The One Big Beautiful Bill will hand about $2.5 billion to the Army, most of which will go to buying more current weapons while accelerating development of new ones, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports. The Pentagon is lumping the reconciliation bill’s funding with its recently proffered 2026 appropriations request, which combined would increase the service’s procurement budget by about 14 percent.
The cash infusion comes as the Pentagon reviews its weapons stockpiles and its ability to send aid to allied countries, a move that temporarily halted planned weapons shipments to Ukraine without approval from the White House. You can read more about that here.
Taking lessons from Ukraine’s fight against Russia, the Army is hoping to pump nearly $1 billion into air defense, including specific allotments to speed up the fielding of M-SHORAD and the Stinger missile replacement. The full rundown is here.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is hoping to stock up on drones for both offensive and defense strikes. A memo signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth calls for the Defense Department to start treating unmanned aerial vehicles as expendable munitions, rather than aircraft, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Friday.
The move would allow Navy captains or Army colonels to buy in bulk as they would other ammunition, rather than having to wait for high-level acquisitions contracts. Read more about the memo here.
Also: SecDef Hegseth pulls 7th Fleet commander nomination over drag? Rear Adm. Michael Donnelly, currently the Navy’s head of air warfare, is no longer under consideration to lead the service’s forces in the eastern Indo-Pacific, USNI reported Friday. The Pentagon has given no explanation, but The Daily Wire, which first reported the story, claimed the move came after the outlet asked the Pentagon questions about drag performers during ship talent shows while Donnelly commanded the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan from 2016 to 2018.
Second opinion: “What is Pete Hegseth so afraid of?” asks Defense One contributor Jon Duffy in a commentary on Donnelly’s scuttled nomination.
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Welcome to this Monday 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 Meghann Myers. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1933, Adolf Hitler abolished all German political parties except the Nazis.
Ukraine developments
NATO chief Mark Rutte is visiting Trump at the White House Monday. Rutte is reportedly spearheading a campaign for alliance members to buy U.S. weapons and pass them on to Ukraine, which has been fending off a Russian military invasion for three-plus years.
One possibility under discussion involves Germany buying two Patriot anti-missile systems and sending at least one to Ukraine, Reuters and the Institute for the Study of War reported this weekend. That arrangement is expected to be a key pillar of German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius’s trip this week to Washington, where he’s slated to meet with Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth.
“Pistorius will also seek clarity on whether Washington remains committed to temporarily deploying long-range missiles to Germany from 2026, as agreed under former President Joe Biden,” the wire service reported separately Monday. “The deployment would include systems such as Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of 1,800 kilometres (1,118 miles) and the developmental hypersonic weapon Dark Eagle with a range of around 3,000 km.” The U.S. military’s force posture in Germany is also expected to be a point of discussion between Hegseth and Pistorius. More, here.
Trump’s Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg visited Kyiv Monday for talks with President Volodymir Zelenskyy. The two discussed “Ukraine’s air defense, joint production, and procurement of defense weapons in collaboration with Europe. And of course, sanctions against Russia and those who help it,” Zelenskyy wrote on social media.
“I am grateful to President Trump for the important signals of support and the positive decisions for both our countries. We deeply value the support of the American people,” he added.
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Trump 2.0
State Department laid off 1,350 employees on Friday, a move the administration argues will make the agency more efficient, Government Executive’s Eric Katz reported, calling the laid off positions “non-core,” “duplicative” or “redundant.” The move brings this year’s overall reductions of State’s manpower to nearly 3,000, when combined with voluntary resignations. Full story here.
DOGE followed up over the weekend by firing nearly the entire staff of the U.S. Institute of Peace, WUSA9 reported. The administration first tried to take over the organization, founded in 1984 by the Reagan administration, in March. A June court ruling lifted a block on moves to gut the organization, which Trump first signaled with an executive order in February.
Over at VA, reported cost savings are apparently unrelated to DOGE cuts, The New York Times reports. The department touted canceled contracts that are still in effect.
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Deportation nation
Trump vowed to deport “dangerous criminals” and “the worst of the worst.” But six months into his administration, more than 7 in 10 people deported had no criminal convictions, the Associated Press reported Saturday after digging into the latest public statistics from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, released on June 23.
Expert reax: “Trump has justified this immigration agenda in part by making false claims that migrants are driving violent crime in the United States, and that’s just simply not true,” Lauren-Brooke Eisen of the Brennan Center for Justice told AP. “There’s no research and evidence that supports his claims,” she said.
Notable: “Research has consistently found, however, that immigrants are not driving violent crime in the U.S. and that they actually commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. A 2023 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, reported that immigrants for 150 years have had lower incarceration rates than those born in the U.S.” And that disparity has in fact grown since 1960, Melissa Goldin of AP writes. Continue reading, here.
Developing: Florida officials appear to be responsible for “enforced disappearances,” which would be a violation of international human rights law, the two celebrated Florida newspapers reported jointly this weekend.
The lede: “The Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times has obtained a list of more than 700 people who have been detained or appear to be scheduled to be sent to the Florida-run immigration detention facility known as Alligator Alcatraz. The DeSantis administration has not made public a list of names of the immigrants held at the facility in heavy duty tents at an airstrip in the Florida Everglades.”
The papers obtained a list of names at the facility, and “searched each of the 747 names in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Detainee Locator.” However, “Only 40 appeared on the public-facing website.”
What is an enforced disappearance? According to this definition provided by the United Nations (emphasis added), it consists of “the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.”
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Read the full article here