A soldier opened fire on his coworkers at Fort Stewart Army base in Georgia, injuring five before he was subdued and taken into custody, Army officials said in a press conference Wednesday afternoon. Two of the wounded remain hospitalized Thursday morning, while three others were released Wednesday, CNN reports.
Latest: The Army awarded the Meritorious Service Medal to six soldiers who intervened in a brief presentation livestreamed Thursday morning at Fort Stewart.
The alleged shooter was a 28-year-old supply sergeant with no prior deployments who used his personal handgun for the violence, Brig. Gen. John Lubas told reporters. He had purchased the 9mm Glock in Florida less than three months ago, the same month he was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence. The incident Wednesday lasted about 30 minutes, and triggered a lockdown across the base. Investigators are still digging into a possible motive.
Related reading: “Base shooting raises questions about military gun policies,” AP reported separately Wednesday.
Welcome to this Thursday 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 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, enabling the Johnson administration to begin heavy bombing in Vietnam. President Johnson had declared in public that North Vietnamese forces attacked a U.S. destroyer, while privately admitting, “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”
China’s nukes
Commentary: How many nuclear weapons will Beijing build? No one knows, but we can game out some logical endgames, writes Jacob Stokes, a senior fellow and deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. “Since 2020, China is believed to have tripled its nuclear arsenal to 600 warheads—enough to begin to shift the strategic balance, if still well short of the thousands held by the United States and Russia.”
Will Xi Jinping stop short of 1,000? Seek parity with the 1,550 deployed warheads of the U.S. and Russia? Go beyond? Stokes looks at the likelihoods for Defense One, here.
Around the world
Spain rejects F-35, will choose between Eurofighter or FCAS. The downselect is a consequence of Spain’s decision to spend some of the funds earmarked for new fighter jets on more immediate needs, in a bid to raise defense expenditures to 2 percent of GDP, a spokesman for the Spanish defense ministry said on Wednesday. The country will buy either the European-made Eurofighter and the tri-national Future Combat Air System. Reuters has a bit more, here.
That makes Spain the latest nation to drop or go wobbly on the F-35 since Trump took office. As New York magazine put it a few months ago: “On March 13, Portugal’s defense minister said that the country would cancel plans to buy the plane. Then Canada’s prime minister said it would reconsider its purchase. Germany, too, is said to be wavering in its commitment to the jet” (though the latter has more recently been thinking about buying more).
What’s going on? Even before Trump returned to office, he and political backer Elon Musk had loudly criticized the F-35, but the real turn came after the second-time president began issuing “threats to forsake or even annex NATO allies,” as Defense One’s Audrey Decker reported back in March.
Other reading:
Trump 2.0
Trump’s military will spend $10 million to resurrect a monument to Civil War-era treason at Arlington National Cemetery. The memorial was removed at the recommendation of Congress, and putting it back will take about two years, AP reported Wednesday. “It features a classical female figure, crowned with olive leaves, representing the American South, alongside sanitized depictions of slavery.”
SecDef Pete Hegseth: The monument “never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it,” the defense secretary wrote on social media Tuesday.
Earlier: Hegseth ordered the military to erase memorials of American servicemembers throughout history as one of his first acts, moving swiftly on the Trump administration’s rejection of diversity, equity and inclusion.
The Confederate monument being restored at Arlington was erected in 1914 during a busy decade of such construction and a year before the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the wake of the 1915 racist epic, “The Birth of a Nation” by D.W. Griffith—the first film to be screened at the White House. But it’s not the only such monument being restored in the Capitol region more than 100 years later. “The National Park Service is planning to restore and reinstall a statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general and Freemason leader, that was toppled during Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020,” NPR reported Tuesday.
Additional reading:
ICE wants young Americans to “Defend your culture! No undergraduate degree required!” The Homeland Security Department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement formally opened up its ranks to 18-year-olds this week, removing its 21-year age limit in an effort to boost Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda and hire 10,000 more staff members.
On the other end of the spectrum, the agency had previously limited potential recruits to as old as 37 or 40, “depending on what position they are applying for,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said this week, “We no longer have a cap on how old you can be” to join ICE.
Fine print: Recruits still “have to go through medical and drug screening and complete a physical fitness test,” AP adds.
By the way: DHS officials have twice seemingly appropriated Nazi propaganda posters to boost ICE recruiting in the past month. Army veteran Brandon Friedman shared the posters—and their apparent Nazi-era precedents—on social media Wednesday, here.
On Wednesday, ICE announced a no-bid contract for iris-scanning and facial recognition services that agents can use on their cell phones. The manufacturer—Massachusettes-based Bi2 Technologies—promises positive identification “in seconds from virtually anywhere” using “the nation’s only secure, encrypted, real-time national criminal justice data sharing network.”
“The user can stand or sit as far as 10 to 15 [inches] away from the unit, and even wear glasses or contact lenses without compromising system accuracy,” Bi2 says on its website.
According to the notice, “The [U.S.] Government conducted extensive market research and determined that Bi2 is the only company that can provide the required services.” (Hat tip to Sean Morrow of the nonprofit newsroom More Perfect Union.)
Related reading:
Anatomy of a redaction: The Trump administration recently released a thinly-redacted, classified report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. In doing so, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard “with the blessing of President Donald Trump, overrode arguments from the CIA and other intelligence agencies that more of the document should remain classified to obscure U.S. spy agencies’ sources and methods,” the Washington Post reported Wednesday (gift link).
The gist: “The document that Gabbard ordered released on July 23 is a 46-page report stemming from a review begun in 2017 by majority Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. It takes issue with U.S. intelligence agencies’ finding earlier that year that Russian President Vladimir Putin developed a preference for Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton and aspired to help him win the election,” veteran intelligence reporter Warren Strobel reports for the Post. However, “Multiple independent reviews, including an exhaustive bipartisan probe by the Senate Intelligence Committee, have found that Putin intervened in part to help Trump,” he adds.
While Gabbard claims the report shows “proof of a deep state conspiracy. The documents themselves tell a much duller story,” Georgetown University researcher Renee DiResta explains, writing Wednesday for Lawfare. One notable consideration: Gabbard is “confusing (or conflating) hacking voting machines with the other forms of interference, such as propaganda and the hack-and-leak efforts, that the later ICA [Intelligence Community Assessment] focused on.”
ICYMI: “Public record contradicts US spy chief’s Russia-gate ‘conspiracy’ accusations,” is how Defense One’s Patrick Tucker put it after Gabbard’s initial release.
Related:
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