The Trump administration is expanding its push to dramatically accelerate U.S. commercial and military shipbuilding, according to Mr. Vought. He spoke on the issue Wednesday at Threat Status’ special IndoPac 2026 | Naval Dominance: Shipbuilding, Autonomy & C2 event at the U.S. Navy Memorial.

With Capitol Hill considering Mr. Trump’s proposal for a $1.5 trillion defense budget for fiscal 2027, Mr. Vought emphasized that the administration has created a specific shipbuilding office within the Office of Management and Budget to give the White House more direct influence over the implementation of the president’s April 2025 executive order on “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance.” Mr. Vought said his team has the capability to “bulldoze bureaucracy” to build new ships and “get back to the pace we would have seen in the 1980s under President Reagan.”

Threat Status will be rolling out exclusive videos over the coming days from the event, which included remarks from Sen. Todd Young, Indiana Republican; Justin Fanelli, the Department of the Navy’s chief technology officer; Capt. Randy Cruz, commanding officer of the Naval Research Laboratory; Rebecca Gassler, the Department of the Navy’s portfolio acquisition executive for robotic and autonomous systems; and a host of top players from the country’s leading defense companies.

The Pentagon’s most expensive weapon system came under scrutiny on Capitol Hill this week after a report from the Government Accountability Office revealed that “hundreds of millions” of dollars paid to contractors “haven’t been effective” in improving maintenance issues.

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory L. Masiello, executive officer of the F-35 Lightning II’s program, testified to the Senate Armed Services airland subcommittee on June 23 that the F-35 is the cornerstone of U.S. airpower policy.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed, saying the F-35 is critical not just to the U.S. military but to global security. Senators warned, however, that the program needs to find a way back to reasonable and controlled costs while delivering on schedule.

Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Mike Lee of Utah want Energy Secretary Chris Wright to crack down on Chinese nationals’ access to sensitive information at the country’s national laboratories.

“We write expressing serious concern regarding the Department of Energy’s continued practice of permitting foreign nationals from China to access facilities across the National Laboratory complex and work alongside American scientists,” the senators said in a letter to Mr. Wright this week.

According to Department of Energy data, about 3,200 Chinese nationals visited, or worked, both long-term and short-term, at the national laboratories as of September 2025, and about 2,100 were formally employed by the labs. Chinese nationals also accessed national laboratories either physically or electronically more than 5,000 times in 2025.

Offices of the Department of Homeland Security did not effectively secure their employees’ mobile devices during the Biden administration, leading to a higher risk of cyberattacks, according to a new report from the department’s internal watchdog.

The two offices include the Office of Intelligence and Analysis and the Office of the Chief Information Officer, which provides the department with IT services. Up to 76% of apps installed on the intelligence office staff’s mobile devices either posed security risks, were prohibited or allowed banned activities, according to the report.

The department agreed with all of the inspector general’s recommendations and told the watchdog that by January 2027, it planned to resolve all the issues that had not been addressed.

Seeing the costs of air defense during the Iran war as a failure, because millions were spent on shooting down cheap adversarial drones, is “misguided,” writes Robert Greenway, a former deputy assistant to Mr. Trump and senior director on the National Security Council.

“Air defense is not judged by the price of what it shoots down. It is judged by who came home. By all accounts, the U.S. military excelled in protecting our men and women overseas during the conflict with Iran. Hundreds of Iranian air attacks resulted in three casualties,” Mr. Greenway writes in an op-ed for The Washington Times.

“Giving up the high end to fund the low end would hand China and Russia a capability gap they have spent two decades trying to close,” he writes. “Failing to field the low end at scale leaves our forces exposed to the threat they actually face most days. Those are two different problems, and pretending they compete is how we end up solving neither.”

• June 25 — Navigating Competition in the Central Arctic Ocean, Hudson Institute

• June 30 — AWS Summit, AI Technologies in the Public Sector, Amazon Web Services

• July 8 — Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Proposers Day: Lightweight Universal Codec Program, DARPA

• July 8-9 — Military Robotics and Autonomous Systems USA Conference, SAE Media Group

• July 14-17 — Aspen Security Forum, Aspen Strategy Group