In a telephonic press briefing Thursday, Marine Corps Gen. Michael Langley, commander of U.S. Africa Command, shared recent developments on the security conditions in the Sahel and elsewhere. He also shed light on his team’s new approach to enable more African-led solutions that confront contemporary risks, at a time when the continent is seen as an “epicenter” for terrorism, and insurgencies continue to make strides against local forces.

“We are leaning into empowerment over dependency. The United States is actively supporting African militaries through targeted training, advanced intel-sharing and help building institutions that can endure over time,” he told reporters.

Africom continues to evolve since it became a fully operational combatant command in 2008. The organization is primarily responsible for overseeing and conducting U.S. military operations, exercises, and security cooperation in its area of responsibility, which covers 53 African states that encompass more than 800 ethnic groups.

Building on policy shifts at the end of the Biden administration — and in alignment with President Donald Trump’s second-term vision to reduce the U.S. military’s global footprint in favor of homeland defense and a focus on the Indo-Pacific — Africom in recent months has been pulling back its physical presence around certain African nations and pushing those partners to assume more responsibility for their security. 

Langley briefed reporters Thursday from Nairobi, Kenya, where he is participating in the annual African Chiefs of Defense Conference with representatives from 37 African countries. There, he’s been engaging in what he referred to as “powerful dialogue.”

“These conversations reaffirm something critical: African nations are not waiting to be saved. They’re stepping up to take control of their own futures,” he said.

One topic addressed during the conference sessions was African militaries’ intent to “match” technological capabilities to existing threats — and ultimately counter them across multiple domains.

“Most pressing was the information domain, and being able to operate at the speed of relevance and getting information out there to shape the operational environment, to shape the strategic environment. They see their ability to be able to do that for stability and security as important. And then also capabilities to protect the force, whether it be because of the asymmetric capabilities that violent extremist organizations can bring to bear, especially through [unmanned aerial systems] and drone technology. Our partners really want the leading edge-type technologies to protect the force,” Langley told DefenseScoop. “So, that forum gave the opportunity for a number of countries to talk about their initiatives going forward and how they can collaborate on sharing information and intelligence.”

While Africom pivots its approach to more directly assist its partners with becoming more self-sufficient, the commander noted, China is trying to “replicate every type of thing” the U.S. military is doing on the continent. Both China and Russia are also influencing African communities by offering short-term economic gains that could impact America’s national security interests in the years to come.

However, Langley said the command’s top strategic priority at this time involves countering threats to the U.S. homeland from terrorist factions — “the most dangerous of which are based in Africa.”

“Let me speak plainly about the threats we’re facing, especially in the Sahel region, including Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. It is the flashpoint of prolonged conflict and growing instability. It is the epicenter of terrorism on the globe. Terrorist networks affiliated with ISIS and Al Qaeda are thriving, particularly in Burkina Faso, where the government no longer controls vast parts of its own territory,” Langley explained.

Extremist groups are simultaneously gaining ground across the Lake Chad regions as attacks are resurging.

“Throughout my travels across West Africa and through dialogue here at the conference, the concerns shared by my peers match my own. One of the terrorists’ key goals now is access to the West Coast of Africa. If they gain access to the vast coastline, they can diversify their revenue streams and evolve their tactics more easily — exporting terrorism to American shores. These terrorists conduct illicit activity like smuggling, human trafficking and arms trading. All these activities that fund their nefarious actions and destabilize the region,” Langley said. 

“That’s why our coastal partners, like Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire and Benin, are relentlessly fighting along their northern borders to keep these threats at bay. Africom has and will continue to support them,” he added.

Since 2022, according to Langley, some terrorist factions have multiplied by up to fourfold around the continent.

In response to these threats and in line with its new strategic approach, Africom has been encouraging its international partners outside of Africa to increase burden-sharing. The command is also focused on helping its allies confront instability and other root causes of terrorism.

Further, early into his second administration, Trump made a policy change that empowered combatant commanders with expanded authorities that allow them to take faster action against “violent extremist organizations,” or VEOs.

“When [Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth] gave me guidance on Africa, he really said his number one priority for me to execute was to be able to hit ISIS, who is inextricably linked to global capabilities, and has a high aspiration and capabilities through their networks to attack the homeland. That was the first priority for me — and yes, with those authorities we’ve been able to execute operations to be able to turn them, degrade them, or affect deterrence of their operations. So, that’s in the name of him telling us to match capabilities to the threat,” Langley told DefenseScoop.

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Inked by Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman and NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth during the annual GEOINT Symposium in St. Louis, Missouri, the MOA outlines the boundaries between NGA’s operations and the Space Force’s nascent Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking (TacSRT) program — putting an end to a two-year turf war over which organization should purchase commercial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance products and deliver them to combatant commanders.

“What [the agreement] really reflects is the quality of collaboration and every echelon that was necessary to work through these procedures,” Saltzman said in a statement. “I’m excited about this because of what it represents, and that’s really industrial strength collaboration.”

Whitworth first shared news of a drafted MOA with the Space Force in April during an interview with DefenseScoop, noting that moving forward NGA will work closely with the service to ensure the organizations weren’t “paying twice” for commercial ISR.

In a statement, Whitworth called the finalized agreement “a new standard for collaboration.”

While the full text of the MOA was not made public, the document outlines a “governance framework” between the intel agency and the Space Force by detailing the roles and responsibilities each organization has in providing commercial ISR to military leaders, an NGA spokesperson said in a statement to DefenseScoop.

Furthermore, a Space Force spokesperson told DefenseScoop that the MOA requires the service to collaborate with NGA support teams to “ensure data purchases and derived products … conform to consistent, mutually agreed upon National System for Geospatial Intelligence standards when applicable.”

The accord also states the Space Force will “coordinate processes and procedures for dissemination and releasability of products,” and submit a report to NGA each quarter that describes the service’s efforts to minimize overlapping efforts, the spokesperson added.

Disputes between the Space Force and NGA first arose when the service kicked off TacSRT in 2023. The program established a marketplace where combatant commanders can directly buy and rapidly receive “operational planning products” — including unclassified imagery and data analytics — from commercial space providers. 

Although Space Force officials have touted the success of TacSRT and begun efforts to scale it, the program caused some tension between the service and the intelligence community.

Under current Pentagon-IC policies, NGA holds responsibility for acquiring commercial ISR products and determining who across the government receives them. At the same time, the National Reconnaissance Office is tasked with buying commercial remote sensing imaging and sharing it across the department and intelligence community.

Space Force leaders have claimed that TacSRT is not meant to step on the toes of NGA and NRO, but instead serve as a complement to the intelligence community’s work.

During a hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Saltzman said the program “fills a niche where you have unclassified capabilities that can get quickly into planners’ hands.”

Now that the Space Force has finalized an agreement with NGA, the service is expected to also reach a similar arrangement with the NRO.

When asked by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., about progress on the Space Force’s work with the intelligence agencies on Tuesday, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink emphasized that foundations for collaboration have been laid — but “the devil’s in the details.”

“We’re just starting to feel good now and starting to do experimentation with [TacSRT] now, using tools to allow that to happen,” Meink said. “There’s obviously still a lot of work to go, but I think there’s been great progress made, and the fact that we already have systems that we can start doing testing work and start doing exercise will be critically important.”

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Their meetings come after President Donald Trump temporarily froze hundreds of millions in American security assistance and ended intel exchanges with Ukraine for more than a week in early March, which caused a major disruption to Kyiv’s defensive battlefield operations. During a briefing with reporters at the German Marshall Fund think tank on Thursday, the Ukrainian delegation shed new light on the frontline impacts of that intel pause and the messages they aimed to articulate to their U.S. counterparts.

“When the weapons supplies were stopped — and the intel-sharing, which was much worse — that was a disaster. Even though it was not a complete shutdown of sharing, it was something that we felt that we couldn’t [fully] replace with anything else that the Europeans have,” said Oleksandra “Sasha” Ustinova, chair of Ukraine’s Parliamentary Special Commission on Arms Control. 

For more than a decade, U.S. spy agencies and contractors have supplied sophisticated surveillance imagery and intelligence to Ukraine that’s proven instrumental in anticipating and responding to Russian attacks.

Oleksandr Zavitnevych, chair of the Parliament’s Committee on National Security, Defense, and Intelligence, (through his interpreter) explained that the Trump-ordered intelligence halt lasted between one and two weeks. He said that combat operations continued during that time and Ukraine’s military was still able to obtain some useful information from other international partners, including the U.K. and France. 

However, Zavitnevych told reporters that his message to leaders at 11 meetings in Washington this week was clear: “Please, while we make those [negotiation] efforts and work on those issues — please don’t shut down intelligence-sharing.”

“We think that would be a disaster if that happens again,” Ustinova also said.

The current state of play with Europe marked another key item the group sought to call attention to this week, she confirmed, noting that many countries in that region continue to step up significantly to support Ukraine in the fight. 

“Everybody’s willing to pay more. The biggest fear they have right now is that the United States might shut down, basically their third-party transfer, so that they cannot buy [weapons and assets] and give it to us. We’re totally dependent on all the missiles, especially missiles for the Patriots — you’re the only ones who do that,” Ustinova said, referring to a high-tech air defense system.

At the roundtable, the officials also emphasized that since Russia’s full-scale invasion three years ago, Ukraine’s production facilities have steadily operated under continuous air strikes and wartime threats. However, the nation’s production output has grown considerably for some in-demand items over that time period.

“Speaking of the newest technologies — like the drones, which became a true weapon, like a military and delivery device. This new type of weapon essentially emerged in 2022. And last year, Ukraine produced over a million such units. [Now, we’ll procure and produce] over 3 million such drones,” Zavitnevych said.

He told DefenseScoop that when the U.S. intel and weapons hold went into effect last month, Ukraine’s government launched a country-wide campaign called “make a drone in your home.”

“In fact, many people did assemble them from some kits at home. But then an additional step was once they shipped them to some facility, then others would have to test their quality assurance. The idea of this was not so much to actually get a great output of those drones, homemade drones — but rather to get people interested and involved in defense. This was an element of national resistance,” Zavitnevych said.

When the German Marshall Fund’s head of strategic democracy initiatives Josh Rudolph likened those DIY drones to improvised Molotov cocktail weapons used in World War II, Zavitnevych said it’s “exactly the same thing.” 

Drones and other uncrewed systems have been a central weapon in the Russia-Ukraine war, with recent reports that they are now killing more people and enabling more damage than any traditional weapons on that contemporary battlefield. Currently, Ukraine’s drone arsenal includes systems that can carry payloads ranging between 1 to 100 kilograms, or more than 200 pounds of explosives, according to Zavitnevych.

“I don’t believe any country in the world has the capability to have one person in charge of such a big number of drones that would destroy a whole division. But I will tell you honestly, this is a thing of the future, which will come quite soon,” he told DefenseScoop.

Today’s battles have led him to believe that future warriors won’t necessarily have to be in elite physical condition. Instead, he said they’ll more likely be “a man or woman controlling drones and the platforms that are deployed.”

“It is the weapon of the future. It’s important to point out, it is cheap — and I mean not inexpensive, but cheap,” Zavitnevych said. 

He noted that a first–person drone priced around $600 U.S. dollars could carry two-kilogram payloads that can “easily demolish two to three floors of this building.”

“Whereas a projectile of caliber 155 will cost several thousand euros. To shoot that projectile, you need a cannon that costs tens of millions of dollars and a factory that costs $100 million that manufactures those projectiles. But with an FPV [drone], you and me can do [an operation] together in two or three days,” Zavitnevych 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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A provision in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, would direct the secretary of defense to establish a new organization that will support the requirements of U.S. Cyber Command along with other combatant commands, military departments and agencies.

The bill passed the committee in late June, but the text of the bill was only released publicly last week.

Per the legislation, the Pentagon chief could establish an all-source analysis center within the Defense Intelligence Agency — which is responsible for providing intel on foreign militaries and owning all the intelligence directorates, or J2s, at the combatant commands — to provide foundational intelligence for the dedicated cyber intelligence capability.

Congress has previously inquired about the creation of such a center. And U.S. Cyber Command has already begun building one that’s akin to the National Air and Space Intelligence Center and the National Ground Intelligence Center.

Now, if the provision in the Senate panel’s version of the NDAA is passed into law, a new organization of that nature will be mandated.

For years, dating back to when Cybercom was created, there have been talks about building the capability and capacity for developing organic cyber intelligence within the U.S. military. Relatedly, as cyber has grown in importance, there have been increasing discussions at the Defense Intelligence Agency regarding what constitutes foundational cyber intelligence.

Congress has grown concerned recently because, of more than two dozen agencies that focus on intelligence, there isn’t a direct line out of Cybercom’s intelligence shop that focuses on nation-state threats from a military angle, according to a defense official who spoke to DefenseScoop on the condition of anonymity.

“It became evident during the Russia invasion into Ukraine that the traditional intel rolls within the DIA could not handle the volume of work needed to support this combatant command. DIA could fill the role but they require restructuring their HR system to provide experts in the technical arena. Some they have — but they’re not near enough,” the official said, adding that the creation of the new center will require a greater depth of cyber knowledge.

With the substantial increase of ransomware and misinformation/disinformation campaigns, such a capability is necessary, but even more so from the DOD’s need to operate both offensively and defensively, they added.

Additionally, despite the close linkage Cybercom shares with the National Security Agency — in which the two organizations share a boss and are co-located — NSA has a fundamentally different mission focused on foreign intelligence targets. Having a dedicated military cyber intelligence capability under Title 10 — the part of U.S. law that governs the armed forces — is considered increasingly important.

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Maxar developed the initial version of Red Wing — which the contractor has described as an “automated, cloud-based geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) analysis architecture” — after being awarded a $14 million contract by the Air Force Research Lab in 2019.

“While data is the critical fuel for geospatial analysts, the ever-increasing volume of available information requires increased levels of automation and more efficient workflows. Maxar’s Red Wing architecture will enable analysts to focus on addressing some of the most challenging intelligence problems by automating time-consuming workflows. Red Wing will also enhance and optimize the production of actionable insights from raw information through advanced exploitation and visualization services and edge node processing. For ease of use, Maxar is designing the architecture to integrate with legacy systems,” the company said in a release at the time of the original award.

Deliverables under the new deal announced Wednesday by the Defense Department include “accelerated” processing, exploitation and dissemination (PED) software.

“This contract provides for the advancement of the Red Wing platform by improving the portability and flexibility of the architecture and deploying it across multiple domains, including various security domains and remote/edge environments. This will be achieved by integrating with external storage segments, integrating new data sources and visualization services, developing new algorithmic capabilities, and delivering robust algorithm characterizations to inform user expectations. Various architecture and algorithm trade studies will inform the optimal course of action,” per the announcement.

“This effort aims to improve interoperability across traditionally disparate systems by providing geospatial intelligence analysts with a robust PED environment that supports evolving mission needs. This effort will also update the National System of Geospatial Intelligence sensor independent standards to keep pace with the myriad of new sensors,” it added.

Work is expected to be completed by June 28, 2026.

Maxar beat out another company for the award, which was a competitive acquisition. The Pentagon did not identify the firm that lost out.

The Air Force Research Lab is the contracting activity for the effort.

Maxar hasn’t commented on the new award.

The new deal for the Red Wing upgrades comes as the DOD is keen on using AI capabilities to enhance its intelligence enterprise, which requires not only intelligence collection, but also timely processing, exploitation and dissemination of that information to the right end users.

One notable example is the Maven initiative, which uses high-tech computer vision and machine learning to detect objects of interest and flag them for analysts. That project is transitioning to a program of record.

Last year, responsibilities for the effort were split between the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the new Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), while its oversight moved to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.

At the annual GEOINT Symposium last month, NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth confirmed his team has been moving to embrace AI and machine learning to quickly fuse enormous amounts of data from disparate sources. And they’re working to automate significant portions of dynamic collection and reporting to rapidly exploit and share that data.

“We’ve worked closely with the combatant commands to integrate AI into workflows — accelerating operations and speed-to-decision. It benefits maritime domain awareness, target management, and our ability to automatically search and detect objects of interest. We’ve increased fidelity of targets, improved geolocation accuracy, and refined our test and evaluation process. And we’ve ensured Maven models can run in other machine learning platforms,” he explained.

Maxar has been contributing to Maven, company executives told the publication C4ISRNET at the GEOINT conference.

“In our conversations, the intent is to enable geospatial AI at scale. And, as a result, as these capabilities get more mature, you want to be able to take advantage of all the collection that’s happening across the constellation,” Tony Frazier, executive vice president and general manager of public sector earth intelligence, told the publication. “The goal is to create an architecture where you can quickly run the algorithms against that source to then get the information out to those users.”

This week’s announcement of the Red Wing contract award did not specify whether the platform would assist or be integrated with Maven, although its capabilities would appear to dovetail with the publicly disclosed aims of that program.

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A list of the entities that landed spots on the GEOINT Enterprise Operations Service and Solutions Program with Industry, Core Mission Operations (GEO-SPI B) contract was included in a federal contracting award notice posted online on Monday afternoon.

“The companies selected for the IDIQ will compete for individual task orders across the seven-year ordering period, collectively worth up to $900 million,” an NGA spokesperson told DefenseScoop in an email on Tuesday.

The spy agency has been pretty tight-lipped about the work GEO-SPI B will fundamentally enable. Contracting materials that would shed light on that are accessible only to individuals and businesses approved by the U.S. government to use the Intelligence Community Acquisition Research Center. 

“This suite of IDIQ contracts provide NGA’s core contracted intelligence and foundational analysis encompassing the tasking, collection, processing, exploitation, and dissemination (TCPED) functions that underpin GEOINT work,” according to the agency’s spokesperson.

The 13 approved contractors include:

• 3GIMBALS
• BAE Systems
• Booz Allen Hamilton
• Castalia Systems
• Continental Mapping Consultants
• Geo Owl
• Leidos
• ManTech
• Novetta 
• ProCleared
• Royce Geospatial Consultants
• Solis Applied Science
• Thomas & Herbert Consulting 

Once selections are made under this IDIQ, associated work will be performed at NGA sites and in partner facilities.

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In a letter penned to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and National Intelligence Director Avril Haines last week, Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., wrote they are “concerned not to have seen more tangible evidence” that government officials are efficiently implementing guidance on the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) that was established via the fiscal year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act.

That office is charged with scrutinizing federal UAP reports, including UFOs.

The letter, shared with DefenseScoop on Monday, comes less than two weeks after AARO’s inaugural Director Sean Kirkpatrick testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing about the office’s activities in its first nine months of existence. There, he hinted at certain bureaucratic hitches his team has been confronting, which the lawmakers now spotlight in their latest correspondence to the DOD and intelligence community bosses.

“To date, we are cautiously optimistic about the limited progress being made by AARO, and we support the considerable efforts of the AARO Director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, to meet Congressional intent,” Warner and Rubio, who lead the intel committee, wrote — after calling out examples of “slow implementation” of some NDAA requirements, so far. 

AARO marks the latest iteration of Pentagon and intelligence community efforts to study and solve reports involving military personnel and government sensors detecting perplexing items across domains that can’t immediately be explained or identified. It has evolved from the now-defunct UAP Task Force and earlier, more secretive Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP — among other government UFO-analyzing teams that predated it. 

But since the new office was established, DOD has scrambled on separate occasions to shoot down several mysterious objects in North American airspace that it still hasn’t explained publicly.

“I just came back from sitting down with [top military officials at U.S. Northern Command] a couple of weeks ago — talking through exactly what we need to do to help them get their arms around this,” Kirkpatrick told lawmakers at the hearing in late April.

During his testimony, he pointed to a number of new resources his AARO team is also generating to advance its UAP investigations based on Congress’ inclusions in the 2023 NDAA. However, in response to a few senators’ follow-up questions, Kirkpatrick also hinted at potential administrative elements delaying the public release or closed delivery of what’s being developed. 

Warner and Rubio pointedly asked Austin and Haines about the status of some of those initiatives in their letter.

The fiscal 2023 law “directed AARO to stand up a secure public-facing website, or communication mechanism, to outline the secure process for witnesses to come forward with relevant information. To date, we have seen no efforts to communicate the existence of the secure process to the public. We request that you provide us an update on the plan to publicize the secure process for witnesses to come forward,” the senators wrote.

Kirkpatrick had confirmed at the hearing that his team “submitted the first version of that before Christmas” and was still waiting on feedback from superiors at the time. 

Warner and Rubio also said they “have not seen evidence of an AARO strategic communications strategy,” and therefore seek to understand why the office is not using social media to better engage the public — as it was directed.

“AARO established a Twitter presence in July 2022, but has yet to post anything further, despite attracting over 31,000 followers. This highlights the lack of communication and transparency with the public,” they wrote.

Going forward, the senators asked that Congress also “be regularly informed about the content of the interviews” AARO conducts with possible UAP witnesses. 

Further, Warner and Rubio also requested that lawmakers receive updates on expectations related to AARO’s personnel and reporting structure, which also were left up in the air when Kirkpatrick testified.

“The FY23 NDAA requires the director of AARO to report directly to the Principal Deputy Director National Intelligence (PDDNI) and the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Despite assurances that there is a proposed plan to implement this change in reporting in circulation, we have yet to see any final guidance issued. We request that you provide us an update on the proposed plan including the timeline for issuance of the final guidance,” they wrote.

The DNI office also has not met the law’s mandate to appoint a deputy director of AARO to serve from the intelligence community, according to the senators, who want answers on that. 

A Pentagon spokesperson on Monday confirmed the Defense Department’s receipt of this inquiry. 

“As with all congressional correspondence, we will respond directly to the authors of the letter,” the spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

Meanwhile on Monday, still-unconfirmed reports surfaced of another new and perplexing balloon flying over the U.S.

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“If you would have asked me three years ago, would you anticipate releasing some of our most sensitive intelligence broadly to the public, I would have said I could never imagine such a day. But yet in the fall of 2021, with the president’s decision and the direction of the Director of National Intelligence, we did that and we did it in a manner that was allowing us to do three things: build a coalition, impact an adversary and enable a partner,” Gen. Paul Nakasone, who leads the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, told the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations Thursday, in response to questions about what lessons the defense intelligence enterprise has taken from the Russia-Ukraine conflict that can be applied to China.

“That is a lesson that we have taken to heart and at the same time, where we’ve been able to do that be able to protect our sources and methods,” Nakasone said.

Top officials, such as the director of the CIA, described this campaign of disclosures as successful for beating back against Russia’s narrative prior to the invasion.

“I think the work that we’ve done — and it’s not without risk as an intelligence community — to declassify information has been very effective,” CIA chief William Burns, told Congress in March of 2022. “I’ve sat for many years on the policymaking side of the table, and I’ve seen us lose information wars. In this case, I think by being careful about this, we have stripped away the pretext that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, in particular, often uses. That’s been a real benefit, I think, to Ukrainians. It’s been a real investment in the kind of actions that our allies have taken.”

In recent years, as foreign information operations have become more prominent and efforts to effectively combat them have appeared difficult, the U.S. military and intelligence community (IC) have emphasized exposing them. Agencies declassified intelligence to disclose Russian troop movements and actions ahead of the assault on Ukraine. Those disclosures continued even after the invasion.

Nakasone noted that there must be a rich dialogue across the intelligence community to make this work.

“The importance of the agency that is looking at the sanitization or the declassification material, working with a series of different senior policymakers and senior military commanders to say, ‘This is the art of the possible,'” he said. “‘This is what we have to do and this is what we have to protect.’ That dialogue was very rich in the fall of 2021.”

Other officials have previously referred to this tactic of disclosure as throwing “our adversaries off their game” to assess their operations in light of disclosures.

“The U.S. and its allies are increasingly using intelligence itself as an instrument of power, as a spoiling attack against adversaries through the rapid declassification and release of timely, accurate and actionable intelligence,” Brig. Gen. Matteo Martemucci, director of intelligence at Cybercom, said last year. Adversaries “have to, in fact, perhaps abandon planned operations, considering the potential sources of our intelligence collection, conduct internal investigations and worry about what we’re going to release next.”

Martemucci noted that the U.S. government has changed its willingness to share intelligence with partners to include NATO and other allies as well as the private sector, industry and academia.

The benefit of sharing more with partners is also a key lesson leaders are taking from the Ukraine-Russia conflict that will be critical if tensions with China heat up in the Indo-Pacific.

“I think one of the top lessons that we took away in the Defense of Department from an intelligence perspective, is that we have to have the right sharing policies in place to be able to provide our allies — and in this [European] case, Ukraine — with the intelligence that it needed to actually defend itself against a formidable, the seemingly formidable adversary … That was probably lesson number one,” Ronald Moultrie, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, told House lawmakers Thursday.

Additional lessons intelligence leaders said must be applied from Ukraine to a potential conflict with China is the importance of strengthening partnerships before an armed conflict starts.

“Lesson number two was ensuring that we had the right partnerships, and establishing those partnerships early on and not waiting till after a conflict actually broke out to do that,” Moultrie said, an idea which was seconded by the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“On the partnership piece, we all have deep professional and personal partnerships with our counterparts and other nations. Those personal relationships go very, very far when you can pick up a secure line and have a conversation with your partner about something bad that’s about to happen. That is key, it’s clutch and it’s clutch today,” Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier told the subcommittee.

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Barker, who has been the deputy PEO since July 2021, takes over for Mark Kitz, who assumed the role in May 2021.

It was not immediately clear where Kitz will be headed. A spokesperson said his next assignment has not been confirmed.

“This a great win for the Army, BG Barker has done a fantastic job as our Deputy the last two years and I know the organization will be in good hands for years to come,” Kitz said in a statement emailed to DefenseScoop. “This organization is at the forefront defining how the Army will fight and win in the future and our programs and capabilities will help define the future of the Army.”

Barker, in a statement, provided he is “honored with this tremendous opportunity to continue serving with the incredible Soldiers, civilians and support contractors that make up PEO IEW&S,” adding the team “will continue our unwavering efforts to deliver critical capabilities for our Army and Nation.”

PEO IEW&S is responsible for equipping the Army and joint force with some of the most sensitive technologies that span intelligence collection and dissemination, cyber warfare, electronic warfare, artificial intelligence and more.

The office is in charge of several key capabilities pivotal to the Army’s transformation and modernization efforts in the next decade. Those include the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN), which is the Army’s next-generation ground system to collect and disseminate sensor data, and the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES), which will be a high-altitude fixed-wing jet the Army is developing to replace several systems and will cover mid-tier altitudes up to the stratosphere.

Both are key pillars for what the Army calls deep sensing, or the ability to collect intelligence over thousands of miles to inform long-range missiles and other effects.

The PEO also recently created a new program office for offensive cyber and space capabilities. Officials previously explained the new office was needed due to the amount of joint work the Army is doing on behalf of U.S. Cyber Command to deliver capabilities and programs for the cyber mission force across all the services.

One such program the Army is running for the joint cyber mission force is the Joint Common Access Platform (JCAP), which will allow the Department of Defense’s cyber operators to connect to their targets beyond friendly firewalls.

Editor’s note: This story was updated April 25 with comments from Kitz and Barker.

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