Insights on AI, autonomous systems, and cybersecurity for defense and government.
Latest articleJess Loban
Maryland law now requires its IT department to staff a technical procurement team with technology and agile procurement expertise. The statute targets the right problem. Two things it leaves open will determine whether the team changes any award outcome.
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Close to half of the applications to the Public Benefit Innovation Fund's first round proposed chatbots. Its new $11M round funds the administrative work behind eligibility instead, and SNAP's merit-staffing rules explain why that matters: federal regulation reserves certification to state merit-system personnel, which sets the boundary between what AI can assist and what only state employees can decide.
NASCIO's 2026 State CIO Survey reports 49% of states require disclosure by software providers — but 77% are inventorying GenAI use. That 28-point gap raises a governance question: if AI capabilities arrive as feature updates to deployed software rather than through new procurement, does the inventory count them?
State cybersecurity confidence has collapsed to 22% as budget growth stalled. The 2026 NASCIO-Deloitte study shows 49% of CISOs naming measurement frameworks a top-five initiative — a signal that the most defensible budget arguments frame cybersecurity in financial and operational terms, not technical ones.
Latest articleJess Loban
The Air Force published two cislunar market-research notices in November. The 90-day delivery objective on the AI software RFI is a deliberate filter for commercial products that already work — and the rules for what an autonomous military spacecraft may decide on its own have not kept pace.
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Two Court of Federal Claims opinions in October 2026 hold that OTA prototype competitions can be challenged in federal court and find the Navy applied evaluation criteria inconsistently in the MUSV competition. The Federal Circuit has not spoken, and an intra-court split is now in place. Program offices relying on OTA's protest resistance should update their risk models now.
Acting Secretary Telle's October 1 memo directed FASCOM's establishment, with General LaNeve selecting Futures and Concepts Command for redesignation on October 13 and a new Portfolio Acquisition Executive directed to field priority autonomous systems by FY2028. Whether the restructuring closes the requirements-to-acquisition gap depends on a final NDAA provision for AutoWarCom—the Senate bill is awaiting floor action and no conference is under way—a reconciliation bill that depends on a narrow lame-duck window before Democrats take control in January, and integrating five absorbed organizations.
The Senate returns this week for NDAA lame-duck negotiations now reshaped by the Nov. 3 election, with Section 917's permissive authority for a Robotic and Autonomous Systems Command in direct tension with the administration's own path to an Autonomous Warfare Command. For defense companies, the near-term procurement channel question is not which end-state command wins — it is which DRPM-UxS evaluation mechanisms are live today.
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