Presumptive Deputy Defense Secretary Norquist pledged to “revise budget review timelines and data collection standards to maximize senior leader decision-making quality and timing.”

A friendly Senate hearing heated up when Sen. Elizabeth Warren told Acting SecDef Esper “you should not be confirmed as Secretary of Defense.”

The Air Force can be an “angel investor” for some startups, said Will Roper, the service’s top acquisition official.

A slew of new civilian officials are settling in at the Pentagon, adding muscle to promises of change in how the military develops and buys technology, and how fast it can put that gear in the field.

The Air Force wants more AI, cloud computing, autonomous drone swarms and thousands of tiny satellites. But most of these projects are only now getting off the ground at the Pentagon, making the service’s new “Flight Path” a little cloudy.

A new command and control system Lockheed is selling to an unnamed international customer includes automated “enemy intent analysis.” So, the Diamond Shield system takes the enormous amount of data gathered by the system, uses Artificial Intelligence to analyze it and tells commanders what it thinks the enemy will do.

As the Pentagon and the defense industry rush to keep up with the shift to great power competition and the fight for tech workers rushing for Silicon Valley, the idea of technology incubators is catching fire.

Project Maven has made huge strides in its first year, but the key is remaining open to updates from whoever has the best idea for new algorithms, and new code, a military leader says.

The Pentagon wants its new AI center up and running in six months, but is taking a different track on directed energy and hypersonics, Deputy Defense Secretary Shanahan says.

The Pentagon is moving out quickly to get in front of Chinese advances in artificial intelligence, and is rushing a plan up to Capitol Hill to work with the intel community more closely.