Pentagon stands up new task force to coordinate anti-drone efforts. The Joint Interagency Task Force 401 will spearhead the acquisition and integration of air defense systems to take down small unmanned aerial systems, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday in a video.
That includes the department’s Replicator 2 project, Hegseth wrote in a Wednesday memo, adding that the group will “rapidly deliver Joint C-sUAS capabilities to America’s warfighters, defeat adversary threats, and promote sovereignty over national airspace.”
The memo also shuts down the five-year-old Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office. “The JCO had great intentions but struggled to compel the different services and organizations to participate,” an Army official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told Defense One. “Whereas the JIATF will have a lot more ability to coordinate and compel.” Meghann Myers has more, here.
The U.S. Navy’s new landing craft cost 40% more than expected. The Ship-to-Shore Connector program from Textron Systems—the service’s next-generation Landing Craft Air Cushion (PDF)—is at risk of a congressionally-mandated termination of the program.
What happened: Labor, material, and supply chain costs have risen roughly 40 percent from their 2021 baselines, according to a Pentagon acquisition report declassified and cleared for public release on Aug. 21. A Nunn-McCurdy breach was formally declared in April. Now the Navy “is currently executing [the] required re-certification process” to assert to Congress “that the program is essential to national security.” That’s expected in October.
What’s behind the spike: Textron has delivered 13 of the craft since 2012, including five since January 2024. But the Navy “entered into a follow-on construction contract with Textron in November 2024 to procure nine” more of the landing craft with money appropriated for fiscal years 2022 to 2024, the report says. A Nunn-McCurdy breach was declared shortly after the Navy awarded a $167 million contract for UK-based Rolls Royce engines in February 2025. So far, Congress has appropriated money for 35 of the landing craft, which leaves 22 still to be delivered.
More 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 with Bradley Peniston and Lauren C. Williams. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Florida, killing more than 1,800 people and causing an estimated $125 billion in damages.
Trump 2.0
The Trump administration is pausing training at the federal government’s primary law enforcement academies for anyone not related to immigration enforcement, saying the change is necessary to meet the president’s “immediate priorities,” Eric Katz reported Thursday for Government Executive.
What’s going on: The administration is in the midst of surging 10,000 employees to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, creating unprecedented demand at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers. Training needs could create bottlenecks as ICE seeks to rapidly onboard the new officers and agents, current and former officials have warned, and the administration is now taking drastic measures to avoid those pitfalls.
After reporting the pause, DHS said in a statement it was “actively supporting training programs for many agencies during the surge,” as well state, local and international partners, “as space and resources allow.” It also noted that some training schedules may be adjusted to accommodate ICE’s needs, but it would restart those as early as possibly in fiscal 2026. More, here.
Developing: After Trump was “disappointed” by the Army’s June parade in Washington, the “Navy is trying to plan a bigger celebration this fall, hoping for a shimmering spectacle with seacraft,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Update: Trump’s Pentagon is reinstalling slaveowner Robert E. Lee’s portrait at West Point’s library, the New York Times reported Thursday.
The 20-foot-tall portrait, “which includes a slave guiding the Confederate general’s horse in the background,” will go back up “three years after a congressionally mandated commission ordered it removed,” Greg Jaffe writes.
Background: “What is important to remember is that the initial installation of the Robert E. Lee portrait had little to do with history. It was installed in the 1950s,” noted Civil War historian Kevin Levin. “To understand why you need to appreciate the vagaries of historical memory. The relevant history or context is the 1950s and not the 1860s.” How so? Levin continues:
- “The Cold War created a need for a unified front against the perceived threat of the Soviet Union and communism. American history was framed to encourage a unified front that tolerated no dissent, which necessitated glossing over lingering tensions from the Civil War and Reconstruction. Memory of Lee played a vital role in this.”
- “The civil rights movement threatened this consensus view as white southerners brandished Confederate flags in the post Brown v. Board of Education period.”
- “By the mid-1950s the federal government was in the process of planning for the upcoming 100th anniversary or Centennial celebration of the Civil War. As part of Cold War culture this commemoration would push a reunion narrative with Lee at the center. Lee became the quintessential American.” He has a little bit more to say about the matter on Substack, and you can find that here.
Second opinion: “I am a simpleton, but it does not make much sense to me to hang a picture of a literal traitor in the halls of your military learning institution,” Bloomberg’s Gerry Doyle wrote on social media. He added, “this is one of those things where ‘nuance’ is just a smokescreen obscuring the core issue, which is—again—that lee and the confederacy committed treason against the united states, and then got beaten soundly in the resulting war, which was about the legality of slavery.”
Additional reading: “Inside Pete Hegseth’s Civilian Purge at West Point,” via Jasper Craven, writing Thursday for Politico.
Federal judge: White House advisor Kari Lake can’t fire Voice of America director. NPR reports: “Instead, by law, Lake must have the explicit backing of an advisory panel set up by Congress to help insulate the international broadcaster and its sister networks from political pressure. As President Trump dismissed six of the seven members of the panel shortly after taking office and has not named their replacements to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Lake cannot take such an action.” Read on, here.
The ruling is a rare hiccup in the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle U.S. government efforts to shape global opinion, which Defense One’s Patrick Tucker wrote about earlier this year.
Additional reading:
Ukraine developments
Test your arms and gear in Ukraine, NATO’s military chief urges companies. Too few defense contractors are testing their technology in real-world situations against a peer adversary, NATO’s military chief said Thursday, praising companies that are making the effort to work with the Ukrainian military. “Those few that have tried it have either learned a lot, or they’ve decided to go home because they can’t compete in that environment. But that is going to be the environment that we face,” said Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, who leads U.S. European Command and serves as NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe. He spoke virtually at an NDIA event. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has more, here.
Industry opinion: “If you want to sell to European ministries of defense, to European militaries, they will want to know that your system is working in Ukraine, that you are testing it there, that you’re evaluating it there,” said Jan-Hendrik Boelens, CEO and co-founder of the Munich-based drone developer Alpine Eagle.
Boelens helped create what Alpine Eagle calls its “Sentinel” counter-drone system, which they say is the world’s first air-to-air, counter-UAS system. He explains how the system works in a new Defense One Radio podcast interview you can find here.
“Rather than just using drones to strike ground targets or provide aerial surveillance, what you can do is essentially equip these drones as fighter jets, both with small interceptors attached that can shoot down other drones, as well as with sensors to detect and track other drones,” Boelens said.
“We deploy multiple drones in a coordinated fashion,” he said. “Some of them are carrying sensors, some of them are carrying effectors. Some of them are carrying both. And essentially, with the distributed sensor network that we deploy, we find the targets, then we make sure that a drone carrying an interceptor is putting itself into a firing position that maximizes the probability of actually hitting the target. And then when the target is within firing range and is locked, we launch the interceptor drone, pretty much like an air to air missile.”
The German military is working with Alpine Eagle as their “launch customer,” Boelens said. And that’s been especially useful for the Sentinel because “as soon as you give it to a customer, give it to a user, then things start to break. You start to find out what’s wrong, which assumptions were and were not correct. And that’s been extremely valuable.” Hear the rest of our 15-minute conversation over on Spotify or Apple podcasts.
Pending U.S. arms sale to Ukraine: 3,350 Extended Range Attack Munition missiles and 3,350 Embedded Global Positioning System/Inertial Navigation Systems with Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module, for a total cost of $825 million.
“Ukraine will use funding from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway and Foreign Military Financing from the United States for this purchase,” the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency said Thursday. Additional details, here.
Update: Real estate billionaire Steve Witkoff’s go-it-alone diplomacy is frustrating U.S. and European officials, Politico reported Friday. His “solo approach has led to repeated miscues with Russia, leaving Trump’s pledge to quickly end the war between Russia and Ukraine adrift.” More, here.
Etc.
And lastly this week, here are several recent AI-related developments we noticed and thought we’d pass along:
Read the full article here