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.
Get The Brief. Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now.
