OUR PICKSPulling Reports, Playing Politics | One Emergency After Another | Saving the Pentagon’s Best Ideas, and more

Pulling Reports, Playing Politics  (Joseph Stabile, Lawfare)
The CIA’s retraction of intelligence reports should raise concerns about politicization and the Trump administration’s embrace of white supremacist rhetoric

DOJ Moves to Undo Jan. 6 Rioters’ Convictions for Seditious Conspiracy  (Salvador Rizzo, Jeremy Roebuck and Perry Stein, Washington Post)
President Donald Trump last year commuted the prison sentences of 12 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

How the Pentagon Can Manage the Risks of AI Warfare  (Paul Scharre, Foreign Policy)
If warfighters don’t trust the technology, they won’t use it.

One Emergency After Another  (Ben Diamond, Lawfare)
As President Trump’s use of emergency powers outstrips his predecessors, Congress and the courts must act to rein him in.

Can a New Bridge Finally Save the Pentagon’s Best Ideas?  (Isobel Porteous, War on the Rocks)
In May 1953, in the desert west of Idaho Falls, a crew powered up the world’s first naval nuclear propulsion system. What made it possible was daringly aggressive innovation: Adm. Hyman Rickover insisted that the Submarine Thermal Reactor Mark I be built to exactly the specifications that would later be required inside a submarine. This meant hundreds of pounds of simulated sea pressure per square inch, shock resistance tested to the standards of a depth-charge attack, and air conditioning sized at three times the requirement. Rickover’s own engineers fought him, arguing that the basic challenge of building a nuclear reactor at all was hard enough without simultaneously solving submarine problems too. After all, this was one of the first-ever experiments on practical applications of atomic power. Rickover overruled them to demand a realistic operational prototype.
When Mark I reached full power in June 1953, Rickover ordered his engineers to test the system on a simulated transatlantic crossing at full power. The test was unplanned. It was also opposed by his senior officer on site and the technical officers at the Naval Reactors Branch, who called from Washington and urged him to stop. But when Rickover refused and completed the test, which took over 65 hours, he had successfully shown the ability for a nuclear-powered submarine to cross the Atlantic nonstop at full power without surfacing. Rickover faced considerable resistance from Navy leadership, and the pursuit of nuclear propulsion made many career diesel submariners uncomfortable. The proposal had initially sounded, in the words of Rickover’s project officer, “like a trip to the moon” to most who heard it. But when the test was complete, skeptics had nothing left to argue.
Sixty years later, the same logic played out on a launchpad. For decades, the Air Force treated reusable rockets as an engineering fantasy. The aggressive counterargument came in December 2015, when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first stage returned to Cape Canaveral and landed itself vertically, engines burning, on four deployable legs, eighteen stories tall and intact. The reusable booster landing was the culmination of a bet that the aerospace establishment had repeatedly pronounced irrational. Today, SpaceX holds eighty percent of the global launch market. That fantasy rocket has eaten the industry.During the first wave of air strikes in Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, 2026, one of the most effective tools cost $35,000 per unit and had been in the U.S. arsenal for roughly eight months. The Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System was built by SpektreWorks, an Arizona startup that began by recreating the same airframe as an Iranian Shahed-136. They were awarded a contract, not through a program office, but by the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies program administered by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Their $30 million contract and seven-month timeline from unveiling to combat would not have been possible through a traditional program of record.The history of defense innovation is full of cases like this: where a leap-ahead capability arrived from a direction that nobody had considered and was nearly disregarded because it didn’t look like the existing program of record. For the reactor in the desert, the reusable rocket booster, or the drone design lifted from an adversary, the capability had to be prototyped and proven to operational readiness before institutions would accept it. In each of these cases, the project was not pre-aligned to existing programs or procurement budgets. Program offices tend to be unprepared for innovation like this, due to calcified assumptions about what is feasible, after spending decades and billions of dollars on mature legacy systems. And when this kind of innovation comes along, inflexible budgets limit what is investable.