In an announcement, Sheehy said the Special Operations Forces Concealed Carry Act would align the status of special operators with active and retired law enforcement officers, who are permitted under federal law to carry concealed weapons across state lines.

“Our elite warfighters never stop serving, and this bill ensures the law reflects the trust they’ve earned through a lifetime of sacrifice,” Sheehy said, adding that “Special Operations Forces spend their careers protecting the American people with unmatched discipline, judgment, and professionalism.”

According to Sheehy’s office, when Congress passed the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act, or LEOSA, in 2004, lawmakers recognized that active and retired officers may need to respond to violent crime or terrorists while off duty. They also recognized that officers face ongoing threats from individuals they previously encountered while on duty.

Sheehy’s office explained that his bill would build on the framework created by LEOSA because individuals in special operations “have completed rigorous selection and possess firearms training that meets or exceeds professional law enforcement standards.”

Congressman Pat Harrigan, a Republican from North Carolina, filed a companion bill in April. In a statement, he said that “it makes no sense that an active or retired SEAL or Green Beret, someone who spent a career mastering firearms under the most demanding conditions in the world, has no equivalent recognition under federal law.”

While the bill would extend concealed carry privileges, it would also require participants to complete annual active-duty-level firearms qualification tests, as well as a Justice Department concealed carry class.

During Sheehy’s bid for a Senate seat in 2024, The Washington Post published an article about an incident in which Sheehy was cited at Glacier National Park for illegally discharging a firearm. According to the report, the park ranger investigating the incident interviewed Sheehy at an emergency room in Kalispell shortly after the shooting in October 2015.

“(Sheehy) stated he was arranging gear in the back of his vehicle, and that the gun (Colt Revolver, .45 long) had slipped down the pile of gear, hit the ground and fired. The round hit him in the right forearm and did not pass through,” the ranger wrote in a narrative with the citation.

The ranger also told The Washington Post that the revolver that Sheehy said had accidentally discharged was loaded except for a single missing bullet.

When confronted with the details, Sheehy told reporters that he lied about accidentally discharging his firearm and that the shooting injury actually occurred during a deployment in Afghanistan. He said he didn’t report it because a teammate’s negligent discharge caused the injury, and he didn’t want to get his teammate in trouble.

“I guess the only thing I’m guilty of is admitting to doing something I never did,” Sheehy told the newspaper. He added: “It was a small price to pay to make sure that a whole team of really great Americans didn’t get dragged through the mud over this.”

Although Congress authorized CMP to sell surplus weapons — and has sold 1911 handguns and M1 Garands in the past — this is the first time it will sell the historic M14.

Jerry O’Keefe, CMP’s chairman and chief executive officer, explained that the challenge was that the rifles were originally serialized as fully automatic firearms.

Although civilians can legally own machine guns, federal law requires both buyers and sellers to adhere to strict regulatory policies.

“We’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time and effort thinking through every step in this process, working with our partners to get everybody in agreement,” O’Keefe said.

He explained that they worked closely with their federal partners and walked them “through every step in the conversion process” to show how they will make the M14s “permanently and irreversibly semi-automatic.”

The federal government created CMP in 1903 to promote marksmanship training among civilians, and in 1996, Congress privatized the organization and gave it authority to sell surplus military firearms.

According to a 2019 Government Accountability Office report, the Army has transferred more than 700,000 rifles and handguns to CMP, which has generated about $196.8 million in revenue from their sale.

While CMP initially announced that the M14s could be available as early as this year, O’Keefe clarified that the first sales will most likely occur in early 2027.

“We expected the demand for this to be extraordinary and frankly, the feedback on all the different forums and websites and YouTubes has even exceeded what we expected,” he said. “So we now know that we’re going to have to spend a few months building up a pretty large inventory of converted guns before we go to first sale.”

The M14 has a complicated military history but remains popular among firearms enthusiasts. Chambered in 7.62mm, it was developed from the M1 Garand and replaced the World War II-era rifle as the standard U.S. service rifle around 1957.

The M14 was intended to serve as an all-purpose infantry weapon. Its select-fire option was part of an effort to consolidate several weapons used by American troops into a single platform.

Ian McCollum, a firearms historian and host of the YouTube channel Forgotten Weapons, explained that the military wanted to combine the capabilities of the M1 carbine, M1 Garand, M3 Grease Gun and M1918A2 BAR into a single weapon.

That effort produced the M14 Infantry Rifle, as well as the M15 Light Machine Gun, which was essentially an M14 equipped with a bipod and pistol grip.

The M14, however, had a short service life. Springfield Armory — the historic military arsenal, not the current manufacturer that produces modernized M14s — designed the rifle but was not equipped for the kind of mass production the military ultimately demanded.

Once other manufacturers got involved, though, they made parts of inconsistent quality, which led to inconsistencies in the rifle’s overall performance.

The military ultimately bought about 1.38 million M14s before ending the program in 1964. The rifle entered combat during the Vietnam War, but its size and materials made it ill-suited for the dense jungle environment compared to the M16, which began replacing it in 1967.

“Tromping through a jungle, you are better off with something a little bit shorter than an M14, so ultimately, the M14 would end up being the U.S. service rifle with the shortest active service life of anything that the U.S. has ever issued,” McCollum said.

Many of the remaining M14s were subsequently destroyed, sold overseas or transferred to foreign militaries, according to McCollum. They also briefly made an appearance during the Global War on Terror. M14 variants were used in Afghanistan and Iraq, primarily as designated marksman and sniper rifles.

That makes CMP’s planned sale particularly notable for enthusiasts who have long viewed the M14 as an iconic American service rifle.

Brian C. Sheetz, the editor-in-chief of the American Rifleman, called it “one of the best general-purpose rifle choices for uncertain times” because it “offers a level of utility and capability — all in an understated package — not commonly encountered in many more modern firearms.”

When the surplus M14s finally go on sale, O’Keefe said they will cost around $2,000 apiece, and buyers should be able to purchase up to two rifles at a time.

In Wednesday’s announcements, the company explained that its Missionforce National Security platform received Impact Level 5, or IL5, authorization, meaning it is “trusted” to address the “most sensitive, unclassified missions.”

Kendall Collins, the chief executive officer of Missionforce and Government Cloud at Salesforce, said the platform is “modernizing government IT” and that they’re “building the trusted AI backbone for America’s national security.”

According to the announcement, Missionforce is the DoD-authorized variant of the commercial Agentforce platform, which is a network of AI agents designed to support analysis and decision-making.

This is the latest application of the technology since Salesforce won the $5.6 billion contract to build Missionforce in January. In early July, Salesforce said the Air Force deployed Missionforce with the 441st Vehicle Support Chain Operations Squadron to help manage its $13.5 billion fleet of over 84,000 vehicles across nearly 389 locations.

The company called the approval a “milestone” because it moves the national security and defense entities “beyond predictive AI and chatbots” and onto “autonomous AI execution.” The AI agents will have access to controlled unclassified information as well as unclassified National Security System data.

While Missionforce is tailored for government use, the underlying technology is based on Salesforce’s commercial Agentforce 360 platform, which the company introduced in late 2025.

Ryan Von, a writer for Salesforce Ben, a publication that covers the company’s products, described Agentforce as Salesforce’s “boldest leap into AI,” and called the latest 360 variant, “the most powerful version of the tool yet.” He said it’s marketed as able to deliver “accurate, context-rich responses across text and voice.”

In an early review of the commercial platform, Von said demonstrations were promising. Still, he suggested the AI performed best on routine, keyword-based requests while struggling with more complex questions, such as personalized recommendations.

For the Army HRC, the company said AI agents will “provide around-the-clock support, respond to routine inquiries, summarize case histories, and surface relevant policy and career information from approved Army sources.”

According to the company, HRC handles more than 1,500 personnel cases each day. Salesforce estimates the AI agents could save roughly $6 million annually while handling more than 55 million conversations a month.

Bill Pessin, SVP of Missionforce National Security at Salesforce, said that the platform will allow the human staff to “focus more on the complex, career-defining decisions that directly affect the readiness and lives of our Soldiers and less on the mundane tasks that can be handled by AI.”

Under the settlement agreement, NCNG agreed to restore Timothy Stanhope’s access to its Facebook page and make reasonable efforts to unhide his comments.

The agreement also requires the Guard to revise its Facebook moderation policy. It can no longer block users or remove, hide or filter comments simply because they are deemed “inappropriate.”

However, comments will still be subject to Facebook’s community standards, and each side agreed to pay its own legal fees and court costs.

Michelle Scott, an attorney with the Center for Individual Rights, which represented Stanhope, called the settlement a victory for free speech.

“When a government agency opens an official page for public comment, it cannot treat that page as a one-way bulletin board where praise is welcome but criticism is censored,” Scott said. “Government officials don’t get to invite public comment and then censor the citizens who take them up on their invitation.”

In a statement about the lawsuit, CIR said the case was about more than “one person or one post.” Instead, it said, the lawsuit was about protecting the public’s right to criticize the government in online public forums.

According to the complaint filed in March 2025, Stanhope was blocked from NCNG’s Facebook page after years of commenting on its posts.

Although superior officers had confronted him about his comments while he was still serving, the Guard did not block him until after he retired in 2023.

The complaint said Stanhope frequently criticized what he viewed as mismanagement by Guard leaders.

In 2019, he commented, “so when do we get the results from the leader[’]s test?” in response to a post about a combat fitness test.

In 2021, he criticized what he described as the Guard’s “ill-conceived and hastily planned” deployment to Washington, D.C., following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In 2023, he responded to a post announcing an officer’s promotion by sharing the officer’s mugshot from a previous drunken driving arrest along with a news article about the incident.

The complaint also cited several posts Stanhope made on his own Facebook page that tagged NCNG, making them visible on the Guard’s page.

In a statement, Stanhope said the settlement affirms that “constitutional rights are not optional.”

“The right to speak freely includes the right to criticize the government, and that right doesn’t disappear when the conversation moves online,” he said. “Officials don’t get to pick and choose which opinions are allowed. I’m glad the Guard finally agrees.”

Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, commanding general of the 4th Infantry Division, called the system “functional but not optimized” and said they will “spend the next year refining how we fight using the technology to share our lessons learned across the Army.”

The Army had been scaling the NGC2 prototype since 2025, an effort that concluded at Project Convergence-Capstone 6. The 10-day event tested NGC2 hardware and software using some 10,000 participants from U.S. and allied forces as well as industry partners using 90 different technologies and a series of complex yet realistic scenarios.

“The dedicated opposing force and the unrelenting Fort Irwin conditions afforded us a great opportunity to stress the full NGC2 stack at PCC6,” Ellis said, adding that he’s “proud to have delivered a prototype at the division scale.”

NGC2 will replace the Army’s legacy C2 systems, which are a collection of systems for managing fire, logistics and airspace on the battlefield. Officials say it will unify data across all functions to increase the speed of decision-making and operational maneuver.

The Army said NGC2 will enable “every echelon from soldier to Corps to run modern warfighting apps and artificial intelligence to support their mission, while providing resilient communications across vast distances for greater dispersion and survivability.”

The Army’s executive leadership stressed the importance of updating its command system but also emphasized the need to implement it rapidly.

“We know the biggest risk to our national security and our national defense is not moving too fast. It’s not moving fast enough,” said Dan Driscoll, secretary of the Army. “The side that can sense a target, process the data, and deliver a kinetic effect the fastest, wins. That is the decisive advantage this capability provides.”

In the Army’s proposed budget for 2027, officials requested $904 million in research and development funding to scale NGC2, saying it will improve its communications and networking technologies. A year before that, Anduril Industries developed the prototype for $99.6 million and has been spearheading parts of the project.

The Army said its I Corps headquarters, which commands tens of thousands of soldiers in the Indo-Pacific region from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, will be the next NGC2 capabilities.

Ladarrion McCray, 23, and Emma Bradshaw, 22, face eight charges, including felony murder by child abuse, making false statements and aggravated animal cruelty, according to a July 15 announcement.

Prosecutors allege the couple “willfully deprived their son of necessary sustenance” for roughly two weeks in January. The child, identified in court documents as “L.M.,” died on Jan. 28 as a result of the alleged neglect.

According to investigators, McCray had recently been transferred to Fort Benning, and Bradshaw joined him a short time later while pregnant with the child.

Court records do not specify the child’s age or when the family moved into on-base housing.

Army investigators executed a search warrant at the home the day the child died and found two dogs — a male hound and a female Doberman — that “appeared severely malnourished.”

Both animals were taken to a shelter, where veterinarians determined they suffered from “severe malnourishment and significant muscle wasting.”

During interviews with investigators, McCray and Bradshaw said their son had shown no signs of illness before his death. They also said they had buried a third dog, a dachshund that died from an illness, at a park off base.

Investigators instead found the dachshund discarded in a trash can behind the home. A necropsy determined the dog died of starvation.

Court records show both defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges on June 11. They were released on bond and placed under pretrial supervision.

McCray, who is currently the subject of discharge proceedings by the Army, was ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation. Once separated from the service, he is to report to his parents’ home in Georgia. Bradshaw was authorized to reside at a women’s shelter in Alabama.

Neither defendant is permitted to possess pets while awaiting trial, although McCray’s release conditions were modified because his parents own dogs.

Their next court appearance is scheduled for July 22 in federal court in Columbus, Georgia. If convicted, they could be sentenced to life in prison.

Brig. Gen. Matthew Ross, the director of the Joint Interagency Task Force 401, the Defense Department’s lead organization for countering drones, described the handbook as “not a technical manual or detailed set of rules” but rather “a common foundation to shape our collective approach to this challenge.”

Using conversational language, freehand sketches and relatable references, Small Drones, Big Problems: A First Principles Approach to Countering-UAS makes the information approachable.

Inside, the handbook introduces the concepts of drones and drone protections. It offers guidance such as “The Four Ps of Drone Threats” and “The Five Ds of Protecting Against Drones,” as well as simple definitions of technical concepts and procedures.

But more importantly, it offers a perspective.

In the opening chapter, the handbook shares a brief anecdote from 1939 about the “happy time” for Nazi Germany because Allied Forces did not yet know how to react to U-boat operations.

“But the ‘happy time’ didn’t last forever,” the handbook reads. “British and American ships learned to adapt to the threat by implementing a convoy system to protect shipping lines, using escort ships, and developing new technologies like sonar, radar, and depth charges.”

The handbook grounds the subject for drone threats, explaining that technology in warfare has always changed, but weapons and equipment don’t win wars alone.

“Learning militaries adapt and innovate, repurposing existing defenses and building new ones to address vulnerabilities exploited by drones,” the handbook reads. “They change how they think about drones and how they fight.”

While a majority of the 100 pages is dedicated to applying tips and techniques to prevent or avoid drone attacks, it also offers a perspective on artificial intelligence, or AI.

“There is a temptation to talk about AI as either a savior or a threat, either a magical solution that fixes everything or a frightening force that removes human control. Neither description is useful. In practice, AI is far more neutral than either of these extreme perspectives suggest,” the handbook reads.

The handbook describes AI as a tool meant for helping analyze data by recognizing patterns and making predictions to assist humans in decision making.

“It does not replace judgment and disciplined decision-making. It does not understand intent or consequences. It does not decide what matters. What it does well is sort, compare, correlate, and highlight signals that would otherwise be lost in the noise,” the handbook reads.

The handbook argues that AI tools can be used for “helping humans apply the principles of detection, denial, disruption, defeat, and discipline more effectively.”

“When protecting against drones, AI is not only useful in moments of crisis, when stress is high in a (Base Defense Operations Center) or when a patrol is already reacting. Its value extends across the entire protection challenge, long before a drone poses a threat,” the handbook reads.

Army Maj. Joe Amoroso, deputy chief of strategic initiatives for JIATF 401, said the handbook offers “vital first principles” to help in “countering the defining threat of our time.”

“It is crucial to build a common foundation for counter-drone efforts as we work with the entire government and interagency partners to respond to this growing threat,” he said.

The process, demonstrated earlier this year at the Army’s Benét Laboratories in New York, uses electrochemical machining, or ECM, to carve the barrel’s 48 spiral grooves without the cutting tool ever touching the steel.

Officials said the no-contact technique leaves the bore in ideal condition for bonding a protective coating that shields the barrel from the extreme heat and erosion generated during firing.

“The protective coating applied to the bore is the primary defense against the extreme thermal and erosive environment inside a firing cannon,” said Christopher Mulligan, a materials engineer at Benét Laboratories.

“Without a perfect bond, the protective coating would fail under the stresses generated by high-energy propellants used in modern artillery and quickly degrade the underlying barrel steel,” he added.

Instead of cutting hardened steel with conventional tooling, ECM uses a cathode cutter, salt water and low-voltage electricity to dissolve metal. In a single pass, the process cuts all 48 rifling grooves inside an M284 cannon barrel.

Christopher Humiston, ECM project lead at Benét Laboratories, called the process “a significant advancement in cannon production” because the cutting tool experiences virtually no wear, reducing maintenance costs and the need for replacement tooling.

He added that ECM also allows engineers to produce complex rifling profiles that were previously impossible to manufacture, including grooves with varying depths in hardened steel.

Army officials said the technology was developed through a partnership between Benét Laboratories, part of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Armaments Center, and its industry partners.

The Army plans to install an ECM machine on the production line at Watervliet Arsenal, a more than 200-year-old facility and the Army’s only manufacturer of cannon barrels.

As demand surged following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Congress approved $1.7 billion to modernize the arsenal and expand its production capacity.

The branch formalizes space as a permanent warfighting specialty, with personnel focused on protecting U.S. assets and helping prevent adversaries from targeting joint forces from outside Earth’s atmosphere.

Brig. Gen. Don Brooks, deputy commanding general of U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, called the announcement “a rallying point” for Army space personnel.

“For 27 years, Army space officers have been working to normalize Army space operations, and that’s what this branch designation now does for the Army,” he said.

The branch stems from the 2024 Army Space Vision, a call to action for commanders and staff to understand how space affects land operations and vice versa. With that, commanders were tasked with identifying soldiers suitable for space operations.

In turn, the service created two new military occupational specialties: Army Space Operations Officers (Functional Area 40) and, on the enlisted side, Tactical Space Operations Specialists (40D). The Army also created the MOS 40C, or Army Astronauts, but the 19 soldiers filling those roles were detailed to NASA.

The two roles complement each other. The service defines them as technical experts who know how to leverage space capabilities, satellite communications, and missile-warning data to support multidomain combat operations. According to the announcement, the service currently integrates hundreds of thousands of space-enabled systems to support multidomain operations.

To fill these roles, the Army is looking for experienced soldiers.

For the officer position, the service wants captains and above with a technical background and who have completed service with their basic branch. And for the enlisted, the service wants grades E-3s through E-9s.

While the initial application period for the 40D role closed on April 30, 2026, the Army said it will need around 1,000 soldiers for the role, and possibly 1,500 by 2032. Training for the position will begin in October.

The disclosure offered a glimpse into how generative AI is being used by the military. It came in a court filing supporting the Justice Department’s effort to dismiss a lawsuit targeting a Mississippi power plant, also owned by Musk, that supplies electricity to data centers used to run the AI system.

Cameron Stanley, the Defense Department’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, made the disclosure in a statement filed in support of the government’s motion. He called the example “a testament to the greatly increased operational efficiency made possible by the Grok Gov Model.”

He added that if the lawsuit succeeds in shutting down the power plant, Grok’s parent company, xAI, would lose capacity to train and develop future versions of the AI tool. “And if xAI is hindered from continuing to improve and upgrade Grok, including the Grok Gov Model, [the Department of Defense’s] ability to meet its national security mission and keep pace with adversaries will be impaired,” Stanley said.

Although Stanley did not elaborate on how military operators used Grok during combat missions, he instead described it as a “critical national security” tool.

“For example, it is deployed in Maven Smart Systems (MSS) to support vital national security missions, including targeting, intelligence, readiness, and recruitment,” he said.

Stanley explained that MSS users process nearly two billion tokens on the Defense Department’s top-secret network each day. Tokens are units used to measure AI processing. “This amount of AI usage is roughly equivalent to 1.5 billion words or up to 6 million pages of text being processed by the technology,” he said.

The Justice Department filed Stanley’s statement alongside its motion on June 15. In the filing, government attorneys argued the lawsuit “threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of Defense’s military operations.”

The lawsuit, filed in April by the NAACP and its Mississippi chapter, alleges that xAI and MZX Tech failed to obtain required permits before installing and operating 27 gas-powered turbines at a facility in Southaven, Mississippi, roughly 13 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee.

The facility, known as the Colossus Gas Plant, powers two data centers — Colossus I and Colossus II — used to operate the Grok chatbot. The complaint said xAI also plans to build a third data center closer to the plant.

The organizations argued the turbines are operating without adequate pollution controls and are emitting harmful pollutants that pose risks to public health. They say the facility operates near an area with “tens of thousands of people” and has the potential to emit more than 1,700 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides.

They contend that a Clean Air Act permit would require the plant to use the “best available control technology,” or BACT, to reduce emissions to acceptable levels.

“Had Defendants obtained a permit, they would have been held to this standard,” the complaint said. “By simply not applying for — or receiving — a permit, xAI and MZX Tech have avoided subjecting these twenty-seven unpermitted turbines to a BACT determination.”

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said the Justice Department intervened because enforcement of federal law falls to the executive branch, not private interest groups. “The Department of Justice is committed to maintaining that constitutional order while protecting national security and promoting American energy and innovation,” he said.

Justice Department officials added in a press release that the state of Mississippi is charged with administering the permitting program and decided no permit was required.

Adam Gustafson, principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division, said the government “will not sit idly by while private organizations use environmental laws to undermine our national security.”

In a statement, officials with Earthjustice and the Southern Environmental Law Center, the legal groups representing the NAACP in the lawsuit, framed the motion as the Trump administration’s attempting to protect wealthy, well-connected companies from being held to account.

They noted that instead of disputing xAI’s permit violations and allegations of unlawful polluting, the Justice Department expressed “vague” concerns about national security.

“This isn’t about national security,” said Laura Thoms, director of enforcement for Earthjustice. “It’s a desperate attempt to protect wealthy corporations like xAI from obeying our bedrock environmental laws.”

Last year, the Defense Department awarded xAI — along with other AI companies — a contract of up to $200 million for developing “agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas.” Around that same time, the White House revealed its plan for integrating AI into workflows across the federal government.

Kym Meyer, SELC’s litigation director, said the motion contradicts “decades of well-established legal precedent,” and called it “an unprecedented attack on the public’s ability to defend themselves from illegal pollution.”