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The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and cybersecurity firm TeamT5 has exposed an intricate Chinese intelligence operation, dubbed the ‘Smiao Network,’ targeting federal workers in both the United States and Taiwan. This network, linked to t…
A sophisticated social engineering campaign that leverages the viral power of TikTok to distribute dangerous information-stealing malware, specifically Vidar and StealC. This alarming trend marks a shift in cybercriminal tactics, moving away from tradi…
Space Force is losing 14% of its civilian workers to SecDef Pete Hegseth’s hurry-up effort to cut Pentagon headcount. That’s a higher proportion than the rest of the Defense Department, whose overall civilian workforce Hegseth is trying to cut by five to eight percent in ways that have caused widespread uncertainty and fear among federal employees.
The loss of civilians is a “large hit” because the service heavily relies on them for acquisition, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Tuesday during a Senate Armed Service committee hearing. “I’m worried about replacing that level of expertise in the near term as we try to resolve it and make sure we have a good workforce doing that acquisition.”
Service officials had anticipated losing about 10% of their roughly 5,600 civilians through Hegseth’s early retirement and voluntary-resignation programs. Defense One’s Audrey Decker has more, here.
The Pentagon’s IT agency expects a 10% cut to its own civilian workforce—and is asking for permission to rehire crucial workers who have already left. The commander of the Defense Information Systems Agency offered an optimistic take on Wednesday: “It’s giving us an opportunity to ruthlessly realign and optimize how we are addressing what is an evolving mission,” Lt. Gen. Paul Stanton said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
But Stanton also appeared to suggest the cuts have ejected some people that DISA really needs back. “Things like the multi-partner environment and initiatives like DoDNet are driving our workforce to perform roles that they hadn’t previously,” he said. “And so we are doing a realignment, and we’re going back to the department to ask for what we refer to as a surgical rehiring. We need to hire the right people back into the right positions to then lead us forward.” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports, here.
It’s apparently official: the Pentagon has accepted the gift of a Qatari jet for President Trump’s use, “despite bipartisan concern that accepting a foreign government’s plane is both dangerous and unethical,” Decker reported Wednesday. The $400 million 747 from the Qatari royal family is expected to cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to search for bugs and upgrade for use as Air Force One.
Don’t forget: This afternoon OpenAI, Scale AI, and representatives from U.S. European Command will join Defense One’s science and tech editor Patrick Tucker to reveal how large language models and other cutting-edge AI tools are reshaping the U.S. military’s approach to China, Russia, and beyond.
The first installment of Genius Machines 2025 launches today at 2 p.m. ET. For more details on the agenda and registration (which is required, but it’s free), go here.
And this evening, Space Command’s Gen. Stephen Whiting is scheduled to speak in a “fireside chat” at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. That’s slated for 6 p.m. ET. Catch it live on YouTube, here.
Related reading:
Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1968, the nuclear-powered submarine USS Scorpion (SSN-589) was lost at sea in the North Atlantic for reasons that remain a mystery.
Months after telling voters he would end Russia’s Ukraine war in 24 hours if elected, President Trump is now telling European officials in private that he doesn’t think Vladimir Putin wants to end his invasion and occupation of Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
Why it matters: “European leaders had long believed this—but it was the first time they were hearing it from Trump,” European officials told the Journal. “It also ran counter to what Trump has often said publicly, that he believes Putin genuinely wants peace.”
The view from Kyiv: “We need to know who we can count on, and who we can’t. A support package from Europe is coming, and it will be a strong one,” President Volodymir Zelenskyy said this week. “As for the package from the United States—that’s a different story.”
In other White House developments:
North Korea suffered an embarrassing setback during the failed launch of a new warship in front of dictator Kim Jong-un at the northeastern port of Chongjin Wednesday, state-run media reported in an unusual public acknowledgement. “A serious accident occurred in the course of the launch of the destroyer,” KCNA said Wednesday.
What happened: During a side launch, which Reuters reports was risky given the size of the vessel, North Korea’s “newly built 5,000-ton-class destroyer became unbalanced and was punctured in its bottom sections after a transport cradle on the stern section slid off first and became stuck,” according to the Associated Press, which paraphrased KCNA’s reporting.
No photos are known to have been released yet, but “South Korean military officials, who were monitoring the ship’s launch with the help of satellite images, said on Thursday that the ship was lying on its side in the water after the failed launch,” the New York Times reports.
According to KCNA, “After watching the whole course of the accident, the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un made [a] stern assessment, saying that it was a serious accident and criminal act caused by sheer carelessness, irresponsibility and unscientific empiricism which should never occur and could not be tolerated.”
Expert reax: “It’s a shameful thing. But the reason why North Korea disclosed the incident is it wants to show it’s speeding up the modernization of its navy,” Moon Keun-sik of Seoul’s Hanyang University told AP.
Just last month, North Korea launched a similarly-sized ship from its western coastal port of Nampo. That one was “the biggest navy ship North Korea has ever built” and “appeared to have been built with Russian technology,” the Times notes. More, here.
From the region: In a break from recent tradition, China’s defence minister is expected to miss this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue, hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies next week in Singapore, the Financial Times reported this week.
And in a big-picture take, the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported on China’s recent rapid advancements in robots, satellites and AI, and how “in some cases [China] is catching up with the U.S.”
Lastly today, an intriguing read from the world of espionage: “As the Soviet Union Fell, Did the K.G.B. Leave a Gift in Brazil for Today’s Spies?” the New York Times asks after presenting some compelling evidence from a series of reporting trips to Brazil, the U.S., and several countries in Europe.
At issue: The delicate task of creating a false identity, or rather many of them, for later use in a long game of spycraft and geopolitics. The Soviets appear to have arrived at one particular tactic that turned out to be too good to pass up in the decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Read more about the latest wrinkle in Moscow’s so-called “illegals” program, here.
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ReliaQuest, hackers have deployed a cunning search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning scheme to orchestrate payroll fraud against a manufacturing sector customer. This deceptive strategy involves crafting fake authentication portals that mirror legiti…
A newly identified .NET-based information-stealing malware, dubbed PupkinStealer (also known as PumpkinStealer in some reports), has surfaced as a significant cyber threat, targeting sensitive data such as web browser passwords and application session …
Recorded Future Payment Fraud Intelligence has uncovered a sprawling network of 71 fraudulent e-commerce domains designed to impersonate a prominent German international discount retailer, with lidlorg[.]com identified as the central node of this scam …
President Trump says his lofty “Golden Dome” missile-defense project will cost $175 billion and be ready in just three years, but experts said those cost and schedule projections were likely far too low.
The project will involve “next-generation technologies across the land, sea, and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors,” Trump said Tuesday in televised remarks from the White House. The latest known concept for Golden Dome combines various existing systems—ground-based missile Patriot and THAAD interceptors, ship-fired Standard Missiles—as well as an extensive constellation of satellites bearing sensors and new space-based weapons, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports.
Threats, illustrated: The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency last week released a graphic showing “Current and Future Missile Threats to the U.S. Homeland,” (PDF) even though it mixes up Hawaii and Alaska at one point, as nuclear weapons scholar Jeffrey Lewis pointed out after reviewing DIA’s illustration.
Industry forecast: The project will likely involve many defense contractors; already the Pentagon has fielded more than 360 responses from numerous firms. Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, RTX, Boeing, Palantir, Anduril, L3Harris Technologies, and others are all hoping for a piece of the $175 billion-plus pie.
Just launching the satellites could cost between $161 billion and $542 billion, the Congressional Budget Office warned two weeks ago. Both estimates were based on the old SDI proposal; Golden Dome will likely require more satellites and more money for costs that could rise to $831 billion over two decades.
That did not deter hawks on Capitol Hill. “What’s exciting about this is it makes it available to everybody to participate, to compete,” North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer said Tuesday at the White House. “The new autonomous space-age defense ecosystem is more about Silicon Valley than it is about” America’s largest defense contractors, he added.
Trump: “This design for the Golden Dome will integrate with our existing defense capabilities and should be fully operational before the end of my term. So we’ll have it done in about three years,” the president predicted Tuesday.
Expert reax: It’ll probably take 10 years, Tom Karako of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told Reuters.
Rewind: In March, a defense official said it would take at least five to seven years to develop Golden Dome’s space-based weapons, though some work might be done earlier, such as integrating existing sensors and interceptors. After speaking with several defense and industry officials, Tucker described the program as “the most ambitious missile-defense project in history.”
Rewind that VHS tape even further: The concept was initially drawn up near the end of the Cold War, but was ultimately abandoned by the Reagan administration over its technological complexity and exorbitant costs. Read more about that project at How Stuff Works, here, or at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, here.
Today, America’s ballistic missile defense system is largely concentrated in Alaska, and it has never achieved 100% success in tests. Because such a system is intended to protect against nuclear-armed ballistic missiles from nations like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, any penetration of missile defenses could be unspeakably consequential.
Space Force vice chief Gen. Michael Guetlein will lead a new office dedicated to creating Golden Dome, Trump said Tuesday. That office will likely include near-term goals—such as improving the accuracy and effectiveness of ground-based missile interceptors—that can be completed before the 2026 midterm elections, enabling the White House to claim some quick success. More ambitious efforts are likely to take at least five to seven years to arrive, like satellites that track, analyze, communicate about, and destroy incoming missiles, Tucker writes.
Q. Did military commanders ask for this system? A reporter posed the question to Trump Tuesday at the White House.
“I suggested it, and they all said, ‘we love the idea, sir,’” Trump replied. “That’s how it’s gotta be.”
Movie trivia: You may recall the 1987 scifi film “Robocop” revolved around a future U.S. rife with crime and insecurity, paving the way for defense firms to pitch the titular robot as a promising solution. You may not recall that this film also included the Reagan-era “Star Wars” missile defense system that, in reality, experts ultimately rejected. The film’s audience catches glimpses of the missile-defense system in recurring TV news segments, which progress from comical to horrifically tragic by the end of the movie, as clips (here and here) from YouTube show.
Related reading:
Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1881, the American Red Cross was established in Dansville, New York.
The U.S. Army’s first armored Transformation-in-Contact unit is integrating 3D-printed drones for greater “massing of effects,” Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Tuesday. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team is working its way through its fourth training rotation as a TiC brigade, at the Army’s Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany.
On Wednesday, the brigade will test a new configuration: first-person viewer unmanned aerial vehicles with forward observers and other anti-tank elements. “And we think that this team is going to produce a lot more massing of effects than maybe a larger team would,” Col. Jim Armstrong, 1st ABCT’s commander, told reporters Tuesday. “So that’s our thesis. We’re going to test it against the enemy tomorrow. And it’s really been helpful, thinking, living, breathing, opposing force to go to fight with at scale, to do more than a prototype test, and really see how these things impact us across our warfighting functions.”
The drones, designed by the division’s Marne Innovation Center and 3D-printed on site, help solve the problem of defending M1 Abrams tanks from drone swarms, a new issue both sides are dealing with as Ukraine beats back Russia’s invasion.
The brigade has also integrated a second electromagnetic warfare platoon, and it’s testing new tech provided by industry partners. That includes a software-defined radio counter-UAS system, which has followed the brigade through multiple training rotations. Read more, here.
Developing: SecDef Hegseth ordered the creation of a panel to review a tragic bombing during the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Pentagon chief announced Tuesday. Once the full panel is formed, Hegseth’s current plan is for them to “reexamine previous Abbey Gate investigations conducted by U.S. Central Command during the Biden Administration,” he said in a statement.
Hegseth’s close friend, Sean Parnell, will join Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, who was placed in the brig after being accused of “wilfully disobeying a superior commissioned officer, failure to obey an order, conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, and showing contempt toward officials,” Task & Purpose reported when Scheller was released from confinement after Trump’s inauguration. Jerry Dunleavy, “who helped lead the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s investigation into the Afghanistan withdraw[al], will serve on the Special Review Panel” with Scheller and Parnell, Hegseth’s Defense Department said Tuesday.
According to Hegseth, “Sean and his team will look at the facts, examine the sources, interview witnesses, analyze the decision making, and post-mortem the chain of events that led to one of America’s darkest moments.”
Additional reading:
Trump’s plan to detain migrants at Guantanamo Bay cost $100,000 per person every day, Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters said Tuesday. “We’re spending $100,000 a day to keep someone at Guantanamo,” Peters said. “We keep them there awhile, then we fly them back to the United States, or we could keep them here for $165 a day. I think that’s kind of outrageous.”
Context: “The White House has requested a huge increase in funding for immigration enforcement as it tries to achieve Trump’s goal of mass deportations,” Reuters reports. “The administration asked Congress this month for an additional $44 billion for the Department of Homeland Security in fiscal year 2026, which begins on Oct. 1.”
Update: U.S. intelligence analysts were ordered “to edit an assessment with the hope of insulating President Trump and [Director of National Intelligence Tulsi] Gabbard from being attacked for the administration’s claim that Venezuela’s government controls a criminal gang,” the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing email traffic from the concerned officials.
Background: “The New York Times reported last week that [Gabbard aide Joe] Kent had pushed analysts to redo their assessment, dated Feb. 26, of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and the gang, Tren de Aragua, after it came to light that the assessment contradicted a subsequent claim by Mr. Trump. The disclosure of the precise language of Mr. Kent’s emails has added to the emerging picture of a politicized intervention.” More, here.
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IBM X-Force’s 2024 cybersecurity report, nearly one-third of cyber intrusions now rely on identity-based attacks, exploiting valid login credentials to breach systems. This alarming trend, continuing for the second consecutive year, highlights a …
Service is focused on overcoming logistical hurdles and other obstacles now so that medical professionals will be ready if they’re needed.
The Navy’s top officer said U.S. forces carried out “the largest air strike in the history of the world” during recent operations near Somalia. Acting Chief of Naval Operations Adm. James Kilby shared the extraordinary remarks Monday evening at the Council on Foreign Relations’ Robert B. McKeon Endowed Series on Military Strategy and Leadership, which is typically a polite, news-free event every spring.
Kilby was speaking about U.S. military operations in the Red Sea, where U.S. forces had been carrying out intense airstrikes against Houthi militants inside Yemen since March 15. But less than two months later, President Trump stopped the airstrikes after the loss of multiple attack drones and Super Hornet aircraft that slid off the deck of Navy aircraft carriers during defensive maneuvers to avoid Houthi missiles and drones.
The USS Truman carrier strike group engaged an estimated 160 missiles and drones aimed at either Israel or vessels transiting the coast of Yemen while U.S. forces operated in the Red Sea over the past five months, Kilby said Monday evening.
“They conducted 670 strikes” and “launched the largest air strike in the history of the world—125,000 pounds from a single aircraft carrier into Somalia,” Kilby said. (Hat tip to Paul McCleary of Politico for flagging Kilby’s stats on social media.) “That single strike group worked for three different combat commanders in the execution of that mission for five months,” said Kilby.
Panning out: The U.S. military in Africa has attacked predominantly ISIS positions in northern Somalia on at least 10 separate occasions since March 17, and at least twice since Trump ordered a halt to U.S. strikes inside Yemen earlier this month. However, U.S. officials have not shared battle damage assessments from these strikes in more than a month and a half when they last claimed “multiple enemy combatants were killed and that no civilians were injured or killed” in a strike on April 1.
Recall that Trump’s national security team worried Somalia could be on the brink of collapse not because of ISIS, but because the terrorist group al-Shabaab has been making steady battlefield gains closer to Mogadishu, the New York Times reported on April 10. At the time, some State Department officials proposed “closing the U.S. embassy in Mogadishu and withdrawing most American personnel as a security precaution,” but others “in the National Security Council, [were] worried that shutting the embassy could diminish confidence in Somalia’s central government and inadvertently incite a rapid collapse,” officials told the Times.
Developing: U.S. and Emirati officials signed a “letter of intent” to begin work on what Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth’s team called “a structured roadmap that will guide enhanced military-to-military cooperation,” defense officials announced Monday.
The Defense Department’s statement is long on ambition but short on specifics—emphasizing, e.g., “a phased framework for advancing bilateral force readiness, interoperability, and innovation-driven collaboration.” The new plans, such as they are, also involve the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit teaming up with the UAE’s Tawazun Council as well as a parallel effort to integrate Emirati officials “into the U.S. National Guard State Partnership Program through a partnership with the Texas National Guard.” That program is intended to “enhance cooperation in integrated air and missile defense, cybersecurity, disaster response, and operational planning,” Hegseth’s staff said. Read more, here.
By the way: The UAE is recruiting DOGE’d Pentagon employees for work on an AI project in Abu Dhabi “despite past warnings from U.S. spy agencies and federal lawmakers that [the] UAE could share AI technologies with China,” investigative journalist Kim Zetter reported Tuesday for Zero Day.
Commentary: The U.S. needs a “security clearance ready reserve,” argues Lindy Kyzer, vice president of ClearanceJobs.com. “Just because you’re out of a contract doesn’t mean your clearance eligibility goes away,” she writes. “When the focus is on the agency, and not the individual, the investment the government has made in a clearance ($5,410 for a Top Secret clearance investigation conducted by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency) isn’t treated as the resource it is.”
“The idea isn’t new,” she reminds readers. The Defense Innovation Board recommended the concept in a 2024 report about driving innovation in the defense industrial base. The report noted the numerous benefits of the type of “enduring reciprocity” Continuous Vetting enables. The vision: treat cleared personnel like an elite national resource, not a disposable line item. Continue reading, here.
Alert: Later this afternoon, Trump is expected to announce developments related to his ambitious “Golden Dome” missile-defense project that could be a boon for defense contractors like SpaceX, Anduril and others. Bloomberg last week reported some sort of developments were in the works, and could include “a draft architecture.” Stay tuned at DVIDS for more around 3 p.m. ET; link here.
Additional reading:
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 Patrick Tucker. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1949, the National Security Agency was established.
Europe piles sanctions on Russia following Trump’s call with Putin. Trump on Truth Social yesterday characterized the two-hour call with the Russian leader as “excellent,” and promised that Russia and Ukraine would “immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire.” The problem is: that’s not the same as a ceasefire, which is what Ukraine and the EU are demanding.
The EU announced its 17th package of sanctions against Russia on Tuesday, targeting Russia’s “shadow fleet,” of third-party shipping partners as well as Russian energy, industry, and individuals. German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul declared, “We have made clear again and again that we simply expect one thing from Russia now: namely, a ceasefire, unconditional and immediate,” according to the Associated Press.
“While Putin feigns interest in peace, more sanctions are in the works,” promised Kaja Kalla, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy.
The view from Kyiv: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on X “It is obvious that Russia is trying to buy time in order to continue its war and occupation.”
Related reading: “Zelensky’s Attempt to Get Trump on His Side Falls Flat,” the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Forecast: Russian attacks on Ukraine will likely persist over the summer, said Jack Watling of the London-based Royal United Services Institute in a commentary published Tuesday. He expects Russia to focus efforts on the areas of Kostyantynivka and Pokrovsk and intensify its attacks in the buildup of the June NATO Summit in the Hague.
Also: Russia has taken to more deliberate targeting of radar stations to knock out Ukraine UAV operations and is now bombing hotels hosting reporters, Reporters Without Borders announced in a report published Friday.
And lastly: OpenAI, Scale AI, and representatives from U.S. European Command will join Defense One’s science and tech editor Patrick Tucker to reveal how large language models and other cutting-edge AI tools are reshaping the U.S. military’s approach to China, Russia, and beyond.
The first installment of Genius Machines 2025 launches Thursday. For more details on the agenda and registration (which is required, but it’s free), go here.
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