Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used his annual “State of the Force” address on Wednesday to make a range of tech-related announcements, including the creation of a new Autonomous Warfare Command within the Pentagon and the establishment of a 120-day initiative called Project Meridian to study how the U.S. military can achieve what the department described as “absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield.”

Mr. Michael is facilitating the commissioning of Project Meridian, which will be co-directed by SpaceX owner and CEO Mr. Musk, Anduril co-founder Mr. Luckey and Mr. Gingrich, former Republican House speaker. It will be supported by a team of academic, policy and defense industry experts.

The new Autonomous Warfare Command, meanwhile, is “designed to scale autonomous warfare across the Joint Force as a 4-star functional combatant command,” the Pentagon said. The command will be led by current Defense Innovation Unit Director Owen West and Navy SEAL Senior Chief Max Strasiser, and will build on the efforts of the Defense Department’s Drone Dominance Initiative that was created in July 2025.

Germany is the latest NATO ally to press Washington for permission to manufacture PAC-3 MSE interceptors, the most advanced missile used by the Patriot air-defense system. NATO more broadly is trying to replenish missiles already consumed in combat while attempting to build a much larger air-defense force for a potential war with Russia amid heightened tensions between Moscow and the alliance.

Threat Status Special Correspondent Guillaume Ptak examines the situation, reporting that four years of high-intensity war in Ukraine, followed by months of heavy American interceptor use countering Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and defending against Iranian missile strikes, have exposed an uncomfortable weakness in NATO’s air defenses: Western militaries are firing sophisticated missiles far faster than the defense industry can replace them.

Ukraine alone says it is arranging purchases of roughly 1,000 Patriot interceptors with help from its European partners. However, Ukrainian officials have acknowledged that most will be delivered over several years. “Global demand for Lockheed Martin’s offensive and defensive systems is unprecedented,” a spokesperson for the company, which manufactures the PAC-3 MSE interceptor missiles, told Mr. Ptak.

National Nuclear Security Administration revealed this week that it conducted an explosive test in the Nevada desert designed to detect low-yield nuclear blasts from China and Russia. The non-nuclear chemical high-explosive experiment was carried out inside a tunnel at the Nevada National Security Site where the first U.S. nuclear bombs were built. 

National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz reports that the site is about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The NNSA said data from the test will be used to assist scientific models and refine algorithms used in detecting foreign nuclear detonations.

The test was part of an effort to bolster U.S. detection capabilities of what the NNSA described as a “decoupled” explosion — the type of test the United States determined that China conducted in June 2020 at its Lop Nur nuclear test site. “Just as a stealth aircraft looks smaller on radar, decoupling can greatly muffle the signals detected by nuclear detection sensors, making a large explosion appear smaller,” the NNSA said.

Details of President Trump’s planned Golden Dome missile defense remain hidden to prevent China and Russia from building countermeasures, but that secrecy is setting off a debate among lawmakers and missile defense experts about both costs and whether the system will work.

Threat Status’ special Golden Dome for America event last year examined the futuristic space-based aspects of the missile defense shield. Analysts at a Senate hearing on Tuesday agreed that threats from long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles, cruise and hypersonic missiles and drones are increasing, along with the need for both traditional and new high-technology defenses against them.

David E. Mosher, director of National Security Analysis at the Congressional Budget Office, said at the hearing that the cost of comprehensive space and ground defense could be $1.2 trillion over 20 years. That figure is sharply higher than the cost estimate made public by Space Force Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, Trump administration’s point man on Golden Dome, who has put the figure at $185 billion through 2035.

Since Russia’s “invasion of Ukraine in 2022 through December 2025, The Associated Press documented 145 Russian sabotage incidents in Europe,” according to Mike Cinnamon, a retired CIA officer, who writes in an op-ed for The Washington Times that “the perpetrators of some of these attack attempts might surprise you: ‘gig economy’ workers.

“Hybrid operations have demonstrated that Russia, along with other adversaries, such as Iran, have the means to exploit the gig economy in any country by identifying potential candidates through online chat groups and social media, criminal networks, the local diaspora community and others who are ideologically aligned,” Mr. Cinnamon writes.

“The gig work they undertake to generate income, in some cases not knowing a nation-state such as Russia is directing them, may consist of taking photographs or videos of a certain location, operating a drone, scouting out local businesses, vandalizing a monument, throwing a Molotov cocktail or igniting flammable materials, following someone around or, worse, assassination.”

• Oct. 1 — Japan as a Maritime Great Power and the China Challenge, Center for Strategic and International Studies

• Oct. 1 — Winning the Adoption War: Diffusing AI Across the U.S. Military, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• Oct. 2 — What’s Next for U.S.-China Relations? A Conversation with Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Brookings Institution

• Oct. 12-14 — AUSA Annual Meeting and Expo, Association of the U.S. Army

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

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