Insights on AI, autonomous systems, and cybersecurity for defense and government.
Latest articleJess Loban
Most states still issue magnetic-stripe EBT cards that criminal skimming operations exploit at scale. Chip migration is the right response, but a chip card program without coordinated terminal upgrades, fraud detection recalibration, and benefit recovery infrastructure closes far less of the gap than early results suggest.
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State finance and HR system replacements fail more predictably than most agencies acknowledge. The organizational preconditions — data ownership, process authority, change management resources, oversight capacity, and governance structure — must be in place before the RFP, not assembled alongside it.
The Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act explicitly covers state and local governments under the Government Facilities Sector. State CISOs who have not started the organizational design work — designating a reporting official, scoping covered agencies, establishing inter-agency notification — are already behind the practical compliance timeline.
NASCIO ranked AI at the top of state CIO priorities for 2026—the first time it has displaced cybersecurity in twelve years. The same research shows only 22 percent of states have an AI-ready data quality program, and only 4 percent describe their data governance as very mature. That gap has a predictable cost.
Latest articleJess Loban
JIATF 401 replaced the JCO with consolidated acquisition authority and a reported $4B+ contract vehicle in 2026. Whether those investments yield effective layered defense depends on how the task force resolves the command-and-control integration problem it inherited—a structural challenge that the organizational change alone does not fix.
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Multi-Domain Task Forces are designed to operate in environments where adversaries deny communications at will. Most JADC2 programs specify for degraded connectivity but not genuine denial. Three architectural choices made in early system design determine whether a C3 architecture can sustain the targeting kill chain when the network disappears.
The Navy has programmed its first LUSV production procurement for FY2027, but the structural requirements for autonomous surface integration—communications architecture under contested conditions, kill chain authorization under DoDD 3000.09, and data link compatibility with the manned fleet—remain under-specified in ways that will surface as expensive surprises when the first operational vessels begin fleet integration.
Electronic warfare effects are increasingly part of joint fires planning, but JADC2 architectures designed to connect sensors to kinetic effectors have significant structural gaps when it comes to representing EW. Classification constraints, timescale mismatches, and a data model built around kinetic effects are design problems—not edge cases—and deferring them means discovering them during operational evaluation.
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