Pentagon Has Reportedly Set Up a Secret Office for Tech Sabotage

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Hybrid warfare is no longer just Moscow’s tool: According to Politico, the U.S. Defense Department has built a new, covert agency meant to disrupt and sabotage foreign technology programs. The so-called Technology Support Office (TSO) targets projects that could threaten America’s military superiority. There was no public announcement, and the unit barely appears on the Pentagon’s website. Politico’s reporting is based on internal memos and interviews with twelve current and former U.S. national security officials.

Hacking, Rigged Components, Supply Chains

According to the report, the TSO was created in April by a memo from Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, with the backing of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. It sits under the under secretary for intelligence and security and is led by Grant Hundley, a former Marine Corps special operations officer. The office largely grew out of two classified programs that had been running similar, smaller-scale operations against other countries’ technological infrastructure since 2023.

Its toolkit reads like a textbook on hybrid warfare:

• Cyberattacks: The TSO is looking for vendors of custom offensive hacking tools.
• Sabotage: Adversaries are to be tricked into installing faulty components in their weapons systems.
• Supply chains: Interfering with supply chains and disrupting technology remotely are also part of the mission.
• Deception: Information operations are part of the toolkit as well.

According to one account of the report, the TSO does not carry out covert operations itself, instead developing the tools and strategies for them. The goal is to buy time or keep adversaries from developing dangerous technologies. No target countries are named, and the budget has not been disclosed. A former senior intelligence official estimates that classified contracts alone could exceed $1.5 billion.

America’s Answer to Russia’s Shadow War?

The timing is notable. Europe has seen a wave of hybrid attacks that Western governments attribute to Russia, including arson, railway sabotage and drones over airports. Poland has already warned NATO of deadly attacks. Hybrid warfare thrives on staying below the threshold of open war and being hard to attribute. With the TSO, Washington is now creating a permanent structure for exactly this gray zone, with a focus on technology.

The idea itself has a long history. The Stuxnet computer worm, which damaged Iranian uranium centrifuges around 2010, is widely attributed to a joint U.S.-Israeli operation. In 2024, thousands of Hezbollah pagers exploded in Lebanon after entering circulation through a manipulated supply chain. What has changed is that such operations against tech programs now get their own agency, with its own budget and procurement powers. Behind this is the race for A.I. and advanced commercial technologies, which the Pentagon increasingly sees as a threat to its military edge. Most recently, the United States banned the Chinese A.I. model DeepSeek from federal agencies.

Concerns About Oversight

According to Politico, only a very small circle of congressional staff members was briefed. Critics worry that the secrecy makes oversight harder and could hide abuses. They warn of harm to civilians and of tensions with countries such as China, with which the United States is not at war. There is also internal friction: Special Operations Command and Cyber Command fear the TSO will eat into their budgets, the report says. Questions have also been raised about conflicts of interest, because Mr. Feinberg’s firms invested heavily in defense tech companies competing for Pentagon contracts before he took office.

The Pentagon rejects the account. A spokesman, Jacob Bliss, said the inquiry appeared to be based on inaccurate information. He called the conflict-of-interest allegations unfounded and said the department has a rigorous, multilayered ethics framework. Parts of the intelligence community, on the other hand, explicitly welcome the new agency, arguing that leadership needs to focus more on such operations to avoid falling behind in the technology race.