The event took place as part of the Defense Department’s Technology Readiness Experimentation, or T-REX, a semiannual showcase and evaluation staged at Camp Atterbury in Indiana. The event aims to validate prototypes built to fill urgent capability gaps across the military services and combatant commands.

Lt. Col. Matt Limeberry, commander of the Pentagon’s Rapid Assessment or Prototype Technology Task Force, told Defense News in an interview Monday that DOD plans to host at least two Top Drone schools each year.

The goal, he said, is to provide a chance for service members, industry and academia to prove out tactics, operational procedures and drone capabilities on a test course that mimics the kinds of terrain and adversary effects an operator might see in the field. It also allows the department to validate and refine its own counter-uncrewed aircraft system sensors.

“It’s a dual effect of data collect but also benefits the warfighter and industry flying through this threat-represented and emulated environment,” Limeberry said.

For the inaugural, four-day event, the task force set up a training course at the Muscatatuck Training Center just south of Camp Atterbury, designing it to imitate an urban setting and focusing on maneuverability, endurance and reconnaissance. Two companies, Vector and Code 19, flew drones alongside two service partners — the Army’s Combat Lethality Task Force and its Aviation Center of Excellence.

The drones were a mix of untethered first-person view systems and fiber-optic-connected drones.

The department also staged a trial at a separate test range at Camp Atterbury that was supporting T-REX where the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team conducted live fire demonstrations.

Limeberry said he was impressed with how well service members participating in Top Drone performed, navigating and identifying targets. For future events, he hopes to expand the trials over multiple weeks to allow operators to “refine” their tactics against more complex obstacles.

The department is also building a secondary Top Drone course at Camp Atterbury to emulate a more dense, wooded environment.

“As we continue to scale the complexity, it will be an a la carte menu of [electronic warfare] jamming and providing a real-world, adversarial threat-informed environment that we need to fly with and through to make sure that we’re staying competitive,” Limeberry said.

Senior leaders in the Pentagon in recent months have ramped up their drive for what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called “drone dominance.” The intent is for the military services to not only field more drones to operators, but also develop the organizational and training infrastructure to support broader adoption by 2027.

Top Drone supports that push as did much of last month’s T-REX event, which focused on low-cost, attritable attack drones as well as counter-uncrewed aircraft system technologies like interceptors and sensors.

Over the course of the two-week showcase, the department assessed 58 technologies, some of which were sponsored by a military service or combatant command and others brought by firms that had never engaged with the Defense Department but had technology with the potential to address a critical capability gap.

Of those technologies, some number will progress into joint, rapid experimentation and others will require further development and iteration or experimentation. Limeberry noted that DOD has a number of innovation pathways aimed at further maturing technology and T-REX is a good way to identify which route makes the most sense for a particular capability.

“The goal of T-REX is to come out and you find your best transition partner, an innovation pathway that fits the need of your company or fits the need of the government, depending on where the gap and critical need is,” he said.

Decisions about which technologies will transition into the rapid experimentation phase are pending, Limeberry said. He expects the team will brief Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael in the coming weeks and have a determination before the end of September.

Along with the technology demonstrations, T-REX also featured static displays from another 50 companies whose capabilities are in an early stage of development. Those capabilities may be considered for participation in future T-REX assessments.

“They were showcasing emergent and urgent capabilities but didn’t have the capacity yet to fully assess and put their prototypes into the environment, so we put them on a prototype technology display,” Limeberry said.

Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress from Alabama, who stood beside Trump during an Oval Office announcement, insisted it was former President Joe Biden who politicized the basing process.

“This delegation has worked together, both chambers, both parties, to make sure that Huntsville was the place that Space Command called home,” Sen. Katie Britt said during the event. “Obviously, the Biden administration chose to make this political.”

The announcement is just the latest development in a yearslong back and forth about which of the two states should host the the military command, which is charged with operating the Defense Department’s space assets.

The headquarters has been provisionally based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, since 2019. In 2021, just as Trump was leaving office at the end of his first term, the White House announced Huntsville, Alabama, as its pick for the headquarters.

The decision sparked pushback from Colorado lawmakers, largely led by former Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., who called the Air Force’s selection process “fundamentally flawed.” A series of Government Accountability Office and DOD Inspector General reports followed, identifying issues with transparency and credibility in the Air Force’s basing process but concluded that the service followed the law in choosing Alabama.

Despite the conclusion of the watchdog investigations — and then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s support for relocating the command to Huntsville due to estimates that the move would save DOD $426 million — the White House announced in July 2023 that it had abandoned the first Trump administration’s decision and that Space Command would remain in Colorado.

Trump’s announcement that he would revert to his earlier, 2021 decision to base the command’s headquarters in Alabama was widely expected. However, his insistence Tuesday that the move was closely linked to Colorado’s embrace of mail-in voting — a major concern for the president — was not previously publicly identified as part of his administration’s justification.

More than once during the briefing he called Colorado’s policy of allowing voters to submit ballots by mail as “crooked” and claimed it influenced his decision.

“When the state is for mail-in voting, that means they want dishonest elections,” Trump said. “That played a big factor.”

As president, Trump has been forward leaning on space policy. During his first term in 2019 he created the U.S. Space Force and reestablished Space Command as the 11th combatant command.

Later in the briefing, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-AL, indicated the new command would be named the “Donald J. Trump Space Command Center.”

The Space Force and Space Command deferred questions about the claim to Tuberville’s office. A spokesman for the senator said he “is exploring avenues to make that the official name.”

“Sen. Tuberville believes that naming U.S. Space Command headquarters after the guy who created Space Force and has brought Space Command back to life is more than appropriate,” the spokesperson told Defense News in an email.

The two-week event, held at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, gathered more than 350 participants from U.S. industry and allied militaries to consider what nascent technologies might be needed to operate in space 10 years from now, with a particular focus on the Indo-Pacific.

For the first time, the wargame identified five notional technology concepts that might be needed in the future and considered questions around how to collaboratively fund and develop them, Space Delta 10 Commander Col. Shannon DaSilva told reporters during a media briefing Monday.

DaSilva declined to provide details on the capabilities, noting that some nations’ classification requirements limited what she could share, but said the missions included space domain awareness, communication and collaboration tools that don’t exist today.

“The idea was to explore what might be in the realm of the possible for future investment discussions and integration with our partners,” she said.

The Space Force is in the midst of a yearslong process to define what it calls an objective force design that lays out what missions and capabilities it will need in the next 10 to 15 years. This year’s Schriever Wargame will help inform that work for the U.S., including how it could partner with allies who might be positioned to provide certain capabilities. It will also provide insight into decisions about system interoperability as well as policies and acquisition approaches.

At the end of the exercise, DaSilva said, the team will publish an evaluation report that it will provide to its allies, which will describe lessons learned and ask for similar input from those partners.

“That will be the first time that we’ve published a report like that,” she said. “We’re just trying to codify our wargame process better for the service as we move forward.”

DaSilva noted that the Space Force is also taking steps to make the Schriever Wargame, which is in its 25th year, less U.S.-centric. For example, while the game’s objectives are typically set by the U.S. Space Force’s Chief of Space Operations, the service plans to have all participating nations help establish goals and scenarios for the event by 2027.

“Our intent is that all the nations will jointly set the objectives for the wargame, and that we will be testing operational concepts that are more internationally focused,” she said.

DaSilva noted that the service may also consider holding future wargames in other countries, though that could prove difficult since much of the gaming infrastructure it uses is based in the U.S.

“We’ve been very, very selective on getting not only the right talent, but the right personalities that understand how to go fast,” Guetlein said Tuesday at the Innovate Space Global Economic Summit in Arlington, Virginia. “Not everybody understands what it takes to move at that speed.”

Previously the Space Force’s second in command, Guetlein was confirmed last week for this role, officially assuming the position Monday. As a direct report to Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, he has a slew of authorities designed to speed up decision-making and capability delivery, including the ability to bypass standard competitive hiring procedures that can slow down the process.

Guetlein said he has a long way to go in building his team but has a list of 30 names, identified from across industry and academia that he hopes will join the effort.

Along with filling out his program office, Guetlein is also pulling together a national-level consortium that includes companies, labs and universities to serve both as capability providers and technical advisers for the effort.

Since President Donald Trump announced plans to develop Golden Dome during his first week in office, the Pentagon has been working to identify a path forward – studying capability options, understanding the industry landscape and getting a sense of the feasibility of crafting a layered missile defense capability that brings together ground, air and space sensors and interceptors.

In May, Trump added another challenge to the project, announcing during a televised Oval Office meeting that he expects Golden Dome to be completed by 2028 at a price tag of $175 billion.

“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they’re launched from space. And we will have the best system ever built,” Trump said at the time.

With Guetlein in place and starting to populate the newly established program office, one of his early tasks is to craft a vision for what the Golden Dome architecture will include and deliver it to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth within 60 days.

To further lay the groundwork and provide context for the 60-day study, Guetlein will travel to U.S. Northern Command on Thursday to discuss current gaps in the current homeland defense architecture with its commander Gen. Gregory Guillot and U.S. Space Command head, Gen. Stephen Whiting.

Guetlein said those gaps will help inform the size of the Golden Dome architecture, the scope of his organization and the capabilities needed to counter future threats.

The office is also planning several engagements with companies vying to support the effort, including a long-awaited Missile Defense Agency that was slated to happen in June but was delayed by Guetlein’s confirmation process.

Space Systems Command will also host an industry session focused on options for developing and fielding interceptors that can destroy missile threats from space. That part of the architecture, Guetlein said, presents the greatest technical challenge, noting that while the capabilities exist and have been proven, there are looming questions about the number of interceptors that will be required and at what cost.

“What we have not proven is, first, can I do it economically, and then second, can I do it at scale?” he said. “Can I build enough satellites to get after the threat? Can I expand the industrial base fast enough to build those satellites? Do I have enough raw materials, etc?”

While those questions will likely take some time to answer, Guetlein said a more near-term task will be integrating various systems from across the military services into a common command-and-control architecture. That includes sensors, weapons and communication channels that need to work together, he said.

To get after that challenge, Guetlein plans to schedule incremental demonstrations on a six-month cadence with a goal of delivering capability as soon as possible.

“We are on a short timeline,” he said. “The president gave us three years to deliver this capability and we’re going to deliver in three years. That means we need to move out with a sense of urgency and move out with incremental wins along the way.”

Each company received a contract worth up to $200 million, according to a notice from the Chief Digital and AI Office. The firms will help the Defense Department develop agentic AI workflows for key national security missions.

“Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems,” Chief Digital and AI Officer Doug Matty said in a statement.

The military services have adopted generative AI tools to varying degrees and for a range of tasks — from tech support to finding files. Agentic AI uses more advanced reasoning to address and act on more complex challenges.

The Pentagon didn’t specify what missions the program would support, but the department has said it wants to use AI in areas like intelligence analysis, campaigning, logistics and data collection.

Following the announcement, Elon Musk-owned xAI — whose conversational AI chatbot goes by the name Grok — unveiled a U.S. government-specific production line called Grok for Government.

Grok has come under scrutiny after an update generated a slew of racists and antisemitic comments. In one instance, the chatbot referred to itself as “MechaHitler.”

The award follows Musk’s months-long push from within the White House to slash federal spending. Amid a public falling out earlier this summer, President Donald Trump has threatened to cancel government contracts awarded to Musk’s companies. Under this new deal, however, the billionaire’s federal work would expand.

About 20 miles to the northwest of Eielson on a sparse, dirt range just outside the Army’s Fort Wainright, a very different kind of testing and training demonstration overlapped with the latter half of Red Flag. The Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s commercial technology hub, chose a handful of companies to trial small, long-range attack drones designed to navigate and hit targets amid attempts to jam their signals.

While much smaller in size and scope than the venerable Red Flag drill nearby, DIU’s tests hit on themes that may be just as consequential for the future of aerial warfare — the role of drones in modern combat, and whether the Pentagon can help stimulate the expansion of the domestic industrial base and transform its own internal bureaucracy in a way that allows it to buy those systems in meaningful quantities.

The Pentagon for years has talked about the importance of autonomous systems in military operations and the prominent role drones have played on the battlefield of Ukraine. More recently, the Trump administration has signaled an interest in investing in the commercial drone industry and reducing some of the policy barriers that make it harder to buy, test and field these systems.

In a July 10 memo, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took that further, directing sweeping reforms to how the military services acquire small, uncrewed air systems and giving troops on the ground more authority to directly test and buy them.

It’s not clear yet whether the U.S. government’s more recent push to invest in domestically-produced drones and the Pentagon’s new reform efforts will lead to change. While the language is stronger and the directives are coming from the White House, past efforts to change DOD acquisition and funding processes and realign priorities within the military services have yielded little progress.

Amid that churn of momentum and uncertainty, DIU’s testing offered a snapshot, though incomplete, of the current readiness of the military’s acquisition system and the U.S. drone industry’s ability to meet the moment.

Defense News traveled to Alaska to observe the testing, which DIU officials said highlighted the challenges of moving fast in a stovepiped bureaucracy that wasn’t designed for speed.

Trent Emeneker, who leads several autonomy projects for DIU, said the event underscored a reality that many in the national security community are already grappling with — the U.S. military’s aerial-drone capabilities are lagging behind its competitors.

“There is so much that we need to do right now in the uncrewed systems space,” Emeneker told reporters. “We are just really far behind, and we have to catch up.”

A project without a partner

Staged over four days, the drone testing was part of a DIU project called Artemis, which aims to identify — and then buy en masse — low-cost commercial UAS that can fly at long ranges, strike enemy targets and operate through electronic warfare countermeasures like signal jamming and spoofing.

On the range in Alaska, DIU officials wanted to see if the Artemis drones could acquire and maintain targets and then hit them with some degree of accuracy when their navigation and communication signals were disrupted.

Four companies are on contract for the project: AV —previously AeroVironment — Dragoon and two Ukrainian firms that are each paired with a U.S.-based software firm, one with Swan and the other with Auterion.

Only AV and Dragoon were in Alaska for testing. The Ukrainian firms, which haven’t been disclosed due to security concerns, are flying their drones in operations at home. One of the firms has already met its contractual testing requirements, Emeneker said. The second was recently targeted in a Russian attack that destroyed its production facilities and is now working to rebuild. It hopes to start testing in the coming weeks.

AV brought a prototype system with an experimental software baseline that it designed specifically for Artemis. The rail-launched drone, built for the one-way attack mission, uses a navigation system that isn’t dependent on satellites like GPS.

Dragoon’s Artemis offering is a vertical take-off-and-landing drone called Sender, which it initially designed under a small contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The aircraft was designed to balance affordability and flexibility with the ability to fly longer-duration missions.

Like most DIU projects, Artemis was created to rapidly test and validate capabilities that military users have said they need in the field.

The effort originated as part of a supplemental spending package for Ukraine that Congress approved last year. In response to requests from operators in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, lawmakers gave DOD around $16 million to quickly identify a solution.

In just seven months, DIU solicited proposals, reviewed submissions and put four companies on contract to build prototypes — much faster than a traditional DOD acquisition program.

A key feature of the organization’s approach is that it partners with acquisition offices in the military services and combatant commands to buy and field the commercial capabilities it validates. Without an acquisition partner, projects flounder, victims to the infamous “valley of death” — the often-terminal phase between when an effort begins and when it’s adopted by an end user.

Despite the heavy use of cheap attack drones in Ukraine and the Middle East and the Pentagon’s stated desire to increase its inventory of uncrewed systems, DIU has struggled to find an acquisition partner in the services for Artemis.

Emeneker and his team have been pitching the project to program offices since last year but have come up short. Services are hesitant to buy in and put time and resources toward a system that isn’t tailored to their specific requirements, he said.

“We continue to make phone calls every day and talk to program offices, talk to people who are interested that theoretically have money. I don’t have a great answer. We don’t have a partner,” he said. “That’s what I have spent the most time on with this project.”

The hope going into testing was that the systems’ performance would help DIU make its case, but the results were not what Emeneker envisioned. If DIU can’t find an office that wants to take over the effort, companies that meet the contract’s requirements will still receive what’s called a “success memo” that allows them to quickly enter into a production contract if a DOD office wants to buy their system.

But even if some firms are ready to transition, Emeneker said, it’s possible Artemis capabilities could end up without a home.

Testing troubles

While the companies made progress throughout the test event, neither performed as well as DIU expected.

In one scenario during the second day of testing, AV’s drone failed repeatedly to find its target when jammed and ultimately crashed into a hill. In another run on the same day, Dragoon’s system flew past its target, made impact and went up in flames.

Critically, neither system performed well under EW conditions.

Emeneker said it’s too early to diagnose why the drones underperformed or to declare the project a failure.

“Without looking at the data and analyzing it, it’s really hard to know because understanding the interplay of the jamming… software bugs, it gets complex,” he said. “I don’t want to jump to conclusions but it was not what I would have hoped for or wanted to see.”

He also noted that while the platforms weren’t perfect, that’s not the goal. The objective of Artemis is to identify a baseline throw-away drone capability that offers a more affordable option than high-end munitions. By the end of testing, the systems had both made impacts and were closer to hitting their targets.

Still, Emeneker is concerned about what the preliminary outcome says about the state of the U.S. drone industrial base.

“If we had to go to war tomorrow, do we have what we need?” he posited. “No. So, how do we fix that? That’s what we’re trying to do is fix that capability.”

Pendulum swing

DIU has been trying to address some of the challenges that plague the U.S. drone industrial base for years.

In 2020, it started a project called Blue UAS to make it easier for units in the field to buy small drones. Chris Bonzagni, a former DIU program manager who now runs his own defense and dual-use consulting firm, was part of the team that helped stand up the project, which vets commercial drones to make sure they comply with U.S. laws that restrict the military from buying uncrewed systems whose key components are made in China.

Bonzagni, who was onsite to support Artemis testing, said Blue wasn’t designed for program managers or bureaucrats — it was intended to meet the needs of tactical units.

“The vision for Blue UAS was, we’re all infantry guys; I’m a former enlisted guy. How do I get a list of drones that, if I’m a staff sergeant in Iraq at the time, they can just purchase with their [government purchase card],” he told Defense News. “That was the original intent.”

While Blue has since become the standard across the U.S. government for validating drone compliance, Bonzagni sees the effort as a failed attempt to get cheap drones into the hands of the troops who need them.

A lack of resources and a convoluted DOD acquisition system prevented the program from scaling. And policies that required companies to prove compliance with every hardware or software upgrade hampered innovation. Just as Ukrainians were fielding drones by the thousands to hold ground in their resistance to Russia’s invasion, the U.S. was struggling to even get systems to its own operators.

DIU is working to address some of the issues with Blue and recently announced changes designed to expand its cleared list to more companies. Hegseth’s recent memo calling for “drone dominance” directs the Defense Contract Management Agency to help scale the effort, which could drive additional resources toward the project and reduce some of the policy barriers that has stifled its potential.

Emeneker said that through projects like Blue UAS and Artemis, DIU is trying to help refocus the Defense Department’s acquisition apparatus on tactical units in the field. Another new effort called Project GI aims to test “ready-now” drones in operational environments — crucial for ensuring that a system will actually work as intended in real-world conditions.

“That’s who we want to focus on. It’s not a lab. It’s not the colonel. It’s not the sergeant first class. It’s the people on the front line,” he said. “The pendulum is all the way over here. We’re trying to swing it back to get more to that end user.”

(Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the system AV brought to the Artemis demonstration.)

Maj. Gen. Tim Sejba, who leads Space Training and Readiness Command, said Thursday the service has started to use the software in readiness exercises like Space Flag and is working now to upgrade the capability to better simulate the space environment.

“This is basically a digital environment at various classification levels that is going to allow us to be able to provide a red threat,” Sejba said during a Mitchell Institute webinar. “We’re bringing units together at Space Flag already and executing within that digital environment.”

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman has made readiness a top focus for the Space Force, calling on the organizations that train guardians and develop the supporting infrastructure to move quickly to prepare the force to operate amid heightened threats from China and Russia to U.S. space capabilities.

That focus includes a push to upgrade its existing simulators, which don’t currently meet the service’s training and tactics development needs. In the long term, the Space Force envisions a more robust virtual training infrastructure, but for now, the service is piecing together new and existing systems to try to fill that gap.

The digital training environment Sejba highlighted, called Swarm, is one tool the service has been using in tactical training exercises. Swarm features simulated threats as well as U.S. and allied capabilities — allowing operators to not only train against adversarial tactics but with representative Space Force systems.

Sejba said STARCOM plans to transition Swarm to a cloud-based environment in the next year or two if it has the funding to support the effort. That would allow geographically distributed crews to train together on a more regular basis.

“With the right funding and the amounts of industry focus, we know that we can deliver fairly quickly on some of these things,” Sejba said.

The Space Force’s fiscal 2026 budget request includes $141 million to build out a National Test and Training Complex, which includes virtual capabilities for basic and advanced training. That’s a $40 million decrease from what last year’s budget projected the service would need in fiscal 2026.

Sejba noted that the Space Force is also working to make sure that training requirements are top of mind for program offices charged with developing new satellites and ground systems.

“That’s just part of what the expectation is so that we can get ahead of this as opposed to playing catch-up,” he said.

Hegseth announced the policy changes in a video recorded on the Pentagon’s front lawn. With Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” playing in the background, a quadcopter delivered a memo announcing the policy changes, which Hegseth then signed.

“While our adversaries have produced millions of cheap drones, before us we were mired in bureaucratic red tape,” he said in the video, which he posted from his official X account. “Not anymore.”

The memo lists three broad goals: bolstering the U.S. drone manufacturing base, delivering thousands of low-cost systems to military units over the next few years and integrating drone operations into training programs.

“Next year I expect to see this capability integrated into all relevant combat training, including force-on-force drone wars,” Hegseth wrote in the memo.

The announcement builds on a June 6 White House executive order that calls for normalizing drone operations and integration into the national airspace as well as investment in production and emerging technologies across commercial, civil and national security sectors.

Specifically, Hegseth’s expansive memo rescinds past policies established by the Defense Department in 2021 and 2022 that provide guidance for implementing congressional mandates that restrict the U.S. military from buying drones and components produced by Chinese companies. It gives procurement authority to combat units to buy, test and train with small UAS that comply with statute and encourages “local innovation” like 3D printing parts.

The memo also references a Defense Innovation Unit-led effort called Blue UAS — established in 2020 as a process for certifying commercial drones for military use. According to the memo, DIU will now work with the Defense Contract Management Agency to scale its “Blue List,” an inventory of compliant drones.

“The Blue List will be dynamic, retaining all previous component and supply chain findings, and including updated performance evaluations from testing and key lessons learned from training,” the memo states.

The document says that DOD has failed to field UAS at speed and in the numbers that the modern battlefield requires. It calls for department-wide reforms to how the military services buy drones and directs the secretaries of each department to “modify or delete” any policies that overregulate testing, training, procurement and fielding.

Further, it directs the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps to each create active duty formations by September, built for the sole purpose of scaling the use of small drones across DOD — with initial systems delivered to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command by 2026.

The services must also create and resource “unsubordinated program offices” focused entirely on rapidly acquiring drones. The memo also tasks them to identify, by September, any existing programs whose requirements would be better met by uncrewed systems. The services will be required to detail improves they’ve made to acquisition processes as part of their fiscal 2027 budget submissions.

Hegseth also tasks the Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Strategic Capital with presenting financing options — like direct loans or advance purchase commitments — to inject funding into the U.S. drone industrial base.

“Our adversaries have a head start in small UAS, but we will perform a technological leapfrog and establish small UAS domain dominance by the end of 2027,” Hegseth wrote. “We will accomplish this urgent goal by combining the Nation’s best qualities, including risk-taking. Senior officers must set the tone. Accelerating this critical battlefield technology requires a Department of War culture.”

The review, conducted from February to March of this year, largely sheds a positive light on the agency’s culture and performance. However, its survey of SDA personnel points to concerns around workforce recruitment and retention, difficulties balancing the drive for speed with the quality of the systems being delivered and compartmentalized, top-down decision-making processes.

“There is concern regarding an operational speed (at all costs) mentality, potential underreporting of performance risks, lack of formalized or cohesive processes and concerns regarding understanding of clear boundaries in bypassing established DOD procedures,” the report found.

SDA employees also reported anxieties about a heightened scrutiny of the agency’s performance, as well as employment uncertainty, following a string of White House executive orders limiting remote work and targeting probationary employees.

The review was directed by the Pentagon’s acquisition and sustainment office in late January. It followed a contentious decision to place SDA Director Derek Tournear on administrative leave after concerns arose around his handling of a prototype contract. Tournear was reinstated in mid-April.

SDA was created in 2019 as a standalone acquisition organization within the Space Force. Its task has been to quickly field a large constellation of advanced missile-tracking and data transport satellites in low Earth orbit, about 1,200 miles above the Earth’s surface.

The agency’s approach, under Tournear’s leadership, has been to incrementally field capability in batches, also known as tranches, that can be replaced or augmented every two years or so with new, more advanced spacecraft.

In April 2023, SDA began launching its first satellites, dubbed Tranche 0, and it’s slated to start launching the next round, Tranche 1, later this summer. Both tranches, which are supposed to demonstrate that the concept works, have faced delays due to supplier issues, but the agency says it’s on track to have its first operational satellites in orbit by 2026.

The Air Force Inspector General report isn’t the first to spotlight the risk associated with SDA’s go-fast strategy.

Most recently, a Government Accountability Office analysis in February recommended SDA delay its next satellite launch until it demonstrates certain key capabilities with the spacecraft already on orbit. That recommendation, in part, informed its decision to push its first Tranche 1 mission from spring to summer.

“SDA’s schedule-driven focus impedes its ability to incorporate lessons from each tranche, a key feature of iterative development,” the GAO said. “As a result, it has not fully incorporated lessons learned and corrective updates into these follow-on efforts.”

The Air Force survey — which includes responses from 129 of SDA’s 155 employees — said that while the agency’s “boundary-breaking” acquisition methods have allowed it to move and grow quickly, there’s a need for SDA to shift away from a “personality-driven to a process-driven leadership approach” as it looks to scale from handfuls of demonstration satellites to hundreds of operational spacecraft.

“Existing infrastructure, including IT systems, facilities, and administrative processes, are struggling to keep pace,” the inspector general report states. “While efforts are underway to implement lessons learned and risk management, these are often reactive and inconsistently applied. Furthermore, the ‘hub and spoke’ leadership model, effective in the early stages, now contributes to information silos and hinders collaboration across the expanding organization.”

The report also pointed to a need for more open information flow among capability tranches, which could make it easier to collaborate and improve on performance — key to the agency’s iterative development strategy.

“While transparency exists in some areas, decision-making processes often follow a top-down, one-way approach, which risks mistrust and hindering buy-in from some employees. Information silos, with information ‘stove-piped’ within specific tranches or functions, impede effective collaboration and prevent the codification of lessons learned,” the surveys found.

The Air Force Inspector General report makes several recommendations to improve SDA’s scalability, communication and culture. It calls for the agency to formalize roles and responsibilities and create clear career paths for its workforce. It also proposes more robust systems for managing and implementing lessons learned and establishing stronger communication channels.

“While SDA demonstrates significant potential for innovation and rapid capability delivery, it must prioritize sustainable growth through enhanced risk management, formalized processes, improved communication, and strategic alignment with the [Space Force]” the report states.

Air Force Weather started its digital transformation in 2017 amid a broader U.S. government push to migrate away from siloed data centers to more secure, efficient and capable could-based environments. As the Air Force’s largest special-purpose data processing node — crunching around 80 terabytes of data, or the equivalent of 6.6 billion pages of text, a day — the organization was a “big fat target” for cyber threats, according to Fred Fahlbusch, Air Force Weather’s data domain officer and chief of the weather resources, programs, data and cybersecurity division.

So, with fresh funding in hand, it began the process of migrating its operations from physical servers at the 557th Weather Wing at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska to its new digital home in the cloud. It contracted with Amazon for cloud services and shifted its high-performance computing capability from Offutt to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which could better accommodate its power and cooling needs.

The transition has been difficult on multiple levels, but Fahlbusch and other officials told Defense News the organization is on the verge of completing its change to the cloud by next year — a milestone they say is likely to spike demand for the operational weather products the organization provides to its user base.

“If we deliver what people want, then the demand signals are going to explode,” Fahlbusch said.

That demand, while a sign of success, presents a whole new set of challenges for Air Force Weather. More utilization requires more resources, Fahlbusch said, and the organization will likely have to take a new approach to funding the services it provides.

Virtual Private Cloud

According to Rod Grady, chief architect and cloud integrator at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Weather Systems Branch, it’s not data that makes Air Force Weather indispensable. In fact, while the organization draws data from Air Force and Space Force radars and satellites, much of the weather information it relies on comes from unclassified sources like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and commercial firms.

The organization’s value proposition, instead, is in what it does with that data.

“You can go out and buy weather data from many different sources,” Grady said. “But what makes us unique is the application of that data to support mission decision-making. And we have services and capability on enclaves that are being exploited every day by the millions.”

The organization, which is the go-to source for environmental data tools for the Air Force, Space Force, Army and intelligence community, sees around 30 million requests a month for weather products from users operating in classified enclaves.

One such tool gives military aircraft access to severe weather data when operating in areas without radar coverage. A hydro-intelligence product developed by Air Force Weather provides detailed flood mapping and forecasting. And a web-based application uses a network of terminals to pull data from U.S. and international weather satellites and make it available to users.

Moving operations to the cloud will help the organization develop more tools at a faster rate and increase its processing abilities, Grady said. It also will make its products available to more users.

The office is already seeing the initial impact of cloud operations on its products, as its transition to what it calls the Virtual Private Cloud, or VPC, has been incremental. One illustration of this, Grady said, is a capability called the Operational Data Layer, which allows a forecaster to create mission-specific tools out of large data sets.

The office started experimenting with the capability in 2010, but the technology proved too challenging and the project lost momentum. In 2020, amid the transition to VPC, Air Force Weather revived the effort with a new plan to use cloud computing processes to develop the data tool. This time, it went from initial concept to operations in less than six months and the organization is now expanding the capability for more applications.

“That product is now the number one hit product and is integrated into a number of applications across the Air Force and the DOD on the unclassified level and higher enclaves,” Grady said.

Fahlbusch said Air Force Weather’s products and delivery timelines will only improve once it’s fully leveraging VPC. And a better product combined with a cloud-based environment that allows users outside its typical base to access its tools will likely mean a significant increase in utilization.

“Once we’re in a cloud environment and available to people we’re not currently available to, there could be an explosion of demand from end users we’re not even aware of,” Fahlbusch said.

Managing demand

The office welcomes the larger user base but is also preparing for the challenges that will come with managing more demand. Fahlbusch said funding is his biggest concern.

The organization, whose fiscal 2025 funding sits around $250 million — not including personnel costs – could request more money to operate in the cloud, but that’s a difficult ask when the defense budget is tightening, Fahlbusch said.

It could also shift to a fee-for-service model, which puts the cost burden on the offices using its services. While the products the organization provides differentiate it from other sources, the cost could prove to be a barrier for users who are also seeing their budgets shrink, he said.

Fahlbusch is not alone in his concerns. Managing the cost and distribution of cloud services has been a challenge for Pentagon agencies that have embraced cloud operations over the last decade without aligning their processes under an enterprise-level management approach. In an effort to address these issues, the Defense Department released a Cloud Financial Operations Strategy last year designed to help both providers and users better navigate the cloud.

Air Force Weather is applying that strategy as it prepares for demand, according to Grady and Fahlbusch — monitoring usage more tightly and putting mechanisms in place to make sure it’s not sending duplicative information or larger amounts of data than necessary.

In practice, that means working more closely with users to get a better understanding of how much data they actually need for a particular task, which is often less than they originally requested, Fahlbusch said.

“We can work with them, and we can tailor it,” he said. “I think that will help defray some of the costs smartly and help curate what the end user really needs — targeted curation, if you will, versus asking for everything. That’ll kill us.”

Workforce, funding cuts

Air Force Weather’s concerns about managing the supply and demand that come with providing a more effective and capable product are set against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s deep cuts to the federal civilian workforce. The Department of Government Efficiency has also targeted contracting expertise and agencies like NOAA — both of which the organization relies on to provide high-quality weather products.

The office has seen some indirect impacts of those reductions, with civilian workforce cuts hitting the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, which provides acquisition and program management support. Fahlbusch said cuts to contractors and federally funded research and development centers — which provide crucial expertise to support Air Force Weather’s cloud transition — could also impact the agency.

“We need these specialists not as consultants but working the front lines as ‘digital grease monkeys,’ doing the coding, data curation, integration and other digital functions to help optimize weather integration into weapon systems,” a spokesman added in a June 4 statement following the interview.

Deep staffing and budget reductions at NOAA could also impact Air Force Weather, Fahlbusch said, giving it fewer reliable data sources from which to draw.

It’s not yet clear what the scope of that impact might be. Fahlbusch noted that while funding and personnel reductions could make it harder for Air Force Weather to continue to support military readiness and planning, the team understands the push for fiscal responsibility and will do what it can to realign manpower and funding if required.

“If there are things we have to stop doing to focus on those warfighting priorities, we will do it . . . consistent with the president and [secretary of defense] guidance,” he said. “Because that’s what we’re all about.”