Why Does the US Military Buy 80% of Its Dogs From Europe — and Can Cloning Fix It?

The United States military has a dog problem, and it is not about the dogs. The Pentagon fields more than 2,200 working dog teams — animals that sniff out explosives, patrol bases and search collapsed buildings — and more than 80% of them were bought from breeders in Europe. After a pipeline of acquisition and training that stretches for years, fewer than half of the dogs that enter it ever qualify for service. Now a new startup with $200 million in funding says it has the answer: clone the best dogs, edit out their genetic flaws, and rebuild America's supply at home.

The company is called Warhound, and the plan sounds like science fiction. But the problem it claims to solve is real, old and expensive — and the question it raises is sharper than the technology itself.

Why Europe supplies America's war dogs

The dependence is not an accident. For decades, the best military working dogs — mostly Belgian Malinois, German Shepherds and Labradors — have come from European breeding programmes that select for drive, nerve and health over generations. The US Air Force trains working dogs for every military branch and for the Transportation Security Administration, running teams at 182 locations around the world. But the supply chain starts overseas, and Warhound argues that leaves it exposed: a foreign pipeline that is slow, costly and, in the company's words, at risk of "geopolitical exposure".

The numbers explain the frustration. A dog can take three years from selection to deployment, and fewer than half make the cut. The rest wash out after months of expensive training. Every failure is a dog the military paid to import, house and train — and then could not use. That is the gap Warhound wants to close: not by training dogs better, but by starting with better dogs.

What Warhound actually plans to do

Warhound was conceived by two of the most recognisable names in American defence and biotech: Palmer Luckey, founder of the defence firm Anduril Industries, and Ben Lamm, chief executive of Colossal Biosciences, the company behind this year's gene-edited dire-wolf pups. The startup emerged from stealth on October 22 with $200 million in seed funding and a $1.2 billion valuation, backed by investors including Sequoia Capital and In-Q-Tel, the venture firm linked to the CIA. Its chief executive is David Spirk, a former Marine who served as the Pentagon's first chief data officer.

The method has three steps. First, Warhound collects and freezes cells from top-performing military and law-enforcement dogs — animals that have already proved themselves in service. Second, it clones those dogs through Viagen, a cloning company owned by Colossal. Third, it applies targeted gene edits to remove harmful variants the original dog may have carried: the genes linked to hip dysplasia, certain cancers, muscle degeneration and vision problems that commonly end a working dog's career early. The first group of dogs has already been biobanked and is being edited, and the first puppies are expected in the first quarter of 2027.

Anduril supplies the hardware layer: protective eye and ear gear, body armour, and its EagleEye mixed-reality system, which feeds battlefield information to the handler. Lamm has described the concept as a "Captain America dog program" with "Ironman tech" on top — and stressed that the technology is wearable, not implanted.

What cloning can — and cannot — fix

The honest version of this story is narrower than the headline. Cloning copies genes, not experience: a clone of a decorated explosives dog is born knowing nothing, and Lamm himself acknowledges that training and environment will always shape performance. The first edits are also subtractive, not additive — removing known defects rather than engineering faster or stronger animals. The "super" in super dog, for now, mostly means a dog that does not wash out early with a bad hip or failing eyesight.

There are commercial limits too. Warhound has no official customers yet and has not disclosed pricing. Its dogs could enter service within roughly two years, but that is a projection, not a contract. The Pentagon has not said it will buy them. For all the funding and the famous founders, Warhound is selling a pipeline, not a product — and the military's procurement process is slower than any startup's press release.

The ethics question nobody can dodge

Then there is the question the video itself raises: should animals be gene-edited for war at all? PETA has criticised the project as outdated, arguing that robots and AI can now do many of the same dangerous jobs without putting a living animal at risk of gunfire, explosives or heat stress. Warhound says animal welfare is central to the project and has engaged the American Humane Society to certify its training programmes and support adoption of retired dogs.

The scepticism extends to the science. Academics have questioned some of Colossal's bolder claims about its de-extinction work, and the dire-wolf pups it unveiled this year carry edited genes inspired by an extinct animal rather than a true resurrection. Warhound inherits that credibility question along with Colossal's technology: the cloning is proven, the editing is plausible, but the promise — a reliable domestic supply of elite dogs — has not been demonstrated yet.

The supply chain is the real story

Strip away the gene-editing headline and Warhound is, at its core, a supply-chain company. The US military depends on a foreign pipeline for one of its most trusted tools, loses most of the animals that enter that pipeline, and has no domestic alternative at scale. Whether cloning is the right fix is a fair debate. That the dependence exists — and that a $1.2 billion startup now exists to end it — is not.

The first puppies arrive early next year. The first working dogs, if the timeline holds, about two years after that. By then we will know whether Warhound solved a real problem or just found a spectacular way to describe it.

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Sources: Wall Street Journal, USA Today