III MEF includes the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, which is “leading the service” in various capabilities.

Plans to build a new class of giant surface combatants were announced Monday by President Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Navy Secretary John Phelan at the president’s Florida mansion. Dubbed “battleships” in defiance of the usual meaning of the term and the “Trump class” in defiance of American tradition, the vessels are to displace some 35,000 tons, three times as much as today’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.

Their armament is to include 128 Mk 41 vertical-launch missile tubes, which would be more than the 96 on the Navy’s latest Burkes but less than the 154 on its SSGN guided-missile submarines. 

A fact sheet says the class will also include several weapons that don’t yet exist: a 32-megajoule railgun, two 300kW tactical lasers, and a dozen large tubes for the under-development Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles. The Associated Press notes that “the Navy has struggled to field some of the technologies Trump says will be aboard the new ship. The Navy spent hundreds of millions of dollars and more than 15 years trying to field a railgun aboard a ship before finally abandoning the effort in 2021.”

Phelan said parts of the ship will be built in all 50 states, hewing to the Navy’s two-century-old practice of spreading contracts to shore up political support. See coverage by the Wall Street Journal and USNI News.

Historian’s note: “The last battleship in history to be built was the HMS Vanguard, completed in 1946; the last battleship commissioned by the U.S. was the USS Missouri, which was decommissioned in the 1990s,” Heather Cox Richardson recounted following the president’s announcement. 

Additional reading: 

• “France to build first aircraft carrier in decades,” Semafor reported Monday, though current plans won’t have the carrier ready until 2038;
• But also from France, read “How U.S. Defense Industry Dodged a Rare-Earth Shortage After China’s Curbs,” via the New York Times reporting Monday on a cache of samarium nitrate found at a Belgium-owned chemical factory in Solvay, France (gift link). 

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Welcome to our final D Brief of 2025, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Amid our hectic daily lives, it remains more important than ever to stay informed. So we’d like to take an additional moment to thank you this year for reading. We welcome your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2002, the U.S. military lost its first drone in aerial combat when an MQ-1 Predator was shot down by an Iraqi MiG-25.

Around the Defense Department

The U.S. is now conducting surveillance flights over Nigeria after Trump threatened to send American troops there to halt violence against Christians, Reuters reported Monday. 

The contracted flights have been taking place since late November, just weeks after Trump issued the threat, and they typically depart from Ghana before returning, according to flight tracking data. An expert from AEI told Reuters “the operation appeared to be running out of an airport in Accra, a known hub for the U.S. military’s logistics network in Africa.” Pentagon officials declined to discuss the surveillance flights. Read more, here. 

Following Monday’s new row between the White House and Denmark, the State Department approved a $951 million sale of 230+ AMRAAM-ER missiles to Copenhagen, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced. 

Additional reading: 

• “Mass Recall of U.S. Ambassadors Leaves Unprecedented Global Vacancies,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday; 
• And “China likely loaded more than 100 ICBMs in silo fields, Pentagon report says,” Reuters reported Monday as well. 

Etc.

Lastly this year, we’ve compiled a list of recent and semi-recent extended reading links following up on several top U.S. national-security themes from 2025. Topics include DOGE’s hype vs. its reality, Trump’s aggressive deportation campaign, billions in U.S. missile defense contracts, the National Guard’s numerous domestic deployments, Israel’s war with Iran, the Pentagon’s rush to adopt AI, and more. 

Think we missed something big or particularly impactful? Let us know, and have a great upcoming holiday. We’ll see you again in 2026! 

• “How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little?” the New York Times reported Tuesday in a wrap-up of DOGE reporting highlighting the hype and the actual returns to date;  
• The Times also takes readers “Inside the Deportation Machine,” in a visually-stunning (and arguably terrifying) multimedia presentation published Monday; 
• “How the US is preparing a military staging ground near Venezuela,” which is another illuminating visual presentation, this time from nearly a dozen Reuters reporters, writing last month; 
• “Stephen Miller’s hard-line Mexico strategy morphed into deadly boat strikes,” via the Washington Post, reporting Thursday on how a border-security prerogative evolved into something quite different;
• “U.S. Boat Strike Campaign: Questions Congress Should Ask Executive Branch Officials,” via three veteran lawyers writing in early December for Just Security; 
• “The International Law Obligation to Investigate the Boat Strikes,” also via Just Security, writing last Monday; 
• “Russia Dismisses Reports of Progress in Ukraine Peace Talks,” the Times reported Sunday; 
• “Gargantuan Golden Dome contract vehicle clears 1,000-plus firms to vie for slices of $151 billion,” via Defense One’s Tom Novelly, reporting in early November; 
• “Another 1,000 defense companies chosen for $151B Golden Dome competition,” which is also from Novelly, reporting Friday in an update; 
• “Build Your Own Golden Dome: A Framework for Understanding Costs, Choices, and Tradeoffs,” via Pentagon veteran Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute, delivering a whopping 51-page report on the technology in September;
• Harrison also authored the much shorter analysis, “Golden Dome is a Trillion Dollar Gambit,” over at War on the Rocks a week later; 
• Lawfare is maintaining a “Trump Administration Litigation Tracker,” which includes numerous cases involving the president’s National Guard deployments across nearly a half-dozen U.S. cities since June, several of which have been put on hold while others have been stayed pending appeal; 
• Israeli “Army chief, hinting at potential new Iran war, says IDF will strike ‘wherever required,’” the Times of Israel reported Sunday; 
• “​​Pentagon to Add xAI’s Grok to AI Service Early Next Year,” the Information reported Tuesday;
• See also “The Good, Bad, and Really Weird AI Provisions in the Annual Defense Policy Bill,” via the Brennan Center for Justice, writing last Monday; 
• “Global investors turn to Chinese AI as Wall Street fears bubble,” Reuters reported Tuesday;  
• And relatedly, “The Pentagon and A.I. Giants Have a Weakness. Both Need China’s Batteries, Badly,” the New York Times reported Tuesday. 

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Developing: U.S. Coast Guard chases third oil tanker with alleged ties to Venezuela. The vessel was reportedly fleeing the Caribbean Sea on Sunday carrying oil from Venezuela as the U.S. Coast Guard worked to intercept it, U.S. officials told multiple media outlets, including Associated Press, CBS News, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. U.S. Coasties seized their first tanker with alleged Venezuelan ties on December 10. 

U.S. forces seized their second tanker on Saturday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced on social media along with a more than seven-minute video of the interception. “It was a falsely flagged vessel operating as part of the Venezuelan shadow fleet to traffic stolen oil and fund the narcoterrorist Maduro regime,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said on social media. That crude oil tanker is called Centuries and it travelled with the Panama flag when it was reportedly intercepted east of Barbados.  

Venezuelan officials called the U.S. interception a “serious act of international piracy,” and accused the U.S. military of “the forced disappearance of its crew,” Reuters reported.  

Also worth noting: The vessel has allegedly not been sanctioned by the U.S., according to Jeremy Paner of the law firm Hughes Hubbard and a former investigator at the Office of Foreign Assets Control. If true, that “runs counter to Trump’s statement that the U.S. would impose a blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers,” Paner told Reuters. 

Coming soon: President Trump is expected to make an announcement with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this afternoon from Palm Beach, Fla., according to the New York Times. 

New: Trump nominated special operations Marine Lt. Gen. Frank Donovan to lead Southern Command, the Defense Department announced Friday. He’s currently serving out of the Pentagon as vice commander of U.S. Special Operations Command. His Senate confirmation is still pending. 

The news came one week after SOUTHCOM’s previous chief, Navy Adm. Alvin Holsey, retired two years ahead of schedule amid Trump’s pressure campaign on Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro. The Times previously reported Holsey stepped down after raising “concerns early in the mission about the attacks on the alleged drug boats, which started in September.”

• Additional reading: “Top lawyer for military joint chiefs told chairman that officers should retire if faced with an unlawful order,” CNN reported Friday.

Notable: On December 8, Trump alleged, “The drugs coming in through the [Caribbean] sea are down to—they’re down by 92 percent,” he said in an interview with Politico. Later that day, he said the figure was “92 or 94 percent.” Three days later, it was back again. “Drug traffic by sea is down 92 percent,” he said in the Oval Office. 

Trump uses that number a lot when he lies. After a bit of digging, Marie-Rose Sheinerman of The Atlantic noticed on Saturday that Trump uses “92 percent” for a whole lot of things, including: 

• Elections: “I won that county by 92 percent.” (In fact, he won the county in question—Wayne County, N.C.—by 16 percentage points.)
• Percentage of the U.S. shoreline along the Gulf of Mexico. (It’s really about 46%.)
• Veterans’ vote. (Estimates put it closer to 65%.)
• Farmers’ vote. (Estimates place that closer to 78%.)
• Decline of egg prices. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics said 12.7 percent.)
• And, as noted, the alleged decline of drugs being trafficked through the Caribbean. 

In this context, it’s notably “unclear how many of the destroyed vessels were actually carrying narcotics,” Sheinerman reminds readers. “The administration has not specified or released evidence of the types or quantities of drugs on them.” And the U.S. military has destroyed the boats, eliminating the chance of verification. 

The broader takeaway may be, “more often than not, the number seems to serve as a clue that the commander in chief might be reaching for a number he can easily remember, caring little whether it is accurate,” Sheinerman writes. Read the rest (gift link), here. 

By the way, Utah Sen. Mike Lee wants U.S. privateers like Blackwater founder Erik Prince freed up to attack alleged drug traffickers on the high seas. Lee sponsored a bill to advance this cause, which he calls “Patriots of the Caribbean,” his office announced last week. 

For what it’s worth, Lee’s critics have equated his bill to greenlighting piracy in the Caribbean and off the Latin American coasts. And back in February, Breitbart reported that Prince said he put the idea in Lee’s head.

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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 and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2010, President Barack Obama signed legislation repealing a ban on homosexuals serving in the military. 

Middle East

U.S. forces struck more than 70 ISIS targets across central Syria on Friday in retaliation for a Dec. 13 attack on a convoy that killed three U.S. personnel. More than 100 precision munitions were delivered by F-15 and A-10 jets, Apache helicopters, and HIMARS rocket systems were used in the strikes, U.S. officials said. (CENTCOM, Reuters.)

Jordanian fighter jets supported the attack; Associated Press has a bit more about that.

Dubbed “Hawkeye Strike,” the operation was intended to eliminate ISIS fighters, infrastructure, and weapons sites, SecDef Pete Hegseth said on social media, framing it explicitly as an act of “vengeance.”

U.S. officials have rarely used that word, because it is not among the legal reasons a country may take military action. “Too much reliance or emphasis on the non-legal justification of retaliation endangers our ability to transparently comply with basic premises and requirements of the law of war,” Lt. Col. Dan Maurer, a judge advocate who has served as an Assistant Professor of Law at the U.S. Military Academy, wrote in 2017. Read that, here.

Rewind: “We defeated ISIS ‘100 percent,’” Trump announced back in 2019.

Commentary: “To foster Middle East peace and prosperity, help Kurdistan fend off extremists,” writes Treefa Aziz, the Kurdistan Regional Government Representative to the United States, in an oped for Defense One.

Around the Defense Department

Another 1,000 more defense companies cleared to compete for up to $151 billion in Golden Dome work. On Thursday, the Missile Defense Agency announced that another 1,086 companies (of 2,463 that applied) would be added to the 1,014 already cleared to compete for awards under the historically large contract vehicle for the wildly ambitious missile-defense program. The list of the latest defense firms in the competition is available here. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Friday, here.

The Pentagon wants a common network for its counter-drone systems. The Army-led task force is looking for a single command-and-control system that can run any of the counter-unmanned aerial systems equipment that government agencies can buy through their online marketplace. Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Friday.

Additional reading: 

• “Pentagon fails financial audit for 8th year in a row,” Military Times reported Friday; 
• “Pentagon preps to enforce ban on companies with ‘indirect’ ties to China,” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports.
• “Investigation underway after 26-year-old Marine dies at Parris Island,” the Hilton Head Island Packet reported Friday; 
• And “WWII Navy veteran Ira ‘Ike’ Schab, one of last remaining Pearl Harbor survivors, dies at 105,” the Associated Press reported Saturday. 

Trump 2.0

Trump’s acting CISA director failed a polygraph this Summer. Now at least six career staff members are under investigation, Politico reported Sunday. 

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin called it “an unsanctioned polygraph test,” which Madhu Gottumukkala, the acting director at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the employees in question have now been placed on administrative leave, she said in a statement. According to Politico, “When asked for clarification on what is considered an ‘unsanctioned’ polygraph, McLaughlin said that ‘random bureaucrats can’t just order a polygraph. Polygraph orders have to come from leadership who have the authority to order them.’” Read more, here. 

Trump says he’s appointed Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry as “special envoy” to Greenland. “Jeff understands how essential Greenland is to our National Security, and will strongly advance our Country’s Interests for the Safety, Security, and Survival of our Allies, and indeed, the World,” he wrote in a social media post late Sunday. 

Background: “Trump has advocated for Greenland, a self-governing Danish territory, to become part of the United States, citing its strategic importance and mineral resources,” Reuters reminds readers. 

Denmark’s foreign minister on Monday called the appointment “completely unacceptable.” Speaking to Danish TV on Monday, Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said, “As long as we have a kingdom in Denmark that consists of Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, we cannot accept that there are those who undermine our sovereignty.”

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and her counterpart from Greenland Jens-Frederik Nielsen were united in dismay. “We have said it before. Now, we say it again. National borders and the sovereignty of states are rooted in international law,” they said in a joint statement. “They are fundamental principles. You cannot annex another country. Not even with an argument about international security.”

“Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders and the U.S. shall not take over Greenland,” they said in the statement, according to AP. “We expect respect for our joint territorial integrity.”

Related reading: “Trump removes nearly 30 career diplomats from ambassadorial positions,” AP reported separately on Sunday. 

Meanwhile back stateside, another migrant has died while in ICE custody, the El Paso Times reported Friday from Guatemala. His name was Francisco Gaspar Cristóbal Andrés, age 48, and he was arrested in Florida over the Labor Day holiday. ICE confirmed his death on Dec. 5. 

He passed away amid liver and kidney complications while being held at the largest immigration detention center in the U.S., known as Camp East Montana located inside the military’s Fort Bliss at El Paso. He passed away on Dec. 3—reportedly the first immigrant to die in custody at Fort Bliss. 

Panning out: “At least 30 people have died in ICE detention this year,” which is “the highest level since 2004,” Reuters reported Friday. That figure included four more deaths in ICE custody between Dec. 12 and 15. 

Related: The New York Times reported Saturday in a 25-minute video “How ‘Turn and Burn’ Immigration Operations Unleash Chaos — and Sweep up U.S. Citizens.” 

Also in video: “ICE agent drags woman through Minneapolis street,” AP reported late last week. 

Dig deeper: From 2021, homelessness inside the U.S. increased largely due to immigration, wherein many people arrived without setting up housing. There are at least two notable reports documenting this link, including a study published in April and this September report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness. 

Related reading: 

• “Trump Administration Says Maryland Woman’s Birth Certificate Is Fake In Dystopian Move,” HuffPost reported Thursday; 
• “Dallas Police to expand controversial facial recognition tech to less serious crimes,” Dallas’s WFAA8 ABC News reported last week;
• “Redactions and Unanswered Questions: A Look at the Epstein Files,” via the New York Times reporting Friday and updated Sunday; 
• Trump’s 2024 criminal defense attorney Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche “defends partial release of Epstein files as Democrats cry foul,” AP reported Sunday; 
• And “GSA backs off planned layoffs within its technology team after court order,” Natalie Alms and Eric Katz reported Friday for Nextgov. 

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Developing: European leaders united around a $105 billion loan to keep Ukraine afloat financially on Friday after pausing a long-discussed proposal to use frozen Russian assets as Ukraine continues to face withering Russian drone and missile attacks following almost 1,400 consecutive days of war. 

Kyiv is set to run out of money by April, and the European Commission was prepared to move ahead with the frozen Russian funds as a “reparations” plan for devastated Ukraine. An estimated $217 billion of $246 billion in frozen Russian central bank funds are held in Belgium at its Euroclear clearing house. But the Guardian reports Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever stopped the plan, warning Moscow “would retaliate, and that courts in Russia-friendly jurisdictions, such as China, could order Belgian assets to be seized.” 

Fiscal forecast: The EU’s $105 billion loan is about two-thirds of what Ukraine “is thought to need to stay afloat over the next two years,” the BBC reports. 

Meanwhile, multiple European nations announced $45 billion in military aid for Ukraine after a meeting of the so-called Ramstein Group on Wednesday, the Kyiv Post reports. 

Germany vowed more than $13 billion, including air-defense equipment as well as drones and artillery shells. The Brits, too, vowed additional air-defense assets and counter-drone systems. Canada announced $50 million in missiles and drone equipment and another $200 million in U.S. equipment to be purchased for Ukraine. The Dutch said they’ve set aside more than $800 million for drone equipment. Norway vowed to send missiles for Ukraine’s F-16 aircraft. Denmark vowed about $167 million for drones and air-defense. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal and the Czech Republic also vowed new military aid to Ukraine. 

In case you were curious, “under Trump’s control, the US contributed a goose egg” at the Wednesday meeting, the Kyiv Post reports. Read more, here. 

ICYMI: Three Russian border guards used a hovercraft to cross into Estonian territory on Wednesday. The encounter was reportedly brief, and seemed to be a test of Estonian responses, analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War noted in their Thursday assessment. 

Additional reading: 

• “Ukraine’s grid confronts the possibility of total collapse,” Semafor reported Friday;
• “Putin, Boasting of Frontline Wins, Says Russia’s Goals in Ukraine Are Unchanged,” the New York Times reported Friday after the Russian leader’s annual address; 
• “Putin labels EU ‘burglars’ in rambling speech over frozen assets,” the UK’s Independent reported separately from Putin’s Friday address; 
• “Ukrainian drones hit a Russian ‘shadow fleet’ tanker in the Mediterranean Sea for the first time, security official says,” Business Insider reported Friday; the BBC has similar coverage here; 
• And “Ukraine offers to help Poland develop drone defences, Zelenskiy says,” Reuters reported Friday from Warsaw.

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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. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1972, America’s last crewed flight to the moon, Apollo 17, returned to Earth with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

Trump 2.0

The U.S. military carried out its 26th known strike against alleged drug-trafficking boats around Latin America on Wednesday, Southern Command officials announced on social media that evening. The strike targeted a single boat and killed four people as they were traveling somewhere “along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific,” SOUTHCOM said with an accompanying video of the attack. 

War crime in DOD’s boat strikes? Sen. Wicker sees none. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said Thursday after a classified briefing this week that SOUTHCOM’s war on maritime drug traffickers is being “conducted based on sound legal advice,” despite allegations to the contrary following Washington Post reporting the Pentagon killed two survivors after their initial strike on Sept. 2. 

“I have seen no evidence of war crimes,” Wicker said in a statement Thursday. “After participating in the various briefings provided by the administration, I am confident that the strikes that have taken place thus far against narco-terrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of operations were conducted based on sound legal advice,” he said, and claimed, “Each strike has been preceded by a rigorous analysis of extensive intelligence, as well as a thorough legal review.”

Wicker’s Democratic counterpart at SASC disagreed, and said in his own statement Thursday that the committee “has been denied basic information, documents, and answers from the Department of Defense about this campaign.” To that end, Ranking Member Jack Reed, D-R.I., said the military has not yet provided several documents “required by existing law and the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026,” including:

• The relevant Execute Orders;
• Unedited video of all strikes;
• Updated legal and policy framework reports;
• All audio, transcripts, and chat logs between commanders, aircraft, and others from the Sept. 2nd attacks;
• Regular staff briefings;
• Responses to dozens of written follow-up questions; and
• Updated costs for SOUTHCOM’s Southern Spear campaign. 

Reed and other SASC and HASC lawmakers were shown video of the Sept. 2 strikes on Wednesday after the Post’s reporting raised concern among experts and critics on Capitol Hill that the U.S. military had possibly violated the laws of war in a campaign of alleged extrajudicial killings. Several lawmakers want the video released so the U.S. public can view what their troops are doing as part of President Trump’s war on drug cartels. 

Trump himself said he would be okay with releasing the full video. A few days later, however, he changed his mind and said, “Whatever [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth wants to do is OK with me.” Hegseth then told reporters Tuesday, “Of course we’re not going to release a top secret full unedited video of that to the general public.” 

Sen. Chris Murphy disagreed with Hegseth’s characterization. “There’s nothing ‘top secret’ about the second strike if there wasn’t anything top secret about the first one,” said Murphy, D-Conn., and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, writing on social media Thursday. 

A note on strategy: The Pentagon’s counter-boat campaign developed only after the White House’s desired war on Mexican drug cartels turned up too few targets, the Post reported Thursday. Trump promised a war on those cartels during his 2024 campaign; but once he took office, at least some cartels responded and conditions reportedly changed—which caused the White House to change its focus. According to the Post, “as the administration surged thousands of U.S. troops to the southern border, increased U.S. surveillance flights and boosted intelligence sharing with its neighbor, Mexican military operations across the border curbed cartel action,” current and former U.S. officials said.”That left [Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller] and his team looking for another target.”

“When you hope and wait for something to develop that doesn’t, you start looking at countries south of Mexico,” a U.S. official said. The result was SOUTHCOM’s campaign targeting drug-trafficking boats off the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Latin America, which has killed at least 99 people to date, according to the U.S. military. Trump’s executive order for that campaign “contains targeting criteria lifted from the language of the counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which some current and former officials say give the Pentagon an overly permissive license to kill,” the Post reported, and notes, “The Pentagon has not publicly identified those killed, and it is unclear whether it has collected the intelligence to do so.” Continue reading, here. 

Another consideration: “Trump’s Venezuela embargo could put Taiwan at risk,” Reuters reported Thursday after a think-tanker flagged a possible “propaganda opening” for China. “When Washington blurs terms, it weakens its ability to call out coercion elsewhere,” Craig Singleton, a China expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, told Reuters. But he wasn’t alone. 

“Ultimately, the U.S. is doing a lot of damage to the normative quality of the rules,” Isaac Kardon of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said. “That is a major blow to the credibility of international law to restrain other actors.” At least one other expert was not quite as concerned. Read more, here. 

Related reading: 

• “Navy Announces New Warship for Trump’s ‘Golden Fleet’,” to be made by HII, reports the Wall Street Journal;
• And the “Coast Guard abruptly deletes swastika, noose entry from policy manual,” the Washington Post reported Thursday in yet another update to USCG policy since November. 

Lastly this week: Review a list of 30 “conflicts to watch in 2026” via our Thursday podcast conversation with Paul Stares of the Council on Foreign Relations. This week, Stares published CFR’s latest annual Preventive Priorities Survey, which features input from hundreds of foreign policy experts ranking conflicts around the globe according to their likelihood and possible impact on U.S. policy for the year ahead. 

One stark observation that we’d missed this past year: “Nine capital cities in the world have been attacked by other countries over the last 12 months,” Stares pointed out in the Thursday podcast. “Nine capital cities. And I would not have imagined, given the normative constraints on the use of force, that we would ever see that. It’s not just covert action or disinformation, it’s actually long-range bombardment from ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and drones.” 

What might lie ahead? You can catch our 20-minute conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on our website. 

Additional reading: 

• “Where Americans want the government to focus in 2026, according to a new AP-NORC poll,” AP reported Friday; 
• “Nativity scenes become protest art in a season of deportations,” Axios reported Friday; 
• “Gunman in Brown University shooting found dead, linked to MIT killing,” Reuters reported Friday;  
• “Inside DoJ’s controversial prosecution of a Texas ‘antifa cell’ charged with terrorism,” the Guardian reported Thursday in a potentially novel case.

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CFR’s Paul Stares unpacks the latest annual survey of foreign policy experts bracing for what might lie ahead.

Trump rebrands Congressionally-approved troop housing subsidy as ‘warrior dividend’ holiday bonus. During a prime-time TV address, Trump said he was “proud to announce” that “1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call ‘warrior dividend,’ before Christmas.” 

He added that to honor the nation’s founding, “we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that. And the checks are already on the way.” 

Fine print: The checks will come from Congressionally-allocated reconciliation funds intended to subsidize housing allowances for service members, a senior administration official confirmed to Defense One’s Thomas Novelly following Trump’s televised remarks. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to “disburse $2.6 billion as a one-time basic allowance for housing supplement” to all eligible service members ranks 0-6 and below, the senior administration official said. 

“Congress appropriated $2.9 billion” for the Defense Department “to supplement the Basic Allowance for Housing entitlement within The One Big Beautiful Bill,” the senior official explained. “Approximately 1.28 million active component military members and 174,000 Reserve component military members will receive this supplement.”

The forthcoming entitlement money comes as some service members have struggled amid rapid changes to the housing market, according to a January report from RAND researchers. “BAH is generally adequate for Army personnel, though not necessarily when the housing market is changing rapidly and dramatically, as it has in recent years,” the report said. “Furthermore, while our analysis of housing choices and expenditures among military personnel and of their locational amenities points to an overall positive picture with respect to BAH, a substantial, though minority, share of members report dissatisfaction with BAH.”

Related: Last week, the Defense Department announced 2026 BAH rates, which are set to increase by an average of 4.2 percent on Jan. 1, 2026.

The money comes as some lawmakers have been scrutinizing the Trump administration’s reallocation of military funding. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., issued a report last week highlighting $2 billion diverted away from the Defense Department and Homeland Security Department for border enforcement—including redirecting funds for barracks, maintenance hangers, and elementary schools. Continue reading, here. 

American SOF troops want to expand drone and electronic warfare tests inside the U.S., officials told Defense One’s Patrick Tucker this week. The need is urgent, officials from the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, or SWCS, said, because as the war Ukraine illustrates, drones and electronic warfare are soaring in importance. 

For a sense of the problem’s scale, U.S. troops say they must learn to operate amid jamming that is far more powerful and ubiquitous than just a few years ago. In Ukraine, this has led to drones controlled by fiber-optic cables or even their own autonomous systems. And some Russian drones use high-powered (and often illicitly acquired) chips to pick out targets based on things like shape and size, reducing their dependence on jammable communications or navigation systems.

However, it is difficult to train for this future on U.S. soil, where civil authorities heavily restrict the use of GPS jammers and other electronic warfare weapons, Tucker writes. 

“If this is the future of warfare, then we need to collaboratively find a way to carve out airspace in order to employ these systems,” Lt. Col. Nicholas Caputo, commander of the 6th Battalion, 2nd Special Warfare Training Group, told Defense One. He said the center has submitted the paperwork to get the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and other relevant agencies to increase the number of places where such training could occur, at least temporarily. He hopes to see some of those efforts come to fruition within a year. Read more, here. 

Additional reading: “Government admits failures by Army and air traffic controllers in DCA crash,” the Washington Post reported Wednesday. 

New: The Pentagon announced eight pending arms sales to Taiwan totalling around $11 billion on Wednesday. The deals involve Javelin, Harpoon and TOW missile systems, $4 billion in HIMARS weapons, another $4 billion in howitzers, more than a billion dollars for Anduril loitering munitions, and an assortment of helicopter services and network support, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced in a stream of releases Wednesday. Lawmakers could object to the arrangements, though that is unlikely. 

Altogether, the sales amount to “the largest ever U.S. weapons package for the island which is under increasing military pressure from China,” Reuters reports. “The announcement followed an unannounced trip by Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung to the Washington area last week to meet U.S. officials,” the wire service adds. 

In related developments for Taiwan, the Senate advanced the latest U.S. defense policy bill Wednesday, which includes $1 billion for Taiwan’s security in 2026. That bill already passed the House, and now heads to the White House for the president’s signature. 

Drone cooperation coming soon: The National Defense Authorization Act also contains a provision to “enable fielding of uncrewed and anti-uncrewed systems capabilities” for Taiwan by March. George Mason University’s Taiwan Security Monitor has details, here; and Defense Scoop has a bit more, here.  

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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 and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1944, the Supreme Court upheld President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1942 executive order to incarcerate about 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, in internment camps—despite a secret report from the Office of Naval Intelligence stating it had no evidence Americans with Japanese ancestry were spying for Japan. The 1944 decision was overruled 74 years later in 2018 when Chief Justice John Roberts said that it was “gravely wrong the day it was decided,” that it “has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—‘has no place in law under the Constitution.’” 

Trump 2.0

Venezuela’s navy begins escorting tankers amid Trump’s partial blockade. On Tuesday, the U.S. president announced that U.S. forces would stop oil tankers that have been sanctioned for illegal international trade heading to or from Venezuelan ports. The following day, Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro ordered the country’s navy to escort at least some tankers: “Several ships sailed from Venezuela toward Asia with a Venezuelan naval escort between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, said three people familiar with the transits. None of the commercial vessels are on the list of sanctioned tankers the United States is threatening to target,” the New York Times reported Wednesday.

Still, the move “increased the likelihood of a violent conflict,” the Times wrote, against the backdrop of Trump’s naval buildup in the Caribbean and the recent revelation by his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, that “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle.”

White House rhetoric on Venezuela echoes Bush officials’ pre-invasion talk. Writers at Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” compare clips of Bush officials talking ahead of the 2003 Iraq invasion with recent comments by White House officials, including President Trump, and Republican lawmakers such as Lindsey Graham. In several instances, the rhetoric is eerily similar. View the compilation on the show’s YouTube channel, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Trump Media is merging with a nuclear fusion company” known as TAE Technologies, The Verge reported Thursday;
• And “Jack Smith says he could prove Trump engaged in ‘criminal scheme’ to overturn 2020 election,” NBC News reported Thursday;
• Relatedly, “Jack Smith tells lawmakers his team developed ‘proof beyond a reasonable doubt’ against Trump,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday.   

Conflicts to watch in 2026: Venezuela jumped atop the list of the Council on Foreign Relations’ annual Preventive Priorities Survey, where hundreds of foreign policy experts rank which potential and ongoing topics are most likely to occur in the new year and how they affect U.S. interests. “By far the most prominent new addition is the possibility of direct U.S. military action against Venezuela, which was ranked as a high-likelihood, high-impact contingency,” CFR’s Paul Stores writes in the new report. 

Israel is involved in two out of five of the highest-tier conflicts, representing a high likelihood of occurring as well as a high chance of impacting U.S. interests. Those concern probable clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinians in the West Bank as well as fighting in the Gaza Strip and the war in Gaza. In addition to Venezuela, Russia’s war in Ukraine and “heightened political antagonism and domestic security deployments” inside the U.S. round out the most volatile and concerning sector in CFR’s survey matrix. 

Panning out, “the number of armed conflicts is now at its highest since the end of World War II,” and “An increasing proportion of those, moreover, are interstate conflicts, reversing a post–Cold War trend,” Stores says. 

But in a notable change, “For the first time, the possibility of widespread conflict in Afghanistan did not appear…though the risk of further cross-border clashes with Pakistan was included,” according to the rankings. 

Stay tuned for more: We’ll be speaking with Stores for our final Defense One Radio episode of the year later this week. In the meantime, you can read the full report on CFR’s site, here. 

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U.S. President Donald Trump announced a blockade of sanctioned oil tanker ships to and from Venezuela in a post on social media Tuesday evening, one week after the U.S. seized an oil tanker allegedly carrying oil to Iran from Venezuela.  

“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” Trump declared on the platform he owns. “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before—Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us,” he said, though it’s far from clear exactly what he was referring to, especially regarding alleged stolen land. 

“Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela,” he added. “America will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation and, likewise, will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” the president said. 

Also unclear is “how many tankers will be affected and how the U.S. will impose the blockade, and whether Trump will turn to the Coast Guard to interdict vessels as he did last week,” Reuters reports. 

New: Another formal U.S. notice to pilots traveling over Venezuelan airspace was issued Tuesday, and this one extends for two months. The first was issued on Nov. 21 over the same sector—known as the Maiquetia Flight Information region—and lasted just 72 hours. 

Clarification: “Flight information regions are how air traffic control authority is divided around the world. They are not national boundaries,” Ian Petchenik explained for FlightRadar24, writing two weeks ago. “Venezuela manages the MAIQUETIA FIR, which includes all of Venezuelan land and extends into the Caribbean Sea,” he added.

Reminder: On Nov. 29, Trump announced in an unusual post on social media, “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.” 

Venezuelan officials at the time described his announcement as a “colonialist threat” and said in a statement, “No authority outside the Venezuelan institutional framework has the power to interfere with, block, or condition the use of international airspace.” One day after Trump’s post, planes continued to fly over Venezuela, NPR reported at the time. 

Consulting history: Two months is close to the timeframe the Bush administration thought it needed before telling the world it had accomplished its mission immediately after invading Iraq in 2003. The invasion began with “shock and awe” on March 20; President Bush declared “mission accomplished” on May 1 from an aircraft carrier off the California coast, which was just 41 days later. 

Update: SecDef Hegseth has declined to publicly release the Pentagon’s boat-strike video from Sept. 2, in which the U.S. military reportedly killed two survivors of the initial strike, in possible violation of the laws of war, during counter-narcotics operations near Trinidad and Tobago. Congressional officials relayed the update to multiple news agencies Tuesday after a classified briefing with House and Senate lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Reuters reported. Lawmakers are close to approving a final version of the annual defense policy bill, which includes a provision to freeze a quarter of Hegseth’s travel funds unless he releases the full video to Congress. 

Hegseth said House and Senate Armed Services Committee members could see the video on Wednesday, but he refused broader release, as a bipartisan ensemble of lawmakers have requested. “In keeping with long-standing Department of War policy, Department of Defense policy, of course we’re not going to release a top-secret full unedited video of that to the general public,” he told reporters afterward.

Second opinion: “If they can’t be transparent on this, how can you trust their transparency on all the other issues swirling about in the Caribbean?” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters after Hegseth’s visit Tuesday. “Every senator is entitled to see it,” Schumer said of the video. 

“I think the American people should see this video and all members of Congress should have that opportunity. I certainly want it for myself,” said Sen. Adam Schiff, D.-Calif., who added of Hegseth’s briefing Tuesday, “I found the legal explanations and strategic explanations incoherent,” according to the New York Times. 

“This was not a serious intelligence briefing. This was a communication of opinion, and if this administration wants to go to war, they need to go get it from Congress,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Tuesday. 

“If you don’t like the classification, talk to the White House about it,” Oklahoma GOP Sen. Markwayne Mullin told reporters.

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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 and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1981, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. James Lee Dozier was kidnapped from his apartment in Italy by a far-left terrorist group known as the Red Brigades. He was held for 42 days until Italian police rescued him in late January. 

Around the Defense Department

Nearly 300 days after purge, Pentagon taps new Air Force vice chief, top JAG. The head of Air Mobility Command, Gen. John Lamontagne, has been nominated to be the service’s vice chief of staff. He has more than 4,000 flight hours as a command pilot in the C-12 aircraft, KC-135 tanker, and C-17 transport; and has served as deputy commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa and as U.S. European Command’s chief of staff. The commander of the Oklahoma Air National Guard, Brig. Gen. Christopher Eason, has been nominated to be the service’s top judge advocate general. As a civilian, he works as a federal prosecutor.

The previous vice chief and JAG were fired by Hegseth on Feb. 21 along with other top officers, including the Joint Chiefs chair and chief of naval operations. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly has background on each of the nominees, here.

The months-old vacancy atop the National Security Agency and U.S.Cyber Command may be filled by the Army’s Lt. Gen. Joshua Rudd, whose name was submitted for promotion by the White House to the Senate. Rudd, who is deputy director for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, appears to not have previously served in military cybersecurity, but a person familiar with the matter confirmed the nomination and said his background would align with U.S. goals to counter Chinese cyber threats. Nextgov’s David DiMolfetta has that, here.

Additional reading: 

• Update: “Coast Guard enacts policy calling swastikas, nooses ‘potentially divisive’,” despite appearing to have dropped the proposed change hours after it became public last month, the Washington Post reported Monday; 
• “U.S. Military Willing to Attack ‘Designated Terrorist Organizations’ Within America, General Says,” the Intercept reported from NORTHCOM Gen. Gregory Guillot’s testimony last week before the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

Around the world

Europe’s governments are issuing the kinds of warnings not heard in a generation or more. “European security officials now regularly broadcast a message nearly unimaginable a decade ago: Get ready for conflict with Russia,” reports the Wall Street Journal. Rarely a week goes by now without a European government, military or security chief making a grim speech warning the public that they are headed toward a potential war with Russia. It is a profound psychological shift for a continent that has rebuilt itself after two world wars by trumpeting a message of harmony and joint economic prosperity.” Read on, here.

The creaky ceasefire in Gaza was disrupted last weekend when two Israeli soldiers were killed by an explosive device and Israel retaliated by killing four people, including—Israeli officials said—Raed Saad, who served as the Hamas official in charge of manufacturing and previously led the militant group’s operations division. 

Trump, who was not informed of the strike in advance, reportedly complained to Binyamin Netanyahu that the Israeli prime minister was hurting “my deal” to stop the fighting and rebuild Gaza, the Wall Street Journal reports. More, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Bondi gunmen were inspired by Islamic State, had travelled to the Philippines, Australia police say,” Reuters reported Tuesday; 
• And the “Hero who wrestled gun from terrorist says he’d do it again despite being ‘riddled with bullets,’” the Sydney Morning Herald reported Monday.

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The U.S. military attacked three more alleged drug-trafficking boats off the Latin American coast, this time all three “were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and were engaged in narco-trafficking,” officials at Southern Command said in a statement and compilation video posted to social media Monday evening. 

“A total of eight male narco-terrorists were killed during these actions—three in the first vessel, two in the second and three in the third,” SOUTHCOM said. As before, no evidence was provided to back up their claims. 

The attacks raise the death toll to 95 people spread across at least 25 strikes, which have left two survivors, the New York Times reports in its updated tracker, which includes U.S. military attacks going back to Sept. 2.

New: The White House says it has now designated fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction,” according to an executive order posted online Monday. President Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth have claimed their attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats stems from their war on drug cartels and the flow of fentanyl into the U.S., which experts say travels into the country via Mexico and not the Caribbean, as the New York Times explained last month.

A note on alleged strategy: Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair in an interview published today that the president “wants to keep on blowing boats up until [Venezuelan dictator Nicholas] Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.” VF’s Chris Whipple noted immediately afterward, “Wiles’s statement appears to contradict the administration’s official stance that blowing up boats is about drug interdiction, not regime change.” Former State Department counsel Brian Finacune called this strategy “​​as boneheaded as it is illegal.” 

Extra reading: Wiles also told the Times in a separate interview published Tuesday (gift link) that the president “has an alcoholic’s personality,” and that the vice president has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” What’s more, she called Elon Musk “an avowed ketamine” user and described White House budget director Russell Vought as “a right-wing absolute zealot.”

U.S. International Command? Pentagon ponders major consolidation of combatant commands. CJCS Gen. Dan Caine is preparing to brief SecDef Hegseth on a plan to consolidate U.S. Central Command, U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command under the control of a new U.S. International Command, the Washington Post reports, citing five people familiar with the matter. 

“If adopted, the plan would usher in some of the most significant changes at the military’s highest ranks in decades, in part following through on Hegseth’s promise to break the status quo and slash the number of four-star generals,” four Post reporters write. “Such moves would complement other efforts by the administration to shift resources from the Middle East and Europe and focus foremost on expanding military operations in the Western Hemisphere, these people said.”

U.S. NORTHCOM and SOUTHCOM would also be consolidated, an idea reported earlier this year by NBC News. The consolidation is “meant to speed decision-making and adaptation among military commanders,” one senior defense official told the Post.

But one former defense secretary said it would likely reduce regional expertise. “The world isn’t getting any less complicated,” Chuck Hagel said in an interview. “You want commands that have the capability of heading off problems before they become big problems, and I think you lose some of that when you unify or consolidate too many.” Read on, here (gift link).

Commentary: The White House’s new National Security Strategy is “the longest suicide note in U.S. history,” writes Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. Noting that the 2025 NSS differs most starkly from its predecessors in neglecting to name any country that threatens the United States, Applebaum writes: “I am not sure whether there has ever been a moment like this one, when the American government’s most prominent foreign-policy theorists have transferred their domestic obsessions to the outside world, projecting their own fears onto others. As a result, they are likely to misunderstand who could challenge, threaten, or even damage the United States in the near future. Their fantasy world endangers us all.” Read that, here (gift link).

Update: Syrian DOD casualties named. The pair of U.S. soldiers killed on Saturday were Iowa National Guardsmen: Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres Tovar, 25, of Des Moines, and Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard, 29, of Marshalltown, the chief of the National Guard Bureau said in a Monday post. 

Consideration: Is carrier Wi-Fi distracting sailors? Investigations released last week into the loss of three F/A-18 Super Hornets and a collision with a merchant vessel by the carrier Harry S. Truman found training gaps and a lack of focus and professionalism, due perhaps to overwork or even distraction by the relatively recent arrival of shipboard wifi, Navy Times reported last week.

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 and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1944, the Battle of the Bulge began.

It’s been a record year for U.S. airstrikes on militants in Somalia, with at least 114 to date, according to a detailed running tally compiled by researchers at the Washington-based New America think tank. The second-busiest year—in a campaign that stretches back to 2003—was 2019 with 66 recorded strikes. 

The most recent declared strike occurred Sunday, though it’s unclear if it resulted in any casualties, according to the press release from U.S. officials at Africa Command. “Specific details about units and assets will not be released to ensure continued operations security,” AFRICOM noted in a change of transparency that’s become a staple of U.S. military activity in Africa since about April. 

About 500 U.S. troops were stationed in Somalia earlier this year, and their attention has focused almost exclusively on airstrikes targeting either al-Shabaab insurgents fighting the government based in Mogadishu—in more than 40 U.S. strikes this year—or Islamic State militants lingering a bit further to the northeast, often around the Golis mountains in the semi-autonomous Puntland region. More than 60 U.S. strikes have targeted IS-Somalia, according to New America’s data. U.S. troops also conducted a ground raid targeting IS-Somalia in late July, the only publicly-known raid of its kind in 2025. 

Not every U.S. strike results in a death, as AFRICOM officials told New America’s David Sterman. Still, according to his digging, somewhere ​​between 115 and 292 people have been killed in those U.S. operations. How many were militants and how many were civilians? It’s unclear, and AFRICOM hasn’t clarified. (Hat tip to Spencer Ackerman and Wesley Morgan for bringing attention to these developments.)

Also notable: UAE troops have conducted at least 19 airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Somalia this year as well, Caleb Weiss of FDD’s Long War Journal reported in late July. However, it’s likely that “this number could be higher, as the UAE does not publicly announce such operations,” and “UAE strikes are only confirmed through Puntland officials officially commenting on them,” Weiss wrote. 

A key question for the White House remains: Escalate or exit? Both options seem to carry risks. Recall that back in April, the New York Times reported the Trump administration’s National Security Council was “divided” over how to handle Somalia, with some—citing years of similar action—concerned an increase in U.S. strikes might have little effect, while others feared withdrawal could “inadvertently incite a rapid collapse.” 

Five alleged “high-threat” migrants were sent to U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Sunday, Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times reported Sunday. They came as part of a wider group of 22 migrants, which were the first arrivals of their kind in two months, a defense official told Rosenberg. 

“The latest transfers, from Louisiana, raised to about 730 the number of men who have been held at the base since early February, when the Trump administration began using it as a way station for ICE detainees designated for deportation,” she added. 

For comparison, during America’s Global War on Terror, the U.S. held as many as 780 men and boys in detention at Guantánamo, only seven of whom were convicted, according to a 2023 report (PDF) by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism. 

Before the Sunday transfers, just 15 men were held at the American military prison at Guantánamo, Rosenberg reported last month. “Of those, 9 have been charged with war crimes in the military commissions system—seven have yet to be put on trial and two have been convicted,” she wrote. Read more, here. 

At least eight U.S. veterans have been deported, and the Trump administration plans to deport dozens more, Rhode Island Democratic Rep. Seth Magaziner announced Saturday using data from the Department of Homeland Security obtained in September by House Armed Services Committee member and Marine veteran Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass. 

Why bring it up: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem told lawmakers in a hearing last week, “We have not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.” But Magaziner then showed her U.S. Army veteran Sae Joon Park, who was deported this summer as part of Trump’s anti-immigration crackdowns. Noem later promised to look into the circumstances behind Park’s deportation, as two different Democratic lawmakers requested in August. 

ICYMI: “The Trump administration is sharing all air travelers’ names with ICE officials to find people with deportation orders,” the New York Times reported Friday in an update to a program that began “quietly in March.” 

Officials at the Transportation Security Administration are now sharing the data “multiple times a week,” after which “ICE can then match the list against its own database of people subject to deportation and send agents to the airport to detain those people.” 

Related reading: 

• “As Trump misses deportation goals, ICE pushes migrants to give up their cases,” Reuters reported Thursday; 
• “Greg Bovino’s the star of Trump’s deportation show. We trace his roots,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported Friday; 
• “How a US Citizen Was Scanned With ICE’s Facial Recognition Tech,” 404 Media reported Saturday; 
• “Trump administration says White House ballroom construction is a matter of national security,” AP reported Monday.

Etc.

Building post-quantum gear is hard. A new partnership aims to make it easier, Defense One’s science and tech editor Patrick Tucker reported Monday. SEALSQ, which specializes in “quantum-safe” chips, and Airmod, a French company that specializes in secure electronics for aerospace and drones, say they can help companies produce the larger, more energy-intensive software that meets standards for quantum-safe hardware and software environments, as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST. 

Under a deal announced Monday, the partners will use Airmod’s middleware software to help clients turn “months of complex cryptographic integration into days” by allowing clients to bridge more easily apply software from previous applications into new ones. 

Why it matters: The standards reflect growing concern and certainty among a broad range of computer and security professionals that engineers—most likely in either China or the United States—will announce the development of a quantum computer capable of breaking Shor’s algorithm before 2035. This is the encryption standard that runs at the heart of most of the world’s financial transactions, web surfing, and device-to-device communication (such as drone operation). 

Whoever wins the race would essentially have a backdoor into private transactions and communications all over the world. Continue reading, here. 

The White House recently suspended a $40 billion “technology prosperity deal” with the UK that Trump agreed to during a visit there in September, the Financial Times reported in a Monday follow-up to New York Times reporting Saturday. The agreement spanned cooperation in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and nuclear energy. 

Why bring it up: “It shows how the administration is continuing to leverage trade policy to push foreign governments to make more concessions on trade and other policies,” the Times noted. “People familiar with those talks said US officials were becoming increasingly frustrated with the UK’s lack of willingness to address so-called non-tariff barriers, including rules and regulations governing food and industrial goods,” FT reports. Reuters has a bit more.

Also from the UK: “New MI6 Chief Warns Putin is ‘Dragging Out’ Ukraine Talks,” Bloomberg reported Monday.

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Two U.S. soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed in Syria on Saturday by what officials said was a lone ISIS gunman. Part of the Pentagon’s much-reduced yet enduring counterterrorism mission in the country, they were the first troops to die there since the fall of dictator Bashar Al-Assad last year. Three more U.S. troops and two Syrian security personnel were wounded in the attack, U.S. officials and Syrian state media said. 

President Trump vowed “very serious retaliation.” Read a U.S. Central Command statement and coverage by the New York Times.

Also from the region: To the southwest, where Israeli forces have occupied Syrian territory for a year, conducting armored patrols and counterterrorism raids, there are concerns that Israel intends to maintain a permanent presence in the country. The Associated Press has more, here.

No clear plan for what happens next with Trump’s military campaign in the Caribbean. If phase one is “killing alleged drug smugglers and pushing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to leave office” and “The end goal—let’s call it phase three—is to work with a new government to gain access to the country’s oil and rare earth minerals,” phase two is “an open question,” write Vivian Salama and Sarah Fitzpatrick for The Atlantic in a broad look at the facts, possibilities, and concerns.

The pair report that “Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as acting national security adviser, has taken the lead in planning for a variety of contingencies,” although officials “said that the planning is restricted to a very small group of senior officials around the president and that they couldn’t provide any details. Other officials involved in Venezuela discussions told us that if there is any substantive planning being done, it was news to them, and that they had little understanding of what the administration intends to do in the event that Maduro is toppled. (The State Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.)”

Anonymous quote: “This is a shakedown—a financial shakedown,” another official said, one that is “being done primarily for profit.”

What happens if Maduro leaves? “The department has a contingency plan for everything—we are a planning organization,” DOD spokesperson Kingsley Wilson said. She did not provide any details. Read more (gift link), here. 

Airliner near Venezuela avoids “midair collision” with Air Force tanker.  On Friday, the pilot of JetBlue Flight 1112 from Curaçao to New York City’s JFK airport told air traffic controllers that “We almost had a midair collision up here…They passed directly in our flight path….They don’t have their transponder turned on, it’s outrageous.” The pilot said the Air Force plane then headed into Venezuelan air space. DOD and Air Force officials had no comment by press time, the Associated Press reported.

Additional reading: 

• “Why Did the United States Seize a Venezuelan Oil Shipment?” the Center for Strategic and International Studies explores the question in a recent explainer;
• “Next presidential jet will arrive a bit earlier than projected, Air Force says,” Thomas Novelly reported Saturday for Defense One; 
• And ICYMI, “New GAO, Navy reports warn of serious V-22 Osprey safety risks, with some fixes stretching into 2030s,” Novelly reported Friday. 

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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 and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1948, the U.S. Navy and State Department signed an agreement that would lead to the Marines guarding U.S. embassies around the world.

Europe and Ukraine

Ukraine’s president is meeting with U.S. envoys in Berlin for the latest round of talks toward ending Russia’s Ukraine invasion. President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and real estate billionaire Steve Witkoff are leading the U.S. side while President Volodymir Zelenskyy is handling matters for Kyiv. 

Reportedly not present for those talks: U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who had played a starring role in recent talks, as AP and Axios reported, including presenting the Trump administration’s 28-point plan to Zelenskyy just last month. Driscoll has reportedly been “reeled in” by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, unnamed sources told the British newspaper Telegraph last week. “He was seen to be exerting himself a bit too much, and he had his hand slapped,” one of the sources said. 

Other European leaders are also meeting in Berlin for related but separate talks, Reuters reports from the German capital. “European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and the leaders of Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden are among those expected” in Berlin. 

Notable: Zelenskyy has reportedly agreed to drop Ukraine’s request to join NATO, but it has no interest in giving up invaded territory to Russia as part of concessions from the developing peace talks, Reuters reports. Relatedly, 75% of Ukrainians surveyed said giving up land to Russia or capping Kyiv’s military was “completely unacceptable,” according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. A further “63% of Ukrainians are ready to endure war as long as necessary,” the survey says. Read more, here. 

Commentary: “On Europe, the Trump administration is out of step with Congress, Americans,” Cameron McMillan and Bradley Bowman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies wrote Friday in Defense One. 

Their lede: “The Trump administration sent shockwaves across the Atlantic last week with its new National Security Strategy. The strategy’s dismissal of the threat from Russia and harsh criticisms of Europe and NATO led the German chancellor to describe elements of the strategy as ‘unacceptable,’ and to call for Europe to become ‘much more independent of the United States in security policy.’” 

Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the strategy was “largely consistent” with Moscow’s vision, which is never a good sign, McMillan and Bowman write. “Thankfully, bipartisan majorities of Americans and their representatives in Congress remain clear-eyed about the threat from Moscow and believe supporting NATO and Ukraine serves American interests.” Read the rest, here. 

By the way: German intelligence officials say they’ve gathered proof Russia has been behind cyberattacks, sabotage, and disinformation campaigns, all of which “clearly [bear] Moscow’s signature,” the Foreign Ministry announced Friday in Berlin. 

“We can now clearly attribute the cyberattack against German Air Safety in August 2024 to the hacker collective APT28, also known as Fancy Bear,” the official said at a press briefing. “Our intelligence findings prove that the Russian military intelligence service GRU bears responsibility for this attack.” What’s more, “we can now state definitively that Russia, through the Storm 1516 campaign, sought to influence and destabilize the most recent federal election,” he added, according to France’s Le Monde. Germany’s Deutsche Welle has more.

Why it matters: “The accusation of sabotage is the latest in a sequence of similar claims in Europe, where officials have blamed Russia for drone flights over Danish and Belgian airports, the jamming of aviation-navigation systems over Sweden and using cans to smuggle explosives into Poland,” the New York Times reported, noting, “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said this month that his country was ‘ready’ for war if Europe started it.”

Additional reading: “Europe starts learning how to shoot down drones,” the Economist reported Sunday. 

Artificial intelligence, in focus 

Generative AI use in the American workplace is rising modestly, the polling firm Gallup reported Sunday from survey data gathered in August. 

Those who said they use AI applications at least a few times a week rose from 19% to 23% from roughly January to June, “while daily use moved less, ticking up from 8% to 10% during the same period,” Gallup research associate Andy Kemp writes. And among those surveyed who say they use AI at least a few times a year rose from 40% to 45%. 

Using it how? “More than six in 10 U.S. employees who used AI at work reported using chatbots or virtual assistants. AI writing and editing tools were the next most commonly used tools (36%), followed by AI coding assistants (14%),” Kemp reports. However, while more may be using AI, “What employees reported using AI for did not change meaningfully from Gallup’s initial measure in Q2 2024,” Gallup notes. 

• Also: The use of AI chatbots has occasionally yielded laughable results like this video of two polite bots that seemingly do not know how to end a conversation. 

Note of caution: The trend may not be so clear-cut. Indeed, “Investors expect AI use to soar. That’s not happening,” the Economist reported just before Thanksgiving. Stanford researchers recently found AI use fell 10 percentage points (46% to 36%) from June to December. The Economist also reported “Ramp, a fintech firm, finds that in early 2025 AI use soared at American firms to 40%, before levelling off.” Meanwhile nationwide, “The share of workers who use AI every day is still pretty small—just 10% in the third quarter” of 2025, Axios reports off the new Gallup polling. 

But there are others who are more bullish and inclined to dismiss lingering cautions. As an outlet, Axios has been notably eager to push the trend, which is backed by billions of dollars and reportedly propping up much of the U.S. economy. “Yeah, I remember back when in 2002, everyone was like, ‘God, the Internet is nothing but like a weird site where you can buy like second-hand Pez dispensers and stuff. This hype thing is crazy right now; it’s bullshit, and I’m not even going with it,’” Defense One’s Patrick Tucker said in a recent podcast on the topic. “Yeah, it turns out that people actually did figure out new stuff to use it for,” he added. As the Economist points out, “history suggests that technology tends to spread in fits and starts. Consider use of the computer within American households, where the speed of adoption slowed in the late 1980s. This was a mere blip before the 1990s, when they invaded American homes.”

Why bring it up: It’s nothing less than “the most important question in determining whether or not the world is in an AI bubble,” the Economist wrote in late November. Indeed, “From today until 2030 big tech firms will spend $5trn on infrastructure to supply AI services. To make those investments worthwhile, they will need on the order of $650bn a year in AI revenues, according to JPMorgan Chase, a bank, up from about $50bn a year today. People paying for AI in their personal lives will probably buy only a fraction of what is ultimately required. Businesses must do the rest.”

New podcast: How will AI reshape the future of warfare? Paul Scharre, executive vice president at the Center for a New American Security, joined us to tackle the topic in our most recent Defense One Radio episode, posted Friday. 

Scharre is the author of two books on the topic: “Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” and “Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War.” 

You can hear our Friday conversation, which also featured Defense One’s Patrick Tucker, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or on our website here. 

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The pair of accountability reports highlight Joint Program Office woes and maintenance failures.