Russian jamming cut the effectiveness of precision artillery in Ukraine from 70 to 6 percent in six weeks. Spoofed navigation signals pulled a British tanker off course before Iran seized it in the Strait of Hormuz. Russian electronic warfare targeted Starlink terminals in Ukraine, disrupting the satellite communications Ukrainian forces relied on for battlefield command and control.

These incidents all highlight the nature of a contested spectrum battlefield. These were all different missions, platforms, and domains, yet each arose from the same vulnerability: the electromagnetic spectrum. The United States Department of War and its industrial base must adapt to this contested environment. If our warfighting systems are to succeed in the modern battlefield, acquisition processes must adapt to better judge RF systems under jamming and buy adaptive capability on commercial timelines.

The Department of War is undergoing one of the most significant transformations in military operations. Artificial intelligence is moving decision-making to the tactical edge. Autonomous systems are proliferating across every domain. Data is becoming as decisive as firepower. And military planners increasingly envision a future where thousands of unmanned and autonomous systems operate simultaneously across highly contested battlespaces. This transformation is reshaping not only how wars will be fought, but also where America's most valuable military information resides. Increasingly, it resides at the edge.

Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the architecture of military computing. Every AI-enabled unmanned aircraft, autonomous ground vehicle, maritime platform, ISR sensor, edge compute node, and autonomous command-and-control system now processes, stores, and acts on operational data locally rather than relying on centralized command centers. As AI pushes computing to the tactical edge, battlefield platforms have become repositories of some of the military's most valuable information.