Today’s D Brief: Ukrainian incursion continues; Israeli border war, mapped; Upping US production; USAF's record sales; And a bit more...

Ukrainian forces are still fighting in Russia’s Kursk region. Washington Post: “In Ukraine’s largest incursion into Russia since Russian forces invaded Ukraine more than two years ago, fighting continued on Thursday in the Kursk region where Ukrainian troops were reportedly occupying several border villages and part of the town of Sudzha. The bold cross-border operation, now in its third day, stunned Moscow and raised questions about whether Kyiv’s troops had violated Western restrictions on the use of donated weapons and fighting vehicles.”

Russia is reinforcing its forces in the region to drive off what Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia's general staff, said at a Kremlin briefing on Wednesday is a Ukrainian incursion force of about 1,000 troops and dozens of armored vehicles.

What is Kyiv’s objective? “Several times since Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian and allied forces have crossed the Russia-Ukraine border for brief, showy raids—counter-invasions, if you will. The risky raids never accomplished very much except to embarrass Russian leaders,” writes David Axe at Forbes. This new incursion drew upon Ukrainian forces stretched thin in the country’s east, where Russian troops have been making small gains. 

“I’m still not sure what the goal here is,” wrote John Helin, a Ukraine expert with Finnish analysis group Black Bird Group. “According to unreliable reports, Ukraine has concentrated elements from two to four brigades in the area. These would be gravely needed in the east.”

Axe: “It’s possible the Ukrainian general staff in Kyiv believes a Ukrainian northern offensive might compel the Kremlin to shift troops away from eastern Ukraine, thereby slowing Russian advances on that front.” But it just might not be a diversion. “Instead, it may be exactly what it appears to be: a serious effort to capture and hold Russian soil.” More, here.

Satellite imagery reveals devastation of “simmering war” along Israel-Lebanon border. New York Times: “Even before a deadly rocket strike and a round of assassinations renewed fears of a wider war across the Mideast, the steady, simmering conflict between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon proved devastating. For almost a year, both sides have been carefully calibrating their tit-for-tat attacks to avoid a larger conflict. But the near-daily exchanges of fire have added up.” A map of these skirmishes, and a before-and-after of the beleaguered town of Aita al-Shaab, are here.

Welcome to this Thursday’s edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Bradley Peniston and Audrey Decker. 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 1924, the Navy’s airship USS Shenandoah tied up to the mooring mast aboard the oiler USS Patoka for the first time, anticipating wider operations with the fleet.

Throughput Thursday. Just under a year ago, the Pentagon launched the Replicator program to address the dawning realization that the U.S. military might swiftly run out of its expensive, hard-to-produce munitions in a conflict with Russia or China. How’s it going? Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks offered some updates Wednesday at an NDIA event:

• The program is on track to deliver “multiple thousands in multiple domains…by end of August 2025.”
• Some U.S. military units have completed training on cheap drones produced by the project. 
• The Pentagon has begun experimenting with the drones in potential combat scenarios, such as fighting high-tech foes with advanced air defenses. “We’ve been operating Replicator’s attritable autonomous systems in real time, in multiple regions around the world,” Hicks said. “We’ve learned valuable lessons about ways to use these drones against [anti-access/area denial] systems that we didn’t even consider at first.”
• Replicator systems will be formally included in the fiscal 2026 budget proposal, which is now under construction. 
• And various service branches are working to include the myriad new systems into their way of war: “The Army has accelerated its move toward a formal program of record. The Navy is developing a standardized [commercial systems opening, or CSO] process for uncrewed systems that can do all sorts of missions. And the Air Force is building its own program of record out of a CSO collaboration it did” with the Defense Innovation Unit, she said. D1’s Patrick Tucker has yet more, here.

Still, there’s a way to go before the U.S. defense industrial base can produce drones at a wartime rate, writes D1’s Sam Skove. Ukrainian forces are expending something like 10,000 quadcopters and other small drones per month. In response, its country’s firms are building around a million drones per year. 

U.S. firms likely aren’t making enough to replace even half of that. Some estimates of total domestic monthly production include the mid-single-digit thousands or the low four-figures.

Solutions? Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute: “Until the U.S. military mainstreams operational concepts that demand large numbers of drones, production will remain at a relatively low level.” David Benowitz, who leads research at drone market firm DroneAnalyst: an order of 1,000 to 2,000 drones could “significantly help justify investments that could ramp up production and potentially lower costs by investing at a component level.” Skove’s piece goes deeper; read it, here.

Anduril pitches a high-production factory. The seven-year-old company announced Thursday that it has raised $1.5 billion to build a facility that can produce tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles and weapons—everything from robot wingmen to large undersea vehicles. The company will focus on weapons that can be built quickly, not exquisitely, Chris Brose, Anduril’s chief strategy officer, told reporters. Using Anduril’s “unified software platform,” called Lattice, to enable production, and taking advantage of the commercial supply chain, this effort will be a “totally different way of thinking about building systems for scale.”

Brose hasn’t picked out a location for the first plant, which he dubs “Arsenal-1,” but he says it might well be the first of a “constellation of hyperscale production facilities across the United States and our allies.”

USAF-facilitated arms exports set record. Foreign countries are buying more weapons through the U.S. Air Force than ever before, due in large part to global instability, officials say. “Business has been booming, I understand, for this team, as events happen around the world and our partner nations recognize that it's a dangerous world once again, things like Russia invading Ukraine,” said Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Geraghty, the director of the Air Force’s Security Assistance and Cooperation Directorate. 

Sales of U.S.-made weapons facilitated by the directorate totaled $46.2 billion in fiscal 2024, up from $28.7 billion in fiscal 2023 and an all-time high, according to Shawn Lyman, deputy director of AFSAC. arlier this year, the U.S. approved the sale of 40 F-16s to Turkey and up to 40 F-35s to Greece. D1’s Audrey Decker reports.

Lastly: Boeing’s new CEO took the reins today. But can Kelly Ortberg rescue a company whose problems extend far beyond the stratosphere? NASA astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams could be stuck in space until 2025 as NASA and Boeing try to figure out why the company’s Starliner capsule malfunctioned and whether it’s safe to fly home. The astronauts arrived in June aboard the International Space Station for a planned week-long mission. NASA, which has reportedly rebuffed Boeing’s arguments that Starliner is safe enough, may even call on SpaceX to get them home next February. This is not good PR for Boeing, which has faced multiple delays and lost $1.6 billion on the program—and now might need to be saved by their direct competitor.