Developing: The U.S. Navy has evacuated hundreds of defense personnel from Naval Station Guantanamo Bay as the category-5 Hurricane Melissa barrels northeast through the Caribbean Sea. The evacuations routed nearly 900 “non-mission essential personnel” from the base in Cuba to Naval Air Station Pensacola this past weekend, Navy officials said Monday.
About the storm: “Hurricane Melissa is just hours from a historic, catastrophic Category 5 landfall in Jamaica today with life-threatening flash flooding, landslides, destructive winds and storm surge in one of the strongest landfalls on record anywhere in the Atlantic Basin,” the Weather Channel reported Tuesday morning. “In eastern Cuba, tropical storm winds are expected starting today, with hurricane-force winds arriving tonight into Wednesday morning.”
In video: The U.S. Air Force shared footage of enormous swirling, fluffy clouds from high above the hurricane on Monday. The service says aircrew from its 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron flew “multiple passes through the storm to collect critical weather data for the National Hurricane Center.” Pick through three videos posted to DVIDS on Monday here, here, and here.
Meanwhile: “U.S. military aircraft have continued to carry out flights off the coast of Venezuela, including a B-1B Lancer bomber mission on Monday, which skirted south of Hurricane Melissa,” the Washington Post reported Monday evening.
Track the course of that B-1B mission via FlightRadar24 or an open-source flight tracker posting updates to social media.
Legal considerations: The White House’s ongoing war on alleged drug-running boats around Latin America “is bringing into sharper view a structural weakness of law as a check on the American presidency,” Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported Monday. How so? “[A]dministration officials have clammed up when asked for the legal analysis to support their assertion that there is a legal state of armed conflict that makes the killings lawful.”
“Even in closed-door congressional briefings, according to people familiar with them, officials have provided no detailed legal answers,” Savage reports. As a result, the president “is blurring a line between enforcing the law and waging a war,” which leaves him “able to dictate his own factual and legal realities, and executive branch lawyers who want to keep their jobs must treat them as settled.”
Expert reax: ““The men and women who volunteered to serve this nation and engage in the most morally challenging conduct imaginable—killing someone who is not immediately threatening you—have a right to know the nation will not order them to engage in that deadly endeavor unless it is genuinely justified both legally and morally,” said former Army JAG Geoffrey Corn, who is now a criminal and military law professor at Texas Tech University. “The service members who conduct attacks have to live the rest of their lives with the memory,” he said. Continue reading (gift link), here.
Related reading: “A federal agent’s daring plan: Recruit Maduro’s pilot to turn on the Venezuelan leader,” via the Associated Press reporting Tuesday from Miami.
Coverage continues below…
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 1922, fascists took over the Italian government, led by Benito Mussolini, whose despotic rule would last for nearly two decades.
Defense civilians and other feds abroad are fretting about making rent during the government shutdown, Government Executive’s Eric Katz reported Monday. For civilian federal employees stationed overseas, the government shutdown—poised to enter its fourth week after a weekend of inactivity in Congress—is bringing a range of unique challenges. Among them: losing not just their pay but their various government-provided housing allowances and other stipends.
Eschewing political compromise to end the shutdown, President Trump has, without congressional authorization, shifted funds to ensure troops in uniform receive their pay on time. Civilians—both those furloughed and working through the shutdown—are now missing paychecks. Story, here.
Developing: Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth is planning to deliver a “major defense reform speech” on Nov. 7, Politico reported Monday. The event appears to be “the first time in recent memory a Defense secretary has assembled industry executives for a speech,” and it’s expected to happen at the National Defense University in Washington. Read more behind the paywall at Politico Pro.
Want up to 19 tons of weapons-grade plutonium? Apply at the Energy Department. Last week, DOE began taking applications from companies that want to buy plutonium as part of a program to encourage the development of nuclear reactors that might slake the needs of the power-hungry AI industry, the Financial Times reported (paywall).
One of the likely candidates is Oklo, a “nuclear startup” that in October was chosen by DOE to join a reactor-development pilot program. Oklo is backed by, and was formerly chaired by, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The winning applicants are to be announced on Dec. 31, Futurism wrote in a separate article.
Concerns? Sure. “If there were adults in the room and I could trust the federal government to impose the right standards, it wouldn’t be such a great concern, but it just doesn’t seem feasible,” Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Financial Times. Read on, here.
Additional reading:
Trump 2.0
Trump and his family are in business with Gulf monarchies. That’s not news, but a lengthy new piece from Forbes traces the thickening strands of unprecedented financial entanglement between the U.S. president and the power players of a region of strategic importance.
In crypto alone, the Trump family has made more than $800 million this year, with billions more in unrealized “on paper” gains, a Reuters examination found. “Much of that cash has come from foreign sources…” Read on, here.
ICYMI: The president’s conflicts of interest have only grown since January, when Defense One posted a roundup. “I think that that people have essentially internalized and normalized that we have a president coming in who is going to disregard basic ethical principles and use the presidency for his own benefit, in ways that might result in decisions that are not in the interest of the American people,” CREW President Noah Bookbinder said in January. Review that, here.
Additional reading: “Peter Thiel-Backed Startup Secures $100 Million to Make Chips in U.S.,” the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Read the full article here