A war against Iran could be a prolonged and damaging conflict with numerous U.S. casualties, Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. Dan Caine has told President Trump and his National Security Council in recent days, according to Monday reports by Axios and the New York Times.
Trump had a different story, posting on Monday afternoon that “if a decision is made on going against Iran at a Military level, it is [Caine’s] opinion that it will be something easily won.” The president added, “I would rather have a Deal than not but, if we don’t make a Deal, it will be a very bad day for [Iran] and, very sadly, its people.”
The Pentagon has already sent nearly half of its deployable U.S. air power to the region. “Think air power on the order of the 1991 and 2003 Iraq war,” Robert Pape of the University of Chicago said Saturday. “Never has the U.S. deployed this much force against a potential enemy and not launched strikes.”
The likeliest options under consideration appear to be focused on aerial strike and subsequent air defense, Axios reports. “No one is advocating for an invasion or ‘boots on the ground’ military action.” Despite the next round of U.S.-Iran talks slated for Thursday in Geneva, the State Department on Monday evacuated non-essential personnel and family members from Lebanon “out of an abundance of caution and until further notice.”
“Trump has been leaning toward conducting an initial strike in [the] coming days intended to demonstrate to Iran’s leaders that they must be willing to agree to give up the ability to make a nuclear weapon,” the Times reports. And if that doesn’t achieve the desired result, “he would consider a much bigger attack in coming months intended to drive that country’s leaders from power.”
Update: The Navy’s newest aircraft carrier is on a twice-extended deployment as it speeds through the Mediterranean and closer to Iran. Troops aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford have been at sea since June, already two months past the typical deployment window; if they make it to May, that would set a new record, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. According to one sailor on the carrier, “many crew members are angry and upset, with some saying they want to leave the Navy at the end of the deployment.” Another admitted “all sailors knew what they had signed up for.”
Last month, the CNO said he’d push back against sending Ford. “I think the Ford, you know, from its capability perspective, would be an invaluable option for any military thing the president wants to do—but if it requires an extension, you know, it’s going to get some pushback from the office,” Adm. Daryl Caudle told reporters at the Surface Navy Association conference. “Regardless, the greatest honor you can have as a person in the Navy is to think you’re so valued that you need to be extended. So the sailors will rise to that occasion,” if need be, he said.
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Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day four years ago, Russia launched its poorly-planned full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sending some troops into the country with their dress uniforms in the expectation Kyiv would fall and the entire country would capitulate in less than a week. But 209 weeks later, Kyiv is still standing and Ukraine is still resisting.
Around the Defense Department
The Pentagon finally released an unclassified version of its reconciliation spending plan on Monday, two weeks after the statutory deadline for the White House to send its spending proposal to Congress. Last year, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act authorized the Defense Department to spend an extra $151 billion through September 2029, but provided little guidance on what. Monday’s document responds to lawmakers’ post hoc request to fill out those details.
The largest chunk, $24.4 billion, will go to parts of the Golden Dome missile-defense effort, the new document says. It also includes measures to address a key shortcoming in the Pentagon’s readiness for high-intensity conflict: getting low-cost, highly autonomous drones to the front lines quickly. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has more, here.
Reminder: The White House wants a $1.5 trillion defense budget for the next fiscal year, which is a more than $500 billion increase—despite a lack of agreement over why such an increase is even necessary, as the Washington Post reported over the weekend.
The U.S. military says it killed three more people in a new strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat in the Caribbean Sea on Monday, marking another instance of what legal experts describe as extrajudicial killings at sea.
According to military officials at Southern Command, “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” they said in a statement, accompanied by a video clip. “Three male narco-terrorists were killed during this action,” SOUTHCOM said.
Second opinion: “The strikes are arbitrary deprivations of life—extrajudicial killings—because lethal force is deliberately being used against people who, in that moment, pose no immediate threat to the lives of others and who could be apprehended by non-lethal means,” humanitarian law professors Michael Schmitt and Marko Milanovic write in Just Security. “Even on the assumption that those killed were drug smugglers, killing them on the high seas is as unlawful as if the police started killing those suspected of dealing drugs on the streets of a U.S. city.”
The strike is the 44th declared attack by the U.S. military in this campaign, which has killed at least 150 people, left three survivors and nine others missing since September.
Analysis: “Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth came to office openly hostile to his department’s legal culture and determined to change it. He is succeeding,” argues former Pentagon special counsel Jack Goldsmith, writing Monday. “One result is persistent lawbreaking by the Department of Defense in derogation of the rule-of-law culture that the department has fostered since Vietnam,” Goldsmith says. That includes the boat strikes, which “might satisfy the promiscuously permissive [Office of Legal Counsel] understanding of Article II of the Constitution. But as many people have pointed out, they take place outside of an ‘armed conflict,’ which makes them unlawful under international law and thus murder.”
Goldsmith calls the boat-strike campaign “the most important legal corruption of the DOD in Trump 2.0 that we know about” because “given the clear legal violations related to the boat strikes, it would be very surprising if there weren’t serious legal shortcuts being taken in other military operations that we don’t know about.” This includes possible artificial intelligence uses within the Defense Department and operations by the National Security Agency, Cyber Command, or special operators around the globe.
He references the legal controversy around interrogation techniques after the 9/11 attacks, which eventually spurred Congressional oversight that led to the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. “Eventually there will be a reckoning,” Goldsmith writes. “It is hard to know what form it will take, but I fear it will hurt some in the military who are now in a bind between what the law requires and what the civilians, including the Commander in Chief, say and order otherwise.” Read the rest, here.
By the way: Trump’s top U.S. attorney in D.C. just shelved her attempted prosecution of six Democratic lawmakers for reminding troops last fall that it’s their duty to ignore illegal orders, NBC News reported Monday.
They shared their video 10 weeks after the boat-strike campaign began. Two days after their video was posted, President Trump accused the lawmakers of sedition and called for their arrest. He also shared a post that said the members of Congress should be hanged for their message, which echoed troops’ guidance in the Uniformed Code of Military Justice.
Despite pressure from Trump and SecDef Hegseth, a grand jury declined to indict the six lawmakers two weeks ago after failing “to convince a single juror that they had met the threshold to bring charges,” NBC reported at the time.
Hegseth also sought to demote one of the lawmakers, former astronaut and retired Navy Capt. Mark Kelly, over his role in the video. But a judge later blocked that effort less than two weeks ago, writing in his decision the “Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees.” Hegseth vowed to appeal the decision.
Air Force officials and Northrop Grumman have reached a deal to accelerate B-21 bomber production by 25 percent following months of negotiations, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Monday.
Where that comes from: $4.5 billion for a production boost was tucked into the $151 billion reconciliation legislation last summer. While those funds can be spent over five years, the Defense Department plans to execute all of it by this October “if that can be done without sacrificing effectiveness,” according to a Pentagon planning document obtained by Defense One on Monday.
It’s unclear how the military plans to use the money to accelerate production, and the document said details were classified. Air Force officials said B-21 bombers were delivered on schedule last year and that the service remains “on track” to deliver the first aircraft in 2027 to Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, which will serve as the bomber’s first main operating base and formal training unit. Read more, here.
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Trump 2.0
After the Supreme Court blocked his global tariff regime, President Trump is now considering national-security tariffs on several industries, including “large-scale batteries, cast iron and iron fittings, plastic piping, industrial chemicals and power grid and telecom equipment,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
Trump already issued a flat tariff rate of 15% in response to the SCOTUS ruling on Saturday. That lasts for 150 days in accordance with a law called Section 122. The new tariffs on the industries listed above would occur under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.
“Trump has already used Section 232 to issue tariffs on sectors such as steel, aluminum, copper, cars, trucks and auto parts during his second term, and those levies aren’t affected by the Supreme Court decision last week,” the Journal reports. More industries could be affected by these new tariffs as well—including “semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, drones, industrial robots and polysilicon used in solar panels” since those were already being considered under Section 232.
Why not just go to Congress for Trump’s tariffs? House Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday he doesn’t see a clear path forward for that. “It’s going to be, I think, a challenge to find consensus on any path forward on the tariffs, on the legislative side,” Johnson told reporters. “And so that is why, I think, you see so much of the attention on the executive side, the executive branch, and what they’re doing and how they’re reacting to the ruling.” Politico has more.
Related reading: “US business, consumers bore 90 percent of Trump tariff costs,” The Hill reported earlier this month citing a recent study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; the Kiel Institute for the World Economy arrived at a similar conclusion in January.
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