The new arms race is measured in gigawatts. Modern military AI—from targeting and operational planning to logistics—runs through data centers. Those facilities depend on reliable, round-the-clock electricity supplied largely by private utilities and governed by a fragmented web of federal, state, regional, and local authorities. This means America’s military edge increasingly depends on civilian infrastructure outside of the Pentagon’s control: commercial cloud computing and the electric grid behind it. Our adversaries are taking advantage of this vulnerability. In March, Iranian drones struck Amazon Web Services facilities in the Gulf, disrupting commercial services and demonstrating how military reliance can distribute wartime risk onto civilian companies. An adversary doesn’t need to disable the entire grid to degrade AI-enabled combat power. The threat will scale with the AI buildout. U.S. data-center power use reached 64.4 gigawatts in late 2025 and could approach 183.2 gigawatts by 2030. Meanwhile, more than 2.2 terawatts of proposed generation and storage sit in interconnection queues, where median waits exceed five years. History offers clear warnings about the military significance of energy security. Churchill helped the Royal Navy transition from coal to oil in time for World War I. Rickover removed the endurance constraint on submarines with nuclear power. Germany’s sophisticated wartime industry failed when the fuel system beneath it collapsed. In each case, the decisive question was whether institutions could secure and deliver the most important sources of energy. Today on First Breakfast, Katherine Lambert proposes a defense energy strategy built around site-specific demand forecasts, protected transmission and interconnection rights, federal siting authority for defense-designated loads, and military responsibility for protecting critical commercial cloud infrastructure. The United States has the engineering capacity and capital. The harder question is whether it can build institutions that move at the speed of the threat. Read the full article, “The Arms Race is Measured in Gigawatts,” on our website: firstbreakfast.com/p/the-arm…

Read First Breakfast's full interview with UFORCE CEO Oleg Rogynskyy on our website: firstbreakfast.com/p/ukraine…

Traditional defense procurement systems couldn’t save Ukraine when Russia invaded in February 2022. It built a different one based on rapid iteration, frontline demand, verified performance, and competition. In First Breakfast’s latest interview, UFORCE co-founder and CEO Oleg Rogynskyy explains how Ukraine shifted from buying hardware to buying battlefield outcomes—and how his drone company is scaling Ukraine’s most effective tech and bringing it to the West. Traditional defense programs spend years moving from requirements to production. Ukraine asks users what they need, fields an imperfect system quickly, gathers combat data, and improves it. Rogynskyy argues that future weapons may never reach maturity at the level of an Abrams or F-35: by the time a system approaches “perfection,” the battlefield will have made it obsolete. Ukraine’s acquisition system turns frontline performance into demand signals. Units earn points for verified kills and spend them through the Brave1 Market, where they can compare products, check inventories, read reviews, and request rapid delivery. The government then uses this data to identify successful systems and place larger orders. This is the meritocracy of the battlefield: equipment that works earns its place on the front line. Equipment that fails disappears. Competition produces many options, while operational data helps users and officials separate effective systems from the rest. UFORCE is now trying to bring combat-proven Ukrainian technology—including MAGURA unmanned boats, Nemesis bomber drones, and Liut ground vehicles—to Western markets. After years of stress-testing its products in the most ferocious combat zone on Earth, UFORCE’s new challenge is persuading Western buyers to think more like their Ukrainian counterparts. Will it succeed?

Read Dan and Dom’s field notes from Ukraine on our website: firstbreakfast.com/p/unmanne…

Drones are forcing a fundamental reordering of combined-arms warfare. America’s response must reach beyond production and procurement to the way its military organizes, trains, and fights. Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces was built from the ground up for the new way of war. @DanFMadden and Dom Ventimiglia of @squadra_vc trekked to USF's operations center to see how it works. They met Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, whose unit—the Birds of Magyar—integrate reconnaissance drones, FPV strike drones, electronic warfare, signals intelligence, and battlefield analytics into a single combat system. The results are lethal. Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces achieve 33% of the country’s military’s effects with fewer than 3% of its personnel. In NATO exercises, small Ukrainian unmanned units have obliterated conventional formations, including American armored forces. This lethality is the result of an organizational approach that connects battlefield operations directly to technical talent and industry. Commanders use operations research to assess effectiveness. Engineers iterate capabilities. Verified strikes earn units “ePoints” that they can spend on preferred systems through an Amazon-like procurement platform, creating a feedback loop between battlefield performance and capability development. These arrangements present difficult tradeoffs; they can’t simply be copied by larger forces with global interests, like our own. But they demand urgent study and adoption on our terms. The newly announced AUTOWARCOM shows the United States is moving to develop unmanned forces suited to its own strategic priorities, strengths, and operational challenges. But this is only the beginning of the age of autonomy—a revolution in warfare as far reaching as the longbow and the cannon, and as Ukraine shows more lethal.

Read “The Ultimate Weapons Innovation Cycle” for @GlennNye's account of Ukraine’s defense production ecosystem and what America can learn from it: firstbreakfast.com/p/the-ult…

.@GlennNye recently returned from a trip to war-torn Ukraine. Today, he shares what he saw with First Breakfast: Ukraine’s battlefield advantage depends on more than the drones it builds. It depends on how quickly soldiers and manufacturers can improve them together. More than four years into Russia’s brutal invasion, Ukrainian forces are locked in a relentless cycle of adaptation. Capabilities that work today may need to be redesigned tomorrow—or replaced with something entirely new. In this cycle, dynamism and innovation are survival skills; standing still kills. This life-or-death cycle has given rise to a defense production ecosystem that the West must study and emulate. Thousands of Ukrainian suppliers compete to meet needs communicated directly from the field. Military brigades have meaningful budget autonomy to choose equipment. Ukraine’s Brave1 marketplace connects those buyers with producers, helping product development respond to operational results. The resulting innovation loops can close in days. The United States can’t merely copy Ukraine’s model. Our circumstances and interests are different; and for now, thankfully, we lack the urgency of existential war. But Ukraine’s approach nonetheless raises a pressing question for American defense reform: how much faster could our industrial base adapt if more military units had the authority to buy, test, and reward the equipment that delivers results? For American policymakers and industry leaders, the challenge extends beyond identifying promising Ukrainian technologies. It means examining the purchasing authorities, incentives, and relationships that allow improvements to reach soldiers while they are still useful. Importing a successful drone design offers a temporary advantage. Building an ecosystem that continually produces better designs could offer something far more durable.

Read the full article by @Hunter_morey on our website: The Naval Nuclear Pipeline firstbreakfast.com/p/the-nav…

As America reindustrializes, industries that are starved for technical talent should study the U.S. Navy’s nuclear training pipeline. Under Admiral Hyman Rickover, the Navy proved that ordinary recruits can transform into elite technical operators through rigorous academics, hands-on qualification, relentless standards, and real responsibility. The Navy nuclear model is simple yet demanding. Students first master fundamentals: math, physics, reactor theory, thermodynamics, electrical and mechanical systems, chemistry, and radiological controls. They must explain, calculate, defend, and prove understanding. Then they move to real nuclear plants, where theory becomes action through oral checkouts, evaluated watches, drills, and qualification under pressure. This rigorous training works because of the culture of excellence instilled by Rickover himself. “Good enough” is not good enough. Competence is built through repetition, ownership, hard study, and instructors who know both the equipment and how to develop people. Qualification is only the beginning. Continuous training, audits, daily drills, critiques, and root-cause analysis keep standards from decaying. Civilian industry can’t simply copy the Navy. Companies can’t compel their employees the way the military can. But they can adapt the principles: paid intensive training, labs, simulations, mentored on-the-job qualification, clear standards, frequent evaluation, strong instructors, career ladders, and retention incentives tied to real advancement. Manufacturing, energy, semiconductors, defense production, data centers, and advanced nuclear all need this mindset. If these industries want workers, they will have to grow their own. Rickover’s legacy is about more than nuclear submarines. It is proof that excellence can be engineered. If America wants to rebuild its industrial strength, it must stop waiting for talent to appear and start replicating the pipelines that can produce it.

America's munitions are bottlenecked by a single factory built in 1942. One fire at Holston Army Ammunition Plant—or worse, sabotage—and the U.S. would lose domestic capacity to produce RDX and HMX, two of the military’s workhorse explosives. Now venture-backed startups are trying to do for explosives what SpaceX did for launch: break the government monopoly with a commercially viable alternative. First Breakfast’s @Madeline_Zimm sat down with the founder of one of these startups, Kevin Capozzoli of the Critical Materials Group. Watch their conversation and read Madeline’s profile to learn why private energetics manufacturing might be America's most underrated national security bet. firstbreakfast.com/p/bringin…