We built the smartest weapons ever. The oversight isn't.
You don’t hand the most powerful tools ever built to the least prepared person in the room.
I’ve spent my career around classified operations and the people trusted to run them. So when the White House signed a new AI rulebook for war this week, I didn’t stop at the press release. I read for what wasn’t being said.
NSPM-11 replaces the Biden-era rules and leans hard on speed and scale. The pitch sounds responsible: move fast, buy from many vendors, keep a human in the loop on autonomous weapons.
Then you start reading closer.
The rules they won’t let you read
The rules that actually matter sit in a classified annex the public will never see. The memo itself says a secret companion document is coming within 90 days. So the part you can read talks about guardrails. The part that decides how this really works is locked away. We’re being told to trust the framing and skip the facts.
Whose judgment are we wiring in?
The best rules on paper still come down to one thing – the person enforcing them. And here’s what most people miss about a human in the loop. That human doesn’t just watch the machine. He decides what it hunts. He sets the priorities, draws the target list, and tells the system who counts as a threat. The machine inherits his judgment.
So the only question that matters is whose judgment we’re building in. And we already know.
He broke the system on purpose
Hegseth recently blocked the promotions of at least seven Navy officers picked by a board of senior admirals – two of them women, two of them Black men. He did the same to four Army officers months earlier, two Black men and two women set to become one-star generals, with no explanation tied to their records. Senior officials say they can’t recall a defense secretary ever yanking individual names off a vetted list like this. I’ve watched that promotion system up close for thirty years. It’s built to be apolitical and earned. He broke it on purpose.
I’ve seen exactly what this recruits
Then there’s the religion. He’s turned a shooting war into a holy one. At the first Pentagon worship service since the Iran war began, Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence” against “those who deserve no mercy.” He’s called Iran’s leaders religious fanatics chasing a “religious Armageddon” while casting our own troops as men of faith.
I spent years on the other side of this fight, helping lead the global coalition against ISIS. I know exactly what hands the enemy a recruiting tool, and this is it. When the American defense secretary frames the war as Christianity against Islam, he radicalizes people who never would’ve raised a weapon against us. He doesn’t shrink the threat. He feeds it. People who study extremism for a living are already calling his rhetoric a propaganda gift for terrorist recruiters – the kind of fuel al Qaeda uses to pull in new fighters aimed at America. Any real national security leader knows this. He either doesn’t know any better, or worse: he doesn’t care.
Then he hired an insurrectionist
The administration hired a man convicted in the January 6 attack on the Capitol – 19 at the time – into a Pentagon office that runs highly classified military operations. Read that twice. Someone convicted in an attack on our own government now sits near the most sensitive work we do. I’ve held those clearances. I know what they’re supposed to protect. If the standard still means anything, it sure doesn’t look like it here.
Now point that at your neighbors
Put it together and the picture is plain: weak judgment, open bias, a war dressed up as a crusade, and a convicted insurrectionist near classified operations. That’s the hand we’re trusting to set the priorities for weapons that move at machine speed. Whatever he fears, the machine learns to hunt.
And we already know where it’s pointed. The administration’s own 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy names “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists” as a top threat. It builds on a memo from last September that civil-liberties groups warn is aimed at silencing political opposition. Surveillance tools have already been turned on people tagged as “terrorists” for nothing more than protesting. Now run that same power through AI – faster than any human can check, behind a classified wall, under leadership that’s shown us exactly what it values and who it doesn’t.
The pros are already worried
Some military leaders have urged caution on battlefield AI and the risks of autonomy. The people in uniform are raising their hands. The political leadership is hitting the gas.
You don’t hand the most powerful tools ever built to the least prepared person in the room.
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Dexter Ingram is a counterterrorism expert with over 30 years in national security. He served as a Naval Flight Officer, led the State Department’s Office of Countering Violent Extremism, and ran the 89-nation Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. He is the founder of IN Network and author of “National Security Careers: The Ultimate Guide to Breaking In” and the Amazon #1 New Release in Military Intelligence and Spies History (July/August 2025), “The Spy Archive: Hidden Lives, Secret Missions, and the History of Espionage.”
Thank you for mentioning again the bias against people of color - men and women. People who have been denied their well-earned promotions. It makes me very angry, as well as sad. Clearly, the inmates are completely in charge.
Whew...! The Trump admin is scary and WRONG on so many levels. Thanks for the insightful article!