Pentagon’s ‘War Force’ Targets Hundreds of AI Engineers

The Pentagon and the Office of Personnel Management launched a recruiting initiative on Tuesday called ‘War Force’ to pull hundreds of software and AI engineers into the Defense Department on two-year stints. Successful applicants can earn up to nearly $200,000 a year during the initial appointment. The push runs under OPM’s broader Tech Force program and feeds directly into the War Department’s AI Acceleration Strategy.

The AI Acceleration Strategy is the blueprint the Pentagon rolled out in January for embedding artificial intelligence across military operations, with named commercial model partners already chosen. War Force is the recruiting arm built to staff that blueprint, with new hires slotted into the strategy’s seven Pace-Setting Projects. Applications will be accepted through July 10, according to the announcement. The first cohort will be measured by which of those seven projects each engineer lands inside.

The Pentagon’s ‘War Force’ opens its hiring push

A recruiting campaign the Pentagon and OPM are calling ‘War Force’ aims to pull hundreds of software engineers and AI specialists into the Defense Department for two-year tours inside the military. The hiring drive folds into OPM’s broader Tech Force program, a governmentwide effort that began in December 2025 to bring technical talent into federal service. The cohort’s work will feed into capabilities including frontier AI, machine learning, automation and data systems, according to the announcement.

‘Through War Force, OPM will recruit top engineering talent from across the country and connect qualified candidates with high-impact technical roles at the Department of War,’ the agencies said in a joint statement, using the Trump administration’s preferred name for the Defense Department. Pentagon CTO Emil Michael framed the push as a call for ‘patriotic forward-deployed engineers who want to serve their country and the warfighter.’ The tour structure mirrors a military assignment, with engineers expected to embed down to the unit level across the department rather than sit at a single headquarters office. The application window is short: USAJOBS will accept submissions through July 10.

OPM set a target hiring scale of ‘hundreds’ of engineers in the release, a round number rather than a precise head count. The proof point is whether USAJOBS collects enough resumes by July 10 to fill the seats the agencies are advertising.

What the package looks like

The War Force offer sits in one USAJOBS posting for a ‘forward deployed engineer’ role, and the structured terms are listed below for the application facts the prose around them handles less cleanly. The application window is short, and the eligibility requirements are narrower than a typical federal posting. The package, taken together, reads more like the early-career fellowships the engineering community knows than the federal hiring most applicants picture.

The cohort’s offering goes past the salary line, with OPM’s listing showing CEO fireside chats, networking events, coding training and certificate programs as part of the package. That orientation borrows vocabulary from startup culture more than from traditional civil-service hiring. The pitch is built for engineers who are largely already working somewhere else. The two-week application window is part of that same pitch, with the tight deadline asking OPM for fast conversions, not slow deliberation.

• Annual salary ceiling: up to nearly $200,000
• Initial appointment: two years
• Extension ceiling: four years total
• Primary location: Washington, D.C.
• Citizenship: U.S. citizen required
• Security clearance: Secret or Top Secret
• Technical focus: frontier AI, machine learning, automation, data systems

The strategy they are being hired to run

War Force is not, on its own, an AI strategy. It is the recruiting arm for one, with new hires slotted into the seven Pace-Setting Projects that make up the executing core of the AI Acceleration Strategy the Department of War released in January.

‘Executing the key tenets of the War Department’s AI Acceleration Strategy and modernizing our enterprise demand the nation’s best talent to ensure American military technological dominance for generations to come,’ Michael said in a statement released with the launch. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth wrote in the strategy document itself that the Pentagon would ‘unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers’ and ‘become an AI-first warfighting force across all domains.’ The acceleration strategy organizes its work around three tenets (warfighting, intelligence and enterprise operations) and stands up seven named projects under accountable leads.

The pace-setting projects below are the named workforce targets the new hires will plug into. Each PSP has a single accountable lead and an aggressive timeline, and they cut across the three operating tenets from front-line warfare down to back-office automation. The workforce plan stays the same even if the personnel churns, with every departure handing a seat to a fresh hire under the same scope. The full text of the strategy from the Department of War sets the targets and the cadence OPM is hiring against.

1. Swarm Forge (warfighting): a competitive mechanism to iterate, test and scale tactics for fighting with and against AI-enabled capabilities, combining elite warfighting units with elite technology innovators.
2. Agent Network (warfighting): AI agent development for battle management and decision support, spanning campaign planning and kill-chain execution.
3. Ender’s Foundry (warfighting): simulation tooling and fast feedback loops for staying ahead of AI-enabled adversaries.
4. Open Arsenal (intelligence): compressing the pipeline from technical intelligence to fielded capability, so intel turns into weapons in hours.
5. Project Grant (intelligence): turning deterrence from static postures and speculation into dynamic pressure with interpretable results.
6. GenAI.mil (enterprise): department-wide access to frontier generative AI models, including Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok, for personnel at the IL-5 classification level and above.
7. Enterprise Agents (enterprise): the playbook for secure AI agent development and deployment across internal workflows.

The model lineups already named in the plan

The acceleration strategy also locks in which frontier models the department’s AI workforce will deploy, a choice the new engineers will inherit rather than make. GenAI.mil, the enterprise-wide generative AI portal, lists access to Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok at the IL-5 classification level and above as a starting capability. The list of cleared models is narrow by design, and the engineers who arrive through War Force will be working inside that list, not expanding it. New hires will be running the selected models, not selecting them. The strategy has paired the workforce push with a vendor push from the start.

The same eight-vendor configuration already governs the eight cleared AI vendors on Pentagon classified networks, a roster the Defense Department sealed in May after Anthropic was left off. War Force engineers will land in a stack whose backbone was chosen before the first application window opened. The strategy is being staffed from both sides at once, with named models upstream and fresh engineers downstream.

War Force slots into a wider federal push

OPM’s parent Tech Force program launched in December 2025 to bring tech and cybersecurity professionals into federal service across multiple agencies. War Force is its first agency-specific spinoff, and it is focused entirely on the Defense Department.

OPM Director Scott Kupor said War Force ‘builds on the momentum of Tech Force by connecting outstanding engineers with opportunities to solve complex challenges alongside the War Department.’ Tech Force itself followed Trump administration moves earlier in 2025 that let go of thousands of tech-focused federal workers and shuttered several innovation units. The sequencing forced the Pentagon to defend whether it was rebuilding or gutting its technical ranks at the same time.

War Force is the first major staffing answer to that question. It is not the only one. The Pentagon announced a separate cyber apprenticeship program in April that does not officially launch until July. Pentagon Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies said last week that the apprenticeship effort has already generated more than 70,000 inquiries.

Davies shared that figure during remarks at the SAP NOW summit in Washington, a sign that the Pentagon is leaning on private-sector channels as much as federal ones to reach engineering candidates. The pitch to applicants borrows vocabulary from startup culture (forward deployed, cohort, fireside chats) and borrows authority from named government officials. The Department of War framed War Force as a joint OPM-Pentagon statement, with OPM in front as the recruiting party. Inside the joint announcement, each agency has its own measure of success, with OPM counting hires and the Pentagon counting projects staffed. The proof point for the entire Tech Force pipeline is whether War Force fills the ‘hundreds’ of seats before the next pivot.

How to throw your hat in

Applications run through USAJOBS, where the ‘forward deployed engineer’ posting went live on the same Tuesday OPM made the announcement. The applicants OPM is targeting have built and operated software with experience in ‘deploying and integrating advanced technologies,’ including frontier AI, machine learning, automation and data systems. The job description OPM published reads less like a federal posting and more like a startup hiring spec rewritten for the government. The application deadline is July 10, and the recruiting office expects to start reviewing submissions the same week.

The first cohort, once selected, will be measured by which of the seven pace-setting projects they land inside. Many of the recruits will support the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office, the unit implementing the AI Acceleration Strategy. The two-year clock on each appointment starts the day the cohort reports for duty, not the day applications close.

Why private-sector AI engineers are getting the call

Speed defines victory in the AI era, and the War Department will match the velocity of America’s AI industry.

The line comes from Emil Michael, Pentagon CTO and Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, in a statement released with the War Force launch on Tuesday. The sentence sets the bar the recruiting push is supposed to clear. The exchange the Pentagon is offering is patriotic framing, mission scope and access to AI infrastructure private companies cannot match, in return for two years of public-service pay. The package is shaped to recruit engineers who already want this kind of work, with the patriotic pitch as the differentiator.

The OPM posting sits at the visible end of a longer pipeline, with vendors chosen, the strategy published and the hiring portal open. The first cohort will land inside the seven Pace-Setting Projects by the fall, working alongside systems like Palantir’s Maven Smart System that already run across the force. Until applicants file, the administration’s claim of marching toward ‘American military technological dominance’ rests on a job posting and a clock.

The next application window, running through July 10, will set the hard answer. The OPM portal is the metric that signals whether the patriotic pitch lands with engineers who could otherwise stay in industry. The applicants USAJOBS collects over the next two weeks will set that signal. The Pentagon will then have a public count it can point to. Until that count lands, the recruitment is only a claim.