Six Shots of Whiskey for a Building That’s Been Sober Too Long

For the last few years, the Department of War carried around a list of 14 “critical technology areas” like an overstuffed rucksack. Every administration added something. No one ever took anything out. The result was a doctrine that tried to be all things to all services—and ended up guiding nothing at all.

Then, on the evening of November 17, Emil Michael posted a three-minute video on LinkedIn. No slides. No graphics. Just the new Under Secretary for Research & Engineering sitting in front of a plain backdrop, speaking directly into the camera.

His opening monologue landed like a gauge round:

“When I stepped into this role, our office had identified 14 critical technology areas. While each of these areas holds value, such a broad list dilutes focus and fails to highlight the most urgent needs of the warfighter. Fourteen priorities, in truth, means no priorities at all.”

Goosebumps. Finally someone gets it.

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. By the time he finished announcing the cut to six—and the shift to fixed-length “sprints” of 12 to 36 months”—the message was unmistakable. The era of endless working groups and equal funding for everyone’s favorite acronym was over.

The reaction was immediate and predictable. Defense primes refreshed their investor decks overnight. Small-drone companies exhaled. Biotech VCs opened new tabs labeled “pivot opportunities.” A retired four-star posted a single word—“Finally”—and collected 8,000 likes before breakfast.

I’ve spent my entire career tracking these lists: the original 2022 version with 11 areas, the 2024 update that ballooned to 14, the quiet congressional earmarks that kept the extras alive. I’ve watched China ship hypersonic test articles while we debated whether renewable energy storage belonged on a warfighting priority list.

This cut isn’t theater. It’s triage.

Six areas remain. Eight are gone. Funding, talent, and political capital will now flow—or dry up—accordingly. What follows is the new battlefield geometry. Not the one drawn on maps, but the one drawn in budget lines, lab space, and prototype timelines. These are the six technologies the building has decided will decide the next fight.

Here's the shift:

The Real Prioritization

This move is good—borderline brilliant—because Beijing has quietly convinced itself that its decisive window sits somewhere between now and 2030. Not forever. Not 2040 when demographic collapse starts biting hard and the PLA Navy might actually outnumber ours in hulls. The next seven to ten years. That’s the span in which Xi believes he can force unification on his terms, or at least make the cost of stopping him politically unbearable in Washington. I know we hear a lot about 2027 being the year. But let's not get into that right now.

I’ve watched the intel estimates evolve on this. Early 2020s assessments gave us breathing room until the mid-2030s. Then the wargames started coming back ugly. CSIS ran 24 iterations in 2023: we “won” most, but at the price of dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and trillions in economic damage. RAND followed up with runs that factored in contested logistics—fuel shortages, satellite loss, undersea cable cuts—and the failure rate climbed. The consistent variable? Time. The longer we take to field decisive capability, the narrower our margin becomes.

China isn’t waiting. Their hypersonic program is already at battalion scale. Their directed energy weapons are burning drones out of the sky over the Spratlys in live-fire drills we only see on satellite passes. Their quantum sensing prototypes are shrinking the submarine detection grid in the South China Sea month by month. And on AI-enabled kill chains? They’re not debating ethics panels—they’re integrating. China clearly doesn't care about how their weapon systems make people feel. They quite literally only care about one thing: 'can this help us win.'

Against that tempo, fourteen priorities was suicide by committee. We were spreading a trillion-dollar budget across a buffet where everything looked tasty but nothing got finished. Renewable energy storage for forward bases is a lovely idea until the base is under blockade and the panels are useless without sunlight or resupply. Human-machine teaming sounds transformative until the comms link is jammed and your expensive robot is suddenly a very smart rock.

Michael’s cut recognizes what the classified Pacific wargames have been screaming for three years: the next fight will be decided in the first 60–90 days by who can maintain tempo when everything is contested—space, spectrum, sea lanes, supply chains. After that, it becomes a slugfest of attrition we might still win, but at a price no administration wants to pay. Even Palmer Luckey has continuously pointed out our lack of ready carriers and destroyers.

Listen to his podcast with our friend Shaun Ryan and you'll get some good info on exactly that problem alone.

By boiling it down to six, the department is finally admitting something I’ve been saying in private channels for half a decade: focus isn’t a luxury. It’s survival.

The sprint model makes it real. Twelve to thirty-six months isn’t arbitrary—it maps almost perfectly to the outer edge of Beijing’s perceived window. Deliver inside that envelope and you change the deterrence calculus. Miss it and you’re bringing exquisite prototypes to a production fight.

Look, I’ve seen brilliant tech die because it lived in the thirteenth priority box with no money and no champion. This cut doesn’t just reorder the deck chairs. It throws most of the chairs overboard so the ship can actually make speed.

The six that remain aren’t perfect. But they are coherent. They form an integrated theory of victory built for the specific war the intelligence community thinks is most likely, not the one we wish we were preparing for.

That’s why this feels different. For once, the priorities match the threat picture instead of the threat picture being massaged to fit the priorities.

The Six Critical Technology Areas

The final list, as Emil Michael laid it out and as Assistant Secretary of War for Critical Technologies Mike Dodd is now charged with executing, is short enough to remember but ambitious enough to reshape the future fight.

Here they are in the order the building uses internally:

1. Applied Artificial Intelligence
2. Quantum and Battlefield Information Dominance
3. Biomanufacturing
4. Contested Logistics Technology
5. Scaled Directed Energy
6. Scaled Hypersonics

No fluff. No overlapping silos. Each area has a principal director, a protected budget lane, and a hard stop clock measured in months, not FYDPs.

What follows is not cheerleading. It is an assessment, based on the threat picture I track every day, of why each of these six is non-negotiable inside China’s decision window—and where the real risk still lives.

1. Applied Artificial Intelligence

You know this is my bread and butter. Some parts of AI is a bubble, yes. That's why they included the word applied. This isn’t academic AI theory — it’s applied machine intelligence built for edge-deployed decision-making. I've spent years at the intersection of OSINT, AI enrichment, and tactical data exploitation, and I’m convinced this is the most critical piece of the DoD’s six emerging tech pillars.

The job isn’t to theorize model performance in a clean lab — it’s to fuse unstructured, multi-lingual data at speed and scale under degraded comms and electronic pressure. Applied AI in OSINT is about pushing intelligence to the point of relevance. That means real-time narrative clustering, target confidence scoring, and autonomous alerting that keeps up with tempo — not PowerPoint reports 12 hours late.

When shit hits the fan, the side that wins the first 20 minutes is the one that can process, enrich, and route information to shooters and analysts before the adversary even knows what was seen. That’s the game. That’s why AI-enabled intelligence and systems is core to C2 survivability.

China is already demonstrating swarms, spoof-resistant targeting, and cross-domain fusion at scale. Meanwhile we’re still running policy sessions on annotation schemas. We need systems that can operate in a blackout, think in bursts, and push intelligence-grade enrichment down to the unit level. That’s the architecture we’re building with Atlas Technologies.

And Mike Dodd owning the protection portfolio is the right move. We need some DIU type critical thinker who pushes the needle and not the goalpost.

2. Quantum and Battlefield Information Dominance

Quantum sensing, quantum timing, quantum-secure comms, and post-quantum cryptography rolled into one bucket. The old list scattered these across multiple lines; now they live together because they solve the same problem: how do you navigate, communicate, and cue fires when GPS is spoofed, satellites are blinded, and every link is jammed? China’s quantum radar prototypes are already shrinking submarine hiding space in the South China Sea. Our answer cannot be another ten-year science project. This priority acknowledges that information dominance is no longer a nice-to-have—it is the new high ground. If we get this right, a carrier strike group sails with positioning accurate to centimeters and comms that Beijing cannot read or break. If we get it wrong, we are fighting blind.

On another note. I was just on a phone call this morning with a Big Beautiful Bill funding backed quantum encryption communications company. This entire sector us undervalued, underappreciated and misunderstood. Again, I think Mike Dodd is the perfect guy to focus on this issue.

3. Biomanufacturing

The surprise survivor. Most people expected straight biotech to get cut. Instead, the department kept the part that matters when global supply chains fracture: using engineered organisms to produce energetics, pharmaceuticals, critical chemicals, and even materials in theater. Think forward operating bases growing their own propellants or medical countermeasures when the sea lanes are closed for six months. This is not about curing cancer in peacetime; it is about not running out of missile fuel or antivirals when commercial shipping stops. China dominates precursor chemicals today the way OPEC once dominated oil. Biomanufacturing is the hedge. Dodd’s team is already mapping which molecules we can synthesize biologically at scale and which production nodes can be air-droppable. Quietly one of the smartest inclusions on the list.

4. Contested Logistics Technology

The phrase barely existed publicly two years ago. Now it sits at the adult table with hypersonics. Everything required to keep a distributed force fed, fueled, armed, and mobile when every port is under threat, every satellite is flashing, and every convoy is hunted. Autonomous resupply drones, additive manufacturing at the battalion level, predictive maintenance that works offline, underwater caching—whatever closes the gap between “we have it in CONUS” and “the Marine on the island has it in his hands.” Replicator taught us that you can build thousands of cheap attritable systems; contested logistics is how you keep them shooting after day thirty. Elevating this to a top-level priority is the clearest signal yet that the department finally believes the next war will be decided by sustainment, not just striking power.

5. Scaled Directed Energy

High-energy lasers and high-power microwaves moving from laboratory curiosities to fleet quantities. The physics works; the problem has always been power, cooling, and beam control at scale. This priority says solve those problems now and buy in bulk. A 300 kW laser on a destroyer changes the cost curve against drone swarms and anti-ship missiles overnight. China and Russia are already deploying operational systems in Ukraine and the Middle East. Our answer has been “we’re studying it.” No longer. The sprint clock forces trades: good-enough cooling today beats perfect cooling never. If we hit the production numbers, missiles become economically irrelevant in saturation attacks.

6. Scaled Hypersonics

Both offensive and defensive. Boost-glide vehicles, scramjet missiles, and the counters that can kill them. China fields battalions; we field test articles. This priority is the department admitting the asymmetry is no longer acceptable. The “scaled” adjective is deliberate—single-digit flight tests do not deter. Hundreds of weapons in inventory do. The defensive piece is equally urgent: if we cannot reliably intercept their hypersonics, the carrier force stays east of Guam and the deterrence equation flips. Money and talent will now flow to common propulsion, common thermal protection, and common kill vehicles instead of three separate service fiefdoms. Brutal for egos, necessary for survival.

Taken together, these six form a coherent whole. AI and quantum dominate the information layer; directed energy and hypersonics dominate the kinetic layer; biomanufacturing and contested logistics ensure the force can endure when the global economy is on fire. Nothing else made the cut because nothing else moves the needle decisively before 2032.

Mike Dodd, as the first Assistant Secretary of War for Critical Technologies, now owns day-to-day execution across all six. His background bridging startups and the building makes him the right officer to kill sacred cows when sprints start slipping. If you don't know Mike, go look him up. He's extremely reputable from DIU to the halls of Capital Factory.

The list is not perfect, but it is honest. And in this business, honest is rare enough to matter.

Risks, Budget Realities, and Whether This Survives Contact With Congress

No prioritization exercise is bulletproof, and this one arrives with built-in fragilities.

First, the good news: the six areas map cleanly to the Pacific deterrence mission set. Every wargame I have seen out of CSP, CSIS, or the classified stacks ends the same way. If we cannot maintain information dominance, kinetic overmatch, and logistical endurance through the first ninety days of a Taiwan fight, the political cost becomes unacceptable. These six give planners a fighting chance to fix that.

Now the bad news.

Congress still writes the checks. The FY26 NDAA markup is already underway and every member with a biotech incubator, a quantum consortium, or a renewable-energy jobs in their district just lost their favorite line item. Expect amendments. Expect earmarks dressed up as “technology transition pilots.” Expect the list to creep back toward ten by the time the conference report drops next December. Emil Michael can announce focus all he wants; appropriators have been ignoring focus since the F-35 was young. And shit, it still isn't getting any attention. Lets hope the FTrump2(F-47) does better.

Second, execution risk sits inside the sprint model itself. Twelve to thirty-six months sounds aggressive until you remember the average OTA still takes four months to award and the average security review still takes six. The primes will slow-roll anything that threatens their legacy franchises. The services will protect their program executive officers. Mike Dodd, with his role as the interesting ASD-CT(R&E), is the man now holding the fire axe. His job is to kill programs that miss gates and redirect the money before it gets reprogrammed into something shiny but irrelevant. I have watched three previous “rapid” initiatives die because no one was willing to actually cancel anything. If Dodd’s background at DIU and NSIC suggests he might swing the axe, whether the building lets him is another question.

Third, money. The RDT&E topline is flat or declining in real terms. Concentrating on six means the chosen few get richer while everything else starves. That is the point. But it also means hard conversations with four-stars who just lost their pet project. Replicator showed this can work when the Secretary personally backs it. Whether the new team has the same political capital remains to be seen. But I think they do. This administration, SecWar Hegseth and team all are interested in progress, not policy.

Finally, China is not standing still. Their version of “sprints” is measured in months, at most, eighteen months from decision to initial fielding. We are trying to compress a decade-long cycle into three years. Possible. Not easy.

Bottom line: this is the clearest, most operationally coherent technology strategy the department has published in a decade. If even seventy percent of it survives the budget process and the bureaucracy, we will be materially harder to fight by 2030.

The next fight will not be decided by who has the longest PowerPoint. It will be decided by who fields first, at scale, under fire.

Watching the Window: My Final Take

I’ve been covering defense technology full-time my entire career, which means I’ve now spent almost a third of my life explaining to investors, Hill staffers, and three-letter deputies why the new shiny 'critical technology' was actually just bloat.

I was on the distribution list when the 2022 version dropped with eleven areas. I’ve had off-the-record drinks with the principals who fought to keep their pet rock in the rucksack, and I’ve sat in happy hours where program managers admitted—after the third beer—that they were spending 40% of their bandwidth writing justification memos for things that would never see a battlefield this decade. Shit, if anything, the SBIR mill problem is just the easiest identification for what we are talking about here.

So when Emil Michael’s video hit my feed last Sunday night, I didn’t just watch it once. I watched it four times, took screenshots, and immediately started DMing the people who actually move money. Their responses ranged from “holy shit” to “about fucking time” to a single emoji of a ninja?

Here’s why I’m allowing myself to be optimistic—for once.

This isn’t another glossy strategy document that gets printed, briefed once, and then ignored. This is a budget signal. A forcing function. Six lanes with actual fences around them. Mike Dodd, who I very weirdly have kept tabs on in recent years, now has the authority to pull funding the moment a sprint slips.

I’ve spent years arguing in closed-door roundtables that we were going to lose the pacing fight because we refused to lose anything else. Every service wanted its own shiny object. Every think tank needed its acronym to stay relevant. Every VC with a deck needed “critical technology area #9” to stay on the list so the SBIR checks kept flowing. The result was predictable: China moved from zero to battalion-scale hypersonics while we were still writing the environmental impact statement for the test range.

Now the music stopped. Eight chairs are gone. The people are scrambling, but the room just got a lot less crowded.

The six that remain aren’t perfect—nothing ever is—but they form the first coherent theory of victory I’ve seen from the building since the Third Offset was still a twinkle in Bob Work’s eye. Applied AI that actually ships on contested networks. Quantum sensors that keep submarines alive. Biomanufacturing that turns a forward island into a chemical factory when the civilian supply chain is on fire. Contested logistics that Replicator desperately needs if the attritables are going to keep attriting past week three. Directed energy thick enough to break the missile-drone cost curve. Hypersonics in real numbers, not PowerPoint fantasy fleets.

I’m not saying we’re suddenly going to out-execute Beijing’s centralized machine. Lord knows the bureaucracy still has more antibodies than a DARPA program manager’s nightmares. But for the first time since I started my career basically, the priorities, the timeline, and the enforcement mechanism all point in the same direction: field decisive capability before the window closes.

I’ve been the skeptical guy in the back of the room for years. The one pointing out that “mosaic warfare” sounded great until you tried to buy it. The one reminding everyone that FCAS is French for “we’ll have it by 2040 maybe.”

Today I’m the guy refreshing the OUSD(R&E) website every hour waiting for the sprint solicitations to drop.

That’s how rare this moment is.

The window is still open. The list is short. The clock is brutal.

If even half of this survives the FY27 bloodbath on the Hill, we’ll be materially harder to fight by the end of the decade.

And if you’ve been reading my stuff for any length of time, you know I don’t say that lightly.

Here’s to the six.

May they ship.