When money’s tight, even the Pentagon has to improvise. That’s why Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has created the Strategic Capabilities Office. It’s a small shop inside the military’s huge bureaucracy designed to tweak, cheaply and speedily, today’s weapons for tomorrow’s wars. Peeks at its secret work reveal, among other efforts, a software rewrite that turns a missile that was designed to protect U.S. warships from attack into one capable of sinking enemy vessels. Another launches swarms of soda-can-size drones from U.S. warplanes, which could be used to flummox enemies’ surveillance–or surreptitiously spy on them.
This appears in the July 11, 2016 issue of TIME.
More Must-Read Stories From TIME
- Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade, Undoing Constitutional Right to Abortion
- What the Supreme Court’s Abortion Decision Means for Your State
- The Failure of the Feminist Industrial Complex
- The Fight Over Abortion Has Only Just Begun
- Column: How Stereotypes Shape the Language People Use
- Everything We Know About Beyoncé's New Album, Renaissance
- Homes Made from Straw or Fungi Can Now Get You a Cheaper Mortgage in the Netherlands
- Going on Vacation This Summer? Welcome to the 'Revenge Travel' Economy
Read More From TIME
