China’s accumulation of military facilities and partnerships beyond the Indo-Pacific region mean U.S. forces must innovate more urgently, air and space intelligence officials said Monday. 

“The China challenge is not just a challenge for INDOPACOM,” Lt. Gen. Max Pearson, Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, said during a panel discussion at AFA’s Air, Space, and Cyber conference. “In addition to the support base in Djibouti … the PLA continues to pursue military installations, [cooperative agreements], and partnerships in a lot of places. I mean, we’re seeing this across Asia, in the Middle East, Africa, across the Pacific. And we’re seeing the PLA partnering with others: strategic bomber patrols with Russia, naval patrols with Russia, as well as exercises—PLA, Russia and Iran.” 

Meanwhile, the Chinese navy launched next-generation fighter and early warning aircraft on test flights from its Fujian aircraft carrier Monday, weeks after Beijing rolled out new weapons at a giant military parade earlier this month.

Related: “Marines showcase ship-killing NMESIS missile system in Japan,” as part of island-defense exercises, Task & Purpose reported Sunday.

Anduril blames CCA delay on push for ‘semi-autonomous’ first flight. The Air Force had anticipated that Anduril’s prototype collaborative combat aircraft, dubbed YFQ-44 Fury, would fly this summer, but only General Atomics’ rival YFQ-42A actually took off. “The goal is to also get to a semi-autonomous first flight, which means takeoff and landing will be done via push of a button,” Anduril vice president Diem Salmon told reporters at the AFA show on Monday. A General Atomics spokesman noted that their YFQ-42A is also designed for semi-autonomous flight, although its August test did not use it. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly has a bit more, here.

ICYMI: F-47’s first flight expected in 2028, a year earlier than officials had previously suggested. Novelly reported off Monday’s keynote by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin, here.

Update: The U.S. Army released the names of four soldiers who perished in an MH-60 helicopter crash Wednesday in Washington state. They include: 

• Chief Warrant Officer Three Andrew Cully, 35, from Sparta, Missouri;
• Chief Warrant Officer Three Andrew Kraus, 39, from Sanibel, Florida;
• Sgt. Donavon Scott, 24, from Tacoma;
• And Sgt. Jadalyn Good, 23, from Mount Vernon, Washington. 

All four were assigned to the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, based at Joint-Base Lewis-McChord, just outside Tacoma. It’s unclear how the crash occurred, but officials from Fort Rucker’s Army Combat Readiness Center have been sent to investigate, Stars and Stripes reports. 

Additional reading: 

• “West Point is violating the First Amendment with a crackdown on professors, lawsuit says,” the Associated Press reported Monday from New York;
• And “Military commissaries could be privatized under Pentagon plan,” Task & Purpose reported Monday.  

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Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, and federalized the Arkansas National Guard to support and protect the integration of Little Rock Central High School.

Americas

First indication of evidence from Trump’s war on drug cartels? U.S. and Dominican Republic officials have pulled 13 bales containing more than 370 packages of “suspected cocaine” from the waters of the Caribbean Sea near a site where the U.S. military recently destroyed a boat suspected of trafficking drugs, several outlets—including the New York Times, Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal—reported Monday (gift link). 

Video of the recovered packages can be seen in a Sunday press conference from Dominican authorities, here. 

It’s unclear when the boat was destroyed, but President Trump has claimed to have ordered the military to attack at least three such alleged drug-trafficking boats this month—the first on Sept. 2, the next on Sept. 15, and the latest on Sept. 19. 

Context: “Human rights groups have said the strikes on the boats amount to extra judicial killings, and on Friday two Democratic senators introduced a resolution in Congress that seeks to block the administration from carrying out further strikes,” AP writes. 

“The speedboat was en route to the Dominican Republic and those on board planned to use the country as a bridge before smuggling the drugs to the U.S.,” the Journal reports, citing officials from the Dominican Republic’s National Directorate for Drug Control. The newspaper did not disclose how the officials made that determination, nor did Dominican officials share any new information on those on the boat when they were killed by the U.S. military. 

A new report says China’s military diplomacy is taking off in Latin America. That includes an increase in students from the region “enrolled in Chinese military colleges, which was more than five times the number in the United States starting in 2020,” researchers from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies write in a report published Monday. 

Russia, meanwhile, has leaned more on its “soft power” in the region, since the majority of its military is bogged down in a Ukraine invasion that has turned into a grinding war of attrition. 

Still, “For now, Washington remains the preferred defense partner for many [Latin American] countries,” the report says. But more could be done, like “Working with Major Non-NATO Allies like Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia to streamline arms procurement processes and encourage greater interoperability with U.S. forces can help to minimize the appeal of Beijing or Moscow’s offers.” Read the rest, here. 

Less than two weeks after Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of attempting a coup in 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department on Monday announced sanctions against Viviane Barci de Moraes—who is the wife of Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who oversaw Bolsonaro’s prosecution. 

Trump’s State Department alleges Justice Moraes “weaponize[d] courts, authorize[d] arbitrary pretrial detentions, and suppress[ed] freedom of expression” in Brazil.  

Brazil’s POV: The U.S. sanctions are “a new attempt of undue interference in Brazilian internal affairs,” Brazil’s government said in a statement. It also alleges “the U.S. government tried to justify the adoption of the measure with falsehoods” in an effort to “politicize” and “distort…the Brazilian judiciary’s efforts to defend democratic institutions and uphold rule of law.” 

Reuters: “The new sanctions underline Trump’s use of financial penalties for political ends.”

Europe

NATO officials met Tuesday to discuss Russia’s violation of Estonia’s airspace on Friday when three armed Russian MiG-31 aircraft flew over the eastern European nation for more than ten minutes amid Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Estonia requested the alliance meeting, in accordance with Article 4, a move Poland also requested when a similar development involving Russian drones occurred less than two weeks ago. 

“Several other Allies—including Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Romania—have also recently experienced airspace violations by Russia,” NATO’s North Atlantic Council said in a statement Tuesday. “Russia bears full responsibility for these actions, which are escalatory, risk miscalculation and endanger lives. They must stop.”

“Allies will not be deterred by these and other irresponsible acts by Russia from their enduring commitments to support Ukraine, whose security contributes to ours, in the exercise of its inherent right to self-defence against Russia’s brutal and unprovoked war of aggression,” the council members added. 

Estonia calls on NATO to expand air patrols and other defense measures under the alliance’s new Eastern Sentry effort, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Monday from Tallinn. 

Germany’s 80-billion-euro rearmament plan mostly skips U.S. weapons, Politico reports off budget documents submitted to the German parliament. Just 8 percent of the total is slated to buy U.S.-made arms, with the lion’s share headed to European companies. “That’s a blow for Donald Trump, who has been putting pressure on European countries to continue buying U.S. arms despite the geopolitical turmoil emanating from the White House,” Politico reported Tuesday. More details, here.

Trump 2.0

President Trump wants to prosecute Americans who openly oppose fascism in a new executive order entitled, “DESIGNATING ANTIFA AS A DOMESTIC TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.” 

According to Trump, “Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and…uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals.” 

He also claims its members “obstruct enforcement of Federal laws through armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers, and routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activists.” Trump’s new order directs federal agencies to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle” Antifa and its financial supporters wherever they can be found. 

For the record: Trump “issued a domestic terrorism designation that doesn’t exist under U.S. law,” the New York Times reported after the order was made public Monday. The Times calls the group “a diffuse and sometimes violent protest culture of left-wing activists who want to stop the far right” after taking “its name and iconography from the antifascist movement that opposed the Nazi Party and other far-right political parties in the 1920s and 30s.”

Another consideration: “Antifa does not have a leader that could be targeted, a roster of known members, bank accounts to freeze or a centralized structure,” the Times reports. The BBC has more, here. 

Related reading/viewing: 

• “ICE agents held 5-year-old girl outside Leominster home to get father to surrender, family says,” NBC Boston reported Monday; 
• “The Marine veteran behind this viral photo at the Chicago ICE protest,” via Task & Purpose reporting Monday; 
• And “Kim Jong Un’s Proposition to Trump: Let’s Talk—but Not About Nukes,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Why is there no Coast Guard commandant yet? At least partly because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lives in the commandant’s house and “she doesn’t want to get kicked out,” Ben Terris of New York Magazine reminded readers in a lengthy Monday profile of the Homeland Security Department under Noem, with an eye on her influential chief of staff and alleged romantic partner Corey Lewandowski. 

Reminder: Adm. Kevin Lunday has been acting commandant since Trump’s inauguration.

Reminder: Noem is “overseeing a massive influx of some $170 billion that Republicans set aside for combating illegal immigration, money that will go toward expanding DHS’s detention capacity to 100,000 beds (ICE is currently holding more than 58,000 detainees), increasing the size of ICE (in part by offering up to $50,000 in signing bonuses and eliminating the age cap on new hires), bolstering law-enforcement border support, and underwriting a propaganda campaign that has clogged social media with everything from Zero Dark Thirty–style PSAs to paeans to white-nationalist mythology,” Terris reports. 

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