With the longest-ever U.S. government shutdown now over, the Air Force wants to build a $500,000 counter-air missile, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Wednesday. That’s costlier than some missiles the service already has, but the main idea seems to be modularity: the effort would start with a ground-launched version that would develop components for an eventual air-to-air version, according to a Nov. 7 request for white papers posted on SAM.gov.
For context: “The proposed cost is less than the service’s $1 million AIM-120D Advanced Medium-Range Air-To-Air Missile and comparable to the existing $472,000 AIM-9X Sidewinder, according to figures from the War Zone. But it is significantly more expensive than the service’s APKWS II jet-fired anti-drone rockets—the most costly components of those missiles run between $15,000 and $20,000,” Novelly writes. Read on, here.
Commentary: The push for modularity is a key part of the Pentagon’s revolutionary new approach to acquisition, says Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, who helped advise the various parts of DOD in the runup to last Friday’s rollout. The U.S. military has finally acknowledged that taking years to build exquisite weapons won’t work on battlefields where tech and tactics change week to week.
“The last few years of war in Ukraine, the Red Sea, and Israel have been screaming the lesson that better kit doesn’t guarantee success. In fact, ‘better’ means something different than it did even a decade ago,” Clark writes in an oped for Defense One. A swift product pipeline is now more important than the products themselves. Read on, here.
Additional reading: “OpenAI’s Open-Weight Models Are Coming to the US Military,” WIRED reported Thursday. However, “Initial results show that OpenAI’s tools lag behind competitors in desired capabilities, some military vendors tell WIRED. But they are still pleased that models from a key industry leader are finally an option for them.”
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 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 2015, ISIS terrorists killed 130 people during a complex attack across multiple locations in Paris.
Trump 2.0
DOGE veteran could bring much-needed change to Navy research, observers say. Rachel Riley, the new head of the Office of Naval Research, is more than just an alum of the controversial Department of Government Efficiency, according to current and former military and defense officials. Indeed, they said, the 33-year-old Rhodes Scholar and former McKinsey consultant may have what it takes to bring urgent reform to the Navy’s top R&D office, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Wednesday.
Riley was appointed acting chief of naval research sometime in October after nine months at Health and Human Services. She had never worked for the government before January, according to her LinkedIn profile. But Riley has completed significant academic work related to China, which sources we spoke to highlighted as relevant. She is also a military spouse, Tucker notes.
At McKinsey, much of her work focused on helping the government address the challenge of too much bureaucracy, too low a risk tolerance, devotion to committee meetings, and other rigid structures that inhibit timely deployment of technology. “There are entire enterprises within ONR that have never produced anything,” one former defense official said. “They continue to be justified as part of the research enterprise, the kind of thing Anduril would love to stand up a division to deliver on tomorrow, and Silicon Valley would respond to by founding a whole new company.” Continue reading, here.
Developing: A senior officer with no experience in cyber security or signals intelligence is now a top nominee to lead Cyber Command and the NSA, Martin Matishak of The Record reported Wednesday—roughly seven months after Trump fired NSA/CYBERCOM chief Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh on the advice of far-right activist Laura Loomer.
The new candidate is Army Lt. Gen. Joshua Rudd, currently deputy commander at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Before that, he served as INDOPACOM chief of staff. And “He previously was the head of Special Operations Command Pacific. Among other leadership positions within special forces, he deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Matishak reports. Read more, here.
You may remember a roughly 300-agent, special-operations-like immigration raid in Chicago in late September. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security was so enamored with the optics of the operation they turned footage of it into a sizzle reel for likes on social media.
Recap: Shortly after midnight on Sept. 30 at Chicago’s South Shore, “Families were woken by flashbangs and helicopters as hundreds of federal agents raided their homes” and “detained nearly every resident of the 130-unit building—including children and babies—placing them in zip ties and separating them by race into vans for more than two hours early [that] morning,” the city’s South Side Weekly reported on location.
Update: Despite the enforcement optics and narrative pushed by DHS officials, five reporters from ProPublica investigated the aftermath and found almost an entirely different story, including:
- None of the 37 people arrested were criminally charged;
- There was no evidence the building was “filled with TdA terrorists,” as White House advisor Stephen Miller alleged;
- And there appears to have been no legitimate reason for agents to rappel down onto the building in the dark of night from a Blackhawk helicopter.
Full story: “‘I Lost Everything’: Venezuelans Were Rounded Up in a Dramatic Midnight Raid but Never Charged With a Crime,” published Thursday morning.
Industry
Norway’s public-wealth fund might invest in defense firms for the first time in two decades, spurred by Russia’s European invasion and fears it can no longer rely on the United States, Reuters reports.
Additional reading:
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