The D Brief: Troops’ pay in jeopardy; CENTCOM’s Syria surge; Army to cut 5% of generals; USAF may trim F-35 buy; And a bit more.

Shutdown watch: Troops won’t get paid over Christmas unless shutdown is averted, Pentagon officials said Thursday after Republicans bowed to tweets from Elon Musk and backed out of a spending deal that would have funded the government through March. 

The federal government will shut down at midnight unless Congress can forge a new deal. “​It’s still possible that the House passes a CR on Friday, then the Senate does so over the weekend, and any FY25 appropriations lapse is immaterial,” writes Capital Alpha analyst Byron Callan. 

A shutdown that proceeds in earnest means no end-of-month paychecks for troops and no pay for drilling reservists after Friday, Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters on Thursday. Civilian personnel deemed essential for operations will work without pay, while those deemed inessential will be furloughed, he said.

Back pay is not guaranteed. Special legislation would be needed for that. AP: “In previous shutdowns Congress has worked to secure troop pay, but not everyone was covered. In 2019, members of the Coast Guard were left out and went more than a month without pay.”

Go deeper: AP has useful reporting on Ryder’s press conference, the scramble for a new deal, and why President-elect Donald Trump and his advisor Musk torpedoed the existing one.

Welcome to this Friday 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. Happy birthday to the Space Force, which turned five today. 

Mideast developments

Update: The U.S. military has some 2,000 troops in Syria, which is more than twice the figure of 900 that the Pentagon has cited for years, Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters Thursday.

If it’s news to you, you’re not alone. Ryder said that he only recently learned that the force in Syria was larger than publicly declared. “As I understand it and as it was explained to me, these additional forces are considered temporary rotational forces that deploy to meet shifting mission requirements, whereas the core 900 deployers are on longer term deployments,” Ryder said. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has a bit more.

New: The U.S. military says it killed an ISIS leader in a precision airstrike in the eastern Syrian province of Deir ez-Zor on Thursday. The strike killed “ISIS leader Abu Yusif aka Mahmud” and at least one other unnamed associate “in an area formerly controlled by the Syrian regime and Russians,” Central Command officials announced Friday. 

“The United States—working with allies and partners in the region—will not allow ISIS to take advantage of the current situation in Syria and reconstitute,” CENTCOM commander Army Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla said in a statement. “ISIS has the intent to break out of detention the over 8,000 ISIS operatives currently being held in facilities in Syria,” he added, and promised, “We will aggressively target these leaders and operatives, including those trying to conduct operations external to Syria.”  

Today in Damascus, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf met with Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham leader Ahmed al-Sharaa to talk about Americans missing in Syria, the country's transition away from the Assad regime, and the possibility of ending U.S. sanctions on the country, according to Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute.

• Leaf had planned to attend a press conference at the Four Seasons hotel in Damascus, but that was cancelled due to security concerns, Lister reports. 

Also attending along with Leaf: Roger Carstens, special presidential envoy for hostage affairs; and adviser Daniel Rubinstein, the New York Times reports. See a public photo of the officials meeting with the relief group the White Helmets, here. 

New: Israel’s military carried out airstrikes on Houthi positions across Yemen on Thursday, including in the port cities of Hodeida and Salif, but also at several inland sites, as the Israeli Defense Forces illustrated in a map published Friday. Those strikes were in response to a Houthi surface-to-surface missile attack inside Israel that allegedly hit a school at about 2:30 in the morning Thursday. 

For what it’s worth: The Houthis claim the attacks on Israel were conducted using drones, and such attacks “will not stop until the aggression on Gaza is stopped.” 

Trendspotting: Israeli airstrikes have dramatically increased since the Assad regime was toppled nearly two weeks ago, the New York Times reported Thursday with a map of apparent Israeli strikes inside Syria alone. Their data comes from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which claims Israel has launched nearly 500 airstrikes since Assad fled Damascus for Moscow on December 8. 

Worth noting: The Houthis appear to be amid a nearly two-week-long lull in attacking commercial ships traveling along Yemen’s coasts. Instead, they seem to be “focusing their dwindling missile supplies on targeting U.S. Navy assets and striking central Israel,” regional analyst Mohammed Al-Basha reports.  

By the way: The Navy’s USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group is in the Red Sea this week, along with two destroyers and a cruiser, open-source sleuths pointed out on social media Thursday. 

Houthi prediction for 2025: “A ceasefire in Gaza should theoretically pave the way for a diplomatic solution to the Red Sea crisis,” Noam Raydan, Farzin Nadimi wrote this week for the Washington Institute. “A serious solution, however, will require the involvement of U.S. regional partners that saw transit to their ports affected by the Houthi attacks,” they noted Monday. 

“On the other hand, if the Trump administration pursues a tough policy toward Iran, commercial ships could face more hybrid risks. Either way, the next administration’s Middle East policy will directly influence the maritime domain in the region.” Read more, here. 

Also: The U.S. just sanctioned more Houthi officials, “including the head of the Houthi-aligned Central Bank of Yemen branch in Sana’a, for their roles in trafficking arms, laundering money, and shipping illicit Iranian petroleum,” the Treasure Department announced Thursday. Details here. 

Related reading: 

• “Looking West: The Houthis’ Expanding Footprint in the Horn of Africa,” by Michael Horton, a fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, writing in the latest edition of the Sentinel from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center; 
• “Israel vs. Turkey: The Intensifying Middle-East Power Struggle,”  Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. 

Around the Defense Department

Bye-bye, top-heavy Army? The U.S. will cut more than a dozen general officer positions in the coming years, a spokesman for Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George told Defense One this week. The revelation comes a week after Defense One published a commentary calling the Army “too top-heavy.” As it turns out, the service’s top officer agrees, Meghann Myers reported Thursday.

“There are general officer billets across the Army that Gen. George, in collaboration with the secretary and staff, has determined are not essential for the Army,” said Col. Dave Butler, George’s spokesman.

George isn’t ready to announce the exact positions, Butler said, but he has been reviewing possibilities since he stepped into his job in September 2023. The Army is authorized a total of 219 general officer positions, so declining to fill 12 of them would represent more than a 5 percent cut. Continue reading, here. 

Developing: The Air Force may reduce its future F-35 purchases, depending on how newer development efforts go, outgoing Secretary Frank Kendall said Thursday during an event at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. 

Kendall emphasized that the F-35 isn’t going away anytime soon, and even if the service decides to build a sixth-generation fighter under the NGAD program, it would be a “very expensive airplane” that would require at least “several years” to field in quantity, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports. 

But the Pentagon does need “better performance” out of Lockheed Martin, Kendall said. The company is still reeling from a year-long F-35 delivery pause caused by technology development problems with an upgrade package for the jet. “They’re not delivering what they've been promising, and they're not doing as fast as they could by a wide margin,” Kendall said. Read the rest, here.