The D Brief: New defense EOs; Somalia concerns; Ukrainian’s advice for US; Spies target fired feds; And a bit more.
Trio of executive orders seek to improve defense acquisition, exports, and shipbuilding. On Wednesday, President Trump released a flurry of ten EOs and memos, including one to modify his market-tanking tariff scheme and another about showerheads. Three defense-related orders focus on:
- Acquisition: Aims to “reform our antiquated defense acquisition processes with an emphasis on speed, flexibility, and execution” and to “modernize the duties and composition of the defense acquisition workforce” and encourage them to take risks. An accompanying statement says all major defense acquisitions programs will be reviewed under the new order, and those “more than 15% behind schedule or 15% over cost will be scrutinized for cancellation.”
- Arms exports: Seeks to bolster U.S. arms exports by reducing regulation and increasing government-industry cooperation. It sets a 90-day deadline for a plan to use “accountability metrics to improve transparency in defense sales, and moves the exportability requirement to be “earlier in the acquisition cycle.” Note: U.S. arms exports have set new records in the past two years, but there are signs that Trump’s ally-hostile policies will reduce global demand for American weapons.
- Maritime dominance: Aims to “revitalize and rebuild domestic maritime industries and workforce to promote national security and economic prosperity.” It sets a Nov. 5 deadline for a plan to do this. It also sets a 45-day deadline for “recommendations to increase the number of participants and competitors within United States shipbuilding, and to reduce cost overruns and production delays for surface, subsurface, and unmanned programs”—with separate lists of recommendations for the Army, Navy, and Coast Guard.
There’s much more in each of the orders; start by reading this report from Defense One’s Jennifer Hlad and Bradley Peniston.
- Also from the White House: “Trump Signs Orders Punishing Those Who Opposed His 2020 Election Lies,” the New York Times reported Wednesday.
Update: The Trump administration can once again fire all probationary employees after a second court ruling in as many days found those challenging the dismissals did not have standing to sue. That includes employees at the Defense Department, GovExec’s Eric Katz reports.
Background: Most recently hired, or in some cases recently promoted, employees the Trump administration fired across government in February were being reinstated back into their jobs after two courts found the terminations were conducted unlawfully. The Defense Department had fired 364 probationary employees when the stays came down, officials said in March.
But on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit paused one of the injunctions that had ordered those rehirings. That followed the Supreme Court on Tuesday also issuing a stay on a related case that had blocked the firing of 16,000 federal workers. In those cases, the Fourth Circuit and the Supreme Court found those bringing the suits did not have standing to make their challenges. Both cases will still hold hearings on the merits of the claims. Read more, here.
Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1863, the nuclear-powered attack sub USS Thresher (SSN-593) sank during dive tests in the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 129 of her crew.
Trump 2.0
New: Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is now the acting ATF director, Reuters reported Wednesday. FBI Director Kash Patel had been serving in the same acting role at ATF. But he was “removed” from that dual role some time around the end of February for unclear reasons, though a Justice Department official said “it had nothing to do with his job performance.”
“This puts a defense leader—with an already large job—in charge of a domestic law enforcement agency,” AP reports, while emphasizing, “U.S. defense officials have historically tried to maintain a strict divide between military forces and law enforcement.” “As the temporary head of ATF, Driscoll will lead efforts within the Department of Justice to investigate federal offenses related to firearms use and sales, as well as illegal sales of explosives, alcoholic beverages and tobacco products,” Leo Shane II of Military Times reports.
Developing: Trump’s national security team worries Somalia could be on the brink of collapse, the New York Times reports as the terrorist group al-Shabaab continues to make battlefield gains.
Where that comes from: “some State Department officials to propose closing the U.S. embassy in Mogadishu and withdrawing most American personnel as a security precaution,” but others “in the National Security Council, are worried that shutting the embassy could diminish confidence in Somalia’s central government and inadvertently incite a rapid collapse,” officials told the Times.
Worth noting: The U.S. military in the region has been burning through ammunition attacking the Houthis in Yemen under what SecDef Hegseth has called Operation Rough Rider.
Where to go from here is unclear, the Times reports. Especially since last week, Trump’s top counterterrorism adviser, Sebastian Gorka “convened an interagency meeting at the White House to begin to grapple with an approach...The meeting is said to have ended without any clear resolution.” Read on (gift link), here.
More reading:
- “Space Force preps ‘international space strategy’ as US-ally ties fray,” and that’s coming within weeks, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports;
- “Will Space Force shift contracts to commercial? ‘Everything’s on the table,' official says,” Decker reports from the Space Symposium in Colorado;
- “Confronted with ‘eye-opening’ costs, SecNav vows to root out waste.” John Phelan, who is learning on the job, says a business approach will fix things, Lauren C. Williams reports from the Sea-Air-Space conference;
- “Marine Corps to field counter-drone systems to dismounted units,” in the wake of a September flyoff, Meghann Myers reports.
Ukraine
Kyiv’s former top military commander has some advice for the U.S. military: Ukraine’s battlefield-management system known as DELTA deserves recognition as a centralized interface for contemporary, software-dependent warfare, argues Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, writing Thursday for Defense One.
“Data, AI, drones, and their management have become the norm, forcing new tactics, equipment, and systems that can adapt quickly against an evolving enemy,” Zaluzhnyi writes. Due to so much incoming information—human reports, open-source intelligence, satellite imagery, drone video feeds, cellphone video clips, cyber data, and more—“Western militaries have slumbered too long” because they’ve been “Lulled by decades of multi-domain dominance.” Russia’s Ukraine invasion has shown that those days are over, Zaluzhnyi says.
Enter Ukraine’s DELTA system, which he calls “an ecosystem of military products” that is “more straightforward than the American Palantir battle-management system.” In this way, Zaluzhnyi argues, DELTA “offer[s] an advantage against a larger yet information-deficient opponent.” Notably, “DELTA uses AI to swiftly sort through the data and give leaders a comprehensive picture of the battlefield and beyond,” he says. “This includes a repository of identified and proposed targets ready for deployment to the appropriate friendly strike or cyber platforms.”
Why it matters: “Meeting adversaries armed with mass-deployed, attrition-optimized autonomous weapons they may end up as the proverbial victims of the German WW2 Blitzkrieg,” the general says. “Fortunately, they have a gift of immeasurable value: Ukraine’s hard-won expertise, forged in a grueling fight for survival.” Continue reading, here.
New: The Kremlin and Trump’s White House carried out a prisoner swap arranged by the two countries’ spy agencies with mediation by the UAE, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
For the U.S., Russia released Ksenia Karelina, a dual national who lived in Los Angeles but was arrested last February while visiting her grandparents in the mountain city of Yekaterinburg. She was later convicted of treason because she’d donated less than $60 to a New York-based nonprofit called Razom for Ukraine. U.S. authorities have called the case “absolutely ludicrous,” the Associated Press reports.
Russia received Arthur Petrov, who “was arrested in Cyprus in August 2023 at the request of the U.S. on charges of smuggling sensitive microelectronics to Russia and extradited to the U.S. a year later,” AP reports.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe is credited with negotiating on behalf of the U.S. “I’m proud of the CIA officers who worked tirelessly to support this effort, and we appreciate the Government of U.A.E. for enabling the exchange,” he told the Journal.
Etc.
Spies from China and elsewhere are trying to draw in unwitting current and former U.S. federal employees, Nextgov reported citing a document (PDF) the National Counterintelligence and Security Center released Tuesday.
The spies are “posing as consulting firms, corporate headhunters, think tanks, and other entities on social and professional networking sites,” the document says. It reminds workers with security clearances that they must protect classified information even after they leave government service. Read more, here.
By the way: The UK’s military chief, Adm. Sir Tony Radakin, just visited China for the first time in a decade, the British Times reports. “He gave an unprecedented speech to future Chinese military commanders at the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) National Defence University in Beijing on Wednesday,” and he spoke privately with “General Liu Zhenli, a member of China’s Central Military Commission and chief of staff of the CMC joint staff department,” the Times reports, noting there is currently “an escalating trade war between the US and China.”
For your radar: By the end of the month, “the Royal Navy flagship, HMS Prince of Wales, will depart for the Indo-Pacific via the Mediterranean as the head of a deployment involving 12 nations.” More, here.