The two planned to bring their respective companies’ strengths to the venture. Lamm would apply Colossal’s gene-editing technology to improve the dogs’ physical capabilities, while Luckey would equip them with advanced military equipment. The unusual mission, combined with the founders’ track records, left plenty of questions about what Warhound had planned.

Some speculated that the company intended to create cybernetic superdogs, while others accused its founders of trying to expand an industry that should instead be replaced with robots. But in a news release shared in response to the initial reporting, Warhound described a more grounded goal: rebuilding the domestic supply of dogs for the military, law enforcement and first responders.

In an interview with Military Times, Lamm and Warhound’s co-founder and chief executive David Spirk, who left a senior position at Palantir for the startup, expanded on that statement, discussing the conversations that sparked the mission, the problems they want to address and the product they hope to sell.

Together, they said they want to do more than bring the supply chain to the United States. Their plan includes cloning top-performing dogs, editing genes associated with health problems and introducing standardized training to puppies as young as two weeks old.

A meeting of minds

The idea for Warhound was born out of conversations Lamm had with Luckey beginning around April 2025. They had met at the Moonshots Summit, where they appeared as guest speakers.

“Palmer’s really excited about animals, and he knows I run both the extinction and species conservation company. So, we’re talking about all kinds of stuff, like can you communicate with animals, all these things leveraging technology, and then he started talking to me about the working dog program,” Lamm said. 

According to the Defense Department, only about 13% of the dogs trained to become military working dogs come from domestic breeders. Conversely, Warhound estimates that around 80% of the dogs are sourced from overseas, mostly Europe. Lamm described those breeding programs as “a little bit puppy millish.”

Because of supply issues and the time it takes to train a working dog, Warhound estimates that it takes roughly three years before a dog becomes operational. The company said more than half the dogs procured are ultimately deemed unfit for service, meaning the government has to “train roughly 200 dogs today to field 100 working animals tomorrow.” 

To address the problem, Lamm said his conversations with Luckey over the past 18 months have evolved from identifying the problem to figuring out how technology could help solve it.

“[Luckey] thought that Anduril could provide a lot of the tech and enabled hardware around this,” Lamm said. “And we could provide the cloning and the genetic engineering.”

The science behind Warhound

Since launching in 2021, Colossal has raised more than $435 million to fund its efforts to revive extinct animals and conserve the genetic material of endangered species. The company’s current valuation is approximately $10.2 billion.

To expand its capabilities, Colossal acquired Texas-based Viagen Pets and Equine last year. Lamm said Viagen has “very high cloning efficiencies … and Warhound will be leveraging Viagen as it relates to dog cloning, which is their core business.”

In 2025, Colossal demonstrated its capabilities by cloning former NFL quarterback Tom Brady’s dog. But cloning and gene editing are distinct processes. 

According to the National Institutes of Health, cloning produces a genetically identical copy of an existing animal, whereas gene editing involves directly altering an organism’s DNA to change specific characteristics. 

With gene editing, “you’re taking the random chance out of nature,” Lamm said, adding, “Genetic engineering is looking at the genome, finding things that are broken in the genome, wrong in the genome, or could lead to health consequences, and fixing and removing that.”

Gene editing has been used to create specific characteristics in several animal species. Scientists, for example, have used the technique to make pigs more resistant to certain diseases; cattle better suited for hotter environments; and fish grow faster. But its application in dogs remains limited.

In August, the company Kindred Companion Sciences unveiled what it described as the first genetically edited dogs. The biotech company created two hypoallergenic beagles using gene editing to remove a DNA sequence associated with a major dog allergen.

However, Lamm said he does not anticipate significant challenges to applying the technology to working dogs.

“We’re working on stuff that’s like a hundred times more advanced than, you know, a couple dog edits,” he said, referring to his team at Colossal.

“When we made our dire wolves, we made 20 edits, which included edits specifically from dire wolves in those variants that had not existed for over 12,000 years in the genome, so not only can we make edits, but we can even make edits with lost alleles,” he added.

Engineering a better working dog

While the science might not be a problem, Warhound co-founder Spirk said the company’s immediate focus is identifying “the best of the best” dogs and breeds to biobank, as well as developing the company’s “Warhound standard” for training working dogs.

He explained that a wide variety of dogs are used across federal, regional and local agencies. Warhound is working with different government organizations to identify the top-performing animals, though he declined to say which ones.

He said they are “understanding who wants what type of dog, and what the specialized capabilities of that dog are.”

“You can imagine that the dog that we need sitting outside McDill Air Force Base is much different than a dog that somebody’s going to jump out of a helicopter with,” Spirk continued.

Using genetic material collected in the biobank, Warhound scientists will map the animals’ genomes and look for opportunities to edit genes to improve their overall health, wellness and longevity before beginning the cloning process.

“Once the scientists do their magic and make these dogs, we will immediately begin training,” Spirk said, adding that their experts suggest training should begin for puppies as young as two weeks.

The idea behind early training, he explained, is to breed dogs to the highest standard, and then begin acclimating them to the tasks and conditions they’ll be expected to encounter in the field. For example, he said, a dog trained primarily on asphalt might struggle to function on a different surface, such as grass or sand.

“You’re just naturally going to have a better product coming out when we domesticate the production,” Spirk said.

The first Warhounds should be “coming off the line” in about two years, he said.  

Once Warhound figures out the right balance of nature and nurture for working dogs, Spirk said the company would like to explore ways to apply its research to the other 98 million dogs in America.

“Nobody’s ever had the resources to do it and to figure it out,” he said, adding, “It’s pretty motivating.”

Texas-based Warhound was conceived by Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey and entrepreneur Ben Lamm, who started Colossal Biosciences, a company best known for its efforts to revive extinct species.

In a press release, Warhound chief executive David Spirk said the company aims to reduce the United States’ dependence on a “shrinking” European supply chain for working dogs.

“Our long-term goal is simple: healthier dogs, better-prepared teams, and more service members and first responders coming home safely,” Spirk said, adding that he cares deeply about “protecting people and helping the animals who support them.”

Before joining Warhound, Spirk held several defense-related positions, including senior counsel at Palantir Technologies and chief data officer at both the Defense Department and U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM.

According to the announcement, Luckey and Lamm conceived the idea for Warhound years ago at the annual Moonshots Summit, a gathering where entrepreneurs discuss ambitious ideas.

They recognized two challenges with military working-dog programs: Most of the canines never complete training, and the U.S. relies heavily on a foreign supply chain. 

According to Warhound, overseas suppliers provide 80% of military working dogs. The company also says the United States must train roughly 200 dogs to field 100, in part because so many fail to complete training.

Warhound plans to combine the founders’ respective areas of expertise to address those problems.

“Colossal’s science will help produce healthier dogs with characteristics suited to demanding missions, while Anduril’s technology will give dogs and their handlers greater awareness and protection in the field,” the company said.

Warhound also said it will work with the American Humane Society to safeguard the animals’ health and welfare. The company said its goal is to reduce training washouts, limit the number of dogs entering intensive training unnecessarily and enable safer, more effective missions.

In a federal lawsuit, the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, Battalion Search and Rescue and Southern Border Communities Coalition argue the Trump administration is misusing so-called “national defense areas” to circumvent longstanding restrictions on military participation in civilian law enforcement.

In a statement, Brian Netter, legal director at Democracy Forward, one of the teams representing the plaintiffs, called the “national defense area” designation “an extraordinary abuse of power with devastating consequences for the people who live, work, worship, recreate, and carry out lifesaving humanitarian work along the border.”

“Public lands do not become military installations simply because the president says so, and the military cannot be handed sweeping new authority to police civilians by drawing a line around land that belonged to the public,” he said, adding, “Our Constitution and laws impose clear limits on the use of the military for civilian law enforcement for a reason.”

The Trump administration began sending troops to the area in March 2025 to support border security and has since expanded the military’s presence along the border in other states. By April of that year, the Defense Department assumed jurisdiction over the 109,651 acres from the Department of the Interior.

The designation made the land, officially named the New Mexico National Defense Area, an expansion of Fort Huachuca for three years. The Defense Department said the designation allowed troops to detain people accused of trespassing in the military area after crossing the border illegally.

However, the lawsuit argues that the federal agencies exceeded their authority to transfer public land through emergency powers. “No statute authorizes the creation of ‘national defense areas,’ let alone permits carving one out of formerly public land,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit adds that the Defense Department has historically used such land restrictions only temporarily to protect people or property during accidents or emergencies.

“Creating a semi-permanent military zone along the southern border for purposes of immigration enforcement is directly contrary to the agency’s longstanding practice,” the lawsuit says.

Beyond alleging violations of federal law, the plaintiffs say the military zones are disrupting their work by limiting access to public lands used for recreation and conservation; supporting border communities; and providing humanitarian aid.

James R. Holeman, founder of Battalion Search and Rescue, said his organization leads volunteers who search for people in distress in remote areas and recover the remains of migrants who died crossing the border. Over the past three years, he said, the group’s monthly searches along the Arizona and New Mexico border have uncovered more than 100 death sites.

“Imagine how many more people could be found if we had the access, resources, and support to search systematically. Instead, we’re being locked out,” he said, adding that vast stretches of borderlands are “virtually inaccessible to humanitarian searchers” because of federal designations.

“Now the government is closing off even more territory. We don’t find weapons or drugs. We find Bibles, prayer cards, love notes, and the belongings of people simply trying to survive,” Holeman said. “There is no meaningful, systematic government effort to search for the missing and the dead. They don’t search, and now they’re preventing us from searching.”

In the complaint filed in federal court in the District of Columbia, Marine veteran Tristyn Edwards and active-duty Marine Morgan Stampfli allege that they experienced fraudulent charges on their financial accounts and an increase in spam messages because of the breach.

In September, the DMDC said it had discovered a vulnerability on July 16 in a file-sharing system that allowed unauthorized users to access unencrypted files containing personal information, including full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and military occupations.

According to the lawsuit, the vulnerability exposed millions of files containing information on service members and people affiliated with the military for approximately nine months before it was discovered.

The lawsuit also alleges that the DMDC failed to “promptly notify” affected individuals, some of whom were informed two or three months after the breach was found.

“The exposure of Plaintiff and Class members’ PII will cause various types of misuse in the coming months and years, including but not limited to, unauthorized credit card charges, unauthorized access to email accounts, identity theft, and other fraudulent use of their Private Information,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit argues that the Pentagon violated federal privacy laws by failing to protect personal records and maintain compliant cybersecurity systems, despite internal warnings about issues in its systems.

The complaint cites multiple reports from the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General describing failures by both the department and the DMDC to implement adequate cybersecurity controls.

In a report published days after the breach, the OIG said that “officials have not taken the necessary actions to demonstrate that they were operating at an effective level for 14 of the 20 [Inspector General Federal Information Security Modernization Act] core metrics.”

News of the Defense Department breach emerged alongside reports of a cyberattack targeting FBI personnel files. However, the group responsible for the FBI incident has not been linked to the Pentagon breach. The department offered affected individuals 12 months of credit monitoring and identity-restoration services.

“Had [the Defense Department] properly implemented standard cybersecurity controls — such as regular review of accounts, scanning for vulnerabilities, field encryption or tokenization of sensitive PII like SSNs, and routine monitoring of system logs for suspicious activity — the Data Breach could have been avoided,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, alongside two other groups, asks a federal court to enforce their request for information about why the Pentagon commissioned the study.

In a statement, Gillian Thomas, senior counsel for the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, argued that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has “repeatedly, without evidence, questioned women’s ability to serve in ground combat,” aims to deliver research to validate his “biased” views.

“Now, without explanation, he has commissioned a study of women’s performance and assigned it to a researcher with a record of criticizing women’s combat readiness,” she said. “The public has a right to know why, and what he plans to do with the results.”

In January, the Defense Department commissioned a non-profit research group called the Institute for Defense Analyses, which is largely funded by the federal government, to study the topic for six months.

However, according to the lawsuit, the study was reassigned to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, or JHU/APL, in April 2026, where the lead researcher, Jane Pinelis, authored a 2015 study for the Marine Corps that found “negative effects of mixed-gender units.”

The lawsuit adds that the 2015 study “was widely criticized for its flawed design and biased analysis.” Those critics, including the Navy Secretary at the time, described it as attempting to show that men are stronger than women rather than establish minimum standards and see who could meet them.

Additionally, The War Horse reported that Hegseth relied heavily on that study to support his argument that women shouldn’t serve in combat roles in his book The War on Warriors.

“Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes,” he wrote in the book. “We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.”

In a November 2024 interview on the Sean Ryan Podcast, Hegseth shared his explicit view on the issue: “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles.”

Although he has since softened his rhetoric on women in combat, critics say he continues to push the agenda under the guise of military standards.

According to the lawsuit, the ACLU, the National Women’s Law Center and the Service Women’s Action Network want Defense Department records showing the scope, purpose, methodology and anticipated use of the study.

The $1.1 billion program is the Pentagon’s effort to rapidly expand the domestic drone industry by having companies submit small unmanned aircraft systems, or sUASs, for competition and then building stockpiles of the systems that perform best for military use.

Erin Cherry, the program’s test lead, told Military Times in an email that DIU is looking to recruit about 100 pilots for the program’s next phase, known as Gauntlet III. But the larger goal is to create a standing registry of drone operators across the military services.

“There’s no cap on the registry,” Cherry said. “We want to hear from any warfighter with FPV experience.”

She explained that service members selected to participate will get “stick time” with some of the newest drones, including systems that are not yet in military service, and some will receive specialized training on one-way attack drones.

“Most importantly, Gauntlet results strongly inform which systems move forward, and these pilots are the ones flying,” Cherry said.

The DIU announcement specifically calls for troops with experience flying FPV drones, which are typically flown manually in “acro” mode and are used for missions ranging from reconnaissance and surveillance to kamikaze attacks and close-quarters combat.

But Cherry said DIU is looking for more than just experienced FPV pilots.

“‘Pilot skill’ isn’t just one thing,” she said. “Flying ability, tactical knowledge, payload experience, and specialized skills like long-distance navigation and urban flight are all distinct, so we look at each one.”

That variety is important because the drones will ultimately be used by more than just the military’s most experienced operators.

“A drone that only performs well in an expert’s hands isn’t ready for the force,” Cherry said, adding that “whether someone has been flying FPV for five years or five months, we want to hear from them.”

For service members interested in participating, DIU is asking them to complete a Pilot Interest Form. Officials will only respond to applicants using a valid .mil email address, and all pilot participation will be coordinated through the individual military services.

According to the statement of work, the app will provide dietitian services to SOCOM troops by coordinating with dining halls to develop meal plans that “optimize human performance and lethality.”

The platform will connect a team of up to 55 performance dietitians to provide “personalized, mission-specific nutrition plans” for more than 18,000 tactical troops across geographically disparate locations, according to the document.

Teamworks Tactical Solutions’ “core business,” according to James Coffos, Teamworks’ chief strategy officer, includes working with Division 1 athletes to professional and Olympic-level athletes.

“With stakes literally being life and death in the tactical context,” Coffos said, “when looking at a software platform to run your HP program, it makes sense to look to a system like Teamworks, which has been proven at the very highest levels of human performance.”

The contract comes as the Pentagon works to improve fitness standards and rally against “fat” troops, but Coffos said the app has already been in use by the U.S. military.

“SOCOM has actually used this particular product for years, so this isn’t an entirely new capability for them,” he said in an email to Military Times.

The original contract was through the Air Force Research Laboratory’s STRONG Lab, but the new contract moves the agreement directly to SOCOM.

Coffos said his company worked with SOCOM’s senior performance dietitian to tune the software to better suit the organization’s needs.

“It’s really a great situation where we have this virtuous circle from sport to military and back again,” he said.

The app allows SOCOM troops to engage with dietitians in two ways. They can see nutritional ratings for options at the chow hall, or, when military dining facilities are not available, they can ask for guidance regarding the food available to them.

“It just removes a lot of friction from the process of making good decisions around what you’re eating, and that in turn frees an operator up to focus on the mission at hand,” Coffos said.

Troops can also adjust their plans based on food preferences and personal goals. But the technology does not eliminate the need for individual decision-making, Coffos said.

“You still have to have a basic understanding of nutrition and the willpower to choose what your body needs versus what just looks like it tastes best,” he said.

As for how the app improves “lethality” through diet, Coffos explained it depends on how the term is defined.

“I’d start by pointing out that ‘lethality’ is SOCOM’s word, not ours,” he said. “But I’d also gently point out that the word isn’t at all foreign to sports.”

He explained that it’s often used to describe performance by professional athletes, like “Mariano Rivera was described as lethal for 19 seasons and no one thought twice about it” or “Steph Curry is lethal from 30 feet.”

But he has come to understand the term, at least in the case of SOCOM, as a reference to maintaining physical performance deep into an arduous mission.

“When SOCOM writes ‘lethality,’ I really think what they’re describing is the mile-22 problem,” he said. “It’s about the quality of the human being at the end of the effort, not the beginning.”

He compared the nutritional demands of a special operator on a long mission to those of a marathon runner nearing the end of a race.

“Watch a marathon at mile 22. You’re absolutely going to see somebody who was running beautifully at mile 18 reduced to a shuffle, and it isn’t because they got less fit in the last four miles. They ran out of fuel,” he said.

In the case of SOCOM, Coffos said, imagine an operator about 20 hours into a mission, carrying about 65 pounds of gear and running on about four hours of sleep.

“That’s the same physiology and the stakes are the only thing that changed,” he said. “When SOCOM writes ‘lethality,’ I really think what they’re describing is the mile-22 problem.”

The pardon came after years of advocacy by gun groups, which argued that Patrick Tate Adamiak was “wrongfully” convicted by a federal jury in 2022.

Lee Williams, who heads a journalism project funded by the Second Amendment Foundation, or SAF, has written more than 60 articles about Adamiak’s case and argued that he was wrongfully prosecuted.

According to the SAF’s reporting, Adamiak enlisted in the Navy in 2012. When he was arrested, he was an E-6 Master-at-Arms and one of the top 500 sellers on Gun Broker.

Williams said Adamiak “never committed a single crime” because he “never sold a single real firearm” and accused federal agents of targeting Adamiak personally and lying under oath about the case.

However, the jury convicted Adamiak, and an appellate court rejected most of his challenges to the conviction. A presidential pardon does not erase the underlying conviction or expunge a criminal record.

According to court documents, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, began investigating Adamiak in 2021 after receiving a tip from a confidential informant.

Between October 2021 and April 2022, prosecutors contend that Adamiak illegally sold to the CI seven machine gun receivers and a PPSh machine gun. Afterward, ATF agents executed a search warrant at his house, where they recovered 25 additional unregistered machine guns as well as two grenade launchers and two anti-tank missile launchers.

Prosecutors also said agents recovered invoices and schematics that detailed Adamiak’s illegal manufacturing of machine gun receivers as well as Adamiak’s phone, which contained messages with sources of machine gun parts.

One source, according to court documents, was a fellow sailor who allegedly straw-purchased gun parts for Adamiak and sold him items stolen from the Navy as well.

Trump pardoned Adamiak on Sept. 3 along with 22 others. According to the SAF, Adamiak plans to continue his legal fight to overturn his conviction.

Markoff explained that calling in air support was an effective way to clear an area, but with thousands of potential targets and few available weapon systems, he constantly had to calculate whether a particular target was worth it.

“Even if that target wasn’t active, knowing that it might be and maintaining availability of that type of a weapon system on station in case it showed up, that was all math I was doing in my head,” he said, adding, “We had to be really careful about saving those munitions.”

In an interview with Military Times, Markoff, now the co-founder and chief executive of Smack Technologies, said his experience in Mosul illustrates the kind of problem his company’s artificial intelligence software, Omega, is designed to help solve.

Earlier this month, Markoff spoke with Military Times about Smack’s Alpha, the wrist-worn device for which the company recently raised $61 million. He followed up to discuss its flagship product, Omega. The company shared a 14-minute video demonstration typically reserved for general officers.

“What the demo shows is a Joint Fires workflow from long-range planning, through what we would call basically the deliberate planning cycle, through the phased execution horizon, to literally right now: What do we do in the context of that larger plan?” he said.

According to the video, a commander begins the process by uploading intelligence and planning documents to give Omega operational context. The commander can then customize that information by selecting factors, such as units and boundaries. Lastly, the system generates high-level plans and detailed workflows.

“The outputs of this workflow look like what a human would create. We’re just generating it automatically for them and then letting them adjust it … We’re just doing it faster and helping them run calculations that are complicated enough that you don’t want to have someone do it on a whiteboard,” Markoff said.

He explained that Omega’s goal is to determine not just which targets to strike, but how to sequence strikes over the course of a month or two to systematically degrade an adversarial force. He added that Omega gives commanders options, along with the pros and cons of each.

“Sometimes it takes people like a month to build that plan. Building the next one to four days takes one to four days,” he said. “And figuring out, ‘What do we do right now?’ Well, the good news is you only have a few seconds, and it only takes a few seconds.”

During the execution phase shown in the video, a commander can monitor operations in real time and adjust plans using information like new intelligence reports, inventory lists or weather forecasts.

For comparison, Smack’s demo likens Omega to Amazon’s approach to the “last-mile delivery problem,” which refers to the logistical challenge of finding the most efficient and resourceful way to get a package to its destination.

Markoff explained the reasoning behind the comparison, saying that while risk tolerances and resources can change during an operation, the overall objective may not.

“It’s not just a scheduling problem, but it’s a pairing of assets and scheduling of assets,” he said, adding that it’s “optimizing that usage in the context of what we’re trying to do long term.”

The demo depicts Omega generating a large number of actions, targets and destinations. The software is designed for campaign-level threats and for developing plans at both the operational and tactical levels. But his company is actively expanding the scope of what it offers to include coordinating humanitarian efforts.

“That has not been the use case that our contracts have focused on, but there is absolutely a demand signal and a requirement for it that we are getting from the users, and it is something that we are building into that longer term,” he said.

While Smack has already shared parts of the demo in marketing materials, the company is in the process of transitioning from prototyping to production, Markoff said. Smack currently has contracts with three U.S. military branches and expects to expand to all six by the end of the year.

In the agreement filed last month, Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay agreed to no longer block or remove comments based on their expressed viewpoints, which aligns its policy with the Navy’s social media handbook.

While there was no monetary award, the base agreed to admit that it violated the Navy’s policy and the plaintiff’s constitutional rights. Officials also had to update the base’s social media pages to state that comments by the general public “will not be banned or blocked” because of their opinions.

In a statement, Michelle Scott, an attorney with the Center for Individual Rights, or CIR, which filed the case, said plaintiff Sergio Rodriguez asked the kinds of questions anyone would ask during a long power outage.

“The Navy doesn’t get to open a comment section, invite the public, and then delete anyone who asks an inconvenient question,” Scott said. “This settlement makes clear that the government can’t silence its critics with the click of a button.”

In July, a CIR plaintiff settled another case in which a North Carolina National Guard unit banned a former guardsman from its Facebook page after he criticized the unit’s leadership. That case also resulted in the unit adopting moderation policies that prohibit removing, hiding or filtering comments because they are deemed “inappropriate.”

According to the complaint, Rodriguez responded to the base’s post announcing a power outage in base housing on Aug. 12, 2024. He asked whether the base had plans to temporarily relocate residents during the outage because of excessive heat and humidity, and how residents could be reimbursed for spoiled food.

The lawsuit described Rodriguez as a disabled Army veteran whose wife served as a supply officer on the naval base. After retiring from the Army, he became an accomplished advocate for military families. He was named “spouse of the year” by Armed Forces Insurance and received a commendation from President Joe Biden.

In his lawsuit, Rodriguez argued he “suffered irreparable injury” because being banned from the page limited his ability to communicate with and receive information from other base residents.

“Base Facebook pages are where military families turn when they’re searching for answers,” Rodriguez said. “When I was banned, I lost the ability to advocate for those families. Those families lost access to a person who was willing to ask hard questions on their behalf. It wasn’t enough for the base to quietly restore my access without ever admitting they were wrong.”