A war against Iran could be a prolonged and damaging conflict with  numerous U.S. casualties, Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. Dan Caine has told President Trump and his National Security Council in recent days, according to Monday reports by Axios and the New York Times.

Trump had a different story, posting on Monday afternoon that “if a decision is made on going against Iran at a Military level, it is [Caine’s] opinion that it will be something easily won.” The president added, “I would rather have a Deal than not but, if we don’t make a Deal, it will be a very bad day for [Iran] and, very sadly, its people.” 

The Pentagon has already sent nearly half of its deployable U.S. air power to the region. “Think air power on the order of the 1991 and 2003 Iraq war,” Robert Pape of the University of Chicago said Saturday. “Never has the U.S. deployed this much force against a potential enemy and not launched strikes.” 

The likeliest options under consideration appear to be focused on aerial strike and subsequent air defense, Axios reports. “No one is advocating for an invasion or ‘boots on the ground’ military action.” Despite the next round of U.S.-Iran talks slated for Thursday in Geneva, the State Department on Monday evacuated non-essential personnel and family members from Lebanon “out of an abundance of caution and until further notice.” 

“Trump has been leaning toward conducting an initial strike in [the] coming days intended to demonstrate to Iran’s leaders that they must be willing to agree to give up the ability to make a nuclear weapon,” the Times reports. And if that doesn’t achieve the desired result, “he would consider a much bigger attack in coming months intended to drive that country’s leaders from power.” 

Update: The Navy’s newest aircraft carrier is on a twice-extended deployment as it speeds through the Mediterranean and closer to Iran. Troops aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford have been at sea since June, already two months past the typical deployment window; if they make it to May, that would set a new record, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. According to one sailor on the carrier, “many crew members are angry and upset, with some saying they want to leave the Navy at the end of the deployment.” Another admitted “all sailors knew what they had signed up for.”

Last month, the CNO said he’d push back against sending Ford. “I think the Ford, you know, from its capability perspective, would be an invaluable option for any military thing the president wants to do—but if it requires an extension, you know, it’s going to get some pushback from the office,” Adm. Daryl Caudle told reporters at the Surface Navy Association conference. “Regardless, the greatest honor you can have as a person in the Navy is to think you’re so valued that you need to be extended. So the sailors will rise to that occasion,” if need be, he said.

Related reading: 

• “Hegseth says he’ll order random pizzas to throw off monitoring app,” The Hill reported Monday; 
• And “Binance Employees Find $1.7 Billion in Crypto Was Sent to Iranian Entities,” the New York Times reported Monday. 

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Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on 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 we’d like to take a moment to 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 four years ago, Russia launched its poorly-planned full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sending some troops into the country with their dress uniforms in the expectation Kyiv would fall and the entire country would capitulate in less than a week. But 209 weeks later, Kyiv is still standing and Ukraine is still resisting. 

Around the Defense Department

The Pentagon finally released an unclassified version of its reconciliation spending plan on Monday, two weeks after the statutory deadline for the White House to send its spending proposal to Congress. Last year, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act authorized the Defense Department to spend an extra $151 billion through September 2029, but provided little guidance on what. Monday’s document responds to lawmakers’ post hoc request to fill out those details.

The largest chunk, $24.4 billion, will go to parts of the Golden Dome missile-defense effort, the new document says. It also includes measures to address a key shortcoming in the Pentagon’s readiness for high-intensity conflict: getting low-cost, highly autonomous drones to the front lines quickly. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has more, here.

Reminder: The White House wants a $1.5 trillion defense budget for the next fiscal year, which is a more than $500 billion increase—despite a lack of agreement over why such an increase is even necessary, as the Washington Post reported over the weekend. 

The U.S. military says it killed three more people in a new strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat in the Caribbean Sea on Monday, marking another instance of what legal experts describe as extrajudicial killings at sea. 

According to military officials at Southern Command, “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” they said in a statement, accompanied by a video clip. “Three male narco-terrorists were killed during this action,” SOUTHCOM said. 

Second opinion: “The strikes are arbitrary deprivations of life—extrajudicial killings—because lethal force is deliberately being used against people who, in that moment, pose no immediate threat to the lives of others and who could be apprehended by non-lethal means,” humanitarian law professors Michael Schmitt and Marko Milanovic write in Just Security. “Even on the assumption that those killed were drug smugglers, killing them on the high seas is as unlawful as if the police started killing those suspected of dealing drugs on the streets of a U.S. city.”

The strike is the 44th declared attack by the U.S. military in this campaign, which has killed at least 150 people, left three survivors and nine others missing since September. 

Analysis: “Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth came to office openly hostile to his department’s legal culture and determined to change it. He is succeeding,” argues former Pentagon special counsel Jack Goldsmith, writing Monday. “One result is persistent lawbreaking by the Department of Defense in derogation of the rule-of-law culture that the department has fostered since Vietnam,” Goldsmith says. That includes the boat strikes, which “might satisfy the promiscuously permissive [Office of Legal Counsel] understanding of Article II of the Constitution. But as many people have pointed out, they take place outside of an ‘armed conflict,’ which makes them unlawful under international law and thus murder. 

Goldsmith calls the boat-strike campaign “the most important legal corruption of the DOD in Trump 2.0 that we know about” because “given the clear legal violations related to the boat strikes, it would be very surprising if there weren’t serious legal shortcuts being taken in other military operations that we don’t know about.”  This includes possible artificial intelligence uses within the Defense Department and operations by the National Security Agency, Cyber Command, or special operators around the globe. 

He references the legal controversy around interrogation techniques after the 9/11 attacks, which eventually spurred Congressional oversight that led to the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. “Eventually there will be a reckoning,” Goldsmith writes. “It is hard to know what form it will take, but I fear it will hurt some in the military who are now in a bind between what the law requires and what the civilians, including the Commander in Chief, say and order otherwise.” Read the rest, here. 

By the way: Trump’s top U.S. attorney in D.C. just shelved her attempted prosecution of six Democratic lawmakers for reminding troops last fall that it’s their duty to ignore illegal orders, NBC News reported Monday. 

They shared their video 10 weeks after the boat-strike campaign began. Two days after their video was posted, President Trump accused the lawmakers of sedition and called for their arrest. He also shared a post that said the members of Congress should be hanged for their message, which echoed troops’ guidance in the Uniformed Code of Military Justice. 

Despite pressure from Trump and SecDef Hegseth, a grand jury declined to indict the six lawmakers two weeks ago after failing “to convince a single juror that they had met the threshold to bring charges,” NBC reported at the time. 

Hegseth also sought to demote one of the lawmakers, former astronaut and retired Navy Capt. Mark Kelly, over his role in the video. But a judge later blocked that effort less than two weeks ago, writing in his decision the “Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees.” Hegseth vowed to appeal the decision. 

Air Force officials and Northrop Grumman have reached a deal to accelerate B-21 bomber production by 25 percent following months of negotiations, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Monday. 

Where that comes from: $4.5 billion for a production boost was tucked into the $151 billion reconciliation legislation last summer. While those funds can be spent over five years, the Defense Department plans to execute all of it by this October “if that can be done without sacrificing effectiveness,” according to a Pentagon planning document obtained by Defense One on Monday. 

It’s unclear how the military plans to use the money to accelerate production, and the document said details were classified. Air Force officials said B-21 bombers were delivered on schedule last year and that the service remains “on track” to deliver the first aircraft in 2027 to Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, which will serve as the bomber’s first main operating base and formal training unit. Read more, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Air Force’s drone wingmen have started flying with weapons,” Novelly reported separately Monday; 
• And “Coast Guard investigating swastika found at recruit training center,” the Washington Post reported Monday. 

Trump 2.0

After the Supreme Court blocked his global tariff regime, President Trump is now considering national-security tariffs on several industries, including “large-scale batteries, cast iron and iron fittings, plastic piping, industrial chemicals and power grid and telecom equipment,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. 

Trump already issued a flat tariff rate of 15% in response to the SCOTUS ruling on Saturday. That lasts for 150 days in accordance with a law called Section 122. The new tariffs on the industries listed above would occur under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

“Trump has already used Section 232 to issue tariffs on sectors such as steel, aluminum, copper, cars, trucks and auto parts during his second term, and those levies aren’t affected by the Supreme Court decision last week,” the Journal reports. More industries could be affected by these new tariffs as well—including “semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, drones, industrial robots and polysilicon used in solar panels” since those were already being considered under Section 232. 

Why not just go to Congress for Trump’s tariffs? House Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday he doesn’t see a clear path forward for that. “It’s going to be, I think, a challenge to find consensus on any path forward on the tariffs, on the legislative side,” Johnson told reporters. “And so that is why, I think, you see so much of the attention on the executive side, the executive branch, and what they’re doing and how they’re reacting to the ruling.” Politico has more. 

Related reading: “US business, consumers bore 90 percent of Trump tariff costs,” The Hill reported earlier this month citing a recent study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; the Kiel Institute for the World Economy arrived at a similar conclusion in January.  

Additional reading: 

• “FCC Asks Broadcasters to Run ‘Patriotic, Pro-America Content’ In America 250 Push,” the Hollywood Reporter reported Friday; 
• “Feds want to stop states regulating, blocking prediction markets,” Route Fifty reported Monday in a curious development as Trump Media entered the prediction-market business just over three months ago; 
• And in everyday tech news, “Algorithms that customize marketing to your phone could also influence your views on warfare,” Justin Pelletier of the Rochester Institute of Technology explained for The Conversation on Monday. 

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The Mexican army killed a key cartel leader Sunday, triggering 27 retaliatory attacks across the country that left nearly three dozen cartel members and two dozen Mexican National Guard soldiers dead, Mexico Defense Minister Ricardo Trevilla told reporters in a press conference Monday. 

Deceased: Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, 60, aka “El Mencho.” U.S. authorities had offered a $15 million reward for information leading to his capture. 

He led the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which was known by its Spanish initials CJNG. He was injured in a shootout during a capture mission led by special forces in Tapalpa, Jalisco, in west-central Mexico; he later died en route to a hospital in Mexico City, the Associated Press reported Monday from Guadalajara. Six other cartel members were killed in the operation, which was supported by U.S. intelligence—but not U.S. troops—and yielded several armored vehicles and “rocket launchers capable of shooting down aircraft,” Mexico’s defense ministry said in a statement. At least three Mexican troops were killed in the initial shootout as well. 

The CJNG cartel was “notorious for trafficking fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine to the United States and staging brazen attacks against government officials who challenged it,” AP reports, citing a Justice Department announcement on the group from last month. “Cartel members responded with violence across the country, blocking roads and setting fire to vehicles.” Photographer Ulises Ruiz posted two dozen images of road blocks and post-shootout carnage to Getty on Sunday.

The cartel’s post-raid chaos extended to some nearby airports and affected flights from Air Canada, Delta, American Airlines and Alaska Airlines, Reuters reported Sunday. Axios has a bit more.

Less than two days from Trump’s next State of the Union address, his advisors are discouraging new military strikes against Iran in order to shift his political fortunes in the U.S., Reuters reported this weekend. “A senior White House official said that despite Trump’s bellicose rhetoric there was still no ‘unified support’ within the administration to go ahead with an attack on Iran.” It’s a point several U.S. newspapers highlighted last week, as we noted atop Friday’s newsletter. 

With the next round of U.S.-Iran talks slated for Thursday, experts told the Times Iranian officials seem to view “capitulating to Washington’s demands on uranium enrichment and ballistic missiles as riskier to its survival than going to war.” 

Iranian officials are also reportedly preparing their proxies for retaliatory attacks abroad should Trump launch strikes on Iran, U.S. and other security officials told the Times on Sunday. 

White House officials have discussed “four separate aims” in using the U.S. military against Iran, so Nancy Youssef of The Atlantic spoke to current and former defense officials to game out each of the four paths—quick strikes, kill or capture operations targeting select leaders, destroying Iran’s ballistic missiles as well as paramilitary bases, and destroying what remains of its nuclear program—in an essay published Saturday.  

Legal consideration: “Any U.S. military strike on Iran under the current circumstances—either in relation to the dire human rights situation within Iran or its damaged nuclear program—would (once again) violate international law’s bedrock prohibition on the use of force,” three experts wrote Saturday in Just Security. “Other States are legally bound not to support or assist in any U.S. military action against Iran, and any potential agreement reached on Iran’s nuclear program under credible threat of U.S. force could be considered legally void,” they added atop their argument. Read the rest, here. 

For what it’s worth: Iran and Russia reached a formerly-secret deal to supply Tehran with 500 advanced shoulder-fired missile systems over the next three years, the Financial Times reported Sunday. However, the first delivery isn’t expected until 2027, Reuters reports. 

The White House foreign-policy strategy has been shaken up slightly in the wake of Friday’s Supreme Court decision to strike down Trump’s global tariff regime, rejecting the view that a presidential declaration of emergency is unreviewable by the courts because that would represent a “transformative expansion” of the president’s authority over tariff policy. But the decision could have other applications as well, since the Justice Department “makes similar claims in use of military domestically,” former Pentagon counsel Ryan Goodman noted Friday. 

Notable: “This decision doesn’t say you can’t issue tariffs,” economist Justin Wolfers pointed out in an interview with the BBC. “It says the president has to go through Congress to do it. So it’s all about the unilateral power of our ‘King.’”

Key consideration: Trump’s entire foreign policy is based on threatening other countries with tariffs. And the New York Times showed Friday that the White House is using the military to carry out an effective blockade of Cuba, which is strangling a country that could run out of oil by mid-March and trigger all sorts of instability for the region. One notable detail from Trump’s pressure on Cuba: “the Trump administration has stopped short of calling its policy a blockade…which legally could be interpreted as an act of war,” the Times reports. 

And that has the potential to raise several questions, including: How does Friday’s Supreme Court decision affect the Pentagon’s Cuban blockade? Does the SCOTUS decision cast the U.S. military and Coast Guard’s tanker seizure operations around Cuba on more of a piracy light rather than legally-sanctioned activity? Trump’s Cuban blockade extends from another national emergency he declared in late January, claiming “the Cuban communist regime supports terrorism and destabilizes the region through migration and violence.” However, any potential court challenge would not materialize before the estimated mid-March timeline for Cuba to run out of oil nationwide. 

Cubans are already “struggling with frequent blackouts, shortages of gasoline and cooking gas and dwindling supplies of diesel that power the nation’s water pumps,” the Times reported Friday. “Trash is piling up, food prices are soaring, schools are canceling classes and hospitals are suspending surgeries.”

“You cannot suffocate a people like this,” Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum said two weeks ago. Mexico is one of the last lifelines the Cuban people have to the outside world via humanitarian aid shipments, which include petroleum. Last month, Trump directly threatened tariffs on any nation providing oil to Cuba, and in early February specifically called out Mexico in this regard. 

Trump lashed out angrily at the 6-3 SCOTUS decision Friday, claiming “the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.” He also said he would impose a new global tariff regime of 10% on all imports under a law called Section 122 that allows a president to do so for a limit of 150 days. “I have the right to do tariffs, and I’ve always had the right to do tariffs,” he insisted to reporters Friday when asked why he can’t just work with Congress to come up with a plan. “I don’t have to,” he replied. 

The following day, he raised his new but temporary global tariffs to 15%, which Reuters reports is “the maximum level allowed under the law.” Also worth noting: “No president has previously invoked Section 122, and its use could lead to further legal challenges,” according to Reuters.  

Related reading: 

• French President Emmanuel “Macron says US Supreme Court tariff ruling shows it is good to have counterweights to power in democracies,” Reuters reported Saturday; 
• “EU loses patience following Trump’s latest tariff threat,” Politico reported Sunday; 
• “China, India Among Winners After US Court Blocked Trump Tariffs,” Bloomberg reported Sunday; 
• “Gold rises and stocks fall as global trade faces new Trump tariff threat,” the Financial Times reported Monday; 
• And the Wall Street Journal explains “Why Tariffs Aren’t Shrinking the U.S. Trade Deficit,” reporting Monday. 

Trump said Saturday he is sending a hospital ship to Greenland, but Denmark’s military chief rejected the plan the following day saying there is “no need for special health care efforts” on the Danish island Trump has been looking to acquire for several months. 

Greenland reax: “Please talk to us instead of just making more or less random statements on social media,” Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said in a statement. “Trump’s idea of sending an American hospital ship here to Greenland has been noted. But we have a public healthcare system where treatment is free for citizens,” he added. 

Trump included an image of the Navy’s U.S.N.S. Mercy in his social media announcement. However, “As of late January, the 1,000-bed hospital ship was firmly in drydock at Alabama Shipyard in Mobile, where it has been undergoing scheduled maintenance since July 2025,” maritime industry blog gCaptain reported this weekend. And “her sister ship USNS Comfort [is also] moored at the Mobile shipyard.” AP has a bit more.

See also: “Danish military evacuates U.S. submariner who needed urgent medical care off Greenland,” also via AP, reporting Sunday. 

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Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston and Thomas Novelly. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to 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 1778, Friedrich von Steuben arrived in Valley Forge, where the Prussian officer would help bring skill and discipline to the Continental Army.

Around the Defense Department

WH struggles with gigantic spending-boost proposal. White House staffers are struggling to accommodate Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s January proposal to increase defense spending by about 50 percent, to $1.5 trillion, in the 2027 budget, the Washington Post reported on Saturday. 

“The idea ran into internal criticism from several other officials, including White House budget chief Russell Vought, who warned about its potential impact on the widening federal deficit, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal deliberations. Since Trump agreed to the higher number, White House aides and defense officials have run into logistical challenges surrounding where to put the money, because the amount is so large, the people said.” Read on, here.

Two weeks late, and counting: The Trump administration is two weeks past the statutory deadline to send its spending proposal to Congress.

Developing: Hegseth is set to meet with Anthropic’s CEO, who has insisted that the Pentagon may not use its AI tools for two things: the mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weaponry. “Anthropic knows this is not a get-to-know-you meeting,” a senior defense official told Axios. “This is not a friendly meeting. This is a sh*t-or-get-off-the-pot meeting.” 

Axios: “Claude is the only AI model available in the military’s classified systems, and the most capable model for sensitive defense and intelligence work. The Pentagon doesn’t want to lose access to Claude but is furious with Anthropic for refusing to lift its safeguards entirely.” More, here.

All eyes on Air Force leaders after a year of chaos and change. “Last March, the customarily lively halls of the Air Force’s largest warfighting conference felt more like a ghost town,” writes Defense One’s Thomas Novelly. “Military attendance at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium just outside of Denver had dwindled” after a travel ban, a scuttling of major service initiatives, and a vacuum at the top. “Now, as the conference returns to Colorado this week, all of that has changed. Airmen and guardians have been approved to travel for the events, said Amy Hudson, the association’s spokesperson.” Read on, here.

More reading:

• “New Army office aims to quickly develop and scale soldier ideas,” reports Defenese One’s Meghann Myers;
• “An MQ-20 drone just teamed up with an F-22 for mock combat missions,” Novelly reports; 
• “Embraer joins Northrop to devise autonomous boom system for KC-390 tanker,” reports Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams.

Birds and nerds of the defense industry: General Atomics announced Monday it has nicknamed its YFQ-42 drone wingman “Dark Merlin.” The company says it was inspired by “deadly falcons” and “the wizardry of Merlin from Arthurian legend, paying homage to the somewhat supernatural new era of semi-autonomous air combat.” 

Similarly, Anduril, whose company name is based on a sword from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of The Rings” fantasy books, calls its CCA offering “Fury,” which is the original name given to the aircraft by Blue Force Technologies, which was later acquired by Anduril in 2023. (There’s also a Silicon Valley startup called Valar Atomics, which—like Palantir and Anduril—is yet another defense-focused reference to “Lord of the Rings” mythology.)

Related/unrelated: Industry veteran Northrop Grumman went a different direction with its contribution to the CCA field, “Project Talon,” which is reportedly a nod to the Air Force’s T-38 trainer aircraft. 

Additional reading: 

• “Palantir, Which Is Powering ICE, Says Immigration Crackdown May Hurt Hiring,” 404 Media reported Wednesday; 
• “Federal judge accuses Trump administration of ‘terror’ against immigrants in scathing ruling,” the Associated Press reported Thursday; 
• “Former top general [Stanley McChrystal] calls military’s removal of trans troops a costly mistake,” NPR reported Saturday; 
• “The U.S. Military Is Reviving Microbes from 40,000-Year-Old Ice,” 404 Media reported Friday; 
• And Defense Secretary Pete “Hegseth frames Trump policies as ‘biblical’ in address to Christian broadcasters,” Religion News reported Friday. 

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As the Pentagon prepares for war with Iran, the White House hasn’t yet decided what the purpose of such an attack would be, two major U.S. newspapers reported since Wednesday. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The U.S. is ready to take action against Iran, but President Trump hasn’t decided whether to order strikes or—if he does order them—whether the aim would be to halt Iran’s already-battered nuclear program, wipe out its missile force or try to topple the regime.” 

“Rarely in modern times has the United States prepared to conduct a major act of war with so little explanation and so little public debate,” David Sanger of the New York Times reports. “The president has given no speeches preparing the American public for a strike on a country of about 90 million people, and sought no approval from Congress. He has not explained why he has chosen this moment to confront Iran instead of, for example, North Korea, which in the years after Mr. Trump’s failed negotiations in the first term has expanded its nuclear arsenal to 60 or more warheads, by U.S. intelligence estimates, and is working to demonstrate they can reach the United States.” 

Trump’s military planners have given him several paths for conflict, including “kill[ing] scores of Iranian political and military leaders, with the goal of overthrowing the government…as well as an air attack that would be limited to striking targets including nuclear and ballistic-missile facilities,” the Journal reports. “Both would involve a potentially weekslong operation.”

Trump says he wants to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. “They can’t have a nuclear weapon and they’ve been told that very strongly,” he said Thursday. But in this regard, “he is in something of a diplomatic box,” Sanger writes. “He faces pressure to show that any new agreement he reached goes well beyond the 2015 deal” reached by President Obama. “But if he signs an agreement that does not address the [Iranian regime’s] missiles, he will appear to have sold out Israel.” And if the deal he agrees to doesn’t stop the regime from shooting protesters, “he will have abandoned a generation of Iranians who see the United States as their last chance to open the country up.” And on top of all this, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants Trump to help kill all of Iran’s current leaders once and for all, at least in part to cement Bibi and Trump’s legacy throughout the region. 

One important question: Is a U.S. attack on Iran legal? At this point, it certainly doesn’t seem so. For example, Iran poses no imminent threat to the U.S., and article 1(8) of the Constitution says only Congress has the power to “declare war.” But just as its decision to circumvent Congress and recast the Defense Department as the “War Department,” the Trump White House seems content to view war as more of a vibe than a legitimate endeavor sanctioned by American law and the courts. That’s partly why U.S. allies in Europe are especially concerned these days, and why its neighbor to the north appears to be the most concerned of all. 

The U.S. won’t have the use of British airbases for an attack on Iran, the Times reported Thursday. “In a rift with Washington, the prime minister is understood to have told Trump that the UK would not allow the use of British facilities at Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, which is home to America’s fleet of heavy bombers in Europe.” 

Coupled with unpopular polling numbers, the White House’s war vibes are leading some academics to use the phrase “gambling for resurrection”: risky actions undertaken to reverse a leader’s declining political fortunes. Diversionary wars are among the most high-profile examples of this concept in political science. 

Trump’s TV ally and Fox pundit Sean Hannity is helping to rattle sabers. “The mullahs should be very worried,” Hannity said Wednesday night on his show. “And I do have a little advice for the radical leaders in Iran. You may want to get on that plane to Russia sooner than you think. Sooner than later. Now would be a good time.” 

Trump “is closer to a major war in the Middle East than most Americans realize,” Barak Ravid of Axios reported Wednesday, adding that “sources noted it would likely be a joint U.S.-Israeli campaign that’s much broader in scope—and more existential for the regime—than the Israeli-led 12-day war last June.”

“With the attention of Congress and the public otherwise occupied, there is little public debate about what could be the most consequential U.S. military intervention in the Middle East in at least a decade,” Ravid warns. And “Such a war would have a dramatic influence on the entire region and major implications for the remaining three years of the Trump presidency.”

“The B-2 bombers are incredible. I never understood the B-2 bomber. I’d watch. It’s a wing, and I’ve never quite understood that,” Trump said Thursday in a meandering speech at the first meeting of his Board of Peace. “I’d look at it, I’d say it was beautiful, but what does it do? It carries very big bombs. And, uh, it went into Iran and it totally decimated the nuclear—nuclear potential. And when it did, when it decimated that, uh, all of a sudden, we had peace in the Middle East.” As for what’s next, “you’re going to be finding out over the next probably 10 days,” he said.  

Many traditional U.S. allies have rejected his invitation to join the Board of Peace, including Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, the UK, Ukraine, and the Vatican. So far, the board’s membership consists “of largely oppressive and authoritarian world leaders,” the Guardian reported Thursday. 

Nations that have joined include Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. “So far none appear to have tossed in the $1 billion that would give them permanent status,” historian Heather Cox Richardson noted Thursday. 

The only one who has announced any money for the organization is Trump himself, who declared Thursday the U.S. will put $10 billion into the group. However, Richardson adds, “since Congress is the only body that can legally appropriate money in our system, it’s unclear how he intends to do this.”

Coverage continues below…

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Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on 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 we’d like to take a moment to 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 1944, the U.S. and British militaries launched a weeklong campaign of bombing Nazi aircraft factories in central and southern Germany.

New: The Supreme Court on Friday struck down Trump’s global tariffs, saying the president exceeded his authority by illegally circumventing Congress to carry out his wide-ranging economic campaign that affected many of America’s closest allies. Reuters described it as Trump’s “key economic and foreign policy tool” and “one that has alienated trading partners, affected financial markets and caused global economic uncertainty.” 

The 6-3 decision will “force the government to unwind trade deals with other countries and potentially pay hefty refunds to importers,” the New York Times reports. 

Additional reading: “US growth falls sharply to 1.4% rate in fourth quarter,” the Financial Times reported Friday, noting that figure is “far below Wall Street expectations, as the record federal shutdown hit government spending.” 

Amid preparations for war, Trump just ordered the U.S. government to release information on alleged aliens and UFOs, the president announced on social media Thursday. “Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters,” he said in an evening post. 

Panning out: “Trump’s push to focus on aliens comes at the beginning of a hectic midterm election year, with a heavy public focus on information disclosed in files related to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein—many of which mention Trump by name—as well as the issue of affordability, which has weighed on his popularity ratings,” Bloomberg reports. 

Trump’s face is now on the Department of Justice building after workers unveiled a large vertical banner Thursday in a gesture the Associated Press described as “a striking symbol of the erosion of the department’s tradition of independence from White House control.”  

“Similar banners were installed at other federal buildings last year, including the Agriculture Department and Labor Department,” adding to “a string of efforts by the administration to emblazon the president’s name and face on everything from coins to national park passes,” the New York Times reports. 

“Such displays are more often a feature of countries run by dictators, not democratically elected leaders,” the Times notes. AP reminds readers as well that “The Trump administration has opened investigations into a number of the president’s perceived enemies, amplifying concerns that the agency is being used to exact revenge on his political foes.”

Trump also said Thursday that he wants to “test the law” and give himself the Congressional Medal of Honor for a visit to the Middle East in 2018. “I decided to go to Iraq and I flew to Iraq. I was extremely brave, in fact, so brave I wanted to give myself the Congressional Medal of Honor,” the president told a crowd Thursday at a rally in Georgia. “And I said, no, it’s a little stretch if I gave myself one of them. But it’s one of those things. Someday I’m going to try. I’m going to test the law.” He added, “Maybe I’ll win in court after everyone sues me.” 

And lastly this week, the Army’s looking for the best drone pilots. You’ve probably heard of Best Ranger or Best Sapper: Army competitions that test the skills of teams of infantrymen and combat engineers. This year, the service added Best Drone Warfighter, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Thursday. 

The inaugural battle kicked off Tuesday at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, bringing teams from across the active, Reserve, and National Guard components of the Army to test their skills and possibly win a slot on the service’s drone competition team. The three-day meet included two different lanes, plus a separate innovation competition where soldiers could submit white papers and custom drone builds, or demonstrate their piloting skills.

Why now? The Army is moving away from its previous drone operator model, which trained soldiers in its aviation branch to operate specific platforms. Instead, it’s likely that soldiers with additional training in operating UAS will be integrated into infantry, armor and other frontline units, where new doctrine will have them working alongside machine gunners, Abrams tanks, and howitzers. Continue reading, here. 

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With multiple naval assets in place and more on the way, the U.S. military is “prepared to strike Iran as early as this weekend,” CNN reported Thursday, one day after top national security officials met in the White House’s Situation Room. 

“Trump has not yet made a final decision about whether to strike,” CBS News reported Thursday as well, noting “the timeline for any action is likely to extend beyond this weekend.” 

U.S. and Iran negotiators met Tuesday in Geneva for indirect talks about the future of Iran’s nuclear program. That meeting was inconclusive, and follow-on talks have not yet been scheduled. 

The Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, Ford, was spotted Wednesday off the coast of West Africa, near Gibraltar, and “could arrive in the region as soon as this weekend,” CNN reports. In addition, Air Force refueling tankers and fighter jets “are being repositioned closer to the Middle East, according to sources familiar with the movements.” 

The U.S. also has the carrier Abraham Lincoln and a dozen other ships already in the region, as the New York Times illustrated in a map updated Thursday. 

Update: Iranian officials have added “a concrete shield over a new facility at a sensitive military site and covered it in soil,” Reuters reported Thursday, supported by recent satellite imagery of the Parchin military complex, about 20 miles southeast of Tehran. 

Iran also blocked several entrances to its Isfahan nuclear complex, which contains “an underground area where diplomats say much of Iran’s enriched uranium has been stored,” Reuters reports. Covering those entrances “would help dampen any potential airstrike and also make ground access in a special forces raid to seize or destroy any highly enriched uranium that may be housed inside difficult,” analysts at the Institute for Science and International Security said on Feb. 9. Read more, here. 

From the region: The U.S. military carried out its 36th airstrike of the year in Somalia on Tuesday. That operation targeted at least one alleged al-Shabaab fighter in the south, near Kismayo. A previous strike the day before occurred in the far north and targeted ISIS militants near the Golis Mountains, according to Africa Command. It’s unclear how many people were killed or wounded in either strike; U.S. Africa Command stopped releasing those details last spring. 

Panning out: “African Union peacekeeping forces are gradually drawing down and Somalia is assuming greater responsibility for its own security,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday from Mogadishu. However, after two decades of counterinsurgency, “al-Shabab is still able to reach vast parts of central and southern Somalia” and “remains one of Africa’s most resilient militant groups.” 

That resilience is in addition to the small but durable ISIS presence in the north, which outlasted the busiest year of U.S. airstrikes across Somalia this century, as David Sterman of New America illustrates in this periodically-updated series of charts.  

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Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on 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 we’d like to take a moment to 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 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering the incarceration of some U.S. citizens on the basis of their ethnic background.

Around the Defense Department

The Pentagon’s top officer for Latin America made a surprise visit to Venezuela on Thursday, Reuters reported shortly afterward. The Thursday visit “is the first by a U.S. military delegation since U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in an audacious raid last month,” the wire service notes. 

The U.S. military’s Southern Command published photos of Marine Gen. Frank Donovan’s arrival at an airport in Caracas to meet with U.S. diplomats and “Venezuelan interim authorities,” according to a press release from SOUTHCOM. That delegation included interim President and oil minister Delcy Rodriguez, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, according to Reuters. U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright visited Caracas last week as well. 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was photographed doing pull-ups on a tree with Dr. Oz for the two men’s social media feeds Wednesday. The Pentagon chief had stopped by for what Oz described as “a beachside brunch,” which included “a cold plunge, and a Mediterranean feast!”

Meanwhile, Army Secretary Driscoll is in Switzerland this week for talks about ending Russia’s Ukraine invasion, which the Washington Post reports is “an unusual diplomatic role for the head of a military service.” Hegseth recently fired one of Driscoll’s top advisors because he had previously worked for former Joint Chiefs Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley. “Driscoll is seen as a powerful figure in President Trump’s military and a potential rival to Hegseth, who has been embroiled in scandals over the past year,” The Hill reported this week. 

ICYMI: Trump’s top diplomat spoke to European allies in Munich on Saturday. In his remarks, State Secretary Marco Rubio praised America’s “allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.” 

“We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir,” Rubio said in Munich.

He echoed one of conservatism’s dominant themes in the wake of America’s 21st-century wars in the Middle East, which have helped trigger massive outflows of refugees into Europe. “Mass migration is not, was not, isn’t some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.”

“Controlling who and how many people enter our countries, this is not an expression of xenophobia,” Rubio said Saturday. “It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty. And the failure to do so…is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself.” 

Rubio wasn’t as confrontational as JD Vance during the vice president’s speech at Munich last year, Thomas Wright of Brookings observed, writing this week in The Atlantic. But as a man with the most concurrent jobs in the Trump administration, Rubio was careful to stay on-brand while conveying the president’s combative approach toward allies—e.g., when he warned audience, “We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.” Instead, “we want an alliance that boldly races into the future,” and “does not allow its power to be outsourced, constrained, or subordinated to systems beyond its control; one that does not depend on others for the critical necessities of its national life; and one that does not maintain the polite pretense that our way of life is just one among many and that asks for permission before it acts.” 

The Trump administration’s approach, Rubio said, “will restore to us a clearer sense of ourselves. It will restore a place in the world, and in so doing, it will rebuke and deter the forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike.”

Second opinion: “The real problem was not what Rubio got wrong about Europe. It was what he chose not to say at all,” Wright argues in his piece for The Atlantic. “The big geopolitical story of this moment, other than Trump, is the increasing alignment and cooperation between Russia, China, and North Korea,” he said. “This authoritarian alignment is the most profound threat that the United States and its allies, in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, face. Yet there was no mention of Russia or China in Rubio’s speech…This seems to be part of a pattern for the administration.”

Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare was more direct, and published a response this week that he said “translates” Rubio’s message into “plain, simple English.” Here’s Wittes paraphrasing Rubio: “Let’s collectively indulge the polite fiction that we have more in common than we do. Let’s overstate a shared history. Let’s pretend we agree on shared challenges. And let’s pretend I’m not saying that the basis for our future cooperation is that you submit to our will.”

New: A JAG officer has been held in contempt and forced to pay $500 daily for violating court orders in Minnesota, Paul Blume of Fox9 out of Minneapolis-St. Paul reported Wednesday. 

What happened: The judge ordered an immigrant who has been detained in El Paso to “be released in Minnesota with all of his identification papers,” but Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials released the man “with none of his papers, forcing his attorney to find him a shelter for the night and flight back to Minnesota,” Blume reports. The JAG officer, Matthew Isihara, now faces a $500 fine each day the man does not have his papers, beginning today (Thursday). According to Blume, Isihara blamed the “situation on case overload” and said “he has picked up nearly 130 habeas cases in just [the] last month.” 

Expert reax: Hundreds of habeas cases are overwhelming local courts, and dozens of Justice Department lawyers have quit in disgust, Aaron Reichin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council explained on social media after the contempt ruling. In response, as Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported last month, JAGs were brought in to cover and help prosecute the massive immigration backlog exacerbated by the administration’s recent Operation Metro Surge crackdown in Minnesota. 

Officials in Cameroon detained and then slapped a reporter “investigating a secretive Trump administration effort to deport migrants to the African nation” this week, the New York Times reported Wednesday. “None of the deportees are Cameroonian citizens. And almost all had received protection from American courts, which banned the government from sending them back to their home countries, where they would most likely face persecution,” the Times reports. 

“The expulsions have raised concerns about human rights and the secrecy of President Trump’s approach to global deportations,” Pranav Baskar of the Times writes. The reporters were later released after authorities in Cameroon confiscated their equipment. 

Related reading: “US judge throws out immigration board’s ruling endorsing Trump mass detention policy,” Reuters reported Wednesday in a case “that covers migrants nationwide.” 

Industry

The Pentagon says it’s getting its AI providers on “the same baseline” regarding expectations, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports from an Amazon Web Services conference in West Palm Beach, Florida. Over the past year, DOD has signed contracts with Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI, Emil Michael, defense undersecretary for research and engineering told venture capital investors on Tuesday. “Now we want to deploy [them] on our system so other people can build agents and pilots, and deploy it,” he said. 

Tucker: “In other words, after months of exercises and experiments, the Pentagon is looking to allow different command elements and business entities to build AI agents that can perform a wider variety of tasks with minimal human oversight.”

Michael and Anthropic appeared eager to downplay recent reports that the Pentagon is “close” to cutting ties with the company over various disagreements. More, here.

Lastly today: Boeing is moving its defense HQ back to St. Louis. A quarter-century after the aerospace giant shifted its defense-business headquarters to Arlington, Virginia, Boeing announced on Wednesday that it would move Defense, Space & Security back to the midwestern home of its fighter-jet production lines and Phantom Works lab. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams has a bit more, here.

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Initial Sentinel ICBM expected by early 2030, Air Force says. Service leaders say that the program will enter its engineering and manufacturing development phase this year, one year earlier than recently expected. The program was awarded to Northrop Grumman in 2020, but by 2024 had blown its budget and schedule so badly that the decision to enter the EMD phase was rescinded. 

The program has made “considerable progress over the last 12-18 months,” Air Force leaders said on Tuesday, including successful ground tests, solid rocket motor qualifications, and critical design reviews. 

Somewhat improbably, the service leaders said that the acceleration was partially due to the December appointment of a Pentagon overseer for Sentinel and several other top-priority Air Force programs. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly has more, here.

See also: The Government Accountability Office has updated its latest report on the Sentinel program.

The Navy struck three more boats on Feb. 16: Two in the “Eastern Pacific” and one in the Caribbean, killing “eleven male narco-terrorists,” according to a Tuesday press release from the U.S. military’s Southern Command. 

ICYMI: “A broad range of legal specialists on the use of lethal force have said that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians—even suspected criminals—who do not pose an imminent threat of violence,” the New York Times notes in its updated tracker. 

The Pentagon launched a competition for voice-controlled drone swarms. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI have both said they will join the fray, Bloomberg reported Monday.

Related: “The El Paso No-Fly Debacle Is Just the Beginning of a Drone Defense Mess,” WIRED reported Tuesday, citing the difficulty of defending densely-populated cities.

DARPA’s futuristic drone concept moves one step closer to flight. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s X-68A LongShot, which is pitched as an air-launched drone armed with air-to-air missiles, just completed “full-scale wind tunnel tests and successful trials of the vehicle’s parachute recovery and weapons-release systems,” officials said in a statement. 

The drone is intended to extend the lethality of F-15 aircraft, “fly[ing] ahead of follow-on forces, and engag[ing] enemy targets with its own air-to-air missiles” while allowing pilots “to remain farther from the front lines,” DARPA said. 

General Atomics, selected to develop the idea in 2021, is leading the design, build, and demonstration of the unmanned drone concept, Defense One’s Novelly reports. In tech-speak, “LongShot burns down significant technical risk and presents a viable path for the military services to increase air combat reach and effectiveness from uninhabited, air-launched platforms,” Col. John Casey, DARPA LongShot program manager, said in the news release. Read more, here.

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Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston and Thomas Novelly. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to 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 1955, the U.S. military staged 900 troops 2.8 miles south of a still-forming mushroom cloud—and in the known fallout path—to observe the response to a nuclear detonation 750 feet above the ground in Nevada as part of Operation Teapot. Subsequent tests would place troops much closer—for example, Shot Tesla on March 1 put some people just 1.4 miles from ground zero. 

Around the world

Satellite imagery this week shows the U.S. Navy’s Abraham Lincoln carrier off the coast of Oman, which is about 440 miles from Iran, the BBC reported Monday. Several other U.S. ships and destroyers are staging in Bahrain, much closer to Iran. 

The sides appear not “to have agreed on anything substantial” at Tuesday’s U.S.-Iran talks in Geneva. One mediator did claim “good progress towards identifying common goals and relevant technical issues,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War wrote in their Tuesday afternoon assessment. The White House wants to stop Iran’s nuclear enrichment process for at least three years, and possibly as many as five; Iran has said publicly it would only consider a three-year halt but only in exchange for considerable economic relief, including unfreezing $6 billion held in Qatar. U.S. officials, on the other hand, are reportedly worried that money would go directly to bolstering Iran’s vast missile program. 

Iranian naval drills in the Hormuz Strait continued into Wednesday. Those operations, which began Monday, have included “deploying fast attack craft and testing unspecified missiles and drones,” ISW reports. 

Meantime, “What we are seeing isn’t just strike preparation” from the U.S. Navy near Iran, “but rather a broader deterrent deployment capable of being scaled up or down,” Justin Crump of the risk intelligence firm Sibylline told the BBC. “This means it has more depth and sustainability than the force packages arranged for either Venezuela or [the joint Israeli-U.S. operation] Midnight Hammer last year. It’s designed to sustain an engagement and counter all potential responses against U.S. assets in the region and, of course, Israel.”  

India’s Coast Guard seized three vessels with cargo allegedly linked to Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, nearly two weeks after the ships were captured northwest of Mumbai and Feb. 6. “A British maritime security company, identified them as the Al Jafzia, the Asphalt Star and the Stellar Ruby. All three tankers were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury last year, when using different names, for allegedly transporting Iranian oil,” the Journal reports. 

“The Stellar Ruby had just received a cargo of Iranian asphalt from the Asphalt Star, which came from Iran,” while the “Al Jafzia was loaded with naphtha, a crude byproduct it had received mid-January from another vessel…under U.S. sanctions that was loaded in Iran and wasn’t detained.” 

Missile watch in the Pacific: The U.S. is planning to “increase deployments of U.S. cutting-edge missile and unmanned systems to the Philippines,” the State Department announced Tuesday—likely extending the Typhon missile system first deployed to the region in April 2024. Similar systems were observed in the Philippines the following January, Australia in July, and in Japan this past September. 

The Typhon system is lauded for its anti-ship capability and uses modified Navy SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles, with estimated 290- and 1,000-mile ranges, respectively. 

The system’s presence in the Pacific is widely seen as challenging to China and Russia, the Congressional Research Service notes in its report on the Typhon published last fall. Observers could see the system in use during the upcoming joint U.S.-Philippine Balikatan exercises, scheduled later this spring. Read more from the State Department, here.  

Canada has a new defense-industry plan to reduce its reliance on the U.S., including a goal of doubling its own exports and creating more than 120,000 jobs over the next decade, the Globe and Mail reported Sunday. For some perspective, “Canada’s defence sector is made up of nearly 600 companies, which contribute more than $9.6-billion to the country’s GDP and 81,200 jobs,” the paper writes. Relatedly, about 70% of its acquisitions have been purchased from U.S. firms, but Ottawa now wants that same percentage to come from Canadian firms within 10 years. 

America’s northern neighbors also plan to spend 5% of their GDP on defense by 2035; it currently allocates 2% of GDP on defense expenditures. “This will mean spending $180-billion on defence procurement, $290-billion on defence-related infrastructure and $125-billion on downstream economic activity,” the Globe and Mail reports from the new strategy document. For many of these planned changes, Canada expects to tap its aerospace and ammunition-production industries, as well as sensors, drones and digital systems, which includes AI and quantum computing. 

Canada also wants to launch its own version of DARPA, known as the Bureau of Research, Engineering and Advanced Leadership in Innovation and Science, “with the first round of projects selected by late 2026.” 

The plans were formulated “so we are never hostage to the decisions of others when it comes to our security,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday according to Politico. “There are many strengths to this partnership that we have with the United States, but it is a dependency,” he said. 

Update: Russian officials indeed murdered leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny with a poison while he was serving time in Siberian penal colony two years ago, the British government said in a statement this past weekend. 

“Consistent, collaborative work has confirmed through laboratory testing that the deadly toxin found in the skin of Ecuador dart frogs (epibatidine) was found in samples from Alexei Navalny’s body and highly likely resulted in his death,” 10 Downing Street said Saturday. “Only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin to target Navalny during his imprisonment in a Russian penal colony in Siberia, and we hold it responsible for his death,” they added. 

Investigators from Sweden, France, the Netherlands and Germany teamed up with the Brits to arrive at this conclusion. “This alarming pattern of behaviour follows the targeting of the Skripal’s with Novichok on the streets of Salisbury in 2018 and Russian troops’ frequent use of chemical weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine,” the statement says. Read more, here. 

While Russian-Ukrainian talks drag on, Russia’s military continues to pound Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with a barrage of missiles and drones, including more than 400 overnight Monday. 

“Russian forces have been launching large strike packages in recent months in the days before and after bilateral and trilateral negotiations but are likely refraining from fully maximizing Russia’s strike capabilities in order to avoid upsetting US President Donald Trump,” analysts at ISW wrote in their Tuesday assessment. “The Kremlin may seek to portray its compliance with another moratorium on energy strikes as a major Russian concession while preparing to launch another devastating strike against Ukraine in the near future.”

Also notable: “Russian forces have been altering their strike tactics, warheads, and the composition of their strike packages in order to maximize damage and disproportionately impact civilians, especially as Russia has intensified its efforts in recent months to collapse the Ukrainian energy grid,” ISW warns. And Russian officials continue to signal they are uninterested in compromising any of their initial goals with their Ukraine invasion, including giving up occupied territory. Continue reading, here. 

Related reading: “Europe Has Received the Message // Without America to rely on, the EU is gearing up to be a global power in its own right,” Joseph de Weck wrote Tuesday for The Atlantic. 

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As a second American aircraft carrier races to the Middle East, Iran says it has briefly closed portions of the Strait of Hormuz for live-fire military exercises as it continues negotiations over its nuclear program with U.S. officials Tuesday in Geneva. After weeks of threats aimed at Iran’s leaders by American President Donald Trump, the Associated Press calls the strait closure “a further escalation in a weekslong standoff that could ignite another war in the Middle East.” 

Rewind: The U.S. joined Israeli attacks against Iran during a single-morning assault last June. The operation, called “Midnight Hammer,” used F-22 and F-35 aircraft as well as submarine-launched cruise missiles and long-range B-2 bombers that dropped munitions in a mission designed to cripple Tehran’s nuclear program. Iran responded by firing missiles at the U.S. military’s at Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, with minimal damage. After the exchange of fire, experts assessed Iran’s nuclear infrastructure had been damaged by the U.S.-Israeli attacks, but warned it could still be reconstituted. 

Latest: The U.S. military has been preparing for what could be “weeks” of new operations against Iran, two U.S. officials told Reuters Friday. “In a sustained campaign, the U.S. military could hit Iranian state and security facilities, not just nuclear infrastructure,” the officials said. Trump is also reportedly “considering options that would include sending American commandos to go after certain Iranian military targets,” the New York Times reported last week.  

Under such a scenario, “the United States fully expected Iran to retaliate, leading to back-and-forth strikes and reprisals over time,” Reuters reports. This could help explain why recent satellite imagery over al-Udeid showed U.S. troops have put Patriot anti-missile units on trucks to increase uncertainty for possible Iranian targeting in a future conflict. Other U.S. bases in the region are also vulnerable, including locations across Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan. 

A dozen U.S. warships are already in the region. That includes the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Another carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, has been rerouted from the Caribbean Sea to the Middle East as well, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The chief of naval operations said in January, Defense One reported, that he would push back against extending Ford, which left Norfolk in June, saying the move would be “quite disruptive” to planned maintenance for the ship and to the lives of its sailors.  

To get a sense of the air and naval power the U.S. is bringing to the region, open-source monitor Ian Ellis drew up this busy map and chart. 

Iranian reax: “An aircraft carrier is certainly a dangerous piece of equipment,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech Tuesday before talks began in Geneva. “But more dangerous than the carrier is the weapon that can send it to the bottom of the sea,” he added. 

Iran’s navy chief said Tuesday the Hormuz Strait will remain under “24-hour surveillance” as Iran continues naval drills in the waterway the Reuters calls “the world’s most vital oil export route.”  

Big picture: “The Iranian government is under considerable pressure to agree to a deal,” the Times reports. “Iran’s economy has struggled under crippling international sanctions, which helped ignite the latest wave of protests against the country’s authoritarian government.” However, “Iranian officials have argued they will not make concessions on nuclear enrichment without sanctions relief. Iran’s deputy foreign minister told state media that in return Tehran could offer Washington lucrative investment opportunities in sectors like oil, gas, and mining.” 

Elsewhere in the region, the U.S. military says it recently carried out 10 strikes in 10 days in its ongoing war against ISIS in Syria. Read a bit more about that from Central Command, here.

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Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Meghann Myers. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to 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 1865, retreating rebels burned two-thirds of Columbia, South Carolina, to the ground as Gen. William Sherman’s U.S. Army swept through the region in the final months of the American Civil War. The city would later host the nearby U.S. Army base Fort Jackson, which was established in 1917.

Around the Defense Department

The Pentagon is facing blowback after reportedly using AI firm Anthropic’s Claude software during the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last month, Axios reported over the weekend. “The military has used Claude in the past to analyze satellite imagery or intelligence,” however two sources told the outlet “Claude was used during the active operation, not just in preparations for it.” Claude is also reportedly the only AI model used in the military’s classified systems. 

Anthropic’s chief concern in this context: “that its technology is not used for the mass surveillance of Americans or to operate fully autonomous weapons,” Dave Lawler and Maria Curi of Axios write. Military officials have countered that those concerns are “unduly restrictive.”

Update: Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth is now reportedly on the verge of cutting ties with Anthropic, which are estimated to cost about $200 million. (Anthropic says it generates about $14 billion in annual revenue.) Hegseth is also considering designating the firm a “supply chain risk,” Axios reported Monday, and noted, “That kind of penalty is usually reserved for foreign adversaries.” Read the rest, here. 

The U.S. military killed three more alleged drug-traffickers in another boat strike in the Caribbean Sea on Friday. That raises the Pentagon’s death toll to 133 people U.S. troops have killed without a trial across nearly 40 strikes since September. 

Trump told soldiers they “have to” vote for the GOP during a speech Friday at an army base in North Carolina. “You have to vote for us,” the president told a crowd of soldiers at Fort Bragg, a base where regulations prohibit partisan displays. 

“Most service members refrained from cheering,” the Washington Post reported after the president’s remarks. “They mostly left the applause and cheers to his staff and the assembled Republican politicians” from the state that had gathered at the army base for Trump’s speech. 

Hegseth pushed out a senior Army spokesman who once worked for former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, a target of President Trump’s ire after having installed him during the president’s first term, Fox News reported. Col. Dave Butler had been nominated for a promotion to brigadier general, but sources told Fox that the defense secretary ordered the Army secretary to fire him last week.

Earlier this month, Hegseth told a crowd at the Pentagon, “I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength.’” It’s been a common refrain for Hegseth over the past several years, and an extension of the Trump administration’s culture-war assault on diversity following nationwide protests against police brutality in the final year of Trump’s first term. Trump began his second term by firing the Black general who was Joint Chiefs chairman because he allegedly promoted diversity, while Hegseth cut celebrations of Black History Month and restored the titles of Army bases named after Confederate soldiers. 

A historian noticed Hegseth’s recent remarks at the Pentagon, and penned a retrospective flagging “an extensive literature that tracks the ways in which concepts of diversity have stood at the heart of the United States of America from the founding.” According to Kevin Kruse of Princeton University, “We only need to take a look at the propaganda posters that the USA employed during World War I and World War II to see that diversity was very much seen as a strength by American leaders in those conflicts,” he wrote Sunday.  

Relatedly, “Immigrant soldiers, for instance, made up about a full sixth of the U.S. Army forces during the conflict,” Kruse adds. And “the War Department (as it was actually known back then) knew incorporating these foreign-born soldiers was so important to their work that it launched the Foreign-Speaking Soldier Sub-Section,” known as FSS.  

Citing several posters from the era, “Even more than the WWI effort, American propaganda during WWII leaned into the idea that diversity—not just in terms of white ethnics, but all races and both genders too—was an asset to be exploited, not a deficit to be overcome,” Kruse writes. Continue reading, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Pentagon may bar tuition aid for top universities in Hegseth’s crackdown on ‘biased’ schools,” CNN reported Friday; 
• And “Trump administration ordered to restore George Washington slavery exhibit it removed in Philadelphia,” AP reported Tuesday.  

Deportation nation

The Homeland Security Department has subpoenaed Google, Meta, Discord and Reddit for the identities of users whose accounts track or comment on ICE activity, the New York Times reported. Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, sources said. Some users were notified of the subpoenas and given 10 to 14 days to fight them in court.

DHS appears to be breaking many of its own use-of-force policies against ICE protestors, according to a review of dozens of incidents by NBC News. “Less lethal” weapons like rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray and flash-bangs have been deployed “inappropriately and indiscriminately” according to court cases in at least four states. “I’ve never seen federal agents so out of control and acting in such a malicious manner,” Rubén Castillo, a former federal prosecutor and federal judge who now leads the Illinois Accountability Commission, a state effort to review allegations of abuse against immigration officers, told NBC. “They said they were going after ‘the worst of the worst,’ then they became the problem.”

El Paso counter-drone weapon update: When the federal government shut down El Paso’s airspace last week, they were responding to the firing of a counter-drone laser “without sufficient coordination,” sources told Axios. Customs and Border Protection had fired AeroVironment’s LOCUST system at what Trump administration officials called “a cartel drone swarm.” It was on loan from the U.S. military. More, here. 

Additional reading: 

• Homeland Security Secretary Kristi “Noem’s use of Coast Guard resources strains her relationship with the military branch, sources say,” NBC News reported Tuesday; 
• “Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. It hasn’t stopped,” Reuters reported Saturday; 
• “U.S. Deports Nine Migrants in Secret, Ignoring Legal Protections,” the New York Times reported Saturday;
• See also “How a Planned Disney World Vacation Turned Into Four Months in Immigration Detention,” via ProPublica reporting Saturday. 

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The Department of Homeland Security is on track for a shutdown this weekend after Senate Democrats rejected a GOP-crafted funding bill that they said provided inadequate guardrails on federal immigration agents. Senators have already left town for the week, though some could return “on short notice if negotiators reach a deal,” The Hill reported Friday morning. 

A possible deal fell apart Thursday after a four-hour hearing on Capitol Hill with the White House’s top immigration officials, including acting ICE Director Todd Lyons. Contradicting several top administration officials’ accounts—including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and President Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller—Lyons testified that the two Americans killed by agents last month in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were not “to his knowledge” domestic terrorists. After his testimony, a deal to keep DHS open failed, 52-47, in a Senate vote that needed 60 votes to advance. 

Lyons also misled lawmakers during the hearing, Kyle Clark of 9News Denver reported Thursday evening. Lyons told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that local law enforcement “made notifications” and tipped off the intended targets ahead of an immigration raid at an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado. “So when tactical teams arrived, protesters were already there and the apartment complex was empty,” Lyons said. 

However, “Those apartments were being cleared out weeks earlier” in January and well before ICE agents showed up in Aurora on Feb. 5, Clark reports. Just hours after Lyons testimony on Thursday, ICE deleted social media posts with the claim.

Lawyers for a U.S. citizen shot by a Border Patrol agent also accused administration officials of lying, in the case of Chicago-based school teacher Marimar Martinez. The Hill has more. 

Additional reading: “A Pilot Fired Over Kristi Noem’s Missing Blanket and the Constant Chaos Inside DHS,” the Wall Street Journal reported in a lengthy feature on Noem and her close adviser Corey Lewandowski.

The U.S. spent more than $1 million per person to deport 300 people to countries they had no connection to, before later flying them again to their home nations at additional taxpayer expense. That’s according to a report Thursday advocating closer bipartisan oversight of DHS operations, via Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats. 

Those operations alone ran up a bill of more than $32 million to five different countries: Equatorial Guinea ($7.5 million), Rwanda ($7.5 million), El Salvador ($4.76 million), Eswatini ($5.1 million) and Palau ($7.5 million). “Much of the funds were provided as lump sum payments, often before any third country nationals arrived,” although “actual costs [are] likely far higher,” according to the report. Details (PDF) here. 

There’s still more local resistance affecting DHS plans to buy warehouses to concentrate migrants. The latest development reported Thursday occurred south of Kansas City after port authority “commissioners said the idea of the site being used for something other than industrial jobs, including possible federal detention, conflicted with long-term plans for the industrial district,” Fox4 reports. 

In case you missed it: GSA’s procurement chief is attending negotiations for Ukraine and Gaza, Natalie Alms of our sister site Nextgov reported last month. His name is Josh Gruenbaum, 40, and he’s the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service. He has a background in private equity and investment banking, but he’s been spotted in meetings alongside Israeli and Ukrainian officials over the past few months, Alms reported five weeks ago. 

Read more: Three Wall Street Journal reporters teamed up Thursday to fill in more of Gruenbaum’s story as an under-the-radar negotiator in the second Trump administration—including his role in rejected missile-acquisition talks, his work with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and how he was photographed shaking hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin just last month. 

Speaking of Kushner, “The highly classified whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is related to a conversation intercepted last spring in which two foreign nationals discussed Jared Kushner,” the Journal reported Thursday updating an unusual case that has concerned lawmakers charged with oversight of the U.S. intelligence community. U.S. officials told the Journal “there was no corroborating evidence to support the allegations,” however, “they said that didn’t prove they lacked any merit.”

Notable: Kushner “is now running an investment fund, Affinity Partners, which has drawn billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies, and has pursued potential projects around the world,” the Journal reports. (It has also been under conflict-of-interest investigation by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.) Meanwhile, “U.S. intelligence officials are treating the material in the complaint with the utmost secrecy, contending that disclosure of the underlying intelligence report at issue could severely damage national security.”

By the way: The U.S. just dropped to its lowest-ever rank in a global corruption index, CNN reported Tuesday. 

There’s a new poll out reflecting voters’ views of top White House officials, published Thursday by the Pew Research Center. Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth is on it, and 31% of Americans said they’ve never heard of him. Of those who are familiar with him, 41% view him unfavorably versus 26% with a favorable view. Read more, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “White House uses USAID funds for budget director Vought’s security, documents show”—specifically, $15 million, Reuters reports;
• “ICE conducted 37 investigations into officer misconduct in last year,” NPR reported from the acting ICE director’s congressional testimony Thursday; 
• “Trump is in the unredacted Epstein files ‘more than a million times,’ [Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin] alleges,” Axios reported Tuesday; 
• “Conservatives unload on GOP’s failures to carry out DOGE cost-cutting,” CNN reported Thursday; 
• “US business, consumers bore 90 percent of Trump tariff costs,” The Hill reported Friday citing a study published this week by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; 
• “Alberta separatists step up efforts to leave Canada after meeting with Trump officials,” Reuters reported Thursday from Calgary; 
• “Many Republicans disapprove of Trump on Greenland,” the Associated Press reported Friday; 
• And “A year into Trump’s term, voters say Biden was better,” Axios reported Thursday. 

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Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on 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 we’d like to take a moment to 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 2013, the cruiser Lake Erie intercepted a medium-range ballistic missile in the first live test of missile-tracking satellites.

Around the Defense Department

President Trump is visiting Fort Bragg, N.C., today to speak with troops who reportedly helped in the operation to abduct Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro last month. Afterward, he’s headed to his Florida resort for the weekend, The Hill reports. 

U.S. troops have officially departed their remote outpost at al-Tanf, Syria, close to the border with Jordan, officials at Central Command said in a statement Thursday. Elsewhere in the country, U.S. forces are withdrawing as part of “a conditions-based drawdown from northeast,” Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute said Thursday. And Syria’s military chief spoke by phone with the top U.S. commander in the region, Maj. Gen. Kevin Lambert this week as well.

The U.S. drawdowns are the result of a new approach from Syria’s new leadership since former dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the country in December 2024. The key U.S. partners in the region, Syrian Democratic Forces, are being increasingly incorporated into the new Syrian state, which is taking on a growing role in fighting ISIS militants, Lister explained. Since last spring, 13 ISIS plots have allegedly failed ISIS leaders have been killed amid 11 joint raids and “dozens of U.S. intel-directed Syrian op[eration]s,” he added. 

“The ISIS threat in Syria has turned increasingly urban over the past year,” said Lister, “and if the SDF integration is achieved, it’ll likely become even more so.” 

U.S. forces in the region also just finished transferring “more than 5,700 adult male ISIS fighters from detention facilities in Syria to Iraqi custody” in an operation that took more than three weeks to complete, CENTCOM said in a statement Friday. 

Forever wars, continued? America may be carrying out a covert air campaign against al-Qaeda in Yemen, argued David Sterman, deputy director of the Future Security program at New America, writing Thursday in Just Security. 

The most recent suspected strike appears to have occurred on Jan. 29, near the border with Oman. “And if this clandestine campaign is ongoing, then the lack of transparency greatly complicates efforts to ensure accountability for errors and civilian casualties. It also exacerbates the risk of further embroiling the United States in an endless war with no clear strategy,” Sterman warns. 

Also from the region: The Indian Navy just took command of a maritime training task force based in Bahrain. It’s known as Combined Task Force 154, and it changed hands this week from the Italians to the Indians, officials said in a statement Wednesday. Twenty-two different nations are represented in the task force, which was established almost three years ago. Read more from the Indian Defense Ministry, here. 

Back in the states, another Osprey was forced to make an emergency landing, this time in Hawaii, as the military rushes to fix enduring mechanical problems with the troubled aircraft, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Thursday. 

The latest incident happened on Feb. 3, when an MV-22B with the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing landed in the Tactical Flight Training Area on Oahu “after experiencing an in-flight malfunction” with a gearbox failure. None of the crew was injured but the aircraft will “require maintenance actions and repairs” before returning to its home station, according to an emailed statement from the aviation wing.

Since 2022, four V-22 crashes have killed a total of 20 service members. Investigations blamed failures within the Osprey’s proprotor gearbox and sudden surges in power after a clutch slip, known as a hard clutch engagement. After the crashes, the Pentagon imposed range and other limits on V-22 flights. In December, the Government Accountability Office and NAVAIR separately issued reports that said the V-22 Joint Program Office failed to adequately assess and address mounting safety risks, even as service members died.

Only one other aircraft type, the F-35, had more than the V-22’s 28, Novelly reports. Continue reading, here.

Deliver what we ask for on time—that’s the terse message two maritime service chiefs are sending to industry, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Thursday from the WEST 2026 conference in San Diego. 

CNO: “Deliver it on time. That’s really what I need. I don’t know how to sugarcoat that. It’s impossible to sugarcoat that. I need my stuff on time,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, told attendees Wednesday. 

Commandant: “If it’s going to be delayed, well, that’s a you problem. That’s not a me problem, because I paid for something and I expect to get it,” Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said. Keeping costs down without sacrificing quality or on-time delivery is a longstanding conundrum for military procurement, Williams reports. But while there’s general reticence towards higher costs, especially for large platforms like ships, it’s a reality the Navy must accept, Smith said. Read on, here. 

US, NATO are practicing to take out 1,500 ground targets a day, plus 600 to 1,200 ballistic missiles, the commander of the Army’s Germany-based 56th Multi-Domain Command told reporters. Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports, here.

Additional reading: 

• “Crowded field of robot-boat makers vies for Navy’s attention,” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported separately Thursday from WEST 2026; 
• “Flight tests validate mix-and-match approach to robot-wingman autonomy,” Defense One’s Tom Novelly reported Thursday; 
• “The Pentagon is removing thousands of transgender troops under Hegseth’s anti-DEI push,” NPR reported Wednesday updating Hegseth’s monthslong crusade; 
• “Former Army colonel sentenced to 2 years for sharing classified war plans with woman he met online,” The Hill reported Thursday. 

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