the Arctic Angels, accounting for their surroundings is part of the fun.

“Winter is always coming in Alaska,” Cogbill says. “They embrace it.”

Editor’s note: Some answers have been edited for clarity.

MT: We’re watching the Arctic domain become increasingly vital, with threats evolving rapidly. How are developments in the region impacting how you’re preparing your soldiers?

Cogbill: The Department of War has an Arctic strategy for a reason. We can range any of these locations and be within 90% of the industrial world within nine hours.

Billy Mitchell, the father of the modern-day Air Force, said whoever owns Alaska owns the world. It’s a power projection platform in any of those directions — west of the International Date Line to the Indo-Pacific or over the pole to Europe.

Therefore, we have to be able to fight in different environments. But we optimize for the Arctic, because we’re the only Arctic division.

We have to have certain vehicles that no other unit has, such as the Cold Weather All-Terrain Vehicle (CATV), the workhorse for moving soldiers and equipment over snow.

We have to be proficient in skis and snowshoes. We have to be able to jump out of airplanes with this gear. We have to be able to do air assault missions with this kit and then sustain ourselves — not just survive, but fight and thrive.

You mentioned unique equipment. Today’s tech does not universally function in Arctic extremes. How are your troops innovating to overcome those challenges?

Drones are a hot topic right now, and it’s something that I’d say we’re catching up a little bit with the rest of the Army.

We’re not a Transformation-in-Contact division, which means we didn’t have an initial fielding of a large number of small- and medium-range drones. But continuous transformation is a mindset for the 11th Airborne Division, which means we’re learning and adapting quickly, and we’re also bootstrapping this effort by learning from other divisions in the Army and how they’ve utilized first-person-view drones, either for reconnaissance or for strike.

So, we are collaborating with these other divisions — like the 101st Airborne Division and the 25th Infantry Division — to get our own parts, stand up our own Arctic innovation labs and build similar systems.

The difference is, if we want to fly these drones in Alaska during our winter training exercise, the battery life will be about 1/20th of what it is in the Pacific. So, we’re trying to figure out ways to prolong battery life, to build drones that are more capable in high wind, high altitude and sub-freezing temperatures.

Something that works anywhere else in the world — we bring it up to Alaska, take it out to the field and put it through its paces.

If it doesn’t work, then we have innovation partners — academic partners at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, for instance — who we go to and say, “Hey, this is an engineering problem. What can you do to help us?”

They’ve got one of the best small UAS engineering programs in the entire world, because they live and operate in this environment.

So, we share as much as we can, learn from our peers and work closely with the modernization enterprise to pioneer some of these efforts.

When you’re seeking those solutions, what combat lessons can you learn from places like Ukraine or Iran, which may be inherently different environmentally?

There are certain things that just work differently in the Arctic. Mobility is harder, going from point A to point B. Sustainment is harder when you’re talking about moving things off-road through waist-deep snow. Battery life is shortened, which means you have to resupply more often. Water can’t be delivered in bulk. Fuel has to be delivered in cubed ice.

Those are all the logistical challenges. For the individual soldier, it’s about just being able to maneuver.

Common across all these operating environments are the need for decision dominance and for human-machine teaming.

So, we understand the importance of drones, which is why we’re catching up as fast as we can and working with the Army Materiel Command and SkyFoundry initiative to get as many of these drones as possible into the hands of our soldiers so they can operate in any environment.

For the decision dominance piece, it’s about being able to develop a common operating picture and a common intel picture at echelon.

Everywhere from the rifle squad up to the division and corps, all the way up to a combatant commander — where we can see the enemy, see ourselves and use all the sensors at our disposal to make decisions about how to strike most efficiently.

We’re using existing exercises and joint partners to pass targets through tactical data links to do machine-to-machine communication, gain and maintain custody of targets and increase our lethality as a division and warfighting headquarters.

When it comes to unmanned and AI integration, what is your command doing to ensure soldiers are critical thinkers who can inform sound decision-making?

It varies depending on the echelon of command. As the division commander, I’m responsible for every decision we make as a division, whether it’s in training or combat. If I make a decision to strike a target, I own that decision and the outcome.

A culture where commanders feel empowered also means a culture of accountability. Having commanders in the loop — although the machines and AI are evolving rapidly, the Army still expects us as commanders to use judgment and experience to make a call to strike or not strike.

You have to practice that. You have to get reps and sets, and do it through training as often as you can. So, we do exercises every 90 days to help us see the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithms, to code, to work with the engineers and our own operators.

We need to be able to program new strategies and develop agentic AI solutions for targeting that allow us to not only find optimal solutions for shortening kill chains, but also to be able to incorporate large language models in things like rules of engagement and lessons learned.

Anything that we’re doing in a training exercise can then be referenced using these large language models to make us better, to make my decisions faster, better, more informed and hopefully yield better outcomes.

Over the last few years, it is the speed of innovation that has been most staggering. How do you ensure the 11th Airborne is up to speed a year or five years from now?

With the proliferation of these machines — and not just at my level or the squad level, but throughout our formations — we have to train and rehearse this physically.

I mentioned digital targeting, but when you talk about the mechanics of lethal squads, platoons and company commanders who are trying to converge fire and maneuver, you have to put that into live-fire training.

Our brigades at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson recently went through nine company iterations of combined arms live fire. In every single one of those live fires, they were employing FPV drones in a strike capability and in a reconnaissance capability, while also trying to think, “Where would the enemy be attacking us right now? What is our counter-UAS posture?”

So, you’re adding another dimension to a company commander’s thought process as they try to make tactical decisions about how to assault an objective. Again, it’s getting those reps and sets. It becomes ingrained in them that there’s always a machine aspect.

So, maybe you’re a battalion commander, and you have to think, “Who can see me right now? Who can see this command post? How many tents do I have set up? What does that look like from above? What does it look like in the summer? What does it look like in the winter, when I’ve got a green tent on a snowy landscape?”

Or, if you’re one step ahead, maybe you set up a white tent, but then you have to consider, “What kind of EW signature am I emitting that can be picked up by a machine or a sensor? What does my heat signature look like? Because I’ve got all these bodies and machines cranking out processing power inside of a tent.”

So, how do you mitigate that? It requires constant thought about how we see the enemy, but also how the enemy sees us, and making sure that we can adapt and stay ahead.

That’s where I think those lessons learned from the battle labs in Ukraine, Operation Epic Fury and other places inform the way we train. That feedback loop has to be super fast, because we can’t be everywhere and do everything, but we can certainly learn from everywhere.

So, if we can use large language models to put all these lessons learned into a one-stop shop, it makes it a lot easier for us to access all that knowledge and incorporate it into how we train every single day.

You’re not just dealing with tech that needs to work, but a changing landscape as well. Impacts of climate change have opened up sea lanes. Chinese-Russian collaboration has surged as a result. How is the Army adapting to those changes?

We’re worldwide deployable and the Pentagon’s only Arctic division, but we could go anywhere.

We’re very aware of the collusion between adversaries and what that would mean to us. With environmental changes — you talked about sea lanes opening — there are also strategic choke points, and we’re seeing how important choke points can be — like the Strait of Hormuz or Bab al-Mandeb in the Red Sea.

We have the Bering Strait right off the coast of Alaska. And there are people in our neighborhood who don’t always have the best interests of the United States in mind.

So, how do we deter? That’s probably the most important thing we can do is deter an adversary from thinking, “Today’s the day that we’re going to go. We’re going to take a shot at the United States of America.”

You deter through forward presence. You deter through people who are trained, and you deter through capable partners that are able to prevail if it goes from competition to crisis to conflict.

That’s what we’re trying to build every day through Operation Pathways. As we train with our multinational partners, we need the ability to project power, to put ourselves astride some of those strategic choke points and be capable of holding adversaries at bay if they start to encroach on our national boundaries.

You mentioned that everything breaks at -40. But there is a certain love, among troops, in shared misery. How do your junior enlisted stay motivated?

We get our soldiers from the same basic training as anywhere else.

They may be coming from Hawaii. They may be coming from Fort Polk. But when they arrive in Alaska, they realize they have a job to do, and they are going to be expected to operate anywhere from -20 to -40, which was the range of temperatures during our last Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center rotation in February.

That’s expected. That’s what our nation needs us to do. And they rise to the occasion.

My sergeant major and I use the ANGELS acronym to remind soldiers of our expectations of every paratrooper in the 11th Airborne Division as the Arctic Angels.

The A is for Arctic tough. Everybody, whether you’re a sustainer, a cyber warrior or an infantryman, has to be Arctic tough, and you’ve got to be able to operate in that environment.

The N means you’ve got to be able to fight at night. Night fighters have to own the night and maintain that advantage over our enemies.

The G represents being a great teammate, whether that’s inside of your team, squad, company, up to your higher headquarters or down to a subordinate unit. We demand that you be a great teammate.

The E represents being experts in the fundamentals — your PT, marksmanship, battle drills, medical training and mobility. This means a lot. Being part of the 11th Airborne Division means you’ve got to be able to jump out of a plane, air assault, move on snowshoes and skis, pull a sled — do all that’s expected.

The L is to be lethal. That’s why we exist — to close with and destroy the enemy anywhere in the world.

And then lastly, the S. We need soldiers to be standard bearers. Because if you violate a standard in the Arctic, people lose a finger, a hand, a leg or a life. It’s a natural risk to operate in this environment, so we need leaders who are very engaged, who know the standard, who uphold it and model it themselves. That builds trust in the organization.

There’s ultimately so much value in Arctic warfare expertise. Not only are we training Rangers, jump masters, air assault and repel masters, but these are people who have learned how to fight and not just survive, but thrive in these conditions.

And once you’ve served in Alaska, you kind of never want to leave. Most people come here a little bit nervous, but they leave kicking and screaming.

That expertise is only enhanced when working with other services and allies. The Marines this year announced an Alaska rotation, for instance. Do you anticipate more collaboration as the region receives greater focus?

We’re all about joint training opportunities and service interoperability. When we do our annual training exercise up there in the Yukon Training Area, we invite all of our multinational partners and all of our joint partners.

We’ll never fight alone. We’ll never fight as just an Army, and we’ll never fight as just the United States of America. We want everybody to come together.

There is plenty of training area in the Joint Pacific Alaskan Range Complex. It’s two and a half times the size of the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California. So, imagine all that wild and wonderful wilderness out there with very permissive airspace and a lot of maneuver area.

So, the more the merrier for us, and those joint training opportunities help us see gaps and seams where maybe our machines are not talking. But we want to be able to seamlessly have a common operating picture and share a common intel picture on a single pane of glass.

You can’t know if you can do it well or not unless you train together on a regular basis, so we welcome that opportunity.

Part of maximizing training is budgeting for it. If you were going to pitch the importance of the Arctic to those who distribute those resources, what would you say?

With the budget, it’ll work out, and soldiers will find ways to train. PT is free, so if we have physically fit, Arctic-tough soldiers, then that’s what we’re going to be.

We can go out there and train in the elements and do all those things we’ve discussed, but I think the most important thing is that we have to be able to project this power. Alaska is far away from a lot, but it’s strategically located at the center of three combatant commands.

If you’re going to build an Arctic-capable lethal fighting force, you have to be able to get it to the fight, whether that’s in the Pacific, Europe, or anywhere else in the world.

When I served in Alaska 25 years ago, we had an airborne battalion task force, but now we have an entire division that’s airborne and air assault capable. And we have these cold-weather all-terrain vehicles. We have all of the kit that the Army has invested in.

How do you get it to the fight? That’s infrastructure, that’s power projection, that’s joint interoperability with the Air Force to make sure we can get there. That’s understanding the sea lines of communication that you brought up earlier, so we can float those things and get it there fast enough.

That goes to our ready-forward concept with Operation Pathways. Not only do we train with multinational partners to build that interoperability and trust, but we also train in those locations to be west of the International Date Line with soldiers and equipment.

So, if we need to do something somewhere in the Pacific, we’re already there with our gear. That really shortens the commute time, if you will.

It’s critically important that we maintain that capability.

Demand for exquisite munitions has skyrocketed as conflicts in Iran and Ukraine — and an ever-tense Indo-Pacific — continue to redefine stockpile demand.

So, too, has there developed an insatiable market for cheap systems and interceptors capable of balancing scales that, in regions like the Middle East, have been encumbered by cost-per-kill ratios as lopsided as 114-1 — in the case of a PAC-3 interceptor versus a Shahed-136 drone.

If that weren’t enough to consider, there’s the lightning-quick speed of AI integration and unmanned systems into formations, and the reality of having to rethink a simple concept — hiding — that was seldom given a second thought due to the total air superiority of the Global War on Terror.

Such frenzied developments, meanwhile, come against a backdrop of new Pentagon policy that aims to eliminate the antiquated red tape of the acquisition process and speed development to the battlefield.

A daunting cluster of problems to solve, no doubt. But if encountering such a catalog of to-dos is stress-inducing, one would not know it when speaking to U.S. Army Under Secretary Mike Obadal, who finds himself at the center of many of these discussions.

From his office and out on the trail, Obadal oversees the service’s business operations, acquisition strategy, and manpower and personnel systems, among myriad other duties.

Obadal assumed the position after a stint in the private sector, which followed a military career that included time as a Special Operations officer, the status of Master Army Aviator and qualifications in nine different aircraft.

Obadal spoke to Military Times about how he and the Army are approaching these seismic shifts in warfighting philosophy, and how this year’s AUSA exposition reflects the blistering pace of innovation that catalyzes them.

There are many examples of individuals without military experience working in consequential positions within the Pentagon. You are not one. How has your military experience shaped how you approach this role?

What I try very hard to do is not let my experience drive the way I do things. I want it to inform the way I do things, whether that’s my experience working with the interagency and seeing how other executive branch agencies operate, my experience in the conventional military or in other parts of the military, doing joint work, working with partners and allies or going out into corporate America.

I don’t want any one of those things to be the driver of how I make decisions and conduct myself in the business of the Army, but I do want all of it to come together and inform it.

So, it’s certainly very helpful for me when I talk to soldiers or when I look at programs or weapon systems.

The biggest thing it helps me with is understanding that there’s no single weapon system that operates by itself anywhere. They are all part of a joint force, and within that, you have a maneuver Army that is reliant — tanks are reliant on infantry, infantry is reliant on fires, all of it is reliant on aviation, medical and logistics.

All those components work together as a chain, and you have to make sure every link in the chain is as strong as possible.

That’s one of the biggest things that I take away from being in the military: an understanding that all of these things have to work in synergy, and there are no easy solutions.

We continue to watch the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran unfold. What do you expect to see at an event like AUSA that reflects what America has learned from them?

If you walk around the hall at AUSA, it’ll give you a good indication of the Army’s priorities. Our priorities are reflected in what we’re procuring.

Going back several years, when we were in the Middle East and we first saw adversary drones — counter-drone systems became a really important topic. It kind of started in the special operations and then expanded into the larger Army.

Ukraine has not just reinforced that counter-UAS is a critical part of operations today; it’s cemented it.

So, if you walk around AUSA, you’re going to see an immense number of not only drones but also counter-UAS. That’s a reflection of the procurement and the budget, not just in the Army but in the Pentagon.

That’s number one. Number two is software. Being able to see, sense and integrate to understand what your positional advantage is, and understand the adversary and their vulnerabilities.

That’s just military operations, but today it’s looking at how we apply the best sensors and best software to bring all of that together to give decision advantage to our commanders.

The third one is fires, and when you look at current conflicts, the importance of long-range precision fires is highlighted.

So, what you’ll also see at the conference is a reflection of our investment portfolio in our magazine depth, but also the variety of munitions.

Expanding out the optionality that commanders have beyond just one or two exquisite munitions, with everything from longer-range artillery, one-way attack and loitering munitions, up into our higher-end missiles.

All of those represent our fires portfolio, but that’s just for offensive operations. When we get into the defensive side, we’ll be seeing everything from ballistic missiles down to Group One drones.

If you look at those three areas — drones and counter-UAS; software and sensors; and the fires portfolio — and were to roll back the clock to AUSA 10 years ago, the difference is remarkable.

At that time, the focus was very vehicle-centric, armor-centric, pieces of kit for individual soldiers. All of those things are important and are continuing to advance, but these newer investment areas represent a noticeable shift in warfare.

These conflicts are obviously influencing the speed of acquisition. But that process includes an emphasis on both cost-friendly and exquisite munition stockpiles. What is the best balance to ensure success?

The conflicts are definitely influencing and accelerating the way the Army — and certainly the broader Department — are innovating, prototyping, procuring and then fielding different capabilities.

If you were to roll back a decade or even less, you would see very traditional models that go from experimentation into writing an initial requirement document, then into prototyping, then selection, then low-rate production and then finally into fielding and high-rate production.

That’s years long. That process is very deliberate, and it built our military to where it is today, which is still the most dominant, but with a number of vulnerabilities because of technical innovation in the commercial market that adversaries are able to take advantage of.

So, where can we compress this cycle and get it more into a process where we ask the commercial industry to experiment on their dime?

A lot of this has to do with private capital being interested in the defense market. They’re making a bet that they can get through some of the experimentation, and then we can follow on with prototyping and quickly get into low-rate and high-rate production before fielding.

Fielding then allows us to get immediate feedback that goes back into industry. That is essentially what had to happen in Ukraine because it’s existential to them.

So, when we say wartime footing, Ukraine is on the ultimate wartime footing, and there are lessons to draw from there. What are the unnecessary steps in the acquisition process? Where can you smartly accept risk?

Probably one of the biggest drivers of speeding things up is acknowledging that we’re willing to accept risk. We know that if we get a tighter innovation cycle, we’re accepting more risk on the battlefield, but we’re also driving down risk on the battlefield because we’re getting it to them much sooner.

So, then we get into how that translates to fires. Exquisite versus low cost. It’s a balance, or a high-low mix, essentially, where we have to have both offensive and defensive exquisite weapons.

We have to have certain stockpiles to be able to counter the exquisite weapons of our adversaries and have our own effects. Then you get into mass, which comes when we start going beyond the first few days of a conflict, and we’re in protraction. We have to have affordable mass. The cost curve needs to come back in our favor.

While balancing the above, how much of a difference has the surge in domestic manufacturing made in having these pre-positioned elements assisting efforts?

A massive difference.

The Infantry Squad Vehicle is a perfect example. That’s a Chevy Colorado chassis; the drivetrain and suspension are a little different, but it’s nothing unusual.

Essentially, it then goes to a detailer that puts the military-specific equipment on top of it. It’s everything that we need it to be.

As with anything, it has its vulnerabilities. We’re sacrificing heavy armor and survivability, which we needed throughout the GWOT years, for mobility, transportability and ease of repair.

But using this model also allows us to sustain it far more easily because so many of the components are commercial.

It especially matters when you get into keeping the ISV — or domestically made equipment — in the decades ahead and needing improvements over the years. With the ISV, as Chevy makes improvements to its chassis and drivetrain, that immediately feeds back into the production line of ISVs.

So, we’re now getting upgrades that are just byproducts of the commercial market.

With acquisition, there’s a major emphasis on AI. What are you discussing with tech companies to ensure the human-in-the-loop element equates to maintaining final say despite the speed of the tech?

Every company that deals with this emerging technology and the military is of the same mindset, which is that the human-in-the-loop factor has to be the default.

There are workflows and cycles that human commanders can say, “I need this to run in the background, and I don’t need to see it or be on it.” But when it comes to kinetic kill chains and making decisions on the battlefield, the workflows that enable commanders have to have very hard stops.

It’s not just a commander saying yes or no. It’s far more complicated and nuanced. It’s presenting options based on a tremendous amount of computing analysis and saying, “Here are all the courses of action based on the priorities that you gave, based on the environmental factors that the agents have been able to ingest and all of the long-term planning that goes into it.

That allows the commanders to then take highly complex tasks like mission planning and distill it down into areas where they can consume it more easily, and then apply what only humans can do, which is context and reason.

That context and reason part is what the tech companies that work with us are very focused on enabling, as opposed to taking over entire workflows.

Autonomy is important, really, in three areas when it comes to warfighting.

Think about combat breaching. That’s one of the most dangerous things we ask a human to do: to breach a linear minefield or barrier. If we can automate that, that removes something inherently dangerous.

The second is highly complex, like command and control. How do you distill what would take human staff officers hours or days into seconds, and give a commander not only several options, but the analysis behind it and the confidence in the product being presented?

The third is the ability to remove repetitive and mundane things human soldiers are doing. Resupplying via trucks, for instance. If we can automate that, we are removing that task from our logistics soldiers and allowing them to apply their talents to solving real problems with a clear vision and mindset.

Beyond weapon systems, something as simple as staging — or hiding — equipment or personnel requires a vastly different strategy than even 10 years ago. How does something as simple as saying, “How do we hide this helo?” impact your conversations with industry?

It’s not something that we’ve had to truly consider as an Army for 40 or 50 years because we were guaranteed air superiority.

We don’t have air superiority at this point because of long-range fires and precision targeting from space.

So, you go back to dispersion, displacement of assets and disaggregation of large headquarters. As you remember from recent decades, a division headquarters would be a massive entity with satellite dishes and other assets in the open. Those days are gone.

We now have to consider how we bring in technology from the companies to allow us to displace 10-foot satellite dishes and 20 miles of wire, and actually have small-scale edge compute and transport systems that can disaggregate everyone. That’s incredibly important.

Certainly, camouflage comes into play. Other classified capabilities come into play as well, and that’s all just the visible element. Then you get into electronic warfare and the ability to monitor.

So, how do you disaggregate some of that?

Those are all things that we are actively moving — and coming back to — in a more modern stance.

“The execution of Nidal Hasan by firing squad will take place at Fort Hood, Texas, on Thursday, December 3rd, 2026, at 1 p.m. CT.,” acting Army Secretary Adam Telle announced, confirming that the location would return Hasan to the site of the murders.

A memo Telle shared on X stated that President Donald Trump approved the execution order on Oct. 2.

“The execution officer will be the Commandant, United States Disciplinary Barracks,” the memo states.

Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell first announced the execution order on Monday, stating, “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended — and President Donald J. Trump has approved — death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan, the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009.

“He killed 13 people and wounded 32 others while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ during the attack,” Parnell wrote.

If the date and method of execution are carried out, it would mark the first such case for the service since Jan. 31, 1945, when Pvt. Eddie D. Slovik was executed by a U.S. Army firing squad in France for desertion during World War II.

The last death sentence carried out by the U.S. military was in 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was executed by hanging at the gallows in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, after he was convicted of raping and attempting to kill a young girl.

Hasan, who was born in northern Virginia, walked into a Fort Hood readiness processing center on Nov. 5, 2009, and opened fire using a semi-automatic handgun.

Thirteen people were killed, including a pregnant soldier.

Former Army Staff Sgt. Patrick Zeigler, a two-time combat veteran, was shot four times in the attack and spent nearly a year recovering in various hospitals.

“He looked me straight in the eyes as he pointed the gun at me, and a split second later, I’m on the floor with a hole in my head,” he told the Killeen Daily Herald in 2023.

At his court-martial, Hasan, now 56, admitted to the shooting, and in 2013 said he carried out the attack in support of the Taliban.

At the time, Hasan requested a delay in court proceedings so he could ready a new legal strategy that would show he acted “in defense of others.”

Asked by presiding Judge Col. Tara Osborn who he was defending, Hasan replied, “The leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban.”

Hasan was convicted by a military jury in August 2013, which recommended he be sentenced to death.

He was subsequently transferred to Fort Leavenworth, where he has been incarcerated on death row.

“Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended — and President Donald J. Trump has approved — death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan, the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009,” Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell announced. “He killed 13 people and wounded 32 others while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ during the attack.

“The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution,” he continued. “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.”

If Hasan’s execution is indeed carried out by a firing squad, it would mark the first such case for the service since Jan. 31, 1945, when Pvt. Eddie D. Slovik was executed by a U.S. Army firing squad in France for desertion during World War II.

The last death sentence carried out by the U.S. military was in 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was executed by hanging at the gallows in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, after he was convicted of raping and attempting to kill a young girl.

Hasan, who was born in northern Virginia, walked into a Fort Hood readiness processing center on Nov. 5, 2009, and opened fire using a semi-automatic handgun.

Thirteen people were killed, including a pregnant soldier.

Former Army Staff Sgt. Patrick Zeigler, a two-time combat veteran, was shot four times in the attack and spent nearly a year recovering in various hospitals.

“He looked me straight in the eyes as he pointed the gun at me, and a split second later, I’m on the floor with a hole in my head,” he told the Killeen Daily Herald in 2023.

At his court-martial, Hasan, now 56, admitted to the shooting, and in 2013 said he carried out the attack in support of the Taliban.

At the time, Hasan requested a delay in court proceedings so he could ready a new legal strategy that would show he acted “in defense of others.”

Asked by presiding Judge Col. Tara Osborn who he was defending, Hasan replied, “The leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban.”

Hasan was convicted by a military jury in August 2013, which recommended he be sentenced to death.

He was subsequently transferred to Fort Leavenworth, where he has been incarcerated on death row.

Jonathan Lehrfeld contributed to this report.

“Early investment and a relentless focus on quality and execution have positioned us to now deliver seekers at unprecedented levels in the near-term, and we’re committed to building on that momentum,” Steve Parker, president and CEO of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, said in a release. “Our Boeing teammates could not be prouder of the role they play in protecting U.S. and allied service members, civilians and critical infrastructure worldwide.”

The agreement follows the framework deal that was announced in April. Production will be spread over seven years, matching Lockheed Martin’s push to surge production on the PAC-3 MSE all-up round.

Lockheed in January announced a seven-year framework agreement to increase annual PAC-3 interceptor production from approximately 600 to 2,000.

Work on the seekers began immediately, the company announced in April, and will be completed at Boeing’s facility in Huntsville, Alabama.

Boeing’s PAC-3 seekers work by identifying, tracking and knocking out a range of threats, from ballistic missiles and hypersonics to hostile air platforms.

Once the seeker identifies the target, the highly maneuverable interceptor, which uses a two-pulse solid rocket motor, engages and eliminates threats via direct body-to-body contact.

Monday’s announcement, meanwhile, comes as the U.S. military’s reliance on costly interceptors against cheap munitions, particularly those deployed by Iran during Operation Epic Fury, has come under increased scrutiny over the past eight months.

The announcement also follows a busy week for Boeing. Last Tuesday, the U.S. Navy selected the company to build its F/A-XX sixth-generation carrier-based fighter under a development contract worth more than $20 billion. The same day, the Air Force signed a $2.38 billion order for 22 more F-15EX Eagle II fighters.

Military Times reporter Michael Scanlon contributed to this report.

The Pentagon on Tuesday announced a $5.1 billion fixed-ceiling incentive contract with HII to complete the carrier’s mid-life overhaul at Virginia’s Newport News Shipbuilding.

The refueling and complex overhaul, or RCOH, comprises approximately one-third of the maintenance and modernization a carrier will undergo during its service life, according to the announcement.

The RCOH process on Truman will “include refueling the ship’s reactors, as well as extensive modernization work in thousands of compartments and tanks, as well as on most ship systems,” a HII release stated. “In addition, major upgrades will be made in the propulsion plant and combat systems.”

Truman’s overhaul notice comes a little over a year after the carrier completed a 251-day deployment that saw the vessel fire over 1.1 million pounds of ordnance and unleash the largest carrier-launched airstrike in history.

Despite making combat history, the carrier’s deployment was also plagued by incidents that prompted an array of investigations.

In February 2025, the ship collided with the merchant vessel Besiktas-M near Port Said, Egypt. The ship’s commanding officer Capt. Dave Snowden was subsequently relieved due to a loss of confidence in his ability to command.

Truman also lost a trio of F/A-18 Super Hornets during the deployment. One was shot down by the guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg in a friendly-fire incident. Another experienced a failed arrested landing and went overboard. A third slipped off the hangar deck as a result of evasive maneuvers in response to an incoming ballistic missile and fell into the Red Sea.

Homeported at Naval Station Norfolk, Truman will be the eighth Nimitz-class carrier to complete its mid-life RCOH in Newport News.

“Our team has been diligently working to get ahead on this critical engineering and construction project that will prepare USS Harry S. Truman for the second half of her service life,” Bryan Caccavale, the Newport News Shipbuilding vice president of program management, said in a release. “When the ship arrives at NNS, we’ll apply that same diligence to working with our suppliers and Navy partners to ensure a successful recapitalization of CVN 75.”

The announcement did not specify when work on the carrier would begin, but noted that the overhaul is expected to be completed by November 2031.

The contract includes additional options that, if applied, could bump its total value to closer to $5.2 billion.

Inked at $20 billion for the full-scale development phase, the contract, according to a Pentagon release, “procures multiple test aircraft for ground, airworthiness, systems, and weapons integration testing.”

“The F/A-XX is a critical pillar in our commitment to maintaining peace through strength,” Michael P. Duffey, under secretary of defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, said in the release. “F/A-XX will dominate contested airspace, extend operational reach, and deliver a decisive combat advantage for the warfighter.”

Equipped with an extended range to provide power projection from U.S. carriers, Boeing has promised that the F/A-XX will, crucially, be interoperable with both manned and unmanned platforms such as Collaborative Combat Aircraft.

“This achievement marks a new era for the U.S. Navy,” said acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao. “The Sixth-Generation fighter is a generational leap in air superiority and will provide the world’s best aviators with unparalleled capabilities to fight, win, and come home safe. We are excited to partner with Boeing, and for our warfighters to continue to dominate the skies and defeat our nation’s enemies.”

Boeing’s contract award marks another milestone victory for the company, which has now all but guaranteed its monopoly on sixth-generation fighters across the services.

In 2025, Boeing beat out Lockheed Martin for the contract to build the U.S. Air Force’s sixth-generation fighter under the Next Generation Air Dominance program, or NGAD.

That aircraft, since dubbed the F-47, has entered its engineering and manufacturing development phase, one service official announced in July, with first flights expected as early as 2028.

The Air Force at the time announced plans to purchase at least 185 of the next-gen fighters, a number designed to replace the F-22 Raptor fleet.

The F/A-XX program, meanwhile, which has yet to receive its official designation, has been the subject of funding disputes for years, with engineering and supply chain concerns prompting some Pentagon officials to push for delaying the program.

The carrier-based fighter jet is slated to anchor the Navy’s next-generation fighter fleet — operating alongside the F-35 — and is expected to replace the aging inventory of F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers beginning in the 2030s.

“It’s an honor to be selected to produce the Navy’s first sixth^–generation platform,” Steve Parker, president and chief executive officer of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, said in a release announcing the deal. “Backed by decades of work, bolstered by game-changing innovations and solidified by the investments we’ve made in new facilities uniquely suited to build multiple products with next-generation capabilities, our dedicated and talented team is ready to execute this critical program.”

Answering a displaced service member’s question about retrieving personal goods from the base they previously called home, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle said the Navy would not be using Naval Support Activity Bahrain for the foreseeable future.

“We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” Caudle said. “I just want to be completely honest with that.”

On Feb. 28, Iran struck NSA Bahrain with missiles and one-way attack drones after the U.S. and Israeli militaries launched strikes on the Islamic Republic.

The Pentagon initially reported zero fatalities and said the strikes did not significantly impact military operations.

Several months later, however, the true impacts of the strike are coming into focus.

Retired Navy Capt. John Cordle recently described the loss of NSA Bahrain as having “profound tactical and strategic repercussions.”

“The more we learn about the attacks on the U.S. Naval Support Activity in Manama, Bahrain, during the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the clearer it becomes why the news of its near destruction was not initially reported or acknowledged,” Cordle said.

Moving supply hubs that were once hundreds of miles away to thousands of miles away will prove to be a major limitation to future maritime operations, he added.

A sailor who was deployed aboard an Independence-class littoral combat ship during the Iran war told Military Times that they were unable to get food resupplies after NSA Bahrain was damaged.

After the damage, the Navy shifted to relying on a logistics hub at Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that sits more than 2,000 miles away from the service’s carrier strike groups in the Middle East.

The distance required the sailors onboard the LCS to place food orders 30 days in advance, which proved challenging due to the unpredictable schedule of frenzied military operations.

At an Aug. 11 town hall in San Diego, military families told acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao that they were concerned about food shortages and declining morale aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln after the ship had not made an official port call in over seven months.

Damage to the Fifth Fleet headquarters, barracks, warehouses and communication towers at NSA Bahrain may lead to construction costs worth roughly $400 million, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.

Meanwhile, thousands of troops and their families are reportedly still in limbo, with many living in temporary lodging while waiting to be reunited with their belongings — and even pets — after the base’s destruction.

Vice Adm. Curt Renshaw, who leads the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, admitted during a recent virtual town hall with Navy families that the service is “making it up as we go because nothing is conceived to go on this length of time.”

“These are complex problems, and the solutions have not been exactly obvious,” Renshaw said.