Pete Modigliani

What happens when warfighters join the design process from the very beginning? Instead of waiting until the end of development, the Air Force is bringing operators into prototyping earlier than ever to build capabilities faster and smarter for the battlefield. This shift could change how military technology is built. #AirForce #Airman

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has approved the second round of appointments to the recently established Science, Technology and Innovation Board (STIB), bringing the newly unified advisory body to a total of 33 members. By bringing together top-tier talent that combines scientific and technical rigor with private-sector agility, the STIB serves as a single, unified voice for innovation. This newly integrated board replaces competing recommendations with fast, coherent guidance to support and equip the Joint Force. STIB Members: • Dr. Mark Albrecht, Ph.D. • Dr. Michael R. Anastasio, Ph.D. • Dr. John W. Betz, Ph.D. • Mr. Alec M. Bierbauer • Colonel Gregory L. Bowman, U.S. Army (Ret.) • Dr. Gary D. Butler, Ph.D. • Dr. Victoria Coleman, Ph.D. • Mr. Angus Davis • Dr. Kelvin K. Droegemeier, Ph.D. • Commander James Galambos, U.S. Navy (Ret.), Ph.D. • The Honorable James F. Geurts • The Honorable James P. Gfrerer • Mr. Kellen Giuda • Captain James R. Gosier, U.S. Navy (Ret.) • Mr. John Hering • Dr. Alicia Jackson, Ph.D. • Mr. Alex Jacobson • Colonel Daniel Javorsek, U.S. Air Force (Ret.), Ph.D. • Colonel Bruce D. Jette, U.S. Army (Ret.), Ph.D. • Lieutenant Colonel Robert F. Lehman, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.) • Mr. Thomas D. Lehrman, J.D. • Mr. Shaun Maguire • The Honorable Christopher C. Miller • Mr. Thomas F. Mooney • Dr. Milan Nikolich, Ph.D. • The Honorable David L. Norquist • Mr. Vayl Oxford • Mr. John D. Robusto • Mr. Joshua Steinman • Lieutenant Colonel Bradford C. Tousley, U.S. Army (Ret.), Ph.D. • Dr. James Trebes, Ph.D. • Dr. Steven H. Walker, Ph.D. • Captain Bryant T. Wysocki, U.S. Air Force (Ret.), Ph.D.

Supersonic. Mach 1.21. Quarterhorse Mk 2.1 is now the world’s first privately developed, unmanned supersonic jet and the fastest unmanned aircraft flying today. This flight makes Hermeus the fastest company in aviation history to go from founding to supersonic flight - exactly 364 days after the maiden flight of our first aircraft. Now, we fly faster. A special thanks to @DIU_x, Director @OwenWest91, Maj. Gen. Joe "Solo" Kunkel, and Deputy Director Kyle Norman.

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video. Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments. The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times. Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it. Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone. The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

Why is Latin America so poor? You can drive from one of America's wealthiest cities into a neighborhood of dirt roads and open sewers in about 20 minutes — separated by nothing but a border fence. It's not because of geography or genetics. Here's what I learned ... Video Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 1:37 - Legacy of Colonization 8:10 - Independence Without Order 13:42 - The Rule of Law

Watch Starship's twelfth flight test twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Thanks to President Trump’s historic $1.5 trillion investment in our military, AMERICA IS REBUILDING THE ARSENAL OF FREEDOM — and doing so responsibly.

"It's imperative that we responsibly and effectively convert this increased appropriation into combat capability and warfighting advantage." Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman testifies in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee to explain how the Space Force FY27 budget request will get vital combat systems in the hands of warfighters faster than ever. #SpaceForce #Guardians #SemperSupra #DAFBudget

What piece of technology does SOCOM need the most right now? The Deputy Director for Acquisition for U.S. Special Operations Command gives his answer.

The drones invade the waterfront at SOF Week 2026. #sofweek #sofweek2026

@GrandpaRoy2 @antonii_doncho I was supporting your joke.

@antonii_doncho @PeteModi I was making a joke, I don’t really think paper airplane drones are going to dominate the battlefield.

Drone Dominance

10,000 Low-Cost Cruise Missiles In Three Years Procurement Plan Laid Out By Pentagon The U.S. military now also plans on buying 12,000 'cheap' hypersonic missiles as part of a larger push to bolster munitions inventories. No primes included. twz.com/sea/10000-low-…

@Grok believes the top 3 likely actions by @SECNAV that John alludes to are: - Waiving or streamlining excessive welding/NDT inspection requirements or similar QA overkill - Approving broader use of COTS, foreign-sourced parts, or relaxed Buy American/ Jones Act-adjacent rules for non-core systems - Direct intervention to cut @NAVSEA or program office red tape.

Can’t say what. Can’t say why. Can’t give details. But within 24 hours of being briefed, @SECNAV @HungCao_VA cleared the single biggest bottleneck in U.S. shipbuilding. Should’ve been fixed years ago. Nobody else in the Pentagon grasped it. Nobody would give the top cover. BOOM. Believe It or Not!

The Air Force is spending more on B-52 engine upgrades ($1.4B) than on its flagship autonomy program, CCA ($1.3B). The F-47 jumped from $2.3B → $5B. David Rothzeid on what FY27 actually says about the Pentagon's priorities. (links in comment)

Elon Musk just revealed what’s actually holding AI back. It’s not chips. Not models. Not data. It’s concrete. Someone asked him the obvious question. Why not just build private power plants next to data centers? Bypass the grid entirely. His answer was four words. Musk: “The power plant makers.” There aren’t enough of them. You can design the best chip on earth. Train a frontier model. Raise $10 billion for a hyperscale data center. None of it matters if you can’t power it. Musk: “You can drill down a level further.” GPUs need power. Power needs turbines. Turbines need factories. Factories need permits. Permits need a government that hasn’t paralyzed itself. Every link in the chain is physical. And every one of them is breaking. We can train a frontier model in weeks. We can’t permit a power plant in under five years. The country that invented the assembly line now needs 40 agencies to approve a gas turbine. China doesn’t have this problem. They don’t run 7-year environmental reviews on infrastructure they need tomorrow. They break ground while America requests approval to break ground. The AI race won’t be decided by whoever writes the best algorithm. It’ll be decided by whoever can still build in the physical world. We spent 30 years getting faster in software and slower in steel. Outsourcing manufacturing. Hollowing out supply chains. Treating builders like liabilities instead of assets. Now the bill is due. Every breakthrough in AI is gated by atoms. Steel. Concrete. Turbines that take years to manufacture and decades to approve. The smartest code on earth is worthless without electricity. Musk didn’t give a speech about this. He didn’t need to. He answered one question and the whole infrastructure myth collapsed. “Where do you get the power plants from?” Follow that thread far enough and you stop finding a technology problem. You find a civilization that mastered thinking and forgot how to build.

Chamath Palihapitiya just said what Silicon Valley is terrified to say out loud. On Joe Rogan. To millions of people. Without flinching. Chamath: “The only person that we can trust is Elon.” Not whispered at a dinner party. Not buried in a podcast nobody listens to. Said on the record. Full weight behind it. And then he told you why. Chamath: “I feel like he’s the least corruptible. He’s the most independent thinking. And I think he’s the one that has an actual empathy for people.” One of the sharpest capital allocators in Silicon Valley history looked at every founder building AI. Every single one. And chose the one the media spends the most energy telling you to hate. That alone should stop you cold. Chamath: “Then there are folks where there’s just an insane profit motive.” He’s talking about OpenAI. He’s talking about Google. He’s talking about companies that swallowed billions from Wall Street and now answer to shareholders before they answer to humanity. Chamath: “They’re less in control of the businesses that they run.” The people building the most powerful technology in human history do not control their own companies. Their boards do. Their investors do. Their liquidation preferences do. And these are the ones we’re trusting with superintelligence. Chamath: “He’s like, I need to get to Mars.” This is the fracture line nobody wants to touch. Every other AI founder is optimizing for the next earnings call. The next funding round. The next quarterly number that keeps the machine fed. Elon is optimizing for the next planet. One group builds to satisfy investors. The other builds to survive as a species. Those aren’t different strategies. Those are different operating systems running on different hardware. And it changes everything about how you build. When your time horizon is 90 days, you cut corners. You monetize behavior. You trade safety for speed because the board needs a number by Friday. When your time horizon is interplanetary, you can’t afford a single shortcut. Because shortcuts don’t survive launch. Chamath: “Where is this going to end up?” The only question that matters. And nobody in power wants you asking it. Because the answer comes down to who gets there first. If it’s a company owned by Wall Street, superintelligence becomes the most sophisticated extraction engine ever built. Every decision optimized. Every behavior predicted. Every market captured. Not for you. For the balance sheet. If it’s someone who can’t be bought, pressured, or voted out by a board of directors, there’s at least a chance it bends toward something bigger than quarterly revenue. History never remembers who built the most powerful technology. It remembers who controlled it. And what they used it for. The only founder in AI who cannot be fired by a board, leveraged by an investor, or replaced by a shareholder vote is the one they spend the most energy telling you not to trust. Ask yourself why.

🔥 Mel Wolfgang and team @BCG spitting fire with the contrast between: - US Navy targets vs. projected output - US vs leading nation shipbuilding Of note, and not what you usually hear... US also has many ADVANTAGES to be a great shipbuilding nation. Great piece