It’s a big overhaul of a department that in 40 years has never before been placed so squarely on the chopping block. Here’s how today’s defense tech corporations, which have fostered close connections to the Trump administration, stand to achieve, and why safety testing might suffer because of this.
The Operational Test and Evaluation office is “the last gate before a technology gets to the sector,” says Missy Cummings, a former fighter pilot for the US Navy who’s now a professor of engineering and computer science at George Mason University. Though the military can do small experiments with latest systems without running it by the office, it has to check anything that gets fielded at scale.
“In a bipartisan way—up until now—everybody has seen it’s working to assist waste, fraud, and abuse,” she says. That’s since it provides an independent check on corporations’ and contractors’ claims about how well their technology works. It also goals to show the systems to more rigorous safety testing.
The gutting comes at a very pivotal time for AI and military adoption: The Pentagon is experimenting with putting AI into every part, mainstream corporations like OpenAI are actually more comfortable working with the military, and defense giants like Anduril are winning big contracts to launch AI systems (last Thursday, Anduril announced a whopping $2.5 billion funding round, doubling its valuation to over $30 billion).
Hegseth claims his cuts will “make testing and fielding weapons more efficient,” saving $300 million. But Cummings is anxious that they’re paving a strategy to faster adoption while increasing the probabilities that latest systems won’t be as secure or effective as promised. “The firings in DOTE send a transparent message that every one perceived obstacles for corporations favored by Trump are going to be removed,” she says.
Anduril and Anthropic, which have launched AI applications for military use, didn’t reply to my questions on whether or not they pushed for or approve of the cuts. A representative for OpenAI said that the corporate was not involved in lobbying for the restructuring.
“The cuts make me nervous,” says Mark Cancian, a senior advisor on the Center for Strategic and International Studies who previously worked on the Pentagon in collaboration with the testing office. “It’s not that we’ll go from effective to ineffective, but you may not catch among the problems that might surface in combat without this testing step.”
It’s hard to say precisely how the cuts will affect the office’s ability to check systems, and Cancian admits that those answerable for getting latest technologies out onto the battlefield sometimes complain that it could possibly really decelerate adoption. But still, he says, the office incessantly uncovers errors that weren’t previously caught.
