US Military Has Own ChatGPT Now; Bodyguard Satellites: Armed Escorts are Coming to Orbit

INNOVATION

Experimental Ops Unit Matures CCA Concepts, Gets New Boss

On the surface, the change of command ceremony that took place July 31 in a hangar at Creech Air Force Base, Nev., didn’t look that much different from scores of others that have taken place across the Air Force this summer.

A small flag called a guidon was ceremonially passed from the unit’s outgoing commander to a group commander, who then passed it on to the new unit commander.

Tata Advanced Systems and JJV to co-produce Javelin missiles in India

Tata Advanced Systems and the JJV will assess establishing Javelin AUR assembly, integration, and component production in India.

INVESTMENT

Lockheed Martin Ventures open to making ‘defense-specific investments,’ GM says

Lockheed Martin’s venture capital fund is increasingly interested in technology focused on defense, its general manager said today.

“A lot of our investments, I’d say 90% plus, are still kind of dual-use,” Chris Moran, who heads Lockheed Martin Ventures, told reporters. “But in the last couple years, we’ve made a few defense-specific investments, which we probably wouldn’t have contemplated before.”

Andreessen Horowitz Adds $1.75B To Fund Targeting AI And Defense

The firm disclosed the larger pool on Aug. 31, roughly seven months after opening the fund in January at $6.75 billion. David George, the general partner who leads the growth investing team, wrote that scaling companies must become multi-product, multi-channel and multi-geography at more or less the same time.

Money from the fund goes to growth-stage companies that are launching new products, entering new countries and building the sales and pricing operations that early teams tend to outgrow.

Drone-Maker Easy Aerial Plans Production Boost and New Products After $20M Series B

Now, if you’ve been keeping up with the defense-tech world, you’ll know that the drone space is getting mighty competitive, but Easy Aerial didn’t just raise this cash to keep them alive long enough to find product-market fit.

AI

The US military gets its own ChatGPT today

The Pentagon’s main portal for AI tools now offers ChatGPT and Grok for Government alongside Google Gemini.

A Defense Department official said the OpenAI product, dubbed ChatGPT Mil, would bring new strengths to GenAI.mil, where troops and defense civilians can use generative-AI tools to work on controlled, unclassified information, or CUI.

Dataminr Brings Agentic AI to Real-Time Intelligence for Defense Agencies

Dataminr’s First Alert Advanced uses AI agents to verify events, gather context, and update intelligence automatically.

TECHNOLOGY

Inside Greece’s $3.6 Billion Bet on Israeli Air Defense

Greece is preparing to spend roughly $3.6 billion on Israeli air-defense technology, a major military upgrade arriving just as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan begin putting their new mutual-defense pact into practice.

Saab conducts maiden flight of Gripen F two-seat fighter jet

The Gripen F programme now enters progressive envelope expansion stages, testing the aircraft’s speed, altitude, G-load, and angle of attack limits.

The rise of the military-technology complex

How Silicon Valley tech firms remade US defense contracting. And then opened the Pentagon’s checkbook—wide.

SPACE

Bodyguard Satellites: Armed Escorts Are Coming to Orbit

A war in space may begin without a shot, when a map starts drifting, a radio dies and an armed satellite pulls alongside something America cannot afford to...

EUROPE

Estonia’s Wolfram Europa invests €200 million into Latvian munitions site

Tallinn, Estonia energetic materials supplier Wolfram Europa said it will invest €200 million to build a vertically integrated energetics complex near Jēkabpils, Latvia. It has secured a 40-hectare site under a long-term land agreement with Latvijas Valsts Meži, the Latvian state forestry company.

DRONES

Ukrainian Army Turns Humvees Into Ground Drones With Bolt-On Remote System

Ukraine’s Ground Forces have deployed a new autonomy kit that can convert the US-built High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles into unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs).

ARMY

5 key questions the Army is still working out for its nuclear microreactor plan

The Army's top energy official recently walked reporters through a series of questions he’s grappling with as part of the push to deploy nuclear microreactors at military installations around the country.

Army selects 5 companies to build nuclear microreactors on bases, under new $2 billion deal

Army officials have selected five firms to build nuclear microreactors at U.S. military bases as a bid to create energy independence, though the nation still relies heavily on imported enriched uranium for such projects.

NAVY

The Navy’s New Malice Missile Gives the F-35C a 250-Mile Punch

The Navy’s answer to Pacific air combat is brutally simple: kill the archers from 250 miles away and carry enough smaller missiles to survive the arrows.

US Navy unveils new specs for carrier-based Collaborative Combat Aircraft

The U.S. Navy this week unveiled an array of new specifications for its future carrier-based Combat Collaborative Aircraft, or CCA.

While the service did not detail the aircraft’s combat radius, the Aug. 31 Request for Information did note that the service wants the CCA to carry up to 5 tons of weapons and cost no more than $30 million per unit.

STRATEGY

A Pacific conflict may not look like conventional war, SOCPAC commander says

At an irregular-warfare forum in Hawaii, commanders offer warnings and advice.

The Political Constraint on America’s Data-Center Power Buildout

In April, President Donald Trump issued two Defense Production Act determinations covering grid infrastructure and large-scale energy infrastructure. One found that the country’s constrained electric grid posed an increasing threat to national defense and made grid infrastructure and its supply chains essential to national defense. The other found that financing risks, regulatory delays, and market barriers were preventing large-scale energy infrastructure essential to national defense from being provided in a timely manner.

Less than three months later, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul imposed a one-year moratorium on new hyperscale data centers. Her order said the pause would keep New Yorkers from paying for transmission and other infrastructure built for large loads that might never fully materialize.