The alloys inside the last plane I flew in were designed in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. In aerospace, relying on decades-old materials is normal. Established materials have earned engineers’ trust through years of testing and service. But the next generation of military capabilities will demand performance that existing materials cannot deliver.

Washington spends considerable time on the defense industrial base: factories, workforce, and budgets. Materials discovery deserves the same attention. This year, DARPA kicked off its Next Generation Hypersonic Cruise Missile program and flagged high-temperature materials among the areas that need to improve. Hypersonic vehicles must withstand extreme heat and oxidation. Directed-energy systems, next-gen armor, and advanced reactors all require materials we don't have yet.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired the Pentagon’s top military planner, a defense official said Wednesday, the latest in a series of generals to be ousted and one that comes even as President Donald Trump is weighing renewed strikes on Iran in the eight-month-long war.

Army LTG Brett Sylvia was removed as head of strategy, plans and policy on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is the second general to be ousted from the post, known in military circles as the “J5,” under Hegseth. His predecessor, Lt. Gen. Joseph McGee, was forced to retire last October.

In a 2024 interview,[1] OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that “AI… it’s clearly a tool” and not “a creature.” While Altman’s view continues to dominate public sentiment about artificial intelligence, industry professionals across the optimist-pessimist spectrum embrace policies that demonstrate their belief that artificial intelligence will amount to independent consciousness.

Both “e/acc” techno-optimists and “EA” safety wonks operate under the assumption that emerging superintelligence will be (or already is) sentient. Over the summer, Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah held a series of extended meetings with a diverse cast of religious leaders to discuss the possibility of conscious AI models, constantly molding the definition of words in an attempt to bring parity of consciousness to digital models.[2] Attendees reported that members of Anthropic’s staff treat its flagship model, Claude, as having “‘moral status’ on par with a person” and as “a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect.” Internally, Anthropic maintains a “soul doc” to outline the company’s plans for “model welfare.”[3] On the techno-accelerationist side, Guillaume Verdon, the CEO of Extropic and champion of “effective accelerationism,” writes that “[AI] consciousness is… a simple phase transition achievable by more scale and more optimization/evolution.”[4]

The Pentagon has launched an investigation after sensitive F-35 fighter jet components, including a cockpit canopy and a weapons-bay door coated with specialized radar-absorbing stealth technology, reportedly ended up in the possession of the Chinese government earlier this year. 

Ask any senior U.S. military leader and they will tell you that F-35 parts could allow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to reverse engineer U.S. stealth technology. That is a threat to our service members and national security. So why are a number of U.S. lawmakers championing “Right to Repair” legislation, which could make it easier for bad actors and foreign competitors to obtain the trade secrets behind critical U.S. defense systems?