The House of Representatives draft version of the fiscal 2026 defense policy bill would require the Pentagon to create and maintain a database of all commercial vendors involved in clandestine military operations, a move aimed at tightening oversight and reducing counterintelligence risks across the U.S. defense ecosystem.
A draft outline from the House Armed Services Committee’s intelligence and special operations panel lists the measure as part of the sweeping FY26 National Defense Authorization Act. The massive defense package is in the early stages of undergoing markups, and congressional appropriators have not yet assigned it a spending value. It will also need to be reconciled with a separate draft in the Senate.
The current bill text would require the Defense Department to “establish, maintain, and continuously update a database for vendors supporting clandestine activities to facilitate deconfliction and risk assessment,” known as the “Clandestine Activities Vendor Database,” the draft text says.
For years, U.S. military and intelligence forces have relied on a shadow workforce of contractors to help augment areas like surveillance, cyber operations and logistics for secret missions. Some of that work falls under clandestine activities, where the operations themselves are hidden. Others are covert, where U.S. involvement is fully obscured to avoid public scrutiny and give officials room to deny involvement.
While not specified in the outline, it’s likely the database would be marked classified and not open to the public. But it could serve as a tool for Congress to conduct oversight if conflicts, operational failures or ethical concerns emerge around how private firms are used in clandestine missions.
Similar databases have already been put into existence. The Defense Contract Management Agency handles hundreds of thousands of contracts with the defense industrial base. The National Industrial Security Program also tracks companies that have clearances to access sensitive facilities or computer systems.
While various Pentagon service branches maintain internal systems to manage classified contracts, those databases are often program-specific and are not built to track contractor participation in clandestine or covert missions.
Past watchdog reports have called for more visibility into military contracting, but efforts to centralize that oversight have largely stalled. The new proposal codifies a formal, continuously updated database specifically focused on vendors supporting clandestine military activity, paired with mandated congressional reports that could become one of the most robust military contractor oversight tools of its kind.
The War on Terror shed light on the advent of private military contracting when Blackwater and other firms took on frontline roles in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007, Blackwater contractors were implicated in the Nisour Square massacre, prompting scrutiny over the legal gray zones in which private forces operated on behalf of the U.S. government. In 2020, President Donald Trump pardoned the four security guards involved in the Nisour Square shooting, which killed 14 civilians, including two children.
The list of contractors in the proposed database would be exhaustive and could encompass clandestine operations conducted both physically and electronically. Lawmakers have recently pitched private sector operatives as potential tools for use in offensive cyber operations that would target foreign adversaries like China and Russia.
For many years, hacking and surveillance capabilities have largely been undergirded by the private sector. The NSA and Cyber Command — the latter of which is a DOD combatant command — have relied on longstanding relationships with telecommunications providers to eavesdrop on conversations that cross the internet backbone. Many cyber threat intelligence providers also share data with the Defense Department and related national security units across the government.
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