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A lot happens every day. Alliances shift, leaders change, and conflicts erupt. With In Brief, we’ll help you make sense of it all. Each week, experts will dig deep on a single issue happening in the world to help you better understand it.***Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered that the Department of Defense conduct a review of its Fiscal Year 2026 budget. “The offsets are targeted at 8% of the Biden Administration’s FY26 budget, totaling around $50 billion, which will then be spent on programs aligned with President Trump’s priorities,” according to a press release. The Pentagon might look for similar reallocations for several years beyond 2026. We asked four experts to weigh in on how the efforts to rearrange spending priorities might affect the department’s stated goal of rapidly fielding emerging technologies.Read more below.Doug Berenson Partner, OliverWymanThere is no reason why the push to cut 8 percent of the Defense Department’s budget should prevent the department from more rapidly fielding emerging technologies. Success will hinge on how the cuts are imposed and how the Defense Department uses the savings it gains. That is the aim of the emerging budget drill: to allocate investment more strategically.President Donald Trump is motivated to make changes in federal government programs despite the risk of political backlash. This political top-cover will be needed to cut activities that each of the armed services has long considered but failed to achieve in the face of congressional opposition. Further, Trump’s support might allow Hegseth to impose changes in organization, process, and investment priorities that run counter to the services’ own instinctive preferences. Assuming Hegseth can accumulate a pool of savings, he can deploy those resources to priority areas, like homeland missile defense, autonomous systems, and others.Radha Iyengar Plumb Former Department of Defense official, including serving as