MCYSEKA-Maritime Cyber Security Knowledge Archive

More F-35s to the Caribbean. An Air National Guard F-35 wing is deploying as part of the Pentagon’s campaign against alleged drug runners off the coast of Latin America. A U.S. official confirmed to Defense One that the Vermont Air National Guard’s 158th Fighter Wing will be mobilizing for Operation Southern Spear, but did not provide details on the number of F-35As that would be deployed. 

Media outlets in Vermont first reported the wing’s preparations for a federal mission, and The War Zone confirmed the ties to the Pentagon’s military activities in the Caribbean Sea.

The deployment marks the latest increase in U.S. military force as part of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro. This past week, a U.S. official confirmed to Defense One that a pair of Navy F/A-18s flew over the Gulf of Venezuela. Other military aircraft tracked off the coast of the South American country in recent months have included B-1 and B-52 bombers, MQ-9 Reaper drones and Marine Corps F-35Bs.

Additional reading: 

• “Troops Involved in Boat Strikes Face a ‘Moral Injury’ Risk, Experts Say,” the New York Times reported Friday; 
• And Homeland Security Secretary Kristi “Noem links the seizure of an oil tanker off Venezuela to US antidrug efforts,” the Associated Press reported Thursday from a House Homeland Security Committee hearing. (Read more from Noem’s Thursday hearing below the fold.)

“Enemy from within”? NORTHCOM commander says he hasn’t seen it. The military commander overseeing National Guard deployments in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had no intelligence to suggest the military is facing an “enemy within,” Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Thursday. 

The remarks from Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot stand in contrast to President Trump’s statements during his September speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico when he told an auditorium of top military officers, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard.” Trump added that “this is going to be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”

But on Thursday, Guillot said he has not been tasked with any domestic military operations against an “enemy from within,” and he doesn’t “have any indication of an enemy within.” Senators questioned the general as well as a top Pentagon lawyer and the Defense Department’s deputy assistant secretary for homeland security and Americas security affairs during a hearing on the recent deployment of National Guard troops to U.S. cities. Several of those deployments have been declared illegal in federal court, but the administration has sought appeals that have allowed troops to stay in place.

“If this administration cared about law and order, it would not be ignoring the growing number of judges, including those appointed by Trump himself, who’ve deemed these deployments illegal,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Army veteran and Illinois Democrat said at the hearing. “In Illinois, a judge from the Northern District found that the [Homeland Security Department] account of the situation on the ground, and I quote, ‘was simply unreliable.’”

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, questioned whether the emergencies Trump has declared to justify sending in troops are truly occurring. “We have a president who has a very low bar as to what constitutes an emergency,” he said. “I live in Maine, on the border of Canada—there is no emergency with Canada, and yet this president declared an emergency in order to impose tariffs on Canada, which is wrecking their economy.” Continue reading, here. 

New: At least 200 National Guard troops have been activated in Washington state after record flooding along several rivers this week, including the Nooksack, Snohomish, Cedar, and Skagit, in the western part of the state, Seattle’s King5 News reports. 

Around 100,000 people could be evacuated, Gov. Bob Ferguson said, declaring a state of emergency after intense rainfall from what meteorologists refer to as an “atmospheric river” swept across the region this week. “Ten to 18 inches of rain have fallen over the Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges in the last 72 hours,” and “More than 5 million people were under flood alerts Thursday morning, including in parts of Montana and a small part of Idaho,” NBC News reported.  

Guard troops are carrying out occasional rescues, flying surveillance over rising waters, and helping fill sandbags across the area, much of which you can review on social media, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “There’s a divide within the Space Force. Congress is forcing the service to address it,” Defense One’s Novelly reported Thursday; 
• “Crew Optional Designs Could Be Barred By Law From Navy’s Drone Ship Program,” The War Zone reported Wednesday; 
• “Navy launches first information warfare squadron,” Military Times reported Tuesday; 
• And the “Air Force wants AI to power high-speed wargaming,” Defense News reported Tuesday.

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson, Thomas Novelly, and 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 1935, the Nazis secretly launched a eugenics program known as the Lebensborn project.

DHS officials deported U.S. Army veteran Sae Joon Park as part of Trump’s anti-immigration crackdowns, Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I, revealed in Thursday’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing. 

DHS Secretary Noem initially denied any such thing had happened, telling the panel of lawmakers, “We have not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.” 

But Magaziner then showed her Park, a Purple Heart recipient, on an iPad listening to the hearing live via Zoom. Park moved to the U.S. from Korea when he was seven years old and enlisted in the Army after graduating from high school. He was shot twice while serving in Panama in 1989. According to an August letter of inquiry sent to Noem by Sens. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., after Park was wounded in combat, he “battled undiagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which led to a drug addiction and a criminal conviction for jumping bail, resulting in the revocation of his green card. However, immigration officials allowed Mr. Park to remain in the U.S. as long as he checked in yearly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). During his most recent check-in in June, ICE officials told Mr. Park that he would be detained unless he self-deported. He left behind two children and an ailing mother in Hawaii.”

Magaziner also introduced a veteran from Missouri named Jim Brown. “Browns’s wife—a native of Ireland—has lived in the U.S. for 48 years before being detained and facing deportation,” ABC News reports. “Her only criminal record was writing two bad checks totaling $80 several years ago.” 

But Noem wasn’t facing an entirely hostile environment. “Deport them all. This is our country,” said Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., when it was his time to speak. “We get to decide who comes in and we get to decide who has to leave. And I say deport them all.”

Noem: “What keeps me up at night is that we don’t necessarily know all of the people that are in this country, who they are and what their intentions are,” she told the lawmakers before later promising to look into Park’s deportation. 

ICYMI: Trump vowed to deport the “worst of the worst” immigrants, and this week DHS launched a website purporting to illustrate this featuring the names of more than 9,800 of the “hundreds of thousands” of people taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the past 11 months. 

However, for the vast majority of people, no corroboration was given of their purported criminality, as Defense One reported Tuesday. Among the first 1,200 names, just 4% linked to DHS press releases; no other kind of documentation was offered. And most people arrested by ICE this year had no criminal record at all, Axios reported last week off a new tranche of data released by the agency. “The new data confirms that the Trump administration isn’t focused on legitimate public safety risks, but rather on hitting politically motivated arrest targets,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told Axios. 

Related reading: 

• “‘Blatant lawlessness’: Judge decries another ‘unlawful’ deportation,” Politico reported last week; 
• “Foreign tourists could be required to disclose 5 years of social media histories under Trump administration plan,” NBC News reported Tuesday; 
• “About 400 immigrant children were detained longer than the recommended limit, ICE admits,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday; 
• And in Illinois, “Church Nativity scenes add zip ties, gas masks and ICE to protest immigration raids,” AP reported Friday. 

Also at the Noem hearing: FBI calls antifa “our primary concern right now,” but can’t explain why. Testifying alongside Noem that the House homeland security hearing, Michael Glasheen, a veteran FBI agent who is now serving as operations director of the National Security Branch, said, “When you look at the data right now, you look at the domestic terrorist threat that we’re facing right now, what I see from my position is that’s the most immediate violent threat that we’re facing on the domestic side.”

When pressed, Glasheen offered not data but non sequiturs. When Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi, the committee’s ranking member, asked where “antifa” is headquartered and how many members it has, Glasheen responded, “We are building out the infrastructure right now.”

“So what does that mean?” Thompson replied. “We’re trying to get the information. You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us, as a committee, how did you come to that? How many members do they have in the United States, as of right now?” Glasheen said the number is “very fluid” and that the investigation into the movement and its members is ongoing, comparing it to al-Qaeda and ISIS. USA Today and The Intercept have more.

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