Three urgent questions define American defense in 2026: Can the United States build and field autonomous systems fast enough to matter? Can the nation’s airspace absorb the platforms it is deploying before the next midair catastrophe? And is Washington’s decade-long “Pivot to Asia” the right strategic frame for a world that refuses to stay in one place?
In Episode 80 of Full Crew Defense Tech Month host and Autonomy Global Operations Ambassador Michelle Duquette led a discussion with three veterans of the field: Mike McCalip , Vice President and Department of War Program Executive at Carahsoft, with 32 years in uniform and a career built on supply chain and technology modernization; Tom Furey, CEO of Sagetech Avionics, a former Navy A-6 Intruder flight officer who now makes the IFF transponder and collision avoidance systems he once relied on; and Maj. Gen. (USAF Ret.) Mark Loeben, Chairman of the National Aerospace Research & Technology Park (NARTP), a 31-year Air Force veteran and current Boeing 787 captain for American Airlines. To paraphrase Duquette, Tom brought us the what, Mark brought us the why, and Mike brought us the where.
The $54.6 Billion Bet on Autonomous Warfare
The Trump administration’s FY2027 defense budget proposes $54.6 billion for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), part of a $1.5 trillion national security package billed as the largest in American history. To put that number in perspective, DAWG received just $225 million in FY2026, its first year of operation. That is a proposed increase of more than 24,000% in a single budget cycle.
McCalip said. “The Pentagon is all-in, or has to be all-in — and we know that these $10-to-$50,000 drones are defeating air defense systems like the Russian S-400. When we defend against them, we’re shooting standard missiles and Patriot missiles, and the cost of using those weapons is sustainable from any direction.”
Running alongside DAWG is the Drone Dominance program, targeting procurement of 200,000-plus autonomous platforms by 2027. But the money, by itself, answers nothing.
The article McCalip brought to the panel presents four unresolved questions: Will doctrine keep pace with hardware procurement? Will organizational change follow the buying? Will battlefield feedback loops be built fast enough to matter? Can the industrial base actually scale to meet demand?
Furey pushed back on the idea that a technology gap is part of the core problem. “I don’t think there are any issues on the technology side,” he explained. “The concern is the investment and the demand signals. Industry can’t self-invest in capacity without knowing what that demand actually is. It’s got to be industry and DoW working together. We have to act differently than we have in the past.”
Loeben called the $54.6 billion “an expensive gamble. And that’s a good thing, because we need risk in our budget to make strides.” But he zeroed in on command and control as his core concern. “Getting intelligence to automated systems through the warfighter decision matrix is going to be a real challenge,” he said. “Even once industry delivers these systems, the feedback loop has to exist to get that learning back. We have legacy systems that will need to be updated to rapidly field new technologies.” He believes a mindset shift within the Department of War toward risk tolerance and faster partnerships with nonprofits, tech parks, and small businesses like the ones incubated at NARTP will be the single most important factor in forward progress.
The group noted one critical vulnerability from the article. The bulk of the $54.6 billion sits in the reconciliation portion of the budget, not the base appropriation. This makes it politically exposed. Analysts project that even if Congress approves the full amount, DAWG may obligate less than 60% in FY27 simply because the contracting infrastructure to deploy funds at that scale does not yet exist.
ACAS X: The Collision Avoidance Upgrade We Can’t Afford to Delay
The second article opened on a tragedy. In early 2025, a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines CRJ700 collided near Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people and amounting to the deadliest U.S. aviation accident in decades. NTSB hearings revealed that the existing Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS II) and standard crew procedures were not sufficient to prevent the crash under those specific geometry and altitude conditions.
Furey, whose company makes avionics for both manned and unmanned platforms, brought the story of ACAS X to the panel because it points toward the broader problem, not just the tragic accident. “There are airlines flying published routes and there’s aircrew training in published routes and we (had) a midair collision, what happens when we continue to add new entrants into the airspace with beyond line-of-sight drones and UAM and AAM?” he said. “It’s just going to get worse.”
The difference between TCAS II and ACAS X is architectural. TCAS uses hard-coded, mostly vertical-only logic with altitude “inhibit” settings near the ground, exactly the scenario at Reagan National, where neither aircraft could safely descend. ACAS X replaces that with a dynamic, decision-theoretic approach using Monte Carlo simulations and optimized lookup tables, enabling both vertical and horizontal avoidance maneuvers tailored to each aircraft type. The ACAS X family covers the full spectrum: Xa and Xo for transport aircraft, Xu for large uncrewed fixed-wing, Xr for all rotorcraft (manned and unmanned), and sXu for small passive drones. MIT Lincoln Lab simulations of the DC collision showed that ACAS-Xr consistently generated effective avoidance maneuvers where standard TCAS logic failed, and most importantly gave the aircrew sufficient time to react and avoid the collision.
Furey also flagged a low-hanging-fruit policy gap. “ADS-B Out has been mandated for many years in most places in the national airspace, aircraft transmitting their own positions, but ADS-B In has not been required anywhere,” he said. “That’s just a crying shame, because different layers of safety such as visual, co-pilot, radar, ADS-B in, all working together hopefully present that solution.” Legislation like the ROTOR Act (Senate) and ALERT Act (House) would mandate ADS-B receivers in aircraft and represent, in Furey’s view, a very low-risk step with significant safety upside.
Loeben, who flies the Boeing 787 as an active airline captain, brought operational weight to the discussion. “TCAS is a great tool, but it’s time for an upgrade,” he said. “The crash over the Potomac was a unique set of circumstances at low altitude. TCAS can’t direct either airplane to descend when they’re only 400 to 700 feet above the ground. Would additional technology like ACAS X have lessened the risk? Absolutely.” He was careful to note that aviation accidents are chains of events. The technology gap was one link, not the whole chain.
For McCalip, the collision avoidance discussion immediately raised a warfighting dimension. “I think about this from a Department of War perspective,” he said. “I’ve been Red Crown in a saturated environment. What happens when there’s a drone swarm? Does this technology step in and help us? What happens when we’re in an area where we can’t communicate, or GPS is jammed?” Situational awareness in contested airspace, he suggested, is the military analog to ACAS X’s civilian application.
Duquette, a former aircraft dispatcher of a decade, summed it up. “Adding collision avoidance to the sector that is flying blind right now is probably one of the most important things we can be doing for our low-altitude operating environment,” she concluded.
Beyond the Pivot: Why Asia-First Is No Longer Enough
The third article shifted the lens from technology to grand strategy, specifically, the question of whether a decade-plus of “Pivot to Asia” thinking has produced a coherent U.S. defense posture or simply distorted how Washington allocates attention and resources. The RealClearDefense piece that Loeben brought to the panel argues that it is time to retire the pivot framing in favor of an integrated strategy that treats the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific theaters as interlinked fronts in the same great-power competition.
Loeben posited the argument fairly. “The author is really talking about balancing the needs, and one way to do that is greater defense expenditures so that we can prepare to deter in more than one theater at a time,” he said. “Even if the $1.5 trillion proposal doesn’t survive Congress intact, it’s probably going to be the biggest defense budget ever, and that might be a good thing for America.”
McCalip connected the geopolitical to the operational. “We are a global military, not a theater-specific military,” he said. “We’re flying the wings off those jets. We’re deploying ships for some of the longest deployments we’ve seen in our history, and they require not just upgrades to stay current with technology, but extensive maintenance.” He invoked the Ford Strike Group’s complex deployment arc from European waters through CENTCOM to SOUTHCOM as evidence that binary theater thinking cannot capture real-world force posture demands.
Taking the interoperability angle, Furey said, “IFF is a NATO standard. But we do share it with allies outside NATO,” he said. “Who’s going to help us in the Pacific? There’s going to be assistance from somebody who’s not in the Pacific themselves. As we look at standardization across allied forces, we need to consider not just NATO.”
Loeben agreed, and extended the point to logistics. “Interoperability is not just weapons and command-and-control. It’s what kind of rail gauge you have in your country, because we’re going to need logistics to get forces to the front.”
The panel reached consensus that a singular geographic pivot is a policy anachronism in a world where Russian behavior in Europe directly shapes China’s room for maneuver in the Pacific. The practical implication, and the recurring thread across all three topics, is readiness across the board, not readiness in a chosen theater.
A Unified Thread: Money, Tech and the Will to Use Both
The $54.6 billion demand signal from DAWG is real. The collision avoidance tools to safely integrate the autonomous platforms that money will buy already exist. The strategic case for multi-theater readiness is well-established. As Duquette drew the conversation to a close, she offered a clear synthesis of the hour: doctrine, technology and strategic intent have to develop in parallel, and they currently do not. What remains is the willingness to close the gaps between them, in acquisition reform, workforce development and policy alignment…before the next crisis forces the issue.
Full Crew Episode 80 — Defense Tech Month was presented by Autonomy Global and sponsored by LiveU, Carahsoft, Cape May County, VICTUS Technologies, and Echodyne. The next Full Crew episode airs July 23rd at 11:00 a.m. on Tech Policy.