Optics may be ironic, but security concerns can be addressed, officials say.

While calling out the National Guard makes a political statement, they’re not the best means of fighting crime, CSIS’s Mark Cancian says.

Presidents Trump and Putin are scheduled to meet Friday at Alaska’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, in northern Anchorage, American officials said Tuesday. The trip will be Putin’s first to the United States in a decade, and the first-ever for a Russian president visiting Alaska, which Russia sold to the U.S. 158 years ago.  

White House officials are already playing down expectations for the summit, which is ostensibly about the future of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, the Financial Times and CNBC reported Tuesday. The Friday meeting is planned one week after a deadline Trump gave Russia to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine or face further sanctions on August 8. Four days later, neither has occurred.  

Trump himself called the Friday meeting a “feel-out session.” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described it as a “listening session” about Russia’s ongoing invasion, which Putin has used to occupy and conquer about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. 

Worth noting: Putin has an arrest warrant out from the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It was issued in 2023 for the war crime of kidnapping Ukrainian children, which is still taking place inside occupied Ukraine, as the New York Post reported last week. Because of the warrant, Putin doesn’t travel abroad that much, especially to Europe where most countries are wary of Putin’s motives. The Middle East was one option; but Trump suggested Alaska and Putin accepted. CNN has a bit more on the difficulties accommodating Putin in Alaska on such short notice.

The view from Kyiv: “This war must be ended. Pressure must be exerted on Russia for the sake of a just peace. Ukraine’s and our partners’ experience must be used to prevent deception by Russia,” President Volodymir Zelenskyy said on social media Wednesday. 

“At present, there is no sign that the Russians are preparing to end the war,” Zelenskyy said. “Our coordinated efforts and joint actions—of Ukraine, the United States, Europe, and all countries that seek peace—can definitely compel Russia to make peace. I thank everyone who is helping,” he added. 

Worth noting: A top Putin aide is already talking about a follow-up summit that will be held somewhere inside Russia, Yuri Ushakov told reporters Wednesday.

Trump spoke to European leaders in a joint call Wednesday. The discussion reportedly featured talk of “red lines,” according to the Wall Street Journal. “These include: a cease-fire as a prerequisite for further talks; any territorial discussions to start from the current front lines; and binding Western security guarantees that Russia must accept.”

The view from Berlin: “We want negotiations to take place in the right order; a ceasefire must come first. Essential elements should then be agreed in a framework agreement,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Wednesday after the phone call with Trump. He added, “Ukraine is prepared to negotiate on territorial issues, but…legal recognition of Russian occupation is not up for debate.” 

But Russian officials muddied the waters a bit, insisting Ukraine must give up four regions Russia has invaded—Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the south. “The territorial integrity of the Russian Federation is enshrined in our constitution, and that says it all,” Russian deputy foreign ministry spokesman Alexei Fadeev said Wednesday. 

Zelenskyy told Trump he thinks Fadeev and Putin are “bluffing.” Zelenskyy said he believes “Putin is trying to apply pressure before the meeting in Alaska along all part of the Ukrainian front. Russia is trying to show that it can occupy all of Ukraine,” according to Reuters in Berlin. 

Additional reading: 

• “A look at Putin’s past trips to the US ahead of planned Alaska summit,” Reuters reported in a retrospective on Monday;  

• “Russia Is Suspected to Be Behind Breach of Federal Court Filing System,” the New York Times reported Tuesday; 

• And the BBC investigated, “How are drones changing the landscape of modern warfare?” in a new 23-minute report.

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Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1961, East Germany began building the Berlin Wall. 

Around the Defense Department

Will tearing up nearly-complete IT overhauls save money? “Donald Trump’s Navy and Air Force are poised to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined to develop, work initially aimed at overhauling antiquated human resources systems.” reports Reuters’ Alexandra Alper, who has a deep dive, here.

Some lawmakers worry that DOD leaders won’t follow congressional intent as they spend $150 billion from the reconciliation act, Breaking Defense reports. The deadline for the Pentagon’s plan is Aug. 22.

ICYMI: “‘Fund first, ask questions later’ is a bad way to go,” Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, wrote in Defenese One.

Vulcan’s first natsec launch lofts the Pentagon’s first experimental navigation satellite in half a century. United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket launched the Navigation Technology Satellite-3 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Tuesday. The satellite will test new anti-spoofing signals, a steerable phased-array antenna to send signals to ground forces in high-jamming areas, and receivers to help the satellite operate without instructions from ground controllers, Joanna Hicks, a senior research aerospace engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory, told reporters Monday ahead of the launch.

The mission was supposed to have launched in 2022, but delays with ULA’s heavy-lift Vulcan pushed it to this year. Defense One’s Audrey Decker has a bit more, here. 

What are the prospects for military action against foreign drug cartels? “The president has ordered the Pentagon to use the armed forces to carry out what in the past was considered law enforcement,” the New York Times reported on Friday. Your D-Brief-er talked with journalist and writer Kevin Maurer, whose work focuses on U.S. special operations forces around the world, and who dug into the subject for Rolling Stone. 

• Listen: Defense One Radio, Ep. 189: “The U.S. military vs. drug cartels.”

• See also Politico’s take: “Why Trump’s War on the Drug Cartels Is Bound to Backfire // The president’s punishment-heavy plan doesn’t just ignore other factors—it actively undermines itself.”

Meet the archconservative church network that Pete Hegseth belongs to. A week after SecDef reposted a video showing pastors arguing that women should not be able to vote, the Associated Press has an explainer.

Trump 2.0

Analysis: “Sending the National Guard into D.C. Is the Wrong Solution to a Crime Problem,” writes former Marine Corps Col. Mark Cancian and researcher Chris Park of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Their argument features three components: 

1. “Military forces are less familiar than police with the nuances of citizens’ rights and the conditions under which force is permissible (see Figure 1, which compares military training with that of the police). National Guard training focuses on combat—how to use weapons and fight—while police training focuses on handling crime and the law.”

2. “Military forces have the wrong attitude about civilians. Law enforcement is trained to see civilians as citizens who deserve protection, except in the most extreme circumstances. Military personnel are taught to treat civilians as potential threats and to always be ready to respond. Crowd control—in other words, dealing with unruly citizens—is the primary law enforcement training the National Guard receives.”

3. “Military personnel are untrained in the complexities of gathering evidence and building a case that will stand up in court. Indeed, nearly half the Police Academy’s 27-week curriculum is dedicated to criminal procedure.”

Their recommendation: “The first action should be bringing the police up to full strength, despite the president’s statements that D.C. has enough police,” Cancian and Park write. What’s more, “If the concern is the protection of federal property, physical security could be enhanced” as happened in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. “Similar measures could be adopted again. Physical security has the advantage that it is on duty 24/7 and does not require expensive personnel.” Continue reading, here. 

Commentary: “There’s a real risk that the feds could posture for 30 days,” writes Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, writing Tuesday for The Atlantic, “and then declare victory as violence continues its downward trajectory. That would, of course, do little to fix the real problems.”

Instead, Lehman argues, “the administration should focus its resources on the people and places that make the District unusually unsafe. The city has already identified the ‘power few’ who drive the large majority of violent offending. The administration’s priority should be to target these people for apprehension, prosecution, and incapacitation—as soon as possible.”

But there is a bit more that can be done, too, says Lehman. “Research shows that deploying more senior officers reduces both crime and use of force—the opposite of what D.C. does. The administration could switch things up in a way that the city perhaps could not.”

Additional reading: 

• The New York Times explained in a fact check how “Trump Misstates Washington Crime Data to Justify Takeover”;

• See also, “Trump’s rhetoric about DC echoes a history of racist narratives about urban crime,” via the Associated Press reporting Tuesday as well. 

And lastly today: A Trump DOD official cited literal fake news in his previous job. The president’s top civilian defense official for Latin America, Joseph Humire, ran an alleged think tank which, in the course of its “Tren de Aragua” coverage, cited at least five newspaper articles that didn’t exist, InsightCrime reported Monday. 

“One of the false events is dated March 10, 2025—one day before Humire testified in the US Congress regarding immigration and security issues, including Tren de Aragua,” InsightCrime reports. Another “entry dated March 18—one week after Humire’s congressional testimony—contained similarly unsubstantiated information.” 

Humire’s former employer at the Center for a Secure Free Society “told InSight Crime that the organization would work to fix the issue,” taking down one of the instances pointed out; but the executive director dodged further inquiry. 

For what it’s worth, “Humire and the Department of Defense did not respond to requests for comment,” InsightCrime adds. 

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A special operations veteran reporter shares what some troops think about the Trump administration’s plans to use the military against Latin American drug cartels.

The president’s Monday declaration of a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C.—notwithstanding most crimes’ decline from a post-pandemic peak—will further entangle the U.S. military, its equipment, and technology, in law-enforcement matters. It could also expose D.C. residents and visitors to unprecedented digital surveillance, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports. 

A similar turn of events happened in June 2020, when the National Guard was sent into the streets of U.S. cities amid protests of police brutality. “Stingrays” and “dirtbags” were deployed to track cellphones. And spyplanes and Predator drones traced the skies, a world away from the war zones they were built for. 

Now, with federal agencies and entities working with military personnel under declared-emergency circumstances, new gear could enter domestic use, Tucker writes. And local officials or the civilian review boards that normally oversee police use of such technologies may lack the power to prevent or even monitor it. For example, in 2021, the D.C. government ended a facial-recognition pilot program after police used it to identify a protester at Lafayette Square. But local prohibitions don’t apply to federalized or military forces. Read more, here.

ICYMI: Trump federalized the DC police, and declared an emergency as crime hit a 30-year low. Defense One’s sister publication, GovExec explains. The New York Times and Associated Press have more.

Anatomy of a decision: Trump had long planned a takeover, the Washington Post reported Tuesday morning, with “an informal playbook for how he would use the powers of the presidency to take control of the District of Columbia, with options prepared for him such as deploying more federal law enforcement officers or taking over the entire municipal government.”

Developing: Pentagon mulls military “reaction force” for civil unrest. A “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” of 600 National Guard troops—split between military bases in Alabama and Arizona—would be kept ready to deploy in as little as one hour to American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to documents reviewed by the Post’s Matt Viser, Emily Davies and Perry Stein. The documents say the cost could reach “hundreds of millions of dollars” if military aircraft and aircrews are used instead of cheaper charter aircraft.

The proposal “represents another potential expansion of President Donald Trump’s willingness to employ the armed forces on American soil. It relies on a section of U.S. Code that allows the commander in chief to circumvent limitations on the military’s use within the United States,” the Post reports. More, here.  

Related reading:

• “US military was deployed to LA protests despite low risk, general testifies,” Reuters reports off testimony by Army Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, who until recently commanded the military operations in Los Angeles;
• “DC facing $20 million security funding cut despite Trump complaints of crime,” Reuters reports after DHS cut funds to various cities to align with the “current threat landscape”;
• “Trump’s terror-prevention cuts leave Americans exposed,” with cuts and closures to five key agencies, argued Kris Isman of Georgetown University, writing Sunday for Defense One;
• “FBI report: U.S. crime rates fell nationwide in 2024, Stateline reports off an Aug. 5 report;
• Commentary: “The President’s Police State.” Trump is delivering the authoritarian government his party once warned about, writes David Graham at The Atlantic.

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Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2017, 32-year-old Heather Heyer was killed and nearly three dozen others were wounded at a rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned violent when one drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters.

Russian troops charge ahead

Ahead of his Friday summit with Trump in Alaska, Vladimir Putin’s invasion forces advanced another six miles or so in Ukraine’s east, toward ​​Dobropillya in Donetsk, almost fully encircling a Ukrainian logistical hub at Pokrovsk. 

“The advance is one of the most dramatic in the last year,” Reuters reports. “Ukrainian troops must pass through a narrow 10-mile corridor to enter [Pokrovsk], leaving them vulnerable to drone attacks,” the New York Times reports.

How it happened: “the Russians found a gap in Ukrainian lines this week after weeks of probing attacks, and then used their vast reserves of manpower to break through the lines,” a Ukrainian officer told the Wall Street Journal. Analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War noted parallels to previous recent gains for Moscow: “Russian forces used a similar tactical penetration in mid-April 2024 to facilitate the seizure of operationally significant territory northwest of Avdiivka,” ISW wrote Monday. 

However, “It is premature to call the Russian advances in the Dobropillya area an operational-level breakthrough, though Russian forces very likely seek to mature their tactical advances into an operational-level breakthrough in the coming days,” ISW’s analysts write. “The next several days in the Pokrovsk area of operations will likely be critical for Ukraine’s ability to prevent accelerated Russian gains north and northwest of Pokrovsk.” Read more, here. 

New: Officials in Ukraine have successfully tested a new direct-to-cell satellite technology from Elon Musk’s Starlink, Reuters reported Tuesday. The new gear “aims to provide reliable connectivity when terrestrial networks are unavailable, a critical asset for war-torn Ukraine where Russian attacks on infrastructure regularly disrupt communications,” the wire service explains. “Space X-owned Starlink has signed deals with telcos in 10 countries for a direct-to-cell service, with Kyivstar set to become the first operator in Europe to roll it out.” Read more, here. 

Developing: Russia’s Geran drones are allegedly laying anti-tank mines along “an unspecified logistics route in Ukraine,” ISW warned in its Monday assessment. The War Zone has more on the video purporting to show the drones at work, here.  

Developing: Trump says he’s preparing to discuss territorial changes for Ukraine at Friday’s summit with Putin in Alaska. “Russia has occupied a big portion of Ukraine…We’re going to try and get some of that territory back for Ukraine,” Trump told reporters Monday. Politico has a tiny bit more.And in commentary: “This isn’t how wars are ended: a veteran diplomat puts Trump-Putin summit in context,” via Donald Heflin of Tufts University, speaking Monday to The Conversation.

Pacific region

South Korea’s military is more than 20% smaller than it was six years ago, Reuters reported Sunday citing a new report from Seoul’s defense ministry. There were about 450,000 troops in uniform last month, down from 560,000 in 2019. 

What’s going on: There are far fewer men of enlistment age across the country, and South Korea has the world’s lowest birth rate. As a result, “the military is 50,000 troops short of the number of troops adequate for maintaining defence readiness,” Reuters reports. 

Developing: America’s acting ambassador to Seoul is visiting Hyundai’s shipyards in Ulsan with Foreign Minister Cho Hyun on Wednesday, Yonhap news agency reports. Trump is expected to meet with Seoul’s new President Lee Jae Myung in Washington on August 25. 

China is about to merge two state-run shipbuilders to create the world’s largest, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The new entity is the result of combining China State Shipbuilding with another entity called China Shipbuilding Industry. The two companies totaled about 17% of the world market for shipbuilding, with an annual revenue of around $18 billion. 

“CSSC’s main business is commercial, but it is also an important contractor for the Chinese navy,” the Journal notes. “The company it is absorbing designed and built China’s first homegrown aircraft carrier, the Shandong.”

By the way: Two Chinese ships collided while trying to harass Philippine Coast Guard vessels in the South China Sea on Monday. A Chinese cutter and guided-missile destroyer ran into each other in a confrontation captured on video that you can see on YouTube, here. USNI News called it “one of the most severe incidents among Chinese forces to date,” and “the most severe incident to occur between the two countries since last year’s June 17th incident, when the two countries clashed at Second Thomas Shoal.” Read more, here. 

Additional reading: “Documents detail China’s AI-powered propaganda push,” Nextgov reported Monday, citing the work of Vanderbilt University researchers. 

Around the Defense Department

Coast Guard commissions first new icebreaker since the 1990s, USNI News reports. The medium icebreaker USCGC Storis (WAGB-21) was commissioned Saturday in a ceremony in Juneau, Alaska, joining the only two other U.S. icebreakers: Healy (WAGB-20) and Polar Star (WAGB-10).

The Coast Guard needs about nine to do the job properly, officials have testified. Get up to speed with the Congressional Research Service’s January report.

Additional reading:

• “Hegseth reposts video on social media featuring pastors saying women shouldn’t be allowed to vote,” the Associated Press reported Friday; 
• “West Point and Air Force Academy Affirmative Action Lawsuits Are Dropped,” the New York Times reported Tuesday; 
• “Can COFFEE filters calm the spectrum tug-of-war?” DARPA is making tiny chips that can help military and civil radios operate on nearby frequencies, Defense One’s Lauren C. Willams reported last week;
• “Will 2026 be military lasers’ breakthrough year?” The Army is preparing to issue a production contract, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has more, writing Friday;

• “What Does Palantir Actually Do? Even former employees struggle to explain it,” WIRED reported Monday.

Lastly today: The Air Force wants to buy two Tesla Cybertrucks for target practice. “Testing needs to mirror real world situations,” said one document cited by Fortune. “The intent of the training is to prep the units for operations by simulating scenarios as closely as possible to the real world situations.” Read on, here.

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The emergency declaration, combined with new tech, will give government broad new abilities to watch and monitor citizens.