The U.S. Army is pushing forward with its new Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) system after a successful test of a $3 billion prototype in the Mojave Desert. The AI-enabled system amounts to a massive overhaul of the Army’s communications and planning architecture, replacing previous and in some cases aging equipment with a combination of off-the-shelf components and advanced technologies.

Mr. Seward was on the ground at Fort Irwin, California, to witness the recent NGC2 testing. The Army’s Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve told reporters on Wednesday the system will boost the capability of soldiers and leaders in the field, not replace them.

NGC2 is being developed by a slew of U.S. defense tech contractors, including Anduril and Palantir. The system consolidates all of the available information on a battlefield in one place for commanders — and AI — to use for planning, targeting, intelligence and other operations.

New details are emerging on the preliminary U.S.-Ukraine drone production cooperation deal struck earlier this month, under which Ukrainian systems are to be sent to the Pentagon for testing as part of the U.S. military’s “Drone Dominance” program.

Threat Status Special Ukraine Correspondent Guillaume Ptak reports from Kyiv that the goal of the partnership is to turn Ukraine’s battlefield-tested drone industry into a resource for the U.S. military. U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker met in Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to sign the documents on July 22.

U.S. law requires production of American military systems to be anchored inside the United States. For Ukraine, the new agreement offers something Kyiv desperately lacks: the money and industrial scale needed to sustain a defense technology sector that is quickly outgrowing Kyiv’s ability to buy everything it can make.

Newly released satellite images appear to confirm Iran’s assertions that it carried out destructive strikes on commercial infrastructure around the region, including two Amazon Web Services data centers in Bahrain earlier this month.

Amazon has yet to confirm that the Bahrain attack took place or that the company’s facilities suffered any damage, but images originally published by Iranian state media reportedly show significant damage to two AWS data centers at Zallaq and Askar in Bahrain following an Iranian cruise missile attack. Those images have now been substantiated by a set of lower-resolution photos from the European Space Agency reviewed by Bloomberg analysts.

While it’s unclear if the U.S. was using the AWS centers for military or intelligence purposes, the development is fueling unease. “Commercial cloud facilities were never designed to sit inside a kinetic threat environment, and now they are being treated as legitimate military targets,” says Laurynas Satas, CEO of the Lithuania-based defense tech firm Aktyvus Photonics. Threat Status previously reported that defense contractor Anduril, a company that works closely with AWS, had its data centers attacked in the Middle East.

The House-passed version of the 2027 defense authorization and policy bill has a section that calls for the Pentagon to report to Congress on whether the U.S. military has a dangerous shortage of missiles and anti-missile interceptors because of the wars in the Middle East, Ukraine and other “unplanned global taskings.”

The Pentagon would be required under the legislation to produce quarterly reports to assure Congress that “deterring China and maintaining a favorable balance of military power in the Indo-Pacific region is a strategic priority of the United States,” according to a House report on the $1.1 trillion 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.

The House version of the bill would also require the director of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff to clarify the impact that contingency deployments and diverted assets have on U.S. military operations worldwide. This comes amid reports that President Trump paused some strikes on Iran due to concerns that escalation would lead to dangerous shortfalls in anti-missile interceptors and limit U.S. hard power projection capabilities in other theaters, including the Pacific.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul “handed Beijing a win” in the race for AI supremacy by signing the ban this month, according to Chuck Flint, who writes in an op-ed for The Washington Times that genuine concerns among Americans have been “amplified by geopolitical adversaries pumping our social media channels with propaganda as part of cognitive warfare.”

Mr. Flint, who suggests the development may be tied to a Chinese influence campaign to turn Americans against data center construction, writes that “President Trump was on Ms. Hochul within a day … telling her to reverse course immediately.

“Other states are watching,” writes Mr. Flint, the executive director of the Coalition for Affordability and Prosperity. “Georgia, Maryland, Oklahoma, Vermont and Virginia all have moratorium bills pending, and every one of those legislatures is waiting to see whether New York pays a price.”

• July 30 — Future of U.S. Land Power: Under Secretary of the U.S. Army Mike Obadal, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• Aug. 4 — Navigating the Strait of Hormuz Energy Crisis: Global Policy Responses, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• Aug. 4 — Taiwan’s Ever-Changing Security Environment, Hudson Institute

• Aug. 4-5 — 2026 Air Force & Space Force Procurement Conference, American Defense Alliance

• Aug. 5-6 — Border Security & Intelligence Summit, Defense Strategies Institute

• Aug. 9-12 — DoDIIS Worldwide Conference 2026, Defense Intelligence Agency 

• Aug. 11-13 — Space & Missile Defense Symposium, Huntsville, Alabama

• Aug. 25-26 — Counter UAS Summit, Institute for Defense and Government Advancement