Overview
- Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s technology chief, said Wednesday at the WSJ Tech Conference that the U.S. failed to anticipate how central low‑cost drones would be in Ukraine and Russia and is racing to catch up.
- Michael gave a new stockpile figure of roughly 500,000 drones and said the U.S. had produced about 1,000 under the prior administration.
- Ukraine has driven large‑scale battlefield innovation and plans to build millions of drones this year, a pace that still outstrips current U.S. production and stockpiles.
- Project Meridian, a Pentagon effort that brings private technologists into planning, includes figures such as Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey and is tasked with imagining future domains and systems.
- The Pentagon said it will keep human judgment central to targeting, has excluded Anthropic as a vendor for national‑security reasons, and continues an unresolved investigation into a high‑casualty Iran strike that involved an AI planning step.