Thursday, October 15, 2026

A powerful spying ability will sunset on Friday — here’s why

A powerful surveillance program — Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — is set to statutorily lapse Friday for the first time in its history, capping months of failed negotiations over privacy and who should lead the nation’s spy agencies. What is Section 702? Section 702 lets U.S. intelligence agencies gather communications of…

Push for new Cyber Force service branch narrowly fails in the Senate

An effort to create a new cyber-focused military service under the Army narrowly failed in the Senate, but the lawmaker who proposed it isn’t backing down.  Last month, Defense One exclusively reported that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., was spearheading a markup amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would create a Cyber Force. The…

The Army wants to build a better data center. Can they do it?

The Army got more than 200 responses to a March open-ended call for private-industry ideas on how the service could upgrade its infrastructure with new contracting models and public-private partnerships. Among the 120 that were deemed viable were proposals to build data centers on four Army installations—and officials are now studying the idea. Aware of…

Senators want a new robot warfare-focused combatant command

Senators want the Pentagon to create a new autonomous warfare-focused combatant command led by a four-star general, according to the latest version of the annual defense policy bill.  The Senate Armed Services Committee wants the Defense Department “to adopt the future of warfare by permitting the establishment of the Robotic and Autonomous Systems Combatant Command,”…

Mystery GPS outages traced to Russian satellite

Occasional bursts of energy from a Russian missile-detection satellite have been briefly disrupting satellite navigation across large parts of Europe, a pattern that may indicate a “qualitative escalation in GNSS [global navigation satellite system] interference.”  At least 75 times between 2019 and 2026, University of Texas researchers observed 10-second bursts of high-powered radio signals at…

‘A terrible risk’: Senate appropriators dim prospects of another defense reconciliation bill

Congress is unlikely to approve a third multi-hundred-billion-dollar budget maneuver to pad the Trump administration's defense spending, Senate Republicans said Tuesday. The occasion was a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense panel, where Air and Space Force leaders were testifying on the 2027 budget proposal. The committee chair, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, noted that…