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Cyber threats against the defense industrial base (DIB) are intensifying, with adversaries shifting from traditional espionage toward operations designed to disrupt production capacity and compromise supply chains. In this Help Net Security interview, …
As a second American aircraft carrier races to the Middle East, Iran says it has briefly closed portions of the Strait of Hormuz for live-fire military exercises as it continues negotiations over its nuclear program with U.S. officials Tuesday in Geneva. After weeks of threats aimed at Iran’s leaders by American President Donald Trump, the Associated Press calls the strait closure “a further escalation in a weekslong standoff that could ignite another war in the Middle East.”
Rewind: The U.S. joined Israeli attacks against Iran during a single-morning assault last June. The operation, called “Midnight Hammer,” used F-22 and F-35 aircraft as well as submarine-launched cruise missiles and long-range B-2 bombers that dropped munitions in a mission designed to cripple Tehran’s nuclear program. Iran responded by firing missiles at the U.S. military’s at Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, with minimal damage. After the exchange of fire, experts assessed Iran’s nuclear infrastructure had been damaged by the U.S.-Israeli attacks, but warned it could still be reconstituted.
Latest: The U.S. military has been preparing for what could be “weeks” of new operations against Iran, two U.S. officials told Reuters Friday. “In a sustained campaign, the U.S. military could hit Iranian state and security facilities, not just nuclear infrastructure,” the officials said. Trump is also reportedly “considering options that would include sending American commandos to go after certain Iranian military targets,” the New York Times reported last week.
Under such a scenario, “the United States fully expected Iran to retaliate, leading to back-and-forth strikes and reprisals over time,” Reuters reports. This could help explain why recent satellite imagery over al-Udeid showed U.S. troops have put Patriot anti-missile units on trucks to increase uncertainty for possible Iranian targeting in a future conflict. Other U.S. bases in the region are also vulnerable, including locations across Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan.
A dozen U.S. warships are already in the region. That includes the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Another carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, has been rerouted from the Caribbean Sea to the Middle East as well, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The chief of naval operations said in January, Defense One reported, that he would push back against extending Ford, which left Norfolk in June, saying the move would be “quite disruptive” to planned maintenance for the ship and to the lives of its sailors.
To get a sense of the air and naval power the U.S. is bringing to the region, open-source monitor Ian Ellis drew up this busy map and chart.
Iranian reax: “An aircraft carrier is certainly a dangerous piece of equipment,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech Tuesday before talks began in Geneva. “But more dangerous than the carrier is the weapon that can send it to the bottom of the sea,” he added.
Iran’s navy chief said Tuesday the Hormuz Strait will remain under “24-hour surveillance” as Iran continues naval drills in the waterway the Reuters calls “the world’s most vital oil export route.”
Big picture: “The Iranian government is under considerable pressure to agree to a deal,” the Times reports. “Iran’s economy has struggled under crippling international sanctions, which helped ignite the latest wave of protests against the country’s authoritarian government.” However, “Iranian officials have argued they will not make concessions on nuclear enrichment without sanctions relief. Iran’s deputy foreign minister told state media that in return Tehran could offer Washington lucrative investment opportunities in sectors like oil, gas, and mining.”
Elsewhere in the region, the U.S. military says it recently carried out 10 strikes in 10 days in its ongoing war against ISIS in Syria. Read a bit more about that from Central Command, here.
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Meghann Myers. 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 1865, retreating rebels burned two-thirds of Columbia, South Carolina, to the ground as Gen. William Sherman’s U.S. Army swept through the region in the final months of the American Civil War. The city would later host the nearby U.S. Army base Fort Jackson, which was established in 1917.
The Pentagon is facing blowback after reportedly using AI firm Anthropic’s Claude software during the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last month, Axios reported over the weekend. “The military has used Claude in the past to analyze satellite imagery or intelligence,” however two sources told the outlet “Claude was used during the active operation, not just in preparations for it.” Claude is also reportedly the only AI model used in the military’s classified systems.
Anthropic’s chief concern in this context: “that its technology is not used for the mass surveillance of Americans or to operate fully autonomous weapons,” Dave Lawler and Maria Curi of Axios write. Military officials have countered that those concerns are “unduly restrictive.”
Update: Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth is now reportedly on the verge of cutting ties with Anthropic, which are estimated to cost about $200 million. (Anthropic says it generates about $14 billion in annual revenue.) Hegseth is also considering designating the firm a “supply chain risk,” Axios reported Monday, and noted, “That kind of penalty is usually reserved for foreign adversaries.” Read the rest, here.
The U.S. military killed three more alleged drug-traffickers in another boat strike in the Caribbean Sea on Friday. That raises the Pentagon’s death toll to 133 people U.S. troops have killed without a trial across nearly 40 strikes since September.
Trump told soldiers they “have to” vote for the GOP during a speech Friday at an army base in North Carolina. “You have to vote for us,” the president told a crowd of soldiers at Fort Bragg, a base where regulations prohibit partisan displays.
“Most service members refrained from cheering,” the Washington Post reported after the president’s remarks. “They mostly left the applause and cheers to his staff and the assembled Republican politicians” from the state that had gathered at the army base for Trump’s speech.
Hegseth pushed out a senior Army spokesman who once worked for former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, a target of President Trump’s ire after having installed him during the president’s first term, Fox News reported. Col. Dave Butler had been nominated for a promotion to brigadier general, but sources told Fox that the defense secretary ordered the Army secretary to fire him last week.
Earlier this month, Hegseth told a crowd at the Pentagon, “I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength.’” It’s been a common refrain for Hegseth over the past several years, and an extension of the Trump administration’s culture-war assault on diversity following nationwide protests against police brutality in the final year of Trump’s first term. Trump began his second term by firing the Black general who was Joint Chiefs chairman because he allegedly promoted diversity, while Hegseth cut celebrations of Black History Month and restored the titles of Army bases named after Confederate soldiers.
A historian noticed Hegseth’s recent remarks at the Pentagon, and penned a retrospective flagging “an extensive literature that tracks the ways in which concepts of diversity have stood at the heart of the United States of America from the founding.” According to Kevin Kruse of Princeton University, “We only need to take a look at the propaganda posters that the USA employed during World War I and World War II to see that diversity was very much seen as a strength by American leaders in those conflicts,” he wrote Sunday.
Relatedly, “Immigrant soldiers, for instance, made up about a full sixth of the U.S. Army forces during the conflict,” Kruse adds. And “the War Department (as it was actually known back then) knew incorporating these foreign-born soldiers was so important to their work that it launched the Foreign-Speaking Soldier Sub-Section,” known as FSS.
Citing several posters from the era, “Even more than the WWI effort, American propaganda during WWII leaned into the idea that diversity—not just in terms of white ethnics, but all races and both genders too—was an asset to be exploited, not a deficit to be overcome,” Kruse writes. Continue reading, here.
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The Homeland Security Department has subpoenaed Google, Meta, Discord and Reddit for the identities of users whose accounts track or comment on ICE activity, the New York Times reported. Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, sources said. Some users were notified of the subpoenas and given 10 to 14 days to fight them in court.
DHS appears to be breaking many of its own use-of-force policies against ICE protestors, according to a review of dozens of incidents by NBC News. “Less lethal” weapons like rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray and flash-bangs have been deployed “inappropriately and indiscriminately” according to court cases in at least four states. “I’ve never seen federal agents so out of control and acting in such a malicious manner,” Rubén Castillo, a former federal prosecutor and federal judge who now leads the Illinois Accountability Commission, a state effort to review allegations of abuse against immigration officers, told NBC. “They said they were going after ‘the worst of the worst,’ then they became the problem.”
El Paso counter-drone weapon update: When the federal government shut down El Paso’s airspace last week, they were responding to the firing of a counter-drone laser “without sufficient coordination,” sources told Axios. Customs and Border Protection had fired AeroVironment’s LOCUST system at what Trump administration officials called “a cartel drone swarm.” It was on loan from the U.S. military. More, here.
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The Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) has identified a new and significantly enhanced version of the LockBit ransomware, LockBit 5.0, currently being deployed in active campaigns. The latest variant demonstrates expanded cross-platform capabilities, e…
The Department of Homeland Security is on track for a shutdown this weekend after Senate Democrats rejected a GOP-crafted funding bill that they said provided inadequate guardrails on federal immigration agents. Senators have already left town for the week, though some could return “on short notice if negotiators reach a deal,” The Hill reported Friday morning.
A possible deal fell apart Thursday after a four-hour hearing on Capitol Hill with the White House’s top immigration officials, including acting ICE Director Todd Lyons. Contradicting several top administration officials’ accounts—including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and President Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller—Lyons testified that the two Americans killed by agents last month in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were not “to his knowledge” domestic terrorists. After his testimony, a deal to keep DHS open failed, 52-47, in a Senate vote that needed 60 votes to advance.
Lyons also misled lawmakers during the hearing, Kyle Clark of 9News Denver reported Thursday evening. Lyons told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that local law enforcement “made notifications” and tipped off the intended targets ahead of an immigration raid at an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado. “So when tactical teams arrived, protesters were already there and the apartment complex was empty,” Lyons said.
However, “Those apartments were being cleared out weeks earlier” in January and well before ICE agents showed up in Aurora on Feb. 5, Clark reports. Just hours after Lyons testimony on Thursday, ICE deleted social media posts with the claim.
Lawyers for a U.S. citizen shot by a Border Patrol agent also accused administration officials of lying, in the case of Chicago-based school teacher Marimar Martinez. The Hill has more.
Additional reading: “A Pilot Fired Over Kristi Noem’s Missing Blanket and the Constant Chaos Inside DHS,” the Wall Street Journal reported in a lengthy feature on Noem and her close adviser Corey Lewandowski.
The U.S. spent more than $1 million per person to deport 300 people to countries they had no connection to, before later flying them again to their home nations at additional taxpayer expense. That’s according to a report Thursday advocating closer bipartisan oversight of DHS operations, via Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats.
Those operations alone ran up a bill of more than $32 million to five different countries: Equatorial Guinea ($7.5 million), Rwanda ($7.5 million), El Salvador ($4.76 million), Eswatini ($5.1 million) and Palau ($7.5 million). “Much of the funds were provided as lump sum payments, often before any third country nationals arrived,” although “actual costs [are] likely far higher,” according to the report. Details (PDF) here.
There’s still more local resistance affecting DHS plans to buy warehouses to concentrate migrants. The latest development reported Thursday occurred south of Kansas City after port authority “commissioners said the idea of the site being used for something other than industrial jobs, including possible federal detention, conflicted with long-term plans for the industrial district,” Fox4 reports.
In case you missed it: GSA’s procurement chief is attending negotiations for Ukraine and Gaza, Natalie Alms of our sister site Nextgov reported last month. His name is Josh Gruenbaum, 40, and he’s the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service. He has a background in private equity and investment banking, but he’s been spotted in meetings alongside Israeli and Ukrainian officials over the past few months, Alms reported five weeks ago.
Read more: Three Wall Street Journal reporters teamed up Thursday to fill in more of Gruenbaum’s story as an under-the-radar negotiator in the second Trump administration—including his role in rejected missile-acquisition talks, his work with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and how he was photographed shaking hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin just last month.
Speaking of Kushner, “The highly classified whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is related to a conversation intercepted last spring in which two foreign nationals discussed Jared Kushner,” the Journal reported Thursday updating an unusual case that has concerned lawmakers charged with oversight of the U.S. intelligence community. U.S. officials told the Journal “there was no corroborating evidence to support the allegations,” however, “they said that didn’t prove they lacked any merit.”
Notable: Kushner “is now running an investment fund, Affinity Partners, which has drawn billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies, and has pursued potential projects around the world,” the Journal reports. (It has also been under conflict-of-interest investigation by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.) Meanwhile, “U.S. intelligence officials are treating the material in the complaint with the utmost secrecy, contending that disclosure of the underlying intelligence report at issue could severely damage national security.”
By the way: The U.S. just dropped to its lowest-ever rank in a global corruption index, CNN reported Tuesday.
There’s a new poll out reflecting voters’ views of top White House officials, published Thursday by the Pew Research Center. Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth is on it, and 31% of Americans said they’ve never heard of him. Of those who are familiar with him, 41% view him unfavorably versus 26% with a favorable view. Read more, here.
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Friday 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 2013, the cruiser Lake Erie intercepted a medium-range ballistic missile in the first live test of missile-tracking satellites.
President Trump is visiting Fort Bragg, N.C., today to speak with troops who reportedly helped in the operation to abduct Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro last month. Afterward, he’s headed to his Florida resort for the weekend, The Hill reports.
U.S. troops have officially departed their remote outpost at al-Tanf, Syria, close to the border with Jordan, officials at Central Command said in a statement Thursday. Elsewhere in the country, U.S. forces are withdrawing as part of “a conditions-based drawdown from northeast,” Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute said Thursday. And Syria’s military chief spoke by phone with the top U.S. commander in the region, Maj. Gen. Kevin Lambert this week as well.
The U.S. drawdowns are the result of a new approach from Syria’s new leadership since former dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the country in December 2024. The key U.S. partners in the region, Syrian Democratic Forces, are being increasingly incorporated into the new Syrian state, which is taking on a growing role in fighting ISIS militants, Lister explained. Since last spring, 13 ISIS plots have allegedly failed ISIS leaders have been killed amid 11 joint raids and “dozens of U.S. intel-directed Syrian op[eration]s,” he added.
“The ISIS threat in Syria has turned increasingly urban over the past year,” said Lister, “and if the SDF integration is achieved, it’ll likely become even more so.”
U.S. forces in the region also just finished transferring “more than 5,700 adult male ISIS fighters from detention facilities in Syria to Iraqi custody” in an operation that took more than three weeks to complete, CENTCOM said in a statement Friday.
Forever wars, continued? America may be carrying out a covert air campaign against al-Qaeda in Yemen, argued David Sterman, deputy director of the Future Security program at New America, writing Thursday in Just Security.
The most recent suspected strike appears to have occurred on Jan. 29, near the border with Oman. “And if this clandestine campaign is ongoing, then the lack of transparency greatly complicates efforts to ensure accountability for errors and civilian casualties. It also exacerbates the risk of further embroiling the United States in an endless war with no clear strategy,” Sterman warns.
Also from the region: The Indian Navy just took command of a maritime training task force based in Bahrain. It’s known as Combined Task Force 154, and it changed hands this week from the Italians to the Indians, officials said in a statement Wednesday. Twenty-two different nations are represented in the task force, which was established almost three years ago. Read more from the Indian Defense Ministry, here.
Back in the states, another Osprey was forced to make an emergency landing, this time in Hawaii, as the military rushes to fix enduring mechanical problems with the troubled aircraft, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Thursday.
The latest incident happened on Feb. 3, when an MV-22B with the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing landed in the Tactical Flight Training Area on Oahu “after experiencing an in-flight malfunction” with a gearbox failure. None of the crew was injured but the aircraft will “require maintenance actions and repairs” before returning to its home station, according to an emailed statement from the aviation wing.
Since 2022, four V-22 crashes have killed a total of 20 service members. Investigations blamed failures within the Osprey’s proprotor gearbox and sudden surges in power after a clutch slip, known as a hard clutch engagement. After the crashes, the Pentagon imposed range and other limits on V-22 flights. In December, the Government Accountability Office and NAVAIR separately issued reports that said the V-22 Joint Program Office failed to adequately assess and address mounting safety risks, even as service members died.
Only one other aircraft type, the F-35, had more than the V-22’s 28, Novelly reports. Continue reading, here.
Deliver what we ask for on time—that’s the terse message two maritime service chiefs are sending to industry, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Thursday from the WEST 2026 conference in San Diego.
CNO: “Deliver it on time. That’s really what I need. I don’t know how to sugarcoat that. It’s impossible to sugarcoat that. I need my stuff on time,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, told attendees Wednesday.
Commandant: “If it’s going to be delayed, well, that’s a you problem. That’s not a me problem, because I paid for something and I expect to get it,” Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said. Keeping costs down without sacrificing quality or on-time delivery is a longstanding conundrum for military procurement, Williams reports. But while there’s general reticence towards higher costs, especially for large platforms like ships, it’s a reality the Navy must accept, Smith said. Read on, here.
US, NATO are practicing to take out 1,500 ground targets a day, plus 600 to 1,200 ballistic missiles, the commander of the Army’s Germany-based 56th Multi-Domain Command told reporters. Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports, here.
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Weekly summary of Cybersecurity Insider newsletters
The post Zero-Days, Shadow AI, and Stealth Tactics Define This Week in Cybersecurity appeared first on eSecurity Planet.
Army’s 56th Multi-Domain Command is looking for electronic warfare-proof munitions, decoy drones.
Border patrol agents prompted the extraordinary U.S. airspace closure over El Paso Tuesday night and into Wednesday after using a high-powered laser to shoot down what was later revealed to be a party balloon that had drifted into the sky near the U.S….
Moscow’s gestures toward normalized relations are no more than an “illusory thaw.”
The U.S. military is taking control of more Texas land, citing “security operations along the U.S. southern border,” Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Tuesday. The seizure has raised questions among experts who note that border crossings have already plummeted and that charges stemming from the militarization of federal lands have been thrown out by judges.
What’s new: Nearly 200 more miles of the U.S. border with Mexico have been placed under Air Force supervision, enabling wider use of military force and heftier charges against people crossing illegally into the country, Novelly writes. Air Force leaders announced the changes Friday, militarizing two new swaths of land along the Rio Grande. One adds about 40 miles to the existing NDA 3, extending the zone upriver to Roma, Texas. The other is a 150-mile stretch from Falcon Dam to Del Rio that has been dubbed NDA 6. (Novelly’s article has a map.)
Background: Last June, Pentagon leaders announced that they would take charge of land along the final 250 miles of the Rio Grande, which had been administered by State Department employees on the International Boundary and Water Commission. Designated National Defense Area 3, the land was placed under the control of Joint Base San Antonio, which is operated by the Air Force. As with similar zones established last year, the NDA designation effectively turned the land into a military base that can be patrolled by troops. As well, trespassers are subject to misdemeanor charges related to illegally entering Defense Department property.
Panning out: Since April, the Trump administration has militarized border lands in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas as extensions of Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps bases. By July, they covered roughly one-third of the U.S.-Mexico border.
“If you believe the administration’s line that there’s basically no more illegal immigration, it seems that the step is probably unnecessary,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow and director of military analysis at the Defense Priorities think tank. “I can’t really see a rationale for doing it,” she added. Continue reading, here.
Welcome to this Wednesday 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 1977, newly-elected Jimmy Carter became the first president to fly aboard the Boeing-made National Emergency Airborne Command Post—an E-4A aircraft, which has since been updated to an E-4B and is called the National Airborne Operations Center, or NAOC. (Hat tip today to Stephen Schwartz.)
National security update: Less than 14% of those arrested by federal immigration agents had violent criminal records, CBS News reported off data spanning Trump’s first year back in the White House.
Why it matters: “Trump and his aides often talk about immigration officials targeting murderers, rapists and gangsters, [but] the internal data indicate that less than 2% of those arrested by [Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents] over the past year had homicide or sexual assault charges or convictions,” CBS reports. “Another 2% of those taken into ICE custody were accused of being gang members.” Meanwhile, a CBS survey last month “found that Americans’ support for Mr. Trump’s deportation efforts had fallen to 46%, down from 59% at the start of his second term.”
Another new survey found a 15-point rise in Americans who “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s handling of border security and immigration, NBC News reported Wednesday. In June 51% approved versus 49% who disapproved. But by the start of February, those numbers had flipped to 40% approving versus 60% disapproving.
Almost 75% of those surveyed also said they think ICE should be reformed or abolished. NBC’s online survey gathered results from nearly 22,000 Americans from Jan. 27 to Feb. 6.
By the way: A 14-year-old American in Idaho was zip-tied while watching her 6- and 8-year-old siblings during an immigration raid at a community horse racing event in the town of Wilder, about an hour from Boise, CBS News reported Tuesday. “On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal civil rights lawsuit highlighting the mistreatment of families attending the weekend recreation event at La Catedral Arena, many of whom were American citizens of Hispanic descent.”
A judge just dismissed with prejudice federal charges against an American who had been jailed for six months following a Los Angeles protest in August. The U.S. citizen was accused of assaulting a federal officer with a cloth hat during the protest, but in her dismissal Monday, the “judge noted discrepancies in officers’ statements,” including allegations the citizen hit the officers—which was not supported by video evidence of the encounter, the Guardian reports.
ICE’s five-stage “detention pipeline” for Americans that runs from Minnesota to Texas is documented by Just Security’s Ryan Goodman and Sophia Khoroushi, who dug through court records for a special report published Wednesday. “U.S. citizens have been caught up in all five stages, as have individuals who are legal residents and others with pending legal status,” Goodman and Khoroushi write. “Indeed, of the three exits out of the pipeline, many have been released pursuant to a court order finding the government unlawfully detained them.”
Update: ICE has spent more than a half billion dollars to buy warehouses to concentrate migrants in detention, including in locations across Maryland, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas and Georgia. “If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they’ll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight,” warned Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council.
For some perspective, “Right now Rikers Island, the physically largest jail in the entire United States, is holding under 7,000 people,” he writes. “ICE’s warehouse plans include detention camps which will hold between 8,500-10,000 people in buildings not designed for human habitation.”
Those warehouses are becoming a “symbol of resistance,” the New York Times reported Sunday. Similar to the CBS and NBC polls noted above, the Times cited their own recent survey to note that “A broad majority of voters—63 percent—disapprove of the way ICE is handling its job,” while “Sixty-one percent of voters said that ICE had ‘gone too far,’ including nearly one in five Republicans.”
That resistance is even reaching Republican-dominated regions like Byhalia, Mississippi, as GOP Sen. Roger Wicker noted last week, according to the Mississippi Free Press. “From my understanding, the ICE detention facility would have a capacity exceeding 8,500 beds,” Wicker wrote in a Facebook post on Friday. “Existing medical and human services infrastructure in Byhalia is insufficient to support such a large detainee population. Establishing a detention center at this site would place significant strain on local resources.”
But ICE is “expanding across the U.S. at breakneck speed,” WIRED reported Tuesday, documenting what it calls “a secret, monthslong expansion campaign.”
“Documents show that more than 150 leases and office expansions have or would place new facilities in nearly every state, many of them in or just outside of the country’s largest metropolitan areas,” WIRED’s Leah Fieger writes. “In many cases, these facilities, which are to be used by street-level agents and ICE attorneys, are located near elementary schools, medical offices, places of worship, and other sensitive locations.”
DHS is also asking officials to hide lease listings due to “national security concerns,” according to emails and memos with the General Services Administration. It’s also been bypassing legislation “that requires open competition among bidders for federal building and lease procurements.” Read more, here.
On Capitol Hill, a stalemate over ICE reform is threatening to shut down DHS by midnight on Friday, the Times reported Tuesday. The latest sticking points include “unmasking those engaged in the immigration roundups and new requirements for warrants for searches and arrests.”
And speaking of Capitol Hill, a grand jury on Tuesday refused to indict six Democratic lawmakers over their video encouraging U.S. troops to disobey “illegal orders” in the wake of the military’s airstrike campaign to kill people aboard alleged drug-trafficking boats in the waters around Latin America. More than three-dozen of those strikes have killed at least 130 people to date, according to the Defense Department. NBC News called the indictment “the latest example of the Justice Department’s targeting the president’s perceived political opponents” in a case led by “political appointees, not career Justice Department prosecutors.”
“Today wasn’t just an embarrassing day for the Administration. It was another sad day for our country,” said one of those lawmakers, former Pentagon official Elissa Slotkin, a Democratic senator from Michigan, writing on social media after the grand jury’s decision. “Trump continues to weaponize our justice system against his perceived enemies. It’s the kind of thing you see in a foreign country, not in the United States we know and love.”
To amplify its social media output, DHS just hired a 21-year-old who was known to post white-supremacist messages while working at the Labor Department, the New York Times reported Wednesday. His name is Peyton Rollins, and he’s authored dozens of posts using imagery and fonts “reminiscent of the 1920s and 1930s,” including the Fraktur font, which “had been used in early Nazi government documents and on the original cover of Hitler’s book, ‘Mein Kampf,’” the Times reports.
While at the Department of Labor, he also posted nearly 20 times using “phrases associated with QAnon, an internet conspiracy theory,” in addition to “violent language and a recurrent antisemitic trope” on the government’s social media account.
Additional reading:
Every soldier is a drone operator. That’s the watchword at Fort Stewart, Georgia, where the 3rd Infantry Division is working on a pair of courses to certify troops to operate small unmanned aerial systems. “The legacy UAS systems were focused on dedicated 15-series UAS operators, whereas now, we’re leaning more toward training standard infantry and armor soldiers to be the UAS operators,”said Capt. Brenden Shutt, the division’s innovation officer. It’s part of a servicewide effort to create doctrine around using drones throughout every formation. Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more, here.
Air Force hones its hub-and-spoke approach to basing. Today’s USAF leaders aren’t axing quite all of the previous administration’s efforts to prepare for a possible fight with China. For example, they’re are continuing to implement Agile Combat Employment, the service’s undersecretary said last week. “We cannot just project force and operate out of our main operating bases,” Matthew Lohmeier told a small group of reporters here as he wrapped up a trip around the Pacific. Defense One’s Jennifer Hlad reports from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, here.
FAA announced a 10-day halt to El Paso flights—then lifted it with conflicting explanations. At 11:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the Federal Aviation Administration shut down all flights to the West Texas city, surprising state and local officials, the New York Times reported.
But the halt was lifted Wednesday morning before an aviation official told Politico the Defense Department had been testing counter-drone technology “without sharing critical safety information” with the Federal Aviation Administration. Those tests originated from the Biggs Army Airfield at Fort Bliss, CNN reported.
But Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said an unspecified “cartel drone incursion” caused the closure. “The threat has been neutralized, and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region,” Duffy wrote on social media.
More reading:
Lastly today: “Inside a Military Bootcamp With Green Berets Training for Arctic Warfare,” a first-person video narrative by a Wall Street Journal reporter who jumped into freezing waters along with the operators.
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Ukraine shows that “the obsolescence is nearly immediate,” for even the best weapons.
