In a 70-20 vote, the Senate passed its $925 billion defense bill Thursday, a month after House lawmakers passed their $893 billion version of the bill. “Armed Services committees will now attempt to negotiate a compromise bill that can pass by the end of the year,” Politico reports. Notable: The Senate’s version restricts U.S. troop reductions in Europe and in South Korea. It also seeks “to overhaul the Pentagon’s complex acquisition process to ramp up the defense industrial base and allow the military to more quickly field needed weapons and technology.”
Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee: “This year’s NDAA reflects the severity of the threat environment we find ourselves in—one that we have not faced since World War II. This bill centers on two main themes: rebuild and reform. My colleagues and I have prioritized reindustrialization and the structural rebuilding of the arsenal of democracy, starting with drone technology, shipbuilding, and innovative low-cost weapons. We have also set out to enact historic reforms in the Pentagon’s budgeting and acquisition process to unleash innovation and root out inefficiencies.”
Jack Reed, D-R.I., and SASC’s ranking member: “This is a good, bipartisan bill that supports our troops and strengthens America’s security. It provides essential resources for servicemembers and their families, modernizes key platforms, and invests in critical technologies like hypersonics, AI, and cybersecurity. This NDAA also bolsters our posture against China and Russia, supports America’s allies, and prepares the Department of Defense for emerging threats.”
AUSA preview: Amid the shutdown, the Army will do its best to talk about transformation, counter-drone gear, and acquisition reform next week at the year’s biggest Army-oriented conference: the annual meeting of Association of the U.S. Army in downtown Washington, D.C. (Agenda, here.)
On Tuesday, AUSA is to bring together the current and former commanders of U.S. Army North to talk about threats to the homeland, promising a rare public discussion on what has become the Defense Department’s top priority as the second Trump administration prepares to roll out its National Defense Strategy. Defense One’s Meghann Myers offers a curtainraiser on that panel and other planned talks of note, here.
By the way: The shutdown limits how the Army can fund travel and meals, so AUSA has donated roughly $1 million to bring senior leaders to D.C., CNN reported Thursday.
Senate to USAF chief nominee: You need to fix alarming mission-capability rates and rising sustainment costs for the Air Force’s F-35A fighter jet, senators said at Thursday’s confirmation hearing for Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, the former head of Air Combat Command and Pacific Air Forces, who was nominated last month to serve as the service’s top uniformed leader.
Wilsback declined to endorse the service’s ongoing China-focused reorganization launched by current chief Gen. Dave Allvin, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported from Capitol Hill, here.
BTW: Allvin’s retirement ceremony is being held today at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland.
For the second time in a month, a U.S. warship commander has been relieved of duty. Cmdr. Robert Moreno, who led the Blue Crew of the ballistic missile submarine USS Wyoming, was relieved on Wednesday by his squadron commander, who lost confidence in Moreno’s ability to command, the Navy announced without further detail. That followed the Sept. 11 firing of the captain of a littoral combat ship. (Navy Times, USNI News)
Better barracks? “A new barracks task force aims to improve military living conditions,” Military Times reported Thursday after Defense Secretary Hegseth posted a video about the topic to social media. In an Oct. 6 memo, Hegseth ordered the task force to get him recommendations within 30 days.
Task & Purpose: “The Pentagon’s new Barracks Task Force will steer toward private sector ‘investment opportunities’ and contracting to overhaul the military’s junior enlisted barracks,” the outlet reported Thursday. See also T&P’s original report on the effort, which includes good background on the oft-woeful state of enlisted living conditions, here.
Coverage continues below…
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. 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 1845, the U.S. Naval Academy was established at the Fort Severn Army post in Annapolis, Md.
Developing: Tennessee National Guard troops are expected to start patrolling Memphis today, the Associated Press reports in what will be the fifth American city with a visible military presence since Trump’s re-election. (The others are Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland.)
Reminder: Tennessee’s Republican governor supports Trump’s use of the military on U.S. streets. Gov. Bill Lee also could have ordered this deployment months ago since he is in control of his state’s Guard troops and didn’t need input from Trump to make the call. The mayor of Memphis, on the other hand, is an elected Democrat—though he’s said he does not oppose additional assistance for city issues like “law enforcement, beautification, and homelessness services,” Mayor Paul Young said on social media in September.
Also notable: Crime in Memphis is currently at a 30-year low, according to the local police. However, Memphis has the highest violent crime rate per capita of any U.S. city, according to FBI data.
New: On Thursday, District Judge April Perry paused for two weeks Trump’s deployment of 200 National Guard troops from Texas and 300 more from Illinois to the Chicago region. “I have found no credible evidence that there is a danger of rebellion in the state of Illinois,” she said in her oral ruling late Thursday afternoon.
Adding more Guard troops to Chicago “will only add fuel to the fire that the defendants themselves have started,” Perry said Thursday. She also stated there appears to be “a growing body of evidence that DHS’ version of events are unreliable.”
Homeland Security officials have also been using “unreliable evidence,” which casts “significant doubt on DHS’s credibility on what is going on in the streets of Chicago…I am very much struggling to find where this would stop,” she said.
Gov. Pritzker: “[T]here is no credible evidence of a rebellion in the state of Illinois. And no place for the National Guard in the streets of American cities like Chicago,” said Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker in a statement on social media after Perry’s ruling Thursday.
Worth noting: Oklahoma’s GOP governor shared his opposition to Texas Guard troops in Chicago, telling the New York Times on Thursday, “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.” Stitt’s attorney general, however, felt differently, as States Newsroom reported near the bottom of its dispatch on the matter Thursday.
Related: Federal agents in Chicago have also been targeting journalists, prompting a different judge on Thursday to grant a 14-day temporary restraining order banning federal agents from “[d]ispersing, arresting, threatening to arrest, threatening or using physical force against any person whom they know or reasonably should know is a Journalist, unless [the] Defendants have probable cause to believe that the individual has committed a crime.”
ICYMI: “Portland’s ‘War Zone’ Is Like Burning Man for the Terminally Online,” Isaac Stanley-Becker reported last Thursday for the Atlantic.
Images from allegedly “war-torn” Portland: Here are National Guard troops sent to Portland in line to eat donuts last Thursday.
Congressional opposition: “An authoritarian President—emboldened by a rubber-stamp Congress and a deferential Supreme Court—is sending military troops against American citizens who are peacefully protesting in city after city,” said Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in a statement Thursday.
“This is un-American and a fundamental violation of the purpose of our military, which is to defend us from foreign powers, not to be a tool in a President’s hand to attack people who disagree with their point of view,” Merkley said.
“Americans have the right under the First Amendment to protest this Administration’s cruel and misguided immigration policies,” Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said. “There is no rebellion or insurrection happening in our state…If the Trump Administration truly wanted to help my city of Chicago and our state of Illinois, it wouldn’t defy Illinois elected leaders. It would work with us. It would restore the millions of dollars it suspended in crime prevention and public safety grants.”
“This kind of use of the military poses a tremendous threat to all of our civil liberties, even if we are not from California or Oregon or Illinois,” said Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
“Today, it’s California. Today, it’s Illinois. Today, it’s Oregon. Where will it be tomorrow? Where does this end?” said California Sen. Adam Schiff. “I’ll tell you where it ends. It ends in more civil strife. It ends in more morale problems in the military. It ends in a lesser democracy. And if we are here in nine months, where will we be with four years of this? And I’ll tell you this, we will not be a democracy. At the pace we are going in four years, we will not be a democracy,” said Schiff.
Read more:
Another thing: The National Guard is upset that some of its Texas soldiers appeared to be out of compliance with fitness regulations, according to an Associated Press photo from a Tuesday report out of a suburb of Chicago.
“All National Guard Soldiers and Airman [sic] are required to meet service-specific height, weight and physical fitness standards at all times,” the National Guard Bureau said in an unusual statement Thursday. “When mobilizing for active duty, members go through a validation process to ensure they meet those requirements. On the rare occasions when members are found not in compliance, they will not go on mission. They will be returned to their home station, and replacements who do meet standards will take their places,” the statement reads.
Developing: Venezuelans prepare for possible U.S. invasion. In coastal Venezuela, “Since the first [U.S. military boat] strike [on Sept. 1], military camps have become ubiquitous in the area as Maduro’s regime prepares for a potential invasion,” Nancy Youssef, Gisela Salim-Peyer, and Jonathan Lemire reported Thursday for the Atlantic.
Reminder: “[T]he idea that Maduro is a major drug lord is a key justification for the strikes,” the trio of reporters write. Indeed, Maduro is “one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world and a threat to our national security,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in August. However, “The idea that Maduro’s regime runs a drug enterprise big enough to endanger American lives is also viewed skeptically in Venezuela, and not just among Maduro apologists,” Youssef and company report. “If the argument is that drug trafficking is a good reason to threaten to invade a country, you’d have to invade Mexico first,” one former Venezuelan official said. Read more, here.
Another theory for U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats: “[T]he endgame of the military strikes against drug cartels in international waters is to lay the groundwork to use lethal military force against Americans at home,” argued former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, writing last week on Substack. “If [Trump] can provoke confrontation between civilians and the military—perhaps one where there is open gunfire or anything that he can use to claim that our military is under attack or in harm’s way—he can then justify arbitrarily designating Americans as military targets,” she writes.
Trump 2.0
Developing: The Pentagon is sending 200 troops to Israel as ceasefire monitors, the New York Times reported Thursday evening. Those forces are set to “join soldiers from nations in the region, including Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates to provide oversight” for the Israel-Hamas agreement officials from both sides agreed upon late last week.
“The first of the 200 troops have already started to arrive in Israel and more will follow over the weekend to begin setting up the new coordination center.” Tiny bit more, here.
Related reading: “How Trump got his Gaza deal done,” via David Ignatius of the Washington Post, writing Thursday.
For those in the administration still thinking about strategic competition with China, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a new report assessing “costs and benefits for seven key alliances across eight core areas of U.S.-China strategic competition.” Among their findings:
- “The Philippines has advantageous military geography—but lacks other benefits and poses an entanglement risk in the South China Sea.”
- “Japan can further U.S. aims with China across all eight categories, especially as its defense spending increases. It is willing to cooperate in several key areas and poses low risk of entanglement.”
- “Australia can make contributions at a more modest level…Risk of entanglement is low.”
- “South Korea is reluctant to use its economic and military power to counter China but poses a substantial military burden and risk on the United States. Chip manufacturing and other nonmilitary capabilities help strengthen the case for the alliance.” Read over the full report, here.
And lastly: A Rutgers scholar specializing in antifa tried to flee to Spain after receiving death threats, but when he got through security and to the gate at Newark Liberty International Airport Wednesday, the airline told him “the reservation was just canceled,” the New York Times reports.
The death threats emerged after “Some students involved in the Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA, the political group founded by Charlie Kirk, began circulating an online petition that claimed [assistant professor Mark] Bray was an ‘outspoken, well-known antifa member’ and referred to him as ‘Dr. Antifa’ while calling for his dismissal,” AP reports. “He said he learned of the petition calling from his ouster when Fox News contacted him for comment. He said he has since received additional threats and that his home address and personal information about his family were posted on social media.”
Note: “Doxing,” or posting someone’s personal information (such as home address) is one of the acts the White House said it will now consider as part of its sprawling “domestic terrorism” designation, administration officials announced in late September—after Trump declared Antifa a domestic terrorist organization, even though there is no such category under U.S. law.
White House: “The Attorney General shall issue specific guidance that ensures domestic terrorism priorities include politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.”
Additional reading:
Admin note: We’ll be back with this newsletter on Tuesday following a day off for Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!
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