The Trump administration helped turn a one-star defense industrial base into a three-star pool of suppliers, and it plans to make even greater gains over the next two years, Pentagon chief technology officer Emil Michael told me.

• "We all know that we're in a technological age we've never seen before," he said. "I'm excited about that."

The big picture: Emil and I spoke for about 45 minutes on stage Thursday at the Emerging Technologies for Defense conference in Washington.

• The conversation came at a time of heavy fighting in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, frenzied arguments over the future of artificial intelligence and ballooning defense budgets around the world.

Zoom in: Here are some additional excerpts from our chat:

🆚 On the Anthropic spat. "Our dispute was fairly well-defined. We wanted to use AI for general purposes. They're building artificial general intelligence. We wanted to use it lawfully. We committed to use it lawfully," he said.

• "When I buy a jet from Boeing, they don't tell the military how to fly it or where to fly it or what country it could go into."

🔋 On directed-energy weapons. "It's definitely the summer of lasers."

• "I think by the end of this term, we're going to have a wide array of capabilities that are going to be workable in almost any theater."

✂️ On consolidating the Pentagon's list of critical tech. "How many companies have 14 corporate values?" he said.

• "We tried to make them more digestible, because they're not only guideposts for the employees at the department, they're demand signals to industry, they're statements to Congress saying these are the things we'd recommend you invest in."

📊 On investors and pitches. "This is the moment with the largest amount of venture capital investment in defense tech ever," he said.

• "I get less sleep; I get a lot more incoming. But I do my best to meet with five to 10 companies a week."

☢️ On nuclear power. "We are, thankfully, going through a renaissance of nuclear technology and nuclear acceptance by the public," he said.

• "We went through decades of lost time, where people were conflating the fear of nuclear weapons with the fear of nuclear energy."

Go deeper: Pentagon CTO seeks "five more Andurils and Palantirs and SpaceXs"

The Air, Space & Cyber Conference kicks off in two days.

Why it matters: It means another pilgrimage to National Harbor, Maryland, for thousands of us. The world's largest defense contractors — and the hottest upstarts — will soon mingle with civilian and uniformed military leadership.

Here are four predictions for Sept. 14–16. Mileage may vary.

1. The show will be dominated by hardware. Yes, networks and cybersecurity matter, but the Air Force is now in pursuit of new fighters, bombers and drones, including the F-47 (Boeing), the B-21 (Northrop Grumman), the FQ-42 (General Atomics), the FQ-44 (Anduril Industries) and Massed Modular Aircraft (to be determined).
2. The Space Force will further loosen its collar when it comes to using words like "weapon," driven in part by the Trump administration's Golden Dome. For years such phrasing was taboo. Times have changed, and so have the threats.
3. The Iran war will color every discussion. Warplanes have been destroyed; bases and radars bombed. American troops are dead.
4. Propulsion will be the dark horse. Someone's got to power these things.

More from Axios:

The space warfare president

Hermeus unveils Ramjet-X, a "high-Mach" aircraft

Air Force taps GE Aerospace and Kratos for JASSM engine

Friday marked 25 years since the Sept. 11 attacks.

• They killed nearly 3,000 people and dramatically reshaped the world.

The big picture: Vantor shared this satellite image of New York City, taken in the immediate aftermath.

My thought bubble: It's worth revisiting this "60 Minutes" reporting about Summit, New Jersey, where I grew up.

Go deeper: NYC unveils records suggesting officials knew air was unsafe after 9/11