threats

The D Brief: Commandant’s ARG/MEU push; Army acquisition reform; B-21, ICBM projects; ‘DoW’ price tag; And a bit more.

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. 

Around the Defense Department

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. 

Additional reading: 

Trump 2.0

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.

Additional reading: 

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November 17, 2025
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The D Brief: A second Southern Spear; Boeing strike ends; Heavy-lift competitor sticks landing; Anduril’s S. Korean lashup; And a bit more.

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. 

Industry

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. 

Additional reading: 

Trump 2.0

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. 

Additional reading: 

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November 14, 2025
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The D Brief: Shutdown ends; USAF’s new missile; New ONR chief; Norway mulls big defense bet; And a bit more.

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.

Trump 2.0

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: 

  • None of the 37 people arrested were criminally charged;
  • There was no evidence the building was “filled with TdA terrorists,” as White House advisor Stephen Miller alleged;
  • And there appears to have been no legitimate reason for agents to rappel down onto the building in the dark of night from a Blackhawk helicopter.

Full story: “‘I Lost Everything’: Venezuelans Were Rounded Up in a Dramatic Midnight Raid but Never Charged With a Crime,” published Thursday morning.  

Industry

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.

Additional reading: 

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November 13, 2025
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The D Brief: Shutdown nears end; Allies limit intel-sharing over boat strikes; Price tag for US occupations; Marines want multiple prototypes; And a bit more.

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.

Around the Defense Department

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: 

Middle East

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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November 12, 2025
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When every day is threat assessment day

In this Help Net Security interview, Paul J. Mocarski, VP & CISO at Sammons Financial Group, discusses how insurance carriers are adapting their cybersecurity strategies. He explains how ongoing threat assessments, AI-driven automation, and third-…

November 12, 2025
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The D Brief: Acquisition reforms; SecDef’s purge; Army’s million-drone plans; Shutdown deal?; And a bit more.

SecDef Hegseth’s message to defense-industry executives: Move faster and invest more, or we just might make you. President Trump’s Pentagon chief spoke for more than an hour to a packed auditorium at the National War College on Friday, a gathering Hegseth himself described as an opportunity to look those very executives “in the eye.”

Chief takeaways: Hegseth unveiled a slew of policy changes intended to replace his department’s Cold War-era acquisition processes with ones that value speed over rigid requirements. But perhaps most notably, he told defense companies to put more of their own money into developing military technology, or take their business elsewhere, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported from Fort McNair in southwest Washington, D.C. 

SecDef: “We commit to doing our part, but industry also needs to be willing to invest their own dollars to meet the long-term demand signals provided to them. Industry must use capital expenditures to upgrade facilities, upskill their workforce, and expand capacity. If they don’t, we are prepared to fully employ and leverage the many authorities provided to the president which ensure that the department can secure from industry anything and everything that is required to fight and win our nation’s wars,” Hegseth said, and vowed to his audience, “We’re going to make defense contracting competitive again.”

The speech drew largely from a draft memo about the changes that circulated last week. More about that, here.

Expert reax: “Their first response is going to be hiring a whole ton of K Street people to lobby Congress to point out the problems with this process, which is, we’re going to take a lot more risk and a lot more things will fail,” said Steve Blank, a professor and co-founder of Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. 

Professor Blank called the speech a death knell for the Pentagon’s existing acquisition system. “The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed,” he said, and added that he expects major defense contractors to push back against the new efforts. 

However, the speech seemed well received among defense tech founders, executives, and investors, Williams reports. “It is a vindication of our thesis that America needs an acquisition system focused on meritocracy and transparency,” one attendee said. Read more, here. 

Related reading: Sen. Elizabeth Warren “challenges [the] defense industry on right-to-repair opposition as funding talks continue,” Reuters reported Monday. 

And more broadly across the Defense Department, “Hegseth Is Purging Military Leaders With Little Explanation,” three New York Times correspondents reported Friday. That includes about two dozen generals and admirals in just nine months. “The utter unpredictability of Mr. Hegseth’s moves, as described in interviews with 20 current and former military officials, has created an atmosphere of anxiety and mistrust that has forced senior officers to take sides and, at times, pitted them against one another,” the reporters write. 

Coverage continues below…

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. The Associated Press reports that on this day in 1898, an estimated “2,000 white supremacists killed dozens of African Americans, burned Black-owned businesses and forced the mayor, police chief and aldermen to resign at gunpoint, before installing their own mayor and city council in what became known as the ‘Wilmington Coup.’”

Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll wants the service to buy one million small drones over a two- to three-year period, Reuters reported Friday, calling the development a “major ramp-up” for the Army’s acquisition plans. 

Notable: The Army “acquires only about 50,000 drones annually today,” which helps indicate the scale of Driscoll’s challenge. For some added perspective, “Ukraine and Russia each produce roughly 4 million drones a year,” Reuters writes. 

Driscoll: “We expect to purchase at least a million drones within the next two to three years. And we expect that at the end of one or two years from today, we will know that in a moment of conflict, we will be able to activate a supply chain that is robust enough and deep enough” to expand based on the threat.

ICYMI: The Army launched a drone-centric pilot program called “SkyFoundry,” which is intended to accelerate work with private industry. “This concept will stimulate the U.S. drone industry, support American manufacturing, increase access to rare earth materials, produce low-cost components and ultimately deliver drones for immediate needs to the Army,” a service spokesman told Military Times, reporting Friday as well.

“Some drones will be expendable as if they’re munitions, others will be durable, but not meant to last forever,” the spokesman said. Read more, here. 

Analysis: As drones proliferate across the Army, Defense One’s Tom Novelly asks, will a new approach to flight school help the service’s pilots transition? 

Background: The Army has said it will will cut 6,500 of its 30,000 active-duty aviation-community soldiers over the next two years, mostly by removing one aerial cavalry squadron from each active-duty combat aviation brigade, as part of the effort to build “a leaner, more lethal force.” 

The rub: Current Army aviators are trying their best to stay optimistic, but fear that decades-worth of experience will be lost in the culling. But the Army doesn’t just want fewer pilots, it wants better-qualified ones; and it’s looking to the defense industry for a solution. 

That includes turning its longtime entry-level helicopter education into a new contractor-owned and -operated model called Flight School Next. Officials and contractors said the new model will offer a simplified approach to training, develop better aviator skills, and save money by taking helicopters, instructors, and maintenance out of the service’s hands. Continue reading, here. 

Related reading: “UK sends defence equipment to help Belgium deal with disruptive drones,” Reuters reported Sunday from London. 

In the Pacific region, the U.S. Army is amid a rapid modernization effort called Transformation in Contact, and several of the units created or chosen to test new technology and concepts are part of U.S. Army Pacific, Defense One’s Jennifer Hlad reported Friday from the AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific conference in Honolulu.

According to USARPAC’s commander, the greatest risk the Army has in the Indo-Pacific region is “being late” when a crisis or conflict emerges, out of position, not fast enough, “or even worse, doing nothing at all,” Gen. Ronald Clark told the conference audience. “So as leaders, we have to become comfortable with failing fast, iterating quickly, and developing better solutions,” he said. Read the rest, here. 

And in new podcasts, a former senior director at the National Security Council joined us to discuss what the new film “A House of Dynamite” got right and wrong on U.S. missile defense and nuclear command and control. Jon Wolfsthal, director of Global Risk at the Federation of American Scientists, shared some of his experiences as special assistant to President Obama, where he was responsible for things like nuclear arms control and policy at the NSC. Find that conversation on our website, on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

And ICYMI ahead of Veterans Day, we recently spoke with historian David Nasaw who just published a new history of American World War II veterans and their often tortured journeys back to normalcy in his book, “The Wounded Generation.” You can find that conversation on our website as well, here. 

Trump 2.0

Developing: The Senate on Sunday took a first step toward ending the longest-ever government shutdown, clearing a procedural hurdle to approve a package that would keep agencies funded through at least January and walk back thousands of federal employee layoffs.

The agreement would approve full-year appropriations for the Veterans Affairs Department, Agriculture Department and the legislative branch. All other agencies would operate at their fiscal 2025 levels under a continuing resolution that would expire after Jan. 30, Eric Katz of Government Executive reports.

Next: The Senate must still take additional votes to send the measure to the House, though the bill could wind up on President Trump’s desk later this week. Read more, here.  

Happening today: A federal judge is set to hear a legal challenge to West Virginia National Guard troops’ deployment to Washington, D.C., in August. That deployment came in response to the president’s orders when he offered false and exaggerated crime statistics to justify soldiers on the streets amid his takeover of the D.C. police force.

Quick summary of the case: “A civic organization called the West Virginia Citizen Action Group says in a lawsuit that Gov. Patrick Morrisey exceeded his authority by deploying up to 300 Guard members to Washington, D.C.,” AP reports. “Under state law, the group argues, the governor may deploy the National Guard out of state only for certain purposes, such as responding to a natural disaster or another state’s emergency request.” For his part, “Morrisey’s office has argued the deployment was authorized under federal law.” 

Related: “In an encrypted group chat, National Guard members question Trump deployments,” NPR reported Monday. 

And lastly: A federal judge is stepping down after warning this Trump administration poses an “existential threat to democracy” because, in part, he warns the president is “using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment,” District Court Judge Mark Wolf wrote in an op-ed published Sunday at The Atlantic.

Why speak out? “I hope to be a spokesperson for embattled judges who, consistent with the code of conduct, feel they cannot speak candidly to the American people,” he told the New York Times this weekend.

“The White House’s assault on the rule of law is so deeply disturbing to me that I feel compelled to speak out,” Wolf wrote in his essay, stressing for his readers, “Silence, for me, is now intolerable.” He added in a warning to Times readers, “Americans proudly say that we live in the longest-lived democracy in the world. But that should teach us that all the others failed.” Read more in his essay (gift link), here.

Additional reading: 

Reminder: Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and we tip our hat to those who served. So enjoy the federal holiday for those marking the occasion. And we’ll see you again on Wednesday!

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November 10, 2025
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