When I founded FedLearn, I wasn’t chasing a trend. I was looking at a training gap.

I’d spent a career in naval intelligence, and then years studying how people actually learn. So, when I looked hard at the learning ecosystem serving the U.S. Department of War and Intelligence Community, one thing jumped out: there was no shortage of instructor-led training on national security topics. Conferences, schoolhouses, in-person courses, week-long resident programs—the classroom side was crowded.

Online training? That was a different story.

For a workforce that operates around the clock, across time zones, in deployed and forward environments, the on-demand, scalable online training simply wasn’t there—at least not built for the mission. What existed online was overwhelmingly commercial content with a government veneer: generic courseware adapted for national security, never designed for it. The deep, mission-contextualized, emerging-technology training that DoW and IC professionals actually needed wasn’t being delivered in a format they could access on their own schedule, in their own location and at scale.

That was the training gap. And I designed FedLearn to fill it.

A Deliberate Choice: Exclusively for the DoW and IC

The decision that defined FedLearn was a decision about focus. We would deliver national security and emerging-technology online training built exclusively for the U.S. Department of Defense (now the DoW) and the IC. Not a commercial platform with a Federal sales team. Not a horizontal training catalog with a defense module bolted on. A company whose entire reason for existing was the national security mission.

That focus is what made the content credible. When you build only for the DoW and IC, you build in the operational context, the tradecraft, the vocabulary and the standards that workforce lives by—because you’re not trying to serve ten other markets at the same time.

That conviction led directly to our course lines:

• Artificial intelligence and data – Literacy and applied skills for workforces being asked to adopt AI faster than they are being trained to use it.
• Intelligence – Analytic tradecraft and the discipline-specific skills the IC runs on
• Space – Emerging-domain training for a mission area that didn’t even have a dedicated service a decade ago

Each was built on the same premise: rigorous, online, on-demand and made for the mission—not adapted to it.

Then the Government Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

On June 5, 2026, the President signed National Security Presidential Memorandum-11, Artificial Intelligence in the National Security Enterprise. Most of the attention will go to the big themes—frontier models, assurance and accountability. But the provision that matters most for the workforce is Section 5(c).

Section 5(c) directs the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of War to develop and implement an AI for National Security Curriculum within 120 days—training personnel across the national security enterprise to employ AI in accordance with guidance and to maintain literacy on the AI frontier: its capabilities, its limitations and its implications.

Read between the lines and the message is unmistakable. The administration looked at the same landscape I saw and identified the same gap: you cannot adopt AI across the national security enterprise if the workforce isn’t trained to use it. Adoption isn’t a procurement problem. It’s a people problem. And the people problem has been the under-addressed half of the AI conversation for years.

NSPM-11 makes it official. National security-focused AI training is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a directed requirement on a clock—with the entire enterprise’s AI ambitions riding on it.

FedLearn Answers the Call—Now

Here’s what I want every DoW and IC leader reading this article to understand: you don’t have to wait 120 days.

The curriculum NSPM-11 calls for is exactly that FedLearn has been building and delivering for years. Our AI for national security courses are live. They’re online, on-demand and mission-contextualized for the DoW and IC. They cover not just what AI can do, but where it fails—the exact frontier literacy the directive demands. And this July, we will add stackable certifications mapped to the Defense Cybersecurity Workforce Framework knowledge, skills, abilities and tasks and All-Source Analyst Skill Standards the federal workforce already uses, so a command can prove its people meet the bar.

A directive starts a clock. It doesn’t build a curriculum. The commands and agencies that move first won’t spend the next four months in a requirements meeting—they’ll spend it deploying, measuring and certifying because the solution already exists.

We built FedLearn for this mission, with a focus no one else has invested in. NSPM-11 simply confirmed what we believed from the start: the national security workforce deserves training built for it, not borrowed for it.

If you own AI readiness in the DoW or IC, you don’t have to wait for the 120-day clock to run out. Let’s get started now.

Dr. J. Keith Dunbar
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
FedLearn