The Trump administration has chosen military installations inside Venezuela to attack, “and the strikes could come at any moment,” the Miami Herald reported Friday—hours after the Wall Street Journal first reported the available targeting.
The attacks “will seek to destroy military installations used by the drug-trafficking organization the U.S. says is headed by Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and run by top members of his regime,” with the goal of “decapitat[ing] the cartel’s hierarchy,” the Herald reports.
“If President Trump decides to move forward with airstrikes…the targets would send a clear message to Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro that it is time to step down,” U.S. officials told the Journal.
Update: U.S. military officials “do not know precisely who they have killed in multiple military strikes against alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean” since the attacks began on Sept. 1, Politico reported Thursday following a classified briefing for lawmakers in the House Armed Services Committee.
Notable: “The briefing came just one day after Democratic lawmakers were shut out of a similar closed-door Senate meeting on the boat strikes,” the New York Times reports.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee: “When an administration decides it can pick and choose which elected representatives get the understanding of their legal argument of why this is needed for military force and only chooses a particular party, it ignores all the checks and balances.” Read on, here.
Additional reading: “UN human rights chief says US strikes on alleged drug boats are ‘unacceptable,’” the Associated Press reported Friday.
STRATCOM nominee takes heat hours after Trump’s nuclear-test bombshell. The morning after President Donald Trump vowed to “start testing our Nuclear Weapons,” his pick to lead U.S. Strategic Command fielded questions from senators who wondered what the president meant and what the nominee planned to do about it. Vice Adm. Richard Correll, a submariner and STRATCOM’s deputy commander, vows to give his best military advice. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports.
ICBM test planned? It appears the U.S. military is about to test an unarmed intercontinental ballistic missile over the Pacific next week, as it does periodically, Dutch researcher Marko Langbroek flagged on social media Friday.
New: SpaceX tipped to win $2B for Golden Dome satellites. Wall Street Journal: “The funding was included in the tax-and-spending bill that Trump signed in July, but wasn’t publicly linked to a contractor. The planned ‘air moving target indicator’ system could eventually field as many as 600 satellites,” according to “people familiar with the matter.” More, here.
Air Force: We need more money to buy the fighter jets we need. Clarifying a report sent to Congress last week, a service official said the Air Force plans to have nearly 1,400 manned tactical aircraft by 2030, about one-quarter more than the 1,160 it has today. But it would need 1,558 to achieve its missions with high confidence and low risk—a goal that would require more funding from Congress. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reports from the Thursday briefing, here.
Related: The Senate confirmed fighter pilot Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach to be the Air Force’s next chief of staff. Wilsback will replace Gen. David Allvin, who unexpectedly announced his retirement in August, halfway through his customary four-year term. Task & Purpose reports, here.
Moving into generals’ houses. Political appointees Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have moved onto military bases, “where they are shielded not just from potential violence but also from protest,” the Atlantic reported on Thursday. The New York Times has more, 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 with 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 1956, the United Kingdom and France began bombing Egypt to force the reopening of the Suez Canal.
Developing: The National Guard is scrambling to staff and train entirely new “quick reaction forces” by the end of the year, Aaron Glantz of the Guardian reported Wednesday. The effort began in earnest on October 8, when National Guard Army Maj. Gen. Ronald Burkett quietly launched the initiative, which extends from an executive order Trump signed on August 25.
This means every state is now “required to train 500 national guard members, for a total of 23,500 troops nationwide,” Glantz writes. That’s a sizable uptick from administration plans two months ago reportedly featuring just two groups of 300 troops stationed in Alabama and Arizona as a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force.”
Each state is expected to “be able to deploy a fourth of all their troops within eight hours and all of those assigned to the units within a day,” AP reported Thursday, citing the new memo. “To help with that goal, units will be provided 100 sets of crowd control equipment as well as two full-time trainers by the National Guard Bureau.”
Since Guard troops are not trained in handling civil disturbances, they will need to attend special courses in “crowd management techniques,” “domestic civil disturbance training,” and “proper use of baton and body shields,” the memo says.
Worth noting: It’s not yet clear exactly how these forces will be dispatched since the U.S. military is forbidden by law from conducting law enforcement activities domestically. The Trump administration has already run afoul of that 150-year-old law with its June deployments of Marines and Guard troops to help immigration enforcement operations in the Los Angeles area—an assignment later found by District Judge Charles Breyer to be in violation of U.S. law. The White House appealed that decision, which moved the case to the 9th Circuit Court.
Historian reax: “The establishment of a domestic quick reaction force to quell civil disturbances at a time when there are no civil disturbances that can’t be handled easily by existing law enforcement suggests the administration is expecting those conditions to change,” warned Heather Cox Richardson of Boston College, writing Thursday.
Update: Despite the government shutdown, U.S. troops will receive their next paycheck. Newsweek reported this week “The money comes from multiple sources, including $2.5 billion redirected from the administration’s summer tax cut legislation, $1.4 billion from a military procurement account and another $1.4 billion from research and development.”
See also: “Who is Timothy Mellon, the billionaire who reportedly donated $130M to help pay troops?” via The Hill, reporting Monday.
Additional reading:
Lastly this week, Ukraine isn’t just hurling attack drones; they’re waging real robot warfare, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Thursday after the release of a recent report from the London-based Royal United Services Institute.
What’s going on: “Political developments in Washington interrupted the provision of military-technical assistance, disrupting Ukraine’s ability to coherently plan the equipping of its forces with its international partners. As a result, Ukraine doubled down on a method which delivered results and was under its control: drones,” RUSI’s Jack Watling writes. “Two dedicated UAV regiments, and two non-standard brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine…are pioneering the use of novel equipment,” as in air and ground drones.
Parallel to this, the U.S. and other European militaries are developing new battle-robot concepts around Ukraine’s experiences, Tucker reports. NATO and Ukraine recently tested new ways to counter UAVs. This effort, led by the NATO-Joint Analysis, Training And Education Centre, “aims to keep the alliance on the cutting edge and to support Ukraine,” a NATO official said. But the war in Ukraine has revealed the obsolescence of the way the large militaries of NATO members do many things, from force design to acquisitions to battlefield maneuver. Continue reading, here.
Frontline dispatch: Ukrainian soldiers have turned their drone war with Russia into an incentivized game, the New York Times reported Friday. “Wound a Russian soldier? Eight points. Kill one? That is good for 12. A Russian drone pilot is worth more: 15 points for wounding one, and 25 points for a kill. Capturing a Russian soldier alive with the help of a drone is the jackpot: 120 points.”
How it works: “Teams compete for points to acquire Ukrainian-made gear, including basic surveillance drones and larger drones carrying powerful explosives, through an internal Amazon-style weapons store called Brave1 Market…The more points a unit gets, the better stuff it can buy, ensuring that resources are directed to the teams that best use them.” Story (gift link), here.
For your ears only, Patrick Tucker unpacked what he learned during a recent trip to Latvia and Estonia regarding the European Union’s emerging plans for a “drone wall” to defend against an increasing number of Russian aerial incursions. Find that podcast episode on our site, at Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
And here are two leftover links we didn’t get to this week, but you might still like to read over the weekend:
Read the full article here