The Pentagon has spent months quietly building an elite new tech agency to help covertly disrupt and sabotage foreign technology programs considered threats to American military superiority.
Neither Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nor any other senior Pentagon official has publicly mentioned the agency since it was established this April — a conspicuous omission for a department that has reveled in announcing other major changes aimed at modernizing the military or adopting hard-nosed new policies against foreign adversaries.
Information on the Technology Support Office, or TSO as it is called internally, is nearly impossible to find on Pentagon websites, and the agency is mentioned by name only in several previously unreported Defense Department historical records and memoranda.
While the specifics of its work are highly classified, POLITICO spoke with 12 current and former U.S. national security officials with varying degrees of knowledge about TSO to understand how the agency came to be, the broad contours of its mission and why its operations are shrouded in secrecy.
Some of these people helped establish TSO or worked closely with it; others attended briefings or spoke with current Pentagon officials about it; and some were familiar with Defense Department intelligence programs now merged into TSO. All were granted anonymity to share sensitive details about the agency that have not been previously reported.
Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, a private equity billionaire and former head of the White House’s Intelligence Advisory Board during President Donald Trump’s first term, led the push inside the Pentagon to create the new agency.
Tom Rakusan, a senior adviser to Feinberg at the Pentagon, has also been closely involved in setting up TSO. Rakusan is a longtime veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service, and most recently worked at Feinberg’s private equity firm, where he focused on emerging technology.
Hegseth and Feinberg established TSO quickly and without attracting outside scrutiny because they largely built the agency by reorganizing two classified Pentagon intelligence programs that have conducted similar clandestine tech-sabotage efforts at a smaller scale since 2023.
But by creating an agency dedicated to expanding that work, the Defense Department is signaling its intent to ramp up a range of aggressive covert activities abroad — potentially including cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions and disinformation operations.
Many of the people who spoke to POLITICO argued that the aggressive new initiative is needed to help the Pentagon counter foreign adversaries they say are harnessing artificial intelligence and advanced commercial technologies, such as drones, in creative ways that could erode America’s military advantage.
“It is a refocus from the highest levels of the government on this type of activity, which has been sorely needed,” said one former senior Pentagon intelligence official with direct knowledge of TSO.
Others worry that the Trump administration has deliberately avoided public mention of TSO to avoid oversight over programs that could harm civilians or inflame tensions with adversary countries the U.S. is not at war with, such as China.
To make an undertaking like TSO successful, said another former senior Pentagon official, “you have to pull off movie-level spy craft.”
“But the questions are: What are the approval structures, what is the oversight, who is read in to give the American people confidence that what you’re doing is consistent with our values and you’re not creating something that five years from now will be seen as incredibly problematic?” the official added.
In response to a series of questions about TSO and the details of this story, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Jacob Bliss said, “This query appears to be built on information that is simply not true. Whoever is feeding you these claims are either badly misinformed or deliberately leading you astray to peddle their fantasies.”
While TSO lacks the legal authority to conduct clandestine operations directly, it works closely with senior U.S. military and intelligence officers to develop cutting-edge tools and strategies to disrupt adversaries’ access to critical defense technologies — or subvert them from afar.
TSO is staffed with engineers, special operators and intelligence officers, and its work spans everything from building bespoke hacking tools to planning elaborate deception operations that trick adversaries into installing faulty components — likely designed by TSO — in key foreign weapons platforms.
TSO’s overarching goal is to “buy time or stop adversaries from developing technologies” that would most threaten the U.S. military in a major conflict, said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked closely with the agency.
Pentagon staff had been exploring whether to create a new agency like TSO for more than a year.
According to three former intelligence officials, staff in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, or I&S, which oversees Defense Department intelligence programs, began work in early 2025 on a white paper exploring how to scale up the Pentagon’s two existing classified tech sabotage programs.
The white paper, completed that fall, considered nesting both programs under the Pentagon’s digital warfighting unit, U.S. Cyber Command, but ultimately recommended merging the efforts into a new agency with its own budget and procurement powers.
The move would empower the agency to more quickly integrate cutting-edge tech from the private sector and think more strategically about which foreign defense technologies pose the biggest threats across U.S. military organizations.
Senior Pentagon leadership also saw an opportunity to consolidate some control over Defense Department intelligence programs, a former Pentagon official familiar with the initiative said.
TSO is “definitely part of this move to centralize some control upstairs,” the official explained.
The race to stand up the agency kicked off in earnest this spring.
Feinberg signed a memo establishing TSO and placing it under the “authority, direction, and control” of the Undersecretary of War for Intelligence & Security on April 14, according to a monthly leadership publication from the Defense Department’s public record-keeping office. The Senate confirmed the current head of I&S, Bradley Hansell, in July 2025.
This summer, the Pentagon tapped Grant Hundley, a former Marine Corps special operations officer, to serve as TSO’s director. They also selected William Nelson, a career Army official recently at Army Futures Command, as the new Director of Intelligence for Sensitive Activities and Special Programs, who will work with Hansell to oversee the agency internally from I&S.
It’s unclear how much money has been allocated to carry out TSO’s secretive operations, or if it has issued any new contracts yet.
A second former Pentagon official and a former U.S. national security official said the agency has told some defense contractors it’s interested in offensive hacking capabilities. The former senior Pentagon intelligence official estimated that its budget for classified contracts alone is likely north of $1.5 billion.
They are seeking contractors on “the leading edge of technology,” that official said, and hope to procure “a whole host of tools wherever your imagination can go.”
Bliss did not respond to a request for comment on whether the Pentagon has requested additional money to fund the agency or if it intends to seek long-term authorization from Congress.
Beyond offensive operations, TSO will also focus on coordinating technology use and cutting red tape for defense contractors spread across a thicket of heavily siloed Pentagon intelligence programs. According to one former U.S. intelligence official who has spoken with Pentagon leadership, one such initiative would see TSO build a central “catalog” of approved commercial AI and tech tools contractors could use on classified initiatives.
The agency’s emergence as a power center for military hacking and sabotage has irked some senior officials elsewhere in the Pentagon.
Special Operations Command and U.S. Cyber Command both objected to creating the new agency, fearing it would cut into their budgets, according to the two former intelligence officials and one former senior U.S. national security official. The two former intelligence officials added that friction over TSO is part of the reason why Cyber Command’s chief acquisition officer, Khoi Nguyen, recently left the command.
Nguyen, whose former role had him overseeing the digital warfighting unit’s efforts to procure cutting-edge hacking tools, did not reply to a request for comment.
TSO, said the former intelligence official who worked closely with the agency, is taking on the types of operations Cyber Command “would love to claim as its own.”
Several people who spoke to POLITICO support TSO’s mission but worry that the secrecy surrounding its work could embolden current Pentagon leadership to carry out missions that flout international law or funnel coveted classified contracts to political allies.
Over the last two years, Hegseth has boasted publicly about operations that test the boundaries of domestic and international law, while slow-rolling Congressional attempts to oversee deadly missions that have gone awry.
The Pentagon recently briefed some congressional officials on its plans for TSO, but only a small number of staffers have been read in on the initiative, said one current U.S. national security official, which could make it harder for Congress to identify any potential impropriety in TSO’s operations or contracting.
“Because it’s a classified space, there’s even more opportunities to hide or misdirect,” the official said. In a statement, Bliss, the Pentagon spokesperson, said the Defense Department ”values its longstanding working relationship with Congress” and “will continue working closely and constructively with the relevant committees to provide appropriate information, answer legitimate questions, and ensure Congress can fulfill its constitutional oversight responsibilities.”
Hegseth and Feinberg have announced a flurry of new modernization initiatives — such as a new commission dubbed Project Meridian led by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey — that skeptics say expose the Defense Department to a torrent of conflicts of interest.
Democrats have focused their concern on Feinberg because the private equity and venture capital firms he led before joining the Defense Department both have sizable investments in defense tech companies that compete for Pentagon contracts.
Bliss called concern about conflicts of interest “a baseless, completely recycled narrative that certain reporters continue to lazily push despite having zero facts to support it.” DOD, he added, “maintains a rigorous, multi-layered ethics framework that includes financial disclosure reviews, divestitures where appropriate, and screening to prevent conflicts of interest. Every DOW official is in full compliance with all ethical laws and regulations. Any claims otherwise are false.”
Other people who spoke to POLITICO said they felt reassured by the current and former career officials chosen to work most closely with the agency, specifically Nelson and Rakusan.
These are “seasoned career professionals who have withstood political pressures before,” said the former intelligence official who has spoken with Pentagon leadership about the initiative.