The U.S. Army’s $3 billion Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) digital communications system is “ready but not done” following a major war game stress test in the Mojave Desert, according to military officials. The AI-integrated system was nicknamed the “God-calculator” by soldiers during the testing at Fort Irwin, California.

Mr. Seward was with the soldiers for the war game testing, carrying out multiple exclusive interviews examining how the new system operates, whether it will work in actual combat and what advantages it presents for the future of Army planning, intelligence, targeting and logistics tasks using machine learning and advanced new AI models.

“The models aren’t perfect, but then again neither were the war games in the past where we were using dice and standing around a big map in the dirt, moving wooden blocks around,” Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, told Mr. Seward. “It’s helping us think through problems, helping us solve those, and we don’t have to all be in the same physical space to do that.”

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas Bergeson, the former deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, says the lines separating the war between Russia and Ukraine and the U.S.-Israel war with Iran are starting to blur, with close tactical relations between Russia and Iran undergirding concerns of a widening multinational war.

“What we’re seeing today is clearly the Iranians and the Russians are supplying each other with various technologies that are being used on the battlefield against Ukraine,” Gen. Bergeson said during a discussion hosted this week by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America think tank.

At the same time, Israel and Ukraine have emerged as increasingly influential players on the fast-evolving defense technology landscape intertwined with the two wars. Both countries are now selling their advanced drone and counter-drone capabilities as battle-hardened and tested.

The director of a Russian drone factory that makes “Ghoul” Upyr first-person view drones for Russian forces operating in Ukraine was badly wounded in a car bombing that ripped through a small Russian town this week, according to local news reports.

Vladimir Tkachuk, the founder of Uraldronzavod, was hospitalized after the explosion that killed the driver of the car he was riding in. He is an ardent supporter of the Kremlin’s military action in Ukraine and is a Russian influencer on Telegram.

The car bombing was the second such incident inside Russia this past week. Gen. Alexander Chaiko, an Army general appointed to lead the Russian Aerospace Forces, was reportedly targeted in an explosion at a Moscow restaurant Saturday that killed five and injured 19 people. No one has claimed responsibility for either attack.

Pope Leo XIV and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are AI alarmists, argues Peter Morici, an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, who writes in an op-ed in The Washington Times that those two contemporaries should be “mindful of competition from autocratic states.

“Pope Leo and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei could conceivably persuade Western nations to ban military application of autonomous AI,” Mr. Morici writes. “But they cannot protect the West from Chinese and Russian aggression.

“Regulation is required to curb the abuses AI shares with social media, but not to govern the pace of its build-out,” he argues, explaining that the natural forces of competition and the markets are the best means to impose regulation.

In another zone of the AI issue, Donna Rice Hughes, a longtime children’s online safety advocate and president and CEO of Enough Is Enough, writes in an op-ed in The Times that “putting limits on users’ access to AI might seem like a counterintuitive strategy, but China knows that AI chatbots are digital spies.

“Without the defensive strategy of congressional action, China’s advanced ‘digital spies’ owned by Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Tencent are able to collect sensitive and personal data from American children and adults alike, in addition to harming children with its addictive by design algorithms,” she writes.

Ms. Hughes argues that “research shows that 1 in 3 children prefer talking to an AI companion rather than a real person” and that AI chatbots need to be regulated by Congress to curtail damage to “children’s mental, physical and sexual well-being.”

• Aug. 9-12 — DoDIIS Worldwide Conference 2026, Defense Intelligence Agency

• Aug. 11-13 — Space & Missile Defense Symposium, Huntsville, Alabama

• Aug. 17 — Beyond Pyongyang: Regional Development, Modernization and Inequality in North Korea, Stimson Center

• Aug. 18 — The Hormuz Implications for Energy Policymaking: Japan and South Korea, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• Aug. 25-26 — Counter UAS Summit, Institute for Defense and Government Advancement

• Aug. 27 — 2026 Navy Summit, Potomac Officers Club