Changes at the Department of Defense and a call for people to embrace AI use in the military were announced by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during a Monday visit to the city of Starbase.

It's part of what Hegseth is calling the “Arsenal of Freedom” tour to revitalize America's manufacturing workforce. 

“Winning requires a new playbook," Hegseth said.

The new changes at the Department of Defense will focus on making "faster decisions" regarding innovation,” Hegseth said.

“We need innovation to come from anywhere and evolve with speed and future,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth said the changes will help get technology into the hands of military personnel at a faster rate. 

“When it comes to our current threat environment, we are playing a dangerous game with potentially fatal consequences,” Hegseth said.

Those changes come under new leadership he announced on Monday that will oversee what he's calling six "execution organizations." 

Hegseth’s visit comes just days after the U.S. Space System Command announced it awarded SpaceX over $700 million to enhance missile warning systems and tracking capabilities.

A new A.I. strategy was also announced to make the USA an “AI-enabled fighting force.”

“This strategy will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus on investments to ensure we lead in military AI,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth said Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, will help in those efforts by joining Google’s AI engine inside the Pentagon network

The announcement comes just days after Grok — which is embedded into X, the social media network owned by Musk — drew global outcry and scrutiny for generating highly sexualized deepfake images of people without their consent, according to the Associated Press.

Hegseth announced that he would “make all appropriate data” from the military’s IT systems available for “AI exploitation.” He also said data from intelligence databases would be fed into AI systems.

According to Hegseth, President Donald Trump proposed a budget of over $1 trillion for the Department of Defense for the upcoming 2027 fiscal year to continue the "transformation of innovation."

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