Twenty-six nations have pledged post-war military support for Ukraine’s security, French President Emmanual Macron announced Thursday during a visit with his Ukrainian counterpart in Paris. Macron, however, did not list the 26 countries. 

“Today, for the first time in a long time, this is the first such serious, very specific substance,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said after a summit meeting of Kyiv’s allies Thursday. 

Context: “The meeting of 35 leaders from the ‘coalition of the willing’—of mainly European countries—was intended to finalise security guarantees and ask Trump for the backing that Europeans say is vital to make such guarantees viable,” Reuters reports.

Macron: “The day the conflict stops, the security guarantees will be deployed,” he said standing alongside Zelenskyy. Read more via the Institute for the Study of War, which also reviewed Zelenskyy’s Paris visit atop their Thursday assessment, here.

ICYMI, here’s Putin, on what may come next in his war of conquest: “It seems to me that if common sense prevails, it will be possible to agree on an acceptable solution to end this conflict,” the Russian leader told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday. “Especially since we can see the mood of the current U.S. administration under President [Donald] Trump, and we see not just their statements, but their sincere desire to find this solution…If not, then we will have to resolve all the tasks before us by force of arms.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration says it will cut some security funds for European countries bordering Russia. “The decision, affecting hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid, has alarmed NATO allies and upset U.S. lawmakers who strongly back the alliance,” the Washington Post reported Thursday. The Financial Times has more, here.

Additional reading: 

• “Veterans lead Europe’s defence tech revolution as Ukraine war fuels investment boom,” Reuters reported earlier this week off an analysis of the continent’s 80-plus defense startups;
• “Russian Strike Kills 2 Deminers From Danish Refugee Council in Ukraine,” the Moscow Times reported Thursday; the New York Times has a bit more;
• And “Denmark to host Ukrainian missile fuel production in NATO first,” Defense News reported Friday from Berlin. 

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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 with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1942, Japanese imperial forces suffered their first land warfare defeat of World War II when they were forced to withdraw from the Battle of Milne Bay, on the eastern edge of ​​New Guinea. 

Around the Pentagon

Newly-revealed: Failed top-secret SEAL mission in North Korea. President Trump ordered a secretive raid into North Korea in early 2019, but it went off the rails almost as soon as it began, resulting in the deaths of at least two Korean fishermen whose lungs were punctured “with knives to make sure their bodies would sink,” never to be seen again. 

Dave Philipps and Matthew Cole reported the extraordinary details Friday for the New York Times, which noted, “If the public and [U.S.] policymakers become aware only of high-profile successes” by American special operations forces, “they may underestimate the extreme risks that American forces undertake.” Such missions, Phillips and Cole write, also risk “setting off a broader conflict with a hostile, nuclear-armed and highly militarized adversary.”

The mission reportedly centered around “a newly developed electronic device” believed to be able to intercept the communications of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. But the SEALs would have to place the device themselves in incredibly challenging conditions: traveling underwater in the cold darkness of a winter night, hoping no one will spot any portion of their activities due to a communications blackout and lack of real-time surveillance along the coast. 

But they encountered a local fishing crew almost as soon as they approached the shore. With little time to waste, “the senior enlisted SEAL at the shore chose a course of action. He wordlessly centered his rifle and fired. The other SEALs instinctively did the same.” They then “swam to the boat to make sure that all of the North Koreans were dead. They found no guns or uniforms. Evidence suggested that the crew, which people briefed on the mission said numbered two or three people, had been civilians diving for shellfish.”

Also: “The Trump administration did not notify key members of Congress who oversee intelligence operations, before or after the mission. The lack of notification may have violated the law.” Read the full account from Phillips and Cole, (gift link), here. 

New: The District of Columbia has sued Trump over the “military occupation” of the city by National Guard troops and units from states outside the district. 

The suit cites Guard troops from Louisiana, South Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi and South Carolina—none of whom were federalized, Jacob Fischler of States Newsroom reports, “meaning they remain legally under the command of their governors and cannot enter another state or the district without a request from the governor or the mayor of Washington, D.C.,” according to the suit filed by D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb. 

“Defendants have established a massive, seemingly indefinite law enforcement operation in the District subject to direct military command. The danger that such an operation poses to individual liberty and democratic rule is self-evident,” Schwalb’s complaint says.

Reminder: Trump offered false and exaggerated crime statistics to justify the Guard deployment and his takeover of the D.C. police in August. 

Expert reax: “The administration is pushing the bounds of every existing legal theory that’s out there for domestic military deployment,” University of Houston Law Center Professor Christopher Mirasola said. “It’s absolutely corrosive of our democracy, because I think there’s a potential for a real shift in how we think about the military’s role in our domestic affairs.” Read more, here. 

New: The White House says Trump will indeed try to rename the Defense Department as the “Department of War,” administration officials told Fox on Thursday. 

His executive order says for now the change will apply “as a secondary title,” and also authorizes “secondary titles such as ‘Secretary of War,’ ‘Department of War,’ and ‘Deputy Secretary of War’ in official correspondence, public communications, ceremonial contexts, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch,” according to Nick Schifrin of PBS News. 

By law, the DOD cannot be renamed by executive order. “Congress created the Dept of Defense through the National Security Act Amendments of 1949, which Truman signed into law. Trump can no more undo this unilaterally than he can rename Mars Trump Wor[l]d,” noted historian Joshua Zeitz, writing Friday on social media. 

That’s likely why Trump’s order also “instructs the Secretary of War to recommend actions, to include legislative and executive actions, required to permanently rename the U.S. Department of Defense to the U.S. Department of War,” according to the White House’s fact sheet. 

“We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, I don’t even think we need that,” Trump said last week. 

Why now? To “sharpen the focus of this Department on our national interest and signal to adversaries America’s readiness to wage war to secure its interests,” the White House says. 

Behind the optics: “The change is also a reflection of how much Trump and Secretary of Defense (his title for now) Pete Hegseth think of themselves as tough guys,” former Naval War College professor Tom Nichols writes in The Atlantic. “It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move.”

If this moves ahead, “The cost of renaming the DOD will run into tens of millions of dollars, maybe much more,” Nichols writes. “Everything from official seals to uniform patches and medals might have to be replaced—and for what? Because a president who never served a day in uniform and a macho-obsessed former Army major think that using words like war will provide the sense of purpose and gravity they both lack?”

Second opinion: “If lawmakers want to preserve our international reputation as a defender against aggression by others and not an initiator of violence, they should reject any name change,” writes former National War College professor Charlie Stevenson, who served as a Senate staffer for 22 years. 

Also today on Fox: its Business channel relays dismal new numbers for Trump’s tariff-shaken U.S. economy: 22,000 jobs that were added in August are “much less than the expectation of 75,000” as the U.S. experienced its slowest 4-month growth since 2020, with rising unemployment and 21,000 in downward revisions for June and July employment numbers.

Around the services

Air Force debuts pilotless cargo flights in the Pacific. Autonomous cargo flights were a little-known feature of the summer’s massive Resolute Force Pacific exercise, designed to prepare for a potential conflict with China. The flights between multiple Hawaiian islands, operated by a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan powered by Joby Aviation’s Superpilot software, were remotely operated from Guam, which is about 4,000 miles away. The goal is to make logistics flights in the vast theater cheaper during wartime, reports Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams, here.

Related: “SECNAV moves to consolidate Navy’s unmanned offices, pauses ‘all’ robotic contracting activities,” Breaking Defense reports, citing a Sept. 3 memo.

Update: Trump is expected to nominate acting NSA/CyberCom chief Lt. Gen. William Hartman to formally lead both agencies, Politico reported Thursday. Hartman has held the posts since April, when Trump fired Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh after meeting with far-right activist Laura Loomer. 

Forecast: “Hartman is unlikely to face much pushback to his nomination in the Senate.” More, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Senator’s Visit to Spy Agency Was Canceled After Laura Loomer Complained,” the New York Times reported Wednesday; 
• “Army cancels Biden-era promotion program aimed at eliminating bias,” Military Times reported Tuesday; 
• And in commentary, “The National Defense Strategy still matters. Let’s get it right,” argue Lauren Speranza of the Center for European Policy Analysis and Chris Estep from the Foreign Policy Research Institute, writing Thursday in Defense One. 

Trump 2.0

Venezuela flew its fighter jets over a U.S. Navy ship in a “show of force” on Thursday, CBS News reports. The two F-16 fighter jets were armed as they passed over the USS Jason Dunham, which is part of a U.S. flotilla deployed to the waters near Latin America to fight drug trafficking. 

“This highly provocative move was designed to interfere with our counter narco-terror operations,” the U.S. military said in a statement on social media, and warned in accusation, “The cartel running Venezuela is strongly advised not to pursue any further effort to obstruct, deter or interfere with counter-narcotics and counter-terror operations carried out by the US military.”

Update: The U.S. is adding two more Latin American gangs to its list of foreign terrorist organizations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Thursday during a trip to Ecuador. 

“One is Los Lobos and the other is Los Choneros,” and both are from Ecuador, Rubio said. According to the Associated Press, “Los Choneros, Los Lobos and other similar groups are involved in contract killings, extortion operations and the movement and sale of drugs. Authorities have blamed them for the increased violence in the country as they fight over drug-trafficking routes to the Pacific and control of territory, including within prisons.”

Context: “Violence has skyrocketed in Ecuador since the pandemic,” AP adds. And “Cartels from Mexico, Colombia and the Balkans have settled in Ecuador because it uses the U.S. dollar and has weak laws and institutions, along with a network of long-established gangs.” 

Also notable: “Ecuador in July extradited to the U.S. the leader of Los Choneros,” who was recaptured in June after a prison escape. More, here. 

Related reading: 

• “Trump Claims the Power to Summarily Kill Suspected Drug Smugglers,” Charlie Savage wrote Thursday in an analysis piece for the New York Times;
• “Can Trump Just Do Whatever He Wants by Declaring Emergencies?” Adam Kushner of the Times asked separately on Thursday; 
• And review “How Trump Used 10 Emergency Declarations to Justify Hundreds of Actions,” also via the Times in an interactive reported about two weeks ago. 

Asia

The big threat left out of Xi’s parade: China’s weaponized AI startups. A new report from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology notes a growing ecosystem of small and nimble dual-use AI companies working with the Chinese military. “Those partnerships make it harder for the United States to track what new weapons China is developing and prevent U.S. investors or technology collaborators from helping them,” writes Defense One’s Patrick Tucker, here.

Contrary view: “Why China is Unlikely to Invade Taiwan.” An invasion of Taiwan is far more complicated than Washington narratives would suggest, write Dan Grazier, James Siebens, and MacKenna Rawlins in a new report for the Stimson Center. Read that, here. 

And lastly, in leftover links this week: 

• “FBI employees worry Trump’s Washington surge is exposing unmarked cars,” Reuters reported Thursday; 
• “The Trump administration is moving staff into jobs they know nothing about,” the Washington Post reported Thursday; 
• Check out “The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler,” via Yair Rosenberg of The Atlantic, writing Wednesday; 
• “Podcast of Hegseth church network airs far-right and Christian nationalist views,” the Guardian reported Wednesday; 
• And journalist Jasper Craven turned in a lengthy profile of Pete Hegseth entitled, “Battle of the Sexes,” published Tuesday at The Baffler.

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After militarizing civilian ships, China’s doing the same with dual-use AI companies.

Under what legal auspices did the White House order Tuesday’s deadly strike on a speedboat off South America? More than 24 hours after the attack on what President Trump claims were eleven “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists…transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States,” military leaders still aren’t sure, or they’re not saying publicly just yet. 

“Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters,” the New York Times reported Wednesday evening. 

“Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Wednesday when asked about the incident during a trip to Mexico City. It’s not clear from the incident video Trump shared that the U.S. military conducted any search of the boat it destroyed or the people it killed on Tuesday. 

Rubio on Tuesday: “These particular drugs were probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean.”

On Wednesday, he changed his story, telling reporters that the boat was headed for the United States but offering no evidence for this new claim. Rubio added that “the President, under his authority as Commander-in-Chief, has a right under exigent circumstances [which means a warrantless search] to eliminate imminent threats to the United States, and that’s what he did yesterday in international waters, and that’s what he intends to do” in the future. 

Trump on Wednesday: “We have tapes of them speaking.” To our knowledge, those tapes have not been released publicly. “In fact, you see it, you see the bags of drugs all over the boat, and they were hit,” he told reporters. Bags are visible in the video, but what’s inside them is not at all clear. What’s more, the Times reported, “A Defense Department official questioned whether a boat that size could hold 11 people,” as the Trump administration alleges. 

SecDef Hegseth: “We knew exactly who was in that boat. We know exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented,” he said on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday. He offered no evidence to support his claim.  

Capitol Hill reax: “The administration has not identified the authority under which this action was taken, raising the question of its legality and constitutionality,” said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Washington. The questions this episode raises, Smith added, are “even more concerning. Does this mean Trump thinks he can use the U.S. military anywhere drugs exist, are sold, or shipped? What is the risk of dragging the United States into yet another military conflict?”

Former Pentagon counsel Ryan Goodman effectively concurred with Smith, writing Wednesday on social media, “I worked at [the Department of Defense]. I literally cannot imagine lawyers coming up with a legal basis for [the] lethal strike of [a] suspected Venezuelan drug boat. Hard to see how this would not be ‘murder’ or war crime under international law that DoD considers applicable.”

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro also said it looks like “murder,” writing on social media Wednesday, “If this is true, it is a murder anywhere in the world. We have been capturing civilians who transport drugs for decades without killing them.”

Notable: The U.S. War Crimes Act criminalizes murder, which is defined as the “act of a person who intentionally kills, or conspires or attempts to kill, or kills whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including those placed out of combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause.”

Dive deeper: Former State Department counsel Brian Finucane assessed several angles of the boat strike in an analysis piece published Wednesday in Just Security. He calls the attack “an unnecessary and performative use of the U.S. military,” and one “that is legally fraught at best,” similar to Trump’s decision to send U.S. troops into American cities like Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Here are a few more observations from Finucane: 

• “The use of lethal force was used in the first resort…to send a message. Such use of lethal force raises a number of distinct legal issues.”
• “Despite labelling the targets ‘narcoterrorists,’ there is no plausible argument under which the principle legal authority for the U.S. so-called ‘war on terror’—the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force—authorizes military action against the Venezuelan criminal entity Tren de Aragua.”
• “Drug trafficking by itself does not constitute an ‘armed attack,’ nor a threat of an imminent armed attack, for the purposes in international law. Nor does drug trafficking represent the predicate for self-defense commonly recognized as required for the invocation of self-defense under criminal law in the United States.”
• “In my view, the U.S. attack on this supposed smuggling vessel constituted the introduction of U.S. armed forces into hostilities, triggering both the reporting requirements of the War Powers Resolution as well as its 60-day clock for withdrawing U.S. forces…U.S. armed forces were deliberately introduced into the situation with the U.S. president himself reportedly giving the order to ‘blow up’ the supposed smuggling vessel.” Read Finucane’s analysis in full, here.  

Update: The U.S. dispatched another guided-missile cruiser to the waters around Latin America. That would be the Navy’s USS Lake Erie, which was spotted four days ago entering the Caribbean from the Pacific Ocean, via the Panama Canal. 

Already in the region: The Wasp-class amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima and the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ships San Antonio and USS Fort Lauderdale. Those “are operating off the coast of Puerto Rico as sailors and Marines from the 22nd MEU take part in an amphibious landing training exercise on the southern part of that island,” Howard Altman of The War Zone reported Wednesday. 

There are at least four more warships nearby: USS Gravely, USS Jason Dunham, USS Sampson, and the fast attack submarine USS Newport News. 

What may lie ahead: “Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate” as the four-engine speedboat, Pentagon chief Hegseth told “Fox & Friends” Wednesday. “It’s important to the American people to protect our homeland and protect our hemisphere.” 

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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 Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. 

The future of the National Guard

After objections in Illinois, Trump says he could send National Guard troops to New Orleans, where the state’s governor is also a Republican, like Trump. “We’re making a determination now, do we go to Chicago, or do we go to a place like New Orleans?” the president told reporters Wednesday. 

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry replied: “We will take President [Trump]’s help from New Orleans to Shreveport!”

For the record: “Landry doesn’t have to wait for Trump if he wants National Guard troops in New Orleans,” the Wall Street Journal reports, citing law professor Steve Vladeck. “The governor can just call out the Louisiana national guard to perform whatever services are necessary. There’s no need for federal intervention,” Vladeck said. 

Background: Trump’s use of National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles this past June violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal judge said Tuesday in a 52-page opinion (PDF). The “defendants instigated a months-long deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles for the purpose of establishing a military presence there and enforcing federal law…There were indeed protests in LosAngeles, and some individuals engaged in violence. Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.” 

“Such conduct is a serious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act,” he wrote, and warned, “Los Angeles was the first US city where President Trump and Secretary Hegseth deployed troops, but not the last.” 

Update: About 140 unmarked vehicles have entered the largest military installation in Illinois, Naval Station Great Lakes, located just north of Chicago, the Sun-Times reported Wednesday. Officials are also hoping to “establish a no-fly zone to keep away news helicopters and drones that aren’t already prohibited from flying in the area.”

Context: “Trump highlighted a surge in gun violence in Chicago over the weekend, framing himself as a savior who can quickly solve an intractable problem,” the Sun-Times reports. But “The deployment, and threats of the National Guard, come as a WBEZ analysis has found that a three-month summer span saw the fewest murders in 60 years in Chicago while overall violent crime remained near its lowest point in at least four decades.”

Additional reading: 

• “What We Lose by Distorting the Mission of the National Guard,” via National Guard veteran Christopher Purdy writing Sunday for The Atlantic;
• And read about “The National Guard soldier pissed about Trump’s DC takeover,” via Mother Jones, reporting Wednesday. 

Industry

The jets were late. Lockheed got on-time bonuses anyway. The maker of F-35 jets is getting paid for on-time delivery, even though it’s not delivering the aircraft on time and without the required upgrades, a government watchdog agency said. “The F-35 program office compensated Lockheed Martin with hundreds of millions of dollars of performance incentive fees while the percentage of aircraft delivered late and the average days late grew,” according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. Defense One’s Audrey Decker has more, here. 

The infantry is getting AI tools to spot incoming threats, the Wall Street Journal reports off a $98.9 million contract between the U.S. Army and TurbineOne, a four-year-old San Francisco startup. “TurbineOne’s software runs on soldiers’ laptops, smartphones and drones, eliminating the need for a steady cloud connection. The AI application equips individual soldiers with the ability to quickly identify enemy threats, such as a drone-launch site or concealed troop position, and the context needed to decide how to respond without relying on analysts sitting miles away.” Read on, here.

Additional reading: “Oak Ridge is using diamonds to marry quantum, classical computers,” our sister site Nextgov reported Wednesday. 

China’s military parade

Chinese leader Xi Jinping staged a giant military parade that marked the public debut of several new weapons. Washington Post: “China’s ambitions to rival the United States militarily—and gain the edge in a potential war over Taiwan—were laid bare Wednesday when Beijing displayed a breathtaking array of advanced new weaponry…” Among them were a new ICBM, a light tank, 65-foot unmanned submarines, and more.

Find the Post’s multimedia list of the new arms on display, here, and another one from the New York Times, here.

Salt Typhoon update: China’s “unrestrained” hacking group may have stolen information from nearly every American, officials said. “I can’t imagine any American was spared given the breadth of the campaign,” Cynthia Kaiser, a former top official in the F.B.I.’s cyber division, who oversaw investigations into the hacking, told the New York Times. Read on, here.

Related reading:

• “‘Front runner’ to be North Korea’s next supreme leader makes international debut in China.” It’s Kim Jong Un’s daughter, Ju Ae, reports Reuters.

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The U.S. military killed nearly a dozen people in a small speedboat allegedly carrying narcotics from Venezuela, President Trump said Tuesday at the White House, echoed shortly afterward by a tweet from his secretary of state. 

Trump posted video of the lethal encounter on his social media account, claiming U.S. troops “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility” and carried out the strike “while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.” 

“The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action,” the president wrote, adding, “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America.”

The Pentagon didn’t have much more to say about the encounter, telling reporters in a short statement on Tuesday, “As the President announced today, we can confirm the U.S. military conducted a precision strike against a drug vessel operated by a designated narco-terrorist organization. More information will be made available at a later time.” 

But: A U.S. official later told the New York Times “either an attack helicopter or an MQ-9 Reaper drone…carried out the attack on Tuesday morning against a four-engine speedboat loaded with drugs.”

Rolling deep: The U.S. has nearly 7,000 troops and more than a half-dozen warships in the region, including a submarine and at least three Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyers—USS Gravely, USS Jason Dunham and the USS Sampson—ostensibly to fight drug trafficking from Venezuela. More than 2,000 troops from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit recently arrived. P-8 maritime patrol planes are also operating nearby, as well as troops aboard the USS San Antonio, USS Iwo Jima, and USS Fort Lauderdale. Some of the Navy ships “can carry aerial assets like helicopters while others can also deploy Tomahawk cruise missiles,” Reuters reports. “U.S. surveillance aircraft and other sensors had been monitoring cartel maritime traffic for weeks before the strike,” a U.S. official told the Times.

No known authorization: Congress has passed no Authorization for Use of Military Force for such action, nor has the White House invoked the War Powers Act—which begs the question: on what legal authority do these lethal actions proceed?

Second opinion: “‘Not yielding to pursuers’ or [being] ‘suspected of carrying drugs’ doesn’t carry a death sentence,” noted Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, writing Tuesday on social media. 

Also notable: Despite Trump’s claim that the “terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States,” Rubio told reporters later that “These particular drugs were probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean.”

Coverage continues below…

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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 with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1954, the First Taiwan Strait Crisis erupted when military forces from the People’s Republic of China began shelling multiple islands around Taiwan.

Update: Trump can’t use the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Tren de Aragua gang members, a three-judge panel from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday. 

Implications: “The decision bars deportations from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi,” the Associated Press writes. However, “The ruling can be appealed to the full 5th Circuit or directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is likely to make the ultimate decision on the issue.”

“We find no invasion or predatory incursion,” the judges said, and explained, “A country’s encouraging its residents and citizens to enter this country illegally is not the modern-day equivalent of sending an armed, organized force to occupy, to disrupt, or to otherwise harm the United States.” They also clarified, “our injunction solely applies to the use of the war-related federal statute and does not impede use of any other statutory authority for removing foreign terrorists.”

Expert reax: The judges observed “that the law is fundamentally about war and about military actions; not illegal immigration or drug trafficking,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. 

Also new: The Pentagon just authorized up to 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges, AP reported Tuesday in what one law professor described as a “Blatant way to further militarize immigration enforcement.”

Context: “[M]ore than 100 immigration judges have been fired or left voluntarily after taking deferred resignations offered by the Trump administration” and “at least 17 immigration judges had been fired ‘without cause’ in courts across the country,” AP’s Konstantin Toropin writes. “That has left about 600 immigration judges, union figures show, meaning the Pentagon move would double their ranks” amid a backlog of more than 3 million cases.

Second opinion: “Expecting fair decisions from judges unfamiliar with the law is absurd,” said Ben Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. The decision “makes as much sense as having a cardiologist do a hip replacement.” More, here. 

Troops in US streets

A judge ruled Tuesday that Trump’s National Guard deployment to California was illegal, and shared his concerns about a president acting as a national police chief. 

The judge said the roughly 4,700 Guard members and Marines engaged in police activity in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which he said built on the constitutional framers’ wariness of a centralized military force conducting police work, Jacob Fischler reports for States Newsroom. 

“Contrary to Congress’s explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws,” the judge wrote in his opinion (PDF). “Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles. In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.”

He also said he’s concerned that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth want to expand the role of National Guard troops for law enforcement, noting the two “have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country… thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.” He continued, “Indeed, resentment of Britain’s use of military troops as a police force was manifested in the Declaration of Independence, where one of the American colonists’ grievances was that the King had ‘affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.’”

Fine print: The ruling only applies to California. 

Next steps: Trump is likely to appeal the ruling to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, where he won a victory early in the case, Fischler writes. Read more, here. 

Trump seemed to spurn the ruling Tuesday, and vowed to deploy National Guard troops to fight crime in Chicago. “We’re going in. I didn’t say when, but we’re going in,” the president said Tuesday at the White House. Trump’s vow is “likely to trigger a legal battle with local officials,” Reuters reported afterward. 

Developing: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker claims Texas National Guard troops are preparing for some kind of immigration-related operation around Chicago. “We have reason to believe that the Trump administration has already begun staging the Texas National Guard for deployment in Illinois,” the governor said Tuesday afternoon. 

“In the coming days, we expect to see what has played out in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., to happen here in Chicago,” Pritzker said Tuesday. “It is likely those agents will be with ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security, and other similarly situated federal agencies. Many of these individuals are being relocated from Los Angeles for deployment in Chicago. We believe that staging that has already begun started yesterday, and continues into today.”

“This is not about crime,” Pritzker said. “More and more reports around these raids include people who were stopped or detained because of how they look, and not because of any threat to the public…Let’s be clear, the terror and cruelty is the point, not the safety of anyone living here.”

Local opposition: “[Trump] just wants his own secret police force that will do publicity stunts whenever his poll numbers are sinking, whenever his jobs report shows a stagnating economy, whenever he needs another distraction from his failures,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a statement Tuesday. 

Additional opposition: “The administration is clearly exceeding its constitutional limits by treating the National Guard as its personal standing army,” said David Janovsky, acting director of The Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight. “First, it was Los Angeles. Then, it was our nation’s capital. Now, the federal government has its sights set on turning Chicago and Baltimore into police states. “This is an egregious and dangerous overreach that is already having disastrous consequences,” he claimed, and asked lawmakers to intervene. “Americans shouldn’t fear going to the grocery store or dropping their children off at school just because the administration wants to exert power and use our service members as political props,” he added. 

For some informed legal analysis of a possible Guard deployment to Chicago, national security law professor Steve Vladeck wrote a quick explainer Tuesday following Pritzker and Trump’s remarks to reporters. 

An excerpt: “[W]e’ve never had a President who thought it was a good idea to try to pull a stunt like this (or, at the very least, who didn’t face insurmountable political obstacles to attempting to do so),” Vladeck observes. “But my own view, having spent a lot of time looking at Founding-era materials on domestic uses of the military, is that a Constitution that authorized what Trump is apparently contemplating would never have been ratified by states that were already suspicious of giving away too much control over their own affairs.”

Related reading: “Can Federal Troops Be Stationed At The Polls In 2026?” former Justice Department attorney Joyce Vance considered, writing Tuesday on Substack. 

New: Space Command HQ will move to Alabama, in part because of Colorado’s voting policies, Trump says. In the latest whiplash for the combatant command, the president says he will move SPACECOM headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama, reversing a Biden-administration decision to keep it at Peterson Air Force Base. The Pentagon spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Peterson HQ, which became fully operational less than two years ago.

Trump has long railed against mail-in voting, claiming falsely that it is more prone to fraud. (“Mail voting malfeasance is exceptionally rare,” says the nonpartisan Brennan Center.) Defense One’s Audrey Decker has more, here.

Additional reading: “Trump’s move of SPACECOM to Alabama has little to do with national security,” via ArsTechnica.

Europe

Ukraine’s milestone shows drones prevent defeat, but don’t secure victory. Kyiv’s announcement that it will procure two million drones this year underscores a counterintuitive phenomenon: increasing the speed of innovation and deployment of new technologies may not result in any increase in battlefield gains.

“Those one-way attack drones are not going to gain air superiority, and they don’t have air superiority, and that’s really one of the key attributes of the conflict in Russia-Ukraine, is no one does,” Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, commander of  U.S. European Command, and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said last week at an NDIA event in Washington, D.C.

Ukraine’s radical rethinking of acquisition now allows frontline commanders to buy drones directly from manufacturers—and receive them in as little as five days. The Pentagon is following suit, in spirit if not in letter. But will it work? Defense One’s Patrick Tucker digs in, here.

Related: “Ukrainian drone strikes strangle Putin’s fuel supplies,” reports Politico, adding that attacks on refineries have caused shortages and interrupted gas exports that are key to Moscow’s ability to continue its war.

How China is secretly arming Russia. An investigation by The Telegraph has unearthed 97 suppliers in ostensibly neutral China that are sending arms and components to Russia. “Goods directly exported by China to Russia included aircraft engines, microchips, metal alloys, camera lenses, fibreglass, emulsion binders for fibreglass, and carbon fibre yarns—all key components to produce the drones that wreak nightly havoc on Ukraine.” Read on, here.

Additional reading: 

• EU Commission President Ursula “Von der Leyen’s plane hit by suspected Russian GPS jamming,” Politico reported Sunday; Reuters has more;
• “EU to boost satellite defences against GPS jamming, Defence commissioner says,” Reuters reported Monday.
• See also AP’s Tuesday explainer, “What to know about Russia’s GPS jamming operation in Europe”;
• And “German authorities warn people against becoming ‘disposable agents’ for Russia,” AP reported separately Tuesday from Berlin. 

Etc.

Developing: There’s lots of new construction around a suspected nuclear weapons site inside Israel, AP reported Wednesday citing satellite imagery over the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center near the city of Dimona. 

Experts who reviewed the imagery said “it could be a new reactor or a facility to assemble nuclear arms—but secrecy shrouding the program makes it difficult to know for sure.” Three said the location and size of the area under construction” pointed to “the construction of a new heavy water reactor.” Four others “acknowledged it could be a heavy water reactor but also suggested the work could be related to a new facility for assembling nuclear weapons.” Read more, here. 

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Defending America’s borders, not deterring China, tops the list of priorities Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent to senior Pentagon leaders and combatant commanders just a few weeks ago, according to a memo obtained by Defense One’s Meghann Myers. 

China has long been seen inside the Pentagon as the military’s “pacing challenge,” cutting into U.S. efforts to influence friends and allies across the Indo-Pacific, Africa and Latin America. But before mentioning China, the first priorities in Hegseth’s new guidance are to “seal our borders, repel invasion, counter narcotics and trafficking, and support the Department of Homeland Security mission to deport illegal aliens.” This focus reflects “the President’s determination to restore our neglected position in the Western Hemisphere,” Hegseth wrote in the document distributed August 7. 

Why it matters: The language is a departure from not just the last president’s National Defense Strategy, but the president’s own first-term strategy, both of which placed deterring China as their first priority. And it’s a shift in rhetoric that has borne out in action, as Trump has ordered the militarization of the southern border while deploying Marines and National Guardsmen to Los Angeles to dispel protests of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, Myers writes.

“I am concerned that DOD has become the ‘easy button’ for everything,” said Glen VanHerck, a retired Air Force general and former head of U.S. Northern Command. “That, long-term, is not good for our nation, to have DOD in our streets. We need to resource those agencies, spelled out in law to enforce our laws, and to conduct crisis response, in our homeland.” Continue reading, here. 

Troops in the USA

Between 5,000 and 10,000 people on Monday protested Trump’s desire to send the National Guard to Chicago. “The march was one of roughly 1,000 ‘Workers over Billionaires’ protests across the country on the U.S. Labor Day holiday,” Reuters reports from Illinois’ largest city. “But Chicago’s demonstration had a decidedly more pointed tone as residents bristled against Trump’s promise to target Chicago next in a deployment similar to those under way in Los Angeles and Washington D.C., two other Democrat-run cities.”

Context: “Homicide rates in the nation’s third-largest city have plunged in recent years, according to city crime data. And though a 2025 University of Chicago survey reported roughly half of Chicagoans feel unsafe in their neighborhoods at night, many protesters said on Monday that they felt largely safe in the city.”

Related reading: “Why Is the National Guard in D.C.? Even They Don’t Know,” Ashley Parker and Nancy Youssef wrote last week for The Atlantic.

Also: Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, and Missouri are GOP-led states whose cities have higher rates of violent crime than D.C. “Yet no Republican governor has asked for federal intervention,” David Chen reported Monday in an analysis piece for the New York Times. 

Cities include: Kansas City, St. Louis, and Springfield in Missouri; Birmingham, Ala.; Cleveland, Dayton, and Toledo, Ohio; Tulsa, Okla.; Tennessee’s Memphis and Nashville; Houston; Little Rock in Arkansas; Utah’s Salt Lake City; and Shreveport, La. “All have crime rates comparable to Washington’s, according to F.B.I. statistics.”

Notable: “Republican governors did not want to answer why they were willing to send their National Guard troops to Washington while not inviting the same attention to their cities,” Chen reports. 

Expert reax: “They’re not doing it to improve public safety. It’s designed to humiliate political opponents,” said Jeffrey Butts of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. 

Dive deeper: The Associated Press on Friday reported a similar observation based on the latest crime statistics, which are presented in two separate charts, here. 

Just in: Trump’s use of National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal judge said Tuesday in a 52-page opinion. “The evidence at trial established that Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles. In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act,” District Judge Charles Breyer wrote in an opinion released publicly on Tuesday morning. The “defendants instigated a months-long deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles for the purpose of establishing a military presence there and enforcing federal law. Such conduct is a serious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act,” he said. 

“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law,” Breyer writes. “Nearly 140 years later, [the] Defendants—President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense—deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced. There were indeed protests in LosAngeles, and some individuals engaged in violence. Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”

Caveat: Breyer’s order blocks use of those troops for law enforcement tasks; but that part of his decision is put on hold until Sept. 12, likely “to avoid provoking either a less-sympathetic Ninth Circuit panel or the justices,” national security law professor Steve Vladeck writes. If his decision is upheld, it would mean Guard and Marine forces cannot participate in “arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants,” Breyer said. “Los Angeles was the first US city where President Trump and Secretary Hegseth deployed troops, but not the last,” he added. CNN has a bit more.

Developing: Trump is expected to make a “defense-related” announcement around 2 p.m. ET Tuesday afternoon, following several days of speculation about his reportedly worsening health, Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich wrote on social media. Catch it live at DVIDS, here. 

Will Trump move forward with his promise to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War? It’s unclear just yet, but the president said on August 25 he wanted to officially change the name “over the next week or so.” 

Coverage continues below…

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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. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1958, a U.S. Air Force RC-130 was shot down over Armenia after it strayed into Soviet airspace during a surveillance mission, killing all 17 crew members.

Venezuela’s dictator says his troops are ready for whatever the U.S. Navy is up to off his country’s coast, the Associated Press reported Monday from Caracas. 

Nearby: “Seven U.S. warships, along with one nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, are either in the region or are expected to be there soon, bringing along more than 4,500 sailors and marines,” Reuters reported Friday. “The U.S. military has also been flying P-8 spy planes in the region [over international waters] to gather intelligence.” 

Why: President Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters Friday the U.S. troops are in the vicinity to “combat and dismantle drug trafficking organizations, criminal cartels and these foreign terrorist organizations in our hemisphere.” However, “most of the seaborne drug trade travels to the United States via the Pacific, not the Atlantic, where the U.S. forces are, and much of what arrives via the Caribbean comes on clandestine flights,” Reuters notes. 

“In the face of this maximum military pressure, we have declared maximum preparedness for the defense of Venezuela,” Nicolás Maduro said Monday, calling the U.S. deployments “an extravagant, unjustifiable, immoral and absolutely criminal and bloody threat.”

Expert reax: The U.S. presence near Venezuela is “too big to be just about drugs. [And] It’s too small to be about an invasion,” one specialist from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington said. His guess? The ships appear to be a show of force for now. Read on, here. 

Additional reading: “Mystery surrounds $1.2 billion Army contract to build huge detention tent camp in Texas desert,” AP reported last week as well. 

The Space Force is increasingly going commercial for space domain awareness. “We’ve gone and looked at many of our acquisition programs that were on the more traditional route, and said, ‘Is there anything that we can do on the requirements side that’s causing us not to go to commercial? Can we take advantage of this?” said Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, who is the military deputy, acting assistant Air Force secretary, and the service’s acquisition executive for space. He spoke at the National Defense Industrial Association’s emerging technology conference on Thursday, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports, here.

More reading:

• “Alarm after FBI arrests US army veteran for ‘conspiracy’ over protest against Ice,” the Guardian reported Tuesday; 
• “Dramatic F-35 Crash At Alaskan Air Base Caused By Iced-Up Landing Gear,” The War Zone explained Friday; 
• “2 civilians indicted for their role in a Pearl Harbor fuel spill that sickened 6,000 people in 2021,” the Associated Press reported Saturday; 
• “Space Force celebrates first Officer Training Course graduation at Peterson Space Force Base,” the Colorado Springs Gazette reported last week;
• And “AI is unmasking ICE officers. Can Washington do anything about it?” Politico reported Friday. 

Asia

Iron Man in the Himalayas? China’s PLA embraces exoskeletons. Six years ago, the Chinese military hosted a “Super Warrior” contest in which 50-plus prototypes from 25 developers competed in categories such as lightweight mobility, heavy-load marching, and munitions handling. That led earlier this year to the PLA’s “intelligent logistics devices” exercise on the far-western Karakoram Plateau of the Xinjiang Military District, part of a push to move such gear from demonstrations to deployment, BluePath Labs’ Tye Graham and New America’s Peter W. Singer report in the latest installment of The China Intelligence column.

More reading:

• China to unveil US ship-killing weapons at military parade—Telegraph
• Japan looks to build drone ‘shield’ in record $60 billion defense budget request—Japan Times

Middle East

Trump, others still want to depopulate and redevelop Gaza, the Washington Post reports off a 38-page prospectus for a “Riviera of the Middle East” to be built on the rubble. The plan envisions paying Palestinians to leave with a share in the new venture, a move the prospectus says would save $23,000 per person. Read on, here.

Israeli strike kills Yemeni prime minister, 11 other leaders. The Saturday strike on the capital of Sanaa, the first such attack to kill senior officials, killed the prime minister of the Houthi-run government and several other ministers. On Monday, thousands attended a funeral in the capital’s largest mosque. Mohammed Miftah, now de facto head of the Iran-aligned Houthi government, vowed revenge. Reuters reports, here.

Related reading:

• “Syria exports first crude oil shipment since 2010,” Semafor reports, a sign of economic revival after its 14-year civil war.

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Pentagon stands up new task force to coordinate anti-drone efforts. The Joint Interagency Task Force 401 will spearhead the acquisition and integration of air defense systems to take down small unmanned aerial systems, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday in a video.

That includes the department’s Replicator 2 project, Hegseth wrote in a Wednesday memo, adding that the group will “rapidly deliver Joint C-sUAS capabilities to America’s warfighters, defeat adversary threats, and promote sovereignty over national airspace.”

The memo also shuts down the five-year-old Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office. “The JCO had great intentions but struggled to compel the different services and organizations to participate,” an Army official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told Defense One. “Whereas the JIATF will have a lot more ability to coordinate and compel.” Meghann Myers has more, here.

The U.S. Navy’s new landing craft cost 40% more than expected. The Ship-to-Shore Connector program from Textron Systems—the service’s next-generation Landing Craft Air Cushion (PDF)—is at risk of a congressionally-mandated termination of the program.

What happened: Labor, material, and supply chain costs have risen roughly 40 percent from their 2021 baselines, according to a Pentagon acquisition report declassified and cleared for public release on Aug. 21. A Nunn-McCurdy breach was formally declared in April. Now the Navy “is currently executing [the] required re-certification process” to assert to Congress “that the program is essential to national security.” That’s expected in October. 

What’s behind the spike: Textron has delivered 13 of the craft since 2012, including five since January 2024. But the Navy “entered into a follow-on construction contract with Textron in November 2024 to procure nine” more of the landing craft with money appropriated for fiscal years 2022 to 2024, the report says. A Nunn-McCurdy breach was declared shortly after the Navy awarded a $167 million contract for UK-based Rolls Royce engines in February 2025. So far, Congress has appropriated money for 35 of the landing craft, which leaves 22 still to be delivered. 

More reading:

• “HII Taps [Eric] Chewning to Lead Maritime Systems and Corporate Strategy,” Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. announced Thursday; 
• And don’t miss, “When the government can see everything: How one company—Palantir—is mapping the nation’s data,” via Indiana University’s Nicole Bennett, writing Wednesday for The Conversation.

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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 with Bradley Peniston and Lauren C. Williams. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Florida, killing more than 1,800 people and causing an estimated $125 billion in damages.

Trump 2.0

The Trump administration is pausing training at the federal government’s primary law enforcement academies for anyone not related to immigration enforcement, saying the change is necessary to meet the president’s “immediate priorities,” Eric Katz reported Thursday for Government Executive.

What’s going on: The administration is in the midst of surging 10,000 employees to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, creating unprecedented demand at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers. Training needs could create bottlenecks as ICE seeks to rapidly onboard the new officers and agents, current and former officials have warned, and the administration is now taking drastic measures to avoid those pitfalls. 

After reporting the pause, DHS said in a statement it was “actively supporting training programs for many agencies during the surge,” as well state, local and international partners, “as space and resources allow.” It also noted that some training schedules may be adjusted to accommodate ICE’s needs, but it would restart those as early as possibly in fiscal 2026. More, here. 

Developing: After Trump was “disappointed” by the Army’s June parade in Washington, the “Navy is trying to plan a bigger celebration this fall, hoping for a shimmering spectacle with seacraft,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. 

Update: Trump’s Pentagon is reinstalling slaveowner Robert E. Lee’s portrait at West Point’s library, the New York Times reported Thursday. 

The 20-foot-tall portrait, “which includes a slave guiding the Confederate general’s horse in the background,” will go back up “three years after a congressionally mandated commission ordered it removed,” Greg Jaffe writes. 

Background: “What is important to remember is that the initial installation of the Robert E. Lee portrait had little to do with history. It was installed in the 1950s,” noted Civil War historian Kevin Levin. “To understand why you need to appreciate the vagaries of historical memory. The relevant history or context is the 1950s and not the 1860s.” How so? Levin continues: 

1. “The Cold War created a need for a unified front against the perceived threat of the Soviet Union and communism. American history was framed to encourage a unified front that tolerated no dissent, which necessitated glossing over lingering tensions from the Civil War and Reconstruction. Memory of Lee played a vital role in this.”
2. “The civil rights movement threatened this consensus view as white southerners brandished Confederate flags in the post Brown v. Board of Education period.”
3. “By the mid-1950s the federal government was in the process of planning for the upcoming 100th anniversary or Centennial celebration of the Civil War. As part of Cold War culture this commemoration would push a reunion narrative with Lee at the center. Lee became the quintessential American.” He has a little bit more to say about the matter on Substack, and you can find that here. 

Second opinion: “I am a simpleton, but it does not make much sense to me to hang a picture of a literal traitor in the halls of your military learning institution,” Bloomberg’s Gerry Doyle wrote on social media. He added, “this is one of those things where ‘nuance’ is just a smokescreen obscuring the core issue, which is—again—that lee and the confederacy committed treason against the united states, and then got beaten soundly in the resulting war, which was about the legality of slavery.”

Additional reading: “Inside Pete Hegseth’s Civilian Purge at West Point,” via Jasper Craven, writing Thursday for Politico.

Federal judge: White House advisor Kari Lake can’t fire Voice of America director. NPR reports: “Instead, by law, Lake must have the explicit backing of an advisory panel set up by Congress to help insulate the international broadcaster and its sister networks from political pressure. As President Trump dismissed six of the seven members of the panel shortly after taking office and has not named their replacements to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Lake cannot take such an action.” Read on, here.

The ruling is a rare hiccup in the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle U.S. government efforts to shape global opinion, which Defense One’s Patrick Tucker wrote about earlier this year.

Additional reading: 

• “U.S. could lose democracy status, says global watchdog,” Canada’s CBC News reports; 
• And in commentary from Canada, “Donald Trump is on the brink of becoming a dictator. Can he be stopped?” asks Andrew Coyne of the Globe and Mail, writing Friday. 

Ukraine developments

Test your arms and gear in Ukraine, NATO’s military chief urges companies. Too few defense contractors are testing their technology in real-world situations against a peer adversary, NATO’s military chief said Thursday, praising companies that are making the effort to work with the Ukrainian military. “Those few that have tried it have either learned a lot, or they’ve decided to go home because they can’t compete in that environment. But that is going to be the environment that we face,” said Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, who leads U.S. European Command and serves as NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe. He spoke virtually at an NDIA event. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has more, here.

Industry opinion: “If you want to sell to European ministries of defense, to European militaries, they will want to know that your system is working in Ukraine, that you are testing it there, that you’re evaluating it there,” said Jan-Hendrik Boelens, CEO and co-founder of the Munich-based drone developer Alpine Eagle. 

Boelens helped create what Alpine Eagle calls its “Sentinel” counter-drone system, which they say is the world’s first air-to-air, counter-UAS system. He explains how the system works in a new Defense One Radio podcast interview you can find here. 

“Rather than just using drones to strike ground targets or provide aerial surveillance, what you can do is essentially equip these drones as fighter jets, both with small interceptors attached that can shoot down other drones, as well as with sensors to detect and track other drones,” Boelens said. 

“We deploy multiple drones in a coordinated fashion,” he said. “Some of them are carrying sensors, some of them are carrying effectors. Some of them are carrying both. And essentially, with the distributed sensor network that we deploy, we find the targets, then we make sure that a drone carrying an interceptor is putting itself into a firing position that maximizes the probability of actually hitting the target. And then when the target is within firing range and is locked, we launch the interceptor drone, pretty much like an air to air missile.”

The German military is working with Alpine Eagle as their “launch customer,” Boelens said. And that’s been especially useful for the Sentinel because “as soon as you give it to a customer, give it to a user, then things start to break. You start to find out what’s wrong, which assumptions were and were not correct. And that’s been extremely valuable.” Hear the rest of our 15-minute conversation over on Spotify or Apple podcasts. 

Pending U.S. arms sale to Ukraine: 3,350 Extended Range Attack Munition missiles and 3,350 Embedded Global Positioning System/Inertial Navigation Systems with Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module, for a total cost of $825 million. 

“Ukraine will use funding from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway and Foreign Military Financing from the United States for this purchase,” the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency said Thursday. Additional details, here. 

Update: Real estate billionaire Steve Witkoff’s go-it-alone diplomacy is frustrating U.S. and European officials, Politico reported Friday. His “solo approach has led to repeated miscues with Russia, leaving Trump’s pledge to quickly end the war between Russia and Ukraine adrift.” More, here.

Etc.

And lastly this week, here are several recent AI-related developments we noticed and thought we’d pass along: 

• “A hacker used AI to automate an ‘unprecedented’ cybercrime spree, Anthropic says,” NBC News reported Wednesday; 
• “ChatGPT offered bomb recipes and hacking tips during safety tests,” the Guardian reported Thursday; 
• “Citizen Is Using AI to Generate Crime Alerts With No Human Review. It’s Making a Lot of Mistakes,” 404 Media reported Monday; 
• And in Louisiana, the state is building three new natural gas power plants to accommodate an “AI” data center for Meta (formerly Facebook) that will use three times as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans. KPLC has the story, reporting last Wednesday. 

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