Meanwhile, the US Department of Defense (DoD) appears to be doing the opposite. The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) recently axed its Chief Technology Officer (CTO) directorate, a move many analysts view as strategic self-sabotage.

This directorate, responsible for overseeing more than $340 million in AI and digital integrations in fiscal year 2024, represented a critical nexus linking battlefield innovations with institutional infrastructure. Its elimination, justified under “efficiency” mandates, alarmed defense observers who fear it fractures continuity, erases institutional memory, and sends a dangerous signal to adversaries willing to exploit perceived American weakness.

The Strategic Misstep

The CDAO was formed in 2022 by fusing key functions from the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Defense Digital Service, Chief Data Office, and Advana analytics, aiming to unify policy, technology, and digital services. Embedded within CDAO, the CTO led cross-functional teams in AI, cyber, logistics, and command-and-control systems, ensuring that new technologies remained interoperable and aligned with warfighter requirements.

Abruptly dismantling this directorate not only removes a pivotal vision and coordination role but also creates a void with no clear replacement. The result is fragmented efforts, lost synergy across mission areas, and a battlefield advantage handed to adversaries.

Expertise Lost, Momentum Undermined

Leadership and expertise take years, even decades, to develop. Figures like Bill Streilein, former CTO of CDAO and veteran of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, carried institutional memory and high standards into Pentagon AI programs. But when top-tier professionals are sidelined under the label of “streamlining,” they often leave and seldom return.

This pattern has already occurred. The Defense Digital Service (DDS), once lauded as the Pentagon’s “SWAT team of nerds,” lost almost all of its members by May 2025, prompting its demise. Nearly every DDS member, citing bureaucratic pressure from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), chose to depart rather than conform.

These departures are not benign transfers. They represent the scattering of core innovators and connectors whose insight and trust networks are irreplaceable. Without them, emerging AI systems risk becoming siloed projects rather than battlefield-enabling capabilities.

DOGE: Efficiency or Engineered Evisceration?

DOGE, instituted by a presidential executive order in January 2025, is authorized to slash perceived inefficiencies across federal agencies—often through AI-enhanced, automated assessments. Under the leadership of figures tied to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, DOGE has repurposed its mandate to aggressively target leadership and innovation roles across the board—including in national defense.

DOGE has justified cuts using its proprietary AI systems to flag and eliminate “inefficient” programs, often without human oversight or contextual nuance. The CTO’s directorate was among its most high-profile targets, methodically identified and removed, despite its mission-critical nature.

To make matters worse, DOGE is reportedly comfortable with these decisions. One Pentagon official described it as a “theater of dominance,” not just cost-cutting, but deliberate erasure of institutional anchors to obfuscate the depth and breadth of the sacrifice.

The High-Stakes Fallout

Adversaries feast on the narrative that the US champions AI yet purges its own tech leadership overnight. “America cannibalizes its talent while claiming leadership in AI warfare,” such narratives go. These optics weaken American deterrence, erode allied confidence, and provide cover for Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang to reframe the battlefield narrative.

Domestic consequences are equally grim. The consistent removal of flagship tech roles projects a clear message to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professionals; serve, and risk being discarded. That weakness is a recruitment boon for adversaries, national lab contractors, and tech-armed autocracies solving tomorrow’s warfare puzzles.

Real efficiencies lie not in gutting leadership but in fortifying it. Per the National Security Commission on AI, prioritizing disciplined recruitment and retention of technical talent, including a Digital Corps and AI fellowships, is key to American competitiveness. Instead, we witness the dismantling of precisely those anchor roles meant to shepherd AI innovation into combat-relevant systems.

The DOGE-Driven Dismantling of Tech Leadership

The concepts herein are alarming and reflect an institutional unraveling that directly undermines America’s global security posture and strategic deterrence in five critical ways. First, the elimination of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) directorate from the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) strips away a core pillar of the Pentagon’s ability to adapt emerging technologies for battlefield advantage. This directorate was not redundant bureaucracy; it was the crucible in which ideas from national labs, industry, and warfighters were harmonized into operational capability.

By abruptly dismantling this team, the Department of Defense has extinguished a pipeline of institutional memory and strategic insight at the precise moment when rapid, informed, and integrated decision-making is needed. This brain drain parallels a historical pattern of self-sabotage and leaves adversaries uncontested in the tech talent race.

Second, the removal of high-level AI leadership is a propaganda gift to revisionist powers like China and Russia. These states are watching America voluntarily decapitate its own strategic leadership, an act they can now frame as proof of American decline. This strengthens their strategic messaging in influence campaigns aimed at allies, neutral states, and even American citizens.

“America cannibalizes its talent while claiming leadership in AI warfare” is not just a phrase, it is a weaponized narrative that demoralizes partners and emboldens adversaries to challenge American dominance in contested domains like cyberspace, space, and AI warfare.

Third, strategic deterrence hinges on credible capability and the perception of cohesion. DOGE’s algorithmic-driven targeting of leadership roles without contextual assessment introduces chaos into the acquisition and integration life cycle of military AI systems. Instead of creating synergistic effects across logistics, cyber, and command and control, the US risks building a fractured, siloed ecosystem that fails in joint operations.

By removing the very leaders who prevent stove piping, the US sabotages its ability to develop and field interoperable, scalable, and warfighter-ready AI tools. This systemic breakdown makes deterrence brittle, vulnerable to being cracked in future high-end conflicts.

Fourth, the US has struggled to compete with the private sector for AI and cybersecurity talent. By signaling that even elite government technologists are disposable under the guise of “efficiency,” this policy drives future talent away from public service. Those who might have joined a modern “Digital Corps” will instead seek stability and respect elsewhere, perhaps even abroad.

Strategic deterrence depends not only on weapons but on technologists who know how to deploy them. Gutting these roles ensures that tomorrow’s innovations will not make it past the lab, let alone onto the battlefield.

Fifth, DOGE’s use of automated assessments to eliminate “inefficiencies” without human oversight is a grotesque parody of reform. Its reliance on cold, context-blind algorithms to purge critical roles mimics adversary models of techno-authoritarianism, not democratic accountability. If allowed to continue, this will hollow out innovation across government agencies and military branches.

Efficiency is not the enemy, misapplied efficiency is. Strategic deterrence requires smart investments, not cost-cutting theater that sacrifices our warfighting edge on the altar of political optics.

Strategic Self-Sabotage Must Be Reversed

This is not merely streamlining, it is full-blown surrender. The dismantling of the CDAO’s CTO directorate and the broader DOGE initiative represents an engineered unraveling of the very leadership needed to project U.S. strategic deterrence in the AI era. Leadership is the vector through which technology becomes capability. Remove it, and you hand your adversaries not only the advantage, but the narrative.

Unless reversed, these concepts and actions will echo through wargames, deterrence failures, and battlefield losses. The US must stop cannibalizing its competitive edge and re-center its national security strategy on strengthening, not sidelining, its AI leadership.

Conclusion

Leadership is not just overhead on the funding spreadsheet; these leaders are our ammunition in the fight for global AI dominance. Removing them during a strategic inflection point is not reform, it is a self-made vulnerability, and as the US disables its own leadership of advanced technologies, it is dismantling future readiness.

The nation must insist on accountability. Cost-cutting means nothing if it costs the technological coherence to compete in tomorrow’s battles. In the strategic competition unfolding now, leadership is the weapon, and ceding it is surrender. This page out of the DOGE handbook should be shredded and burned. Remember, Iranian nuclear scientists were not dismantled by their own regime, they were destroyed by US and Israeli bombs.

Greg Sharpe is Marketing Director at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies. He is retired from the US Air Force. The views expressed are his own.

The Quiet Dismantling of America’s AI Warfighting Edge was originally published on Global Security Review.

The United Kingdom’s Defense Issues

The United Kingdom’s military spent several decades downsizing its military. Still, the UK took part in major conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, showing that Britain continues to have some force projection capability.

Nevertheless, British Ministry of Defence (MoD) data shows recruitment shortfalls over the past five years. Recent data published by the UK Defence Journal show the biggest recruitment shortfalls are found in the army, where manpower gaps in land forces are most pronounced.

A major factor in recruiting failure was a several-year attempt to draw down spending, that included the army’s closure of half of its recruiting offices, according to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). A lack of recruiting offices only erodes the interaction between recruiters and the community. This lack of interaction dissuades civilians, who may not fully understand the benefits of military service, from joining.

Furthermore, an aging population, a rise in health risks, and an extremely long pipeline from recruitment to basic training can dissuade young men and women from choosing service. While Britain’s Air Force and elite Royal Marines remain formidable, further emphasis on naval power and regrowing the land forces is much needed.

Canada’s Rearmament Crisis

The Canadian Armed Forces are currently facing a readiness crisis. According to an internal overview by the Department of National Defence, only 58 percent of the military is ready to handle any situation. Canada’s lack of readiness is increasingly causing concern among the general public. War in Eastern Europe and Africa and brewing conflicts in Asia show the need for North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member-states to bolster each region. Canada’s military is unready to face a crisis.

A major challenge is stagnation in the Air Force and Navy, where much equipment is neglected and degraded. Because logistics win wars, Canada needs to recruit and train support personnel such as technicians, maintenance, supply, and communications personnel.

Australia’s Defense Issues

Australia, a rising regional power in the Indo-Pacific, also faces challenges for the Australian Defence Forces. Being a member of the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the UK, and the US (AUKUS), Australia is currently awaiting the construction and transfer of three to five Virginia-class submarines from the United States, which may not come in time for Pillar II of the AUKUS agreement, due to stagnant American naval production rates.

Only 80 percent of the 69,000 recruits needed to enhance the Australian Defence Forces have either signed up or met recruiting requirements. Simultaneously, younger Australians feel they have better economic and social opportunities in the private sector than in the military, drawing potential recruits away.

Continuously growing defense spending over several decades will be critical in maintaining readiness. Decades of neglecting defense forced the Australian military into a position where it must catch up to other mid-sized powers like Japan and South Korea. Furthermore, as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute noted, confidence in the military remains low. Thus, efforts to change this view are needed in the information sphere if public institutions are to effectively remilitarize, in lieu of rising threats.

Recommendations for Each Country

The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia face major recruitment and militarization woes. However, steps can be taken for all three countries to push towards modernization and expansion. This is particularly important if these Anglo nations are to remain a close alliance.

British recruitment woes correlate with the lack of recruitment offices. The British Ministry of Defence must grow and lobby for more offices and events where promising youth can learn and gather information about military service. Furthermore, efforts are needed in the more neglected Royal Navy and Army.

The British have an opportunity to take a leadership position on the continent. Growing the British military will also support defense exports and further enhance and expand the military—albeit with an effort to increase the MOD’s budget.

Canada’s efforts must include broader government support for the military as Canadians question the credibility of a government that drew down the military to ineffectiveness. The Canadian Defence Ministry can also take lessons from NATO partners, such as Poland, Romania, Finland, and others, who are modernizing successfully.

Australia’s expansion of the military must take a two-pronged approach. First, show potential recruits the benefits of military service. Second, the government must instill a sense of patriotism and respect for the Armed Forces. The government can focus on brewing threats in the Indo-Pacific, which will eventually reach Australia, while explaining the benefits of military service.

The Commonwealth countries of the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada all have capable yet stagnant militaries. Addressing problems with recruitment, logistics, and maintenance can reduce stagnation and help restore these nations’ military strength. As close allies of the United States, their success matters.

Julian McBride is a former US Marine. He is a forensic anthropologist and independent journalist.

Commonwealth Defense and Recruitment Hurdles was originally published on Global Security Review.