Mr. Telle made the comments about the Army moving quickly as he doubled down on the Trump administration’s push to fundamentally overhaul how America’s largest military service innovates and operates in the 21st century.

“Cut the red tape so we can win again,” said Mr. Telle, who asserted the military is “taking too long” to find and fund good ideas. “That’s because we based who we did business with not on how well they could deliver equipment or innovation to our soldiers, but based on whether their bureaucracy was big enough to interface with our big bureaucracy,” he said. “Agile, hungry companies with brilliant ideas were starved while we forced them to wait.”

Mr. Telle said the situation is changing. He cited the Army’s FUZE program, described as a venture-capital-centric strategy for finding nontraditional companies building cutting-edge capabilities, as one example. “Think of it as ‘Shark Tank’ for the Army,” he said, referring to the popular TV reality show. “It pipes American ingenuity directly into the Army.”

NATO’s top commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, issued the alliance’s harshest rhetorical response so far to the recent surge in Russian hybrid warfare operations that have targeted European nations that provide military support for Ukraine and have raised fears of a direct clash between Russian and NATO forces.

“If someone is foolish enough to attack us, we will fight. We will stop the attack,” Gen. Grynkewich told an audience at a major security forum in Warsaw, just hours after the Kremlin rejected a Ukrainian truce offer. Threat Status Special Correspondent Jacob Wirtschafter covered the remarks in a dispatch from Poland, which borders Ukraine, Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave and hosts about 10,000 American troops.

Gen. Grynkewich, who took over the NATO command in July 2025, urged the European leaders attending the annual defense conference to step up support for Ukraine in response to Russia’s increasingly aggressive actions against NATO members, including airspace violations, arson attacks, sabotage and cyberattacks.

Iran-backed Houthi militants from Yemen are firing more missiles and drones into Saudi Arabian territory, escalating an already tense clash tied to the U.S.-Iran war just days after a Houthi missile struck King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, killing more than a dozen people and injuring more than 300.

Recent weeks have seen the Houthis launch missiles and drones at oil infrastructure inside U.S.-aligned Saudi Arabia. An attack last month on the kingdom’s East-West pipeline caused Aramco, the government-owned oil giant, to shut down production for several days for repairs. The pipeline has served as a major bypass around Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. has mostly stayed out of direct combat in Saudi Arabia’s war with the Houthis. But Mr. Trump said Saturday he was considering joining the attacks on the Houthis. The president’s threat came after he said last week that he did not plan on launching any new direct military strikes on Iran ahead of the November midterm elections.

North Korea test-fired multiple ballistic missiles Monday, widely seen as a reaction to South Korea’s first successful test of its own hypersonic missile last week.

South Korean officials detected that the missiles were launched eastward from a site in the Pyongyang area toward the Sea of Japan. Japanese officials reported that the missiles reached an altitude of 43 miles and flew more than 565 miles — typical altitude and range parameters for the class of subatmospheric, short-range battlefield missiles that North Korea has widely sold to Russia for use in its war against Ukraine.

The developments come amid rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula following a Sept. 21 land mine explosion that wounded three South Korean soldiers in the demilitarized zone that has divided China- and Russia-backed North Korea from U.S.-allied South Korea since 1953.

Mr. Hegseth has announced that the Dec. 3 firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan will be carried out via livestream and available for the public to watch. “Allowing the death of Hasan to be witnessed by millions of people doesn’t elevate it nor make the sentence more effective,” writes Tim Constantine.

“To the contrary, it cheapens the action, turning what should be the most somber of penalties into a carnival-like act. It degrades the dignity of life,” Mr. Constantine, who hosts The Washington Times’ Capitol Hill Show, writes in an op-ed for the newspaper.

“Showcasing violence, including state-sanctioned violence, breeds more of it,” he writes.

• Oct. 13-14 — AUSA Annual Meeting and Expo, Association of the U.S. Army

• Oct. 14 — The Future of the U.S. Artificial Intelligence ‘Stack’ in the Middle East, Middle East Institute

• Oct. 14 — 2026 Energy & Defense Summit, Atlantic Council 

• Oct. 15 — The Rise and Fall of the U.S.-Pakistan Relationship After 9/11, Stimson Center

• Oct. 21 — A Discussion with U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Andrew Puzder, Hudson Institute

• Oct. 22 — What’s at Stake in the Israeli Election? Brookings Institution 

• Oct. 27 — Chemistry of Combat: Rebuilding America’s Energetics Base, Hudson Institute

• Nov. 20-22 — Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia, Canada, HFX