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Remote Access Trojans (RATs) like Quasar have been a persistent threat for years, enabling attackers to control infected systems remotely. Recent SANS research has uncovered a new and particularly stealthy Quasar campaign, characterized by strong …
Will Israel attack Iran soon? CBS News reported the possibility Wednesday, just a few short days before the next U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations are set to take place in Oman on Sunday.
America’s diplomats and its top military officer in the Middle East seem to suspect an attack is possible, “with the State Department authorizing the evacuation of some personnel in Iraq and the Pentagon green-lighting the departure of military family members across the Middle East,” the Washington Post reported Wednesday evening.
Central Command’s Gen. Erik Kurilla even postponed congressional testimony set for Thursday, citing new tensions in the Middle East, according to Reuters.
Background: The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a May 31 report it found three locations inside Iran that “were part of an undeclared structured nuclear programme carried out by Iran until the early 2000s and that some activities used undeclared nuclear material.”
Israel’s POV: “Iran has consistently obstructed IAEA’s verification and monitoring, it removed inspectors, and it sanitized and concealed suspected undeclared locations in Iran. These actions undermine the global non-proliferation regime and pose an imminent threat to regional and international security and stability,” the country’s Foreign Ministry said on social media.
Latest: On Thursday, Iran’s atomic-agency chief announced the country would “accelerate its production of near-weapons-grade uranium and would open a previously unrevealed [third] enrichment site in what he said is a secure location,” the Wall Street Journal reports, citing state-run media.
Notable: “Iran currently has two main enrichment sites. One is underground, at Natanz, and another is built deep into a mountainside, near the holy city of Qom, at Fordow,” the Journal’s Lawrence Norman writes. “Iran kept the construction of Fordow secret for years before it was revealed by Western officials in 2009. Both are built in a way to protect them from strikes by Israel or the U.S.”
Iran’s POV: If “a conflict is imposed on us,” Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh said Wednesday that Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “will target all U.S. bases in the host countries.”
Rewind: “Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel last year [October 1] after Israeli forces bombed Tehran’s consulate in Damascus,” Reuters reminds readers. “Israel replied with missile strikes in Iran and Syria—the first such direct attacks between the region’s most entrenched enemies.”
From the region:
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 1987, President Ronald Reagan challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.
Developing: 700 or so Marines are expected on the streets of Los Angeles beginning today and into Friday, the U.S. military’s Northern Command announced Wednesday as the Trump administration continues plans to accelerate its masked immigration raids across the country.
“We are expecting a ramp-up,” said Army Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, commander of the troops sent to protect immigration officials from protestors. “I’m focused right here in LA, what’s going on right here. But you know, I think we’re, we’re very concerned.”
Notable: “There are now more U.S. troops deployed to Los Angeles than serving in Syria and Iraq, a fact the chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, promoted on social media on Wednesday,” the New York Times reports in an analysis piece assessing the likelihood of an expanded troop presence on U.S. streets in the coming weeks.
Trump told troops Wednesday that LA is being “invaded by a foreign nation.” But his top military officer disagreed in remarks to senate appropriators Wednesday. “At this point in time, I don’t see any foreign, state-sponsored folks invading,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine said. He also disagreed with Trump’s view of Vladimir Putin’s ambitions in Europe. The Washington Post has more.
California’s view: “There is no invasion or rebellion in Los Angeles; there is civil unrest that is no different from episodes that regularly occur in communities throughout the country, and that is capable of being contained by state and local authorities working together,” the state’s attorney general writes in a legal brief that goes before a judge today in San Francisco.
Update: Fort Bragg’s 82nd Airborne Division “handpicked” soldiers “based on political leanings and physical appearance” for Trump’s speech at the Army base Tuesday, Military-dot-com reported Wednesday, following up a claim previously reported by Jane Coaston.
Notes included, “No fat soldiers,” and “If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out.”
Reax: “This has been a bad week for the Army for anyone who cares about us being a neutral institution,” one commander on Bragg told Military.com. The alleged controversies don’t end there; read on, here. DOD reax: “This is a complete & total fabrication. It absolutely did not happen. Fake news never stops,” said combative public affairs assistant Sean Parnell on social media.
Commentary: “The military must remain nonpartisan. America depends on it,” Heidi Urben, a retired Army colonel-turned-Georgetown University professor, wrote Wednesday for Defense One.
USAF slashes F-35 buy, boosts next-gen fighter in unconventional 2026 budget proposal. The Pentagon is proposing to halve its planned F-35 buy and boost funding for the sixth-gen F-47 fighter jet—but many of its 2026 budget-proposal details hinge on the reconciliation legislation still being debated on Capitol Hill. The budget proposal was quietly delivered to Congress on Tuesday—an unorthodox rollout without the typical public release and background briefings for press.
Even more unconventional: documents sent to Capitol Hill include not just the usual defense appropriations, but also money they are seeking in the reconciliation package.
And another oddity: the proposal arrived one day after the House Appropriations Committee, frustrated by the Trump administration’s tardiness, moved ahead with its own draft of the 2026 defense budget.
For the Air Force, total procurement in 2026 would reach $54.2 billion, plus another $9.7 billion in the reconciliation bill. The baseline request is down for the 2025 enacted budget, which allocated $55.8 billion for service procurement. Defense One’s Audrey Decker has more details, here.
SecDef Hegseth’s week on Capitol Hill continues with testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning.
Yesterday, lawmakers ripped into the defense secretary over the flat Pentagon budget. At a Senate appropriations defense subcommittee hearing, Hegseth described a $961.6 billion defense-spending proposal for next year, but that number includes more than $100 billion in the reconciliation bill, an infusion the Pentagon is counting on to cover investments in shipbuilding and missile defense.
“Reconciliation, Mr. Secretary, was meant to provide one-time supplemental funds to augment the defense budget, not to supplant the investments that should be in the base budget,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. The $831.5 billion proposed for the discretionary Defense Department budget is the same amount authorized for the current fiscal year, and therefore a slight decline in real terms. Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports, here.
Extra reading: “McConnell Tells Hegseth America’s Reputation Is at Stake in Ukraine War,” the New York Times reported Wednesday from Hegseth’s hearings. “Will we defend democratic allies against authoritarian aggressors?” Sen. Mitch McConnell, the former Senate majority leader who leads the Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee, asked the SecDef.
Pentagon may push to scrap AUKUS. Defense Undersecretary for Policy Elbridge Colby is reportedly leading a policy review to determine whether the U.S. should withdraw from the 2021 technology-sharing pact between Australia, the UK, and the United States. Colby has long expressed skepticism about the deal, whose centerpiece is Australia’s planned acquisition of three to five Virginia-class nuclear submarines, then a new SSN-AUKUS class built with Britain.
Financial Times: “Ending the submarine and advanced technology development agreement would destroy a pillar of security co-operation between the allies. The review has triggered anxiety in London and Canberra.”
Lastly today: DHS wants Americans to report on their neighbors. A June 11 social media post evokes WWII and the migrants-as-“invaders” theme.
Another DHS post from June 11 takes aim at “liberals,” reposting a meme that says they are “driven by the consumption of fiction.”
Additional reading:
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Proofpoint Threat Intelligence has uncovered a large-scale Account Takeover (ATO) campaign, internally tracked as UNK_SneakyStrike, that leverages the open-source penetration testing framework TeamFiltration to target Microsoft Entra ID user accounts a…
Standing before troops, Trump called protesters in Los Angeles “a foreign enemy” and “animals” during a speech at a North Carolina Army base Tuesday.
“We will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy, and that’s what they are,” the president said to an audience of soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., Tuesday. “These are animals, but they proudly carry the flags of other countries but they don’t carry the American flag,” the president said. “We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again.”
Worth noting: “President Donald Trump made a series of false claims” during his speech to troops Tuesday, CNN’s Daniel Dale reports in an annotated fact check. “Trump lied again about the 2020 election. He repeated a long-debunked story about a Minnesota National Guard deployment in 2020. He again distorted the history of his first administration’s fight against the ISIS terror group. He revived a fictional tale about immigration during former President Joe Biden’s administration. And he exaggerated the military’s recruiting challenges under Biden. In addition, Trump made a series of vague assertions about the protests in Los Angeles for which he presented no evidence.” More, here.
Mission photo op: Trump’s Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth posted an image of soldiers—unclear precisely who—protecting what a caption claims are immigration officials during an apparent arrest recently, and wrote, “This We’ll Defend” beside the photo Tuesday on social media.
Update: The Pentagon claims its LA deployments will cost $134 million and last 60 days. The deployment of some 4,000 California National Guard and 700 Marines will be funded by the Defense Department’s operations and maintenance budget, acting Comptroller Bryn MacDonnell told lawmakers at a Tuesday hearing of the House appropriations’ defense panel. Military Times has more.
Evolving tasking? The National Guard federalized by Trump over the weekend were originally ordered to protect federal buildings. However, “the Pentagon plans to direct the California National Guard to start providing support for immigration operations,” which “would include holding secure perimeters around areas where raids are taking place and securing streets for immigration agents,” the Associated Press reports.
Developing: Trump officials plan to expand their “tactical” immigration raids to New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, and northern Virginia, MSNBC reported Tuesday.
Coverage continues below the jump…
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 1944, the USS Missouri (BB 63) was commissioned, the last battleship to enter U.S. service.
Trump “is turning the U.S. military against American citizens,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement Tuesday. “Yesterday, we filed a legal challenge to President Trump’s reckless deployment of American troops to a major American city,” he said in nationally-televised address Tuesday evening. “Today, we sought an emergency court order to stop the use of the American military to engage in law enforcement activities across Los Angeles.” A judge set a hearing date for Newsom’s request on Thursday.
“If some of us can be snatched off the streets without a warrant, based only on suspicion or skin color, then none of us are safe,” said Newsom. “Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there.”
A second opinion: “This Is What Trump Does When His Revolution Sputters,” historian Anne Applebaum argued Wednesday for The Atlantic. “The bloodiest, most damaging revolutions have all been shaped by people making the most extreme choices,” she writes. “When the Bolsheviks ran into opposition in 1918, they unleashed the Red Terror. When the Chinese Communists encountered resistance, Mao sent teenage Red Guards to torment professors and civil servants. Sometimes the violence was mere theater, lecture halls full of people demanding that victims recant. Sometimes it was real. But it always served a purpose: to provoke, to divide, and then to allow the revolutionaries to suspend the law, create an emergency, and rule by decree.”
The bigger picture: “Trump’s henchmen have a set of radical, sometimes competing goals, all of which require fundamental changes in the nature of the American state,” Applebaum writes. “The concentration of power in the hands of the president. The replacement of the federal civil service with loyalists. The transfer of resources from the poor to the rich, especially rich insiders with connections to Trump. The removal, to the extent possible, of brown-skinned people from America, and the return to an older American racial hierarchy.”
“But their revolutionary project is now running into reality,” she notes. “More than 200 times, courts have questioned the legality of Trump’s decisions, including the arbitrary tariffs and the deportations of people without due process.” What to watch for now? “At each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier. If not stopped, by Congress or the courts, the Trump revolution will follow that logic too.” Read the rest (gift link), here.
New: Trump ordered Confederate names back on more U.S. Army bases. Service officials raced to comply, accidentally mixing up the name of one Virginia base (Fort Anderson-Pinn-Hill for Fort A.P. Hill) in their announcement Tuesday.
The order covers seven installations, and follows the recent re-re-namings of Forts Bragg and Benning in North Carolina and Georgia, respectively. As with those two bases, administration officials dug through U.S. military history and decorations to find individuals who happen to share last names with Confederate generals including Pickett, Lee, Hood, Gordon, Polk, Rucker, and Hill.
Rewind: Those bases were renamed for various veterans and values in the shadow of the George Floyd protests of 2020. But growing support for the effort began three years before that, in the wake of a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., whose marchers circled Confederate monuments while shouting racist slogans such as “You will not replace us!” In the summer of 2020, the Army began the process to consider new names for the bases. Congress used its 2021 defense policy bill to launch a bipartisan process that convened a panel of experts to consider new names, and those recommendations were announced in 2022 and implemented several months later. But not long afterward, Trump used the 2024 election campaign to proclaim his adoration for the Confederate names, and others in his administration—Pete Hegseth, in particular—joined him in calls to restore those names at all of the affected installations, which are located almost entirely in southern states.
About the newly-recognized veterans: The Army says “Five of them received the Medal of Honor, three received the Distinguished Service Cross and one received the Silver Star.” Read over the entire list of the seven affected bases and their new namesakes, here.
And the discarded names? The Army ignored them in their press release Tuesday. But they can be found in this archived report from the Pentagon before Trump began his second term and launched his campaign against diversity across the federal government.
Silent on these reversals: Congress, including GOP Rep. Don Bacon who told Politico in October, “The law was you had to get rid of the Confederate names, and the commission was to determine what those names should be,” said Bacon, who spearheaded the legislation authorizing the renaming panel. “The law was passed, it’s not going to go backward,” he said just eight months ago.
Update: 76% of Americans (including 52% of Republicans) oppose Trump’s military parade this weekend in Washington. But Trump is unbothered, and in remarks Tuesday even threatened to order the use of force against those who protest during the Army’s parade, which coincides with Trump’s birthday.
Related reading:
Around the services
US Air Force’s nascent radar plane faces the axe. The service’s plan to buy 26 Boeing E-7 Wedgetails may be discarded to fund a Pentagon shift toward space-based ISR, SecDef Hegseth said at a Tuesday hearing of the House appropriations defense subcommittee hearing.
The service has already spent more than $1 billion to develop and begin production of its first two E-7s, which it has long argued are the more capable, more survivable successors to the decades-old E-3 AWACS needed for airborne domain awareness in the Indo-Pacific. Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports, here.
Speaking of Hegseth: NBC News reports that the White House “is looking for a new chief of staff and several senior advisers to support Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after a series of missteps that have shaken confidence in his leadership, but it has so far found no suitable takers, according to four current and former administration officials and a Republican congressional aide.” Read on, here.
DARPA, admirals offer glimpses of the Navy’s robotic future. Navy leaders have often tempered expectations around replacing manned vessels with uncrewed ones. In 2020, for example, acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly suggested that autonomous capabilities might actually increase the need for manned surface vessels. But the pace of technology and the realities of U.S. industrial capacity are opening naval minds.
“I could imagine the battle group eventually becoming completely autonomous,” said Greg Avicola, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, outlining a vision of a Navy strike force built not around an aircraft carrier, but of a “heterogeneous” mix of robotic assets of varying size, role, and capability. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has more, here.
Meet DOGE’s team inside the Defense Department. ProPublica has identified four men installed by defense contractor Elon Musk at the Pentagon:
Read more about each of these men at ProPublica’s DOGE tracker; filter by “Department of Defense” to see the short list.
Lastly today: USAF’s relaxation cubes. Air Force Times: “At dozens of bases across the Air Force, troops are undertaking tried-and-true relaxation techniques — biofeedback, meditation — in shiny mirrored cubes that can project light patterns and even galaxies. The experience, as one researcher put it, is more like a ‘Disney ride’ than a studio or clinical office.” Read on, here.
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A recent report by Kaspersky ICS CERT, released on June 10, 2025, sheds light on the persistent and evolving cyberthreats targeting industrial automation systems (IAS) worldwide during the first quarter of 2025. The comprehensive analysis, based on dat…
A discovery by Socket’s Threat Research Team has unveiled a malicious Python package named imad213, masquerading as an Instagram growth tool. Created by a threat actor identified as im_ad__213 with the associated email madmadimado59@gmail[.]com, …
President Trump called for the arrest of California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday after the state’s attorney general sued Trump’s decision to federalize National Guard troops for at least 60 days without a request from Newsom in response to protests against federal immigration raids in Los Angeles.
Latest: An estimated 4,000 Guard troops have now been federalized and put on active duty—doubling the total from Monday—in support of Trump’s raids, which have been conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE agents. The newest announcement of 2,000 more Guard troops was delivered via social media not by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth or Trump, but by Hegseth’s assistant public affairs official Sean Parnell.
Why seek to arrest Newsom, according to Trump? “His primary crime is running for governor, because he’s done such a bad job,” Trump told reporters Monday. “What he’s done to that state is like what Biden did to this country,” Trump alleged.
California reax: “We don’t take lightly to the president abusing his authority and unlawfully mobilizing California National Guard troops,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said Monday. He’s seeking a court order to declare the Guard authorization unlawful “and asking for a restraining order to halt the deployment,” according to the Associated Press. You can find Bonta’s 22-page suit (PDF) here.
Rhetoric watch: Trump claimed the protesters are “insurrectionists” in remarks to reporters Monday. Other White House officials have echoed their boss “in what may become a rationale for him to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act,” David Sanger of the New York Times reported Monday.
Hours later, Trump backpedaled his LA “insurrection” claim, telling reporters, “I wouldn’t call it quite an insurrection, but it could have led to an insurrection.” CNN has more on Trump’s inconsistent handle on the i-word, noting “an insurrection isn’t about the level of violence; it’s about the target and purpose of it,” here.
Coverage continues after the jump…
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 1964, the Senate broke a 75-day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act, leading to the bill’s passage.
New: Trump ordered 700 active duty Marines to Los Angeles ostensibly to protect federal law enforcement officers and property on Monday, defense officials at U.S. Northern Command announced in a statement. They’ll be joining “approximately 2,100 National Guard soldiers” whom NORTHCOM says “have been trained in de-escalation, crowd control, and standing rules for the use of force.”
The Marines are from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division. The Guard troops include “approximately 1700 soldiers from the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, a California National Guard unit in a Title 10 status,” NORTHCOM says.
Reaction: Newsom said Monday the state of California will sue in response to Trump’s deployment of Marines, too.
Status report: “So far, the troops appear to have largely stayed out of confrontations between protesters and local police, who broke up protests downtown late Monday night,” the New York Times reported Tuesday morning, and noted, “There generally seemed to be fewer clashes between protesters and police officers than on Sunday, when demonstrators briefly shut down the 101 freeway.” Police have arrested 150 people in Los Angeles since Friday.
Newsom to Trump: “You sent your troops here without fuel, food, water or a place to sleep. Here they are—being forced to sleep on the floor, piled on top of one another. If anyone is treating our troops disrespectfully, it is you, [Trump],” the governor wrote on social media Monday afternoon.
“This isn’t about public safety. It’s about stroking a dangerous President’s ego,” Newsom said in a separate post. “This is Reckless. Pointless. And Disrespectful to our troops,” he added.
Developing: The Pentagon is “scrambling” to draw up rules of engagement for the 700 Marines sent to LA, AP reported Monday evening. “For example, warning shots would be prohibited, according to use-of-force draft documents viewed by The Associated Press. Marines are directed to deescalate a situation whenever possible but also are authorized to act in self-defense, the documents say.”
Worth noting: The Pentagon’s draft memo includes “measures [that] could involve detaining civilians until they can be turned over to law enforcement,” AP writes, describing what would be a highly unusual escalation in the use of the military inside the United States.
Trump’s Homeland Security Department wants those troops to be able to arrest “lawbreakers” in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday after obtaining a copy of a letter sent Sunday from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to the Pentagon’s Pete Hegseth.
Why it matters: “The military is generally barred under federal laws from taking part in domestic law enforcement. Noem’s request may be a step toward the administration sidestepping those laws by invoking the Insurrection Act,” the Chronicle reports.
Local reax: “This isn’t what happens in a democracy, this is what happens in a dictatorship,” State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said. “We have a time-honored tradition in the United States that the military does not enforce civilian law.”
ACLU reax: “From the get-go, the Trump administration’s deployment of troops into the streets of California, over the governor’s objection, has raised serious constitutional concerns,” Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement Monday.
“Every move President Trump has made since Saturday night has been escalatory and inflammatory. The idea that these Marines have anywhere near the kind of training required to police protests while respecting people’s constitutional rights would be laughable if the situation weren’t so alarming,” Shamsi added.
What does history tell us about responding to protests with active duty troops? “The most recent modern invocation of the Insurrection Act took place in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush used it in an attempt to quell the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles,” the Center for American Progress wrote in a report published in February.
“In one notorious incident, the Marines and police were called to respond to a domestic disturbance at a local home. When the officers arrived, the inhabitants fired a shotgun through the front door. A policeman yelled ‘cover me,’ meaning hold your fire but prepare to shoot as necessary. The Marines, however, ‘responded instantly in the way they had been trained, where ‘cover me’ means ‘provide me with cover using firepower.’ The soldiers then opened fire on the residence, shooting more than 200 bullets into the front of the house. Three children were inside the home at the time. No one involved in the incident was killed, but federal troops were pulled out of Los Angeles on May 10, just days after their initial deployment.”
“This incident illustrates the enormous safety risks posed by deploying combat-trained troops to a civilian environment,” the report’s authors warn. Read more, here.
LA-based journalist Jim Newton wrote a concurrent opinion at the height of the George Floyd protests of 2020, for Politico. Writing about the same incident noted above, he recalled that “By the time soldiers and Marines were in position, the violence was already subsiding, so their mission was muddied from the start: Authorized to ‘restore law and order,’ they were not empowered to ‘maintain law and order.’ Some military leaders concluded that their authorization thus was no longer valid. From then on, each request for military backup—including each request for the guard, which by then had been federalized—was evaluated according to whether it was a request to ‘restore’ order or merely to ‘maintain’ it. The process was cumbersome and sometimes slow.”
BLUF for Newton: “The history in Los Angeles suggests that solid coordination between the state and federal governments, along with decisive use of the National Guard, can save lives and protect property.” But it also “argues against employment of active-duty forces, certainly without consultation and consent of the states,” he said back in June 2020. Read the rest, here.
Another pesky matter: Lots of misinformation and misleading photos are being shared on social media, as the BBC and the New York Times are tracking and flagging for readers. “One was a still from ‘Blue Thunder,’ a 1983 action-thriller about a conspiracy to deprive residents of Los Angeles of their civil rights,” the Times reports. Another featured “a fabricated quote, attributed to former President Barack Obama, discussing a secret plot to impose socialism on the country, as well as a video of burning police cars that was from 2020.”
Several others have been recirculated by influential conservatives since the George Floyd protests of 2020. Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz and conspiracist Alex Jones fell for one of those recirculated images this week, as the BBC’s Shayan Sardarizadeh reported. NYT: “The flood of falsehoods online appeared intended to stoke outrage toward immigrants and political leaders, principally Democrats.”
By the way: The bill Trump is trying to push through a GOP-led Congress includes $160 billion for anti-immigration efforts, including $8 billion for ICE personnel, $15 billion for deportations, and $45 billion for more detention facilities. ICE’s current total budget is $8 billion.
“For perspective, we would be spending [almost] 3x as much on immigration jails alone as on NASA,” observed Naval War College Professor David Burbach.
Pentagon chief Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine are on Capitol Hill today testifying before House appropriators on the latest annual budget request. That began at 9:30 a.m. ET. Details and livestream here.
Update: Hegseth appears to be repeating misleading information about immigration to lawmakers, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted on social media Tuesday, with supporting evidence.
Related reading:
After stoking immigration tensions in California, Trump is to fly to the Army’s Fort Bragg, where soldiers are preparing to celebrate the service’s 250th anniversary this weekend, the Pentagon announced in a short statement Monday.
POTUS limits use of cyber rules to punish U.S. hackers, election meddlers. A Friday executive order, the latest of Trump’s second-term cybersecurity mandates, rolls back an Obama-era order that the State and Treasury departments have used to financially punish people who supported attacks that harmed U.S. national security. His EO echoes unproven claims that cyber and surveillance authorities were politicized to target Trump and his allies. Nextgov/FCW’s David DiMolfetta reports, here.
Related: “Trump might be the most accessible president ever — for spies or scammers,” reports Axios, adding that his administration is “uniquely vulnerable to basic scams like spoofed calls and impersonation attempts.”
The State Department is using AI to help pick new hires, Reuters reported Monday, citing an internal message to employees. “The cable said that StateChat, an in-house chatbot which works using technology from Palantir and Microsoft, will be employed to pick foreign service officers for participation on the Foreign Service Selection Boards, the annual evaluation panels which decide whether and how to promote and shuffle around State Department employees.”
China sends two aircraft carriers to the Pacific at the same time. In an apparent first, the Liaoning and Shandong were operating on Saturday in separate areas near remote southern islands belonging to Japan, the Japanese defense ministry said. Reuters has a bit more, here.
China’s propaganda surges as the U.S. retreats from the information war. Washington Post: “Two months after the Trump administration all but shut down its foreign news services in Asia, China is gaining significant ground in the information war, building toward a regional propaganda monopoly, including in areas where U.S.-backed outlets once reported on Beijing’s harsh treatment of ethnic minorities.
“Cutbacks at Radio Free Asia and other news outlets funded by the U.S. Agency for Global Media have allowed China to fill a programming void and expand the reach of its talking points, according to an analysis prepared for a USAGM grantee that, though based on publicly available data, was not authorized to be shared publicly.” More, here.
And lastly: Comcast is among the firms likely hit by China’s Salt Typhoon hackers, sources say. Two U.S. security agencies have listed the telecom-and-entertainment conglomerate, along with the data center giant Digital Realty, among companies likely ensnared by a Chinese hacking group that has penetrated U.S. and global telecom operators, DiMolfetta reported for Nextgov.
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Such intrusions into the world’s network infrastructure could mean the hackers have a deeper foothold than previously known.
SentinelLABS, a sophisticated reconnaissance operation targeting SentinelOne, a leading cybersecurity vendor, has been detailed as part of a broader espionage campaign linked to China-nexus threat actors. Tracked under the activity clusters PurpleHaze …
Trump ordered a U.S. military response to protests against immigration enforcement in California. In a memo announcing the move, President Donald Trump invoked his Title 10 authority (10 U.S.C. § 12406) to federalize and deploy 2,000 National Guardsmen in Los Angeles Saturday evening, citing a need to protect “federal personnel and property”—that is, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents whose recent raids in the city have drawn protests.
Latest: The LA police declared the downtown to be an unlawful assembly area and told protesters to go home Sunday evening. “Los Angeles police said some protesters had thrown concrete projectiles, bottles and other items at police,” Reuters reports. “Police declared several rallies to be unlawful assemblies and later extended that to include the whole downtown area.” Almost 40 people had been arrested by Sunday evening, Police Chief Jim McDonnell said.
Trump’s federalizing of the Guard marked the first time since 1965 that a president has sent troops into a state without a request from its governor, according to Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice. In 1965, the federalization occurred to protect civil rights demonstrators; in 2025, the federalization occurred to protect ICE agents.
The U.S. military’s Northern Command took charge of the Guard troops, announcing Sunday the creation of “Task Force 51, with a two-star general, as the ground command and control element over the Title 10 forces.” By the evening, an estimated 300 members of the California Army National Guard’s 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team deployed to Los Angeles, Paramount, and Compton, California, NORTHCOM said in a statement.
Trump’s Pentagon chief threatened to send active duty Marines to Los Angeles, claiming Saturday evening that “violent mob assaults” and a “dangerous invasion” have caused the Marines to be “on high alert” from their base at Camp Pendleton.
It’s worth noting that in his threat to send Marines, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cited no law that would allow such a move. “Any use of active-duty troops to enforce [10 U.S.C. § 12406] under this memorandum would thus be a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act,” Goitein said. “The administration would likely claim an inherent constitutional right to protect federal personnel and property (in keeping with the memo’s language). But the Posse Comitatus requires ‘express’ authorization—not a claim of implied power,” she warned.
About those active duty troops: They consist of “Approximately 500 Marines from 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines at Twentynine Palms, California,” and they “are in a prepared to deploy status should they be necessary to augment and support the DoD’s protection of federal property and personnel efforts,” NORTHCOM said in its statement.
California’s governor called Trump’s decision “unlawful” and has formally asked him to withdraw the National Guard. “We didn’t have a problem until Trump got involved,” Gavin Newsom said on social media Sunday evening. “This is a serious breach of state sovereignty—inflaming tensions while pulling resources from where they’re actually needed.”
Latest: Newsom also said California will file a lawsuit challenging Trump’s federalizing of the Guard, the governor said Monday, adding: “Pete Hegseth is a joke.”
Some legal background: On Saturday, Trump claimed the protests “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” But the law he invoked is not the Insurrection Act, and the Posse Comitatus Act forbids the military (including federalized National Guard troops) from being used for domestic law enforcement.
Another thing: The U.S. military’s job is not to police fellow citizens; it is to protect against foreign threats.
More background: “10 USC 12406 has not historically been treated or used as an independent authority. Trump’s move is vulnerable to legal challenge on that ground alone,” Goitein explained. But “No president has ever federalized the National Guard for purposes of responding to potential future civil unrest anywhere in the country,” she added. “Preemptive deployment is literally the opposite of deployment as a last resort. It would be a shocking abuse of power and the law.”
For what it’s worth: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem just last year claimed federalizing the National Guard “would be a direct attack on state’s rights.”
Observations from a former Naval War College professor: “Sending in the National Guard is meant to provoke, not pacify, and [Trump’s] power will only grow if he succeeds in tempting Americans to intemperate reactions that give him the authoritarian opening he’s seeking,” Tom Nichols argued in The Atlantic on Sunday in a piece titled, “Trump Is Using the National Guard as Bait.” “Trump sees the U.S. military as his personal honor guard and his private muscle,” Nichols writes, “and he’s going to get a show from his honor guard in a birthday parade next weekend. In the meantime, he’s going to flex that muscle, and prove that the officers and service members who will do whatever he orders are the real military.”
“ICE is on a rampage, but physically assaulting or obstructing its agents—and thus causing a confrontation with the cops who have to protect them, whether those police officers like it or not—will provide precisely the pretext that some of the people in Trump’s White House are trying to create,” Nichols argues.
Bigger picture: Trump “is resorting to the grand theater of militarism because he is losing on multiple fronts in the courts—and he knows it,” says Nichols. “The law, for most people, is dreary to hear about, but one of the most important stories of Trump’s second term is that lawyers and judges are so far holding a vital line against the administration, sometimes at great personal risk.”
Historian’s reax: “There is real weakness behind the regime’s power grab.,” Heather Cox Richardson of Boston College wrote Sunday evening. “Trump’s promised trade deals have not materialized, and indicators show his policies are hurting the economy…There is no doubt that as their other initiatives have stalled and popular opinion is turning against the administration on every issue, the Trump regime is trying to establish a police state.”
“We are one flared temper, one foolish incident, away from a true national emergency,” said Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. “This is a moment where de-escalation is called for. But it doesn’t look like that’s what the Trump administration wants here,” she added. Indeed, “They are not taking steps to de-escalate. To the contrary, they continued to dig in on Sunday afternoon.”
Worth noting: “As written, Trump’s Action is not limited to California,” Vance continues. “The framework is there for this to expand to other states, for instance, if protests against ICE operations erupt.”
Something to watch for: If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, “The military can’t go any further than their civilian counterparts could in enforcing the law,” Vance explains. “They can arrest people, if the law authorizes it, or disperse them. However, our constitutional rights would still remain in effect. That constitutional context is not an environment in which members of the military are accustomed to operating, which could present its own complications.”
By the way: ICE arrested a former Afghan National Army soldier at his home in Texas, Houston Public Media reported last week. He entered the U.S. legally, has no criminal record, and was applying for asylum, his attorney says. His case appears to be the result of Trump’s decision to de-document legal Afghan immigrants.
Expert reax: “This guy did nothing wrong. He broke not a single law. He was a guard at a base that housed U.S. troops. He came here legally through humanitarian parole. He had an asylum application pending. Yet the Trump admin had ICE grab him anyway,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council.
Related reading:
Welcome to this Monday 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 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a national day of mourning following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
Move faster, share things: A former NATO transformation chief previews the summit. American reticence and Russian aggression have created a sense of urgency for the upcoming NATO Summit in The Hague, where leaders plan to redouble efforts toward digital transformation and multi-domain operations. That’s according to Philippe Lavigne, a former chief of staff of the French Air and Space Force and a former NATO Supreme Allied Commander for transformation.
Lavigne talked with Defense One’s Patrick Tucker as part of a series of podcasts ahead of the 2025 Globsec Forum, taking place in Prague from June 12 to 14. (Defense One is a media partner of the conference.) Read the highlights, here, and come back for the full podcast later today.
Russia launched its biggest drone attack of the war so far overnight Sunday, Ukrainian officials said Monday. “Ukraine’s air defence units downed 460 out of 479 drones and 19 out of 20 missiles launched by the Russian forces,” Reuters reports from Kyiv.
Targeted: A military airfield in Dubno, the western part of Ukraine, appeared to be one of the main targets. So far, just one person is known to have been injured, according to AP.
Additional reading: “Fiber Optic Bird’s Nest Heralds A Fiber Drone Summer In Ukraine,” David Hambling reported for Forbes last week. The article’s photos and video show the drones in action—reaching kilometers away and littering Ukrainian fields with glittering threads.
Hegseth headed to the Hill: SecDef Pete Hegseth will defend Trump’s 2026 budget proposal—and likely other things when grilled by Democrats—at the House and Senate Appropriations hearing on Tuesday and before the House Armed Services hearing on Thursday. Military Times has a preview.
By the way: “White House security staff warned Musk’s Starlink is a security risk,” the Washington Post reported Saturday.
And lastly: A new startup aims to build a 100-foot robot boat by year’s end. HavocAI, which has built 42 autonomous vessels in 18 months, is working on a 100-footer, CEO Paul Lwin tells Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams in an interview. Read on, here.
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