Military officers must now meet with President Trump if they want to be promoted to four-star positions, the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing three current and former officials. “The move, though within Mr. Trump’s remit as commander in chief, has raised worries about the possible politicization of the military’s top ranks by a president who has regularly flouted norms intended to insulate the military from partisan disputes,” Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the Times write. 

In case you were wondering, there are about three dozen four-star postings across the Defense Department. 

Considerations: Personally interviewing each replacement will take more time than the process ordinarily demands, Pentagon officials said. It also risks creating the impression that “they’re political appointees selected on the basis of their personal loyalty and partisan alignment,” said Heidi Urben, a Georgetown University professor and retired Army colonel. 

Developing: Pete Hegseth and his aides are angry at an inspector general report over the Pentagon chief’s handling of classified information, and his team “appears designed to undermine the inquiry’s legitimacy—even before its findings are made public,” Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported Tuesday. 

Hegseth’s team calls the pending IG report a “witch hunt” and a “sham,” and blames “Biden administration holdovers.”

Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Jack Reed, D-R.I., was more even-handed. Reed and his Republican colleague, Roger Wicker, requested the IG report after the “Signalgate” scandal burst into headlines three months ago. Reed said in a statement, “Taxpayers and military personnel deserve to know the truth, and the Inspector General’s office has a responsibility to follow all evidence and report its independent findings.”

“The civilian leadership of the Department of Defense is not above the law,” Reed said in his statement. 

Also developing: Pentagon officials are confused over Hegseth’s ban on officers speaking at certain think-tank events, Politico reported Monday. “The Pentagon said it made the move to avoid lending the department’s name to organizations and events that run counter to Trump’s values.” But “officials and experts warned cutting off employees’ access to such venues, which include major global conferences, gives the appearance of partisanship to the Pentagon, an institution intended as largely apolitical.”

Notable: “The decision follows other seemingly political moves by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, including firing top generals and numerous admirals, and attacking the ‘left-wing’ media.” It also “came a week after Defense Department officials pulled out of the high-profile Aspen Security Forum citing ‘the evil of globalism.’” 

Reminder: “Transparency doesn’t happen on its own, and this will be the most transparent administration ever,” Hegseth said in a post on social media back in February. 

New: NSA fires its top lawyer. The National Security Agency’s general counsel, April Falcon Doss, was removed from her post on Friday after far-right activist Laura Loomer highlighted Doss’ work in the GOP-led Senate intelligence committee investigation that concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Read coverage by the Times, Politico, and Nextgov.

Additional reading: 

• “Trump 2.0 Doesn’t Like Drama. So Why’s He Swallowing So Many Bad Headlines About Hegseth?” Rachel Bade asked in her Monday column for Politico;
• “Military Spouses Quit Jobs, Families Bust Budgets in Scramble for Child Care,” Jennifer Brookland wrote Friday for the War Horse;
• And ICYMI: “Military Says It Will ‘Continuously’ Monitor Bathrooms to Comply With Anti-Trans Order,” 404 Media reported last week. 

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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 1866, a group of armed former Confederate soldiers and police attacked a crowd of mostly Black Union veterans demonstrating peacefully in New Orleans, killing at least 38 people, including 34 Black men. “The sadism was so wanton that men who kneeled and prayed for mercy were killed instantly, while dead bodies were stabbed and mutilated,” historian Ron Chernow wrote of the incident. The massacre helped galvanize support for the First Reconstruction Act.

Industry

Boeing downplays impending fighter-jet worker strike. The 3,200 union workers at three St. Louis-area facilities that produce fighter jets and munitions are an “order of magnitude less” than the 30,000 machinists who went on strike last fall in the Pacific Northwest, CEO Kelly Ortberg said Tuesday during the company’s second-quarter earnings call. 

After union members rejected a proposed contract on Sunday, Boeing “activated our contingency plan” and is “focused on preparing for a strike,” Dan Gillian, Boeing’s vice president of air dominance and general manager and senior executive in St. Louis, said in a statement. 

The workers build and assemble parts for the F/A-18, F-15, T-7 trainer, and MQ-25 drone. The facilities also will be a major contributor to the future sixth-gen F-47, which will be centered in St. Louis. Defense One’s Audrey Decker puts it all in context, here. See also the Wall Street Journal’s take on the call, here.

Could this be the year hydrogen power gets practical? The Defense Innovation Unit is betting that recent technological advances may turn the promise of hydrogen fuel-cells into reality, more than a century after they were first proposed. DIU has given a contract to engineering firm Pratt Miller to prototype a hydrogen-powered system for naval vessels. “If successful, the Expeditionary Hydrogen On Ship & Shore project, or EHOSS, could help fulfill a long-standing Pentagon goal of eliminating petroleum-based propulsion from military operations,” writes Defense One’s Patrick Tucker.

Update: A Fort Bliss detention camp is set to be built by a contractor that illegally hid undocumented workers from DHS. Last week, the Pentagon awarded a massive contract to build the nation’s largest migrant detention camp at the Texas base. ProPublica reported Friday, “Unmentioned was that one of the subcontractors slated to work on the project, Disaster Management Group, is owned by Nathan Albers, who previously co-owned a company that pleaded guilty in 2019 to a scheme to hire undocumented workers and conceal them from immigration authorities. Albers is a big-time Republican donor who has spent time at Mar-a-Lago.” Read on, here.

Europe

Germany’s defense industry is about to take off, with officials “preparing a wave of multi-billion-euro procurement orders, including 20 Eurofighter jets, up to 3,000 Boxer armoured vehicles, and as many as 3,500 Patria infantry fighting vehicles,” Reuters reported Tuesday from Berlin after Defense Minister Boris Pistorius briefed lawmakers the day prior. 

About those systems: “The Eurofighter order alone is expected to cost between 4 billion and 5 billion euro…while the Boxer vehicles —built by KNDS and Rheinmetall— are estimated at 10 billion euro” and the “Patria vehicles are seen costing roughly 7 billion euro.” But that’s not all. More IRIS-T air defense systems are expected—especially given their effectiveness for Ukraine’s defense against Russia—along with “several hundred SkyRanger drone defence platforms,” Reuters reports. 

Related reading: 

• “Germany Aims for NATO Goal With €162 Billion Budget by 2029,” Bloomberg reported Monday; 
• “Germany Readies Military Order For 8,500 Armored Vehicles,” Bloomberg reported separately on Tuesday. 

Britain’s BAE Systems posted a strong first half of the year, with officials claiming Wednesday that they expect earnings “to rise 9% to 11% on last year’s result, higher than the 8% to 10% growth it had previously forecast,” Reuters reports from London. “The company is set to receive a new order for Eurofighter Typhoon military jets after an agreement between Turkey and Britain was signed earlier in July. Orders from Saudi Arabia and Qatar could also be on the cards.” More, here. 

And Italy wants to tap the EU’s new defense fund for about 15 billion euros in spending through 2030, Reuters reported Wednesday in a short update from Rome. 

Commentary: Who should coordinate Europe’s defense buildup? Asked Georgetown University’s Sara Bjerg Moller, writing Tuesday in Defense One. “This is a question not simply of resources but of institutional design and coordination,” she says. Without appropriate caution, “Europe risks squandering a rare window of opportunity where political will and financial commitment have finally aligned.” 

Her suggestion: U.S. European Command. She argues that “as the theater command with responsibility for all of Europe—including non-NATO members—EUCOM is uniquely positioned to take a holistic approach, unencumbered by institutional and membership divides between NATO and the EU. Its reach extends to countries that belong to neither organization, a strategic asset that recently demonstrated its value: When the Germany–Switzerland–Ukraine Patriot deal came together in July, responsibility for executing it fell to EUCOM.” Continue reading, here. 

From the region: “Why US plans to hit Russia with fresh economic penalties will have little effect,” two political science professors argued Tuesday in The Conversation.

Cyber

Monitoring: French submarine secrets have reportedly been posted online after an apparent cyber attack, BitDefender reported Monday. The alleged hack appears to have hit Naval Group, which builds ships, subs, and aircraft carriers for the French navy. “The data was said to include source code related to combat systems used on French nuclear submarines and frigates, weapon system software, simulation environments, network designs, user manuals, and internal communications.”

Naval Group said it was investigating the incident, and claimed Saturday that “At this stage, no intrusion into our IT environments has been detected and there has been no impact on our activities.”

Developing: CISA vows to publish 2022 telecom-security report to get its next director confirmed. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., had vowed to block the confirmation of Sean Plankey, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, unless it released a 2022 report on telecommunications industry security vulnerabilities.

Wyden has long sought the release of the report. “CISA’s multi-year coverup of the phone companies’ negligent cybersecurity has real consequences,” he said in April, citing sweeping Chinese intrusions into swaths of U.S. telecommunications infrastructure that was discovered around a year ago.

Now this: “CISA intends to release the U.S. Telecommunications Insecurity Report (2022), that was developed but never released under the Biden administration in 2022, with proper clearance,” CISA public affairs director Marci McCarthy said in an email to Nextgov/FCW. More, here.

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Sen. Ron Wyden has said he’ll block Trump’s nominee unless the report’s findings are made public.

A gunman killed four people with an M4 rifle in New York City’s deadliest shooting in 25 years Monday evening around 6:30 p.m. local. The shooter was a 27-year-old former high school football player from Las Vegas named Shane Tamura, authorities said. 

After the seemingly random shootings, Tamura left behind a three-page suicide note before taking his own life on the 33rd floor of a skyscraper on 345 Park Avenue, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters Monday night. His note suggested he was targeting the National Football League’s headquarters in the building, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday. His note also “referred to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a brain disease that has afflicted people who play contact sports,” the New York Times reports, and adds, “The disease can only be definitively diagnosed after death.” 

“He appeared to have blamed the NFL for his injury,” Mayor Adams told CBS News. 

The victims include a 36-year-old police officer and an executive at the private equity firm Blackstone. “He then shot a woman and two men in the lobby but inexplicably allowed another woman to pass him unharmed before he took the elevator to the 33rd-floor offices of Rudin Management,” Reuters reports. “There he fatally shot his final victim before taking his own life.”

“New York City is on pace this year to possibly have its fewest homicides and fewest people hurt by gunfire in decades,” the Associated Press reports. “But the city’s corporate community has been on edge since last December, when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed outside a hotel hosting a conference.”

Another gunman killed three people and wounded two others before he was shot by police and taken into custody early Monday outside the Grand Sierra Resort in Reno, Nevada. As in New York, the victims in Reno also seem to have been shot at random, Reuters reports. “At this time we have no reason to believe there is a connection between any of the victims and the suspect, and we have no known motive by the suspect,” Police Chief Chris Crawforth told reporters. AP has a bit more. 

By the way: In April, the Trump administration cut federal funding for gun violence prevention by more than half, representing about “$158 million in grants that had been directed to groups in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Baltimore,” Reuters reported separately Tuesday. 

Background: “The majority of [community violence intervention] grants were originally funded through the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and part of a push by former President Joe Biden to stem the rise of gun violence in America, including establishing the first White House Office for Gun Violence Prevention.” But the Trump administration closed that office on the first day of his second term in January. 

Panning out: “Gun violence deaths in the U.S. grew more than 50% from 2015 to the pandemic-era peak of 21,383 in 2021, according to the Gun Violence Archive,” Reuters writes. “Since then, deadly shootings have been in decline, falling to 16,725 in 2024, which is more in line with the pre-pandemic trend.” 

Related reading: “Michigan Walmart customers restrain man accused of stabbing 11 people,” AP reported in a video on Monday. 

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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 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower signed legislation to create NASA.

Around the Defense Department

The U.S. appears to have sent nuclear weapons to the UK, a first since 2008, Bloomberg reports: “On July 16, a US military aircraft flew with its transponder on — making its identification and location publicly visible — from a US nuclear weapons depot at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to an airbase in the UK city of Lakenheath, according to defense analysts and open-source data.”

The developments were noted by planespotters and reported by The Aviationist on July 17: “Reach 4574, a C-17 Globemaster III, flew direct from Kirtland AFB, home to the AFMC Nuclear Weapons Centre, to RAF Lakenheath with the support of KC-46 Pegasus refueling aircraft. Ever since the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) reported in 2022 that RAF Lakenheath had been included in a list of nuclear weapons sites scheduled for upgrade, it has been expected that U.S. Air Force B61 bombs would eventually arrive there.”
“There are strong indications” that this is now the case, Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project, told Bloomberg. The C-17 was attached to the Air Force’s Prime Nuclear Airlift Force, which transports nuclear weapons, and didn’t fly over any other nation’s territory, according to William Alberque, a Europe-based senior fellow at the Pacific Forum. The U.S. and UK governments don’t comment on the status or location of their nuclear weapons.

Secret spaceplane heading back to orbit to test new tech. The Space Force will launch its X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle on an eighth mission, this one to test an inertial quantum sensor intended to enable “robust navigation capabilities when GPS navigation is not possible,” a service official said in a press release. The mission will also see tests of laser communication, reports Defense One’s Audrey Decker, here.

“Fort Bragg Has a Lot of Secrets. It’s Its Own Little Cartel” is a quote from The Fort Bragg Cartel, a new book by Rolling Stone contributing editor Seth Harp that purports to reveal new details about a violent drug ring embedded in the U.S. Army Special Forces and the Airborne Corps. “It has been more than four years since a pair of elite special operations soldiers were found murdered in the woods on Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and no one has been convicted of the crime,” begins the lead-in to an excerpt, which you can read, here.

A new change to U.S. tax law will help lower rates for Lockheed Martin, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. 

Additional reading: 

• “Pentagon Shifting $200 Million to Border Wall Project in Arizona,” Military-dot-com reported Monday; 
• “Army ROTC cadet dies during training at Fort Knox,” Military Times reported Monday; 
• “Airman killed by M18 pistol was 21-year-old from Kentucky,” the same outlet reported Monday as well; 
• “New Report Details Airman’s Humvee Death Amid Halt in Vehicle’s Usage at Missile Bases,” Military-dot-com reported Monday; 

Around the world

Donald Trump says he’s given Russia about two weeks to forge some kind of ceasefire with Ukraine or else he says he’ll pile more sanctions on Moscow, he told reporters during his visit to a golf course in Scotland on Monday. 

About two weeks ago, Trump said he’d give Russian leader Vladimir Putin 50 days. On Monday, he said he will shorten that timeline, saying, “We just don’t see any progress being made,” and “there’s no reason in waiting.” This would suggest his updated “deadline” will fall somewhere between August 7 and 9; his previous deadline was September 2. 

Warning: So-called “secondary tariffs” could be the result, but those could be considerably costly, and not just to the Russian economy but to U.S. consumers as well because it would likely “drive up global oil prices, hitting American consumers at the gas pump, shaking markets and spurring general inflation,” the New York Times explained two weeks ago. “Russia could be so rich right now,” Trump said Monday. “Instead, they spend all their money on war. They spend everything on war and killing people.”

Also: Trump claimed his new trade deal with Europe will result in “vast amounts” of U.S. weapons sales worth “hundreds of billions” of dollars—but European officials disagreed, Politico reported Monday. 

“This was more an expression of expectation on the part of President Trump that the increased defense expenditure would benefit U.S. defense companies,” a senior EU official told reporters Monday. “But it was not calculated in any way into the figures we talked about,” the official said. 

To be clear, “no specific figure was attached to potential U.S. weapons purchases in the U.S.-EU trade deal,” Politico reports. “And while the EU pledged to buy $750 billion worth of American energy and invest an additional $600 billion in the U.S. economy, the [European] Commission has already conceded it has no control over those investments, which would come entirely from the private sector.” More, here. 

Developing: Polish authorities have arrested 32 people accused of working with Russia in various sabotage operations, Poland’s national press agency PAP reported Tuesday. The detained include individuals from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Colombia, Prime Minister Donald Tusk told reporters. 

At least two of the incidents occurred in May 2024 and were allegedly commissioned by Russian intelligence agents. Some of the incidents were also commissioned via the Telegram messaging app. Read more, here. 

Read about a start-up working on spy cockroaches and AI robots as Germany plots “the future of warfare,” according to Reuters, reporting Wednesday on Europe’s “most valuable” new firm, Munich-based Helsing. “Helsing is part of a wave of German defence start-ups developing cutting-edge technology, from tank-like AI robots and unmanned mini-submarines to battle-ready spy cockroaches,” Reuters writes. What’s going on: “Some of these smaller firms [like Helsing] are now advising the government alongside established firms—so-called primes such as Rheinmetall (RHMG.DE), and Hensoldt (HAGG.DE)—that have less incentive to focus primarily on innovation,” Reuters reports. 

ICYMI: “Europe now boasts three start-ups with a unicorn valuation of more than $1 billion: Helsing, German drone maker Quantum Systems, and Portugal’s Tekever, which also manufactures drones.” Read on, here. 

Related reading: “SpaceX’s rocket diplomacy backfires in the Bahamas,” Reuters reported Tuesday from Nassau. 

And lastly: 42 more U.S.-made Abrams tanks arrived in Taiwan Sunday evening, Focus Taiwan reported Monday. These are the second such batch of M1A2Ts to arrive in Taiwan, following 38 sent last December. 

Background: Taiwan “earmarked NT$40.52 billion (US$1.37 billion) from 2019-2027 to procure 108 M1A2T tanks from the U.S. These tanks will be deployed with the Army’s Sixth Corps to bolster defenses in northern Taiwan.” More, here. 

From the region: “North Korea says Trump must accept new nuclear reality,” Reuters reported Tuesday from Seoul. 

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