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Princeton University has confirmed a breach of its Advancement database and is urging vigilance as investigators assess the exposed information.
The post Princeton University Confirms Data Breach Affecting Advancement Records appeared first on eSecurity Planet.
WhatsApp scammers are using screen sharing and malware to rapidly steal accounts and money worldwide.
The post WhatsApp Screen-Sharing Scam Drains $700K in Minutes appeared first on eSecurity Planet.
President Trump suggested he would be okay ordering U.S. military strikes inside Mexico and Colombia as part of his administration’s ostensible war against fentanyl and cocaine, he told reporters Monday at the White House.
“Would I launch strikes in Mexico to stop drugs? OK with me. Whatever we have to do to stop drugs,” he said inside the Oval Office. “Colombia is—has cocaine factories, where they make cocaine. Would I knock out those factories? I would be proud to do it, personally.” NBC News and Bloomberg have a bit more.
Update: The U.S. Navy’s Caribbean Sea build-up now features at least a dozen ships, including the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, which arrived in the region over the weekend, Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post wrote on social media Monday. Other vessels include the guided missile destroyers Mahan, Bainbridge, Winston S. Churchill, Stockdale and Gravely; the guided missile cruisers Lake Erie and Gettysburg; the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima; amphibious transport dock ships Fort Lauderdale and San Antonio; and the littoral combat ship Wichita.
Developing: The State Department says it will designate Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization beginning next Monday, CBS News reports. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio allege the cartel is run by Venezuelan dictator and President Nicolás Maduro. CBS reports the group “is not known to be a traditional, hierarchical drug cartel like the Sinaloa or Tren de Aragua,” and that “The term is instead generally used to describe a loose, decentralized network of military and government officials within the Venezuelan state who are alleged to be involved in the illegal drug trade.”
After the announcement, Trump told reporters Sunday evening, “We may be having some discussions with Maduro, and we’ll see how that turns out. They would like to talk.” Trump repeated that somewhat on Monday when he said, “At a certain period of time, I’ll be talking to [Maduro],” but he did not elaborate.
Related: Maduro said Monday he’s ready to speak “face to face” with anyone in the U.S. “who wants to talk to Venezuela,” Agence France-Presse reported.
And despite its coziness with the Trump administration, Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister told AFP the country would not let the U.S. military use its soil to launch attacks on Venezuela. “The US has NEVER requested use of our territory to launch any attacks against the people of Venezuela,” Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar told AFP in a message, adding, “Trinidad and Tobago will not participate in any act that could harm the Venezuelan people.”
Big-picture consideration: The New York Times explores “The ‘Donroe Doctrine’: Trump’s Bid to Control the Western Hemisphere,” reporting Monday.
Developing: A Tennessee state judge temporarily blocked Trump’s National Guard deployment to Memphis, saying it appears to violate the state’s militia law, which instructs local lawmakers to call in such soldiers for matters of public safety.
Background: Memphis is one of several U.S. cities to which Trump has sent the National Guard, departing from norms against deploying troops on U.S. soil,” Reuters explains. “Trump has said they are needed to suppress civil unrest, support immigration enforcement and fight crime. Democrats have accused the Republican president of abusing military powers meant for grave emergencies such as an invasion.”
The judge gave Trump officials five days to file an appeal, declaring Memphis crime rates—while among the top 10 in the nation—still do not constitute the “grave emergency” or “disaster” required to call in the National Guard, according to Tennessee’s state constitution. The Associated Press has a bit more.
Additional reading: “New York Officials to Team Up With Wall Street to Keep National Guard Out,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
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 1978, the F/A-18 Hornet flew for the first time.
Happening today: Defense One’s State of Defense Business Acquisition Summit, with several panel discussions and featured guests scheduled between 1–5 pm ET, with a networking lunch beginning at noon.
Location: The River Birch Ballroom at the Westin Washington D.C Downtown (999 9th St NW, Washington, DC 20001).
Guests include Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces. We’ll also hear from top officials at ScaleAI, Shield AI, HII, Anduril, Slingshot Aerospace, Oracle, Lockheed Martin and more. Panels discussions will span autonomy, U.S. munitions stockpiles, the future of the defense industrial base and more.
Registration and additional details, here.
Trump: U.S. will sell F-35s to Saudis, despite Pentagon concerns that the jet’s secrets might leak to China. New York Times: “Mr. Trump’s announcement came on the eve of a White House visit from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, during his first trip to the United States in more than seven years. Prince Mohammed, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, and U.S. officials are expected to discuss a Saudi purchase of 48 of the fighter jets and a potential mutual defense agreement.” Read on, here.
The president’s insistence on the sale comes as his company pursues business deals in Saudi Arabia. Axios has the latest roundup of the Trump family’s pursuit of wealth in foreign lands, which continues to present unprecedented conflicts of interest. Read that, here.
The “mixing of politics and profitmaking during President Trump’s second term has shattered American norms, shocking scholars who study ethics and corruption,” the Times writes in a separate article.
The pilot of an F-22 recently controlled a drone wingman in flight. The pilot used a tablet to control a General Atomics MQ-20 Avenger over the Air Force’s Nevada Test and Training Range, according to Monday statements from General Atomics and Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works; L3Harris was also part of the demonstration. The flight, apparently the first of its kind with an F-22, took place in October. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly has a bit more, here.
France, Germany are talking about scrapping their plans to jointly build a fighter jet, the Financial Times reported on Monday. Instead, they might focus on a command-and-control system, Reuters writes off the FT report.
Europe hunts for ways to speed up defense innovation, production. Early next year, the EU Commission says it will “air a proposal” for a “pilot initiative that will allow companies to test and refine new technologies, aiming to turn projects into defence products ready for sale quicker,” Reuters reported on Tuesday.
Also in the works: Proposals for “ways for different member countries to recognise each other’s certifications for defence technologies, help companies access EU research facilities and encourage EU member governments to allocate at least 10% of arms budgets to emerging and disruptive technologies, according to the draft roadmap.” Read more, here.
France promises Ukraine 100 new Rafale warplanes, plus air defence systems, munitions and drones. On Monday, the presidents of France and Ukraine signed a letter of intent for the transfer of the arms; an actual purchase deal is planned later. The countries aim to finance the deal “with EU programmes and the planned use of frozen Russian assets, which the EU still has to agree,” Reuters reported.
Background: “The announcement comes after a surge of Russian drone and missile attacks on Ukraine in recent weeks, and Moscow’s reports of ground advances in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region,” Reuters wrote, here.
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U.S. national security requires three deployed ARG/MEUs, Marine Corps commandant argues in Defense One. That’s Amphibious Ready Groups and Marine Expeditionary Units, like the one built around the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima that has been sailing in the Caribbean since August.
Once the United States could keep three such groups at sea, ready to respond to conflict or other need, Gen. Eric Smith writes. “But as the nation focused on extended land campaigns in the Middle East, the amphibious fleet was deprioritized. By 1997, that number had dropped to 40, and by 2016 it stood at just 31. Today the amphibious fleet has 32 ships whose average readiness hovers around 45 percent. Shipyards are strained, timelines are slipping, and hulls are aging faster than we can replace them.
“Sustaining a 3.0 ARG/MEU presence will require 31 amphibious ships at 80 percent readiness. The recent LHA/LPD block buy was a step in the right direction, but we must continue to build on this momentum.” Read how, here.
Developing: Former U.S. military bases in Panama and Puerto Rico are returning to service as the Trump administration eyes possible military action in Venezuela amid its new war on alleged drug trafficking-boats around Latin America, Task & Purpose reported Friday.
This includes Naval Station Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico and Fort Sherman in Panama. If these sound familiar, Reuters mapped the ongoing U.S. military build-up in the region in a special report published two weeks ago, here.
Update: The Pentagon wanted to stage at an old base in Ecuador but voters there rejected the proposal on Sunday, AP reports from Quito—calling the decision “a significant defeat for President Daniel Noboa, a conservative who is closely aligned with the Trump administration.”
Also: The Pentagon says it killed three more people it claims were trafficking drugs on Saturday. Like nearly all the other U.S. attacks since September, this strike hit a small boat traveling off the coast of Latin America—this time on the Pacific side. That makes 21 known strikes that have killed at least 83 people.
ICYMI: American Marines in Haiti exchanged gunfire with suspected gang members near the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince on Thursday, the Washington Post reported Saturday.
The Marines returned fire; none were harmed in the incident, a spokesman for the service told the Associated Press in a very brief follow-up.
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 1856, the U.S. Army established a post called Fort Buchanan in southern Arizona to control new land acquired from Mexico two years earlier. The fort was officially abandoned five years later.
Army unveils its own acquisition reform. Among other moves, it’s “gathering up the many offices that weigh in on requirements and stacking them under a new program office structure,” Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported on Friday. The previous dozen Program Executive Offices will be compressed under six Portfolio Acquisition Executives (Fires; Maneuver Ground; Maneuver Air; Command and Control and Counter Command and Control; Agile Sustainment and Ammo; and Layered Protection and Chemical, Biology, Radiological and Nuclear Defense). Read on, here.
One-stop shopping for counter-drone gear? That’s what the Army’s-led Joint Interagency Task Force 401 is working on as it pushes to improve the military’s counter-drone defenses. Myers reports on that and other steps, here.
B-21, ICBM construction projects. The deal that reopened the government included some $850 million for 11 construction projects related to the Air Force’s nascent strategic bomber and its under-development ICBM, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported on Friday. Learn what and where, here.
Update: Changing the Defense Department’s name to the War Department could cost as much as $2 billion, NBC News reported Wednesday, noting this “estimate for renaming the Pentagon comes as Trump has promised to cut back on federal spending.”
For the record, changing the actual name of the department requires an act of Congress. And while it is true that President Trump has ordered the executive branch to refer to the Defense Department as the “War Department” and to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as “Secretary of War,” Trump’s Sept. 5 executive order does not formally change the name of the department.
Trump’s own order acknowledges this, saying: “The Secretary of Defense is authorized the use of this additional secondary title—the Secretary of War—and may be recognized by that title in official correspondence, public communications, ceremonial contexts, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch.”
Changing “New department letterhead and signage alone could cost about $1 billion,” NBC reports. But “rewriting digital code for all of the department’s internal and external facing websites, as well as other computer software on classified and unclassified systems” could cost more, four senior congressional staffers said.
Survey: Do you approve of DoD to DoW name change? Overall 54% opposed while just 22% supported, with the rest undecided, according to a survey of 2,542 people by political scientists Don Casler and Robert Ralston. Only 42% of Republicans overall expressed support for the name change, they said. More, here.
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Update: The Pentagon pulled hundreds of National Guard soldiers from Chicago and Portland beginning this weekend, ABC News reported Saturday. That includes 200 federalized California Guard soldiers in Portland and 200 more Texas troops sent to Chicago early last month.
Northern Command officials teased the reductions in a vague social media post Friday night, writing, “in the coming days, the Department will be shifting and/or rightsizing our Title 10 footprint in Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago to ensure a constant, enduring, and long-term presence in each city.” That leaves around 300 activated Illinois Guard soldiers on standby for Chicago, and another 100 Oregon Guard troops will stay near Portland, the New York Times reported Sunday.
“While they deployed to the two cities, the troops never carried out operations because of several legal rulings that placed a hold on their deployment,” ABC explains. A federal judge in Portland blocked the Guard from deploying to the city after protests outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility led the president to declare Portland a “war-ravaged” combat zone. The judge disagreed. Meanwhile in Illinois, an appeals court upheld a federal judge’s temporary restraining order blocking those Guard troops from deploying to Chicago. That decision has now moved to the Supreme Court.
By the way: Less than 3% of the 600-plus people arrested during DHS’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago had criminal histories, the Chicago Tribune reported Friday, citing Justice Department statistics.
Related reading: “Immigration crackdown inspires uniquely Chicago pushback that’s now a model for other cities,” AP reported Sunday.
The Border Patrol arrested 81 people on its first day of a new immigration crackdown in Charlotte, North Carolina, Reuters reported Monday. Homeland Security officials surged to the city, arresting most of those over a five-hour span Saturday in an effort dubbed “Operation Charlotte’s Web.” NPR has a short history of naming such operations, here.
Related reading: “Homeland Security Missions Falter Amid Focus on Deportations,” five writers for the New York Times reported Sunday in a big-picture analysis.
Developing: Energy Department officials want to “tamp down Trump’s idea of explosive nuclear testing,” and they could have that conversation with National Security Council officials quite soon, CNN reported Friday.
The gist: “Energy Secretary Chris Wright, National Nuclear Security Administration leader Brandon M. Williams and officials from the US National Laboratories are planning to inform the White House that they do not think blowing up weapons for nuclear warhead testing, as Trump suggested last month, is tenable,” CNN reported citing two sources familiar with the matter.
Happening today: Trump welcomes Saudi Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud to the White House for talks about AI and nuclear energy, Reuters reports. AP, the New York Times and Fox have more.
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The Army-led effort is also working on policy for buying and deploying C-UAS systems stateside.
The U.S. military’s war on drugs in Latin America has a (borrowed) name. “Today, I’m announcing Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted Thursday. “Led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and SOUTHCOM, this mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people. The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood—and we will protect it.”
Hegseth made the announcement on social media; he hasn’t held a press conference since late June.
And the Pentagon’s 20th known boat strike killed four more people on Wednesday, raising the death toll in these U.S. attacks to at least 80 people, CBS News reported.
ICYMI: To date, “U.S. officials have not provided specific evidence that the vessels were smuggling drugs or posed a threat to the United States” on any of the 20 known strikes, CBS reminds readers. And U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk said this week there are “strong indications” of “extrajudicial killings” in the Pentagon’s boat attacks.
“From what we know, these instances violate international human rights law,” he told French media.
Notable: It wasn’t immediately clear how Hegseth’s announcement relates to the pre-existing Operation Southern Spear, an effort to “operationalize” the use of aerial and seaborne drones that the Navy’s 4th Fleet began running in the region in January.
A widening window into the White House’s legal decision-making process is emerging after more reporting Thursday from Charlie Savage of the New York Times, who has been tracking the development of a secret memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
The memo declared “extrajudicial killings of people suspected of running drugs were lawful as a matter of Mr. Trump’s wartime powers,” which Savage reports “contradicts a broad range of critics, who have rejected the idea that there is any armed conflict and have accused Mr. Trump of illegally ordering the military to commit murders.”
The conclusion of the memo also “offers potential legal defenses if a prosecutor were to charge administration officials or troops for involvement in the killings. Everyone in the chain of command who follows orders that comply with the laws of war has battlefield immunity, the memo says, because it is an armed conflict,” the Times reports.
Expert reax: “It would be difficult to establish that the cargo on these vessels was a military objective under the law of war because there is no obvious connection between a shipment of drugs and military action by these supposed groups,” said former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane.
Another seemingly confusing wrinkle: “Despite concluding that an armed conflict is underway, the memo also says the operation is not covered by the War Powers Resolution,” Savage writes. Continue reading (gift link), here.
New: Just 29% of Americans support the U.S. military killing drug suspects without the involvement of a court or judge, according to survey results from Reuters/Ipsos published Friday.
More than half openly opposed the killings (51%), including 27% of Republicans polled in a survey of 1,200 adults that concluded this week.
Less than half supported designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (47%), including 75% of Republicans compared to just 22% of Democrats surveyed.
And starting a war to depose Venezuela’s leader? Just 21% of Americans supported it versus 47% opposed—including 49% of voters who said they are not aligned with the GOP or Democrats. Read the rest, here.
Additional reading: “Family of Fisherman Killed in U.S. Military Strike Says It Wants Justice,” the New York Times reported Thursday from Colombia.
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 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 1969, NASA launched Apollo 12, its second moon-landing mission.
Boeing Defense workers have approved a new contract, ending a strike that idled fighter-jet and weapons production in St. Louis for three months. “The roughly 3,200 members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) District 837 voted 68% in favor of approving the five-year contract. They will start returning to work as early as Sunday,” Reuters reported on Thursday. The New York Times also has a report, here.
Anduril says it will build an autonomous vessel prototype in Korea. It’ll be the first fruit of a partnership with shipbuilding tidal HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, and is intended to lead to subsequent vessels built at the former Foss Shipyard in Seattle, Wash., the company said. The goal is to have infrastructure in place to compete for the Navy’s Modular Attack Surface Craft, or MASC, program, a combination of the service’s previous large and medium unmanned surface vessel programs. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports, here.
Related: See “How American and Chinese Drone Arsenals Stack Up,” via the Wall Street Journal reporting Friday.
Blue Origin’s giant reusable rocket matches SpaceX’s landing on second flight. Ten months after missing its “stretch goal” of sticking the landing in its maiden flight, the heavylift New Glenn booster touched down safely on a landing ship Thursday after launching a probe toward Mars. “I think New Glenn is the most promising competitor for SpaceX right now because it is the only other medium/heavy-lift launcher with reusability. ULA’s Vulcan and Arianespace’s Ariane 6 missed the boat on reusability and have no real chance at being cost-competitive,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Defense One in January. Space-dot-com has more, here.
Fresh possible U.S. arms sales include the first batch of assistance to Taiwan since Trump took office in January. That pending sale includes “spare and repair parts, consumables and accessories, and repair and return support for F-16, C-130, and Indigenous Defense Fighter aircraft” for about $330 million, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced Thursday.
And in a smaller package intended for Iraq, the U.S. is on the verge of selling Baghdad an array of communications equipment for a “country-wide repeater system” totalling about $100 million. DSCA has details. Congress could object to either of these packages, though that prospect seems unlikely.
It’s now been a week since SecDef Hegseth announced his arms procurement makeover from the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington. “Move faster and invest more—or we just might make you,” was how Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams characterized his effort.
Second opinion: “There’s nothing remotely transformative about this strategy. The admin is simply fulfilling arms industry demands for bigger, longer contracts, reduced weapons testing, and the ability to determine contract prices. Of course, they’re justifying it all by fearmongering on China,” says Julia Gledhill of the Washington-based Stimson Center think tank, writing Thursday on social media. “The result will be unfettered weapons development and production—regardless of need, cost, or reliability. Hard to imagine how military contractors could tighten their grip on USA, Inc… but here we are,” she added.
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Developing: Trump’s State Department says four left-wing groups in Europe are anti-fascist “foreign terrorist organizations.” The groups span Germany, Italy and Greece, and State Secretary Marco Rubio said Thursday he plans to announce the terrorist designations sometime next week.
Rubio: “Groups affiliated with this movement ascribe to revolutionary anarchist or Marxist ideologies, including anti-Americanism, ‘anti-capitalism,’ and anti-Christianity, using these to incite and justify violent assaults domestically and overseas,” he said in a statement Thursday.
The groups include Germany-based “Antifa Ost,” two organizations from Greece—Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense—and one out of Italy the State Department refers to as the “Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front.”
By the way: Antifa Ost—Antifa east, in German—is “not a formal organization but a label used by German police, intelligence services, and media to describe a cluster of more militant anti-fascist activists in eastern Germany,” extremism researcher Amarnath Amarasingam noted on social media Thursday.
The designations come at least partly in response to physical attacks against neo-Nazis in Germany, including this 2023 Dresden court case involving beatings of far-right extremists using clubs and hammers. The other three groups have carried out select attacks over the past two years that have included explosive devices, but those did not result in injuries, Reuters reports.
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In this Help Net Security interview, Adnan Ahmed, CISO at Ornua, discusses how organizations can build a cybersecurity strategy that aligns with business goals. He explains why many companies stumble by focusing on technology before understanding risk …
Europol and Eurojust dismantled major criminal infrastructure powering widespread infostealer, RAT, and botnet operations.
The post Operation Endgame Dismantles 1,025 Malware Servers appeared first on eSecurity Planet.
With the longest-ever U.S. government shutdown now over, the Air Force wants to build a $500,000 counter-air missile, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Wednesday. That’s costlier than some missiles the service already has, but the main idea seems to be modularity: the effort would start with a ground-launched version that would develop components for an eventual air-to-air version, according to a Nov. 7 request for white papers posted on SAM.gov.
For context: “The proposed cost is less than the service’s $1 million AIM-120D Advanced Medium-Range Air-To-Air Missile and comparable to the existing $472,000 AIM-9X Sidewinder, according to figures from the War Zone. But it is significantly more expensive than the service’s APKWS II jet-fired anti-drone rockets—the most costly components of those missiles run between $15,000 and $20,000,” Novelly writes. Read on, here.
Commentary: The push for modularity is a key part of the Pentagon’s revolutionary new approach to acquisition, says Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, who helped advise the various parts of DOD in the runup to last Friday’s rollout. The U.S. military has finally acknowledged that taking years to build exquisite weapons won’t work on battlefields where tech and tactics change week to week.
“The last few years of war in Ukraine, the Red Sea, and Israel have been screaming the lesson that better kit doesn’t guarantee success. In fact, ‘better’ means something different than it did even a decade ago,” Clark writes in an oped for Defense One. A swift product pipeline is now more important than the products themselves. Read on, here.
Additional reading: “OpenAI’s Open-Weight Models Are Coming to the US Military,” WIRED reported Thursday. However, “Initial results show that OpenAI’s tools lag behind competitors in desired capabilities, some military vendors tell WIRED. But they are still pleased that models from a key industry leader are finally an option for them.”
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 2015, ISIS terrorists killed 130 people during a complex attack across multiple locations in Paris.
DOGE veteran could bring much-needed change to Navy research, observers say. Rachel Riley, the new head of the Office of Naval Research, is more than just an alum of the controversial Department of Government Efficiency, according to current and former military and defense officials. Indeed, they said, the 33-year-old Rhodes Scholar and former McKinsey consultant may have what it takes to bring urgent reform to the Navy’s top R&D office, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Wednesday.
Riley was appointed acting chief of naval research sometime in October after nine months at Health and Human Services. She had never worked for the government before January, according to her LinkedIn profile. But Riley has completed significant academic work related to China, which sources we spoke to highlighted as relevant. She is also a military spouse, Tucker notes.
At McKinsey, much of her work focused on helping the government address the challenge of too much bureaucracy, too low a risk tolerance, devotion to committee meetings, and other rigid structures that inhibit timely deployment of technology. “There are entire enterprises within ONR that have never produced anything,” one former defense official said. “They continue to be justified as part of the research enterprise, the kind of thing Anduril would love to stand up a division to deliver on tomorrow, and Silicon Valley would respond to by founding a whole new company.” Continue reading, here.
Developing: A senior officer with no experience in cyber security or signals intelligence is now a top nominee to lead Cyber Command and the NSA, Martin Matishak of The Record reported Wednesday—roughly seven months after Trump fired NSA/CYBERCOM chief Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh on the advice of far-right activist Laura Loomer.
The new candidate is Army Lt. Gen. Joshua Rudd, currently deputy commander at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Before that, he served as INDOPACOM chief of staff. And “He previously was the head of Special Operations Command Pacific. Among other leadership positions within special forces, he deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Matishak reports. Read more, here.
You may remember a roughly 300-agent, special-operations-like immigration raid in Chicago in late September. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security was so enamored with the optics of the operation they turned footage of it into a sizzle reel for likes on social media.
Recap: Shortly after midnight on Sept. 30 at Chicago’s South Shore, “Families were woken by flashbangs and helicopters as hundreds of federal agents raided their homes” and “detained nearly every resident of the 130-unit building—including children and babies—placing them in zip ties and separating them by race into vans for more than two hours early [that] morning,” the city’s South Side Weekly reported on location.
Update: Despite the enforcement optics and narrative pushed by DHS officials, five reporters from ProPublica investigated the aftermath and found almost an entirely different story, including:
Full story: “‘I Lost Everything’: Venezuelans Were Rounded Up in a Dramatic Midnight Raid but Never Charged With a Crime,” published Thursday morning.
Norway’s public-wealth fund might invest in defense firms for the first time in two decades, spurred by Russia’s European invasion and fears it can no longer rely on the United States, Reuters reports.
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After nearly two months away from their jobs, House lawmakers are returning to vote on a deal to end the 43-day government shutdown, which is the longest in U.S. history. That vote is expected sometime this evening.
The deal, which advanced through the Senate Monday evening, would use a continuing resolution (PDF) to fund the Defense Department until Jan. 30. It will also unwind the more than 4,000 layoffs the Trump administration issued during the shutdown. Those reductions in force are currently paused by a federal court, Eric Katz of Government Executive reports.
Bigger picture: “[A]s the possibility of an end to the shutdown draws near, almost no one will be satisfied. Democrats didn’t get the health insurance provisions they demanded added to the spending deal,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday morning. “And Republicans, who control the levers of power in Washington, didn’t escape blame, according to polls and some state and local elections that went poorly for them.”
ICYMI: Leaders from four of the military’s professional advocacy groups united to ask Congress to re-open the government, provide backpay to civilians who are looking at another missed paycheck, and pass legislation so that in the event of another shutdown, Defense Department civilians won’t be forced to work without pay, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Monday.
Despite House preparations to vote this evening, the services are looking at a long road to recovery. That’s in large part because the prospect of another CR to patch over a shut down means the services will have to pick and choose which missions to prioritize even more than usual. Read more, here.
Squeezed into that deal to end the shutdown: Funding for the Air Force’s new E-7 Wedgetail radar jet—despite the fact that the service wants to gut the program, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Monday.
Background: The E-7 was pitched as a replacement for the service’s aging E-3 Sentry aircraft. Boeing and the Air Force reached an agreement last year for two test planes, to be delivered in 2028 for a substantial $2.6 billion. Those costs have risen by $884 million, according to a June Government Accountability Office report.
However, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told appropriators this summer that the E-7 was an example of a platform that was “not survivable in the modern battlefield or they don’t give us an advantage in a future fight.” Additionally, defense officials this summer said the program was going to be cut “due to significant delays with cost increases.”
Expert reax: “If it passes, this is a big win for Boeing, and it shows that many in Congress still have doubts about how quickly the Space Force can deploy the AMTI system it funded in the reconciliation bill a few months ago,” said Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert with the American Enterprise Institute think tank. “This is Congress hedging its bets on the airborne warning mission.” Continue reading, here.
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 1969, journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.
New: The British military has paused intelligence-sharing with the Pentagon regarding alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean region “because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal,” CNN reported Tuesday. The halt in sharing began “over a month ago,” British officials told Natasha Bertrand.
Notable: “Several boats hit by the US have either been stationary or were turning around when they were attacked, CNN has reported, undermining the [Trump] administration’s claim that they posed an imminent threat that could not be dealt with through interdiction and arrest.”
Not just the Brits: Canada “has made clear to the US that it does not want its intelligence being used to help target boats for deadly strikes, the sources told CNN.”
And Colombia said it would stop sharing intel with the U.S. over the strikes, President Gustavo Petro announced Tuesday on social media. “Such a measure will be maintained as long as the missile attack on boats in the Caribbean persists. The fight against drugs must be subordinated to the human rights of the Caribbean people,” he wrote.
Britain’s MI5 is also annoyed with FBI chief Kash Patel, who reportedly went back on a pledge to keep a key liaison officer in London, the New York Times reported Monday. The report raised eyebrows among longtime intelligence watchers, who noted that disputes between the countries’ intel communities rarely emerge in public.
On Sunday, the U.S. military attacked and destroyed two more alleged drug trafficking boats in the waters off Latin America, SecDef Hegseth announced on social media the following morning. “Both strikes were conducted in international waters and 3 male narco-terrorists were aboard each vessel. All 6 were killed,” he said. “These vessels were known by our intelligence to be associated with illicit narcotics smuggling, were carrying narcotics, and were transiting along a known narco-trafficking transit route in the Eastern Pacific,” Hegseth claimed.
Updated death toll: According to Hegseth and Trump, the U.S. military has killed at least 76 people in almost two dozen strikes since Sept. 2. The New York Times and Military Times are both maintaining a running log of these strikes (though the NYT is typically more up to date).
New: The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier is now in the Caribbean region after it was diverted out of the Mediterranean Sea and closer to Venezuela, U.S. Naval Institute News reported Tuesday. Ship spotters located it off the coast of Puerto Rico on Tuesday.
By the way: “Ford’s escorts include guided-missile destroyers USS Bainbridge (DDG-96), USS Mahan (DDG-72) and USS Winston Churchill (DDG-81),” USNI writes. There are already at least eight U.S. warships, a nuclear submarine and F-35 aircraft operating in the Caribbean region, Reuters reminds readers.
Related reading: “Venezuelan military preparing guerrilla response in case of US attack,” Reuters reported separately on Tuesday.
Update: Trump’s military occupations of U.S. cities have cost nearly half a billion dollars so far, the Intercept reported Tuesday, citing estimates from the National Priorities Project and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.
The total includes “$172 million spent in Los Angeles, where troops arrived in June; almost $270 million for the occupation of Washington, D.C., which began in August; nearly $15 million for Portland, Oregon, which was announced in September; and more than $3 million for Memphis, Tennessee, and almost $13 million for Chicago, which both began last month,” Nick Turse writes.
Those costs could rise, too, considering Trump “has specifically threatened to surge troops into Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle to put down supposed rebellions and to aid law enforcement agencies, despite falling crime numbers and pushback by local officials. Troops are also expected to be deployed to New Orleans later this month.” Read more, here.
Related: “Trump Administration Plans to Send Border Patrol to Charlotte and New Orleans,” the New York Times reported Tuesday.
Meanwhile in the Pacific region, just one prototype won’t cut it anymore, Marine Corps Forces Pacific commander Lt. Gen. Jim Glynn said during a keynote speech at the recent AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific conference in Hawaii.
Glynn: “What we need is: when you come with it, don’t come with one with the intention to take it home with you, and all the data that was collected while we conducted an exercise together. Come with five. Take one or two home and leave three with us, and we’ll continue to work with it. We’ll give you access to all the data that’s coming off of it, and we’ll do everything we can to break it, with the goal of making it better.”
He cited the Joint Fires Network as an example, saying that it has evolved over the past five years from “the amalgamation of some prototypes” to a formal program. Defense One’s Jennifer Hlad has more from Honolulu, here.
Additional reading:
U.S., Saudi officials rush to finalize defense pact before MBS visits White House. The pact may include the sale of weapons, including F-35 jets, promised as part of a giant package in May. It might also include a U.S. security guarantee of the sort Trump extended to Qatar last month, though “would fall short of a legally binding defense treaty, which would be nearly impossible to pass through the Senate,” Axios wrote. U.S. and Saudi officials have also discussed Riyadh’s desire to normalize relations with Israel, but only if Jerusalem ends its opposition to a deadline for creating a Palestinian state. More, here.
Next week’s visit will be the first to the U.S. by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman since the 2018 murder and dismembering of journalist Adnan Khashoggi, a killing that MBS has called a “mistake” and which U.S. intelligence sources say he directed.
The negotiations include Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who in 2020 launched a private equity firm with a reported $2 billion investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund controlled by MBS. Kushner has denied this represents a conflict of interest.
Trump welcomed al-Qaeda leader-turned-Syrian president to the White House on Monday. New York Times: “The Syrian leader has been discreetly cooperating with the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS and Al Qaeda since he took control of a slice of rebel-held territory in northwestern Syria in 2016, according to Syrian officials and Western diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with diplomatic protocol.” Read on, here.
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