Boeing’s fighter-jet workforce just went on strike in St. Louis. The strike affects more than 3,000 machinists across St. Louis and St. Charles, Missouri, as well as Mascoutah, Illinois, after they rejected a new four-year contract proposal on Sunday. The New York Times calls the stoppage “the first in nearly three decades for the local chapter of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, IAM District 837.” 

At stake: “Boeing’s smaller military business supplies advanced jet fighters such as the F-15 and F/A-18, as well as key parts of the munitions supply chain. The company last week reported a second quarter of stable performance in its defense segment during a phase of surging demand for missiles and other weaponry from the Pentagon and other allied countries,” the Wall Street Journal reports. The rejected deal “would have raised the average wage by roughly 40% and included a 20% general wage increase and a $5,000 ratification bonus. It also included increasing periodic raises, more vacation time and sick leave,” Reuters reports. “​​However, the proposal removed a scheduling provision that would have affected workers’ ability to earn overtime pay,” the Associated Press adds. 

Boeing reax: “We are prepared for a strike and have fully implemented our contingency plan to ensure our non-striking workforce can continue supporting our customers,” Dan Gillian, Boeing Air Dominance vice president and general manager, said in a statement. “We’ll manage through this. I wouldn’t worry too much about the implications of the strike,” CEO Kelly Ortberg told analysts last week. 

Extra reading: AP put together a history of labor strife at Boeing, which you can read over here.

The Pentagon is planning its first test of the Golden Dome missile defense system just before the 2028 election, CNN reported Friday. “Right now, the project is all about moving quickly and relying on existing systems to show that the broader concept of a massive missile shield is worth more funding,” a source told CNN. 

Some inside the Defense Department are skeptical of the timeline. “In the end, a lot of money could be spent trying to make this work, and then it might not even meet testing requirements or do what they want it to do,” one defense official said. More, here. 

The Army’s giant data deal with Palantir is a harbinger, service CIO says. The service collapsed 75 data and software contracts into one contract potentially worth $10 billion—it was awarded to Palantir last week—and it’s how the service wants to buy software. “We have a lot of big software packages that are out there. They’ve been bought over several years, several program offices, several commands [and] not getting a lot of parity across the board on how they’re being delivered. Adding a lot of complexities,” Army CIO Leonel Garciga told reporters.  “But our intent is to continue to move down this path, to really focus on reducing that complexity, adding agility to how we buy….[and] save taxpayer dollars as much as we can.” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams has more, here.

Related: “Palantir Is Extending Its Reach Even Further Into Government,” WIRED reported Friday. 

Trump’s Navy secretary wants to boot 60 civilian professors from the Naval Academy to curb the institution’s diversity efforts, Fox reported Thursday. The plan was described in a draft memo from Secretary John Phelan to Scott Duncan, acting Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. 

Why expand the permanent military professors from 40 to 100? To address “imbalances in civilian-dominated governance that weaken the Academy’s military mission,” the memo reads. 

Phelan: “The previous administration instilled corrosive DEI programs in the Academy’s curriculum and allowed identity politics and wokeism to take priority over warfighting, leadership, and the critical thinking necessary to be superior Naval and Marine Corps officers,” the secretary said in a statement to Fox.

If it sounds familiar, the Air Force Academy’s superintendent pitched a similar plan. The Denver Gazette reported in April that the USAFA plan “intended to increase the percentage of military service members among the faculty up to 80% and bring the percentage of civilians down from about 37% to 20%…To meet the proposed goals, 105 civilian positions would have to be cut.” 

Elsewhere around the Navy, the service’s ships are “languishing in repair yards,” the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday in an update to a trend that’s been well-reported for several months, as we explained in a November podcast. 

The gist: “Repairing naval vessels often takes longer than scheduled. Roughly a third of surface ship maintenance wasn’t completed on time last year, Navy officials have said. In recent years as much as two-thirds has been late, and officials have said improvement is needed to hit the Navy’s combat-readiness target.”

And in commentary, learn about lessons from this year’s unfunded priority lists, gleaned by AEI’s Elaine McCusker and John Ferrari, writing Sunday for Defense One.

Additional reading: 

• “Former US soldier suspected of killing 4 in Montana remains at large,” AP reported Monday; 
• “Fugitive dad [and former Army Ranger Travis Decker] wanted for alleged triple murder possibly spotted as massive police response ends empty-handed,” Fox reported Sunday. 

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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. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1790, President George Washington authorized 10 ships to enforce tariffs and trade laws, creating the U.S. Coast Guard.

Around the world

China is restricting the sale of rare earths to U.S. and allied defense manufacturers, “delaying production and forcing companies to scour the world for stockpiles of the minerals needed to make everything from bullets to jet fighters,” the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. “As a result, one drone-parts manufacturer that supplies the U.S. military was forced to delay orders by up to two months while it searched for a non-Chinese source of magnets, which are assembled from rare earths.”

In a related case, “Earlier this year, one U.S. defense supplier, the United States Antimony Corporation, tried to ship 55 metric tons of antimony mined in Australia to its smelter in Mexico. The load transited via the Chinese port city of Ningbo—until recently a routine practice.” But Chinese customs officials held the shipment for three months, and eventually “released the shipment in July, on the condition that it be sent back to Australia and not to the U.S.” However, upon arrival in Australia, “United States Antimony learned that product seals had been broken. It is currently working out whether the antimony has been tampered with or contaminated.” More, here. 

ICYMI: “Official statements and state-linked commentators have since made clear that this new export-license system is designed to increase Beijing’s leverage over Pentagon supply chains. It may, in fact, become a signature tool of great power competition,” wrote Peter Singer and Tye Graham for Defense One’s The China Intelligence column.

From the region: 

• “India and the Philippines stage joint naval drill in the disputed South China Sea,” AP reported Monday from Manila; 
• And don’t miss a special report from Reuters all about “How Pakistan shot down India’s fighter jet using Chinese gear.” 

Update: Germany will fast-track two Patriot anti-missile systems to Ukraine as part of a deal to buy two new Patriot systems from the U.S. for Berlin, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius announced Friday. 

Meanwhile, the U.S. and NATO are working with Ukraine to create a new way to arm Kyiv, Reuters reported Friday. Under the plan, “Ukraine would prioritize the weapons it needs in tranches of roughly $500 million, and NATO allies—coordinated by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte—would then negotiate among themselves who would donate or pay for items on the list.” 

One alliance official called the plan “a voluntary effort coordinated by NATO that all allies are encouraged to take part in.” 

The fine print…is still being worked out. “Money for the arms would be transferred into a U.S.-held account, possibly at the U.S. Treasury Department, or to an escrow fund, although the exact structure remains unclear,” Reuters writes. Read the rest, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Home by Home, Russia Is Selling Occupied Ukraine to Russians,” the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday;
• “Ukrainian anti-corruption agencies uncover drone procurement graft scheme,” AP reported Sunday from Kyiv;
• And “Ukraine bets big on interceptor drones as low-cost air shield,” Reuters reported Monday from Ukraine. 

Trump 2.0

The Pentagon is preparing to widen its use of the military for domestic purposes like the Los Angeles deployment in June to protect Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents as they arrested people for possible deportation, a memo obtained by the New Republic reveals. 

In short, “DHS is anticipating many more uses of the military in urban centers, noting that L.A.-style operations may be needed ‘for years to come,’” Greg Sargent of TNR reported Saturday. 

“The memo was authored by Philip Hegseth—the younger brother of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—who is a senior adviser to Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and DHS liaison officer to the Defense Department,” and it outlined a July 21 meeting with “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and several of his top advisers, Joint Chiefs chairman Dan Caine, and NORTHCOM Commander Gregory Guillot.” The document states DHS officials are seeking “a verbal agreement to find places where DoD can detail personnel within ICE and CBP (and vice-versa) to increase information sharing, and specifically support nationwide operational planning capabilities.”

Expert reax: “This memo is talking about turning internal homeland security into a regular Defense Department activity, which it is not. This is not normal,” said Lindsay Cohn, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College. More, here. 

Deportation nation update: Nine out of 10 participating nations are human-rights violators. “The U.S. has solicited 64 nations to participate in its growing global gulag for expelled immigrants,” Nick Turse of the Intercept reported last week. But “Fifty-eight of them—roughly 91 percent—were rebuked for human rights violations in the State Department’s most recent human rights reports,” he writes. 

Trump threatened “Nuclear Submarines” in tit-for-tat with Putin pawn. Last week, President Trump said he might impose sanctions on Russia if no progress was made on ending its war on Ukraine. Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev responded by warning the U.S. president against a “game of ultimatums.” Trump then said Medvedev should “watch his words,” whereupon Medvedev alluded to Russia’s Soviet-era nuclear arsenal. 

Which brings us to Friday: “Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev…I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that,” Trump said in a social media post. Reuters has a bit more, here.

Former Naval War College professor Tom Nichols called the move “reckless,” writing Friday in The Atlantic. “It is, in fact, news when the most powerful man on Earth starts talking about nuclear weapons,” Nichols wrote, suggesting Trump announced the submarine moves to distract from bad economic news Friday. Trump “has initiated a new era in which the chief executive can use threats regarding the most powerful weapons on Earth to salve his ego and improve his political fortunes,” Nichols said, and added, “Nuclear-missile submarines are not toys.”

Russia’s reax: “Kremlin plays down Trump submarine order, urges caution on nuclear rhetoric,” Reuters reported Monday from Moscow.

Additional reading: 

• “Trump Fired America’s Economic Data Collector. History Shows the Perils,” the New York Times reported Sunday; 
• “‘He has trouble completing a thought’: bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump’s mental acuity,” the Guardian reported Sunday; 
• And “Trump’s mental decline is undeniable—so what now?” appellate lawyer Chris Traux wrote Friday in The Hill.

Lastly today: commentary by AEI’s Kori Schake via her essay, “Dispensable Nation: America in a Post-American World,” published by Foreign Affairs in late June. “Trump and his advisers seem to believe that, despite the country’s allegedly parlous condition, unilateral action on Washington’s part can still force others to capitulate and submit to American terms. But since the end of World War II, American power has been rooted mostly in cooperation, not coercion…”

In conversation: Schake talked to NPR’s Sarah McCammon on Saturday’s “All Things Considered.”

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The White House’s pick to lead the Pentagon’s weapons testing wants “automation everywhere.” That’s because the complexity of new weapons is mostly in software, Amy Henninger said at her Thursday confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The systems to be tested “are software-enabled and software-defined and there’s only five to 10 percent that is only hardware,” she said. “I would suggest that using more software to automate software testing is where we need to go.” 

But it won’t replace live testing, Henninger vowed. “It makes sense to model or simulate the things that we know and live test the things that we don’t know. And with that as a baseline heuristic, I don’t ever foresee a day where we will have no live testing.” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports, here.

With deep cuts ordered by SecDef Pete Hegseth, some Senators wondered whether testing in general will suffer. “Unfortunately, in May, the Secretary of Defense announced his plan to significantly reduce the DOT&E office, including slashing its workforce budget and resources,” said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I. “With drastically reduced resources, DOT&E may be unable to provide adequate oversight for critical military programs, risking operational awareness and taxpayer dollars.” Breaking Defense has more on that angle, here.

At the hearing, senators also grilled the nominee for Pentagon comptroller, particularly about the prospects of a clean audit for the Defense Department within three years, as required by the 2024 defense policy act. Michael Powers said he expected to have a checklist of technical tasks by January—and a plan to get and keep senior leaders on board. Read, here.

Related reading:

• “Pentagon asks to move $150m to speed up Air Force One by two years” as part of a $5.4 billion reprogramming request, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports.
• Commentary: “‘Fund first, ask questions later’ is a bad way to go,” writes Gabe Murphy of Taxpayers for Common Sense, who argues at Defense One that the $154 billion in reconciliation funding is ripe for waste.

Developing: Two senators want answers from the Navy about the death of U.S. Navy Seaman Angelina Resendiz, whose body was discovered behind an elementary school in Norfolk, Va., almost two weeks after she was reported missing on May 29. Her body was found on June 9, and an unnamed sailor assigned to the same ship as Resendiz was taken into custody on June 10. 

Virginia Democratic Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine sent a letter (PDF) to Navy Secretary John Phelan on Wednesday requesting “significantly greater detail about the circumstances of Seaman Resendiz’s disappearance and death, including a more fulsome accounting of the Navy’s engagement with Seaman Resendiz’s loved ones and fellow sailors who had raised concerns about her well-being.”

According to the victim’s mother, when she first saw her daughter’s body, “she was covered, just infested with maggots, with bugs and decaying. And they didn’t preserve her body or prepare her to come home.” In response, Warner and Kaine told Phelan, “We have serious questions as to what policies and procedures govern dignified transfer of remains after an investigation, and whether those were followed in this instance.”

The two lawmakers gave Phelan until August 14 to arrange a “briefing from relevant Navy and installation leadership” regarding Resendiz’s death, including “from the initial reports of Seaman Resendiz’s missing status, up to and including the return of her remains to Texas.” 

Notable: “The case is drawing parallels to the 2020 death of Vanessa Guillen, the 20-year-old private first class who was last seen in the parking lot of her barracks, and was later found in a shallow grave near Fort Cavazos in Texas,” CNN reported in June. 

Additional reading: 

• “South Korea tours will now be a year longer as Army cuts down on moves,” Task & Purpose reported Tuesday;
• “Navy’s drone refueler delayed again”: Decker spotted the news in budget docs;
• “Details in an Air Force crash report open window on drone flights,” and you can read them at Task & Purpose;
• The Marine Corps is trying to slim its enlisted ranks by offering early outs to some 4,400 Marines. Read on at Task & Purpose and Military Times;
• “6 firms to join Northrop in autonomous-flight effort,” Washington Technology reported Thursday; 
• And “Florida vending machine owner gets prison time for defrauding military exchanges,” Stars and Stripes reported Thursday. 

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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 and Audrey Decker. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2023, a grand jury in the District of Columbia indicted Donald Trump on four charges for his actions after the 2020 presidential election and through the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The charges included conspiracy to defraud the U.S.; obstructing an official proceeding; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights. Procedural delays dragged on through the 2024 election, and after Trump’s victory, prosecutors dropped the charges, citing Justice Department policy to not prosecute a sitting president.

Ukraine

An overnight Russian missile and drone attack on Ukraine’s capital city killed 31 people, including five children, President Volodymir Zelenskyy said Friday on social media. More than 150 others were wounded in the strikes, including 16 children, AP reports from Kyiv, calling it “the highest number of children killed and injured in a single attack on Kyiv since aerial attacks on the city began in October 2022.” 

Russia’s invasion troops, meanwhile, claim to have taken control of the strategically located city of Chasiv Yar, Reuters reports. However, “available geolocated footage does not support claims that Russian forces have yet advanced to the western administrative boundary of the town,” analysts for the Institute for the Study of War wrote Thursday. 

Trendspotting: After six months in office—and 193 days since the president promised to end the war in Ukraine—Trump and congressional Republicans are changing their tune on U.S. support for Ukraine, the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reported this week. From the Post: The Senate’s Appropriations Committee “on Thursday approved an $852 billion defense budget framework that includes $800 million in long-term military support for Ukraine…That shift has emboldened the GOP’s pro-Ukraine contingent, including members of the Appropriations subcommittee on defense spending, to push for tightening the screws on Russia’s economy and sending more weapons to the government in Kyiv.”

At the same time, GOP Sens. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Idaho’s Jim Risch “laid out a plan Wednesday to allow allies to finance donations of U.S. weapons and military equipment to Ukraine, following through on a proposal pushed by President Trump to raise billions of dollars a year for the war effort,” the Journal reported Thursday. “Their bill would create a fund at the U.S. Treasury to accept money from allies. The defense secretary could then use the fund to pay contractors to replenish U.S. stockpiles so the Pentagon can continue sending weapons packages to Ukraine without undermining America’s own military readiness.” 

For your radar: “The plan is to pass it later this year as part of the annual defense policy bill produced by Wicker’s committee.” Read more, here. 

Related reading: “Microsoft catches Russian hackers targeting foreign embassies,” Ars Technica reported Thursday; review the Microsoft alert issued Thursday, here.

Trump 2.0

Vermont’s Republican governor has declined the Pentagon’s request to use the state’s National Guard at ICE facilities, Vermont Public media reported Wednesday. 

“We just don’t see this as a good use of the Guard,” Gov. Phil Scott said this week. 

Reminder: The National Guard can be federalized without the consent of governors, as the Trump administration learned when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the administration’s favor in the case of California on June 19. As Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote the day after that ruling, “The administration claims that the troops are merely protecting federal personnel, property, and functions, not quelling civil unrest or enforcing the law. However, that assertion is dubious given the fact that troops are accompanying ICE on their raids, detaining civilians, and physically confronting protesters.” And as such, “A nationwide preemptive deployment to address any protests against any federal activities is wholly unprecedented in U.S. history” and “poses a grave threat to the First Amendment right to engage in peaceful protest.”

Related:

• “Pentagon orders removal of 1,350 national guard troops from Los Angeles,” the Guardian reported Thursday; Military Times has a bit more;
• “Indefinite Detention Is the New Normal in Trump’s America,” Felipe De La Hoz wrote Thursday for Slate.

See also: Half a dozen Washington Post journalists spoke to 16 former detainees of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center to “offer the most complete view yet of conditions at the notorious prison” where the Trump administration has deported people from the U.S. Read that, here. 

Speaking of El Salvador, the country just changed its constitution to end term limits, which allows President Nayib Bukele to “seek reelection indefinitely,” the New York Times reported Friday. 

Additional reading: 

• “Federal judges detail rise in threats, ‘pizza doxings,’ as Trump ramps up criticism,” AP reported Thursday; 
• And “Judge orders Trump administration to explain why order to restore Voice of America wasn’t followed,” AP reported Wednesday;
• And “Virginia Giuffre’s family expresses shock over Trump saying Epstein ‘stole’ her,” AP reported Thursday.   

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A Navy F-35 crashed close to Naval Air Station Lemoore, in central California on Wednesday evening around 6:30 p.m. local. Fortunately the pilot ejected and is safe, base officials announced on Facebook. 

The aircraft was assigned to the VFA-125 Rough Raiders, which is tasked with training pilots on the Navy’s F-35C variant. See video of the crash’s fiery aftermath via a clip posted to social media, here. 

The crash was the second for an F-35 since late January when an A-variant crashed at Alaska’s Eielson Air Force Base. An F-35B crashed in New Mexico in May 2024, though the pilot was injured in that incident. Review additional reported F-35 crashes, involving both the U.S. and allies’ aircraft going back to 2014, here.

The aircraft, which rings in at about $100 million per jet, is flown by the Navy, Air Force, and Marines, and 17 countries, but has come under scrutiny for cost overruns and poor reliability and availability.

Update: Imprecise altitude readings contributed to the Army’s fatal Black Hawk helicopter collision with a passenger jet over Washington, D.C., in January, according to the first day of National Transportation Safety Board hearings Wednesday. 

But the altitude measurement wasn’t the only factor, the Associated Press reports from the hearings. “The Army acknowledged that their Black Hawks altimeters might be more than 100 feet (30 meters) off, but they seemed to say that was acceptable because their pilots’ goal is to maintain altitude within 100 feet of a limit.”

Army officials pointed to “the lack of separation between landing aircraft and helicopters flying on approved FAA routes near the airport,” which Army officials said “was up to the air traffic controller to keep helicopters from flying on that route anytime planes were taking off or landing.”

What’s more, according to an NTSB report (PDF) released Wednesday, “All aircraft could hear the controller, but helicopters could only hear other helicopters on their frequency and airplanes only other airplanes.” As a result, “helicopters and airplanes were not aware when the other was communicating,” the report said. 

The U.S. Army’s counterdrone mega-exercise in Europe, Project Flytrap, isn’t over just yet, but at least one thing seems clear: senior officers need more data training, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Wednesday. 

The drills have been running for the past five months, involving soldiers from Australia, Poland, the U.S., and the United Kingdom. Acquisition officials and industry representatives also joined the event, whose fourth phase wraps up today—with plans to add two more phases in fiscal year 2026. But one big lesson so far has been that senior leaders, which means lieutenant colonels and above, need training to manage the troves of data collected and detected in a drone-heavy battlefield, 2nd Cavalry Regiment commander Col. Donald Neal told reporters. Read more, here. 

Army rescinds West Point role for ex‑CISA director after pressure from far-right activist Laura Loomer. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said he had rescinded the appointment of Jen Easterly, a West Point grad and former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as the new Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in its Department of Social Sciences. Loomer had highlighted the hiring on social media. 

Nextgov: “CISA has been the target of the Trump White House for myriad reasons. In 2020, Trump falsely claimed the election that year was rigged and stolen from him. After former CISA director Chris Krebs said the election was the “most secure in American history,” the president fired him. Krebs, as well as his former private-sector employer, have since been targeted by the second Trump administration.” More, here.

Related reading: 

• “‘Loyalty Enforcer’ Laura Loomer Targets Additional Officials,” writes the New York Times, adding: “After being denied jobs in both President Trump’s campaign and in his administration, Laura Loomer has set out to prove that she is a better judge of personnel than the president’s people are.”
• “Army Puts Political Operative in Charge of Public Affairs, Stoking Concerns of Creeping Partisanship,” reports Military-dot-com. “While it’s not unusual for political hands to manage messaging at the highest levels of the Pentagon, the ongoing change to military public affairs marks a broader institutional pivot.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee is considering four key Defense Department nominees this morning, including Michael Powers to be the Pentagon’s next comptroller; Amy Henninger to be the department’s new testing and evaluation director; David Denton as General Counsel for the Navy; and Benjamin Kohlmann to be the Navy’s Assistant Secretary for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. That began at 9:15 a.m. ET. Details and video here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Pete Hegseth has discussed running for political office in Tennessee, sources say,” NBC News reported Tuesday;
• “Navy suspends search for missing USS George Washington sailor,” Military Times reported Wednesday; 
• “‘Open Cruelty’: Transgender Troops Describe Indignities as They’re Kicked Out of the Military,” Military-dot-com reported Tuesday;  
• “Texas man is charged with killing Afghan refugee who fought alongside Green Berets,” NBC reported Wednesday;
• And, “Texas man who fled to Russia to escape ‘woke’ America sent to front line of war, wife says,” the Dallas Morning News reported Wednesday.

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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 Audrey Decker. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2007, the British Army’s longest-ever deployment came to an end with the formal conclusion of Operation Banner in Northern Ireland.

Trump 2.0

Under Trump, ICE now has more money to spend each year than all but 15 of the world’s militaries. At $27.7 billion annually, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is newly offering $50,000 signing bonuses, student loan repayment and forgiveness options, and even “patriotic recruitment posters and benefits to attract the next generation of law enforcement professionals to find, arrest, and remove criminal illegal aliens,” the Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday. 

Bigger picture: “ICE is set to get $76.5 billion, nearly 10 times its current annual budget,” AP reported Wednesday. “Some $45 billion will go toward increasing detention capacity. Nearly $30 billion is for hiring 10,000 more staff so the agency can meet its goal of 1 million annual deportations.”

One former ICE official “estimated it would take three to four years to actually hire and train” those 10,000 new employees. Meantime, ICE is expected to “rely on private contractors, National Guard troops and other federal law enforcement officers to meet the administration’s goal of 3,000 arrests a day,” AP writes. Politico has more.

Developing: ICE is already operating at least nine large detention facilities for migrants in Louisiana, the New York Times reports in a multimedia feature published Thursday. One such facility in Alexandria—a former Air Force base until 1992—is now, as Times puts it, “the deportation capital of America.” 

About the Alexandria, La., facility: “More deportation flights have taken off from there than from any other place in the United States, and more domestic ICE flights have passed through there than anywhere else, according to a widely cited database of ICE flights,” the Times reports. 

Notable: “With cheap labor and real estate, the daily cost of holding an ICE detainee in the region is roughly a third of the average daily cost elsewhere. The highest court in the region—the federal appeals court based in New Orleans—is particularly Trump-friendly, and the state’s top elected officials, all of whom are Republicans, have put up no opposition.” Continue reading (gift link), here. 

By the way: The Trump administration is running “a bit of a [legal] black hole” with its Everglades migrant detention facility, a federal judge said Monday. At the facility, known as “Alligator Alcatraz” to the Trump administration, “detainees have been barred from meeting attorneys, are being held without any charges and that a federal immigration court has canceled bond hearings,” AP reported Monday. 

The judge warned at the Monday hearing “The court may be walking into a bit of a black hole about the interplay between the federal and state authorities and certainly jurisdictional concerns,” and added, “That’s part of the problem—who is doing what in this facility?”

Additional reading: 

• “Trump Administration Told Taiwan’s President to Avoid New York Stopover,” the New York Times reported Wednesday;
• “Top White House pandemic preparedness official resigns, officials say, in sign of broader disarray,” STAT reported Wednesday; 
• “US government will ingest all federal data into AI models, WH tech director says, adding that that’s one of the national-security reasons the U.S. needs to lead the world in AI; that via Nextgov;
• “The federal government is paying more than 154,000 people not to work,” thanks to its workforce-slashing efforts, the Washington Post reported Thursday;
• And “Despite grand claims, a new report shows noncitizen voting hasn’t materialized,” NPR reports off the latest study to show this.

Etc.

Turnabout for the chip industry? After years in which Western security agencies warned that network gear from Chinese firms might be used against its customers, Beijing has summoned Nvidia officials to explain why China should not fear backdoors in the U.S.-made chips. The Wall Street Journal reports, here.

ICYMI: Coast Guard says it chased off a Chinese icebreaker in U.S. waters last week. “A Coast Guard C-130J Hercules fixed wing aircraft from Air Station Kodiak responded to the Xue Long 2, an icebreaker operated by the Polar Research Institute of China and 130 [nautical miles] inside the [extended continental shelf] boundary” north of Alaska, the service said in a July 26 statement. “The U.S. has exclusive rights to conserve and manage the living and non-living resources of its ECS.” CBS had a bit more, here.

Ukraine charges air force officer with spying on fighter jets. Reuters: “Ukraine’s domestic security agency has detained an air force officer on charges of having spied for Russia by leaking the location of prized F-16 and Mirage 2000 fighter jets, officials said on Wednesday. The unidentified officer, a flight instructor holding the rank of major, stands accused of helping Russia carry out air strikes by providing coordinates and suggesting strike tactics, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said in a statement.”

Lastly: “Radioactive wasp nest found at site where US once made nuclear bombs,” reports the AP, which says a routine check at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., found a nest with 10 times the allowable level of radiation, according to a July report from the U.S. Department of Energy. Officials said there is no danger to anyone, but Tom Clements of the Savannah River Site Watch watchdog group, called the report incomplete at best. “I’m as mad as a hornet that SRS didn’t explain where the radioactive waste came from or if there is some kind of leak from the waste tanks that the public should be aware of,” Clements said. More, here.

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