Category: Washington Post

In a late-June meeting with more than a dozen of the nation’s top defense technology firms, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had an urgent message: The Pentagon needed their help to rapidly replenish America’s weapons arsenal.

Outside the room, the United States was mired in a conflict with Iran that was rapidly depleting U.S. stocks of missiles and interceptors. According to three people familiar with the meeting, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, Hegseth told executives that their companies would be critical to restocking the nation’s supplies.

The meeting, several details of which were previously unreported, underscores a pivotal shift in the U.S. defense industry. With the Iran war consuming vast quantities of precision munitions and relying less on ground troops or drone warfare, the Pentagon is leaning on venture-backed startups to solve one of its most pressing problems: rebuilding America’s weapons stockpiles at speed.

The meeting was filled with the Pentagon’s top brass, including Steve Feinberg, the deputy defense secretary; Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering; and Michael Duffey, the Pentagon’s top acquisitions official.

Leading defense tech firms were summoned, including AI-aircraft software company Shield AI, the autonomous weapons firm Anduril, cruise missile startup CoAspire, and low-cost munitions maker Castelion. Some details of the meeting were previously reported by Breaking Defense.

In many ways, this is the moment Silicon Valley’s defense entrepreneurs have said they were made for — to be cheaper, quicker, and more nimble to the needs of the U.S. fighting force than legacy multibillion-dollar defense contractors.

They represent a sharp departure from established firms, which have far more experience managing clunky government acquisition processes and billions of dollars in capital to spend producing weapons en masse and lobbying lawmakers, but can move more slowly, especially in creating new supplies featuring cutting-edge technology, including artificial intelligence.

The urgent need for new weapons is a major test for the Trump administration, which has turbocharged its relationship with Silicon Valley and made collaboration with startups a core part of its weapons acquisition process. The conflict, according to industry experts, may reveal whether newcomers can deal with the challenging realities of providing weapons at scale, overcoming antiquated contracting processes and congressional gridlock.

Hegseth focused on these hurdles at the gathering, asking each executive what obstacles stood in the way of producing more weapons, according to the people. Several pointed to slow Pentagon contracting processes and the difficulty startups face securing enough up-front financing to fund large production runs and expensive research and development.

It’s unclear, however, whether the industry’s newest entrants can scale quickly enough to meet the Pentagon’s demands.

“It’s one thing to build … it’s another thing to then mass produce,” said Jerry McGinn, the director of the Center for the Industrial Base at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Can they deliver?”

Acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez said in a statement to the Washington Post that the Defense Department is “transforming how the Department fights, buys, and builds” its weapons “to ensure we rapidly deliver critical technology to the warfighter at scale.” He added that the department “will harness the creativity and drive of American innovators, clear bureaucratic blockers, and put our acquisition system on a wartime footing to deliver tangible solutions to the Joint Force.”

Anduril and Shield AI did not reply to a request for comment.

‘Begging to be unleashed’

In the second Trump administration, the Pentagon has made it increasingly clear that Silicon Valley will be essential in creating cheaper, smarter, and smaller weapons to reshape how the U.S. fights war.

The Defense Department’s top leadership has become stuffed with former Silicon Valley executives, bringing their startup ethos to the Pentagon to transform the military.

Speaking in November at the National War College in Washington, Hegseth outlined his vision to overhaul the Pentagon’s acquisition process in partnership with U.S. industry to ensure it can operate on a wartime footing.

“American industry and its innovative spirit are begging to be unleashed to solve our most complex and dangerous warfighting problems,” he said. “We need to get out of our own way, out of your way and enter into real partnership with you rather than overprescribe and decelerate your natural progress.”

Approximately 10,000 new defense tech companies have entered the market since 2024, according to a July report by CSIS. Nontraditional companies outside of legacy defense contractors received more than $120 billion in contract obligations in the 2025 fiscal year.

But one of the Pentagon’s most urgent needs is munitions. The war with Iran has sharply depleted U.S. stockpiles, with CSIS estimating Monday that inventory of Patriot interceptors has fallen from 2,200 before the war to fewer than 827, and THAAD missiles from 452 to fewer than 278.

It could take three or more years to replenish the supply of THAAD and Patriot missile defense systems to what it was before the Iran war, according to a CSIS analysis in May, putting the U.S. at increased risk of service members dying and military assets abroad becoming damaged due to weakened defenses. Precision strike and joint air-to-surface missiles may take several months to a year to replace, according to the analysis.

The Defense Department is aiming to fill this gap by turning to tech companies that make low-cost munitions. The Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 budget calls for nearly half of all of its munitions to be low-cost, with that share rising to 70% by fiscal 2031, CSIS analyzed.

This mindset has filtered into current agreements. In May, the Pentagon announced several multiyear arrangements with defense tech companies, including Anduril, Castelion, CoAspire, Leidos, and Zone 5, to “aggressively expand” the U.S. military’s strike capabilities and purchase their low-cost missiles.

The goal, according to the announcement, is to procure 10,000 low-cost cruise missiles in three years, starting in 2027. The Defense Department has also said it will issue a contract to Castelion to purchase a minimum of 500 of its low-cost hypersonic missiles — called Blackbeard — annually with a desire to buy up to 12,000 over five years if the technology receives proper testing accreditations.

McGinn of CSIS said the demand will expose the industry to the realities of making weapons in real time. The startups have shown they can build the technology at low cost, he said, but now they have to prove their products are up to Pentagon standards, while navigating the whims of Congress, which appropriates defense spending.

Doug Denneny, the founder and chief executive of cruise missile startup CoAspire, said startups face a challenge beyond mastering technological advancements.

“That is the direct messaging that we receive from the Department of War,” he said, using the Trump administration’s preferred name for the Defense Department. “‘Great that you’ve got this great technology. … We get it. We believe it. You’ve demonstrated it. You’ve proven your capability. Now you have to manage your supply chain, and now you have to produce at scale. Otherwise, it’s not worth the investment.’”

“The importance of that has been emphasized to me personally by senior leadership in the Pentagon,” he added.

The rush to expand weapons production could also overwhelm the subcontractors that supply critical components, creating bottlenecks across the defense supply chain, Denneny said.

Bryon Hargis, co-founder and chief executive of Castelion, said the Pentagon’s reliance on startups carries enormous pressure. His company’s Blackbeard hypersonic missile could cost about $500,000 each — far below the roughly $5 million price tag of comparable weapons v but scaling production to meet military demand remains the challenge.

“I feel the weight of … everything that we still have yet to do and to build out,” he said, adding that making good on supply promises is “going to be just tremendous amounts of pain over the next years.”

He noted that the partnership is “an honor, but it’s a great responsibility. Like I feel we have to deliver.”

The Trump administration is asking Congress for an additional $10 million to cover costs related to Freedom 250 events recently held on the National Mall, including a prayer event, a fair and a fireworks show.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D, Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for the Mall, said an earlier request from the administration was presented to Congress last week as part of a broader request for short-term funding across the government. That request, which asked for an unspecified amount of funding “to recoup costs associated with support of events celebrating America’s Semiquincentennial,” prompted questions about why the additional funds were needed, Merkley said.

In a briefing with Merkley’s office, Interior Department staff said that the money was needed to cover routine National Park Service costs incurred during the Rededicate 250 prayer event, the Great American State Fair, and the July Fourth Salute to America, according to Merkley.

Those events were organized by Freedom 250, a public-private partnership launched by the White House in December to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary. The group — which has partly supplanted a bipartisan group created by Congress a decade ago to help coordinate anniversary events – has organized initiatives and projects shaped by President Donald Trump, such as the July Fourth fireworks show that Trump pledged would be the largest in history. The Great American State Fair, a 16-day event extolled by the president, was beset by poor weather and saw periods of strikingly low attendance.

Asked about the funding request, the Interior Department told The Washington Post on Wednesday that the extra funding was needed to help address security needs, citing recent threats against high-profile events such as the UFC event held outside the White House and the attempted shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner.

“Given the elevated security threats against high-profile events in Washington, D.C. …an elevated security posture was needed to ensure the safety of the public at these events. This funding would help address the expenditures associated with the elevated security posture,” the department wrote in an email.

Merkley on Wednesday wrote to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, asking how past funds set aside for Freedom 250 had been spent, in a letter shared with The Post. The One Big Beautiful Bill, which Republicans passed last summer without Democratic votes, set aside $150 million for the Interior Department for events and activities related to the semiquincentennial.

Much of that funding has been redirected to Freedom 250, which has also solicited donors and received financial support from major corporations.

“It is unacceptable to ask the American people to bail out Freedom 250,” Merkley wrote, asking for more details on why the administration was requesting the funds and how past money had been spent. “Congress already appropriated $150 million — without bipartisan input — with the administration promising that private donors would help finance the rest.”

Schools in at least three states will be equipped with drones this year that can zoom through halls, smash windows, and pepper-spray active shooters if teachers report a threat.

At least nine schools — three in Florida, five in Georgia, and one in Colorado — will have storage boxes that house the plastic, nonlethal aircraft made by Austin-based Mithril Defense. The drones, which can be activated by teachers, are capable of reaching a shooter within 15 seconds.

The aircraft are designed to distract their targets by flashing strobes, blaring sirens, spraying them with pepper gel, or ramming into them at 60 mph.

“Once I get the drones on you, you just can’t escape them,” said Bill King, a retired Navy SEAL and Mithril Defense co-founder.

The programs continue a wave of spending on high-tech security on campuses — a multibillion dollar industry fueled by threat of school shootings. Nearly 400,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since the 1999 attack at Columbine High School in Colorado, according to a Washington Post tracker, which has recorded 435 shootings over that period.

Deltona High School, a public school just north of Orlando, with about 1,700 students, became the first campus to install the system at the end of last school year. Two more Florida schools — Boyd H. Anderson High School near Fort Lauderdale and Godby High School in Tallahassee — were also tapped by the state to complete the $557,000 pilot spearheaded by state legislators.

Five schools in Georgia will also test the drone systems after state legislators there approved a roughly $500,000 pilot program with Mithril Defense. The state has not finalized the schools that will participate, but Mithril said the systems will come online during the upcoming school year.

Georgia state Rep. Matt Dubnik (R), chairperson of the House appropriations education subcommittee, said the technology could protect schools that don’t have resource officers on campus. The pilot will be tested in schools with and without the officers, he said.

“I’m a believer in the technology,” Dubnik said, adding that hundreds of other state legislators agreed when they voted to pass the budget, which included the funding for the program.

And in Colorado, John Adams Academy — a public charter school in Sterling Ranch for students in kindergarten through grade 12 — will self-fund a drone program for its inaugural year.

Teachers will have an app or classroom panic buttons to summon the drones. Mithril Defense’s professional drone pilots can then fly them remotely.

The drones have been tested in simulations but never by a shooting.

Justin Marston, Mithril’s founder and CEO, said the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed in 2022 as law enforcement waited over an hour to enter the classroom, inspired the project.

When he learned of the Russian and Ukrainian military forces using cheap drones to attack each other, Marston said he figured a nonlethal version might have saved lives in Uvalde.

“The first 120 seconds are incredibly critical, because that’s when most of the shooting happens,” Marston said.

While the drones could be activated any time, they’re meant specifically for potentially lethal situations. The drones wouldn’t break up a schoolyard fight, Marston said. But if one of the students pulled a knife, they could.

Schools across the country have embraced a range of defense technologies from artificial intelligence-powered cameras to weapons detectors amid the threat of campus shootings. But some say military-grade equipment, like Mithril’s drones, don’t belong on campuses packed with children.

School security consultants have, for years, cast doubt on high-tech solutions to school shootings, arguing that low-tech measures, like simply locking external doors, are just as effective.

Curtis Lavarello, who leads the School Safety Advocacy Council, a security consultancy firm, said he worried that Mithril’s drones might accidentally target a fleeing student instead of a shooter. Or that remote pilots, in a split-second decision, might mistake a law enforcement officer for a shooter, especially if teachers initiate a false alarm.

“It’s almost like where gaming and school safety collide,” Lavarello said. “I have some really serious reservations about the deployment of drones in schools.”

Mithril isn’t the first company to attempt to place anti-shooter drones in school. In 2022, Axon Enterprise halted development of taser-equipped drones after a mass resignation of its ethics board, which worried that the devices would stun innocent students or be abused by hackers.

Jaclyn Corin, who survived the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17, said she’d prefer to see officials prioritize policies that help prevent gun violence instead of responding to it.

“School districts have finite budgets and limited attention,” said Corin, executive director and co-founder of March for Our Lives, a youth-led organization advocating for strict gun control. “If we spend significant resources on technologies designed to respond after shooting begins, we have to ask what we’re not investing in instead.”

Nicole Lawrence said she found out from a local TV news story that her child’s Atlanta-area high school was solicited by Georgia to host Mithril’s drones this year. (District officials said they do not yet have specific plans for installing the devices.) Lawrence said she’s unsure whether the drones will be effective but is willing to give them a chance.

“I’ve put $100,000 toward worse things,” Lawrence said.

Florida plans to review the number of violent incidents at the schools and measure response times to threats. The state will also survey parents, students, and staff about whether they feel safer under the pepper-spraying, window-smashing devices.

As the drones sat in Deltona High School this summer awaiting their first action, the state approved another $564,000 for the following school year.

The Kremlin has initiated a new crackdown on anti-war voices ahead of Russia’s parliamentary elections in September, barring candidates from running if they show any sign of opposing the bloody, expensive, and increasingly unpopular military operation in Ukraine.

While repression of political opposition forces is nothing new in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the new clampdown is jarring because for a moment this spring, it seemed like a rare window had opened for dissent, as the authorities appeared to create a pressure-release valve for growing dissatisfaction over the war.

But with the government coming under increasing pressure over Ukraine’s relentless drone strikes and the growing toll on the economy, including an acute fuel crisis, hard-liners in the Kremlin and the security services are gaining the upper hand and have pushed successfully for more repressive measures.

In recent weeks, the liberal-leaning Yabloko Party, which is attempting to campaign under the slogan “For Peace and Freedom” — a pointed counter to Putin’s unyielding push for conquest — has come under increasing pressure across the country. Meanwhile, Russia’s most prominent anti-war politician, Boris Nadezhdin, who sought to run as an independent, has been barred from the campaign.

Authorities in St. Petersburg last week refused to register Yabloko for the local parliamentary elections, and more than a dozen of its candidates have been barred from federal and regional elections over accusations they displayed alleged “extremist symbols” such as posting photos online of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

The Russian authorities “are not going to give any platform to people with anti-war views in the election,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, an independent political analyst in Moscow. “There is now not one noticeable voice against the war.”

Recent challenges to Yabloko’s registration in several regions over claims of incorrect paperwork could lead to Yabloko being barred overall from the federal election, analysts say — a move that could strengthen United Russia, the ruling party that controls the parliament and has long backed Putin.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied the government was targeting anti-war voices, and said individuals were being punished for “violations of the law.”

“Those who break the law are under pressure and those who don’t break it freely speak their opinion,” Peskov told The Washington Post. “I wouldn’t even call Yabloko a party. It’s no more than a cell,” he added.

In spring, however, the atmosphere seemed very different. A video posted by social media influencer Viktoriya Bonya lambasting the government’s botched handling of internet restrictions and other problems went viral, forcing the Kremlin to respond.

A former Kremlin lawyer, Ilya Remeslo, openly branded Putin a war criminal and a thief — but after a brief incarceration in a psychiatric hospital was somehow released and allowed to continue his tirade. More recently in June, German Gref, the head of Russia’s biggest state bank, broke ranks by publicly saying everyone wanted the war to end as soon as possible.

Remeslo, whose open stance against the war had been seen as representing a divide in the upper reaches of the Kremlin, has since been quietly arrested, accused of spreading allegedly false information about the Russian military — a charge that carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years. He is now being held in a Moscow psychiatric facility, the Serbsky Institute, notorious for its incarceration of political prisoners, according to Remeslo’s lawyer, Sergei Badamshin.

Forces in the Kremlin decided to put an end to the public dissent, Nadezhdin, the independent anti-war candidate, told The Post in an interview after he was briefly detained and fined for displaying alleged “extremist symbols” — for sharing a link to a video containing an image of Navalny, who died in prison in 2024.

On July 10, the Justice Ministry declared Nadezhdin a foreign agent, a move that barred him from public office, and he was prohibited from leaving the country.

“People trust Putin and United Russia less and less because the war has come to them,” Nadezhdin said. “Every day, warehouses and oil bases are exploding. People are dying. And in this situation they are trying to get rid of the most visible political actors like me and Yabloko, who speak against the war and for peace and freedom.”

Nadezhdin, who won popularity on an anti-war platform in the 2024 presidential elections until the authorities refused to register him as a candidate, said he was now withdrawing completely from opposition politics because it had become impossible.

In the weeks since public dissatisfaction spilled into the open, Putin’s popularity ratings continued to fall.

On July 17, a state pollster, the Public Opinion Foundation, recorded the biggest one-week drop in Putin’s approval rating since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, a decline of five percentage points to 66%.

Putin’s falling ratings have been exacerbated by Ukraine’s campaign of long-range drone strikes on Russian oil facilities that have caused widespread fuel shortages and price hikes across the country and potentially pose a threat to this year’s harvest. His declining popularity has raised the stakes in the parliamentary elections, analysts and opposition politicians said.

“More and more people don’t understand if the authorities at least have a plan about how to exit the situation with the war, and whether all these sacrifices and losses being wrought on Russian society and the economy are justified,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

“2026 is a turning point,” she added. “In the first four years of the war people lived in the understanding that the authorities know what they’re doing. Now they don’t know what to expect from tomorrow and there is the feeling that the situation is getting out of control while the authorities don’t have a plan.”

“Everyone is living from day to day,” Stanovaya said, “while Putin seems far removed from reality.”

The Kremlin can remove perceived opposition voices at will, and is widely expected to retain a tight grip on the election.

Still, the gloomy backdrop appears to have forced the Kremlin to reassess what would constitute a win, especially amid persistent public anxiety that the government is planning a new military conscription effort after the election.

Officials now forecast United Russia could win with 45% of the vote, Russian independent news outlet Meduza reported, down from a previous official prediction of 55%.

In the Kremlin, officials are still divided over how to handle the increasingly thorny situation, according to Nadezhdin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former Russian oil tycoon who is now a leading opposition figure living in exile in London.

The recent arrest of Remeslo is a sign that Russia’s Federal Security Service is strengthening its hand against more progressive forces in the Kremlin who had supported figures like Remeslo, Khodorkovsky said.

“In Putin’s circle a discussion is going on about what to do,” Nadezhdin said. “The [security services] are just trying to repress everyone … And the other part of the administration is trying to somehow work … and get some kind of acceptable result at the election. But it is becoming more and more difficult.”

In recent weeks, at least 14 members of Yabloko have been barred from running over accusations that they displayed alleged “extremist symbols,” and the party’s registration is being challenged in several regions over claims of incorrect paperwork. The Federal Election Commission has yet to register Yabloko’s list of candidates.

In addition, at least four members of the Communist Party have been barred from running over charges they posted “extremist symbols.”

With little sign of renewed peace negotiations, some Russian officials appear to hope that the political situation in Kyiv will deteriorate first, Khodorkovsky said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week ordered a far-reaching government shake-up, including the dismissal of the defense minister, the prime minister and the commander in chief of the armed forces.

“They are counting on political destabilization in Kyiv,” Khodorkovsky said of hawks in the Kremlin.

As Russia ramps up ballistic missile strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure in response to Ukraine’s drone campaign, the impact on Ukraine is becoming ever more worrying, one senior Ukrainian official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

“Of course the Russians suffer a lot,” this official said. “But we suffer the same and on an even bigger scale and what will happen in the winter, no one can say.”

The Trump administration launched a plan Tuesday to channel hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers directly into deportation proceedings, a change that some attorneys said could lead to people being removed from the United States without a hearing.

Trump officials introduced a rule designed to reduce the 1.4 million asylum cases pending in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Homeland Security agency that processes immigration applications, by nearly a third. The rule took effect immediately, before the public could weigh in.

In the past, asylum seekers who entered the U.S. legally or were never charged with an immigration violation had the opportunity to apply for refuge in an office before a trained asylum officer. The officer could refer them to immigration court for removal proceedings if they were rejected, or allow them to continue proceedings and potentially get on a path to obtaining U.S. citizenship.

Under the new rule, officials say as many as 444,724 cases could be transferred directly to one of the Justice Department’s immigration judges. Trump officials have empowered judges to dismiss certain cases without a hearing, so attorneys say it is possible that many asylum seekers will be deported without a chance to be heard.

Trump officials said in a statement that the rule is necessary because the asylum system is facing a “crisis.”

“For far too long the asylum system has been exploited for purposes of delay and work authorization, not legitimate claims of protection,” USCIS Director Joseph B. Edlow said in a statement. “America’s asylum system exists to protect individuals who genuinely fear persecution and this rule will help ensure that resources are directed to the timely adjudication of those claims instead of to those seeking to use the system as a loophole.”

The measure is the latest means through which the Trump administration has sought to transform the asylum system. President Donald Trump, in one of his first acts in office, barred asylum seekers’ entry into the United States by declaring an “invasion” at the U.S.-Mexico border.

He has also targeted those who are already living inside the U.S., including hundreds of thousands of people who probably arrived legally and followed the rules to apply for asylum.

Trump officials are preparing to terminate work permits for Haitians and Syrians in the coming days after the Supreme Court enabled officials to allow their temporary protected status to expire. If those immigrants also applied for asylum and their cases are referred to the courts, lawyers say, the threat of deportation could be imminent.

“It’s all part of a plan to take legal people and make them illegal,” said Ira Kurzban, one of the attorneys who represented Haitians in the case that went to the Supreme Court. “That’s what they’ve essentially done.”

The United States is a signatory to the 1967 United Nations protocol on refugees, which prohibits member countries from expelling immigrants to nations where they face serious threats to their lives.

Trump officials, Kurzban said, are betraying that principle and turning the asylum system into “a joke.”

“At a 30,000-foot level it sure looks like a deportation machine,” he said.

Trump officials argue that smugglers have exploited the U.S. asylum system, flooding it with weak applications so that immigrants may live and work legally in the United States as their cases drag through the system.

Asylum creates a path to U.S. permanent residency and, eventually, citizenship. To be eligible, applicants must show that they face persecution in their homeland based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or another trait that makes them a specific target. They also must pass background checks and apply within one year of arrival.

The more than 400,000 pending asylum cases before USCIS that could be sent to deportation proceedings largely involve individuals who filed for refuge after being in the United States for more than a year, officials said in announcing the rule.

Federal law says asylum seekers must apply within a year of arriving, and officials contend that most late applicants referred to immigration judges in the past few years have been ineligible for an exception to that requirement.

Advocates for immigrants have long argued that people fleeing for their lives are not well versed in the intricacies and deadlines of U.S. immigration laws, and note that the immigration courts do not assign them public defenders. Sometimes bona fide applications are filed late, they say, and federal law allows judges to overlook that in extraordinary cases.

Though the new rule took effect immediately Tuesday, USCIS said it will accept public comments and later issue a final rule with its responses.