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

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

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

Additional reading: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional reading: 

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

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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, Thomas Novelly, and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1935, the Nazis secretly launched a eugenics program known as the Lebensborn project.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related reading: 

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

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

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

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

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The new service was supposed to meld the “tribes” of operators and acquisition specialists. It didn’t happen.

Top DOD officials defended National Guard deployments to American cities, which are facing multiple injunctions from local judges, during a Senate hearing.

Dozens of U.S. troops seized a tanker ship allegedly transiting oil to Iran from Venezuela, President Trump announced Wednesday. “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela, large tanker, very large, largest one ever, actually, and other things are happening,” the president said. Asked what will happen next, he replied, “We keep it, I guess.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi later shared a video of the seizure on social media. “For multiple years, the oil tanker has been sanctioned by the United States due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations,” Bondi said. 

Venezuelan officials called it “an act of international piracy” and “blatant theft,” while Iranian officials called it a “grave violation of international laws and norms,” Reuters reports. The vessel—reportedly known as “Skipper”—was falsely flying a flag from Guyana, that country’s maritime officials said afterward. 

Analyst reax: “Seizing this tanker further inflames…supply concerns but also doesn’t immediately change the situation fundamentally because these barrels were already going to be floating around for a while,” Rory Johnston of Commodity Context said, according to Reuters. 

Context: U.S. forces in the region have amassed their largest troop and naval buildup since the Cuban missile crisis as the Trump administration attacks alleged drug-trafficking boats off the Latin American coast—and White House officials apply pressure on Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro to step down. The boat strikes have so far killed more than 80 people in a naval campaign that eschews due process, causing critics to warn at least some of the attacks could constitute war crimes.  

Additional reading: 

• Just Security published a new “Expert Backgrounder: Law on Targeting Shipwrecked Traffickers,” via former Naval Academy law professor Mark Nevitt; 
• And the New York Times sifted through history to unpack “‘Voodoo Rituals’ and Banana Wars: U.S. Military Action in Latin America,” in an explainer published Tuesday. 

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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 1972, Apollo 17 became the sixth and last time humans landed on the Moon.

On the Hill

Update: House passes $901 billion NDAA, 312-112. “Fiscal hawks were also not happy that the bill had a top line of about $8 billion more than the $892.6 billion that President Trump requested in May,” but the bill still advanced through the lower chamber on Wednesday, The Hill reports. The Senate is expected to pass the bill sometime next week. 

Second opinion: While the bill contains provisions for “military construction projects that will improve quality-of-life infrastructure—barracks, housing, and Child Development Centers, including one at Travis Air Force Base,” the NDAA “does not do enough to reinforce Congress’s role as a co-equal branch responsible for matters of war and peace,” Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., and member of the House Armed Services Readiness Subcommittee, said in a statement. However, “this Administration is dangerously close to dragging us into a disastrous and unauthorized war” in Venezuela, “eroding our military’s readiness while advancing their authoritarian ambitions,” he warned. 

“Meanwhile, Congress hasn’t held a public hearing since July and most Americans haven’t seen the videotape of the double-tap strike in Venezuela. And when we have demanded oversight, the Republican majority and Trump’s Pentagon have delayed and obstructed it,” he continued. “Congress can fix this. Sadly, this bill does not rise to the moment.” 

And: Trump officials allegedly took more than $2 billion earmarked for the U.S. military and diverted it to immigration-related actions. These include flights to Guantanamo Bay and Djibouti, as well as National Guard deployments to Illinois and Oregon that judges later deemed illegal, 13 Democratic lawmakers said in a new report (PDF).  

Those costs could rise, the lawmakers warn. “The exact cost of these operations remains unclear, including the actual cost of mobilizing and deploying National Guard troops to American cities, the total cost of deporting and transporting noncitizen detainees on military aircrafts, the cost of detaining individuals on U.S. military installations, and more,” according to the report, which notes “the vast majority of these funds have not been reimbursed by the Department of Homeland Security.” 

“The diversion of DoD resources is adversely impacting military readiness and servicemembers’ quality of life, while simultaneously diminishing the National Guard’s capacity to respond to disasters and other emergencies in their home states,” including funds diverted from “training programs, barracks repairs, and even repairs for elementary schools.” Read more, here. 

Troops in US cities

NORTHCOM’s Gen. Gregory Guillot is testifying on Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in multiple U.S. cities. Guillot is joined by Defense Department counsel Charles Young and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Mark Ditlevson. 

All three witnesses appear to have submitted the same joint statement (PDF) for their pre-hearing witness testimony. “Unfortunately, the President and his Administration inherited a troubling state of lawlessness at home and are fully committed to ensuring the American people are safe and secure,” the three men say in that document. 

“Confronted with an intolerable risk of harm to Federal agents and coordinated, violent opposition to the enforcement of Federal law” when the administration launched its immigration crackdowns across the country—starting in Los Angeles—last spring, “the President invoked power delegated to his office by Congress to utilize the National Guard to safeguard Federal personnel, property, and functions on June 7, 2025,” Guillot, Young and Ditlevson write. “Since that time, the National Guard has been mobilized in California, Illinois, and Oregon under title 10 authorities.” 

They also note troops have been sent to Washington, D.C., which a judge deemed illegal but an appeals court stayed temporarily last week, as well as Memphis, Portland, and Chicago. Last month, a state judge in Tennessee temporarily blocked that deployment, which triggered an appeal by state officials. Guard deployments to Portland and Chicago were also deemed unconstitutional by district judges after state officials objected, describing the troops’ presence as unnecessary. Administration officials are also eyeing Guard deployments to New Orleans, though troops have not yet been sent there. 

And this week, a district judge ordered an end to the Guard deployment inside LA, excoriating the White House for what he described as an attempt to wield “unchecked power to control state troops [that] would wholly upend the federalism that is at the heart of our system of government.” 

“The founders designed our government to be a system of checks and balances. Defendants, however, make clear that the only check they want is a blank one,” the judge wrote in his Wednesday ruling, which he put on hold until Monday as the White House is expected to appeal. 

Stay tuned for later reporting out of today’s Guard hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

Additional reading: 

• “Trump administration adds militarized zone in California along southern US border,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday, pointing to a zone that “extends nearly from the Arizona state line to the Otay Mountain Wilderness”; 
• “Split DC Circuit sides with Pentagon on transgender military ban,” Courthouse News reported Wednesday; 
• “Pentagon did not conduct routine investigation on whether Hegseth damaged national security by sharing strike plans on Signal,” CNN reported Thursday; 
• And “I asked the Pentagon about Pete Hegseth’s mentor [Eric Geressy]. Then the threats started,” Dan Friedman of Mother Jones reported Thursday. 

Europe

The U.S. is pitching plans to boost investment in Russia. Europe isn’t having it. Late last month, the Wall Street Journal revealed how a Putin envoy pitched a Ukraine peace plan to Trump envoy Stephen Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner: end the war with Russian gains, then invest in projects in Russia. 

Now the Trump administration has handed European counterparts “a series of documents, each a single page,” proposing to end the war and touch off a broad re-opening of Russia to foreign business. “The clash at the negotiating table is now not just about borders but increasingly about business—and in a twist, pits not just Russia against Ukraine but the U.S. against its traditional allies in Europe.” the WSJ reported on Wednesday. 

European officials say this could give Russia the reprieve it needs “to rev up its economy and make itself militarily stronger. A new assessment by a Western intelligence agency, reviewed by the Journal, said that Russia has technically been in recession for six months and that the challenges of running its war economy while trying to control prices are presenting a systemic risk to its banking sector.” Read on, here.

Video explainer: “Why Russia Won’t Agree to Peace Without Ukraine’s ‘Fortress Belt’,” from the WSJ.

Danish intelligence report: U.S. is our closest ally…and possibly a threat. “If you’ve been following what has happened over the past few months, you can see why the Danes feel they have to recognize that something is changing,” said Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told the New York Times. Read on, here. 

NATO official pushes back on NSS. Countries looking to join NATO are still welcome to apply, a top alliance official said Wednesday in tacit repudiation of the Trump administration’s recent declaration that the group must not be a “perpetually expanding alliance.”’ Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports, here.

Trump 2.0

U.S. greenlights sale of advanced chips to China, neutralizing a key advantage in AI development. NYT on Tuesday: “President Trump’s decision to allow Nvidia to sell its chips to China has raised questions about whether he is prioritizing short-term economic gain over long-term American security interests.”

Additional reading:

• “Trump’s Nvidia move could help China win the AI war, analysts say,” reports Quartz, adding: “Policy experts say Trump’s Nvidia plan weakens America’s only clear advantage in AI compute.”
• ICYMI: A year ago, Peter Singer and analysts from BluePath Labs explained why China remains dependent on Western chips for AI—and how that gives the United States leverage.

Back in the States: Elon Musk says DOGE was only “somewhat successful.” Would he do it again? “I don’t think so,” the world’s richest man told an interviewer. “Instead of doing DOGE, I would have, basically, built … worked on my companies.” AP reports, here.

Related: OPM says 92% of fed departures this year were voluntary. Those who left disagree. That’s the headline from GovExec, reporting on reactions to a social-media thread from Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor. One former worker: “I ‘voluntarily’ chose to leave the most amazing job I could ever have as a scientist because of the toxic environment the administration made for us federal employees.” Read on, here.

ICYMI: DOD has said 60K civilians have left, but refused to give more details. Review that, here.

And introducing: The Defense Business Brief

The defense industry is booming, and Defense One has a new weekly newsletter to tell you what’s happening and what’s next. Learn something new each Wednesday with the Defense Business Brief. 

Produced by Business Editor Lauren C. Williams, DBB explores the makers, buyers, and sellers of defense technology, the money behind it and why it all matters. Read the first edition, here.

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Nearly half of Americans (48%) oppose U.S. military attacks on alleged drug trafficking boats, and that includes almost a fifth (19%) of Republicans, according to a new survey conducted in early December and published Wednesday by Reuters/Ipsos. 

Just 34% support the attacks, while another 18% said they were unsure. “There have been at least 22 strikes that have killed 87 people since September 2,” Reuters reminds readers. The U.S. has killed those aboard the boats without due process and in a manner that critics have argued may violate the laws of war. 

• Also in that survey: 64% said they don’t support Trump’s recent pardon of convicted cocaine trafficker former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, whom Trump last week ordered to be released amid a 45-year prison sentence in the U.S. Read more, here. 

New: Two U.S. Navy F/A-18s were tracked flying over the Gulf of Venezuela on Tuesday, according to open-source monitor Flightradar24, which noted afterward the fighter jets were the most tracked flights on the live radar website.

When asked about the jets, a U.S. official told Defense One’s Thomas Novelly Tuesday evening that the Defense Department “conducts routine, lawful operations in international airspace, including over the Gulf of Venezuela,” adding: “We will continue to fly safely, professionally, and in accordance with international law to protect the homeland, monitor illicit activity, and support stability across the Americas.” 

Their flight path marks the latest escalation of U.S. military force near Venezuela, which has included repeated military strikes on alleged drug runners in the Caribbean Sea in addition to regional B-1 and B-52 bomber flights amid the largest U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis.

Could the U.S. really invade right now? The force “lacks support or logistics for Venezuela ground invasion,” which “leaves airstrikes as Trump’s most feasible and immediate option—despite his warnings of stronger action,” Politico reported Tuesday after a podcast interview with the president.

Expert input: “The United States does not have the ground forces needed for an invasion,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and co-author of a recent CSIS analysis. “The Venezuelan ground forces number some 90,000 including the army, marines and National Guard. The United States has only 2,200 Marines [nearby], and there’s no movement to reinforce them.” Read on, here.

During classified briefings about the Pentagon’s boat strikes Tuesday on Capitol Hill, “We got some clarity on the chain of command and who made decisions at what point, but on the legality of it we didn’t get a lot of clarity,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., said afterward, according to the New York Times. Smith also said it was “pretty clear” that the second strike on Sept. 2 to kill two survivors was the commander at the time “Admiral [Frank] Bradley’s call, based on the rules of engagement given to him by Hegseth.”

Developing: Smith’s counterpart on the Armed Services Committee said he plans to quash a congressional inquiry into the Sept. 2 strikes, Politico reported Tuesday. “It’s done,” said HASC Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., to reporters. “I’ve got all the answers I needed,” he said. Meantime, “It’s still an open question whether the video will be made public, as some lawmakers have urged,” Politico’s Connor O’Brien reports. 

Hegseth told lawmakers Tuesday he wants more time to weigh the merits of releasing the footage publicly, the New York Times reported. Lawmakers could still “hear from the commander who ordered the strike and see the unedited video of the incident in the coming days,” according to Politico.

A new window into the boat-strikes: In September and October, the Pentagon’s lawyers raced “to ensure survivors did not end up in the U.S. judicial system, where court cases could force the administration to show evidence justifying President Trump’s military campaign in the region,” the New York Times reported Tuesday (gift link).

Also notable: U.S. “military officials referred to [the survivors] by specific terms that included ‘distressed mariners.’ That phrase is usually used in a peacetime and civilian context,” a trio of Times reporters write. Read the rest, here. 

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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, Thomas Novelly and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1954, U.S. Air Force Col. John Stapp took 19 Gs as his rocket sled accelerated to 632 mph in five seconds—then 40 Gs as it slammed to a halt. The test helped prove the feasibility of rocket-powered ejection seats.

SecDef Hegseth’s AI rollout stumbles immediately out of the gate. “The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled A-I,” SecDef Hegseth said in a video announcement Tuesday—linking to the program at GenAi.Mil. 

The idea is to allow service members to “conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed,” Hegseth said. However, “the platform can’t actually be accessed from external networks,” and so readers of Hegseth’s social media post were left with internet errors, the New Republic reports. According to Reddit users, active duty troops “received surprise invitations to use the new platform on their work computer.” But since the announcement emerged for some with little warning, at least one user said the invite looked “really suspicious.”

Related: View some of the new AI program promotional posters “plastered” throughout the Pentagon and also shared on Reddit, here.

And ICYMI: Research and engineering chief Emil Michael talked about the department’s AI efforts on Monday. 

Update: Congress is committing to only a fraction of the funding given to the Navy’s F/A-XX program last year.  But the latest version of the defense policy bill fully backs the development of the Air Force’s F-47 fighter, Defense One’s Tom Novelly reported Tuesday. 

The numbers appear to reflect a White House and Pentagon victory over lawmakers who pushed to get the long-proposed replacement for the F/A-18 Super Hornet and F/A-18 electronic-warfare jet onto the drawing board this year. As things stand, the F/A-XX will receive less than 1 percent of the $38 billion that the NDAA would authorize to develop, buy, and upgrade military aircraft, according to the House majority’s summary of the bill. 

Caveat: The 2026 appropriations bill has yet to emerge, the reconciliation bill might add funds, and the program might also, as it has in the past, receive funds through classified accounts, Novelly writes. Read more, here. 

Additional reading: 

• Developing: “US judge blocks Trump’s National Guard deployment in Los Angeles,” Reuters reported Wednesday morning from New York; 
• “South Korea’s Hanwha, US defense startup Vatn to build underwater drones,” the wire service reported Wednesday as well; 
• “Australian MQ-28 CCA Downs Drone in Milestone Air-to-Air Test,” Air and Space Forces Magazine reported Tuesday; 
• And Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale says he “wants to bring back public executions,” Newsweek and multiple other outlets reported this week. 

Trump vs. Europe

A longer, unpublished version of the National Security Strategy proposes new vehicles for leadership on the world stage and a different way to put its thumb on the scales of Europe’s future—through its cultural values. Defense One’s Meghann Myers, who reviewed the document, reveals some takeaways, here.

Trump himself espoused his desire to reshape a “weak” Europe in a Monday interview with Politico, which wrote on Tuesday that he “denounced Europe as a ‘decaying’ group of nations led by ‘weak’ people,…belittling the traditional U.S. allies for failing to control migration and end the Russia-Ukraine war, and signaling that he would endorse European political candidates aligned with his own vision for the continent.

“The broadside attack against European political leadership represents the president’s most virulent denunciation to date of these Western democracies, threatening a decisive rupture with countries like France and Germany that already have deeply strained relations with the Trump administration.” Read on, here. The New York Times added its own coverage of the interview as well.

Meanwhile, in Europe, leaders are accelerating plans to “confront the unthinkable: a future in which America is no longer their primary security guarantor and Europe has to organize its own defense far sooner than anyone imagined.” Politico, here.

By the way: Just last year, Russia reportedly plotted to plant bombs on U.S.-bound flights, according to the Financial Times. That update extends from the previously-reported instances from July 2024 when “DHL parcels exploded in logistics centres in the UK, Poland and Germany,” FT’s Sam Jones writes. 

“Security services would eventually trace the plot back to a group of Russian-directed saboteurs who had a further 6kg of explosive material in their possession. That was enough to give them the capability for what security officials told the Financial Times was the next stage of the plan: to attack flights to the US, and cause more disruption to the airline industry than any act of terror since the World Trade Center attacks.” More, here. 

Additional reading: 

• Ukrainian President “Zelenskyy reaffirms his refusal to cede land to Russia as he rallies European support,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday; 
• And ICYMI, here’s “What the US wants from Ukraine: Leave Donbas, one way or another,” Politico reported Monday. 

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Five days after President Trump said he was ok with releasing video of the U.S. military’s first attack on alleged drug trafficking boats off the Latin American coast, he backed away from that pledge Monday, telling reporters he’d let his embattled Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth decide. 

Dec. 3: “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem,” Trump told reporters (read a transcript via Roll Call, here). 

Dec. 8: On Monday, a reporter asked the president if he still felt that way. “Mr. President, you said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on Sept. 2 off the coast of Venezuela. Secretary Hegseth now says—” the reporter said before the president interrupted her. 

“I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that,” Trump responded. “This is ABC fake news. I said, whatever Hegseth wants to do is OK with me.”

SecDef Hegseth’s latest position: “Whatever we were to decide to release, we’d have to be very responsible” about it, he said Saturday on the sidelines of the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in California. 

Why it matters: The strike in question reportedly killed two survivors aboard the boat on Sept. 2, according to the Washington Post, which noted the operation was carried out on Hegseth’s orders. “I watched it live,” the secretary told Fox the following day. But he changed his account after details of the operation became public. Last week, the Pentagon chief told reporters that he “watched that first strike live” but “didn’t stick around” for subsequent strikes. In the days since, several lawmakers have called for the release of surveillance footage of the attacks, which the Post reports involved four strikes in total: “twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it.” 

Killing survivors of a strike at sea could be a violation of the laws of war, multiple legal experts have argued since the Post published its report just after Thanksgiving.

Lawmakers of both parties want the public to see the videos, and are planning to withhold one-quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget until he releases them, Politico reported Monday after House and Senate negotiators agreed on a compromise version of the 2026 defense policy bill (PDF). House lawmakers are expected to approve the final draft this week, with Senate approval expected shortly afterward. 

Also included in the pending NDAA: 

• $400 billion for Ukraine through a provision to pay U.S. companies for the sale of weapons to Kyiv; 
• $175 million to help boost Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia’s defense against Russian aggression; 
• $200 million for Israeli missile defense as well as $80 million for anti-tunneling operations and $70 million for joint counter-drone programs;
• $1 billion intended for Taiwan’s military to help defend against a possible Chinese attack or invasion; 
• $1.5 billion in support for the Philippines; 
• And 4% pay raise for U.S. troops. 

Notably, the NDAA does not fund Trump’s plan to rename the Defense Department to the “Department of War,” which NBC News reported last month is estimated to cost $2 billion. (Hat tip to Reuters.)

Additional reading: 

• “Pentagon would have to explain future JAG firings under NDAA provision,” Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Monday; 
• “House strips its own provision protecting Defense civilians’ union rights from NDAA,” Government Executive reported Monday; 
• And after a review of archival footage, CNN Monday reported “Hegseth in 2016 repeatedly warned of Trump issuing unlawful military orders.” 

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 1938, the first operational shipboard radar was installed aboard the battleship USS New York.

Developing: The Pentagon will widely deploy new AI tools for logistics, intelligence analysis, and combat planning in mere days or weeks, its research-and-engineering chief said Monday, adding that wide deployment of artificial intelligence now tops his list of “critical technologies,” Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports. 

The department has chosen Gemini for Government as the platform that will support DOD’s first department-wide rollout of AI tools, Google and defense officials announced Tuesday morning. The moves come after the Defense Innovation Unit, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, or CDAO, and others were combined under Emil Michael, defense undersecretary for research and engineering, in a bid to accelerate deployment of AI and other technologies. He said that he will likely reduce the number of technology areas that DIU is working on as well.

The advent of large-language-model tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have made it possible—and necessary—to develop AI tools faster, Michael told reporters at the Defense Writers Group on Monday. “The explosion of capabilities has been enormous, and we’re just catching up to that,” he said. “Now we can take CDAO and actually try to use it to push the capability into the Department for actual use cases.” Read more, here. 

Big-picture analysis: The U.S. military needs to reinvent itself to deter future wars, the New York Times editorial board argues in a new roundup of many national security dynamics Defense One readers will be probably familiar with. A few of the more salient points include the following reminders: 

• The Pentagon has an “overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically advanced ones.”
• “An entrenched oligopoly of five large defense contractors, down from 51 in the early 1990s, has an interest in selling the Pentagon ever-costlier evolutions of the same ships, planes and missiles.”
• The “Ford [carrier], which is currently deployed in the Caribbean, is fatally vulnerable to new forms of attack. China in recent years has amassed an arsenal of around 600 hypersonic weapons, which can travel at five times the speed of sound and are difficult to intercept. Other countries possess quiet diesel-electric submarines capable of sinking American carriers.”
• And as the latest NDAA makes its way through congress, the Times editorial board notes “The Trump administration wants to increase defense spending in 2026 to more than $1 trillion. Much of that money will be squandered on capabilities that do more to magnify our weaknesses than to sharpen our strengths.”

“This is the first of a series of editorials examining what’s gone wrong with the U.S. military—technologically, bureaucratically, culturally, politically and strategically,” the Times writes. Read the rest, here. 

Additional reading: 

• Tom Wright of Brookings argues the White House’s new strategy “Ignores the Real Threats” facing the U.S., including “silen[ce] on Beijing’s ambition to displace Washington as the world’s leading power,” and “nothing about the Russian threat to U.S. interests.” Read his Monday response in The Atlantic, here.
• See also “The Origin of Hegseth’s Anti-Beard Obsession,” via former Pentagon official Alex Wagner, writing Saturday in The Atlantic;
• And “General Dynamics wants to turn competitors into teammates,” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Monday. 

Trump 2.0

“Worst of the Worst” site skips evidence. A new Department of Homeland Security website purports to list the worst “criminal aliens” arrested by ICE. The website names more than 9,800 of the “hundreds of thousands” of people taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the past 11 months. Each name is presented, information-card style, with their countries of origin and one or more alleged crimes. Most include a formal or informal mug shot; some, oddly, do not.

For the vast majority of people, no corroboration is given of their purported criminality. Among the first 1,200 names, just 4% link to DHS press releases; no other kind of documentation is offered. (The site is “all about transparency,” a DHS spokesperson said in a press release.)

Best of the worst of the worst? Many of the names are listed with one or more awful crimes: homicide, sexual assault, human trafficking, and more. But the sample also includes more than a handful of people whose only listed crimes were far more minor: shoplifting, marijuana possession, traffic offenses. Nearly 5% were accused solely of (felony) illegal re-entry.

Finally, more than two dozen names have quietly been removed from the site since it went up on Monday, according to a Defense One analysis of the site. No explanation is given. 

Most people arrested by ICE this year had no criminal record at all, Axios reported last week off a new tranche of data released by the agency. That wasn’t the case until May, when the White House reportedly ordered ICE to triple its daily quota of arrests from 1,000 to 3,000. “Now, agents have a broader mandate and have been encouraged to make more ‘collateral arrests,’ apprehending undocumented people who happen to be with someone on a target list, such as people in the same household,” Axios wrote.

That’s especially true in Washington, D.C., the first city to see an unprecedented deployment of federal troops under Trump. “More than 80 percent of the immigrants arrested in D.C. during the surge in federal law enforcement this year had no prior criminal record,” the Washington Post reported on Thursday. 

“The new data confirms that the Trump administration isn’t focused on legitimate public safety risks, but rather on hitting politically motivated arrest targets,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told Axios last week.

Related reading: 

• “Immigrants kept from Faneuil Hall citizenship ceremony as feds crackdown nationwide,” Boston’s WGBH reported Saturday; 
• “Video shows masked Border Patrol agent chasing [U.S.-born] woman back to her Louisiana home,” NBC News reported Saturday; 
• “Ring camera captures Burnsville ICE raid that leaves 7-year-old without parents, according to family,” Minneapolis St. Paul’s KARE11 reported Sunday;
• And “Arrests of Afghans increase as ICE steps up enforcement, immigration lawyers say,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday from Sacramento.  

Additional reading:  

• “Trump-brokered truce under threat as Thailand-Cambodia fighting reignites,” Reuters reported Monday; 
• “Trump’s attacks on Minnesota’s Somali community cast a spotlight on fraud cases,” AP reported Monday from Minneapolis; 
• And “Trump’s Own Mortgages Match His Description of Mortgage Fraud, Records Reveal,” ProPublica reported Monday. 

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Last summer’s $156 billion defense spending boost through the reconciliation bill is likely “only just the beginning,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told an audience at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California on Saturday.

“We need a revived defense industrial base. We need those capabilities. We need them yesterday. And so, resource-wise, I think this room will be encouraged by what we’ll see soon. But I don’t want to get too ahead,” Hegseth said in his keynote address. 

Context: U.S. defense spending has risen in recent years from $812 billion in fiscal year 2017 to $870.7 billion in fiscal year 2021 to $895.2 billion in 2025, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports from Simi Valley. 

“We received a historic boost in funding last year, and believe that is only just the beginning,” the Pentagon chief said, alluding to the $156 billion boost from budget reconciliation on top of the DOD’s proposed budget for 2026. That funding will be key to “supercharging” the defense industry, which is one of the Pentagon’s four “lines of effort,” along with homeland defense, pushing allies to increase defense spending, and deterring China. 

Meanwhile, the White House may ask for a second reconciliation bill next year, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said at the defense forum. Continue reading, here. (Williams has more reporting below.) 

New analysis: The lopsided cost of Operation Southern Spear means the U.S. military is sinking speedboats with a supercarrier, strategist Peter W. Singer of New America writes in an economics explainer for Defense One. 

“Debates over the legality of U.S. military strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats have obscured calculations of their cost,” Singer says. But while no U.S. casualties have been reported during the Pentagon’s war on alleged drug cartel boats, the campaign is consuming far more American treasure than cartel lucre, he warns. 

Consider: The Pentagon has released few details about the 23 vessels it has blown up, but one was reported to be a civilian-type 39-foot Flipper-type motorboat with four 200-horsepower engines. A new one retails on Boats.com for $400,000, but the old, open-top motorboats in the videos must cost far less. The crew of the boats have been reported as making $500 per trip.

However, “On the other side of the conflict is certainly the most expansive–and thus most expensive–military deployments in history for a counter-narcotics mission,” Singer writes. The first task force of warships deployed to the operation, which included an Amphibious assault ship and even a nuclear powered attack submarine, cost $19.8 billion to buy. They were later joined by the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford, which cost $12.9 billion to buy after $4.7 billion for research and development. Its three escorts pushed the purchase price of the Southern Spear fleet past $40 billion.

The estimates for every hour of the carrier’s operation is roughly $333,000, while each escort consumes a comparatively cheaper $9,200 per hour, Singer explains. Then there are the munitions costs, as well as personnel pay and benefits for the roughly 15,000 US service members who have been deployed so far in the operation, including 5,000 ashore in Puerto Rico and 2,200 Marines aboard ships.   

At the operational level, the cost to acquire the U.S. forces for this mission is at least seven times the annual revenue of their enemy and at least 5,000 times more than what the enemy paid for the speedboats they are fighting. “At the tactical level, the numbers are even more asymmetric,” Singer says. What’s more, if U.S. forces used four munitions for each strike—“twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it,” as the Washington Post reported—that’s 320 to 1200 times the cartel’s cost. 

Bottom line: “The operations in the Caribbean could soon face the same sustainability problem that surfaced in conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan,” Singer warns. “When the U.S. has to spend orders of magnitude more to neutralize a target than its foe spends to field or replace it, it enters into what businesses call a ‘losing equation’ that often adds up to failure.” There’s much more to his analysis, here. 

Related reading: 

• “Admiral told lawmakers everyone on alleged drug boat was on a list of military targets,” NBC News reported Saturday;
• And “Chinese Hospital Ship Visits Jamaica as US Gunboats Ply Caribbean,” Bloomberg 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 just last year, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the country as his regime abruptly collapsed after 13 years of civil war. 

The U.S. Army just activated its new Western Hemisphere Command, which will replace Army Forces Command and eventually absorb Army North and Army South, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Friday. 

The idea is to take FORSCOM’s mission of preparing troops for deployment and combine it with Army North’s experience in supporting civil authorities and Army South’s expertise in working with allies across the Caribbean, Central America and South America, an Army official told reporters last week. 

In doing so, Gen. Andrew Poppas, who currently leads FORSCOM, will retire, and the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations, Lt. Gen. Joe Ryan, will put on a fourth star and assume command of the newly minted USAWHC, or WESTHEM for short. 

The reorganization follows the recent inactivation of Army Training and Doctrine Command, which merged with Army Futures Command to form Army Transformation and Training Command, netting the Army one less four-star organization. 

It also feeds into the second Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, including a forthcoming National Defense Strategy that promises to make military operations in support of domestic law enforcement a core mission. Continue reading, here. 

Notable: Fort Bragg could get a bit more crowded. “Most of the civilian and military personnel now at Army North and Army South commands at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston could be headed to Fort Bragg, North Carolina,” the San Antonio Express-News reported Friday as well. “Army North currently has as many as 600 soldiers and civilian employees and Army South up to 500,” the newspaper reports, citing Army figures. 

“Most of those have been told that they probably will have to move,” retired Army South commander, Maj. Gen. Freddie Valenzuela said. Read more, here. 

Developing: The Navy’s frigate program is back on, sort of. Mere days after Navy Secretary John Phelan canceled the service’s yearslong delayed program, the White House greenlit a plan to design and build a frigate domestically as part of its proposed “Golden Fleet,” Secretary Phelan announced at the Reagan Forum on Saturday. 

Trump “has signed off on what we are calling the Golden Fleet…We will continue to build ships that are the cornerstones of the fleet—carriers, destroyers, amphibs, submarines. But we need new ships and we need modern ships,” Phelan said, Defense One’s Lauren Williams reports from California. 

Background: OMB Director Russell Vought said the decision to axe the program was driven by delays that grew from 15 percent during the first Trump administration to 85 percent during Trump’s second term. To turn that around, the government will have to “do things differently,” he said. Read more, here. 

National Security Strategy reactions

NATO reax: “The late Thursday release of the White House’s National Security Strategy, a document sketching the president’s foreign policy priorities and their ideological underpinnings, landed like a grenade in Brussels,” the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor wrote Sunday.  Instead of focusing on the geopolitical challenge of Russia and China (as Trump’s first term NSS did), it took aim at Europe itself, warning against the ‘civilizational erasure’ of the continent thanks to unfettered migration and a feckless liberal establishment.” Tharoor rounds up notable social-media posts:

• Donald Tusk, prime minister of Poland: “Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem. And we have common enemies. At least that’s how it has been in the last 80 years. We need to stick to this, this is the only reasonable strategy of our common security. Unless something has changed.”
• Gérard Araud, who served as France’s ambassador to the United States as well as the United Nations: “…the stunning section on Europe reads like a far-right pamphlet.”
• Carl Bildt, former Swedish prime minister: “The only part of the world where the new [U.S.] security strategy sees any threat to democracy seems to be Europe. Bizarre.”

Another angle: Despite its “incoherent babble,” Trump’s NSS still contains “three valuable points,” former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen argued Friday in The Atlantic. 

• First, “the United States has tended to ignore the Western Hemisphere until a crisis” erupts—e.g. the Cuban revolution or the near-collapse of Colombia.
• Second, the document “shift[s] from understanding the [African] continent primarily through the perspective of development aid to one focused on commerce,” Cohen writes. 
• And lastly “on Europe, the NSS is uncomfortably in the right ballpark in pointing out the challenge of mass migration,” he argues, noting the administration “has put its finger on a real problem.” Read the rest, here.   

Historian’s reax: The “Trump administration is embracing the old idea of spheres of influence in which less powerful countries are controlled by great powers, a system in place before World War II and favored now by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, among others,” which amounts to “a dramatic reworking of the foreign policy the U.S. has embraced since World War II,” Boston College’s Heather Cox Richardson wrote Friday. 

Trump’s officials “have openly rejected the world based on shared values of equality and democracy for which Americans fought in World War II. In its place, they are building a world dominated by a small group of elites close to Trump, who are raking in vast amounts of money from their machinations,” Richardson warned Saturday, on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. “Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?” she asked. 

Another historian: If “the world is just a balance of power where law does not much matter, as the new National Security Strategy indicates, then it is hard to say what prevents countries attacked by the United States from resorting to any sort of violence they choose,” warns former Yale historian Tim Snyder. “For decades the United States has justified foreign invasions in the name of democracy (for better or for worse, usually for worse). Nicolás Maduro lost an election (in 2024) and stayed in power.” 

“But however one adjudges past American interventions, now we are in a new situation: Trump does not even pretend to like democracy,” Snyder writes. And indeed, “there is no sign that the Trump administration is preparing for the security and economic support that a new democratic government would need.” More, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Trump’s national security strategy wants spy agencies to watch world supply chains,” Nextgov reported Friday;  
• “‘Cultivate resistance’: policy paper lays bare Trump support for Europe’s far right,” the Guardian reported Friday; 
• And “Trumpian Corruption Is Worse Than Ukrainian Corruption,” argues historian Anne Applebaum, writing Sunday for The Atlantic.

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National Security Strategy, released

The second Trump administration posted its National Security Strategy to the White House site late Thursday. Read the 33-page document, which is required by Congress but does not necessarily bind future decisions, here.

As expected, it puts unprecedented focus on the Americas and immigrants. A section titled “What Do We Want In and From the World?” [formatting in the original] begins: “We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States.” Later, it adds that “border security is the primary element of national security”—an assertion it calls part of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

Europe comes in for much criticism. The report chides European leaders for a lack of “self-confidence,” particularly in their dealings with Russia, which—lest we forget—has for three years been waging a war of conquest on European soil. “European allies enjoy a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure, save nuclear weapons. As a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, European relations with Russia are now deeply attenuated, and many Europeans regard Russia as an existential threat. Managing European relations with Russia will require significant U.S. diplomatic engagement, both to reestablish conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states,” the report says.

Efforts to contain Russia—explicit in the strategies of the Biden, first Trump, and earlier administrations—are only obliquely mentioned in the new one: e.g., “reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia.”

European officials are chided for “unrealistic expectations for the war” in Ukraine—an interesting charge by Trump, who repeatedly promised to end the war within 24 hours of taking office.

The greater threat to Europe, the report avers, is “civilizational erasure” brought on by “activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”

Washington Post: “The strategy was likely to unsettle European leaders who were already struggling to find a way to match Trump administration priorities with their own. Now the White House is officially embracing the far-right nationalist parties that have vowed to take down centrist leaders, often alongside plans to embrace a more pro-Russian line.”

As for China: it must be deterred from “predatory” industrial and trade practices by protectionist U.S. policies and military might, the report says. U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific must be induced to share more of the burden. Deterring “a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority. We will also maintain our longstanding declaratory policy on Taiwan, meaning that the United States does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”

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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 Bradley Peniston with Meghann Myers. 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 1945, five Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers disappeared, giving rise to theories about supernatural phenomena in the Bermuda Triangle.

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Ukraine

Russia’s seizure of the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk has created a worrisome template, writes George Barros, who leads the Russia team at the Institute for the Study of War, in a multimedia explainer for the Washington Post. After Ukrainian drones chewed up five Russian tank divisions in the assault on Avdiivka, Russian forces switched to “small unit infantry infiltration missions” that make “advances at literal footpace and at high losses.” But, Barros writes, the fall of Pokrovsk validates “a newly developed operational template for seizing Ukrainian towns: First, systematically degrade Ukraine’s logistics lines with drones, then send in infantry assault and infiltration groups to overwhelm the beleaguered defenders.” Read on, with maps and timelines and graphs, here.

Ukraine is helping the US catch up with modern warfare—for now, reports Defense One’s Patrick Tucker off a recent trip to Europe and conversations with U.S. and foreign officials. “Even as the Pentagon designs new tactics and tech based on lessons from Ukraine—like the new attack drones it is testing—some say the United States is still undervaluing its relationship with Kyiv,” he writes. “Observers say broader cooperation could help both sides, if the Trump administration allows it.” Read on, here.

Boat-strike hearing

Video shows strike on survivors clinging to overturned boat. Lawmakers watched a video at Thursday’s closed-door Hill briefing by the commander in charge of the Sept. 2 strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea. New York Times: The video showed the first strike, “a fiery explosion that destroyed most of a boat in the Caribbean Sea. A black plume filled the air. 

“When the smoke finally cleared about 30 minutes later, the front portion of the boat was overturned but still afloat, according to lawmakers and congressional staff who viewed the video or were briefed on it. Two survivors, shirtless, clung to the hull, tried unsuccessfully to flip it back over, then climbed on it and slipped off into the water, over and over.

“Then Adm. Frank M. Bradley, commander of the operation, gave an order for a follow-up strike. Three flashes of light filled the video screen. And the men were gone.” Read on, here.

The hearing didn’t change the minds of legal experts speaking later in the day at the Center For A New American Security, who “said the administration has failed to make a case using domestic, military, and international law that would support the continued targeting of boats in the Caribbean Sea,” Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported.

Read a timeline of Trump administration’s shifting statements on the boat strikes, by the Post, here.

Signalgate

SecDef Hegseth’s claim of “TOTAL exoneration” ignores the DOD inspector general’s finding that he violated department policy “for transmitting information that could have put service members in danger—in this case, the Navy pilots who were flying the March 15 mission to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen—by taking sensitive details about time, place and manner and sharing them on an unapproved messaging platform via his personal cell phone,” Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Thursday after the report was posted online. 

Washington Post: “Hegseth’s falsehoods about the report’s conclusions underscore the extent to which he and his top aides have worked to downplay the seriousness of his actions. Former top military officials and other national security experts have argued since the scandal surfaced earlier this year that such handling of highly sensitive information almost certainly put American lives at risk — a point the inspector general’s team emphasized in its findings,” the Post’s Dan Lamothe wrote.

Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass.: Hegseth’s “refusal to take responsibility at any stage of this investigation shows a complete lack of accountability that should be unacceptable for anyone in uniform, let alone the Secretary of Defense,” the Marine Corps veteran said in a statement.

Reminder: Hegseth was criticizing his department’s IG office as early as September. During his Quantico speech to flag officers, he asserted that the independent office had somehow been “weaponized.” “I call it the ‘No-more-walking-on-eggshells policy,’ ” Hegseth told the auditorium full of senior leaders. “We are liberating commanders and NCOs. We are liberating you. We are overhauling an inspector general process, the IG that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver’s seat.”

His subsequent guidance to the service secretaries included tightening the threshold for opening IG investigations, requiring frequent written updates, and creating a system for tracking “serial complainants”—a problematic step because IG hotlines are anonymous. Faith Williams, who directs the Effective and Accountable Government Program at the Project on Government Oversight, to Myers: “I’m not saying IGs are above reproach, but that memo just really dripped with hostility toward whistleblowers, and it does beg the question, ‘why?’” Read that, here.

Etc.

The Trump administration can continue to keep National Guard troops in DC streets while another appeals court ponders its decision, a panel of judges said Thursday. Washington Post: “Last month, that U.S. District Court judge handed D.C. a preliminary legal win in its lawsuit over the deployment, writing in an opinion that it was illegal and ordering the administration to pause it while litigation proceeds.” But now the U.S. Court of Appeals panel has ruled that the troops may stay past a Dec. 11 deadline while the appeals court considers its decision. Read on, here.

Additional reading: 

“Navy deployment marred by friendly fire, lost jets, collision at sea,” reports the Washington Post’s Tara Copp. “The U.S. Navy on Thursday released its findings from four investigations scrutinizing the significant challenges encountered by one of its aircraft carrier groups over nine months in the Middle East, where several major accidents occurred as the ships battled Yemeni militants.”

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Partisan lines were drawn after Thursday’s briefing on the Hill about the Sept. 2 strike.