Explosive ordnance disposal warfare lieutenants with six years of commissioned service and lieutenant commanders with 10 years of commissioned service are eligible for bonuses of up to $100,000.

Both ranks can commit to a 2-year or 4-year contract with different payment plans.

Lieutenants who sign up for the 4-year contract bonus receive a $100,000 retention bonus and must complete the EOD Department Head Qualified training by 8 years of commissioned service.

Lieutenants can also opt for a 2-year contract bonus, netting $12,500 annually, with the possibility of another two-year bonus worth the same amount at eight years of commissioned service.

This track would ensure $50,000 in bonuses.

The Navy is offering lieutenant commanders $100,000 in retention bonuses if they sign a 4-year contract after notching 10 years of commissioned service.

They can also instead sign up for a 2-year contract after those 10 years, with a $15,000 annual payment. If they re-up the 2-year contract at 12 years, they are eligible for the same yearly payment until they reach 14 years of commissioned service.

Eligible officers can submit an application through their commanding officer for the retention bonus within one year of being eligible.

The officer must submit a copy of their original signed contract and commanding officer approval to the Bureau of Naval Personnel for consideration.

The Navy has recently devoted its explosive ordnance resources to Arctic training, as the U.S. and allied nations focus on defending the frozen terrain from Chinese and Russian infiltration.

U.S. sailors worked alongside Swedish and Norwegian troops during February’s Arctic Specialist 26 exercise to destroy explosives underwater and on land.

Commander of I Corps Lt. Gen. Matt McFarlane told reporters at a media roundtable in Washington that the desire to see the platform deployed across the formation by the end of fiscal 2027 was dependent on what the service was able to provide.

“Scaling and speed up is based on resources available,” said McFarlane. “That’s not in my job jar.”

The Army’s NGC2 platform will permit technologies, weapons, sensors, devices and applications from across the force to co-exist on the same network, streamlining decision-making during combat environments.

As the service expands the new platform across the I Corps, which oversees troops across the Indo-Pacific, the Army will get a close-up look at how the system allows military personnel and machines to communicate with each other over vast geographical distances and in communication-contested environments.

Among its many responsibilities, the I Corps works with Security Assistance Group-Ukraine, a U.S.-led joint military command headquartered in Germany that provides weapons and training support to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

I Corps uses SAG-U to digest lessons learned from the unique military dynamics of the war in Ukraine and determine how to apply them to other potential conflicts worldwide.

The Army recently awarded defense tech company Anduril Industries a contract worth up to $1.8 billion to continue developing NGC2’s common data baseline, or software foundation.

Anduril, along with Palantir, Raft and Striveworks, has been refining the technology to help the service move NGC2 from the experimental phase to fielding.

The resources McFarlane referred to include funds, which are currently up in the air as the Senate still works to pass the National Defense Authorization Act.

With Congress currently in recess, the timeline for approval of those funds is murky.

The Army’s proposed budget for fiscal 2027 includes a $904 million request for the research, development and scaling of NGC2.

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.

Speaking at the Association of the United States Army Conference in Washington, Lt. Gen. Christopher Eubank described an iterative human-in-the-loop process in which military personnel learn in real time how to balance giving AI agents autonomy and exercising control over them.

“It’s occurring daily and weekly inside of the headquarters as we watch agents learn and grow, and then determine what we should let them do on their own versus have a human in the loop,” Eubank said. “All work right now is safeguarded human-in-the-loop as we continue to learn across this very important emergent technology.”

Military personnel currently watch AI agents perform routine tasks, with a governance board within Army Cyber Command making decisions on whether that agent should be allowed to continue performing a task without human intervention or whether it should be allowed to work unsupervised.

During its current human-in-the-loop iteration, every machine AI team checked in with the human team daily and was not operating alone.

Every AI agent was also assigned the same work role as a human, so Army Cyber command trained those agents to be masters of their craft in the same way the Army did with the humans.

As the service worked through the iterative process, the uptick in speed that AI ushered in was drastic.

In two days, an AI agent could complete work that took an analytics support officer six months, Eubank said.

Army Cyber Command used artificial intelligence to operate, secure, defend and attack networks, and make sure that technology works hand in hand with the human workforce, according to Eubank.

Artificial intelligence also enabled the command to move faster than it had ever moved and sift through mountains of data at machine speed, which allowed humans to focus on solving critical problems.

Head of Army Cyber Command Lt. Gen. Christopher Eubank on Monday at the Association of the United States Army conference in Washington gave an approximate timeline for when the service would be delivering the new unit devoted to the exact same mission as the 11th Cyber Battalion, dubbed the Leviathans.

“It should start standing up in earnest within the next couple months, and it will be an exact replica of the 11th Cyber Warfare Battalion,” Eubank said.

The new battalion will achieve initial operating capability within the next year and from there work toward full operational capability, according to the Cyber Command leader.

The battalion is currently working on behalf of Joint Task Force–Southern Border, providing radio frequency-enabled cyber effects as directed by the division commander, Eubank said.

The Leviathans was activated on Oct. 16, 2022, as the first scalable expeditionary capability to handle the Army’s current and future cyberspace objectives.

It was built with the specific intention of rolling out non-lethal and non-kinetic effects that include cyberspace and electronic warfare assets.

Its previous iteration, the 915th Cyber Warfare Battalion, was activated on June 6, 2018, before being renamed during the 11th Cyber Battalion’s activation.

At the time of the battalion’s creation, the Army said it planned to have 12 expeditionary teams it could deploy under the 11th Cyber Battalion by September 2027.

The service has labeled the battalion the first of its kind.

“Just as Gen. Patton led the modernization of tank warfare into WWII, the leaders and soldiers of the 11th Cyber Battalion spearhead concept development for the delivery of CEMA [cyber electromagnetic activity] combat power to the tactical edge of the contemporary battlefield,” said Lt. Col. Lou Etienne, who led the 11th Cyber Battalion until June 25.

Developers from 11th Cyber Command worked alongside the Cyber Solutions Development unit within the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade to develop new drone technology between July 2025 and July 2026.

The partnership project was performed to support the Army’s “Transforming in Contact” initiative, which delivers new unmanned technology to soldiers to track their feedback in real time as they utilize it in the field.

The 11th Cyber Battalion also participated in a demonstration at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, from August. 5-8, simultaneously deploying three new Army technologies and proving their efficacy in diffusing electromagnetic threats from enemies.

Forterra installed its AutoDrive autonomy software platform that powers unmanned maneuverability onto Hypercraft’s Razorback ground vehicle, yielding a product that can withstand the punishing logistics of combat without putting soldiers at risk.

“The point of an autonomous military vehicle is to deliver payloads to the point of friction,” Forterra Chief Growth Officer Scott Sanders said. “Razorback has the power, power generation and capacity to carry a wide variety of weapons systems without modification.”

Forterra’s AutoDrive autonomous driving system has become an industry standard, integrated on more than 200 vehicles in active service.

Meanwhile, the Razorback weaponizes 300 horsepower, 4,0000 volumes of payload range, a 500-mile range and up to 38 kilowatts of distributable power.

Forterra was the first U.S. ground autonomy company to be actively deployed in Ukraine and has completed 88 casualty evacuation missions to rescue Ukrainian soldiers from the front lines, according to Forterra spokesperson Kelsey Szablowski.

That mission to not put military personnel in harm’s way is part of Forterra’s mantra.

“Robots don’t bleed,” Szablowski said.

The Army has taken notice of the company’s approach.

In August, the service selected Forterra as a prime contractor for its Engineer Autonomous Breaching Capability program, a larger effort to field autonomous vehicles during mine-clearing missions.

The company outfitted a Ford F-250 with its AutoDrive technology and named it the Mobile Autonomous Uncrewed Lanemaker, or MAUL.

The MAUL, which hosts no human in the driver’s seat and can drive autonomously or be controlled by an operator, is made for reconnaissance, planning and clearing in mine-contested environments.

The autonomous vehicle deploys a rocket-propelled mine-clearing line charge, or MICLIC, to detonate explosives in an area before driving through.

In mid-August, Forterra demonstrated the MAUL’s capabilities during Project Sandhills at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in which drones attacked the vehicle as it attempted to mine-detect and clear.

The MAUL fought off and destroyed the drones with an onboard automated turret, while it navigated through the area autonomously.

The exercise took place from Aug. 17 to Aug. 28 and demonstrated the Army’s ability to tackle a myriad of mission sets using attributable autonomous systems that reduce risks to soldiers.

“Instead of relying solely on high-value, crewed assets, we can field semi-autonomous F-250s, sUAS swarms and autonomous c-UAS systems that are adaptable, scalable and resilient,” said Capt. Denny Drummey, Sandhills Project operations officer, during the exercise.

The service will pay a one-year total of $93.6 million, spread out across nine companies, to create applications for its Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, software.

“While the Army is providing capability we can deploy today, we’re also providing a blueprint and reference point for how industry can integrate in the future with interoperability and speed,” said Brig. Gen. Shane Taylor, portfolio management executive for the Command and Control Information Network.

The NGC2 will provide a shared network for technologies, weapons, sensors, devices and applications to operate within that will increase decision-making speed on the battlefield.

The chosen companies include General Dynamics Mission Systems, Air Space Intelligence Federal, Immersive Wisdom, LMI, Mente Systems, Stilman Advanced Strategies, Onebrief, Rune Technologies and AIR.

The applications will be hosted on the common data baseline, or software foundation, that Anduril Industries, Palantir, Raft and Striveworks have built in collaboration with the Army.

The NGC2 system, in conjunction with the applications the companies build for it, will allow information sharing that streamlines mission completion across the Army’s six warfighting functions of command and control, fires, intelligence, movement and maneuver, sustainment and protection, the service said.

The Army is currently in the process of delivering the NGC2 software to the I Corps, which commands service members in the Indo-Pacific.

The move will further test NGC2 software’s ability to host technologies and devices separated by thousands of miles, some in communication-contested environments.

The Army has spent the last year moving from the experimental phase to the fielding phase of NGC2, going from prototype development to placing software in the hands of soldiers at the 4th and 25th Infantry Divisions.

In July 2026, the Army hosted a 10-day event at Fort Irwin, California, entitled Project Convergence-Capstone 6, that asked 10,000 participants from U.S. and allied forces as well as industry partners using 90 technologies to test software for the NGC2.

The service conducted a joint force exercise shortly after in May at Fort Irwin that marked the end of the NGC2 prototype phase and came away stating that the new platform was ready to be scaled up.

The Army awarded Anduril Industries a $162.8 million contract on Sept. 30 worth up to 1.8 billion to continue refining the NGC2’s common data baseline, or software foundation.

The Cyber Mastery Incentive program debuted on Oct. 1, promising a new way of paying service members that rewards technology mastery and performance of demanding tasks. But reports emerged that the program wasn’t as financially enticing as advertised, with reductions in certain soldiers’ pay by up to $1,000 per month.

Lt. Gen. Christopher Eubank told audience members at the Association of the United States Army conference in Washington that wasn’t the case.

“Nobody’s losing pay,” said Eubank.

The new incentive plan was broken down into two tiers: skill incentive pay and special duty assignment pay.

The former provides a financial incentive to soldiers for their specific skill set, whether that’s basic, senior or master.

The latter pays soldiers who complete assignments that U.S. Cyber Command labels “exceptionally demanding.”

Analysts and operators at a basic level could reportedly lose $12,000 a year under the new C-MIP program, while developers could lose $850 a month, reports said.

Service members in the master tier could see their pay boosted between $100 and $250.

Eubank admitted that when the program first rolled out in June, the Army was in danger of putting a dent in soldiers’ wages.

But the service huddled with the Army’s Principal Cyber Advisor Brandon Pugh and Assistant Secretary of Cyber Policy Katherine Sutton and decided to sustain cyber assignment incentive pay for the next year to make sure soldiers’ wages didn’t dip.

Cyber assignment incentive pay offers between $200 and $1500 to soldiers based on skill level, assignment and certification, according to the Army.

The Army would use the CAIP program to fill the gap while it focused on refining the CMIC program over the next year, Eubank said.

It is not immediately evident where the money for C-MIP will come from since the Senate is still deliberating over passing the National Defense Authorization Act and Congress is currently in recess.

The Army instituted C-MIP to remodel how it retains and builds the military and civilian personnel that make up its Cyberspace Operations Forces.

Those in charge were focused on making sure that process was easy on the warfighter.

“Part of my job is making sure this is rolled out, that Army soldiers are being benefited and supported,” said Pugh, who also spoke at AUSA Monday. “If not, that’s going to be our job, to advocate to OSW so they can see where there’s been perhaps some challenges that we can try to course correct over the next year.”

Operation Jailbreak, which began in May and concluded in late August, staged two major events that brought contractors, operational units and Army technical experts together to fast-track the future of unmanned tactical networks.

“The completed effort dismantled longstanding system silos, proving that autonomous platforms, sensors, weapons, and command-and-control (C2) technologies can exchange real-time data seamlessly across disparate vendors,” the Army said after the final initiative concluded.

The first three-week event began in May, bringing 600 people and 50 defense companies to Fort Carson, Colorado.

Former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said the idea for the initiative came after he traveled with then-U.S. Army Europe and Africa Commander Gen. Christopher Donahue to allied training sites in Germany to observe how Ukrainians integrated drones, sensors and shooting platforms onto a single network.

Driscoll resigned on Aug. 31, after allegedly butting heads with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Donahue unexpectedly relinquished command of U.S. Army Europe and Africa in July and retired in August.

Driscoll and Donahue observed Ukrainian military utilizing one network that allowed different systems and technologies to exchange data and information without any software barrier.

This, in turn, sped up the ability to identify and destroy targets.

Within 30 days of the first Operation Jailbreak event at Fort Carson, the Army began fielding system integrations with service members in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility.

Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer for Operation Jailbreak, lauded the strides in technology by describing a nightmare hypothetical involving everyday power adapters for civilians.

“Imagine if every accessory you have—light bulbs, toasters, TVs—had a different way to connect,” Miller said at a May 28 media roundtable. “You couldn’t just plug the light bulb in; you had to go find a special cord to plug it into the wall.”

Miller likened the scenario to the siloed information exhanges, explaining that it placed too much pressure on soldiers to act as the adapter and said communication between unmanned machines could change that.

The second and final exercise, Operation Jailbreak Falcon Fury, concluded on Aug. 28 in Tampa, Florida, after a several-week sprint that began on July 27. Seventy companies utilized more than 150 pieces of technology.

Major defense contractors took part, including Epirus, which showcased how its Leonidas high-powered microwave system, which melts drones, could integrate into a wide command-and-control network that hosts other autonomous systems.

Anduril previously helped develop the prototype for the service’s Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, for the 4th Infantry Division, using its proprietary AI-powered operating system Lattice.

“A common data layer allows the Army to integrate new systems without rebuilding the underlying architecture for every sensor, application, or weapon, so new capabilities can be fielded on the same foundation as those already in use,” Anduril said.

The Army awarded $162.8 million to Anduril to continue working on NGC2’s common data baseline, or software foundation, as it begins to implement it across the service’s I Corps, which commands service members across the Indo-Pacific.

The contract contains options that can grow its value up to $1.8 billion.

Anduril, along with Palantir, Raft and Striveworks, have helped build out the baseline.

The NGC2 system will allow technologies, weapons, sensors, devices and applications from across the force to operate on the same network and increase decision-making speed on the battlefield.

By expanding the NGC2 system to the I Corps, technologies will have to figure out ways to connect to the same network despite being separated by thousands of miles and experiencing interrupted or degraded connectivity.

This will provide the Army and Anduril an opportunity to test how well information flows between the systems as they access the NGC2 framework in a myriad of environments.

During a July 2026 ten-day event at Fort Irwin, California, entitled Project Convergence-Capstone 6, the Army asked 10,000 participants from U.S. and allied forces, as well as industry partners using 90 technologies to test software for the NGC2.

Afterward, the Army awarded a contract to Anduril to develop the software prototype for NGC2 for the 4th Infantry Division.

Over the past year, Anduril has conducted several operational exercises in collaboration with the Army to test the NGC2’s common data layer baseline.

In May, Anduril deployed its NGC2 system at Fort Carson and Pinon Canyon, using over 160 tactical edge computers, over 2,500 devices and 40 applications while navigating simulated cyber and electromagnetic attacks.

Two months later, after a joint force exercise at Fort Irwin, the service said the battlefield command system was ready to be scaled.

The NGC2 is set to replace the Army’s first-gen command-and-control system, which helps control fire, logistics and airspace on the battlefield.

The Army has made it clear that it wants to implement the NGC2 as soon as possible.

“We know the biggest risk to our national security and our national defense is not moving too fast. It’s not moving fast enough,” said former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. “The side that can sense a target, process the data, and deliver a kinetic effect the fastest, wins. That is the decisive advantage this capability provides.”