There you have it! The Department of War just dropped a $1.01 TRILLION defense budget for FY2026 …
March 25, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
Defense
There you have it! The Department of War just dropped a $1.01 TRILLION defense budget for FY2026 — a 13% increase — and for the FIRST TIME in history, there's a dedicated AI and autonomy budget line.
$13.4 BILLION. For drones, autonomous systems, and AI.
$9.4 billion for autonomous aerial systems alone. $1.7 billion for maritime. $1.2 billion for software integration. The Defense Innovation Unit got bumped to $2 billion. And Palantir's Maven just went from a $480 million pilot to a program of record with a $1.3 billion ceiling. They showed up, they delivered, and the Pentagon rewarded them for it.
Now here's the hard question nobody wants to answer:
What are you going to DO with $13.4 billion?
Because money was never the problem. We've watched the DoW throw billions at internal AI projects that produced absolute garbage. NIPRGPT was a joke — a glorified chatbot that cost more to build than commercial platforms that were already deployed and working across NIPR and SIPR. GenAI.mil is even worse, if that is even possible, thanks to the incompetence of the newly selected alleged leader, Emil Michael. Giving more money to this guy is the same as setting it on fire.
And yesterday, Judge Rita Lin told the DoW's lawyers their Anthropic ban "looks like an attempt to cripple" the company and "looks like punishment." The same people who banned the most deployed AI on classified networks are now deciding how to spend $13.4 billion. Let that sink in.
The budget isn't the problem anymore. The acquisition culture is. The leadership is. The people making the decisions are.
Fix the people. The money is there.
$13.4 BILLION. For drones, autonomous systems, and AI.
$9.4 billion for autonomous aerial systems alone. $1.7 billion for maritime. $1.2 billion for software integration. The Defense Innovation Unit got bumped to $2 billion. And Palantir's Maven just went from a $480 million pilot to a program of record with a $1.3 billion ceiling. They showed up, they delivered, and the Pentagon rewarded them for it.
Now here's the hard question nobody wants to answer:
What are you going to DO with $13.4 billion?
Because money was never the problem. We've watched the DoW throw billions at internal AI projects that produced absolute garbage. NIPRGPT was a joke — a glorified chatbot that cost more to build than commercial platforms that were already deployed and working across NIPR and SIPR. GenAI.mil is even worse, if that is even possible, thanks to the incompetence of the newly selected alleged leader, Emil Michael. Giving more money to this guy is the same as setting it on fire.
And yesterday, Judge Rita Lin told the DoW's lawyers their Anthropic ban "looks like an attempt to cripple" the company and "looks like punishment." The same people who banned the most deployed AI on classified networks are now deciding how to spend $13.4 billion. Let that sink in.
The budget isn't the problem anymore. The acquisition culture is. The leadership is. The people making the decisions are.
Fix the people. The money is there.