Defending America’s borders, not deterring China, tops the list of priorities Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent to senior Pentagon leaders and combatant commanders just a few weeks ago, according to a memo obtained by Defense One’s Meghann Myers.
China has long been seen inside the Pentagon as the military’s “pacing challenge,” cutting into U.S. efforts to influence friends and allies across the Indo-Pacific, Africa and Latin America. But before mentioning China, the first priorities in Hegseth’s new guidance are to “seal our borders, repel invasion, counter narcotics and trafficking, and support the Department of Homeland Security mission to deport illegal aliens.” This focus reflects “the President’s determination to restore our neglected position in the Western Hemisphere,” Hegseth wrote in the document distributed August 7.
Why it matters: The language is a departure from not just the last president’s National Defense Strategy, but the president’s own first-term strategy, both of which placed deterring China as their first priority. And it’s a shift in rhetoric that has borne out in action, as Trump has ordered the militarization of the southern border while deploying Marines and National Guardsmen to Los Angeles to dispel protests of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, Myers writes.
“I am concerned that DOD has become the ‘easy button’ for everything,” said Glen VanHerck, a retired Air Force general and former head of U.S. Northern Command. “That, long-term, is not good for our nation, to have DOD in our streets. We need to resource those agencies, spelled out in law to enforce our laws, and to conduct crisis response, in our homeland.” Continue reading, here.
Troops in the USA
Between 5,000 and 10,000 people on Monday protested Trump’s desire to send the National Guard to Chicago. “The march was one of roughly 1,000 ‘Workers over Billionaires’ protests across the country on the U.S. Labor Day holiday,” Reuters reports from Illinois’ largest city. “But Chicago’s demonstration had a decidedly more pointed tone as residents bristled against Trump’s promise to target Chicago next in a deployment similar to those under way in Los Angeles and Washington D.C., two other Democrat-run cities.”
Context: “Homicide rates in the nation’s third-largest city have plunged in recent years, according to city crime data. And though a 2025 University of Chicago survey reported roughly half of Chicagoans feel unsafe in their neighborhoods at night, many protesters said on Monday that they felt largely safe in the city.”
Related reading: “Why Is the National Guard in D.C.? Even They Don’t Know,” Ashley Parker and Nancy Youssef wrote last week for The Atlantic.
Also: Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, and Missouri are GOP-led states whose cities have higher rates of violent crime than D.C. “Yet no Republican governor has asked for federal intervention,” David Chen reported Monday in an analysis piece for the New York Times.
Cities include: Kansas City, St. Louis, and Springfield in Missouri; Birmingham, Ala.; Cleveland, Dayton, and Toledo, Ohio; Tulsa, Okla.; Tennessee’s Memphis and Nashville; Houston; Little Rock in Arkansas; Utah’s Salt Lake City; and Shreveport, La. “All have crime rates comparable to Washington’s, according to F.B.I. statistics.”
Notable: “Republican governors did not want to answer why they were willing to send their National Guard troops to Washington while not inviting the same attention to their cities,” Chen reports.
Expert reax: “They’re not doing it to improve public safety. It’s designed to humiliate political opponents,” said Jeffrey Butts of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Dive deeper: The Associated Press on Friday reported a similar observation based on the latest crime statistics, which are presented in two separate charts, here.
Just in: Trump’s use of National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal judge said Tuesday in a 52-page opinion. “The evidence at trial established that Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles. In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act,” District Judge Charles Breyer wrote in an opinion released publicly on Tuesday morning. The “defendants instigated a months-long deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles for the purpose of establishing a military presence there and enforcing federal law. Such conduct is a serious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act,” he said.
“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law,” Breyer writes. “Nearly 140 years later, [the] Defendants—President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense—deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced. There were indeed protests in LosAngeles, and some individuals engaged in violence. Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”
Caveat: Breyer’s order blocks use of those troops for law enforcement tasks; but that part of his decision is put on hold until Sept. 12, likely “to avoid provoking either a less-sympathetic Ninth Circuit panel or the justices,” national security law professor Steve Vladeck writes. If his decision is upheld, it would mean Guard and Marine forces cannot participate in “arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants,” Breyer said. “Los Angeles was the first US city where President Trump and Secretary Hegseth deployed troops, but not the last,” he added. CNN has a bit more.
Developing: Trump is expected to make a “defense-related” announcement around 2 p.m. ET Tuesday afternoon, following several days of speculation about his reportedly worsening health, Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich wrote on social media. Catch it live at DVIDS, here.
Will Trump move forward with his promise to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War? It’s unclear just yet, but the president said on August 25 he wanted to officially change the name “over the next week or so.”
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 with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1958, a U.S. Air Force RC-130 was shot down over Armenia after it strayed into Soviet airspace during a surveillance mission, killing all 17 crew members.
Venezuela’s dictator says his troops are ready for whatever the U.S. Navy is up to off his country’s coast, the Associated Press reported Monday from Caracas.
Nearby: “Seven U.S. warships, along with one nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, are either in the region or are expected to be there soon, bringing along more than 4,500 sailors and marines,” Reuters reported Friday. “The U.S. military has also been flying P-8 spy planes in the region [over international waters] to gather intelligence.”
Why: President Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters Friday the U.S. troops are in the vicinity to “combat and dismantle drug trafficking organizations, criminal cartels and these foreign terrorist organizations in our hemisphere.” However, “most of the seaborne drug trade travels to the United States via the Pacific, not the Atlantic, where the U.S. forces are, and much of what arrives via the Caribbean comes on clandestine flights,” Reuters notes.
“In the face of this maximum military pressure, we have declared maximum preparedness for the defense of Venezuela,” Nicolás Maduro said Monday, calling the U.S. deployments “an extravagant, unjustifiable, immoral and absolutely criminal and bloody threat.”
Expert reax: The U.S. presence near Venezuela is “too big to be just about drugs. [And] It’s too small to be about an invasion,” one specialist from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington said. His guess? The ships appear to be a show of force for now. Read on, here.
Additional reading: “Mystery surrounds $1.2 billion Army contract to build huge detention tent camp in Texas desert,” AP reported last week as well.
The Space Force is increasingly going commercial for space domain awareness. “We’ve gone and looked at many of our acquisition programs that were on the more traditional route, and said, ‘Is there anything that we can do on the requirements side that’s causing us not to go to commercial? Can we take advantage of this?” said Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, who is the military deputy, acting assistant Air Force secretary, and the service’s acquisition executive for space. He spoke at the National Defense Industrial Association’s emerging technology conference on Thursday, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports, here.
More reading:
Asia
Iron Man in the Himalayas? China’s PLA embraces exoskeletons. Six years ago, the Chinese military hosted a “Super Warrior” contest in which 50-plus prototypes from 25 developers competed in categories such as lightweight mobility, heavy-load marching, and munitions handling. That led earlier this year to the PLA’s “intelligent logistics devices” exercise on the far-western Karakoram Plateau of the Xinjiang Military District, part of a push to move such gear from demonstrations to deployment, BluePath Labs’ Tye Graham and New America’s Peter W. Singer report in the latest installment of The China Intelligence column.
More reading:
- China to unveil US ship-killing weapons at military parade—Telegraph
- Japan looks to build drone ‘shield’ in record $60 billion defense budget request—Japan Times
Middle East
Trump, others still want to depopulate and redevelop Gaza, the Washington Post reports off a 38-page prospectus for a “Riviera of the Middle East” to be built on the rubble. The plan envisions paying Palestinians to leave with a share in the new venture, a move the prospectus says would save $23,000 per person. Read on, here.
Israeli strike kills Yemeni prime minister, 11 other leaders. The Saturday strike on the capital of Sanaa, the first such attack to kill senior officials, killed the prime minister of the Houthi-run government and several other ministers. On Monday, thousands attended a funeral in the capital’s largest mosque. Mohammed Miftah, now de facto head of the Iran-aligned Houthi government, vowed revenge. Reuters reports, here.
Related reading:
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