MCYSEKA-Maritime Cyber Security Knowledge Archive

The White House’s boat-strike defense reportedly continues to evolve. Trump officials now say the second strike that killed two survivors of a Sept. 2 attack was intended to destroy the speedboat and not the crew, Hugo Lowell of the Guardian reported Wednesday, describing this as “the firmest legal ground” to base the attacks, which numerous lawmakers and critics have said appear to have been either murder or a war crime. (Former Justice Department attorney Joyce Vance wrote Tuesday, “If we were at war, it was a war crime. If we were not, it was murder.”)

This defense hinges on “a secret justice department office of legal counsel (OLC) memo blessing the strikes,” according to three lawyers familiar with the memo, Lowell reports. “And perhaps most crucially for the administration…the OLC memo says the fact that anyone on board would probably die from a strike does not make a boat an improper military target.”

On the other hand, “The OLC memo has been fiercely criticized by outside legal experts given the little public evidence to support the notion that the cartels are using drugs to finance armed violence, rather than the other way around,” Lowell writes in what could be a preview of classified testimony today before lawmakers from the commander at the time, Navy Adm. Frank Bradley. Continue reading, here. 

Bradley is expected to testify that he and local commanders concluded that the two survivors of a Sept. 2 attack were still trying to deliver drugs and therefore were lawful targets, two defense officials told the Wall Street Journal.

Related: Defense Secretary Pete “Hegseth Asked Top Admiral to Resign After Months of Discord,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, revising the Pentagon’s initial narrative that Southern Command’s Adm. Alvin Holsey’s early departure was voluntary. 

DODIG’s Signalgate report just came out; read it here. Several newsrooms have already reported on the investigation by the Defense Department’s inspector general on Hegseth’s use of a messaging app to share imminent war plans over the Signal messaging app with a journalist in March.

Topline: “Hegseth risked compromising sensitive military information, which could have endangered American troops and mission objectives, when he used Signal in March of this year to share highly-sensitive attack plans targeting Houthi rebels in Yemen,” CNN reported Wednesday. However, it doesn’t appear as though Hegseth will face any consequences for his actions “since the IG concluded that the defense secretary has the authority to declassify information,” four sources familiar with the report said.  

“The information Hegseth shared included the precise times that fighter pilots would attack their targets, the sort of information ordinarily shared only on secure platforms,” five reporters for The Atlantic wrote Wednesday, noting, “If Houthi militants had learned those details in advance, they might have been able to shoot down American planes or better defend their positions.”

Hegseth’s Trump-esque reax: “No classified information. Total exoneration. Case closed. Houthis bombed into submission.” (“Houthis Resume Red Sea Ship Attacks” reported the Soufan Center in July, while the Stimson Center concluded that “U.S. airstrikes on Yemen fell short of degrading the Houthis’ military capabilities and strengthened their domestic and regional propaganda.”) 

SASC’s Wicker says Hegseth did nothing wrong sharing the strike plans over an open channel. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said in a statement Wednesday “the Secretary acted within his authority to communicate the information in question to other cabinet level officials.” 

“It is also clear to me that our senior leaders need more tools available to them to communicate classified information in real time and a variety of environments. I think we have some work to do in providing those tools to our national security leaders,” he said.

SASC’s Reed demurs: “The Inspector General’s findings confirm that Secretary Hegseth violated military regulations and continues to show reckless disregard for the safety of American servicemembers,” Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said in his own statement. 

“Contrary to the Administration’s claims, this report is the opposite of ‘total exoneration’ for the Secretary. The IG concluded this information could have jeopardized the mission and endangered U.S. personnel.”

Coverage continues below…

Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Bradley Peniston with Ben Watson. 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 1992, President George H. W. Bush ordered 28,000 U.S. troops to Somalia in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 794. On Tuesday, President Trump said of Somali-Americans, “I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you, OK? Somebody would say, oh, that’s not politically correct. I don’t care. I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”

Fatal mishap in California. A Marine died from injuries in a tactical vehicle accident during training at Camp Pendleton Wednesday. 

It’s too soon to know much about the incident. But the mishap occurred at about 1:45 p.m. PST, and the service member was assigned to the 1 Marine Expeditionary Force. “The name of the deceased is being withheld until 24 hours after next of kin notification. The cause of the incident is currently under investigation,” base officials said in a statement late Wednesday.

The $148 billion failure: Watchdog’s final report excoriates America’s attempt to rebuild Afghanistan. For 17 years, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, tracked every dollar allocated to the country for security, development, and humanitarian aid. 

SIGAR’s final report, a 125-page “forensic audit,” limns its thousands of pages of analysis and documentation of a reconstruction effort that consumed more money than the Marshall Plan, yet was rife with waste and fraud. Per the 2025 defense authorization act, the office will close Jan. 31. “The mission promised to bring stability and democracy to Afghanistan, yet ultimately delivered neither,” the report said. “The outcome in Afghanistan should serve as a cautionary tale for policymakers contemplating similar reconstruction efforts in the future.” Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reports, here.

Developing: The New York Times just filed a lawsuit against the Defense Department “over the Pentagon’s new policy that requires media outlets to pledge not to gather information unless defense officials formally authorize its release,” NPR’s David Folkenflik reported Thursday. 

1A considerations: The new restrictions are “exactly the type of speech and press-restrictive scheme that the Supreme Court and D.C. Circuit have recognized violates the First Amendment,” the suit says. “The Policy abandons scrutiny by independent news organizations for the public’s benefit.” 

Second opinion: “The Pentagon’s press access policy is unlawful because it gives government officials unchecked power over who gets a credential and who doesn’t, something the First Amendment prohibits,” Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement Thursday. “The public needs independent journalism and the reporters who deliver it back in the Pentagon at a time of heightened scrutiny of the Department’s actions.” Read or listen to more from Folkenflik, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Majority of Americans favor more support to Ukraine, Ukrainian victory,” Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports from the latest annual Reagan National Defense Survey;
• “Trump is fighting the Institute of Peace in court. Now, his name is on the building,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday;
• And relatedly, “Congo and Rwanda to sign symbolic peace deal in Washington as fighting rages,” NPR reported Thursday.

Industry

Northrop Grumman to fly new, improved CCA offering next year. When Northrop Grumman lost its initial bid for the U.S. Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft, the company went back to the drawing board. Now, it wants to fly a new prototype, called Project Talon, in the next nine months, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports from testing grounds at Mojave, Calif. 

Project Talon—previously referred to as Project Lotus internally—builds on the company’s initial offering for the first increment of the U.S. Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft program. But while CCA’s first increment is designed for air-to-air missions, Northrop developed Talon to handle a variety of missions, Tom Jones, corporate vice president and president for Northrop Grumman Aeronautics Systems, told reporters Wednesday in California. 

The prototype aircraft took about 15 months to build with Northrop’s subsidiary Scaled Composites, and goals of lowering costs while speeding up manufacturing to produce aircraft faster. Northrop was able to reduce Talon’s build time by almost a third, and cut the aircraft’s number of parts in half compared to previous designs. 

The new unveiling comes a few months after Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works announced its multipurpose CCA competitor drone, Vectis, and its plans to fly it in 2027. It also comes after the Navy awarded contracts earlier this year to Anduril, Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to develop the service’s CCA drones. Read more, here. 

Grumman was also recently awarded a $200 million contract to make counter-drone munitions using an air-burst round produced since at least 2022 based on sensing technology a company official said at the time “has been around for decades.” The round “only needs to get close enough to detect a target, at which point it detonates, sending fragmentation for defeat,” Grumman said in a press release Wednesday. 

Production will be spread across four locations: Plymouth and Elk River facilities in Minnesota, West Virginia’s Allegany Ballistics Laboratory, and Virginia’s Radford Ammunition Plant. 

Related reading: “To rebuild America’s defense industry, unleash private capital,” Rep. Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, argued in a commentary published Wednesday in Defense One.

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