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ESET reports FSB-linked Gamaredon and Turla collaborating in cyberattacks on Ukraine.
The post Russian Hackers Join Forces: Gamaredon + Turla Target Ukraine appeared first on eSecurity Planet.
Air Force brings great-power conflict concept to the Caribbean. When Kentucky Air National Guard troops recently “seized” an airport on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, they were practicing Agile Combat Employment, a maneuvering scheme intended to enable the Air Force to generate combat power despite the anti-access/area denial efforts of China, Russia, and others. But experts said the wargame—part of the larger, long-planned Emerald Warrior exercise organized by Air Force Special Operations Command—might also serve as a message to drug cartels and unfriendly governments in the region. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reports, here.
Commentary: Mexico’s new president is trying to fight the cartels; a U.S. invasion would do more harm than good. That’s the argument in Foreign Affairs from a group of counter-terror policy practitioners led by CSIS’s Ryan Berg; read on, here.
Special-ops helicopter crash: Four members of the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment were in a Black Hawk that went down outside Olympia, Washington, on Wednesday evening, Army officials said in a statement. Few other details have been released; local police say they’ve found the crash site. Task & Purpose rounds up what we know, and provides some context, here.
Get a better handle on lasers versus drone swarms via a new industry explainer on the growing trend, published Thursday by the New York Times.
Mentioned: The “Apollo” 100-kilowatt laser from Australia’s Electro Optic Systems, and Israel’s Iron Beam, which was declared operational earlier this week. Also, the U.S. military “is working to develop a one-megawatt weapon next year,” which “potentially could shoot down ballistic missiles and hypersonic weapons.”
Lasers of this sort are “going to be a total revolution in the history of warfare,” said Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Israeli weapons supplier Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. “This is just the beginning of the beginning,” he said.
Related reading: “The US Military Used Lasers to Shoot Down a Drone in 1973,” Paleofuture reported almost 10 years ago.
Trump wants Bagram again? Five years after he signed a deal to withdraw from Afghanistan, President Trump on Thursday said he wanted to take Bagram Air Base back from the Taliban. Speaking to reporters during a visit to Windsor Castle in the UK, Trump said, “Bagram, the big air base, one of the biggest air bases in the world, we gave it to them for nothing. We’re trying to get it back by the way, okay? That could be a little breaking news. We’re trying to get it back because they need things from us, we want that base back.” It’s unclear to whom Trump was referring to with “they.”
“One of the reasons we want the base is, as you know, it’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons,” Trump said—echoing a line he’s first known to have spoken in April 2022, and again this past February when he told reporters, “it’s exactly one hour away from where China makes its nuclear missiles.” It’s not clear what he’s referring to, but Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has pointed out that Afghanistan is somewhat close-ish to China’s nuclear test site at Lop Nur—though the site is much closer to Mongolia and even Russia than Bagram.
“That was gross incompetence to give [Bagram] up” when the U.S. military left in August 2021, Trump told reporters on Air Force One later Thursday. “It’s one of the most powerful bases in the world in terms of runway strength and length. The strength and length, you can land anything on there.”
But the Air Force is working to move away from giant bases, which service leaders call untenable in the face of new weapons and tactics. One day before Trump’s remarks, the three-star in charge of Air Force futures wrote, “No longer can the Air Force rely on Bagram-style air bases as sanctuaries, thanks to anti-access and area-denial capabilities developed by China and others. To deter and defeat adversaries, the service must focus on agility, adaptability, and operating with a smaller footprint in austere environments.” Read that in Defense One, here.
Expert reax: The Taliban can’t be trusted, warns Bill Roggio of the Washington-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “President Trump should take care to not repeat the mistakes of both his first administration and the Biden administration in believing that the Taliban is a partner that can be trusted,” Roggio told Defense One. “The Trump administration’s mistake in negotiating with the Taliban and signing the Doha Agreement in Trump’s first term set the stage for the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal,” he noted.
Also: “The Taliban fought for 20 years to eject the United States and it will not permit the U.S. to return,” Roggio pointed out.
Then there’s China: “Even if the Taliban considered this, China most certainly would do everything it can to entice the Taliban to keep the U.S. out of Afghanistan and has far more leverage and enticements to make this happen,” Roggio predicted, and ended with a final warning, “The Trump administration should be very careful not to grant the Taliban concessions only to be prevented access to Bagram in the end.”
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2019, an errant U.S. military drone strike killed 30 Afghan farmers and wounded more than 40 others.
Ukraine has received its first arms through a new NATO aid pool: the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, an unnamed alliance official told the National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine.
No details were immediately available, but in a press conference, President Volodymr Zelenskyy said the first PURL shipments would contain interceptors for Patriot air defense systems and HIMARS munitions, the Associated Press reported.
$3.5B expected: Zelenskyy said the pool contains about $2 billion and another $1.5 billion is expected by next month. Read more, here.
Explainer: How PURL works, from The Gaze, a Ukrainian-government site.
Ukraine arms-industry expansion is being funded by European governments that want to deter Russia—and eventually buy Ukrainian arms for their own militaries. AP reports: “Ukraine’s weapons industry now meets nearly 60% of its army’s needs, up from 10% when Russia’s full-scale invasion began 3 1/2 years ago, according to its defense minister. But its military budget—$64 billion in 2024—is less than half the size of Russia’s, which is why it turns to Western allies for weapons and, increasingly, money.” More, here.
Related reading:
Saudi Arabia signed a mutual defense pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan on Thursday, which is “a week after Israel’s strikes on Qatar upended the diplomatic calculus in the region,” Reuters reports. “This is a comprehensive defensive agreement that encompasses all military means,” the Saudis said. Wider context: The Wall Street Journal described it as “the first recent significant example of a longstanding U.S. partner in the Middle East seeking to move away from dependence on Washington for national security.”
The pact also “marks a blow for a U.S.-led plan to integrate Israel more closely into a Middle East security partnership to contain Iran,” the Journal reports.
For what it’s worth, “Saudi Arabia has loaned Pakistan $3 billion, a deal extended in December, to shore up its foreign exchange reserves,” Reuters notes. More, here.
A Taiwan arms expo on Thursday “double[d] its previous number of exhibitors, as firms flock for a slice of the island’s increased defence spending,” Reuters reported from the capital city. “The Taipei Aerospace and Defence Technology Exhibition features 490 exhibitors at 1,500 booths, up from 275 exhibitors at about 960 booths in 2023, when it was last held,” the wire service explained.
Several weapons deals are expected to be finalized soon, including “with U.S and Canadian companies for weapons such as anti-drone rockets from Canada’s AirShare and underwater surveillance drones from U.S. firm Anduril.” More, here.
What weapons should Taiwan consider to help thwart an invasion from Beijing? We discussed the question last year on the Defense One Radio podcast, featuring Dmitri Alperovitch and retired Australian Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan.
Related reading: “What the rapid pace of AI means for China’s threats toward Taiwan,” via Defense One’s Patrick Tucker, reporting Thursday.
And lastly, there’s a new thriller coming out about nuclear weapons, missile defense, and human psychology. It comes from “Zero Dark Thirty” director Kathryn Bigelow, and it’s called “A House of Dynamite,” which will begin streaming on Netflix October 24.
The tagline for the movie is “Not if. When.” The longer description is as follows: “When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.” It stars Rebecca Ferguson from the “Mission: Impossible” films and Idris Elba, who we often associate most with HBO’s Baltimore-based drama series “The Wire.”
The film is generating Oscar buzz, Variety reported Thursday.
Critical reax: “Bigelow’s ability to take a series of hypotheticals and render them into narrative actuality has never been more pinpoint accurate or merciless,” Glenn Kenny of RogerEbert.com writes, “One irony of the scenario is that the personnel depicted here have been thoroughly trained to deal with this eventuality. But once the eventuality is ongoing, these folks can’t help but fall apart.”
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Security teams rely on threat reports to understand what’s out there and to keep their organizations safe. But a new report shows that these reports might only reveal part of the story. Hidden malware variants are quietly slipping past defenses, leavin…
Security teams rely on threat reports to understand what’s out there and to keep their organizations safe. But a new report shows that these reports might only reveal part of the story. Hidden malware variants are quietly slipping past defenses, leavin…
Last month, U.S. forces “seized” a St. Croix airport in a demonstration of the Agile Combat Employment maneuver scheme.
U.S. troops attended Russia-Belarus war games on Monday, Pentagon officials confirmed after news organizations photographed them attending Zapad-2025, Reuters reported Tuesday. It was the first time U.S. representatives have attended the sprawling exercise since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Belarus described the U.S. troops’ appearance as an unexpected addition to the 22 other foreign militaries represented at the wargames, including NATO’s Hungary and Turkey, the Telegraph reported Monday.
“Mr Trump is said to want to reopen the American embassy in Minsk as part of a wider strategy for cultivating ties with one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies,” the British paper reported, adding, “Just last week, the US president sent [Belarus leader Alexander] Lukashenko a hand-written note” via Trump’s envoy John Coale.
This year’s joint, multidomain Zapad exercises, which began on Sept. 11 and stretch from Belarus to the Arctic, involved some 40,000 troops, far fewer than in pre-invasion years. The Telegraph has a separate look at what’s happening, and what it might mean.
Watching closely was Lt. Gen. Dariusz Parylak, NATO’s commander in Poland and the Baltics. “We will have a kitchen-window observation on how Russia is transferring lessons from Ukraine to training,” Parylak said earlier this month. “That’s vital because it shows how their thinking is developing, how modernisation processes are going and the evolution of their tactics, techniques and procedure doctrines.” More, here.
The U.S. Air Force must move on from decades-old assumptions, says Lt. Gen. David A. Harris, the service’s deputy chief of staff for futures, in a Defense One op-ed. A2/AD tactics have made Bagram-style air bases untenable, and so leaders must develop options for agile, light-footprint operations. In spirit, if not technology, the service must continue the fierce innovation of Gen. Pete Quesada and the 9th Air Force, which put liaison officers in tanks for groundbreaking combined-arms operations. Read that, here.
AFRICOM says it targeted an “al Shabaab weapons dealer” in an attack near Badhan, Somalia last Saturday. The airstrikes were done in coordination with the Somali government, U.S. Africa Command said in a Wednesday press release.
The strikes reportedly targeted Abdullahi Omar Abdi, whom the Ottawa-based Hiiran Online called “the first Somali elder publicly acknowledged to have been killed by a US strike, an escalation that has fueled anger among traditional leaders.” Read on, here.
Lawmaker to Trump’s Pentagon: “There seems to be some confusion this morning, because several of you mentioned that you are going to work for a department that doesn’t exist,” Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, told Defense Department officials at a hearing Thursday on Capitol Hill, alluding to the administration’s determination to call it the War Department.
“The name of the department is the Department of Defense,” King said. “That was established in the National Security Act of 1947, amended in 1949. I’ll commend to you 10 U.S. Code § 111. If the name of that department is going to be changed, it has to start right here,” King said. “Congress has established the name of the department. It’s the Department of Defense, and I hope that you understand that that’s who you’re going to work for, not some other department that several of you mentioned in your testimony.”
Additional 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 and Meghann Myers. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day 78 years ago, the National Security Act of 1947 took effect, dropping the “Department of War” from the U.S. military’s formal title, replacing it with the short-lived National Military Establishment—or NME, which if read aloud, one can understand why that was later changed to the Department of Defense two years later.
New: More than 10 years after its debut against Hezbollah drones, Israel’s laser-based “Iron Beam” interception system was officially declared operational this week, the Times of Israel reported Wednesday. After several weeks of tests, Israeli officials say the system proved itself against dozens of targets including rockets, mortars, and drones.
In case you’re curious, “The Iron Beam is not meant to replace the Iron Dome or Israel’s other air defense systems, but to supplement and complement them, shooting down smaller projectiles and leaving larger ones for the more robust missile-based batteries such as the David’s Sling and Arrow systems,” the Times reports. i24 News has a bit more.
From the region: The State Department designated several more Iran-backed groups as foreign terrorist organizations on Wednesday. The militias include Harakat al-Nujaba, Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, Harakat Ansar Allah al-Awfiya, and Kata’ib al-Imam Ali. “Iran-aligned militia groups have conducted attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and bases hosting U.S. and Coalition forces, typically using front names or proxy groups to obfuscate their involvement,” the State Department said in its announcement.
Expert reax: The new designation “is both justified and long overdue,” said Joe Truzman of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
However, he warns, “[T]he move risks straining U.S.–Iraq relations” due to “Iraq’s controversial [Popular Mobilization Forces] law, [which was] amended to fold the militias into the state’s security apparatus. This is a step Washington views as a dangerous legitimization of Tehran’s influence. By issuing FTO designations, the United States appears intent on drawing a line, signaling that Baghdad’s embrace of Iranian-aligned forces is incompatible with a stable partnership with Washington,” Truzman told The D Brief.
Cocaine has become much cheaper in the U.S. amid President Trump’s focus on immigrants and fentanyl, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. “Cocaine prices have fallen by nearly half to around $60 to $75 a gram compared with five years ago, said Morgan Godvin, a researcher with the community organization Drug Checking Los Angeles.”
Contributing factors: “The president’s campaign to deport immigrants in the U.S. illegally has taken federal agents away from drug-traffic interdiction,” including in Arizona, where “two Customs and Border Protection checkpoints along a main fentanyl-smuggling corridor from Mexico have been left unstaffed. Officers stationed there were sent to process detained migrants,” the Journal reports.
Also: “Colombia is producing record amounts of cocaine, and the volume of the drug arriving in the U.S. is driving down prices, the people familiar with cartel operations said.”
Vice President JD Vance joked about extrajudicial killing Wednesday. Referring to recent U.S. military strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats that have killed more than a dozen people so far, Vance told a crowd in Michigan, “I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world.”
Reminder: The people on these small boats could easily have been stopped by the U.S. Navy, but the Trump administration chose instead to kill rather than arrest them. Retired Navy Capt. Jon Duffy elaborates on those considerations in an op-ed published last week in Defense One.
Indeed, “Some military lawyers and other Defense Department officials are raising concerns about the legal implications” of Trump’s war on drug cartels, but some of those lawyers and officials “believe they are being ignored or deliberately sidelined,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
And: “People should not be able to celebrate others’ deaths in a very public way and then keep their jobs,” White House Faith Director Jenny Korn said in a Wednesday interview. Korn was referring to ABC’s suspension of TV host Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday after FCC commissioner Brendan Carr threatened to pull ABC’s broadcast license over Kimmel’s monologue about the death of Charlie Kirk.
Recommended reading: “Free Speech and Me Speech,” by U.S. historian Tim Snyder writing last week in the wake of Kirk’s death.
The National Guard’s “crime-fighting” mission to pick up trash and blow leaves in DC is costing taxpayers about $2 million per day, USA Today reported Wednesday.
The gist: “So far, the DC National Guard has spent more than $45 million on the deployment, with $18.8 million going toward operations and $26.6 million toward pay and allowances for soldiers, according to the internal tally. That price tag does not include the cost to deploy the more than 1,300 National Guardsmen from eight states that are also stationed in Washington,” which means the final price tag is almost certain to rise.
As of Tuesday, Guard soldiers have “cleared 1,015 bags of trash, spread 744 cubic yards of mulch, removed five truckloads of plant waste, cleared 6.7 miles of roadway, and painted 270 feet of fencing,” the Guard said in a Tuesday update.
Expert reax: “$200 million is a lot of money, but it tracks,” said Virginia Burger of the Project on Government Oversight. “A domestic deployment of that scale is not cheap.”
ICYMI: “Trump deploys National Guard to Memphis, calling it a ‘replica’ of his crackdown on Washington,” the Associated Press reported Monday.
Historian reax: “We have to be watchful of our reflexive American militarism,” said Tim Snyder, writing Thursday. “It moves us, mindlessly, towards fascism,” he warned.
“By sending troops to city after city, Trump is creating the statistical likelihood that something will happen—a suicide of a service member conflicted by an illegal and immoral mission, a friendly fire incident, the shooting of a protestor—that they can use to manufacture some greater crisis by lying about it. Or they can wait for their Russian friends to stage something, or for one right-wing person to shoot another, and then blame the opposition.”
Update: About 40 troops with the Virginia Air and Army National Guard began supporting ICE this week, Norfolk-based WHRO reported Tuesday. “The Virginia troops are authorized to perform administrative and logistics support tasks, including answering phones, data entry, appointment scheduling, biometric collection, performing basic vehicle maintenance and tracking fleet expenses and utilization,” but they “will not perform law enforcement functions or aid in arrests, according to the governor’s office.”
The Guard’s Virginia support to ICE is scheduled to run until mid-November, while the Guard’s DC deployment is authorized to run until the end of November.
Study: Mass deportations do not broadly improve Americans’ job prospects, according to the work (PDF) of Washington College economics professor Robert Lynch, who is testifying this morning before a Democratic-led “shadow hearing” on Capitol Hill.
Lynch reviewed U.S. deportations in the 1930s, the 1960s, and between 2008 and 2015. “The most studied measures, employment and unemployment among the U.S. born, were consistently lower for employment and higher for unemployment across these episodes,” Lynch wrote in his report on the topic, published in 2024. He added, “Other measures, such as GDP, also were found to worsen. These adverse effects were the result of native-born workers’ job dependency on the deported immigrant workforce and the loss of immigrant spending in communities which led to economic retrenchment.”
Marine Corps veteran Janessa Goldbeck also spoke about ways she believes National Guard deployments are hurting the people they’re meant to serve, how domestic deployments are taking them away from their families, and often harming the immigrant communities where they live.
“There are two stories that really stand out to me,” Goldbeck said. “One is in California where ICE agents arrested Narciso Barranco, a father of three active-duty U.S. Marines while he was out doing landscaping work. He had no criminal record. His sons have served this country honorably—they’re still serving. Yet their father was pinned to the ground and hauled off like a criminal. He spent nearly a month in detention before being released on bond. For those Marines and every service member who sees this story, the message is clear: Your service doesn’t protect you or your family. And that betrayal cuts deep.” (The New York Times published a profile of Barranco’s story on Wednesday; you can find a gift link for that here.)
“There’s also the story of Alma Bowman in Georgia. She’s the daughter of a U.S. Navy veteran and has lived here for decades,” Goldbeck said. Bowman “was born in the Philippines while her father was serving. She was detained at an ICE check-in despite strong evidence that she is a U.S. citizen by birth. She’s now in a wheelchair struggling with diabetic neuropathy, yet she’s still held in detention.”
The detention of Barranco and Bowman “shakes all veterans’ faith in the system and that they will be protected,” said Goldbeck.
An Army veteran also warned in a commentary this week, “I’m a U.S. citizen who was wrongly arrested and held by ICE. Here’s why you could be next.” It’s the story of 25-year-old George Retes, a security guard who was arrested during a federal immigration raid at a cannabis farm in California on July 10 as California National Guard troops stood guard. As he showed up to work in his car that day, he says the occupying troops gave him conflicting orders to both back up his car and open his door.
“Suddenly, an agent smashed my window and pepper-sprayed me. I was pulled from the car, and one agent knelt on my neck while another knelt on my back,” Retes writes in the San Francisco Chronicle. “My wallet with my identification was in the car, but the agents refused to go look and confirm that I was a citizen. Instead, I sat in the dirt with my hands zip-tied with other detainees for four hours. When I was sitting there, I could hear agents asking each other why I had been arrested. They were unsure, but I was taken away and thrown in a jail cell anyway.”
After three days and nights in detention, “I was just let go, with no charges, no explanation for why and no apology,” Retes says. Why bring up his case? “To me, it feels like the system isn’t working,” he writes. “By letting masked agents stop people based on how they look, talk or where they work, protection has become persecution.” But more than that, “I’m concerned that the court didn’t have a full view of what is happening in our state,” he says.
Retes: “I served my country. I wore the uniform, I stood watch, and I believe in the values we say make us different. And yet here, on our own soil, I was wrongfully detained. Stripped of my rights, treated like I didn’t belong and locked away—all as an American citizen and a veteran. This isn’t just my story. It’s a warning. Because if it can happen to me, it can happen to any one of us.” Read the rest, here.
Update: At least 8 American service members have been punished for social media comments about Charlie Kirk’s death, Task & Purpose reported Wednesday. That includes “at least five Army officers and an Air Force senior master sergeant have been suspended from their jobs” for such posts, in accordance with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s social media post ordering such a review last Thursday.
Noted: Kirk often made “incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences,” the Guardian reported last Thursday.
Despite Trump’s framing, “most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, and right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism,” University of Dayton sociology professors Art Jipson and Paul Becker explained Wednesday for The Conversation.
In addition, “Right-wing extremist violence has been deadlier than left-wing violence in recent years,” they write. “Based on government and independent analyses, right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities, amounting to approximately 75% to 80% of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001…By contrast, left-wing extremist incidents, including those tied to anarchist or environmental movements, have made up about 10 to 15% of incidents and less than 5% of fatalities.”
Also: The BBC arrived at a similar conclusion. Verify’s Shayan Sardarizadeh has more, reporting Wednesday on X, here.
Worth noting: “Politically motivated violence in the U.S. is rare compared with overall violent crime,” Jipson and Becker write. “Political violence has a disproportionate impact because even rare incidents can amplify fear, influence policy and deepen societal polarization.” Read the rest, here.
Related reading:
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Wormable malware spread through npm packages, stealing secrets and infecting code.
The post Wormable Malware Compromises npm Supply Chain appeared first on eSecurity Planet.
Microsoft dismantled a major phishing service stealing Microsoft 365 credentials.
The post Microsoft Disrupts Major Phishing Operation Targeting Microsoft 365 appeared first on eSecurity Planet.
Malvertising hides malware in online ads, stealing data from users and businesses.
The post When Ads Attack: Inside the Growing Malvertising Threat appeared first on eSecurity Planet.
Decades-old defense contractors are leaning into the Pentagon’s new focus on startups, entwining themselves with emerging companies that have the technologies or even the contracts they seek. “We’re making bets in advance on specific capabilities and then going back to the market to say, ‘Who are the founders, and who are taking novel approaches to building something that is unique and different and can be applied within a military context?’” said Brian McCarthy, Booz Allen Hamilton’s managing partner of ventures.
The trend reflects the Pentagon’s new urgency to expand the military’s industrial base and bring in more tech companies. A series of recent directives from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other administration officials have prodded the Pentagon to more aggressively pursue commercial technologies, enable lower-level commanders to make their own purchases, and to use simpler contracting methods that are friendlier to would-be contractors. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has more, here.
Pentagon CTO wants AI on every desktop in 6 to 9 months. “We want to have an AI capability on every desktop—3 million desktops—in six or nine months,” Emil Michael, defense undersecretary for research and engineering, said at a Politico event on Tuesday. “We want to have it focus on applications for corporate use cases like efficiency, like you would use in your own company…for intelligence and for warfighting.”
Michael was handed oversight of the Pentagon’s main AI body—the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office—in August, after it was demoted from reporting to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg. (Michael was also appointed acting DIU chief after that office’s chief resigned a few weeks ago.)
CDAO will become a research body like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Missile Defense Agency, Michael said Tuesday. “To add AI to that portfolio means it gets a lot of muscle to it,” he said. “So I’m spending at least a third of my time—maybe half—rethinking how the AI-deployment strategy is going to be at DOD.” Nextgov’s Alexandra Kelley has more, here.
Nov. 10 is the start date for implementing the Defense Department’s new cyber and supply-chain security standard for the entire industrial base. That’s when Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification 2.0 standard will begin to appear in DOD solicitations, almost six years after Pentagon leaders began talking about it. Washington Technology has a bit more, here.
Additional 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. 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 1939, the Soviets invaded Poland from the east—16 days after the Nazis invaded Poland from the west.
Developing: The Trump administration could soon send the first batch of weapons for Ukraine that have been paid for by NATO allies, Reuters reported Tuesday.
The shipments fall under what’s called a Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, or PURL. And so far, there are only two shipments cleared, which are worth about $500 million each and reportedly include air defense equipment to help Ukraine defend against the constant onslaught of Russian drones and missiles.
New: Taiwan showed off the first missile to be jointly manufactured with Anduril, Reuters reported Wednesday from Taipei. It’s called the Barracuda-500, which Anduril says has a range of more than 500 nautical miles and can carry a payload weighing more than 100 pounds. Reuters calls it “an autonomous, low-cost cruise missile.”
Bigger picture: “Taiwan has set a goal of spending 5% of its GDP on defence by 2030, up from a target of 3.3% next year, and is keen for greater international support aside from the United States,” Reuters adds.
Additional reading:
There has been “a fundamental, though little-discussed, change in the administration’s national security focus,” veteran White House reporter David Sanger reported Wednesday for the New York Times. To build his case, he points to the administration’s lack of an updated national-security strategy, which Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported in mid-August.
At its core, the alleged shift concerns the administration’s draft NDS, which focuses on “defending the homeland” above any great-power threats from China or Russia.
“What’s now playing out is the administration’s interpretation of domestic defense,” which started in February with an increase in troops deployed to the southern border, followed by the creation of a militarized border zone in April, Myers reported in August. Less than two months later, Trump ordered the military to support immigration enforcement in Los Angeles—a move that a judge this month declared a violation of law. And just last month, Trump ordered the National Guard to Washington, D.C., ostensibly to “fight crime,” but they’ve since been relegated to spreading mulch and picking up trash around the city as residents have stayed home and businesses have suffered.
By the way, Senate Democrats want a congressional hearing on Trump’s deployment of the military to American cities like Washington, Los Angeles and Memphis. Dems on the Senate Armed Services Committee submitted their request to SASC Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi, Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth said Wednesday.
“The American people deserve clarity on the short- and long-term implications for national security and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars of this new focus on a mission usually reserved for law enforcement professionals,” the senators wrote to Wicker. They also note that “in many public statements since his confirmation, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has regularly prioritized the southern border over the Indo-Pacific, despite a bipartisan consensus that U.S. defense policy should focus on the complex security challenges in that region.”
“We call on the Department to explain to Congress and the American people how it plans to resource, execute and justify such a campaign,” the senators write, “and how doing so will impact military readiness, the U.S. military’s execution of core missions of deterring and preparing for war, public trust in our military, implications for servicemembers and their families across the United States and the safety of the American people.”
In addition, the administration has also greenlit a campaign of naval-based attacks in the waters around Latin America. Trump claims he’s so far authorized the military to destroy three boats transporting alleged drug traffickers, though the administration has not offered evidence to back up its claims—and some of those claims took on a different, suspect form when shared with lawmakers—and Pentagon officials have declined to elaborate on the alleged third destroyed boat.
Second opinion: “No president can secretly wage war or carry out unjustified killings—that is authoritarianism, not democracy,” Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Monday. “These reckless, unauthorized operations not only put American lives at risk, they threaten to ignite a war with Venezuela that would drag our nation into a conflict we did not choose. The American people deserve to know what is being done in their name and why. Congress must demand answers, force transparency, and hold this administration accountable before it plunges us into another needless war,” he added.
Expert reax: Trump “likes shooting at targets that can’t shoot back,” Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, told Sanger. Put simply, the president “sees the threat to the homeland as greater than the threat from China.”
For your radar: “The mystery now is whether Mr. Trump will take the next step,” Sanger writes. And that would include, as he threatened this week after the shooting that killed Charlie Kirk, “using the investigatory powers of the Justice Department, the F.B.I. and other agencies—to implicate nongovernmental organizations and political groups for supporting those he calls ‘leftist radicals,’ and leverage the findings to designate some of them as domestic terrorists.”
Indeed, Trump said Monday he wants to designate several U.S.-based groups as domestic terrorist organizations. “We have some pretty radical groups, and they got away with murder,” Trump told reporters Monday at the White House, without elaborating or fielding any questions for clarification. His Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has been pointing a finger at Democrats for several weeks, claiming in late August that it is “not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”
Even “The threats of a crackdown have already taken a toll,” the Times reported Tuesday, citing “A culture of fear among prominent Democratic donors and groups concerned about retribution.” Meanwhile, “Liberal foundation leaders have been in close touch with one another in recent days, beefing up security and discussing a letter of solidarity as they await any Trump administration action.”
Additional reading: “Prosecutors already have dropped nearly a dozen cases from Trump’s DC crime surge, judge says,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
Developing: House GOP lawmakers want $30 million for increased personal security, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday “as many lawmakers say they have canceled events or changed routines” after Kirk’s death last week in Utah.
One complication: “Party leaders such as [House Speaker Mike Johnson] currently have personal security details. That has fueled criticism from some colleagues that leaders don’t understand their fears,” the Journal writes.
“Somebody’s going to get killed” if lawmakers don’t get a larger ensemble of protective officers following closely while they travel, Tennessee GOP Rep. Tim Burchett said. “Leadership’s got their protective bubble around them. They’re not accosted when they cross the street, and there’s no Capitol Police to be seen. They don’t see that. And it’s falling on deaf ears,” he said.
For what it’s worth, Democratic Sen. Jon Fetterman was not terribly concerned about the issue when speaking to reporters Monday. “If somebody wants to take me out, it would be easy to just pop me,” the Pennsylvania lawmaker said. Read more, here.
And lastly, in case you missed it: “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists,” according to a study published by researchers at the U.S. Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice in June 2024. The authors tallied 227 such far-right attacks that killed more than 520 people. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives,” the researchers said.
Trump’s Justice Department has removed the report from its website. Investigative reporter Jason Paladino noticed the omission and wrote about it on Friday. “Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States,” the authors warned in the report. “In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”
Fortunately, the study was archived, and can be found (PDF) here.
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