The move follows an executive order issued last week by President Donald Trump, which aims for “a transformation in Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public,” according to the EO.

The effort is part of the new administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives, which are being spearheaded by billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk.

“Each Agency Head, in consultation with the agency’s DOGE Team Lead, shall conduct a comprehensive review of each agency’s contracting policies, procedures, and personnel. Each Agency Head shall complete this process within 30 days of the date of this order and shall not issue or approve new contracting officer warrants during the review period, unless the Agency Head determines such approval is necessary,” per the EO, which was issued Feb. 26. The order also called for agencies to build centralized systems to track every payment they issue for contracts, grants and other expenditures.

DOD’s review, which has major implications for contractors who do business with the department, is now underway.

“My staff and I are presently conducting this review to determine where we might achieve efficiencies to save American taxpayers’ money while executing contracting operations in support of our nation’s defense,” John Tenaglia, the Pentagon’s principal director of defense pricing, contracting and acquisition policy, wrote in a new memo signed Wednesday.

The memo was directed to acquisition and procurement leaders at the Departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force, U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Transportation Command, and Defense agency and DOD field activity directors.

“Per the EO, Components are directed to forgo issuing new contracting officer warrant appointments to DoD civilian staff members until March 28, 2025, the duration of the review period. On an exception basis, the Secretaries of the Military Departments may approve warrant appointments as necessary for civilian staff members during this period. Given the fact the EO is inapplicable to uniformed service members, there is no restriction on contracting officer warrant appointments to uniformed members of the military,” Tenaglia noted.

He added that he welcomed memo recipients’ input about “specific policy, procedure, and workforce matters we should address to further strengthen our contracting operations toward more affordable defense capabilities for the Warfighter.”

The new memo comes as the DOD is carrying out other cost-cutting initiatives.

On Monday, Darin Selnick, who is performing the duties of undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, issued a memo stating that the planned firing of probationary employees would commence March 3.

“The Department will continue taking steps to implement President Trump’s direction to restore accountability to the American public, reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition, and faithfully and responsibly manage taxpayer dollars,” he wrote.

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Sonic Spear, beginning in April with elements peppered into other exercises throughout the year, will be SOCOM’s first opportunity as a combatant command to host such an event as opposed to tabletop exercises. The gathering will test the command’s ability to synchronize joint special operations effects from seabed to low-Earth orbit in support of the joint force and integrate those to support a joint task force commander, according to a command spokesperson.

Overall, the event will help validate how service components to SOCOM provide forces to it and geographic combatant commands, exercising those offerings and integrating them into a truly joint special operations force presentation, they added.

Special ops forces, much like the conventional units within the U.S. military, are taking a harder look at how to integrate capabilities seamlessly across all the domains of warfare. Commandos and conventional forces have historically been too siloed in their approaches to employing capabilities, looking at single domains rather than a more integrated arrangement.

The exercise will also help SOCOM look at different technologies, such as robotics, and the future investments it might need in those areas.

“Let’s look at our investments. We have a lot of autonomy investments happening across the force. We want to hold ourselves accountable … Robots can do what we told them to do. They can drop track quality data into the Joint Fires Network, theater agnostic, and then all those actions put together can support, again, the SOF effects that support joint SOF maneuver,” Lt. Gen. Francis Donovan, vice commander of SOCOM, said Feb. 20 at the Special Operations Symposium hosted by NDIA. “Sonic Spear 25 is our first go at this. That’s where we’re going to look at again, seabed to low-Earth orbit, what are our gaps and seams? Let’s push our autonomous investments, some other investments we’re making … and what do our forward forces need to be able to control ourselves, control our robots and then link in with the joint force.”

This all builds towards SOCOM’s eventual model for an emerging O-6 — colonel or Navy captain — level multi-domain special operations task force.  

Special ops historically has integrated multiple O-5 — lieutenant colonel or Navy commander — and O-6 forces from individual components under a general or admiral. The new model under development will look to integrate those joint special operations forces at the O-6 level to enable them across each domain, to include space and cyber.

With the need to integrate capabilities seamlessly across domains, combined with adversary actions that will disperse friendly forces, the forthcoming task force will allow commando formations to conduct synchronized operations at levels historically held at higher echelons, the SOCOM spokesperson said.

“That is our first step to moving forward of a SOF force presentation model that looks a little different from the past. We’ll eventually have a multi-domain special operations task force at the O-6 level that can synchronize SOF effects, seabed to low-Earth orbit in support of the joint force. Yes, that’s what we’re building towards. But we have to start somewhere,” Donovan said of Sonic Spear 25.

While this year will be relatively rudimentary as the first instantiation, he said officials hope to evolve it — adding in electromagnetic interference, for example — culminating in 2027 with “a joint SOF force offering.”

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The proliferation of drone warfare in the Russia-Ukraine conflict has highlighted these types of threats, but SOCOM has been looking at how to address UAS attacks on special operations forces for the last few years, Lt. Col. Gabriela Arraiz, deputy chief technology officer at Joint Special Operations Command, said Wednesday during a panel at NDIA’s Emerging Technologies for Defense conference and expo.

The counter-drone mission is usually focused on which kinetic or non-kinetic weapons can best defeat incoming UAS, but Arraiz said there are more pressing challenges to address as the command deploys its systems.

“What we discovered was that the most challenging part of this problem actually has nothing to do with the final step, and everything to do with the steps that precede it. And the steps that precede it are largely dependent on software and data,” she said.

Arraiz compared current constraints with counter-UAS platforms to those often attributed to the Pentagon-wide effort known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control. The concept aims to connect weapons, sensors and data across the entire Defense Department under a single network, thereby enabling better and faster decision-making.

“What we discovered was that the counter-UAS problem set and the challenges that we are experiencing today in this space are a microcosm of the challenges that the JADC2 initiative will also experience,” she said. “Getting systems to talk to one another, getting sensors to send data, getting access to that data, being able to use it to make decisions — [it’s] a counter-UAS problem, and at the larger scale also a major initiative and movement for the JADC2 problem set.”

In 2022, the command awarded Anduril Industries a contract worth nearly $1 billion to serve as the lead on its counter-drone systems integration efforts. But the Defense Department’s slow acceptance of commonplace practices in the commercial industry — such as application programming interfaces, data-sharing and cloud storage — has created gaps in new and legacy systems, Arraiz said.

“[Anduril] have very modern technology, but that modern technology now has to work with something that was built into the Army 30 years ago that uses an antiquated programming language and isn’t cloud native,” she said. “And so, how do you make these systems talk and communicate — especially when we’re talking about the kill chain and how long that kill chain is?”

Better connectivity between systems enabled by cloud environments would also boost data-sharing speeds, which is crucial for the projected fast-moving fights of the future where commanders will need to make decisions about incoming drone threats quickly, Arraiz noted. 

Modern software could also improve how counter-drone platforms are updated with new capabilities to meet rapidly evolving UAS threats, Stephen Bowdren, Marine Corps program executive officer for land systems, said Wednesday during the panel.

His office is particularly interested in capabilities that have open architectures and are easily upgradable — especially when Marines are conducting operations in distributed and remote environments in the Indo-Pacific, he said.

“As threats change and different threats show up in different form factors — let’s say, swarming [drones] versus individual — how will your software adapt to that? And how can a Marine out in the field download that? Does a field service rep have to come out and plug in and then do an update? That’s not going to necessarily work very well in the first island chain,” Bowdren said.

In terms of ground-based air-defense systems like counter-UAS platforms, there isn’t a single agreed upon open-architecture connectivity standard that would promote interoperability and modularity, Arraiz said. Traditional software protocols will suffice until otherwise determined, she suggested.

She urged companies interested in working with SOCOM and other Defense Department components to come to the table with capabilities that already enable interoperability.

“If your solution is cloud native, if it adheres to modern systems architecture [and] open systems architecture, if you have data dictionaries and application programming interfaces, come to the DOD with all of that from day one,” Arraiz said.

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Officials have described this modern-age triad as a key aspect to integrated deterrence — a major pillar of the Biden administration’s national defense strategy — focused on combating malign adversary activity occurring on a daily basis. The U.S. military term “triad” has traditionally been a reference to the three legs of the nation’s nuclear forces, which consist of bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and ballistic missile submarines.

Army officials with Army Cyber Command, Army Special Operations Command and Army Space and Missile Defense Command first unveiled the new triad concept in August 2022 and described it as combining each of their unique capabilities to provide better and more integrated options to policymakers.

Now, the joint combatant commands are beginning to look at how this partnership can apply across their areas of responsibility.

U.S. Special Operations Command “has been reviewing the work U.S. Army Special Operations Command is doing with Army Space and Cyber Commands to determine which elements they have developed have applicability at the combatant command level to ensure the entire Joint Force maximizes the SOF/Space/Cyber triad’s capabilities,” a Socom spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

This informal relationship of synching and integrating the capabilities of these three organizations stems from their global reach.

“At its heart is the ability to converge those capabilities, the SOF placement and access, the cyber work and certainly the space work in places for integrated deterrence effects that we would otherwise not get if we were doing it individually, and bringing certainly a bigger sum back to not only the mission, but any partner we’re working with,” Gen. Bryan Fenton, the commander of Socom, told senators in March.

Fenton noted the ties that exist between Socom and U.S. Cyber Command and said the organizations are looking at experimenting to advance the partnership.

“We’ve got a very close relationship with Gen. [Paul] Nakasone and Cybercom and it’s progressed into an area that we now call a capability: SOF, space, cyber triad,” Fenton said during a March hearing. “That’s been an incredible effort alongside Gen. Nakasone’s team. We’re very grateful for that and also in the [U.S. Space Command] arena. We are moving forward with exercises, experimentation, a number of senior leader huddles, and I think you’ll see that progress and we’d be happy to talk about the progress.”

Special operations forces are also at an inflection point of sorts. Following the heavy reliance on these troops during the global war on terror, many inside and outside the Pentagon have openly wondered what role they’ll play in the so-called great power competition with China.

Moreover, there have been talks of cutting SOF due to budgetary restrictions.

Some have noted that greater partnership — such as the triad — is a way to ensure the importance of these elite troops and thus negate cuts some find counterproductive.

“Special operations forces are our nation’s premiere force during peacetime and war. In the face of recruiting challenges for our military and growing threats around the world, cuts to SOF are not the answer,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said in a statement. “We should be increasing greater cooperation between Special Operations Command, Space Command, and Cyber Command to prevent conflict and protect the homeland. With the shift to peer competition, this integration will help us operate more effectively in the information domain.”

Ernst added that as ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, she will ensure cuts to SOF won’t risk operational security or pose a threat to missions, noting that the U.S. “must be prepared to take on the risks of the 21st century and deter aggression in the face of great power, and that means we need a fully operational SOF.”

Spacecom and Cybercom deferred to Socom regarding this triad, but pointed out the strong relationship they have with one another.

“U.S. Space Command contributes to integrated deterrence by preserving freedom of action in space and by providing critical support to the rest of the Joint Force. Our mission spans the spectrum of conflict and every domain. For example, we are creating concepts to further integrate space, cyber, and special operations to generate asymmetrical advantages around the globe,” Gen. James Dickinson, commander of Spacecom, told lawmakers in March.

The nominee to be the next Cybercom commander at his July confirmation hearing noted the “strategic competitive advantages” each of these combatant commands brings to the table.

“It offers us an opportunity to look at where each of us can come together to work in support of a geographic combatant commander’s needs and be able to do that more effectively together,” Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh told senators. “We’re looking for what are those hard requirements that a geographic combatant commander needs, and those are the areas that we’re focused on. How do we work together to achieve something that would have been more difficult independently, but when we partner with unique strengths of Special Operations Command and Socom components, with what our cyber mission force brings, that capacity tied together our goals to satisfy hard problems for the geographic combatant commands.”

Haugh, as well as Army officials, have noted that special operations forces provide Cybercom’s forces placement and access, which alludes to the notion that these forces are forward deployed in austere locations and provide proximal plug-ins to targets that Cybercom can then attack.

He also explained that when he was the commander for Cybercom’s Air Force component that oversaw cyber operations for U.S. European Command — from October 2019 to August 2022 — they were working with Special Operations Command Europe every day on meeting needs of the Eucom commander.

From a space perspective, Haugh described the relationship between Cybercom, Spacecom and the Space Force as “inextricable” when it comes to supporting the joint force.

“When we think about what those challenges are and we think about the resiliency that is going to be required, as we think about what potential future conflict could look like, how do we ensure both a redundant set of communications? Much of that is going to be built on space,” he said.

At the Army level thus far, officials have said there isn’t a desired end state for the time being. The immediate focus has been synchronizing and converging the capabilities of each organization to create an effect and delivering outcomes.

According to an article by three active-duty Army officers, an emerging partnership between special operations forces and cyber forces involving data integration and information capabilities has “demonstrated the value of the larger ‘Space, Cyber, and SOF Triad.’”

“Within three weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the combined SOF-cyber team developed seven new analytic approaches (including two new deep learning models and three new network science models) to support the unique requirements of the information dimension in Eastern Europe,” the officials wrote. “In addition to the seven models, the team also relied upon existing models that the team had already developed and deployed, including machine learning, network science, natural language processing, and image-analysis models and visualizations. These models were deployed into production in custom machine-learning pipelines and atop the unified SOF-cyber data to feed a daily product automatically produced and distributed to relevant Army, Joint, and SOF commands in Europe.”

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The confab, named IF11, will bring together U.S. and international Special Operations Forces (SOF), government officials, industry, academia and futurists to think through scenarios that the world’s most elite warfighters might face as the internet of things proliferates.

“The goal of the event is to develop concepts and approaches for the framework, technologies, infrastructure, and capabilities required to effectively conduct SOF operations in a world where omnipresent sensors track people, organizations, vehicles, and systems throughout their lives, at home and around the world in both the physical and virtual realms,” according to a special notice posted on SAM.gov.

Areas of interest include sensor design and development; radio frequency (RF) tech; low probability of intercept/low probability of detection (LPI/LPD) solutions; data analysis and visualization; communications; networking; autonomous systems, robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning; and situational awareness tools.

The gathering, held in collaboration with Special Operations Command’s science and technology directorate, will include personnel from SOCOM’s Next-Generation Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance and Tactically Relevant Situational Awareness (NGISR/SA) capability focus area, international S&T liaisons, and Joint Staff Intelligence (J2).

“To ground the discussion, IF11 participants will use a fictional mission scenario that reflects the future operating environment with omnipresent sensor networks that are part of the civilian infrastructure. This scenario will also consider the potential for additional sensor networks emplaced by military and intelligence organizations who may be friendly, neutral, or adversaries. Participants will emphasize the opportunities and challenges related to these sensor networks and their resultant information products, reflecting the complex interplays of social, technological, political, and cultural factors as they might play out in the 2035 timeframe,” according to the special notice.

SOFWERX and SOCOM want to explore how the command and its international partners can transition from relying on traditional ISR platforms and sensors to “future state-of-the-art methods to understand and conduct operations in this future environment, considering both offensive and defensive perspectives.”

They also want to identify ways to better collect, analyze, and disseminate data, and use that information to fight in contested or operationally constrained environments.

Those interested in attending the event must respond to the special notice by Aug. 15. The confab will be held Sept. 27-29 at the SOFWERX facility in Tampa, Florida, near SOCOM’s headquarters.

The IF11 initiative could eventually lead to business-to-business research and development agreements; other transaction agreements (OTAs) for research and prototype projects; procurement for experimental purposes; cooperate R&D agreements; prizes for advanced technology achievements; or Federal Acquisition Regulation-based procurement contracts, according to the special notice.

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Improving intelligence fusion through real-time data integration is a key pillar of SOCOM’s plans for digital transformation. That data must not only be gathered, fused and transferred to the appropriate end users; it also has to be secured — a challenge that will grow with the development of quantum computing capabilities.

“How do we get after the way those bits and bytes interact with each other and create the intelligence that we need, while at the same time protecting that data, you know, ensuring that the data is trustworthy?” Thomas Kenney, chief data officer at Special Operations Command, said Thursday at the SOFIC conference.

“Here’s a really interesting aspect of this that we’re looking at today because we know in a few years this is going to become really important — by some accounts, we’re less than eight years away from quantum cryptography being able to break the non-quantum cryptography that we have today … We need an answer for that,” he said.

When the technology is ready for prime time, officials say it could be a game changer.

Data “may very easily be decrypted by a capability that has a quantum decrypt capability,” Kenney warned.

The time is now to be thinking about that problem before adversaries have already acquired that capability, he added.

Technology developers are putting a lot of effort into quantum computing, he noted, highlighting the implications of quantum processing.

“One of the really interesting tenants of quantum computing is that you can compute multiple outcomes simultaneously. And when you think about the speed of battle and where we’re going to, that ability will be absolutely essential,” Kenney said.

“Quantum computing is being played with right now. And we look at where we’re going for quantum cryptography, we need about a factor of 1,000 qubits to be able to get to that next level,” he said.

A qubit is a computing unit that leverages the principle of superposition — the ability of quantum systems to exist in two or more states simultaneously — to encode information, the Congressional Research Service explained in a recent report on the technology.

Whereas a classical computer encodes information in bits that can represent binary states of either 0 or 1, a quantum computer encodes information in qubits, each of which can represent 0, 1, or a combination of both at the same time. As a result, the power of a quantum computer increases exponentially with the addition of each qubit, according to CRS.

“Being able to have multiple outcomes calculated at the same time on a battlefield that’s happening extremely fast is going to be mission essential to us. Are the technologies there today? Maybe not. But they certainly need to be there in the future, so it’s something that we’re taking a look at,” Kenney said.

Earlier this month, President Biden signed two new policy directives aimed at advancing U.S. quantum technologies and the ability to defend U.S. infrastructure against the threat posed by quantum computers.

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SOCOM acquired a slew of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to meet requirements for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But some of those might no longer be needed as the command pivots to new technologies and great power competition with China.

“We need to look hard at all those systems and go, which ones within our enterprise are the biggest bang for the buck? And which ones do we need to retain? And which ones do we actually need to cut away?” SOCOM Commander Gen. Richard Clarke said Tuesday at the SOFIC conference.

Systems will be reviewed as the command undertakes long-term planning for capabilities development and resource allocation.

“We need to take a comprehensive look at all of our programs,” he said. “As we’re going into some specific discussions about future POM [program objective memorandum] cycles, there are some things that we need to look at hard and go, ‘Is this really what we still need within our formations?’ We’ve got to take a whole full-throated effort towards that because we’ve got to point towards China, but we still have other missions we’ve got to do.”

The command is less interested in remotely piloted drones and is looking for UAVs that can operate more autonomously and reduce the manpower burden for Special Operations Forces (SOF).

“Unmanned systems have shown great value to SOF operations and will continue to show great value. The issue for us is, we have a small formation and everyone in that formation is dedicated to a certain task. And if I’ve got to pull an operator to have them go one-on-one to operate that unmanned system, I’ve just pulled them away from the tasks that they’re … supposed to be doing,” SOCOM Acquisition Executive Jim Smith said.

He continued: “That’s why we’re really interested in autonomy to be able to get the operator off of the Xbox controlling the unmanned system, and back over their rifle sights and doing what they were paid to do. And so that’s where I think unmanned systems will go in the future.”

UAVs are just one tool for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). SOCOM wants to leverage more space-based sensors — including commercial satellite imagery — cyber tools, and other technologies.

“We have focused for the last 20 years on airborne ISR overhead capabilities that allow us to look down and see [and] sense the enemy with multiple pods on top of them,” Clarke noted. “We’ve got to layer in the space capabilities with that, we have to layer open-source data with that. And we have to be able to pull that all together. And those things that are flying above, we need to make sure we have the best capabilities on top of them. So, as I look at next-generation ISR I think that’s something that still needs further development, because … just buying overhead UAVs — that is not going to be the solution in the long run.”

Special Operations Command wants technologies that enable “collaborative autonomy” and AI for small unit maneuver.

“We are going to use a lot of sensors — whether they’re unmanned aerial systems, unmanned ground systems, unmanned maritime systems, unattended sensors — all working together,” Smith said. “Our goal is to have those working together collaboratively and autonomously.”

SOCOM aims to take ISR data collected by a variety of unmanned systems, fuse it with data collected from satellites and cyberspace, and provide it to SOF at the tactical edge to improve their situational awareness. Artificial intelligence and machine learning could help SOCOM sort through the sensor data and separate the wheat from the chaff, and give commandos the information they need to accomplish their missions.

“That’s what we think next-generation ISR looks like,” Smith said, adding that a lot of AI and data transfer will be required to enable that.

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