Neither Israel nor Iran are backing down after more than a week at war.
An Iranian missile attack wounded more than 20 Israelis in the north and south of the country on Friday, Haaretz reports. And for the Israeli side, “Fighter jets struck several Iranian missile systems and radar installations in the areas of Isfahan and Tehran, which were intended to target IDF aircraft and disrupt their operations,” the country’s military said on social media Friday, with an accompanying video of said strikes.
Iran’s top diplomat is visiting European officials in Switzerland. “Can they stop Trump joining Israel’s war?” Politico asked in its coverage of that meeting Friday.
Trump: “I will make my decision on whether or not to [join Israel’s war] within the next two weeks,” the president said in a statement Thursday, according to his press secretary. His statement cited “a chance for substantial negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future.”
Analysis: “That dashed Israeli hopes of a swift climax to the war,” the New York Times reports. “Israel seeks to destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, and its leaders had hoped that Mr. Trump would soon send American bombers to destroy an underground enrichment site deemed largely impermeable to the kinds of munitions in Israel’s arsenal. Now, Israel must decide whether to wait for U.S. military support or use its own, less powerful missiles to attack the site.”
About that special munition the U.S. is sitting on: It’s the GBU-57, or Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the subject of special features by the Times and the Wall Street Journal. “The U.S. military has concluded that one bomb would not destroy the Fordo facility on its own. To destroy the site, an attack [using B-2 Spirit stealth bombers] would have to come in waves, with bombers releasing one after another down the same hole,” the Times writes.
But U.S. defense officials are reportedly considering nuclear options as well, if it turns out Iran’s Fordo underground enrichment facility is beyond the reach of GBU-57s, the Guardian reports. Should the U.S. eventually elect to go the nuclear route, it would likely choose the B61-11 nuclear earth penetrator, arms control scholar Jeffrey Lewis writes. And that would have “a yield of 300 or 400 kilotons. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 15 and 21 kt,” says Lewis.
“Nuclear earth penetrators don’t dig all the way down to the bunker,” Lewis explained in a thread on social media Friday. “Instead, they burrow just deep enough to couple the energy from the explosion into the ground, sending a shockwave through the geology to crush the bunker. A few meters is enough,” he says. That’s because “A 300 kt weapon that burrows 3 m into the ground will impart the same energy as an 8 mt contact burst…Moreover, severely diminishing returns on ground shock occur ~10 m.”
The big problem: Fallout. A panel of experts from the National Academy of Sciences “calculated that a 300 kt weapon would need to penetrate ~800 m to fully contain the explosion.” And that suggests, “Depending on which way the wind is blowing and the time of day, you might kill a lot of civilians,” he warns. Read the rest of his thread for details.
Related reading:
Welcome to this Friday 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 1963, the so-called “red telephone” was opened linking Washington, D.C., and Moscow.
Around the Defense Department
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth has not yet completed this year’s defense budget, and he’s weeks behind deadline. But $25 billion Hegseth and Trump want to spend on their conceptual missile-defense system “Golden Dome” is in the reconciliation bill, which only needs Republican support to pass—and would raise the country’s debt ceiling by $5 trillion.
But Golden Dome is a completely unproven system with incredibly ambitious goals, as former astronaut and Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly stressed in his exchange with Hegseth this week on Capitol Hill. “First of all, is this system designed to intercept a full salvo attack?” Kelly asked. Hegseth eventually replied, “Yeah, it’s not meant to be just one nation.”
“So what kind of reliability are you aiming to build into this system? Are we looking for something like four-9s on intercept success?” Kelly asked. Hegseth seemed confused, so Kelly continued, “99.99% reliability.”
Hegseth: “Obviously you seek the highest possible. You begin with what you have in integrating those C2 networks and sensors. Building up capabilities that are existing with an eye toward future capabilities that can come online as quickly as possible. Not just ground-based but space-based.”
Kelly: “So against future capability too. So do you believe that we can build a system that can intercept all incoming threats? Do you think we could build that system? This is a very hard physics problem.”
Hegseth: “You would know as well as anybody, sir, how difficult this problem is and that’s why we put our best people on it. We think the American people deserve it.”
Kelly: “You’re talking about hundreds of ICBMs running simultaneously, varying trajectories, MIRVs, so multiple re-entry vehicles. Thousands of decoys. Hypersonic glide vehicles, all at once. And considering what the future threat might be, might even be more complicated than that. And you’re proposing spending not just $25 billion, but upwards of—I think [the Congressional Budget Office] estimated this at at least half a trillion; other estimates, a trillion dollars. I am all for having a system that would work. I am not sure that the physics can get there on this. It’s incredibly complicated.”
Kelly also pointed out Hegseth and Trump cut 74% of the staff at the Pentagon’s weapons-testing office, the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation. And that’s the same office that would oversee testing of the Golden Dome.
Kelly’s advice to Hegseth: Finish your homework on Golden Dome. “You got to go back and take look at this but I also strongly encourage you to put together some—before we spend $25 billion or $175 billion or $563 billion or a trillion dollars—put together a group of people to figure out if the physics will work,” the senator said. “You could go down a road here and spend hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars with the taxpayer money, get to the end and we have a system that is not functional. That very well could happen.”
Watch the full five-minute exchange (shared via veteran journalist Marcy Wheeler) on YouTube, here.
More reading:
Europe
Russia is on “the brink of recession.” That’s what Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Thursday, according to Russian media reports. Indeed, the country may already be in one: “The numbers indicate cooling, but all our numbers are [like] a rearview mirror,” he said, some three years into a war that has drawn international sanctions and focused largely on military spending. AP reports, here.
Meanwhile in Paris, U.S. defense companies—and their congressional backers—chased rising military spending. Trump-European “tension has been notably absent at this week’s Paris Airshow, where U.S. lawmakers and arms manufacturers pledged greater transatlantic partnership as Europe ramps up spending on everything from artillery shells and fighter jets to missile defence systems,” Reuters reports.
Runup to the June 24-25 NATO summit:
Troops in the homeland
Update: An appeals court let Trump keep control of California’s National Guard for now. The latest decision (PDF) from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals keeps in place a hold on California’s request to return the troops back to the authority of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who did not ask for the National Guard’s assistance protecting immigration enforcement officials and federal property. A lower-court judge called Trump’s decision illegal, but the administration appealed the district judge’s ruling.
9th Circuit: “The undisputed facts demonstrate that before the deployment of the National Guard, protesters ‘pinned down’ several federal officers and threw ‘concrete chunks, bottles of liquid, and other objects’ at the officers. Protesters also damaged federal buildings and caused the closure of at least one federal building. And a federal van was attacked by protesters who smashed in the van’s windows,” the court’s three-judge panel wrote in its Thursday decision.
Why it matters: “The court case could have wider implications on the president’s power to deploy soldiers within the United States after Trump directed immigration officials to prioritize deportations from other Democratic-run cities,” the Associated Press reports. “The ruling means control of the California National Guard will stay in federal hands as [California’s] lawsuit continues to unfold.”
Notable: “Newsom could still challenge the use of the National Guard and U.S. Marines under other laws, including the bar on using troops in domestic law enforcement,” Reuters reports.
On the horizon: Trump may try to send more National Guard troops to cities across the country, he said on social media just before midnight Thursday. “The Judges obviously realized that Gavin Newscum is incompetent and ill prepared, but this is much bigger than Gavin, because all over the United States, if our Cities, and our people, need protection, we are the ones to give it to them should State and Local Police be unable, for whatever reason, to get the job done. Thank you.”
Second opinion: “That’s not exactly what the [9th Circuit Court’s] opinion said,” said former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance. “Although this is a win for Trump, the panel disagreed with him on a key issue,” she wrote Friday. “Instead, they noted that under the caselaw, ‘courts may at least review the President’s determination to ensure that it reflects a colorable assessment of the facts and law within a “range of honest judgment.”’ That language would seem to be a warning to the president not to overstep,” Vance said, and added, “But based on his social media post, it went unheard.”
Next up: San Francisco District Judge Charles Breyer “has a hearing scheduled for later [Friday] on a preliminary injunction request that could reach additional issues like Trump’s use of the Marines and the Posse Comitatus Act, so expect more on this one in the coming days,” Vance said.
This week in masked men with guns: In Los Angeles, a group of men kitted out with body armor, weapons, and no identification tried unsuccessfully to gain entry into Dodgers Stadium parking lots Thursday ahead of an evening game with the Padres. The team believed they were Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and turned them away.
But who were they? USA Today reports ICE said the agency was “never there” and the Department of Homeland Security claimed the masked agents were with Customs and Border Patrol, though their presence was “unrelated to any operation or enforcement.”
Drawing a crowd: “In recent immigration raids, ICE and other federal officials have sometimes operated in unmarked cars,” the New York Times reports. On Thursday, the cars and masked men eventually attracted protesters to the parking lot, so the LA police were dispatched to remove both the apparent agents and the protesters.
When did masks become standard at ICE? “By law, federal agents are allowed to cover their faces, in order to protect themselves from retaliation by drug cartels and the like. But masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents seem to have become the rule rather than the exception,” writes Sam Adams at Slate. “It’s difficult to put a finger on exactly when the practice became widespread, especially since the volume of ICE raids has increased so dramatically so recently (and has received corresponding increased attention). But go back even a year, and it’s relatively easy to find coverage of ICE raids in which the agents’ faces are clearly visible.”
Why it matters: “ICE says it wasn’t them. DHS says they were Border Patrol. But honestly who the hell knows? They’ve given permission for any psycho to put on a ski mask, point a gun, grab people & throw them into an unmarked vehicle,” California state Sen. Scott Wiener wrote on social media.
Rewind: It was less than a week ago that a man dressed as a masked police officer went on a shooting spree in Minnesota this past weekend, killing former Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark—shortly after non-fatally shooting Minn. State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, at their home.
Additional reading:
- “As ‘lone actor’ attacks rise, Trump cuts program aimed at spotting them,” USA Today reported Tuesday;
- “LA Residents Foil ICE Raids Using Amazon Ring’s Neighborhood Watch App,” Forbes reported Wednesday;
- “Trump administration puts new limits on Congress visits to immigration centers,” Reuters reported Thursday; Axios has similar reporting Friday, here;
- “Trump Is Losing Political Ground on Immigration,” the Wall Street Journal reported Friday;
- And a “French Lawmaker Says He Was Denied Entry Into the United States,” the New York Times reported Thursday from Paris; relatedly, “Do Americans Have a Right to Know About the World?” Sam Lebovic, historian at George Mason University, asked in February for the Knight First Amendment Institute.
Read the full article here