The D Brief: More maritime strikes, seizure; Warships off Haiti; US official hints at new nukes; Introducing ‘Fictional Intelligence’; And a bit more.

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The U.S. military seized its eighth tanker allegedly linked to Venezuela, the Defense Department said on social media Monday. 

The interdiction occurred “without incident in the INDOPACOM area of responsibility,” according to the post, which claimed the incident happened “overnight” though the accompanying one-minute video showed a daytime operation. 

“Suezmax tanker Aquila II departed from Venezuelan waters in early January…carrying about 700,000 barrels of Venezuelan heavy crude bound for China,” Reuters reports. U.S. forces “tracked and hunted this vessel from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean,” the Defense Department said in a statement, and added, “By land, air, or sea, our Armed Forces will find you and deliver justice. You will run out of fuel long before you will outrun us.” 

The U.S. military carried out its 37th deadly strike on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the waters around Latin America, U.S. Southern Command said in a statement late last week. The strike happened Thursday and killed two occupants as the vessel traveled along “known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific,” SOUTHCOM said, and specifically credited its new commander as ordering the strike. 

The U.S. has killed at least 128 people in its boat-strike campaign so far, which began in early September with a series of strikes that some say may have violated the laws of war. Critics have likened the strikes to a campaign of extrajudicial killings, and the administration has yet to share evidence supporting its claims that those aboard the boats were in fact trafficking drugs when they were killed. The New York Times maintains a tracker from that lethal campaign, here. 

By the way: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed Thursday that “Some top cartel drug-traffickers in the @SOUTHCOM [region] have decided to cease all narcotics operations INDEFINITELY due to recent (highly effective) kinetic strikes in the Caribbean,” the Pentagon chief wrote on his personal social media account—without providing evidence to support his claim. “This is deterrence through strength.”

While the White House continues to threaten Cuba by cutting off oil shipments to the island nation, U.S. Navy warships are in the waters near Haiti, which is dealing with growing gang violence and instability, the Haitian Times reported Wednesday. 

“The ships—the USS Stockdale, USCGC Stone and USCGC Diligence—arrived under Operation Southern Spear, according to an embassy statement issued after images of the vessels circulated widely on social media on Feb. 3, prompting widespread reaction of Haitians across the world,” the local newspaper reported last week. “The U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard reaffirm their partnership and support to ensure a safer and more prosperous Haiti,” embassy officials said in their statement. 

“As Haitians debate sovereignty, security and foreign involvement, reactions to the U.S. naval presence remain mixed,” the Haitian Times reports. “Some see it as a potential lifeline amid worsening insecurity, while others fear it signals renewed external influence at a time when Haiti’s political future hangs in the balance.” More, here. 

Related reading: 

Army moves to link a full division with its next-gen C2 prototype. The 4th Infantry Division is working to scale testing of the Army’s next-generation command-and-control system from a battalion to division level by this summer, the division’s commander told reporters on Thursday.

The Colorado-based unit is coming off of more than two weeks in the field for its latest Ivy Sting exercise, Maj. Gen. Pat Ellis said, the fifth since the series began in September. This time, they increased from the ability to shoot from one networked artillery system to six, among other incremental advancements. Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more.

See also: “The US Army’s quiet rotation in the Philippines,” via Military Times, reporting Saturday. 

New: Defense One launches Fictional Intelligence, a new monthly column by authors Peter W. Singer and August Cole; it explores the future of technology and warfare through the lens of short speculative fiction. Read the first one—about China, space, ground networks, and special operations—here.

Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on 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 we’d like to take a moment to 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 2001, and during a public-relations mission with eight CEOs and their spouses, U.S. Navy submarine USS Greeneville surfaced and collided with the Japanese fishery training ship Ehime Maru, killing four of the 35 people on board and sinking the ship just 10 minutes later off the coast of Hawaii. 

Trump 2.0

The Trump administration is under fire after the NSA detected a “foreign intelligence phone call about a person close to Trump,” the Guardian reported Saturday in a follow-up to Wall Street Journal reporting last week regarding unusual actions taken by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last May—just weeks before the U.S. military carried out unprecedented attacks inside Iran in conjunction with the Israeli military. 

“But rather than allowing NSA officials to distribute the information further, Gabbard took a paper copy of the intelligence directly to the president’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, according to the whistleblower’s attorney,” Cate Brown of the Guardian reports. “One day after meeting Wiles, Gabbard told the NSA not to publish the intelligence report. Instead, she instructed NSA officials to transmit the highly classified details directly to her office.” 

Lawmakers were briefed on the matter last week. And after that briefing, the New York Times reported that “It is not clear what country the two foreign nationals were from, but the discussion involved Iran.”

Relatedly, the White House has changed its story four times while trying to explain DNI Gabbard’s presence during a recent FBI raid at an election center in Georgia, the New York Times reported Thursday. Why it matters: “Gabbard’s involvement in the Georgia raid has drawn scrutiny given that her role overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies does not include on-site involvement in criminal investigative work, and because the results of Georgia’s 2020 election have been the cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s claims that the election was rigged against him.”

Commentary: “Tulsi Gabbard is showing why her job shouldn’t exist,” veteran national security columnist David Ignatius argued Thursday in the Washington Post. 

In Eastern Europe, Trump’s ambassador to Poland floated withdrawing American troops after a Polish lawmaker said the president doesn’t deserve a Nobel Peace prize, Politico reported Friday. Those remarks from Ambassador Tom Rose were just one in a flurry of posts on social media after criticism Monday from Polish Parliament Speaker Włodzimierz Czarzasty. Rose announced “no further dealings, contacts, or communications” with Czarzasty, and later threatened, “Should we take all our soldiers and equipment with us?” (He eventually deleted that post after calls for decorum from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.)

Meanwhile, the White House has reportedly given Ukraine and Russia a new deadline to find some way to end Russia’s Ukraine invasion. AP has a bit more, reporting Saturday from Kyiv, here. 

And speaking of Russia, disgraced financier Jeffrey “Epstein’s network included Russian tech investors with past Kremlin ties,” the Washington Post reported Friday. That includes “Masha Drokova, a former teen leader of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s youth organization, Nashi.” 

Trump’s Navy secretary John Phelan is listed on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs twice in 2006, CNN reported Friday after the manifests were shared on Reddit. The first was a flight from New York to London while Phelan worked on Feb. 27, 2006, while Phelan worked as an advisor with Dell Technologies. The second was from London back to New York on March 3. “There is no evidence Phelan knew of any wrongdoing by Epstein or his associates when he took the flight,” CNN reports. Four months later, Epstein was indicted in Florida for felony solicitation of prostitution.

“The flight manifests list Epstein, Phelan and a handful of other men, including Jean-Luc Brunel, a French model scout who was accused of rape during the 1990s and later of providing girls to Epstein. Brunel was found dead in his jail cell in France in 2022 after being charged in a related case; authorities ruled it death by suicide,” Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported Friday as well. 

Related reading: 

U.S. official hints at building new nukes. “February 5, 2026, indeed marks the end of an era: the end of US unilateral restraint,” Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Thomas DiNanno told the U.N.’s Disarmament Conference in Vienna on Friday, alluding to the end of the New START Treaty. CNN: “Although he did not explicitly say the US would upload additional nuclear weapons now that it was no longer bound by the agreement, he indicated it was likely.”

DiNanno also accused China of testing a nuke, saying that the country had “conducted one such yield-producing nuclear test on June 22 of 2020.” DiNanno provided no details about the test, though he further alleged that China had sought to conceal the test by conducting it in a purpose-built underground cavern. A former U.S. official told CNN that U.S. information about the test has been declassified.

China is a signatory to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty of 1996, but has not ratified it, which is part of the reason the treaty is not yet in force.

DiNanno also repeated calls for new arms-control talks between Russia, China, and the United States, echoing the approach of the first Trump administration. Arms-control experts have noted that China has little interest in such talks. 

Amid Trump’s talk of one day acquiring Greenland as America’s “52nd state,” Canada just opened a consulate there in a “show of support” for the Arctic island, the Financial Times reported late last week. 

The Greenland consulate is part of “our new foreign policy and Arctic strategy,” and is “focused on security, sovereignty, and partnership in the North,” Foreign Minister Anita Anand announced on social media Thursday. 

“France also opened a consulate in Nuuk on Friday, making it the first EU member to have a diplomatic mission in Greenland,” FT adds. 

By the way: Trump again posted about making Greenland and Canada a U.S. territory, sharing an AI-generated map on social media just before midnight Sunday. 

Additional reading/listening: 

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