Outgoing Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker tells Threat Status that he and his caucus are concerned that the planned Golden Dome missile shield may not be “funded adequately.”

Mr. Wicker says Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg will be coming to Capitol Hill “early next week to talk about a number of defense priorities” including Golden Dome. At issue is a roughly $350 billion funding gap for fiscal 2027. A large portion of space-based capabilities and Golden Dome support sits in that gap.

Mr. Hegseth told reporters this week that he and other Trump administration officials are “flooding the zone because this lame-duck period is critically important for the funding of our department.” 

Mr. Wicker, meanwhile, was blunt when asked if he is concerned that Congress may not be able to overcome the funding gap for Golden Dome. “Yes, I am,” the senator said.

Vice President J.D. Vance and Mr. Hegseth are on opposite sides of a Republican Party split over the Iran war after losing control of both chambers of Congress. Mr. Vance took to social media shortly after the midterm election in a lengthy post blaming the Iran war for the loss. Sources tell Threat Status the post heated up a rivalry that has been brewing since the early days of the Trump administration.

When asked about his relationship with the vice president this week, Mr. Hegseth said “politics is not really my thing” and called Mr. Vance a “crucial member of the team” making military decisions. Mr. Vance has publicly backed Mr. Hegseth on numerous occasions, dating back to his January 2025 tiebreaking vote in the Senate to confirm the defense secretary. Yet Pentagon insiders, former senior military officers and others familiar with the matter describe the relationship between the two men as nuanced and at times tense.

A senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee said that although Mr. Vance blamed the Iran war for the election disaster, Mr. Hegseth was following the president’s orders. “It’s hard to push the secretary of defense in front of the bus when the commander in chief is his boss and makes all the final calls,” the senior Republican told Threat Status.

China’s military is shifting the focus of its entire force toward advanced drone warfare and AI-powered capabilities, according to a report published by the People’s Liberation Army. The 2025 report by Col. Zhao Hui and Maj. Zhang Yicheng was translated by the U.S. Army War College’s China Landpower Studies Center and made public last month.

“Unmanned warfare is set to become a primary mode of modern combat,” according to the translation of the Chinese report titled “Influence of Unmanned Warfare on Political Work and Our Responses.” The 30-page report outlines that PLA tactics will shift to include decapitation drone strikes targeting military leaders and scientists of adversaries.

The Chinese report coincides with the disclosure of a July 2025 memorandum from Mr. Hegseth calling for “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance” in the American military and declaring drones to be the most significant battlefield innovation in a generation.

Joshua Arostegui, research director at the China Landpower Studies Center, said the Chinese report confirms that the greatest friction point of drone warfare for the PLA remains institutional control rather than hardware. “The [Chinese Communist Party’s] foundational requirement for absolute political supremacy over military operations actively collides with the realities of machine-speed warfare,” he wrote in an assessment of the report.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, speaking on the sidelines of the G7 talks in Paris this week, blamed Iran for the latest wave of refrigerator cyberattacks across his country that affected about 700 of France’s supermarkets.

“This is an attack of unprecedented scale and aggressiveness,” Mr. Barrot said, according to The Associated Press. “It is the first large-scale cyberattack aimed at sabotage on French soil, and it represents a major threat to our national interests and the security of the French people. That is why it will not go unanswered.” Mr. Barrot said the Iranian ambassador attending the Paris meeting was being summoned so France could “strongly protest against this extremely serious act.”

France’s national cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, attributed the attack to the Shahid Kaveh group, described as a “cyber unit” affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said the investigation targets the leader of the group as well as his two deputies and any other individuals who might be identified in connection with the case.

Funding the outstanding military budgets before Democrats take over majority control of Capitol Hill is critical to “signal long-term financial commitments” in defense, Marc E. Andersen, the assistant secretary of the Army for financial management and comptroller, writes in an op-ed for The Washington Times.

“National security leaders often cite the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ as the pinnacle of defense-industrial base mobilization,” according to Mr. Andersen, who argues that private capital will be as essential as taxpayer funding.

“We need the full might of American capital — private equity, venture capital, private credit, infrastructure funds, pension funds, insurers and public markets — mobilized alongside American industry in the national interest,” he writes, although he added that “private capital cannot, and should not, replace congressional appropriations.”

• Nov. 13 — The Future of U.S.-Japan Cooperation in a Competitive World: Economic Security and Strategy, Hudson Institute

• Nov. 16 — The Black Sea Blueprint for Taiwan: Lessons in Asymmetric Naval Warfare, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• Nov. 16 — The Strategic Implications of the Russia-North Korea Axis, Center for Strategic and International Studies

• Nov. 17 — Special Threat Status Event: The Golden Age of Space, Threat Status

• Nov. 18 — Rebuilding the Arsenal of Freedom and Reindustrializing America, Hudson Institute

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

• Dec. 4-5 — 2026 Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif. — The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute