Detailed budget materials are being released on a rolling basis this week, but the officials provided insights into the nearly $1 trillion spending plan in an off-camera press briefing Thursday morning.

“This budget is the first year that we are calling out — specifically — our autonomy line in its own section. So, it will be $13.4 billion for autonomy and autonomous systems,” a senior defense official told DefenseScoop. 

“For counter [unmanned aerial systems], the total request is $3.1 billion across the services,” they also confirmed. 

The new requests for additional drone and counter-drone funding come as the U.S. military confronts serious challenges integrating and defending against the rapidly evolving weapons, which often cost much less to produce than the multimilllion-dollar missiles that have been deployed to take them down.

The senior defense official supplied a high-level breakdown on the robotics and autonomy-enabling budget lines.

“For unmanned and remotely-operated aerial vehicles, it’s $9.4 billion; autonomous ground vehicles, $210 million; on the water autonomous systems, $1.7 billion; underwater capabilities, $734 million; and enabling capabilities — that’s the autonomy software, the things that underlie all these systems, working and operating together as a central brain — it’s $1.2 billion to work across all those platforms on autonomy,” they said.

A senior Navy official at the briefing also pointed to what they consider to be a “big increase” associated with autonomy investments for the sea service.

“[It’s] $5.3 billion across all systems. And that’s $2.2 billion above FY 2025. That includes procuring three MQ-25s, which we’ll have our first flight in 2026 — and then additional unmanned air [assets], new efforts in unmanned undersea and in unmanned surface, to include procuring our medium unmanned surface vessel. So, we have a lot of efforts across all domains,” the senior Navy official told DefenseScoop.

Two aircraft carrier strike groups operating in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility are “engaged in combat every day” against enemy-launched drones, they noted.

“We have the [USS Gerald R. Ford] that is just now deploying. Ford will deploy with some additional counter-UAS capabilities, and then we’ll continue to look and learn and develop those kits that we sent before, and [applying] part of what we’re learning,” the senior Navy official said.

Representatives from the other military services did not share information about their departments’ autonomy toplines during the briefing.

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“Despite the dramatic rise in threats and increasing importance of space over the last few budget cycles, the Space Force has experienced shrinking resources. This disconnect between value and investment creates risk for our nation,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Tuesday during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. “Further exacerbating the situation, the Space Force has been asked to accept new responsibilities and missions forcing tough choices between delayed readiness, reduced capacity and vulnerabilities.”

The Space Force has recently named “space control” as its newest and most important core function. As outlined in the Space Warfighting Framework released in April, the mission requires capabilities and guardians that conduct orbital, electromagnetic and cyber warfare operations to achieve “space superiority” by protecting on-orbit assets and military personnel from an adversary’s space-enabled attack.

Saltzman told senators that unlike its other core functions that require modernization of systems, space control calls for capabilities and infrastructure to be created entirely from scratch — a task he said would be the Space Force’s top priority in fiscal 2026.

However, the service would be unable to achieve that with current funding levels and personnel without experiencing negative impacts to its other mission areas, he said.

In his written testimony, Saltzman explained that 78 percent of the Space Force’s budget is dedicated to delivering capability to the entire joint force — leaving less than a quarter of the service’s funds available for developing space control.

“At present, we do not have the full set of capabilities necessary to secure the space domain at the scale we need to assure joint force success,” Saltzman said. “These decisions have disproportionately impacted the [Space Force’s] ability to meet its obligations to the nation.”

Compounding the issue are a number of novel mission areas given to the Space Force in the last three years. Along with space control, the service is working on transferring ground- and air-moving target indicator systems to space, developing modeling and simulation tools, increasing its launch cadence and taking a lead role in President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense shield.

“There’s a lot of new equipment, there’s new training, there’s new people. We can’t just take what we have and presume that we can gain space superiority with that equipment. That new equipment requires new resources, and so that’s where the disconnect comes,” Saltzman said. “We are not adequately funded for new missions that I’ve been given in space superiority.”

As the Defense Department’s newest and smallest service, the Space Force’s funding accounts for only about three percent of the entire Pentagon’s budget allocations. Officials have previously said that fiscal constraints caused by repeated continuing resolutions and FY25 funding caps imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act have stifled the service’s growth.

At the same time, the Trump administration’s ongoing push to cut excess spending and reduce workforce across the federal government could further impact the Space Force’s efforts to develop and buy new capabilities, Saltzman said.

He told lawmakers that the service has lost almost 14 percent of its civilian employees to early retirement and deferred-resignation programs — more than what officials previously estimated. Civilians make up over one-third of the Space Force’s 17,000 personnel, and they mainly hold roles inside the acquisition community.

“I’m worried about replacing that level of expertise in the near term, as we try to resolve it and make sure we have a good workforce doing that acquisition work,” Saltzman said.

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Defense Department leadership in 2021 kicked off a process to combine four organizations — the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Defense Digital Service (DDS), Office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Advana program — to form that hub, the Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO). Led first by technology executive Craig Martell, and since early 2024 by its second permanent chief, acquisition expert Radha Plumb, the CDAO has moved to enable multiple high-stakes AI adoption pursuits for the Pentagon and military services during its early years.

Last month, Plumb shared new details with DefenseScoop about a recent organizational restructure inside the CDAO that’s been coming together as the Biden administration prepares to depart. She shed light on operations within the new AI Rapid Capabilities Cell and Advanced C2 Accelerator Cell.

There’s also now a nascent cell to coordinate and execute on budget and programming functions at the office, a document laying out how it’s currently organized shows. 

“The Budget and Programming Cell has begun operating on an interim basis to conduct an analysis of organizational processes and pain points and will achieve full operating capacity early in 2025 after a permanent director is identified,” a DOD spokesperson said in a conversation over email last week.

That team and its to-be-named director are positioned to report to the CDAO’s Executive Director Chris Skaluba, the document revealed and the official confirmed. 

“The Budget and Programming Cell will provide executive-level insight and enhanced oversight into CDAO’s budget priorities and programming objectives, to ensure CDAO budget execution aligns with the Department’s priorities for advancing data, analytics, and AI adoption,” the spokesperson told DefenseScoop. 

They didn’t provide further details about what motivated the creation of this new group. A federal watchdog report released in November briefly mentioned concerns about budgeting overlaps between the CDAO and DOD’s Chief Information Office that were then beginning to be addressed.

Beyond that emerging cell, there are multiple other entities under Skaluba’s purview — including the CDAO’s Sensitive Intelligence Office, which the document suggests is led by Shane Partlow. The Pentagon spokesperson said that group serves as a liaison between the AI office’s leadership team and the intelligence community, but declined to provide further details on its portfolio.

In response to other questions based on the document, they confirmed that “Kaleb Redden, [a member of the Senior Executive Service] with experience in strategy development and international cooperation on key technologies, joined CDAO at the end of last year to run CDAO’s Policy Directorate.” 

The spokesperson also acknowledged that President-elect Donald Trump’s agency review team has met with CDAO leadership as part of the transition in administrations.

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For the study, co-authors Greg Allen and Doug Berenson analyzed a dataset that was designed to show what share of the major weapons system acquisition budget went to commercial companies or defense specialists, dating back to 1977. 

“One important conclusion: the defense industrial base that we have today is not the same one that won the Cold War,” Allen told DefenseScoop this week in an email conversation. 

Back in the Cold War era, the report and its co-authors suggest, commercial companies were frequently considered leading players across both defense and non-defense markets.

Drawing from a dataset developed by longtime defense industry consultant Martin Bollinger that tracks major defense acquisition programs (MDAPs) between 1977 and 2024, the experts argue that “DOD acquisition spending is now overwhelmingly in the hands of a core group of traditional defense contractors.” 

Around the time then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter launched the Defense Innovation Unit nearly 10 years ago to help Pentagon components field commercial technologies to the military more quickly and less costly than traditional government buying methods allowed, he and other leaders often spoke about the department’s dire need to adopt tech and business practices from the private sector.

“What our data shows is that this narrative is only half the story. Yes, commercial companies have stopped selling to the DOD. However, there’s a parallel phenomenon where the companies that sell to the DOD have largely exited the commercial economy. And because most of the name brand defense primes have corporate heritage that extends back many decades, too many people assume that this separation of the defense industrial base and the commercial economy has always been the case,” Allen told DefenseScoop. “We show that, in fact, it is a relatively recent phenomenon.”

The report offers a variety of explanations for why this “massive shift,” as the authors call it, has been taking place — including intensifying regulatory burdens and historic industry consolidations.

“The biggest takeaway is that the defense industrial base structure that we have now is not inevitable. A very different structure is not only possible but actually existed not that long ago,” Allen noted.

In response to questions from DefenseScoop, Allen — who formerly served as a top AI policy developer and strategist at the Pentagon — also pointed out that DOD is more recently trying to attract a mix of both start-ups and established commercial firms as it seeks to deploy emerging technologies for military missions.

“One of the most favorable trends right now is the return of venture capital investors to defense markets, first in the 2000s with SpaceX and Palantir, and more recently with companies like Anduril and Shield AI. However, this latest wave of investment is for companies that are aiming to be the next generation of defense market specialists,” Allen said.

“That’s good news, but it would be even better if there were more companies that were able and willing to succeed in both defense and commercial markets. There are some early causes for optimism in markets such as cloud computing and space launch, but ideally this would be a much more widespread trend,” he added.

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“It’s pretty clear that relying on the Air Force [for such training] — as we have the last couple of years, we wouldn’t be where we are without them — is not going to meet our requirements going forward,” the commandant said during a Senate subcommittee hearing on the fiscal 2024 budget request for the Navy and Marine Corps.

Berger and other military leaders are exploring “a couple options” to solve those evolving instructional challenges, he confirmed, which include “opening up a Naval school for unmanned pilots, ourselves,” or leaning on contractors. 

Uncrewed aerial systems and other emerging drone technologies are a major enabling element of Force Design 2030 — the Marine Corps’ big plan to reshape its combat power for future fights against high-tech adversaries. 

In 2020, the service set up a new military occupational specialty for operators that can advise commanders on deploying larger “Group 5” unmanned aerial systems, such as MQ-9 Reaper drones. Marines have been using those lethal, long-endurance, remotely-piloted aircraft in the Middle East since that year, with a great deal of training support from the Air Force. 

In May 2022, Berger told Congress about the Marine Corps’ plans to “expand the number of [drone] squadrons that we’re flying, the number of vehicles that we’re buying and the number of people that need to be trained” — with the near-term priority being to push “them out into the Pacific” to ultimately help deter China. Then, in August, the Navy awarded a $135.8 million contract to General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. for eight MQ-9A Extended Range (ER) drones to be delivered to the Marine Corps in late 2023.  

The MQ-9 has wide-range sensors, synthetic aperture radar, significant loitering and surveillance capabilities, and the capacity to strike targets via the weapons it carries.

“While our commitment to uncrewed systems is unshakeable, we have concluded the Air Force’s capacity to generate trained MQ-9 UAS officers is insufficient to satisfy Marine Corps requirements,” Berger said in his written testimony ahead of Tuesday’s budget hearing. 

“At present, half of our total inventory of UAS officers (72 of 148) are not yet trained and qualified to operate the MQ-9. We are working with the Air Force to remedy this throughput issue. However, there is a need to direct the necessary resources in future budgets to establish a Naval UAS School to resolve this larger joint force issue,” he wrote. 

Responding to questions on that matter from Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., at the subcommittee hearing Tuesday, Berger confirmed that senior Navy and Marine Corps officials are exploring the potential of launching a UAS school of their own. 

“We don’t know yet what that would cost, where we would put it, the instructor base — all that sort of thing,” Berger said. However, “it’s pretty clear” to them that “relying on the Air Force” probably won’t be the best move as the sea services’ drone deployments continue to expand and mature. 

Spokespersons from the Navy and the Marine Corps have yet to provide DefenseScoop more information on this training requirement.

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The White House proposes increasing the Defense Department’s total discretionary budget authority to $842 billion, a 3.2% boost from the 2023 enacted level.

The move comes as the military services are looking to augment their existing fleet of remotely piloted unmanned aerial systems with more advanced platforms that have greater autonomy and can be teamed with manned systems, among other roles.

To help build “the Air Forces needed for the 21st century,” the 2024 budget proposal “funds the procurement of a mix of highly capable crewed aircraft while continuing to modernize fielded fighter, bomber, mobility, and training aircraft. The Budget also accelerates the development and procurement of uncrewed combat aircraft and the relevant autonomy to augment crewed aircraft. Investing in this mix of aircraft provides an opportunity to increase the resiliency and flexibility of the fleet to meet future threats, while reducing operating costs,” according to documents released by the White House on Thursday.

Earlier this week at the AFA Warfare Symposium, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said his service is planning for 1,000 drones known as “collaborative combat aircraft” (CCAs) that could serve as robotic wingmen for manned fighter jets or perform other tasks.

He confirmed that his team “will be requesting the resources needed to move these programs forward, along with associated risk-reduction activities that will allow us to explore operational organizational and support concepts as well as reduce technical risk.”

At a media roundtable, he told DefenseScoop that the Air Force is “going to move as fast as possible” to develop and unleash the systems. 

Air Force acquisition executive Andrew Hunter told reporters: “We have been looking at an acquisition strategy and fielding in increments, and as the secretary said, the initial increment being one that we think is very much within grasp, not trying to shoot too far. So that suggests, you know, by the end of the decade we intend to start fielding them.”

Meanwhile, earlier this week a spokesperson for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency told DefenseScoop that DARPA’s LongShot air-launched combat drone program is approaching key milestones, with a critical design review and an award of a phase 3 contract expected in the next few months.

The fiscal 2024 budget documents released on Thursday note that the DOD has been making investments in new applications of emerging tech including artificial intelligence, quantum science and biotechnology, while also boosting resilience in the cyber and space domains.

These investments have the potential to “revolutionize” how U.S. forces operate and give them an edge over advanced adversaries such as China and Russia, the documents say.

They also note the need to partner with the broader innovation ecosystem across the defense industrial base, private sector and academia as the Pentagon pursues cutting-edge capabilities.

The White House budget documents do not provide a detailed breakdown of how much of the $842 billion in proposed defense spending would go toward research, development, test and evaluation — which funds future capabilities that are in the works — or procurement. Nor do they say how much money each of the services and other DOD components would receive or provide details about five-year funding plans for the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP). Much of that information is expected to be released next week.

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“That planning assumption is 1,000 CCAs. This figure was derived from assuming two CCAs [each] for 200 NGAD platforms and an additional two for each of 300 F-35s, for a total of 1,000,” Kendall said during his keynote at the AFA Warfare Symposium. 

“This isn’t an inventory objective, but a planning assumption to use for analysis of things such as basing, organizational structures, training and range requirements, and sustainment concepts,” he noted.  

The Air Force must accelerate technological change and be integrated with allied partners “by design” to confront future threats, Kendall said, especially if it aims to out compete its top challenger: “China, China, China.”

He emphasized that, under the maturing plan, the CCAs will complement and enhance the performance of the service’s crewed fighter force structure, and the drones will not impact the planned manned fighter jet inventory. 

“One way to think of CCA is as remotely controlled versions of the targeting pods, electronic warfare pods or weapons now carried under the wings of our crewed aircraft. CCAs will dramatically improve the performance of our aircraft and significantly reduce the risk to our pilots,” Kendall said.

Though he did not share much details on the Air Force’s impending budget request for fiscal 2024, which is expected to be released in the coming days, Kendall confirmed that his team “will be requesting the resources needed to move these programs forward, along with associated risk-reduction activities that will allow us to explore operational organizational and support concepts as well as reduce technical risk.”

During his keynote, Kendall did not provide a timeline or insights regarding when the service expects the robotic wingmen to be fielded — but in a media roundtable after his speech on Tuesday, he told DefenseScoop that the Air Force is “going to move as fast as possible” to develop and unleash the systems. 

“The whole motivation initially on CCAs was observations over the last several years of a number of technology programs in that area that were being successful,” Kendall said.

He pointed to DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program and Australia’s Loyal Wingman program, among others, as examples.

As soon as he assumed his position as head of the Air Force, he asked his scientific advisory board to specifically look at the maturity of that suite of technologies to determine whether or not the service could proceed with a CCA type of program that was intended to move into production, he noted.

“And the answer is ‘yes’ from that advisory board,” he told DefenseScoop. “So that’s all evidence I have that we’re moving in the right direction.”

Air Force acquisition executive Andrew Hunter told reporters: “We have been looking at an acquisition strategy and fielding in increments, and as the secretary said, the initial increment being one that we think is very much within grasp, not trying to shoot too far. So that suggests, you know, by the end of the decade we intend to start fielding them.”

However, senior officials acknowledge that Congress will play a major role in determining whether or not the grand plan comes into fruition.

“I am concerned about the [political] polarization this year, and how that’s going to affect how things ultimately come out,” Kendall said.

Updated at 6:00 PM on March 7, 2023: This story has been updated to include additional comments from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Air Force acquisition executive Andrew Hunter at a media roundtable at the AFA Warfare Symposium.

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Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is the Defense Department’s novel concept to connect sensors, shooters, and associated technologies to provide battlefield commanders with the best information to make informed decisions more rapidly as conflicts evolve to be more digital. The Air Force’s major contribution to JADC2 is its in-development Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) architecture, which will underpin DOD’s network-centric approach for future-facing fights.

“We’re going to be putting someone in charge of that overall enterprise of C3 battle management for the Air Force. We’ll be naming someone very shortly and they’ll have responsibility for pulling it all together and focusing all that work and making sure it’s truly joint and interoperable with our allies, as well as works together for the Air Force,” Kendall said Wednesday at the Defense News conference. 

The secretary and his team are in the process of determining the service’s budget request for fiscal year 2024. He further confirmed that a bit of that funding will likely be focused on getting JADC2 and ABMS “right from the Air Force.”  

Though he would not go into great detail, Kendall added the next budget will focus heavily on the relatively recently conceptualized operational imperatives the Air Force crafted to confront war-related threats of the future and modernize contemporary assets. 

​​”I just got back from the Pacific. I visited Hawaii, Guam, Australia, Japan, and Alaska — and we clearly need to take steps to make our bases more resilient, and to make agile combat employment a priority,” Kendall noted. “And those are things that we can do relatively quickly.” 

Another operational focus, and anticipated area of more fiscal support in the coming years, involves introducing unmanned collaborative combat aircraft as components of a new family of systems for its Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program.

Those priorities and the other operational imperatives were structured by Air Force officials based on existing and “very foreseeable” gaps in the branch’s capabilities, the secretary noted. From that lens, Kendall also spotlighted the United States’ long-term, high-stakes technological competition with China and how it requires further strategic investments and innovation from the branch. 

“Let’s be clear about that. The strategic competitor or the pacing challenge is China — and China has been working for about 30 years now to develop and fuel capabilities designed to keep the United States out of the region of the western Pacific,” he said.

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Unlike warheads on detectable rockets for ballistic missiles used in previous conflicts, when in-the-making and ultramodern missiles reach and maneuver at hypersonic speeds — or more than 5 times faster than the speed of sound — they become almost impossible to track or deter. America has attempted to master hypersonic flight in fits and starts over the last few decades, but recently sharpened its focus and started massively boosting investments to enable associated assets, largely in response to its competitors’ ambitious programs pushing rapid development. 

The SASC’s proposed defense policy bill for fiscal 2023 continues that upward trend in investing in hypersonics, with provisions that would mandate significant funding for the Defense Department’s hypersonics-aligned initiatives. But notably, the lawmakers behind it also revealed they are uneasy about the government’s capacity to assess such sophisticated capabilities and bring them into full fruition. 

China, on the other hand, last year shocked the Pentagon and the world with the first reported successful test of a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile, which lawmakers and national security leaders considered a “wake up call” for the U.S. 

“The committee notes the [DOD’s] overdue investment in fielding hypersonic defensive and offensive capabilities. The committee encourages additional funding for defensive and offensive capability to enable the department to not just pace, but leap ahead of peer competitors,” members of that committee wrote in a report accompanying their passed version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2023.

The added: “However, one of the greatest concerns of the committee is the ability to test hypersonic systems, which requires extensive range space and sophisticated testing capabilities.”

To that end, the congressional cadre called for the defense secretary to provide a briefing to congressional defense committees by March 31, 2023 ”on the capabilities and shortfalls of existing and planned DOD, academia, and industry testing facilities to ensure the on-time development and fielding of these critical hypersonic systems.”

Facilities for this sophisticated type of testing essentially simulate the unique conditions of hypersonic flight, like speed and pressure. China reportedly has the world’s first operational wind tunnel that can assess a full-scale hypersonic missile through the key stages of flight.

SASC’s version of the NDAA for the next fiscal year incorporates a number of hypersonic-related funding proposals — including almost $300 million for the Pentagon’s glide-phase interceptor initiative to combat such capabilities, which is in its early stages and being steered by the Missile Defense Agency. 

Separately, while the department’s budget request included $2 million in a specific line for Navy weapons industrial facilities, the committee instead recommended an increase of $25 million for that line, specifically for a hypersonic test facility.

“The committee believes that further investment in hypersonic test infrastructure is vital to the rapid fielding of emerging hypersonic weapons technologies,” the senators wrote in their accompanying report. 

They also recommended an increase of $30 million for major range and test facility base improvements. 

In their report, the committee members wrote that they understand “that the test and training range in the eastern Gulf of Mexico has aging infrastructure and inadequate instrumented airspace to test the newest generation of weapons and munitions.” They also noted concerns “that open-air test ranges of the major range and test facility base are not capable of supporting the full spectrum of development testing required for current and next generation technologies, including hypersonic and autonomous systems.”

Further, the lawmakers encouraged DOD’s Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) to accelerate the making of launch and down range tracking facilities to support robust testing of both offensive and defensive hypersonic weapons. Alaska, in their view, is one unique geographical location where hypersonic testing could be conducted with “unrestricted flexibility” to meet mission objectives.

This overarching issue is top of mind now, but DOD has been grappling with its deteriorating hypersonics research infrastructure for years. 

In a 2014 study, the Institute for Defense Analyses warned that “no current U.S. facility can provide full-scale, time-dependent, coupled aerodynamic and thermal-loading environments for flight durations necessary to evaluate these characteristics above Mach 8.” The nation’s facilities and areas for experimentation have evolved since then, but more recent federal evaluations of the department’s assets to mature these capabilities have not been released to the public. 

SASC’s version of the NDAA also aims to require several further assessments related to this topic—including a proposal to require the Defense Secretary to “submit a report on estimated costs for conducting not fewer than one full-scale, operationally relevant, live-fire, hypersonic weapon test of the systems currently under development each year by the Air Force, the Army, and the Navy, once such systems reach initial operational capability.”

It’s not yet clear if the provisions mentioned will be included in the final version of the NDAA. The Senate has yet to vote on this version, while House lawmakers have already passed their chamber’s. The two versions will have to be reconciled in committee before the hefty bill becomes law. 

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The Multi-Domain Task Forces are to be in constant contact with adversaries during the so-called competition phase of conflict.

The first was designed to support the Indo-Pacific theater with a second activated in September 2021 to support the European theater.

The third task force will be similar to others, but the Army has not made a stationing decision yet, Brig. Gen. Mac McCurry, director of force development with Army G-8, told reporters Tuesday.

It will conduct electronic warfare and cyber operations and support exercises and experimentation, officials said.

The Army created a non-kinetic, battalion-sized unit within the task forces, initially dubbed the Intelligence, Information, Cyber, Electronic Warfare and Space battalion (I2CEWS). It has recently been renamed the Multi-Domain Effects Battalion.

This organization won’t conduct offensive operations, but rather assist with defensive measures, pass targets off to other offensive forces and provide advanced deep sensing information through electronic means to tip others and provide greater situational awareness at the theater level.

McCurry noted that new capabilities the Army is developing, such as the Terrestrial Layer System-Echelons Above Brigade – a system capable of signals intelligence, electronic warfare and cyber ops – will be used by the task force and others for large-scale combat operations against near peer adversaries operating within the electromagnetic spectrum. Officials have previously said the task force is the priority fielding unit for this forthcoming capability, which is expected to be fielded in fiscal 2024.

An existing Multi-Domain Task Force will play a big role in helping the Army experiment with its tactical cloud infrastructure.

Correction: March 30, 2022. An earlier version of this story stated that TLS-EAB was a tracked vehicle. It is not.

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