Trump’s Pentagon is under fire for not coordinating fully with the White House before halting recent weapons transfers to Ukraine, the Associated Press reported Tuesday evening, citing administration officials. 

Trump on Monday said he’d reversed that decision to halt arms to Ukraine, which just fended off another overnight attack from Russia involving more than 720 drones and at least a dozen missiles—including six alleged hypersonic missiles—striking 11 regions in the country, according to Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy. Reuters reports those 720-plus drones set a new record for the three-plus-year conflict. 

“This is a telling attack—and it comes precisely at a time when so many efforts have been made to achieve peace, to establish a ceasefire, and yet only Russia continues to rebuff them all,” Zelenskyy wrote on social media. 

Blame game: Politico reported last week that Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby has been accused of ordering the pause in arms transfers, which reportedly involved “Patriot antimissile interceptors, AIM-120 antiaircraft missiles, howitzer rounds, AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, GMLRS missiles to arm Himars rocket launchers, Stinger surface-to-air missiles, and grenade launchers,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The Guardian reported Tuesday “The decision was rather made by [deputy defense secretary Stephen] Feinberg…to whom Colby reports,” and “Defense secretary Pete Hegseth then signed off on Feinberg’s determination.” CNN—noting Hegseth lacks a chief of staff or close advisors—reported Tuesday it was ultimately Hegseth who made the decision. But Politico reported Tuesday Colby is nevertheless facing intense scrutiny for having “gotten out ahead of the administration on several major foreign policy decisions.” 

For his part, Trump was seated beside Hegseth when he told reporters Tuesday at a cabinet meeting that he didn’t know who ordered the pause, and asked in response to the question, “I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?” 

Worth noting: “The Secretary of Defense had also previously paused weapons being sent to Ukraine in both February and May,” The Daily Beast reminded readers. 

“We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin,” Trump said at the televised cabinet meeting. “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless,” Trump told his audience. When asked what Trump will do about it, he declined to say, and added, “We want to have a little surprise.”

Trump continued: “Putin is not… he’s not treating human beings right” and is “killing too many people. So we’re sending some defensive weapons to Ukraine, and I’ve approved that,” the president said Tuesday. 

Happening today: Hegseth is meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Pentagon. Read a bit more on Israel and its military at the bottom of today’s newsletter. 

Commentary: “What Pete Hegseth Doesn’t Understand About Soldiers.” Parts of Hegseth’s anti-woke agenda “seem like common sense,” writes Mike Nelson, a retired Army Green Beret, in The Atlantic. “Why wouldn’t a department charged with fighting America’s wars encourage a warrior spirit by empowering the people who risk their life in combat? Clearly it should. Still, Hegseth risks creating a false dichotomy—that one must choose between lethality and professionalism. This view comes at a cost to operational effectiveness as well as moral clarity.” Read on, here.

Profiled: Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Cain, by Mark Bowden, of Black Hawk Down fame. Excerpt: “Caine’s background might actually make him better suited for the top job today than many of his peers. Particularly since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, American military action has primarily employed three sectors: air power, covert special ops, and intelligence. The attacks against Iranian nuclear sites in June certainly involved two of these and likely all of them. Here Caine has more direct experience than most four-stars.” More, here.

Additional reading: 

• “Former Air Force chiefs sound alarm about planned F-35, E-7 cuts,” Defense News reports off an open letter from nearly two dozen former chiefs and other former generals;
• “Army expands combat patch approval for soldiers in Africa, Middle East,” Army Times reported Tuesday; Military-dot-com has similar coverage;
• And ICYMI, “Trump OKs using National Guard as immigration judges at Florida detention center,” the Miami Herald reported last week. 

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Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1944 and after more than three weeks of fighting, the U.S. military claimed victory at the Battle of Saipan in the northern Mariana Islands, which suddenly put much of Japan within range of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ new B-29 bombers.

Europe

Intelligence officials worry a sabotage campaign blamed on Russia is growing more dangerous. The AP goes deep, with anecdotes, maps, and more, to lay out the growing dimensions of a continent-wide pattern. Read that, here. 

Denmark to buy, rent air defenses as it rushes to rebuild missile shield. Copenhagen will buy ground-based air defense systems from Germany and France and lease them from Norwegian manufacturers “as the country seeks to urgently fill critical air defense gaps,” Defnese News reports. “The decision comes almost two decades after Denmark decommissioned its ground-based air defense capability, in 2005, in an attempt to focus more on international operations.” More, here. 

North American extremism

After right-wing influencers and GOP lawmakers spread conspiracies about “weather weapons,” a U.S. extremist group took credit for attacking a weather station in the wake of recent flash floods that killed more than 110 people and left around 160 people still unaccounted for, WIRED reported Tuesday.

Targeted: A Nexrad—or Next Generation Weather Radar—system, used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to detect precipitation, wind, tornadoes, and thunderstorms. The Nexrad system used by Oklahoma City’s News 9 was broken into, damaged and knocked offline briefly Sunday night. A 39-year-old male suspect in the case was arrested Tuesday, News 9 reports; he has not yet been charged, but an investigation is under way. 

About the extremist group: It’s called Veterans on Patrol, and they’re an Arizona-based, anti-government extremist group run by a Christian nationalist named Michael “Lewis Arthur” Meyer, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Meyer “rallies hard-right extremists and conspiracy theorists around the issue of immigration and encourages vigilantism,” SPLC reports, citing VoP’s own messaging on Telegram going back to at least 2021. “Not to be confused with everyday Christianity, Meyer’s Christian nationalist beliefs push hateful falsehoods about immigrants, Native Americans, the Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and government officialdom,” SPLC writes. 

Meyer told WIRED this week, “Anyone that’s going out to eliminate a Nexrad, if they haven’t harmed life, and they’re doing it according to the videos that we’re providing, they are part of our group.” He added, “We’re going to have to take out every single media’s capabilities of lying to the American people. Mainstream media is the biggest threat right now.” Read more, here. 

Related reading: 

• “New Mexico governor declares emergency over deadly flooding,” Axios reported Wednesday;
• “Trump appointees have ties to companies that stand to benefit from privatizing weather forecasts,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday. 

See also:

• “Canadian Armed Forces members among four charged in Quebec extremist plot,” from the Toronto-based Globe and Mail.

Middle East

Israel has launched a new ground incursion in Lebanon, despite truce. Officials said on Wednesday that these “targeted operations” were aimed at military infrastructure belonging to Hezbollah. According to the New York Times, “The military did not say when the operations took place. But the announcement came amid rising tensions over Hezbollah’s disarmament, a core requirement of an increasingly shaky cease-fire agreement signed in November, which ended the deadliest conflict between the two sides in decades.” More, here.

Additional reading: 

• “In Rare Video, Jailed Kurdish Leader Declares an End to Armed Struggle,” the New York Times reported Wednesday from Istanbul;
• And “Elon Musk’s xAI deleted posts by its chatbot after it made antisemitic remarks and threatened the Turkish president,” Semafor reported Tuesday. 

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