A break in the Israel-Hamas fighting after two years of war appears to be holding, so far. “After the release of the last living hostages and Palestinian prisoners and detainees, the tenuous ceasefire in Gaza was holding Tuesday while questions remain over other key parts of a U.S. plan for the region,” the Associated Press reported on Tuesday morning. “The long list of uncertainties includes when Hamas will return to Israel the bodies of the 24 hostages believed to be dead in Gaza, and Israel’s insistence that a weakened Hamas disarm. The future governance of Gaza is also unclear.”
President Trump touted the ceasefire during a Middle East trip on Monday. “In an atmosphere of ebullient or exhausted relief, few wanted to rain publicly on Trump’s parade,” the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung wrote, but many obstacles to a permanent peace remain. For example, DeYoung wrote on Tuesday, Trump “predicted the rapid expansion of the Abraham Accords, his first-term achievement of normalization between Israel and a handful of Arab states, but ignored the insistence of much of the rest of the Arab world that the path to a viable sovereign state combining the West Bank and Gaza under the Palestinian Authority must come first.” More, here.
Revealed: Arab-Israel military cooperation. Washington Post, reporting on Saturday: “Even as key Arab states condemned the war in the Gaza Strip, they quietly expanded security cooperation with the Israeli military, leaked U.S. documents reveal. Those military ties were thrown into crisis after Israel’s September airstrike in Qatar, but could now play a key role in overseeing the nascent ceasefire in Gaza.” Read on, here.
NPR has a look at the Gaza war by the numbers, e.g. more than 67,000 Palestinians reportedly killed by the Israeli military since October 2023 versus about 1,200 Israelis during the surprise attack by Hamas two years ago. More, here.
Welcome to this Tuesday 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. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so 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 in 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work fighting racial inequality with nonviolence.
Around AUSA
Day 1 of the year’s biggest Army-themed event was busy, but several panels were cancelled, including an Indo-Pacific roundtable and a discussion of augmented reality, showing mixed success in efforts to defray the effects of the federal shutdown and the Pentagon’s new restrictions on public speaking.
News from the annual meeting of the Association of the U.S. Army in downtown Washington, D.C., includes:
- Although the Pentagon’s latest strategic documents knock the Indo-Pacific off its perch as the Defense Department’s priority theater, that has not so far reduced funding or training opportunities for soldiers in South Korea, the commander of 8th Army told reporters. Defense One’s Meghann Myers has a bit more from Lt. Gen. Hank Taylor, who confirmed that his civilian workforce has been furloughed during the shutdown.
- The Army wants AI to help man artillery and air defense units—when the tech is ready, said Maj. Gen. Frank Lozano, who heads Program Executive Office Missiles and Space. “Language learning models aren’t at the point where they can do spatial reasoning or real-time situational awareness and deliver a plan to a soldier to act on. But the Army is working on what they want that to eventually look like,” Myers writes, here.
Among the industry announcements:
Around industry
Defense tech has a new unicorn. Software and analytics firm Govini has joined the ranks of defense unicorns with a new investment that pushes the company’s valuation past $1 billion, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Friday.
Govini, which boasts a 300-person workforce and reported $100 million in revenue for fiscal 2025, joins other billion-dollar defense startups such as robot-boatmaker Saronic, Anduril, and Germany’s Helsing.
Background: Govini has recently landed several contracts for its Ark.ai platform, which is used to track and analyze supply chains down to raw materials, including Army and Defense Department-wide IDIQ contracts for supply chain analysis for undisclosed amounts and a slice of the similar government-wide $919 million SCRIPTS contract. The company is also part of the Army’s pioneering Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, program, a $99.6 million effort led by Anduril to prototype a new system for the 4th Infantry Division. Govini is working to introduce predictive logistic and replace a manual process. Read more, here.
In other industry news, a startup called Valinor has unveiled what is essentially a field hospital in a box, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Sunday. It’s called “Harbor,” and it’s a 20-foot shipping container that can be modified for different types of battlefield care, such as immediate damage control or prolonged casualty care—and it can be modified to power anti-drone defensive systems.
Also: Anduril is partnering with Valinor to allow telehealth over its Lattice mesh network to manage and reduce the unit’s electromagnetic signatures.
Harbor can be set up in minutes and units start around $300,000, which puts them “several orders of magnitude less [in cost] than other traditional medical solutions,” said Luke Sciulli, former U.S. Army medic and head of medical innovation at Valinor. More, here.
Around the Defense Department
The top enlisted leader of the Air Force announced his upcoming retirement on Monday, following the death of his wife on Sept. 20. “After nearly 30 years in uniform, I am retiring from active-duty service, to ensure I take care of our family and learn to live with Katy in a new way, to continue to honor her as I should,” Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force David Flosi wrote in his message. Task & Purpose has more on Flosi’s career and parting message, here.
Additional reading:
Trump 2.0
Developing: The Pentagon will build a facility for the Qatari air force at an Idaho air base, the U.S. defense secretary announced on Friday. The arrangement appears to flow from earlier agreements related to the 2017 sale of Boeing F-15Q combat jets to the Gulf monarchy, but the scope of the project, its cost and financing, and Congressional buy-in remain unclear, Defense One’s Tom Novelly reports.
“Today, we’re announcing we’re signing a letter of acceptance to build a Qatari Emeri Air Force facility at the Mountain Home air base in Idaho,” Hegseth said during a morning appearance with Qatari Defense Minister Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani at the Pentagon. Hegseth made the announcement after thanking his counterpart for Qatar’s role as mediators during the Israel-Gaza war.
However, seven hours later, Hegseth’s X account tweeted, “Important clarification:.. Qatar will not have their own base in the United States—nor anything like a base. We control the existing base, like we do with all partners.” Asked for further detail, the Office of the Secretary of Defense wrote in an email: “Facilities Construction and Operational Support for Qatari F-15 Aircraft at Mountain Home Air Force Base was executed via foreign military sales, will enable the construction and operational integration of an enduring location for Qatari F-15 aircraft at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho.” Continue reading, here.
Update: An appeals court ruled Saturday National Guard troops sent to Illinois can remain on standby but can’t deploy—e.g., to the streets of Chicago against the wishes of local officials—while a lawsuit filed by the state of Illinois works its way through the court system.
That means 200 Texas National Guard soldiers will stay nearby in Chicago while 300 Illinois National Guard troops are activated and training, but not deploying to the streets yet either. “Members of the National Guard do not need to return to their home states unless further ordered by a court to do so,” the Saturday ruling said.
The panel’s one-page order Saturday “did not include a rationale for the decision, which is temporary,” the New York Times reports, explaining, “Appeals courts often issue short, temporary rulings on time-sensitive matters. Courts generally issue lengthier rulings once judges have had time to review and consider arguments from each party.”
White House reax: “We’re obviously going to litigate this as much as we can,” Vice President JD Vance said on ABC’s This Week Sunday.
Related: Washington state’s attorney general joined Illinois’ suit against the White House over National Guard deployments to Chicago. Already, two dozen other states’ top attorneys and their governors have joined the suit, which “warns that turning the military into a domestic police force would blur the line between civilian and military power—the very abuse the Founders sought to prevent when creating our democracy,” Washington’s Attorney General Nick Brown said in a statement Sunday.
Other states in the suit include Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawai‘i, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont. “The governors of Kansas, Kentucky and Pennsylvania also joined the filing,” Brown noted.
Bigger-picture analysis: “Trump deploys tactics and language of war against perceived domestic threats,” Emily Davies and Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported Saturday. In sum, “Through public statements, orders and a little-noticed policy directive, President Donald Trump has made clear that he is eager to use the might of the American military and the resources of the federal government to crack down on what he sees as domestic threats: violent crime, illegal immigration and the antifa movement,” they write.
Expert reax: Trump’s order last month designating “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization” is “ungrounded in fact and law,” Faiza Patel of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program wrote in an explainer published Thursday. Acting on Trump’s order, she warns, “would violate free speech rights, potentially threatening any person or group holding any one of a broad array of disfavored views with investigation and prosecution.”
To begin, “As both former FBI Director Chris Wray and the Congressional Research Service have explained, antifa is not a group or an organization, but a decentralized movement,” Patel notes. “Moreover, the administration has no authority to designate groups as domestic terrorist organizations, as is obvious from the failure to cite any statute or constitutional provision in support of the president’s action.”
Further, in pursuit of anti-fascists, Trump’s order and accompanying memo says he wants to target “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” Patel calls that list “breathtakingly broad…threatening to turn the full force of the federal government to rooting out a conjured-up left-wing conspiracy of political violence funded by shadowy figures.”
“Neither the law nor the facts support this premise, and court challenges to actions taken pursuant to these orders will likely meet with success,” Patel predicts. “But in the process, many individuals and organizations will be vilified and harmed for their constitutionally protected activities and others will be muzzled as they fear the consequences of associating with or speaking up for groups that have been targeted. And we will all be less safe as law enforcement resources are diverted from real threats to imagined ones.” More, here.
Additional reading:
Lastly today: Ahead of a Tuesday afternoon deadline, at least 30 news outlets say they won’t sign the Trump administration’s new restrictive rules for Pentagon coverage from inside the building.
Among those not signing, per WaPo’s Scott Nover: Defense One, the New York Times, AP, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Atlantic, CNN, NPR, Task & Purpose, Breaking Defense, The Hill, Politico, the Washington Times, the Washington Examiner, Newsmax, the Washington Post.
- One outlet that has agreed to the restrictions: One America News.
Point of clarification: Hegseth’s Monday tweet falsely suggested, among other things, that members of the press currently have unfettered access to Pentagon spaces and don’t wear badges.
“It’s important everyone understands that this document is not about press’ ability to ‘roam the halls,’” writes CNN’s Natasha Bertrand. “It equates asking for information—the press’ literal job—with criminal activity. The new rules even stipulate that sharing our contact information on social media and asking people to reach out could make journalists a ‘security risk’ and be grounds for revoking badges. That is the real reason why no one —save one far-right outlet—is signing.”
Related reading:
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