The D Brief: Red Sea combat; Ike comes home; Juntas unite; Zelenskyy’s wishlist; And a bit more.

The Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen attacked two more commercial ships in the Red Sea on Monday. The terrorist group also claims to have attacked a third ship in the Mediterranean Sea, with all three ordered as the Houthis’ response to an Israeli airstrike in Gaza Saturday that killed at least 90 Palestinians and wounded 300 others. The crew aboard one of the Red Sea ships reported damage while the other is believed to have escaped a dynamic attack surprisingly unscathed, according to U.S. defense officials at Central Command.

Involved: 

• MT Chios Lion, a Liberian-flagged, Marshall Islands-owned, Greek-operated crude oil tanker. It was hit with one of the Houthis’ drone boats in the Red Sea, which caused some damage but not enough for the crew to request assistance. 
• MT Bentley I, which is a Panama-flagged, Israel-owned, Monaco-operated tanker vessel, was also attacked Monday as CENTCOM said it hauled a cargo of vegetable oil from Russia to China. A combined Houthi force of three boats, including one “uncrewed surface vessel” and two manned boats were used—and hours later an anti-ship ballistic missile was also fired at the ship—but no damage or injuries were reported in the immediate aftermath of those attacks, according to CENTCOM.

Worth noting: That attack on Bentley 1 featured an unmanned boat that collided twice with its target, but didn’t explode, according to Maritime Executive. “The other two boats were manned and gunfire was exchanged between the boats and the security guards on the tanker before the boats withdrew,” the industry watcher reported Monday. 

Separately, CENTCOM forces also destroyed five Houthi aerial drones over the Red Sea and in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen on Monday. 

And this weekend, the crew of a Greek frigate HS Prasa encountered a “fleet” of drones while escorting a commercial ship in the Gulf of Aden. “At least one UAV was intercepted, and the others left the area,” European officials said on social media early Sunday. 

“Mighty Ike” comes home. About three weeks after departing the Middle East, the Navy’s USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier arrived at its home port of Norfolk, Virginia, this weekend. Local photographer John Morgan captured an image of the ship that—as coastal mists tangled with the dust of a hot and busy beach—almost seems Photoshopped or AI-generated. 

CVN 69 and its crew deployed to the Middle East one week after Hamas launched its surprise attack on Israel in early September. The crew’s six-month mission was eventually extended three different times as the Israeli-Hamas conflict continues to drag on. 

Brief dispatch aboard the Ike: “All around the aircraft carrier, the signs of the intense fight during its deployment were apparent,” Julian Barnes of the New York Times reported Monday on location. “Combat action patches for the sailors. A unit commendation ribbon for the crew. And on the flight deck, F/A-18 Super Hornets with stencils of the Houthi drones they shot down. One showed three drones destroyed and 16 bombs dropped.”

Over the strike group’s nine-month deployment, U.S. troops launched 155 Standard-series missiles and 135 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Houthi targets, the Navy announced Monday after CVN 69 rolled into Norfolk. Strike group vessels also “expended nearly 60 air-to-air missiles and released 420 air-to-surface weapons,” from November to June, according to officials.

Commander’s POV: “For nine months, Sailors on the Mighty Ike performed admirably with very little liberty and nearly seven months battling in the Red Sea,” said Navy Capt. Chris Hill, in a statement Sunday. “The crew operated flawlessly in a threat weapons engagement zone, and they brought the fight to the enemy every single day, as they were trained to do, launching and recovering aircraft.” 

“I cannot tell you how many civilian lives they saved, and there were many,” he said, “but I can say I have never been more proud to serve with such a fine group of warriors in my life. They proved the USS Dwight Eisenhower, with Carrier Air Wing Three, is indeed the best damn ship in the Navy.”

Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2015, four U.S. Marines and a sailor were killed when a 25-year-old gunman attacked two military sites (a recruiting station and a reserve center) in Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

Update: “The current total of U.S. forces in Niger is around approximately 300,” Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters Monday. For the past several years, the U.S. military maintained about 1,000 troops in Niger to fight regional terrorism. But a coup in Niamey last summer, along with growing collaboration with Russian mercenaries and troops, pushed both the U.S. and a small contingent of French troops out of Niger.

Ahead: The last 300 Americans are “still on track to meet that safe and orderly withdrawal by September 15th,” as negotiated with the Niger junta, Singh said. 

Niger, land of opportunity and/or desperation: A displaced 33-year-old father from the Middle East has traveled to Niger in an effort to earn money as a mercenary to support his family in Syria. 

“He is a member of Turkish-backed opposition forces that have been fighting President Bashar al-Assad for more than a decade,” the BBC reported Monday. “The faction he works for pays him less than $50 (£40) a month, so when Turkish recruiters appeared offering $1,500 a month to work in Niger, he decided it was the best way to earn more money.” 

The BBC spoke to at least two others from Syria, one 25 and the other 22. They are three of at least 1,000 Syrian fighters who have traveled to fight in Niger since December, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Read more, here. 

ICYMI: Juntas unite. The military juntas of coup-stricken Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso signed a treaty of confederation about 10 days ago that’s partly intended to help stop regional jihadi violence, while also illustrating the hopes of junta leaders to “build a new economic alliance that will reshape West Africa,” France24 reported over the weekend. On Friday, the UN’s top regional official warned the new treaty will hurt all three countries more than it will help. 

Despite announcing a mutual defense pact last year, “it remains unclear if the new approach has helped to stem the violence that has plagued the countries,” al-Jazeera reported when the recent treaty was signed. For example, “In 2023, Burkina Faso saw a massive escalation in violence, with more than 8,000 people killed.” Meanwhile, “In Niger, slight gains against armed groups largely backslid following the coup.” Read more, here.

Ukraine wants 25 Patriot air defense systems and an unspecified number of additional F-16 warplanes, President Volodymir Zelenskyy told reporters Monday in his first press conference since visiting the U.S. for the NATO summit last week. The Associated Press has more from Kyiv.

Additional reading: “US journalist Masha Gessen is convicted in absentia in Russia for criticizing the military,” the Associated Press reported Monday.

New: The Brits announced a formal review of their military to be led by turn-of-the-century NATO chief George Robertson, AP reported Tuesday from London. The review comes on the heels of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new government, which wants to “increase defense spending to 2.5% of GDP from its current level of about 2.3%, but has not set a deadline,” AP writes. 

Donald Trump announced his vice president pick Monday: vocal Ukraine critic and junior Senator from Ohio J.D. Vance. “J.D. honorably served our Country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal, and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association,” Trump wrote on social media Monday. “J.D. has had a very successful business career in Technology and Finance, and now, during the Campaign, will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for,” Trump added. 

Vance is the first veteran on a major-party presidential ticket since John McCain, Task & Purpose notes. Unlike McCain, Vance was not a prisoner of war, about whom Trump famously said, “I like people who weren't captured.”

Reuters recalls: “J.D. Vance once compared Trump to Hitler. Now they are running mates.”

Forecast: “Donald Trump’s first running mate, Mike Pence, tried to steer him toward defending European democracy. His new one will not,” writes Patrick Tucker for Defense One.

New ICBM effort won’t slow down despite pledges to ‘restructure’ as costs balloon. Work on the Air Force’s Sentinel program “can still continue under the contract that exists today, so we don’t want to slow down, come to a full stop on the program. But there definitely needs to be a restructure to get after the cost growth that’s happened,” said Lt. Gen. Andrew Gebara, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, said Monday at a Mitchell Institute event.

Last week, the program’s Milestone B decision was rescinded by defense acquisition chief William LaPlante, who said he won’t restore it until the program is restructured. (The decision enables a program to move from “technology maturation and risk reduction” to “engineering and manufacturing development.”) But with Gebara saying the program is rolling on, what effect will the Milestone B rescinding actually have? D1’s Audrey Decker reports, here.

Espionage Act update: With a new guilty plea, we appear to now have “the first known prosecution under a WWII-era statute banning the use of aircraft to photograph sensitive military sites,” the Verge reported over the weekend.
Involved: "Fengyun Shi, a Chinese citizen and graduate student at the University of Minnesota, [who] was arrested in January after a drone he was flying got stuck in a tree in Newport News, Virginia...After the FBI seized the drone and pulled the images off it, investigators discovered that Shi had photographed Navy vessels at multiple shipyards in Virginia." Story, here.

And lastly today: The Pentagon's generative-AI task force is trying to answer a lot of questions. How should new tools be used? Where should the actual computing take place? How much will this all cost? And that's just the start for Task Force Lima, launched last August with a planned 18-month lifespan and the stated goal of helping the department use AI “in a responsible and strategic manner." The task force is currently “providing its recommendations up to me," Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer Radha Plumb said an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Monday. More, here.