mark
Defense One
[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/10/25 2:03pm
The U.S. is not trying to goad China into a military conflict, the Pentagon’s no. 2 official said Friday, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s remark last summer that he thinks the U.S. is trying to bait him into invading Taiwan so the U.S. can step in. In the waning weeks of her tenure, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told an audience at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies that the U.S. is watching its words and actions when it comes to China, lest any hint escalate into a confrontation neither country can walk back. “Even if deterrence is what we intend, it behooves us to consider how our actions might be perceived behind closed doors on the other side,” Hicks said. “And it behooves China to do the same.” But the U.S is not “trying to bait or trick them into a war,” she added.   The U.S. is keeping a close eye on People’s Liberation Army exercises and its public comments about the potential use of force against Taiwan’s independence movement. “We don’t believe conflict is inevitable. But it’s our job to prevent war, by always being ready for  war if it comes,” she said. “So where Beijing might see DOD anticipating a potential conflict, that’s because  we’re concerned Beijing will instigate one. Both sides must try hard to avoid misunderstandings in this dynamic.” [[Related Posts]] Her statement echoed headlines from four years ago, when it came to light that the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Mark Milley, had called his Chinese counterpart just before the 2020 election and again after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, moves he said were to assure Beijing that chaos in the administration would not result in lashing out against China. “My task at that time was to de-escalate,” Milley told senators during a subsequent Senate hearing, saying he was motivated “by concerning intelligence which caused us to believe the Chinese were worried about an attack by the U.S.” Hicks described the U.S. approach as “peace through strength,” an expression dating back to the 1950s, which President Joe Biden invoked in a speech at NATO’s 75th anniversary over the summer, and which President-elect Donald Trump has dropped in multiple social media posts since winning reelection. Trump announced in December that he would nominate Stephen Feinberg, a career hedge fund manager, to replace Hicks. To fill her boss’s shoes, Trump plans to nominate Pete Hegseth, a former Army National Guard infantry officer and longtime Fox News contributor. Hegseth has famously said China is "building an army specifically dedicated to defeating the United States of America."  He’ll face questions on his potential China policies and more Tuesday at a confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. ]]

[Category: Threats]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/10/25 12:27pm
SecDef confirmation hearing set for Jan. 14. Pete Hegseth, who is Donald Trump’s announced nominee to succeed Lloyd Austin as U.S. defense secretary, will go before the newly GOP-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. Hegseth’s testimony will follow weeks of less formal attempts to win senators’ consent for a nominee who “has never made national-security policy, served in a senior military role, worked in defense acquisition, or led an organization larger than a nonprofit advocacy group,” as Defense One put it last month.  GOP senators have expressed concerns about Hegseth’s history of heavy drinking, though some have pronounced themselves mollified by his promise not to drink on the job in the E-ring. Still others are concerned about sexual assault allegations (he denies them) and reported marital infidelities. Democratic senators are expected to focus on Hegseth’s contention that women should be ejected from combat roles and his embrace, as Politico put it, of “an aggressive form of Christianity that is at war with the military’s nonpartisan and pluralistic culture.”  The SASC has also requested records that may shed light on Hegseth’s reported ejection as leader of a Koch-backed nonprofit group amid allegations of financial mismanagement. Committee members are also still awaiting the results of an FBI background check into the nominee. What are Hegseth’s chances? “The only time a nominee by a new president was rejected by a Senate vote occurred in 1989, when George H.W. Bush nominated John Tower, a former senator from Texas, to be his secretary of defense,” CNN wrote in November. “Tower was undone by stories of his excessive drinking and what press reports at the time referred to as ‘womanizing.’” No hearing date yet for Gabbard. White House and Senate Intelligence Committee Sen. Tom Cotton had hoped to schedule for next week the confirmation hearing of former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s choice to run the U.S. intelligence community. But that has been delayed, in part because Gabbard’s own FBI background check has yet to be delivered, CNN reported on Tuesday. The ODNI pick lacks experience in intelligence or running large organizations; she has also been noted as “an apologist for both the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin,” wrote Tom Nichols, a former U.S. Naval War College professor. Also: Commander in chief-to-be avoids jail time. Trump, the first felon to be elected president, was sentenced on Friday, seven months after a jury found him guilty of all 37 charges related to falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal. Justice Juan Merchan “imposed a so-called unconditional discharge of Mr. Trump’s sentence, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation” and said that only his electoral victory had shielded him from punishment, the New York Times reports, here. Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Bradley Peniston with Lauren C. Williams. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1954, the U.S. Navy established its nuclear-power training school at New London, Connecticut. Army’s recruiting skid ended largely because more women enlisted, Military.com reported Thursday after reviewing data provided by the service. “Nearly 10,000 women signed up for active duty in 2024, an 18% jump from the previous year, while male recruitment increased by just 8%,” the report said. “The numbers mark the continuation of a trend reported in a Military.com investigation that found a yearslong Army recruiting slump was centered around men, while female recruiting numbers have remained relatively strong.” Read on, here. Navy’s shipbuilding plan would be costlier than service officials say, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In his most recent analysis, CBO’s Eric Labs writes that the “2025 plan would cost 46 percent more annually in real terms (that is, adjusted to remove the effects of inflation) than the average amount appropriated over the past 5 years. CBO estimates that total shipbuilding costs would average $40 billion (in 2024 dollars) over the next 30 years, which is about 17 percent more than the Navy estimates. CBO’s estimates for the 2025 plan range from 8 percent to 16 percent higher in real terms than its estimates for the three alternatives in the Navy’s 2024 plan.” Bottom line: “Including the costs of operating and maintaining those ships, buying new aircraft and weapons, and funding the Marine Corps, the Navy’s total budget would need to increase from $255 billion today to $340 billion (in 2024 dollars) in 2054 to implement the 2025 plan.” Read the report, here. CNO has a new data dashboard. Instead of juggling readiness and other reports from around the Navy, Adm. Lisa Franchetti can now pull up a digital dashboard to find exactly what she’s looking for. Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic executed it last year, feeding data uploaded from around the fleet into a landing page with clickable graphics for topics like maintenance or manning, then a search function to look for specific commands. “Previously, the CNO was receiving multiple reports from multiple Navy organizations” including Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, and PowerPoint slides, Claire Ameen, a data scientist for NIWC Atlantic, said in a release. “We are helping to automate that process and trying to decide on one authoritative data source so that the CNO has current figures at all times.” D1’s Meghann Myers has more, here. ICYMI: The Navy has been creating other such dashboards as part of its contribution to the Pentagon’s connect-everything JADC2 effort. Lastly this week: California National Guard forces are helping to fight the huge wildfires—and to forestall looting—in and around Los Angeles. Deployed units include troops equipped for security and aircraft fitted to dump water on the blazes, which are among the state’s most destructive ever, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters this morning. But high winds are preventing the aircraft from doing their job, she said: “Right now, we cant even get assets up in the air because the fires are so bad and the winds are so bad.” (As well, a Canadian firefighting aircraft was grounded after it collided with a drone operated by a civilian photographer in violation of emergency no-fly orders.) Meanwhile, “Armored vehicles were seen on the 210 freeway late tonight traveling towards the Eaton Fire that has torn through Pasadena and Altadena the past several days, forcing thousands to evacuate and burning homes and other buildings to the ground,” Deadline reported on Thursday. NBC News reported that “at least 150” troops were deployed for various tasks, including setting up checkpoints to control access to affected areas.  Have a safe weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday. ]]

[Category: Threats]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/9/25 12:04pm
Instead of juggling reports from around the Navy to stay up-to-date on the fleet, these days the chief of naval operations can pull up a monitoring tool on her computer to find exactly what she’s looking for. Now part of her weekly routine, the CNO Executive Metrics Dashboard is built to pull in data on Adm. Lisa Franchetti’s priority areas in a few clicks. “We all get to see our bank accounts live, why shouldn’t the CNO be able to see the readiness of our ships live?” Jim Raimondo, Franchetti’s special assistant, said in a December release. Raimondo came up with the idea and Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic executed it last year, feeding data uploaded from around the fleet into a landing page with clickable graphics for topics like maintenance or manning, then a search function to look for specific commands. “Previously, the CNO was receiving multiple reports from multiple Navy organizations” including Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, and PowerPoint slides, Claire Ameen, a data scientist for NIWC Atlantic, said in the release. “We are helping to automate that process and trying to decide on one authoritative data source so that the CNO has current figures at all times.” Franchetti’s data analytics staff check the dashboard daily and add updates to CNO briefings, Cmdr. Desiree Frame, Franchetti’s spokeswoman, told Defense One.  Frame said her boss looks at the dashboard on a weekly basis, using it to take notes and bring up-to-date information to meetings with Pentagon, congressional and White House officials. “The dashboard currently has nearly a dozen metrics that are automatically updated,” she said. “There is still work in progress to automate other data, removing the need for manual updates.” The Navy is building multiple dashboards as part of its contribution to the Pentagon’s connect-everything JADC2 effort. But a dashboard, no matter how slick, is only as good as its data, warned Jamie Foggo, the retired admiral who is now dean of the Navy League’s Center for Maritime Strategy. For some metrics, there’s a distinctly unobjective human creating the inputs. The Defense Readiness Reporting System, for example, has a stoplight-style rating that commanders fill in based on their readiness to deploy: green for ready to go, yellow for some issues but not totally out, and red for absolutely not.  But what if you’re leaning more toward orange? “Whats the difference between yellow and orange? Its closer to red. So if Im orange, do I say Im yellow? Because its not as bad?” Foggo said. “So there has to be, you know, honesty and forthrightness in the reporting of the criteria – you dont want to give the CNO information thats incorrect.” NIWC considered that in the dashboard’s creation. It uses the Department of the Navy’s Jupiter data management system, which pulls in data from across the Navy and displays it as raw data (bronze), organized data (silver) and verified and ready-for-use data (gold). The gold stuff goes into CNO’s dashboard. Even if it’s not perfect, Foggo said, the new dashboard is a bit of a dream realized. He recalled a 1997 discussion with a Pentagon official about building a tool that could pull in data from DRRS. The idea, he said, was that “I can sit at my desk and I can have, like, a baseball card pop up for an individual unit, a frigate, a destroyer, a submarine, an aircraft carrier, a strike group, you know.”  It never happened back then, Foggo said, but it makes even more sense now. “I mean, look at the New York Stock Exchange. Everybody can tell exactly you know whats happening to their particular equity market stocks on a second-by-second basis,” he said. “So why shouldnt we be able to determine the readiness of the fleet on immediate notice?” ]]

[Category: Defense Systems]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/9/25 9:32am
SecDef Austin’s last trip to Europe  America’s European allies are reeling from President-elect Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland and Canada, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports from the Pentagon-led Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which met today in Germany.  The view from Berlin: “Its a little bit—let me express that diplomatically—astonishing to read things like that and to hear in television,” Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told reporters. “I dont know what his objectives are to do [annex Greenland], but anyway, alliances are alliances and stay alliances regardless of whos governing countries. Otherwise it would be only something like communities or whatever else.” Kaja Kallas, foreign affairs chief of the European Union Commission: “I spoke to [Denmark’s] Prime Minister Frederickson yesterday, and I mean, she assured [me] that Danish and American relations have been very good. And she also said that its good that the President-elect takes interest in [the] Arctic, which is a very important region both for the security but also for the climate change. So this is, this is good. And of course, Greenland is part of Denmark. So this is what also she said—we have to respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty” of nations.  Canada’s Defense Minister Bill Blair called Trump’s comments on Canada “deeply concerning and in many respects, profoundly disappointing,” he told reporters. “And I would hope that the United States would recognize the value of...Canada as neighbor, as an ally, as a friend and as a partner,” he said. “We work so collaboratively together not to be able to ignore that in the defense of North America, we have always stood side by side together. Our economies, our national interests, our people are deeply united, and I would hope that that relationship would be respected by our closest friend.” Ukraine’s donors are working to systematize military aid deliveries. The members of the Ukraine-aid coordination group have agreed goals for production of arms and equipment for donation to the besieged country, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief said Thursday.  That will enable national armaments directorates to make plans to provide weapons to Ukraine on a schedule, rather than in occasional pledges, William LaPlante, U.S. acquisition defense undersecretary, said in a conversation with reporters at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. Pledges, he said, are “interesting. But you gotta get real.” The goals emerged from a year-long “capability coalition” effort to coordinate foreign military aid to Ukraine, build up the country’s own industrial base, and ensure that the newest equipment is moving to front lines. On Thursday, eight such coalitions, led by Ukraine and 14 donor nations, endorsed a series of roadmaps to guide aid through 2027, Patrick Tucker writes from Germany. At the meeting, the Pentagon detailed a $500 million military-aid package, which CNN called the Biden administration’s “final” aid to Ukraine before Trump takes office.  This package includes AIM-7, RIM-7, and AIM-9M missiles for high-demand air defense systems; unspecified “air-to-ground munitions,” and “equipment to support Ukraines use of F-16s,” the Defense Department said in a statement.  The view from Kyiv: “It would honestly be crazy to drop the ball now,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the members of the contact group Thursday. Zelenskyy highlighted Ukraine’s continued need for drones and other munitions, but he and other European leaders are already planning for the possibility that U.S. leadership of the Ukraine support effort vanishes. “Production of drones in Ukraine is more cost-effective than anywhere else,” Zelenskyy said Thursday. “We are focusing on drones that our brigades need to hold the front lines, and drones essential for ensuring security, like maritime drones and drones made for deep strikes on the enemys military facilities and infrastructure in their territory,” he said.  New: Canada announced it will give $100 million to help Ukraine rapidly build its own drones under a so-called “Danish Model” where countries contribute to Ukraine’s domestic weapons manufacturing rather than pull from their stockpiles. Blair also announced $200 million to help Ukraine acquire weapons under a Czech initiative pulling from various countries.  The Brits also made a £190 million pledge Thursday to help Ukraine acquire an estimated 30,000 new drones. Read on, here. Update: Russia has dropped more than 51,000 guided bombs on Ukraine since the start of the invasion nearly three years ago, Ukraine’s air force announced Thursday.  About 40,000 fell in just the past year, the air force said on Telegram. “Most of them fell on Ukrainian soldiers and residents of front-line regions. However, the enemy has repeatedly used this deadly weapon against civilians in large cities,” the service added.  Developing: Trump has abandoned his promise to resolve Russia’s Ukraine invasion in 24 hours. “I hope to have six months,” the president-elect said at his free-wheeling press conference Tuesday in Florida. And on Wednesday, a top Trump aide, retired Army three-star Keith Kellogg, told Fox he hopes a ceasefire can be brokered within the first 100 days of the new administration. Forecast: “Ukraine will likely lose the war within the next 12 to 18 months…if there is not soon a large new infusion of aid from the United States,” Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution warned Tuesday, writing for The Atlantic. “Ukraine will not lose in a nice, negotiated way, with vital territories sacrificed but an independent Ukraine kept alive, sovereign, and protected by Western security guarantees. It faces instead a complete defeat, a loss of sovereignty, and full Russian control.” “Trump must now choose between accepting a humiliating strategic defeat on the global stage and immediately redoubling American support for Ukraine while there’s still time,” Kagan advises. “The choice he makes in the next few weeks will determine not only the fate of Ukraine but also the success of his presidency.” Read on, here. Second opinion: “The incoming [Trump] administration will inherit a few billion dollars worth of authority to donate weapons, enough to continue meeting Ukraine’s needs for some months,” John Hardie of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies tells The D Brief. “Eventually, though, Congress will need to pass another assistance package or else see America’s ability to aid Ukraine—and thus its negotiating leverage—rapidly diminish. This would encourage Russian intransigence,” he warns.  “To maximize his chances of brokering a good and durable peace deal, President Trump should push a ‘Ukraine leverage’ package through Congress without delay while also tightening sanctions on Russia,” says Hardie.  Related reading:  “A rapid ceasefire in Ukraine could lead Donald Trump into a Russian trap,” Orysia Lutsevych writes Thursday from Chatham House;  “Donald Trump Jr. finds way to blame Ukraine for spread of Los Angeles wildfires,” Politico reported Thursday;  And “Serbia First to Deploy China’s FK-3 Air Defense System in Europe,” Defense Post reported Wednesday. Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson, Bradley Peniston, and Patrick Tucker. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1918, the “last battle of the American Indian Wars” took place near the U.S.-Mexico border, pitting Buffalo soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 10th Cavalry against the indigenous Yaquis tribesmen of Arizona’s Bear Valley. Around the Defense Department Pentagon officials are devising new plans to defend air bases worldwide. They are aiming to foster collaboration across the military services, rather than relying solely on the Army, the traditional provider of short-range air defense,” Defense One’s Audrey Decker writes.  Can satellite buses be mass-manufactured rather than bespoke? One California startup is giving it a shot, Decker reports off a trip to a Los Angeles factory floor. Additional reading:  “Verizon Wins $3.7 Billion Contract to Deploy 4G & 5G Networks Across 35 U.S. Air Force Bases,” Data Center Wires reported Thursday;  “Navy needs billions more each year to make shipbuilding plan a reality, CBO says,” Stars and Stripes reported Tuesday;  “Storied Marine infantry battalion to be transformed into Littoral Combat Team,” Task & Purpose reported Wednesday;  “Army doctor pleads guilty on first day of trial in largest military abuse case,” Task & Purpose reported separately Wednesday;  And ICYMI, “Nearly 8,000 National Guard troops requested to support presidential inauguration,” Stripes reported Monday.  Mideast  Israels top three defense companies “are on pace to sell more weapons than ever,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday from Tel Aviv. Those three companies include Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries. “Together, the three companies have seen an increase of more than 25% in their collective backlogs—or orders to be fulfilled in the future...to the equivalent of $63 billion in the first three-quarters of 2024” compared to the previous year, Dov Lieber of the Journal writes. “For all of 2023, the collective backlog grew by 23% from the year-prior, which was a record at the time,” he added.  The country’s top attention-getting systems are the Iron Dome and Arrow air defense weapons, as well as “defensive systems for tanks,” all of which have been tested over the last year-plus of war in Gaza and Lebanon. However, “Israel will still need to recruit at least 6,000 more employees in the defense industry to meet the future demands,” one expert said. Read on, here.  Related reading: “Iran Was ‘Defeated Very Badly’ in Syria, a Top General Admits,” the New York Times reported Wednesday from a “candid” speech delivered last week.  Etc. Lastly today: A home built by a soldier who served under George Washington is available for $1.2 million in Long Island, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday for its Luxury Homes section. The owners bought the 3,000-square foot home for $236,000 in 1989, and added to it in the years since. It still has the original wood floorboards and hand-hewn ceiling beams. Details and photographs, here.   ]]

[Category: Threats]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/9/25 9:32am
SecDef Austin’s last trip to Europe  America’s European allies are reeling from President-elect Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland and Canada, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports from the Pentagon-led Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which met today in Germany.  The view from Berlin: “Its a little bit—let me express that diplomatically—astonishing to read things like that and to hear in television,” Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told reporters. “I dont know what his objectives are to do [annex Greenland], but anyway, alliances are alliances and stay alliances regardless of whos governing countries. Otherwise it would be only something like communities or whatever else.” Kaja Kallas, foreign affairs chief of the European Union Commission: “I spoke to [Denmark’s] Prime Minister Frederickson yesterday, and I mean, she assured [me] that Danish and American relations have been very good. And she also said that its good that the President-elect takes interest in [the] Arctic, which is a very important region both for the security but also for the climate change. So this is, this is good. And of course, Greenland is part of Denmark. So this is what also she said—we have to respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty” of nations.  Canada’s Defense Minister Bill Blair called Trump’s comments on Canada “deeply concerning and in many respects, profoundly disappointing,” he told reporters. “And I would hope that the United States would recognize the value of...Canada as neighbor, as an ally, as a friend and as a partner,” he said. “We work so collaboratively together not to be able to ignore that in the defense of North America, we have always stood side by side together. Our economies, our national interests, our people are deeply united, and I would hope that that relationship would be respected by our closest friend.” Ukraine’s donors are working to systematize military aid deliveries. The members of the Ukraine-aid coordination group have agreed goals for production of arms and equipment for donation to the besieged country, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief said Thursday.  That will enable national armaments directorates to make plans to provide weapons to Ukraine on a schedule, rather than in occasional pledges, William LaPlante, U.S. acquisition defense undersecretary, said in a conversation with reporters at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. Pledges, he said, are “interesting. But you gotta get real.” The goals emerged from a year-long “capability coalition” effort to coordinate foreign military aid to Ukraine, build up the country’s own industrial base, and ensure that the newest equipment is moving to front lines. On Thursday, eight such coalitions, led by Ukraine and 14 donor nations, endorsed a series of roadmaps to guide aid through 2027, Patrick Tucker writes from Germany. At the meeting, the Pentagon detailed a $500 million military-aid package, which CNN called the Biden administration’s “final” aid to Ukraine before Trump takes office.  This package includes AIM-7, RIM-7, and AIM-9M missiles for high-demand air defense systems; unspecified “air-to-ground munitions,” and “equipment to support Ukraines use of F-16s,” the Defense Department said in a statement.  The view from Kyiv: “It would honestly be crazy to drop the ball now,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the members of the contact group Thursday. Zelenskyy highlighted Ukraine’s continued need for drones and other munitions, but he and other European leaders are already planning for the possibility that U.S. leadership of the Ukraine support effort vanishes. “Production of drones in Ukraine is more cost-effective than anywhere else,” Zelenskyy said Thursday. “We are focusing on drones that our brigades need to hold the front lines, and drones essential for ensuring security, like maritime drones and drones made for deep strikes on the enemys military facilities and infrastructure in their territory,” he said.  New: Canada announced it will give $100 million to help Ukraine rapidly build its own drones under a so-called “Danish Model” where countries contribute to Ukraine’s domestic weapons manufacturing rather than pull from their stockpiles. Blair also announced $200 million to help Ukraine acquire weapons under a Czech initiative pulling from various countries.  The Brits also made a £190 million pledge Thursday to help Ukraine acquire an estimated 30,000 new drones. Read on, here. Update: Russia has dropped more than 51,000 guided bombs on Ukraine since the start of the invasion nearly three years ago, Ukraine’s air force announced Thursday.  About 40,000 fell in just the past year, the air force said on Telegram. “Most of them fell on Ukrainian soldiers and residents of front-line regions. However, the enemy has repeatedly used this deadly weapon against civilians in large cities,” the service added.  Developing: Trump has abandoned his promise to resolve Russia’s Ukraine invasion in 24 hours. “I hope to have six months,” the president-elect said at his free-wheeling press conference Tuesday in Florida. And on Wednesday, a top Trump aide, retired Army three-star Keith Kellogg, told Fox he hopes a ceasefire can be brokered within the first 100 days of the new administration. Forecast: “Ukraine will likely lose the war within the next 12 to 18 months…if there is not soon a large new infusion of aid from the United States,” Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution warned Tuesday, writing for The Atlantic. “Ukraine will not lose in a nice, negotiated way, with vital territories sacrificed but an independent Ukraine kept alive, sovereign, and protected by Western security guarantees. It faces instead a complete defeat, a loss of sovereignty, and full Russian control.” “Trump must now choose between accepting a humiliating strategic defeat on the global stage and immediately redoubling American support for Ukraine while there’s still time,” Kagan advises. “The choice he makes in the next few weeks will determine not only the fate of Ukraine but also the success of his presidency.” Read on, here. Second opinion: “The incoming [Trump] administration will inherit a few billion dollars worth of authority to donate weapons, enough to continue meeting Ukraine’s needs for some months,” John Hardie of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies tells The D Brief. “Eventually, though, Congress will need to pass another assistance package or else see America’s ability to aid Ukraine—and thus its negotiating leverage—rapidly diminish. This would encourage Russian intransigence,” he warns.  “To maximize his chances of brokering a good and durable peace deal, President Trump should push a ‘Ukraine leverage’ package through Congress without delay while also tightening sanctions on Russia,” says Hardie.  Related reading:  “A rapid ceasefire in Ukraine could lead Donald Trump into a Russian trap,” Orysia Lutsevych writes Thursday from Chatham House;  “Donald Trump Jr. finds way to blame Ukraine for spread of Los Angeles wildfires,” Politico reported Thursday;  And “Serbia First to Deploy China’s FK-3 Air Defense System in Europe,” Defense Post reported Wednesday. Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson, Bradley Peniston, and Patrick Tucker. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1918, the “last battle of the American Indian Wars” took place near the U.S.-Mexico border, pitting Buffalo soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 10th Cavalry against the indigenous Yaquis tribesmen of Arizona’s Bear Valley. Around the Defense Department Pentagon officials are devising new plans to defend air bases worldwide. They are aiming to foster collaboration across the military services, rather than relying solely on the Army, the traditional provider of short-range air defense,” Defense One’s Audrey Decker writes.  Can satellite buses be mass-manufactured rather than bespoke? One California startup is giving it a shot, Decker reports off a trip to a Los Angeles factory floor. Additional reading:  “Verizon Wins $3.7 Billion Contract to Deploy 4G & 5G Networks Across 35 U.S. Air Force Bases,” Data Center Wires reported Thursday;  “Navy needs billions more each year to make shipbuilding plan a reality, CBO says,” Stars and Stripes reported Tuesday;  “Storied Marine infantry battalion to be transformed into Littoral Combat Team,” Task & Purpose reported Wednesday;  “Army doctor pleads guilty on first day of trial in largest military abuse case,” Task & Purpose reported separately Wednesday;  And ICYMI, “Nearly 8,000 National Guard troops requested to support presidential inauguration,” Stripes reported Monday.  Mideast  Israels top three defense companies “are on pace to sell more weapons than ever,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday from Tel Aviv. Those three companies include Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries. “Together, the three companies have seen an increase of more than 25% in their collective backlogs—or orders to be fulfilled in the future...to the equivalent of $63 billion in the first three-quarters of 2024” compared to the previous year, Dov Lieber of the Journal writes. “For all of 2023, the collective backlog grew by 23% from the year-prior, which was a record at the time,” he added.  The country’s top attention-getting systems are the Iron Dome and Arrow air defense weapons, as well as “defensive systems for tanks,” all of which have been tested over the last year-plus of war in Gaza and Lebanon. However, “Israel will still need to recruit at least 6,000 more employees in the defense industry to meet the future demands,” one expert said. Read on, here.  Related reading: “Iran Was ‘Defeated Very Badly’ in Syria, a Top General Admits,” the New York Times reported Wednesday from a “candid” speech delivered last week.  Etc. Lastly today: A home built by a soldier who served under George Washington is available for $1.2 million in Long Island, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday for its Luxury Homes section. The owners bought the 3,000-square foot home for $236,000 in 1989, and added to it in the years since. It still has the original wood floorboards and hand-hewn ceiling beams. Details and photographs, here.   ]]

[Category: Threats]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/9/25 9:01am
RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany–The members of the Ukraine-aid coordination group have agreed goals for production of arms and equipment for donation to the besieged country, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief said on Thursday.  That will enable national armaments directorates to make plans to provide weapons to Ukraine on a schedule, rather than in occasional pledges, William LaPlante, U.S. acquisition defense undersecretary, said in a conversation with reporters at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting here. Pledges, he said, are “interesting. But you gotta get real.” The goals emerged from a year-long “capability coalition” effort to coordinate foreign military aid to Ukraine, build up the country’s own industrial base, and ensure that the newest equipment is moving to front lines. On Thursday, eight such coalitions, led by Ukraine and 14 donor nations, endorsed a series of roadmaps to guide aid through 2027. The effort includes an “innovation group” to rapidly develop new weapons, LaPlante said.  “What are the new concepts for long-range strike? Theres a lot of emphasis on things like ATACMS or [UK’s] Storm Shadow. Well, thats today. What can we build within a year, six months, that are equivalent of cruise missiles, long- range drones? What are each of our countries doing? What can we do inside Ukraine, tying it to the other groups?” he said.  It was the final Ukraine-group meeting convened by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who will step down with the arrival of the Trump administration. President-elect Donald Trump has sent mixed signals, at best, about his approach to the international effort to support Ukraine.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged the group to continue its work, even if U.S. leadership of the Ukraine support effort vanishes. "It would honestly be crazy to drop the ball now and not keep building on the defense coalitions weve created, especially since they are already helping us grow and strengthen whats basically our shared defense power,” Zelenskyy said at the meeting. He highlighted Ukraine’s continued need for drones and other munitions. “Production of drones in Ukraine is more cost-effective than anywhere else,” he said. “This year, we in Ukraine want to set a record for the number and quality of drones we produce and get from our from our partners, and we are focusing on drones that our brigades need to hold the front lines, and drones essential for ensuring security, like maritime drones and drones made for deep strikes on the enemys military facilities and infrastructure in their territory.”  Last month, Ukraine announced it had met its goal to build more than one million drones in 2024. On Thursday, U.S. officials released details of a new $500 million package of arms to be drawn from stockpiles under in Presidential Drawdown Authority. The package includes: AIM-7, RIM-7, and AIM-9M missiles for air defense; Air-to-ground munitions; Support equipment for F-16s; Armored bridging systems; Secure communications equipment; Small arms and ammunition; and Spare parts, ancillary equipment, services, training, and transportation. That $500 million figure leaves some $3.8 billion of PDA unspent, at the discretion of the incoming Trump administration.  Also on Thursday, Canadian Defense Minister Bill Blair announced that Canada would be contributing $100 million to help Ukraine build its own drones, a donation under the Danish model  in which countries contribute to Ukraine’s domestic weapons manufacturing rather than pull from their stockpiles. Blair also pledged $200 million for a Czech initiative to procure munitions for Ukraine from various countries.  As well, the U.K. government pledged £190 million to help Ukraine acquire some 30,000 new drones. Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (who arrived late at the meeting) told a small group of reporters over the phone that she could not speculate on the future of American leadership of Europe’s efforts to support Ukraine but the Union is “ready to take over this leadership if United States is not willing to do so.” She pointed out that the Union is on track to train some 75,000 Ukrainians by February. Similar to Austin and other officials, Kallas framed the decision to continue support as one in the interests of the United States. “Its also clear that whoever is the leader of the United States, I think, it is not in the interest of America that Russia will be the strongest force in the world.”  Trump has promised to push for some sort of negotiated ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia shortly after taking office on January 20, a promise his Ukraine special envoy pick re-iterated on Thursday. “Hell be talking to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and also…President Zelenskyy as well. And I think theyre going to come to a solvable solution in the near term.” Kallas cast doubt on a Trump plan to negotiate a ceasefire with Russia. In a later discussion at Ramstein with reporters, she said. “Russia has no intention to keep those peace agreements.” ]]

[Category: Policy]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/8/25 7:37pm
LOS ANGELES—Even as satellites have proliferated, their buses—the main body and structural components—have generally remained bespoke affairs. Now a California startup aims to manufacture a line of buses that takes just a few weeks to customize and deliver. An iPad stands near the entrance of Apex’s 50,000-square-foot facility in downtown Los Angeles, beckoning customers to use the touch screen to choose a configuration, get a price, and place an order.  During a tour in December, the factory was fairly empty, waiting for production lines to be built, but a few employees were there, working on three Aries satellite buses. Apex’s first product, Aries, is a 100-kilogram bus about the size of a kitchen table that can hold roughly another 100 kilograms of payload. The first Aries satellite was launched in March, just a year after it was a clean-sheet design. Those three buses have since been finished, and took a few months to build—but by April, the company aims to be able to build 12 satellites per month, said Ian Cinnamon, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “Theres very few companies, I would argue maybe any at all, that were able to put three buses together in one quarter, let alone are scaling up to being able to do 12 [per month],” Cinnamon said.  For decades, the space industry operated around an architecture of large, exquisite satellite systems, a reality that has been upended in recent years. The Space Force and other space entities are now pushing for proliferated architectures with hundreds of satellites, arguing that more satellites will provide much-needed resilience.  “Apex is providing that proliferated and attritable layer for space that nobody else has really done. I think the key is not just, can you build a lot of satellites, but can you build a lot of them very quickly? And that speed element has been the biggest missing thing in the industry right now,” he said.  The three Aries buses are now sitting in Apex’s clean room, waiting for the customers to take delivery. One will go to Anduril for its planned military space missions, another to a non-disclosed customer for an Earth-sensing mission, and the third bus was built for a commercial customer. In addition to Aries, the company will eventually start producing a mid-sized, 300-kilogram satellite bus called Nova, and Comet, a 500-kilogram bus that is much flatter than Aries or Nova, and is designed to stack like a pancake, similar to Starlink, Cinnamon said.  The 12-buses-per month can be any mix of the three satellites, he said, since the vehicles share many components, equipment and will run on the same assembly line. All of the satellites are built to be dual use, for government or commercial missions. The Nova bus will likely be best suited for the Space Development Agency’s proliferated architecture, given that those missions will require more mass and payload, Cinnamon said, but for certain SDA missions, Aries could still be a good fit. While Cinnamon couldn’t detail the scope of his company’s work with various government entities, he said Apex already has “close to a dozen” direct government contracts.  The new factory will be the "forever headquarters” of Apex, but the company will eventually need to build more than 12 satellites a month, Cinnamon said, indicating further growth within LA and beyond the West Coast. “I will also say that we have plans down the line to expand outside of just Los Angeles as well. So we think about other locations around the United States, but then also other locations around the globe as well, as we work with not just the U.S. government and commercial companies, but allied nations as well,” Cinnamon said.  And as the company expands, its making plans to double its workforce this year to nearly 200 employees, he said.  ]]

[Category: Business]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/8/25 7:19pm
Pentagon officials are devising new plans to defend air bases worldwide—plans that prioritize collaboration across all the military services, rather than relying solely on the Army for protection.  The growing threat of long-range missiles from China, along with the proliferation of drone swarms, has complicated the Army’s long-held mission to defend air bases. At the same time, the Air Force is building more small bases in the Indo-Pacific to reduce reliance on a handful of large installations, but traditional Army air defense systems like Patriot and THAAD are too expensive to field at a constellation of tiny bases. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has suggested that the Air Force could take over the air base defense mission from the Army, if given the resources. But other Pentagon leaders have advocated for a “joint” approach to air base defense.  Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin met with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George at the end of last year to plot a course ahead—one that will include the entire joint force. “The conclusion we both came to is this is something we need to look at beyond just Air Force versus Army roles and missions. There is a spectrum. Theres a continuum of base defense that goes from group one UAVs that were seeing here in the continental United States, all the way up to ballistic missiles, so we need to come to the recognition across the joint force that this is a new entrance into the changing character of war,” Allvin told Defense One during a December interview. [[Related Posts]] The two chiefs didn’t reach a conclusion on Army versus Air Force roles and missions, Allvin said, but agreed they need to work together, and not “swing lunch boxes at the bus stop at each other, saying, it’s your job, it’s my job.”  “This is a new environment that we’re in where there are probably joint requirements that need to be sort of investigated on who does what and where and when,” Allvin said. A new report from the Hudson Institute, released Tuesday, underscored the need for new air base defense plans—arguing that China has made major investments to defend, expand, and fortify their airfields, while the U.S. has done very little in the region.  The report made three primary recommendations to mitigate the Pentagon’s shortcomings: build resilient infrastructure that has both active and passive defenses, field systems that can operate at long distances and spend more time in the air, and force China to invest in defensive measures and field new classes of cheaper standoff and stand-in weapons. Specifically, the report stressed the need to harden infrastructure like aircraft shelters and fuel and ammunition storage, arguing that even if the military uses the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment concept, China still has a slew of targeting capabilities to expend. And forcing the Chinese to use larger, more expensive weapons against each hardened aircraft shelter would reduce the number of weapons the PLA could use for other targets. Additionally, the argument that the military should only operate from afar instead of hardening infrastructure is ill-advised, the report says, because it will be years before the Air Force will field those types of forces in large numbers, “and the DOD will still require passive and active defenses at airfields regardless of these changes in force design. It cannot hope future military forces will address its current airfield weaknesses.” However, implementing these recommendations will require considerably more money, Tim Walton, a senior fellow at Hudson and co-author of the report, told Defense One. Absent a major top line budget increase, DOD would need to fund investments by decreasing spending in other areas, he said.  Specifically, the report recommends moving resources from Army ground maneuver forces to Army air defense artillery, or ADA.   “I think theres an opportunity in this new administration for there to be a significant rebalancing and reshaping of the force,” Walton said.  The Air Force could take ownership of the air base defense mission, as Kendall suggested, which Walton said is not an unusual arrangement. A majority of countries with ground-based air defenses have medium- and long-range assets within their air forces, he said. But that plan carries some risk, he added, if Air Force leaders can’t properly resource the mission.  This issue is “one of the most important force design decisions” the incoming defense secretary will need to make, Walton said.   “Previous secretaries of defense have deferred action on this, and theyve concluded that all services have a role. Although thats true, the Army has the leading role in ground-based air defense and so we need a secretary of defense, with congressional support, whos going to prioritize the Army properly resourcing air defense artillery, which is arguably the Armys most important contribution in the Indo-Pacific,” he said. ]]

[Category: Threats]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/8/25 1:00pm
As White House cyber-policy lead, Harry Coker has helped oversee efforts to develop the federal workforce, harmonize regulations, and promote memory-safe programming. On Tuesday, the outgoing National Cyber Director offered a suggestion for the incoming administration: We need to up our game. “There’s so many challenges that the nation has to take on. Open up the papers nowaday, you read about pre-positioning on our critical infrastructure [and] our telecommunications systems being compromised,” Coker told reporters on the sidelines of a talk at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security think tank in Washington, D.C.. “We have a lot of work to do. I can’t sugarcoat that.” Coker delivered a speech that outlined the work his office has done in the U.S. cyber policy world over the past few years and said during a fireside chat that he wishes in the future for ONCD to have more say in the federal government’s cybersecurity spending. “It’s good to give budget guidance. We need to give budget direction when it comes to cybersecurity,” he said. “I would love for the incoming administration, or any administration, to recognize the priority of cybersecurity. It’s a responsibility that every department and agency needs to stand up to. We need to give more than guidance when it comes to cybersecurity budgets.” That budget approach is part of a broader wishlist to have future leaders focus on the cyberdefenses of the nation. The federal government is a constant target of cybercrime groups and nation-state hacking syndicates. Outside the government, private sector organizations are frequently subjected to ransomware attacks or surreptitious hijackings of infrastructure they own or operate. Perhaps ONCD’s flagship product was the March 2023 national cybersecurity strategy that reflected conclusion that regulation, not voluntary efforts, were needed to make the U.S. more secure from hackers. Many of its components remain unimplemented. It’s not entirely clear how a Trump-era ONCD would oversee future cyber proceedings. As Coker departs, the office is still working through sweeping regulatory harmonization efforts to help streamline reporting rules for organizations when they’re hit in a cyberattack. The office is also trying to transition federal cyber jobs toward a skills-based hiring structure by this summer.  The office also queued up a forthcoming software liability regime that aims to legally hold software makers accountable for lax security practices. Asked about how the incoming administration’s slimmer regulatory style could intersect with that software regime, he said balance will be key and that “I expect it’s going to be a set of options on various extremes.”  Coker noted some parts of industry have expressed interest in software liability, namely when it comes to third-party supply chain compromises, where one organization is breached because of another organization’s software tethered onto their systems. In his speech, Coker said the ONCD team “will serve the American people in the Trump administration and beyond with dedication and excellence.” Incoming Trump officials and lawmakers have recently signaled a desire to hack back against cyber adversaries, namely in response to recently discovered Chinese intrusions into telecom infrastructure. But Coker said he’s of the view that ONCD doesn’t need to have an added say in offensive cyber activity right now. “I think, offensively, we’re covered. It’s a good setup for offense,” Coker told reporters when asked about the office’s role in attack-oriented cyber operations. He referred to NSA, Cyber Command and other federal entities that oftentimes have the digital threat hunting capabilities available to them. “Our hands are full on cybersecurity on defense. I’d like to get that squared away first before we look at taking on any additional responsibilities,” he said. On stage, he said the U.S. has to do a “better job deterring the [People’s Republic of China]” through “deterrence by denial” where cyber defenses are shored up in a way that Chinese state-aligned hackers wouldn’t be able to intrude into American systems. As for his future, Coker said he doesn’t know and is currently not looking around for new work. But he appears to be keeping the door open. “I’m always interested in public service,” he said.  ]]

[Category: Threats]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/8/25 9:34am
Spotlight on Trump President-elect Donald Trump has seized headlines with another extreme suggestion: leaving open the possibility of using military or economic force to expand U.S. territory by annexing Greenland, Canada, and/or the Panama Canal. The president-elect brought it up 20 minutes into an hourlong press conference Tuesday in Florida. When asked about it a bit later, Trump confirmed his interest in keeping the option of invasions open.   David Sanger of the New York Times: “I wanted to touch on the world empire that you mentioned, but lets start if we could, with your references to Greenland and the Panama Canal, so forth. Can you assure the world that as you try to get control of these areas, you are not going to use military or economic coercion?” Trump: “No.” Sanger: “Can you tell us a little bit about what your plan is? Are you going to negotiate a new treaty? Are you going to ask the Canadians to hold a vote? What is the strategy?” Trump: “Youre talking about Panama and Greenland. No, I cant assure you on either of those two, but I can say this. We need them for economic security. The Panama Canal was built for our military.” Big-picture consideration: Annexing U.S. neighbors by force or by using tariffs to coerce close allies would be unprecedented for an American president in the contemporary era. But is there really a plan for such aggressive moves? Consider, for example, that Trump admitted during last year’s debates he doesn’t really have robust plans for much of anything, but rather “concepts of a plan” for issues like the future of affordable healthcare in America.  Second opinion: “Seizing the uncontrolled edges of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it has very little logic in any real-world scenario,” Atlantic staff writer Jonathan Chait wrote Tuesday. “On the one hand, Trump almost certainly has no plan, or even concepts of a plan, to launch a hemispheric war,” he writes. “On the other hand, Trump constantly generated wild ideas during his first term, only for the traditional Republicans in his orbit to distract or foil him, with the result that the world never found out how serious he was about them.” In context: “The imperialistic land grabs Trump is floating—which, if he follows through and succeeds, would represent the first major changes to the American map since Hawaii’s statehood in 1959—are a dramatic break from the foreign policy approaches of presidents in both parties in recent decades,” CNN political reporter Eric Bradner writes, noting Trump’s threats “come as Western leaders have opposed Russia’s attempts at expansion into formerly Soviet territory, including its war in Ukraine.” Reaction from Ottawa: “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote on social media after Trump issued his threats. Foreign Minister Melanie Joly wrote in her own social media post, “President-elect Trumps comments show a complete lack of understanding of what makes Canada a strong country. Our economy is strong. Our people are strong. We will never back down in the face of threats.” Panama’s reaction: “Let it be clear: The canal belongs to the Panamanians and it will continue to be that way,” Foreign Minister Javier Martínez-Acha said at his own press conference Tuesday. “The sovereignty of our canal is nonnegotiable and is part of our history of struggle and an irreversible conquest,” he added.  Denmark reax: “Greenland is not for sale and will not be in the future either,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Tuesday. “We need to stay calm and stick to our principles,” she said in an interview with Danish television station TV 2. “I dont think its a good way forward to fight each other with financial means when we are close allies and partners,” she added Tuesday evening, according to Reuters.  Historian’s reax: The controversy is a useful distraction from campaign promises. Consider, e.g., “Trump ran on the promise that he would lower prices, especially of groceries. Yet in mid-December he suggested in an interview with Time magazine that he doesn’t really expect to lower prices,” Heather Cox Richardson wrote two weeks ago, when Trump began escalating his threats about a Greenland-Panama-Canada invasion on social media. “That promise [of lowering grocery prices] seems to have been part of a performance to attract voters, abandoned now with a new performance that may or may not be real.” By the way, Russian propagandists praised Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward Panama, Greenland and Canada, Newsweek reported, with political scientist Sergey Mikheyev describing them as “especially interesting because it drives a wedge between him and Europe, it undermines the world architecture, and opens up certain opportunities for our foreign policy.” Another (Stanislav Tkachenko) said Trump “is teaching us a new diplomatic language. That is, to say it like it is. Maybe we wont carve up the world like an apple, but we can certainly outline the parts of the world where our interests cannot be questioned.” Like those Russians, at least one top Republican senator is savoring the attention Trump’s ideas are generating. Writing Monday on social media, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham said, “My only thought today as the states’ electoral votes were listed off: they skipped Canada. We’ll fix that next time!” Panning out: Trump, the only felon to be elected president, may be angry about his legal issues. “One of the biggest things that stood out to me from that press conference, from moments when Trump got out there before he even started taking questions, is the level of anger,” CNN’s Kaitlin Collins said Tuesday.  Collins pointed to “the sentencing that he is facing on Friday that so far is still Judge [Juan] Merchan has denied efforts to delay it. His attorneys are still working to do so,” Collins said. “And two, its this report by [special counsel] Jack Smith that we are told is imminent and is going to come out. Trump was informed during that that Judge [Aileen] Cannon down in Florida has tried to temporarily block that. Well, its not a settled matter. Well see if its successful. But his level of anger over that is unmistakable. He has not been this angry since he won the election.” The press conference also underscored the many conflicts of interest Trump is bringing to the White House. He led off the press conference by touting projects by a longtime Middle East business partner of his. He later “pointed out that one of his sons, Eric Trump, who has been pushing new Trump tower deals in the Middle East, was in the back of the ballroom, as well, on the same day that LIV Golf, the Saudi-financed golf league, disclosed that it intends to host another tournament this year at the Trump National Doral resort near Miami. This means that money tied to the Saudi government will continue to flow to the Trump family, even when Mr. Trump is back in the White House,” the New York Times reported.  What’s wrong with conflicts of interest? In 2021, the good-government non-profit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington wrote that “the line between the Trump Organization and the Trump administration has blurred so much that it is unclear where President Trump’s public responsibilities end and his private financial interests begin. Unlike any other modern president, Trump has forced the American people to ask if the decisions and policies his administration is implementing are because they’re the best policies for the nation, or because they personally benefit him—either by helping his businesses directly or the special interests spending money there.” Also on Tuesday: the Trump Organization’s “other major Middle East business partner, Dar Al Arkan, disclosed that it planned to start building projects in the United States for the first time, according to a report by Reuters.” And: “It all comes as Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, recently disclosed that he has raised an additional $1.5 billion from Middle East investors for his private equity company. The firm he started after he left his position in the White House in 2020 now has more than $4.5 billion, mostly from oil-rich sovereign wealth funds.” Read on, here. Related reading:  “Trump’s threats to Greenland, Canada and Panama explain everything about America First,” CNN reported Wednesday;  “Trump takes ‘America First’ to its expansionist endpoint,” Philip Bump of the Washington Post wrote Tuesday; “France to Trump: EU won’t let you invade Greenland,” Politico reported Wednesday;  “What to know about Trump’s calls to make Canada the ’51st state’,” The Hill reported Wednesday;  “Gulf of America? Trump says hell change name of Gulf of Mexico,” USA Today reported Tuesday off Trump’s press conference;  “Why Does Trump Want the Panama Canal? Here’s What to Know,” the New York Times reported Wednesday;  “Why Trump’s pursuit of Greenland could be cheered on by Russia,” CNBC reported Wednesday.  Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2023, supporters of far-right former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro sought to overturn his election loss by storming the Supreme Federal Court, the National Congress Palace and the Planalto Presidential Palace in what would ultimately be a failed coup.  Around the Defense Department Ukraine military-aid donors aim to set Kyiv up through 2027. The nearly 50 nations sending military aid to Ukraine will attempt to map out a way to sustain the war-torn country’s defensive efforts through 2027, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports ahead of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s final meeting with the group later this week in Germany.  The allies’ roadmaps focus on Ukraines air force, armor, artillery, de-mining, drone, integrated air and missile defense, information technology and maritime security needs, a senior U.S. defense official said Tuesday. Developing: U.S. Transportation Command is in a “surge operation” to get promised aid to Kyiv in the coming days and weeks, the official said. Ukrainian officials have frequently complained that promised aid has been slow to arrive, and that some weapons, such as long-range ATACMS missiles, were delivered years after Kyiv requested them, out of U.S. escalation fears that did not bear out. Read more, here.  The U.S. military carried out precision airstrikes against more Houthi locations inside Yemen on Tuesday. The operation targeted two underground “advanced conventional weapon storage facilities,” which the Iran-backed terrorist group had used “to conduct attacks against U.S. Navy warships and merchant vessels in the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden,” Central Command officials said Tuesday with little elaboration.   AI-infused terrorism: The U.S. Army special forces soldier who exploded the Cybertruck in Las Vegas last week used generative AI to derive his explosives cocktail he detonated in the back of the truck, authorities said Tuesday.  “This is the first incident that I’m aware of on U.S. soil where ChatGPT is utilized to help an individual build a particular device,” Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill said, calling the development “a concerning moment.” Among the new details police discussed publicly Tuesday: The soldier “stopped during the drive to Las Vegas to pour racing-grade fuel into the Cybertruck, which then dripped the substance,” the Associated Press reports. “The vehicle was loaded with 60 pounds (27 kilograms) of pyrotechnic material as well as 70 pounds (32 kilograms) of birdshot but officials are still uncertain exactly what detonated the explosion,” noting “it could have been the flash from the firearm that Livelsberger used to fatally shoot himself.” Police are also sitting on “a six-page document that they have not yet released because they’re working with Defense Department officials since some of the material could be classified,” AP reports. Investigators also have a laptop, mobile phone, and smartwatch to examine. Read on, here.  Additional reading:  “New Orleans attack a reminder of ongoing ISIS threat,” Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Tuesday off remarks from the Pentagon’s civilian head of special operations; And “As the US and China race to the Moon, loopholes in space law could allow conflict,” Professor of Law at the University of Bradford Gbenga Oduntan wrote this week for The Conversation.  ]]

[Category: Threats]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/7/25 5:09pm
The New Year’s Day terror attack in New Orleans is a warning that ISIS, and foreign terror groups in general, still have influence in the United States, the Pentagon’s civilian head of special operations said Tuesday. Though the Islamic State and al-Qaida aren’t able to launch attacks on America from abroad, their online campaigning can still reach vulnerable targets, Chris Maier said during a Center for Strategic and International Studies event. “I think many of the tactics we saw, and the overall framing, is not something thats that surprising,” Maier said. “Which is unfortunate, of course, because as a veteran of the counter-terrorism environment, we spend a lot of time and a lot of resources trying to focus on preventing these sorts of attacks.” The tactic of using a vehicle, he said, hearkens back to the “opportunistic” attacks al-Qaida encouraged in 2010 on the Arabian Peninsula. A 9/11-style attack on the U.S. is unlikely now, he said, because ISIS and al-Qaida’s capabilities have been so degraded by U.S. and coalition efforts in the Middle East. “So theyve looked to inspire individuals that already have access and in some cases, over time, develop the ideological desire to kill their fellow citizens,” Maier said. [[Related Posts]] That appears to be the case with Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a native Texas and U.S. Army veteran, according to law enforcement reports following the attack. “The Europeans have experienced this, and certainly this is a good reminder again, that it still exists in the United States, despite all the efforts and all the good work overseas,” Maier said. Though the Biden administration wound down use of the Global War on Terror label in 2021, deployed U.S. forces still carry out counter-terror operations in the Middle East. “You know, simultaneous with this attack is a tremendous campaign by Central Command to put a lot of pressure on the remnants of ISIS in Syria and Iraq,” Maier said. As recently as last week, CENTCOM teamed up with Iraqi forces to target ISIS camps in the Hamrin mountains. During the same period, CENTCOM supported Syrian Democratic Forces in capturing an ISIS leader in Dayr az-Zawr, according to a Monday release.  The future of operations in Syria is unclear, Maier added, as the deposing of former President Bashar al-Assad means the U.S. will have to negotiate its presence in Syria with new leadership. CENTCOM has been putting “a lot of focus on what the change in the political environment in Syria will mean for potentially ISIS, and our longstanding ability to keep that pressure on the core there,” he said. It’s a similar story for Iraq, as the multinational coalition that’s been stamping out the remnants of ISIS in that country is set to end no later than September, a decision that came out of the U.S. Iraq Joint Security Cooperation Dialogue in Washington, D.C. last summer. The move does leave room for a new U.S.-Iraq partnership “in a manner that supports Iraqi forces and maintains pressure on ISIS,” the State Department said in September 2024. ]]

[Category: Threats]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/7/25 3:52pm
Outer space is infinite, but that hasn’t stopped humans trying to impose their laws on it. There are more ways for people to travel to space than ever before, and the next few decades are likely to see the US and China sending humans to the Moon again.  Both countries aim to set up long-term research stations on the lunar surface, a bit like there are now in Antarctica. But could disputes between these two countries – and potentially others, such as Russia or India – arise over where to locate bases on the lunar surface? And could the same happen over claims to the Moon’s resources, such as the water ice located in craters at the lunar poles?  Countries will want to extract this ice because it can be turned into rocket fuel for onward journeys and for life support at their lunar bases. Indeed, the prospect of “space water wars” is actually nearer, timewise, than the prospect of providing clean drinking water to everyone in the developing world. But the legal arguments around rights to space water and other resources are complex. Laws are also in place to ensure countries don’t pollute bodies such as the Moon while they are exploring them. The basic tenets of international space law are laid out in ten treaties and “soft law” agreements between multiple countries. For example, the Outer Space Treaty (1967) says that space should be “free for exploration and use by all states”, and is “not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty”. This suggests countries could be on shaky ground if they try to establish national bases on the Moon to extract water ice, as all other countries are equally entitled to explore and use that “territory”. This treaty’s stipulation that nations are free to “explore and use outer space and celestial bodies” means anyone can extract lunar resources and use them while in space. However, there’s a potential contradiction with another part of the treaty, which allows countries to retain jurisdiction over objects they put into space – potentially implying that bases on the Moon would remain under the jurisdiction of the country that has put them there. If so, explorers from other nations might be restricted from exploring where this interferes with the jurisdiction of these bases. The Moon Agreement, which was created in 1979 and has 17 parties including France, Australia and India, goes a bit further on resources, stating that “neither the surface nor the subsurface of the Moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any state”. However, major spacefaring nations such as the US, Russia and China never signed this agreement. The US has drawn up its own agreement, known as the Artemis Accords(originally signed into being in 2020), which tries to establish ground rules over the use of lunar resources such as ice. While emerging spacefaring nations including India are signatories, important space powers such as China and Russia are not.  There’s also a difference between extracting space resources such as lunar ice, which are needed for further exploration, and taking resources from space and bringing them back to Earth purely because they are financially valuable. The latter question affects the burgeoning field of asteroid mining. A number of companies, mainly in the US and Luxembourg, have outlined plans to travel to asteroids (the leftover rocks from the birth of the solar system) and extract valuable minerals and metals, which would then be delivered back to Earth. However, it is debatable whether the repatriation of resources is allowed under the Outer Space Treaty. Under both the Outer Space Treaty and the UN’s Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects (1972), nations are liable for any destruction caused by their space hardware, and are obliged to avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies. This will apply to countries that aim to extract resources on the Moon and other nearby bodies, such as Mars. But what happens when spacecraft leave our Solar System and head to the far-off reaches of our cosmic neighbourhood? Can states still be held responsible for pollution or damage so far from Earth? The Voyager 1 and 2 probes, launched by Nasa in 1977, have already left the Solar System, and others are on trajectories that will eventually take them out of it. In the treaties it is party to, such as the Outer Space Treaty and the Liability Convention, the US appears to have agreed to continue lawful space operations endlessly into the infinity of space. This implies that, from the design stage, scientists should configure their spacecraft and instruments in such a way that, even when not within the control of humans on Earth, they do not pollute outer space.  For example, some spacecraft use radioactive materials as power sources. The careless spread of radioactive materials would be a violation of international space law, especially where the presence of such dangerous materials is not reported to the UN bodies that oversee such matters. Under the Moon Agreement, there is an obligation to notify the UN before any placement of radioactive materials on the Moon, and of their purpose. But in the even that contact with a spacecraft is lost, should countries be held to their liability obligations into the infinity of space? Space operations are fast expanding into deeper reaches of outer space. Pioneers 10 and 11, launched in the 1970s by Nasa, are on trajectories that will eventually take them out of the Solar System – potentially within the next few decades. Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft passed Pluto in 2014 and is currently travelling through a distant region called the Kuiper Belt. One answer to these legal questions is that human laws ought to logically end wherever our ability to conceptualise and carry out space operations ends. There are, for example, some good reasons to limit space law to our Solar System – because it may be impractical for states to exert control over them once they travel further, whether or not they could cause damage or pollution to more distant celestial bodies. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. ]]

[Category: Ideas]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/7/25 3:13pm
The dozens of nations sending military aid to Ukraine will attempt to map out a way to sustain the wartorn country’s defensive efforts through 2027, a senior U.S. defense official said Tuesday ahead of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s final meeting with the group. At Thursday’s planned meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the leaders of the group’s eight “capability coalitions” will “need to endorse roadmaps that articulate Ukraines air force, armor, artillery, de-mining, drone, integrated air and missile defense, information technology and maritime security needs and objectives through 2027. These roadmaps are intended to enable donors to plan for and support Ukraine sustainably into the future," the official told reporters. As well, “You will hear a very substantial announcement of another tranche” of U.S. military arms and gear to be donated via presidential drawdown authority, the official said.  Still, “more than a couple” billion dollars of approved presidential drawdown authority will remain for President-elect Donald Trump’s national security team to distribute as they see fit, the official said.  Meanwhile, the official said, U.S. Transportation Command is in a “surge operation” to get promised aid to Kyiv in the coming days and weeks. [[Related Posts]] Additionally, new research study out this week shows that journalistic focus on Ukraine could play a big role in continued U.S. public support for aid.  Thursdays UDCG meeting  will be its 25th—and Austin’s last as defense secretary. He launched the group soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, drawing on “his experience and contributions to the [Defeat ISIS coalition] and his deep belief that when you bring allies and partners together, the sum will be much greater than the parts,” the official said.  The group’s 50-some member nations have collectively sent Ukraine more than $126 billion in security assistance, the official said. The United States alone has sent $61.4 billion in military aid, including arms and equipment worth $27.7 billion from Pentagon stockpiles, according to a Dec. 30 State Department release. Ukrainian officials have frequently complained that promised aid has been slow to arrive, and that some weapons, such as long-range ATACMS missiles, were delivered years after Kyiv requested them, out of U.S. escalation fears that did not bear out.  Asked about Kyiv’s complaints, the official said that while the Pentagon could move fairly quickly to ship items from its stockpiles, things provided under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative must be specially bought and modified for Ukraine’s use. Such items include armored vehicles, drones, and counter-drone gear.  “They have to be built and produced and then provided,” the official said. “Because Ukraine needs them for the battlefield, there may be some of those vehicles that I referred to which need refurbishment, which may not be delivered, but the vast majority of what has been announced will be delivered this month.”  It’s unclear whether the United States will continue to participate in the Ukraine Defense Contact Group after Donald Trump becomes president. Trump was impeached in 2019 for improperly withholding aid to Ukraine, tried to block Congressional approval for new aid in early 2024, and several months later vowed to cut aid if elected. But in December, officials around Trump told the Financial Times that the new White House team will likely continue to provide aid while also demanding greater defense spending by European NATO allies. The senior defense officials said on Tuesday that Thursday’s meeting would show how the group will enable European countries to take on a larger role in supporting Ukraine regardless of further U.S. participation or leadership.  Media could shape US support The extent of future U.S. aid to Ukraine likely hinges, at least in part, on how the media chooses to continue covering the war, according to research recently published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. Coverage of the civilian death toll of Russian attacks—which UN and other estimates put at nearly 12,000—will be particularly important, according to a paper out this week from Alon Kraitzman, Tom Etienne, and Dolores Albarracin. The researchers used five experiments to gauge the impact of empathy on U.S. public support for wartorn countries.   In one experiment, 800 participants were given various amounts of information about civilian casualties. Those who saw casualty details showed increased empathy, with 78% scoring high on a five-item index, compared to 51% in the control group. Of those in the high-empathy group, 82% supported continued U.S. military aid to Ukraine, versus 59% among the lower-empathy group. Another experiment divided 1,200 respondents into two groups: one that was exposed to detailed accounts of Ukrainian civilian casualties and the other given neutral information about the conflict. Among those exposed to civilian casualty narratives, 72% expressed support for increased U.S. aid to Ukraine, compared to 48% in the neutral group.  “Our research highlights the crucial role of media in shaping continued support for foreign intervention, indicating how empathy-inducing reporting on foreign conflicts can increase and sustain support for US involvement,” the researchers write. ]]

[Category: Policy]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/7/25 9:16am
A service member from the U.S.-led, counter-ISIS coalition was killed during a flurry of operations in the region over the past week, Central Command officials announced Monday. It’s unclear just yet who perished and where they’re from. Two others in the coalition were also wounded, and they are “from two different nations,” according to CENTCOM, which insisted, “There were no injuries to U.S. personnel or damage to U.S. equipment.” Locations included the Hamrin mountains of Iraq and around Deir ez-Zor, Syria in a series of raids spanning December 30 and January 6. It’s also unclear how many suspected terrorists were killed in the operations. However, CENTCOM said its combined forces captured an “ISIS attack cell leader” during an overnight raid in Syria late last week.   “During the operations, ISIS fighters engaged coalition forces on several occasions,” CENTCOM said. Those engagements resulted in coalition airstrikes “using F-16s, F-15s, and A-10s,” the latter of which were “successful in eliminating the ISIS fighters within a cave,” according to CENTCOM.  Developing: Iran’s military has withdrawn most of its forces from Syria, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing U.S., European and Arab officials. Perhaps most importantly for U.S. and allied forces in the region, “Members of Iran’s elite Quds Force have now fled to Iran and the militia groups have disbanded,” a U.S. official claimed.  However, Iranian forces “could find a way back in thanks to sectarian divisions that remain largely unresolved under the new regime,” Andrew Tabler, a former director for Syria at the National Security Council, warned.  Turkey’s leader is watching Syria’s future nervously, just in case the Kurdish population attempts to negotiate any new divisions of Syria, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday. “We can not accept under any pretext that Syria be divided and if we notice the slightest risk we will take the necessary measures,” Erdogan said, adding, “we have the means” and “we could intervene in one night,” he warned. Agence France-Presse has a bit more. Get a clearer picture of “How Iran moves sanctioned oil around the world” thanks to an intriguing multimedia report published Tuesday by Reuters. The news agency tracked several shipments from an Iranian import-export firm known as Sahara Thunder beginning in February 2022. (The U.S. sanctioned the Iranian “front company” in April.) Background: “Reuters shared its reporting with Roke Intelligence, a part of British research and development firm Roke which specialises in monitoring sanctions evasion for clients in the maritime industry. It independently verified many of the findings, located ships with satellite imaging, found the likely offloading points for vessels, and identified manipulated vessel tracking data.” Among their findings: “There were 92 owner or operating companies for the 34 ships involved with Sahara Thunders activities,” Reuters reports. The news agency says it “contacted 79 of them and was unable to reach 13. Ten companies replied. Eight said they were not involved. Two said they only handled the ships’ technical management and had no knowledge of chartering or voyages.” Read the rest, here.  Related: A key Chinese port that handles oil from U.S.-sanctioned countries has agreed to bar tankers from sanctioned companies. “Shandong Port said it expects the shipping ban to have a limited impact on independent refiners as most of the sanctioned oil is being carried on non-sanctioned tankers,” Reuters reports. Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2015, two al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing 12 people and wounding 11 others before authorities tracked them down and killed them two days later.  Around DOD New details emerge on proposed fast, runway-independent aircraft. Aurora Flight Sciences and Bell Textron are the two contractors racing to complete designs for the SPRINT program, a DARPA-SOCOM search for aircraft that can both hover and cruise faster than 400 knots. Aurora says it’s planning a demonstrator with a 45-ft wingspan and 1,000-pound payload whose blended wing and embedded lift fans will enable speeds of 450 knots. Bell Textron, meanwhile, says it has completed wind-tunnel tests of its Stop/Fold rotors that are to lift its aircraft off the ground, then fold back to allow a faster propulsion system to take over. Read, here. More than 800 “potential vulnerabilities and biases” found in DOD’s proposed AI-infused medical services. A Pentagon red team that included more than 200 people—including DOD clinical providers and healthcare analysts within the department—looked at “three popular LLMs” that might be used to summarize clinical notes and drive a medical advisory chatbot. Their work to build a list of potential problems will guide future efforts to procure and build AI-based tools, according to a release from the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, or CDAO. Read more, here. “Murder Hornet” is official. Last year, the Navy ordered a crash program to outfit Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets with nine air-to-air missiles: five AIM-120s, four AIM-9Xs, and an ATFLIR targeting pod. The upgunned aircraft made its combat debut last May in the battles against Houthi forces targeting shipping in the Red Sea. Crews dubbed it the “Murder Hornet” after a particularly ferocious wasp, and it’s now the Navy’s official name for the variant, The War Zone reported Monday. How should Boeing fix itself? Wall Street Journal: “We asked dozens of people—current and former Boeing leaders, airline executives, employees, suppliers, safety regulators and others—in recent months what Boeing should do to turn itself around. Here’s what they said.” More, here.  China Tencent, CATL added to U.S. list of Chinese firms that allegedly help Beijing’s military. Both are behemoths; Tencent is a tech conglomerate that includes the world’s biggest videogame company, while Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. “accounts for 35 percent of global lithium-ion battery production,” as Defense One reported earlier this year.  Reuters: “While the designation does not involve immediate bans, it can be a blow to the reputations of affected companies and represents a stark warning to U.S. entities and firms about the risks of conducting business with them. It could also add pressure on the U.S. Treasury Department to sanction the companies.” ICYMI: A year ago, Congress ordered the Pentagon to stop buying batteries from CATL. But with battery-powered military gear only set to grow, replacing Chinese sources is more easily said than done, Thomas Corbett and Peter Singer noted in May. GAO wonders: What would it cost to replace U.S. telecoms China-linked gear? With Salt Typhoon still unpurged from U.S. systems, the Government Accountability Office may try to put a price tag on one immensely complicated countermeasure: replacing Chinese-made gear in many of smaller U.S. telecoms. Read on, here. Europe and Russia Better late than never: The Brits just launched a UK-led, AI-driven system to “track threats to undersea infrastructure and monitor Russian shadow fleet,” the Defense Ministry said Monday.  Ten nations are involved with a focus across 22 regions, “including parts of the English Channel, North Sea, Kattegat, and Baltic Sea,” 10 Downing Street said. The alliance includes Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, and of course the UK.  “Harnessing the power of AI, this UK-led system is a major innovation which allows us the unprecedented ability to monitor large areas of the sea with a comparatively small number of resources, helping us stay secure at home and strong abroad,” British Defense Secretary John Healey said in a statement. Read more, here.  And lastly: Denmark’s king just changed the nation’s coat of arms. The new coat “more prominently feature[s] Greenland and the Faroe Islands – in what has also been seen as a rebuke to Donald Trump,” the Guardian reported Sunday.  Some history: “For 500 years, previous Danish royal coats of arms have featured three crowns, the symbol of the Kalmar Union between Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which was led from Denmark between 1397 and 1523. They are also an important symbol of its neighbour Sweden,” Miranda Bryant of the Guardian writes. “But in the updated version, the crowns have been removed and replaced with a more prominent polar bear and ram than previously, to symbolise Greenland and the Faroe Islands respectively.” By the way: Donald Trump Jr. flew to Greenland Tuesday for a five-hour visit to record a podcast, AP reports. “In a statement, Greenland’s government said Trump Jr.s visit would take place ‘as a private individual’ and not as an official visit and that Greenlandic representatives would not meet with him.” “Neither Trump Jr.s delegation nor Greenlandic government officials had requested a meeting,” a Greenland official told AP. Read more, here.  Related reading:  “Danish PM says Greenland is still not for sale as Donald Trump Jr. arrives,” Politico reported Tuesday;  “Donald Trump Ally [Scott Jennings] Discusses Taking Greenland by Force,” Newsweek reported Tuesday;  “Trump Jr. touches down in Greenland amid US speculation of a territorial grab,” France24 reported Tuesday;  “Why Would Trump Buy Greenland When He Can Rent It?” Bloomberg reported Tuesday.  ]]

[Category: Threats]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/6/25 9:05pm
A bit more than halfway to the final-design deadline in DARPA’s SPRINT vertical-takeoff program, the two contractors have revealed new details about their candidates. Aurora Flight Sciences is preparing an uncrewed demonstrator with a 45-ft wingspan and 1,000-pound payload, officials said in an October statement. The demonstrator will include an “off-the-shelf turbofan and turboshaft engines” to drive the aircraft to 450 knots, some 50 knots past the minimum requirement, the statement said. These off-the-shelf components will be harnessed in the innovative “fan-in-wing” system that Aurora announced when the program launched last May: a blended wing body design that the company says will combine stealth, vertical flight, and fixed-wing payload and speed. This basic design could be scaled up for a range of medium- and heavy-lift aircraft—say, “a manned, 130-ft wingspan aircraft with four lift fans and 40-ft payload bay,” Aurora officials said in their October statement. “The FIW aircraft could meet or exceed the payloads, ranges, and speeds typical of fixed wing military transport aircraft while delivering the tactical advantage of true vertical takeoff and landing.” [[Related Posts]] Meanwhile, Bell Textron, the other company with a SPRINT contract, said last month that it has completed wind-tunnel tests on its “Stop/Fold rotor system,” which will enable an aircraft to use rotors to take off vertically, then fold them backwards to allow a different, presumably faster and more fuel-efficient propulsion system to take over. (Here’s a February 2023 video of a Stop/Fold rotor assembly doing its thing on a test track.) The SPRINT effort—formally, the Speed and Runway Independent Technologies program run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency with U.S. Special Operations Command— seeks a proof-of-concept technology demonstrator whose technologies and concepts can power military aircraft of various sizes that can cruise at 400 to 450 knots and operate from unprepared surfaces in austere environments. Preliminary design review is scheduled for April 2025, with flight testing planned for 2027, according to the Aurora release. The program’s requirements “underline an urgent need for U.S. decision makers eyeing future aircraft built for the vast range and distance challenges posed by operations in the contested Pacific region. With the U.S. Army FLRAA fielding set near the decade’s end, all four U.S. service branches will soon operate tiltrotor aircraft,” Forecast International analyst Jon Hemler wrote in a recent post. “In view of the long-term future of DOD aircraft acquisitions and likely every military branch as a customer on the line, the stakes to deliver an effective design are high.” ]]

[Category: Science & Tech]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/6/25 9:00pm
The nation’s top oversight office is considering penning a study to assess the cost of administering a far-reaching operation to rip out and replace swaths of at-risk or compromised telecommunications equipment owned by small communications providers around the country, according to a senior U.S. official. The deliberations, which have not been previously reported, are fueled by an ongoing Chinese espionage intrusion into U.S. and allied telecommunications networks by Salt Typhoon, a hacking unit tied to Beijing’s Ministry of State Security that likely had unfettered access to key elements of America’s telecommunications backbone for around two years. As part of the work, the U.S. Government Accountability Office would study the costs of undertaking such a project and, separately, would also evaluate security vulnerabilities that affect the telecommunications industry, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private deliberations. Should President-elect Donald Trump’s national security team support this study, it could motivate his allies in Congress to greenlight what would likely be a multi-billion-dollar effort to weed out troves of telecommunications hardware that’s been accessed or is at risk of being ensnared by Chinese hackers and other adversaries. It’s not entirely clear when the study would commence, but GAO staff are anticipating that Congress will formally request that the work begin soon, the senior official said. The Federal Communications Commission is already locked in an effort to help small, rural broadband providers remove and replace equipment made by Huawei and ZTE, a pair of Chinese telecom companies deemed an unsuitable security risk to U.S. networks.  That “rip and replace” program was toplined with $2 billion in funding when it initially passed in 2020. Only last month did it receive an added $3 billion from Congress to cover a funding shortfall that the FCC had been flagging to lawmakers for months.  This GAO study would be broader in scope. It would focus on the viability of discarding and replacing telecom equipment embedded across the entire nation, including hardware managed by smaller providers ensnared by Salt Typhoon.  The Chinese cyberspies broke into the systems of major providers, including AT&T, Verizon and Lumen. They also accessed Charter Communications, Consolidated Communications and Windstream, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday, citing people familiar with the matter. In total, the hackers infiltrated at least nine U.S. communications firms and dozens of others around the world.  Telecommunications Industry Association CEO Dave Stehlin said in a statement that TIA has “consistently championed the use of trusted suppliers throughout our expansive network ecosystem, encompassing wireless, wireline, satellite, subsea cables and IoT networks” and added the trade group has advocated for rip and replace initiatives for several years. The Competitive Carriers Association, which represents regional and rural wireless providers, declined to comment. The FCC and a staffer for incoming Republican leader Brendan Carr did not return a comment. Multiple providers recently disclosed that Salt Typhoon was no longer in their networks. Still, several hundred organizations comprising telecom companies and other sectors were notified over the past couple of months that they may be at risk of compromise, Nextgov/FCW reported in December. One of the major vulnerabilities exploited is a hardware flaw within Cisco equipment that cannot be patched with a software update and requires physical replacement, according to a person with knowledge of the intrusions. “The [GAO] study is needed,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to be candid about their understanding of the hacks. The government watchdog may also explore providers’ equipment supply chains. Beijing can legally compel companies that operate in China’s borders to hand over schematics about their products. Given its operating unit in mainland China, it’s likely that Chinese intelligence services had extensive knowledge about Cisco device architecture that allowed Salt Typhoon to later get inside, according to a congressional aide familiar with the hacks. The Chinese cyber unit also exploited software vulnerabilities in Ivanti, Fortinent, Sophos and Microsoft Exchange Server systems. Early glimpses of what a nationwide rip-and-replace initiative could involve are already taking shape. Officials are researching national security risks tied to China-owned router provider TP-Link, and are readying for a possible countrywide ban of the firm, which can be invoked under a Commerce Department authority created in Trump’s first term. Commerce is also moving to jettison remaining operating units of China Telecom in the U.S., the New York Times reported last month. “The risk to our telecommunications infrastructure has only grown since we discovered the threat posed by Huawei,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., said in a statement when asked about the study. “Due to the widespread nature of this most recent intrusion by the CCP actor known as Salt Typhoon, it’s essential to fully evaluate the cost of creating a more resilient foundation for the telecommunications sector. This way, we can take concrete steps toward improving collective cyber defense across the government,” he added, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. It’s unclear how such a sweeping rip and replace project would unfold, given society’s everyday reliance on phone systems for jobs, banking and other vital activities. Moreover, millions of Americans rely on major wireless providers for services that allow them to conduct phone calls, send text messages and browse the internet.  Some telecom operators also have a strong presence in the federal space. AT&T, for instance, manages FirstNet, a public safety network used by first responders like firefighters and police officers. Data tied to FirstNet call logs was compromised in a separate 2022 breach, Nextgov/FCW reported in July. The U.S. government’s communications equipment could also be scrutinized as part of the study. The fiscal year 2019 defense policy bill barred agencies from buying or using certain telecom or video surveillance equipment from several Chinese companies and their related business units, but equipment purchased before that law took effect is not considered. Updating the vulnerable systems and security practices across the telecom industry would be a massive and costly undertaking. Modern-day telecom networks operate as a complex mix of antiquated technology from the past few decades integrated with contemporary digital infrastructure. In certain areas, protective measures were robust, but in others outdated hardware and lax security practices left vulnerabilities that Salt Typhoon identified and exploited. Making matters more complex is the fact that Salt Typhoon also breached America’s “lawful intercept” systems that house wiretap requests used by law enforcement to surveil suspected criminals and spies. Telecom firms are required to engineer their networks for wiretapping under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, which passed in 1994. The FCC oversees the law. Over the years, wiretapping methods have shifted from analog procedures to streamlined digital systems. Today, law enforcement analysts can file requests for targets’ phone metadata directly to telecom operators. Many of those requests are processed at legal demand facilities that could be inadvertently swept up in the equipment replacement efforts. Not all experts are confident that a mass rip and replace project would shore up U.S. communications security. “Nothing I’ve seen of Salt Typhoon’s activity would suggest rip and replace would be a cost effective or efficient approach. Most of these intrusions took advantage of decades-old security architecture flaws and exploited known cyber hygiene issues like missing patches or vulnerable accounts and leaked passwords,” said Marc Rogers, a 35-year telecom security practitioner who worked with a major carrier on deploying, operating and securing its technology from the 1990s into the late 2010s. “The first step should be to fix these [issues]. Exploitation of our carriers via old known flaws that have patches is an indefensible position,” he added. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said replacing the hardware is a “necessary, but insufficient step.” “Salt Typhoon demonstrated in a scary way how the aged telecommunications infrastructure on which Americans rely is highly fragile and extremely vulnerable,” he said in a statement that argued the need for minimum cybersecurity standards and for providers “to build their systems in ways that take into consideration security by design and not only speed to market.” “I hope GAO will also include in their study the costs of doing such things,” Warner added. China has repeatedly denied involvement in hacking activities against the U.S. and Western allies. Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu told Nextgov/FCW that, during a meeting between President Biden and President Xi Jinping in Peru at the APEC Summit late last year, Xi said there’s no evidence supporting the “irrational claim” of cyberattacks from China. Biden raised the question to Xi in response to the Salt Typhoon hacks. “The [People’s Republic of China] threat is probably the top threat that we’re addressing right now,” Brett Leatherman, the FBI’s deputy assistant director for cyber operations, said in a recent interview. “All these PRC-based cyberattacks against the United States — they’re meant to either increase the PRC’s footprint on U.S. infrastructure for potentially some sort of wartime footing, as well as to conduct sophisticated espionage against the United States,” he added. “All of that is a threat to national security.” ]]

[Category: Threats]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/6/25 9:14am
Domestic extremism update: Last week’s Las Vegas Cybertruck bomb suspect was a supporter of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, as well as an active-duty Green Beret with PTSD who left notes (PDF) in his phone stating he believed the U.S. was “headed toward collapse,” authorities said Friday after accessing one of two phones found at the scene. He’d also been experiencing marital problems just days before the incident occurred, officials told the New York Post. ICYMI: His name was Matthew Livelsberger, a 37-year-old from Colorado Springs who was a master sergeant in the Army special forces when he carried out his suicidal final act on New Year’s Day. Police said he shot himself in the head seconds before his rented Tesla Cybertruck truck exploded in flames and fireworks on the Vegas strip. The attack, which wounded seven bystanders, is being investigated as a possible act of terrorism, officials announced shortly after it occurred. Several messages on the soldier’s phone would seem to meet the textbook definition of terrorism: carrying out a violent act to advance a political ideology.  But from the soldier’s troubled perspective, “This was not a terrorist attack. It was a wake-up call,” one of his notes read, according to Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren of the Vegas police. “Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence,” Livelsberger wrote. “What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives?”  What was his “point,” or message? “Masculinity is good and men must be leaders,” he wrote in one of the notes. The U.S. must “focus on strength and winning” and “weed out those in our government and military who do not idealize” masculinity and strength, according to the soldier—who also called on military personnel, veterans, and militias to “move on DC starting now.”  Livelsberger also encouraged insurrection in Washington, urging those with a like mind to “Occupy every major road along fed[eral] buildings and the campus of fed[eral] buildings by the hundreds of thousands. Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.” “Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dem[ocrat]s out of the fed[eral] government and military by any means necessary,” he advised. “They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse…Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans!” said the deceased soldier. Historian’s reaction: “The vision of the U.S. as a hellscape that can only be fixed by purging the government of Democrats does not reflect reality,” Heather Cox Richardson of Boston College wrote Sunday. However, she continued, “Livelsberger’s notes reflect not reality but rather the political rhetoric in which many Americans have marinated since the 1950s: the idea that a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights crushes the individualism on which America depends.” (Richardson goes into greater detail on the myth of the American cowboy and how that seems to color several of the soldier’s themes and grievances, here.) But Livelsberger left another notable clue as to his violent final act: “Why did I personally do it now?” he wrote in one of the messages, according to police. “I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took,” he said. He also blamed processed foods, children “addicted to screens by the age of two,” and lamented, “Our soldiers are done fighting wars without end states or clear objectives.” Said one close friend: “He needed help, and he was afraid to get it,” a former Army nurse told the New York Times, and noted that fear of seeking help “is very common for guys who do his job.” The Army even released a statement acknowledging the “behavioral health” toll on its personnel, as well as measures taken to support the special operations community, in particular. “The Army is fully committed to assisting our Soldiers and has a multitude of behavioral health professionals and resources that are available to our Soldiers around the clock,” Chief of Public Affairs Brig. Gen. Amanda Azubuike said in a statement Saturday. “Additionally, the U.S. Special Operations Command established the Preservation of the Force and Family (POTFF) program which provides holistic care in physical, cognitive, medical, and support resources as appropriate to each individual.”  For the record, “We encourage our Soldiers, if they need help, mental health treatment or need to speak with someone, to seek proactive behavioral health treatment either on base or online,” the general said in her statement. “They also have the option of talking to an Army chaplain. We are committed to supporting our Soldiers in every possible way.  Worth noting: “In this particular case, Master Sgt. Matthew Livelsberger had access to and used the POTFF program,” Azubuike said, and stressed, “he did not display any concerning behaviors at the time, and was granted personal leave. All relevant records were provided to the FBI as the lead investigative agency,” she added.  FBI: “Although this incident is more public and more sensational than usual, it ultimately appears to be a tragic case of suicide involving a heavily decorated combat veteran who is struggling with PTSD and other issues,” Spencer Evans, the special agent in charge of the Las Vegas field office, said Friday.  Related reading:  “Tesla data helped police in Las Vegas. It highlights privacy concerns,” the Associated Press reported Saturday;  “New Orleans attacker visited city twice in recent months, wore Meta glasses to record the scene in advance,” CNN reported Monday;  “Truck-ramming suspect used wrong device in failed detonation of IEDs: Officials,” ABC News reported Sunday;  “Driver in Ramming Attack Made Trips to New Orleans and Abroad,” the New York Times reported Sunday;  “Biden is traveling to New Orleans following the French Quarter attack that killed 14 and injured 30,” AP reported Monday;  And don’t miss: “A Mole Infiltrated the Highest Ranks of American Militias. This Is What He Found,” ProPublica’s Pulitzer-winner Joshua Kaplan reported over the weekend after the infiltrator shared a flash drive with thousands of secret files.  Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2021, thousands of Trump supporters rushed the U.S. Capitol Building, dozens attacked police and hundreds broke inside in a violent attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election of President Joe Biden. More than 1,580 people have since been charged with crimes related to the insurrection; more than 1,000 have pleaded guilty and at least 220 were convicted at trial. Pacific The same day the White House blocked a Japanese steelmaker from buying a U.S. firm, the Pentagon’s arms export agency announced a $3.6 billion sale of missiles to Tokyo on Friday.  Involved: More than a thousand AIM-120D-3 and AIM-120C-8 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles, aka AMRAAMs, in a deal benefiting Tucson-based RTX Corporation. Lawmakers could still object to the deal, though that does not seem likely.  North Korea launched what may have been a hypersonic missile on Monday, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reports. Seoul’s military described the projectile as an intermediate-range ballistic missile that flew an estimated 1,100 kilometers before splashing into the East sea. Japan’s military said it had a maximum altitude of about 100 kilometers.  Context: “The latest launch took place as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was visiting Seoul for talks on efforts to deter North Korean threats amid political turmoil in South Korea stemming from President Yoon Suk Yeols failed martial law bid,” Yonhap writes, and adds, “South Korean officials have warned the North could take advantage of the political crisis by engaging in military activity and ratchet up cross-border tensions.” From the region:  “How Chinese Hackers Graduated From Clumsy Corporate Thieves to Military Weapons,” four Wall Street Journal reporters wrote Saturday;   “Afghans arrive in the Philippines to complete visa processing for resettlement in US,” AP reported Monday from Manila;  “Philippines deploys maritime and air assets to monitor Chinas monster ship,” Reuters reported Monday from Manila.  Trendspotting: Trump’s promise to build more warships is on a collision course with his deportation pledges. Early last year, the then-candidate promised that when he got back into the Oval Office, he’d authorize the U.S. Navy to build more ships, reports ProPublica’s Nicole Foy. “It’s very important,” Trump said, “because it’s jobs, great jobs.” However, Foy writes, the companies that build ships for the government are already having trouble finding enough workers to fill those jobs. And Trump may make it even harder if he follows through on another pledge he’s made: to clamp down on immigration. Read on, here. Boeing appoints a former Trump Pentagon official as CIO. From December 2019 to January 2021, Dana Deasy served as DOD’s CIO. Read the company’s press release. The Americas Honduras: We’ll eject U.S. forces if Trump proceeds with mass deportations. President Xiomara Castro’s threat, made in a New Year’s Day radio address, is “the first concrete pushback by a leader in the region to Mr. Trump’s plan to send back millions of Latin American citizens living in the United States” and came as “as foreign ministers were set to meet later this month to address the deportation issue,” the New York Times reported Friday. Trump has also proposed unilateral military action in Mexico. “Mexican officials have tried to learn whether he is serious or merely blustering to gain leverage in talks about shutting down the pipeline of migrants and drugs heading into the U.S,” the Wall Street Journal reported late last month. “Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has rushed to blunt criticism from Trump’s orbit and put to rest worries at home that there is any danger from the country’s neighbor to the north.” What might such action look like? Veteran military reporter Kevin Maurer writes that he “talked to half a dozen former special operations soldiers and intelligence agents to see what this saber-rattling might look like in practice. On paper, they argued it was an easy operation to dismantle the cartel leadership, something that our military—particularly units like SEAL Team Six and Delta Force—has mastered after two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he reported in Rolling Stone last Thursday.  However, “Carolyn Gallaher, a professor studying guerrilla and paramilitary violence at American University’s School of International Service, calls the idea folly. She researched cooperation between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement in the mid-2000s and says one takeaway from the Mexicans was that it was a mistake to target cartel leaders.” Read on, here. ICYMI: A recent ridealong with ICE officers revealed obstacles to mass deportations, AP reported from New York City just before Christmas. For starters, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is already understaffed. “About 1.4 million people have final orders of removal, while about 660,000 under immigration supervision either have been convicted of crimes or are facing charges. But only 6,000 officers within ICE are tasked with monitoring noncitizens in the country and then finding and removing those not eligible to stay. Those staffing numbers have largely remained static as their caseload has roughly quadrupled over the past decade to 7.6 million. About 10% of that workforce was pulled from their regular duties last year to go to the U.S.-Mexico border at times when immigration spiked.” Read on, here. Lastly today: Migrant flows have plummeted in one key route. “Over 300,000 migrants crossed the Darien Gap into Panama in 2024, 42% fewer than the record number who made the perilous jungle crossing from South America a year earlier, Panamas migration authorities told Reuters on Thursday.” Reuters has more, here. ]]

[Category: Threats]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/6/25 9:00am
The last several months have seen progress in the over-budget, years-delayed effort to overhaul the federal-employee background-check system, officials with the lead agency say.  Workers in national security-sensitive positions are now fully enrolled in continuous vetting—that is, automated reviews of a person’s actions to ensure they meet security requirements.  “We successfully enrolled roughly four million clearance holders in those CV services. And I do think thats a good-news story in itself. Its a good news story because of the scale,” David Cattler, the director of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, told reporters on Dec. 18. “Thats also a good-news story because it demonstrates some of the cost avoidance that we could get when we use the authorities that have been granted to the interagency, including DOD, by the president through Trusted Workforce 2.0.”  The agency is now focused on enrolling employees in non-sensitive public trust positions, which would add an estimated 1 million more federal workers to CV. “As of Dec. 12, 23 federal agencies have completed the onboarding process. We currently have 26,540 enrollments into CV,” Cattler said. “The goal remains for full enrollment of the [non-sensitive public trust] population into the CV before the end of this fiscal year. Im confident were positioned to do that.” By fiscal 2028, DCSA wants to finish moving relevant federal employees to CV under Trusted Workforce 2.0.  On Dec. 18, the Office of Personnel Management published a final rule for enrolling certain federal employees and contractors into CV. Also in December, DCSA announced that all agencies that were required had switched to its electronic application for beginning background investigations, a process that began in March 2023.  The Defense Department in November approved DCSA’s three-year plan to implement the National Background Check Investigation Services system, which is the IT system that will undergird Trusted Workforce 2.0.  Cattler, who assumed his position in March, attributed the program’s recent progress partly to bringing on new people. “We have hired a lot of new people — the right people to have in the seat in order to get the work done,” he said.  DCSA has altered more than 100 job descriptions to support NBIS and aims to hire people with engineering, architecture and cybersecurity skills, according to agency spokesperson Royal Reff.  DOD started work on NBIS in late 2016 and had planned for it to be fully operational by 2019, but has had to repeatedly push that date back generally due to what the Government Accountability Office said last year was unreliable schedules and cost estimate planning.  The director doesn’t expect the presidential transition to affect the implementation of Trusted Workforce 2.0, noting the initiative largely originated in Trump’s first administration.  “We will, of course, adjust to what the president directs, but the plan I’m taking into the transition is the plan we’re executing,” he said.  Reps. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, and Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., the chairman and ranking member of the Government Operations and the Federal Workforce Subcommittee, on Dec. 13 asked the GAO to review DCSA’s revised plans for NBIS and CV enrollment.  The bipartisan duo wrote that they appreciate the new agency leaders’ “commitment to better practices,” but they are concerned about contractor performance and that national-security personnel aren’t undergoing all required background checks. ]]

[Category: Policy]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/6/25 6:00am
More than 800 “potential vulnerabilities and biases” were uncovered by a Pentagon effort to spot problems with using large language models in military medical services, officials said Thursday. The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, or CDAO, said the initiative was conducted through its Crowdsourced AI Red-Teaming Assurance Program, with help from the Program Executive Office, Defense Healthcare Management Systems, and the Defense Health Agency. It was conducted by Humane Intelligence, a technology nonprofit. CDAO’s LLM pilot focused on identifying potential system weaknesses and flaws when it came to using emerging tools for clinical note summarization and for a medical advisory chatbot. DOD said more than 200 people — including clinical providers and healthcare analysts within the department — participated in the red teaming effort, which “compared three popular LLMs.” A press release said the initiative had been "successfully concluded." “This exercise will result in repeatable and scalable output via the development of benchmark datasets, which can be used to evaluate future vendors and tools for alignment with performance expectations,” it said. “Furthermore, these findings will play a crucial role in shaping DOD policies and best practices for responsible use of Generative AI (GenAI), ultimately improving military medical care.”  Matthew Johnson, who heads CDAO’s Responsible AI Division and served as the office’s lead on the pilot, also said in a statement that “this program acts as an essential pathfinder for generating a mass of testing data, surfacing areas for consideration and validating mitigation options that will shape future research, development and assurance of GenAI systems that may be deployed in the future.” CDAO, which became operational in June 2022, has worked to test, expand and streamline DOD’s adoption and use of AI capabilities since its creation. The office previously launched a GenAI task force — known as Task Force Lima — in August 2023 to better study and understand how it could use emerging technologies “in a responsible and strategic manner.” Although the department sunset the task force last month, it also created an Artificial Intelligence Rapid Capabilities Cell to carry out the group’s recommendations. CDAO said the new program, created in partnership with the Defense Innovation Unit, “will lead efforts to accelerate and scale the deployment of cutting-edge AI-enabled tools, to include Frontier models, across the Department of Defense.” In its Thursday announcement, DOD said, in part, that pilot initiatives conducted as part of its Crowdsourced AI Red-Teaming Assurance Program “will be critical to accelerating the CDAO’s AI Rapid Capabilities Cell.” ]]

[Category: Science & Tech]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/3/25 3:02pm
MARINE CORPS AIR STATION MIRAMAR, California—While Marines wait for new F-35s, officials say recent delivery delays havent altered their goal to fully switch to the fifth-generation stealth fighter jet by the end of the decade.  The service is replacing its aging F/A-18 Hornets with F-35s, a massive effort complicated by a year-long pause in deliveries of the newest version of the jet.  “Its not gonna happen all overnight, but right now, I think the forecast still has us completing it in 2030,” said Col. William Mitchell, commanding officer of Marine Aircraft Group 11, which includes two F-35C squadrons, an F-35B training squadron, two F/A-18C squadrons, and a KC-130 aerial refueling squadron. But for that plan to work, Lockheed Martin needs to finish clearing a backlog of deliveries caused by technology-development problems that led the Pentagon to stop accepting the aircraft for a year. In July, Lockheed received the green light to resume deliveries without the full version of the upgrade, dubbed Technology Refresh-3.  “We need Lockheed Martin to deliver the jets, and we need to continue to procure them, but on paper, that is what the plan is right now,” Mitchell said. [[Related Posts]] The delays have caused some “nuances” to the schedule but won’t necessarily have a “ripple effect” that will extend the overall transition, Mitchell said. The Marines’ second F-35C squadron, VMFA-311, was supposed to have all 10 of its F-35s months ago, but is currently short four. The squadron likely won’t get its first TR-3 jet until May, but the exact date is still up in the air.  “Its an impact, just that we have fewer jets to fly…but no deployment has been held up. Theyve still been able to fly their six aircraft and get a lot of great training and do a lot of great events with what they have,” he said.  Despite software-development problems with TR-3, the software VMFA-311 is flying with now is solid, Mitchell said. “The jets that we fly here, no issues, aside from any anomaly you might get in any aircraft, but its very dependable, very resilient. But obviously in the test world, I cant really speak to that. Thats where the delays seem to be.” Eventually, the two remaining F/A-18 squadrons will become F-35 squadrons, and MAG-11 will have four F-35C squadrons, Mitchell said, in addition to its F-35B training squadron and KC-130 squadron. The Marine Corps also plans to increase the number of F-35s per squadron from 10 to 12, but that likely won’t happen until the early 2030s, he said.  Under the service’s 2022 aviation plan, the Marines plan to buy a total of 67 F-35Cs and 353 F-35Bs, at a rate of roughly 20 aircraft per year. The service has yet to release its new aviation plan, which was supposed to be published by the end of 2024.  Mitchell hasn’t seen the new document yet, but said he doesn’t think much has changed in the F-35 transition plan “other than some delays in squadrons that are standing up due to the TR-3 delays.” In the coming years, all F/A-18 infrastructure will become F-35 infrastructure, and three new hangars will be built here at Miramar to support the new squadrons. In the meantime, Marine aviators and maintainers have started to switch to the new jet, and more Marines will move over once the Hornet squadrons sundown.  “Marines will be up for reenlistment, and then theyll put in a reenlistment [lateral] move package and then, the next month, theyre at school to learn how to work on the F-35. So that happens throughout the course of a year. Same thing with the pilots: they can put in a package to transition to an F-35 and there’s a board process for that, and so that’s managed through Headquarters Marine Corps Manpower,” he said.  While the service prepares for its future fleet, it’s squeezing all the life out of its remaining Hornets. The F/A-18s are getting a version of RTX’s APG-79 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, which is already in service on the Navy’s F/A-18E/Fs. The service is about halfway through the radar installation, which will bring a ton of new capability to the Hornets, Mitchell said.  The F/A-18s are also getting beyond-line-of-sight reception for communications, and an upgraded GPS system, Mitchell said. “Theres some upgraded navigation, but theres really kind of not a whole lot more we can do, but where we can, we are.” The Hornet squadrons have enjoyed high readiness rates, despite their age, since the squadron can take parts from retiring aircraft,  Mitchell said.  “As we transition to the F-35, we’ve been able to take the best jets that we have with the most life on them, and then place them in our operational squadrons, and harvest a lot of parts from the aircraft that were going to be retired. So the supply system is very healthy in the F-18, pilots are getting a lot of flight hours in the F-18. The readiness is some of the best Ive seen in many years,” he said.  The service maintains that the Hornet is the “Swiss Army knife” of the Marine Corps air component, since the F-35 is still waiting on some capabilities, like maritime strike.  “There are certain maritime strike capabilities that the F-18 have that arent mature yet in the F-35 so, were basically help each other out, whereas the F-35 is more survivable in INDOPACOM against some of the advanced threats that our adversaries have than the F-18, so they can push in a little bit further and help mitigate some of those threats, to allow the F-18s to employ their tactics,” Mitchell said.  ]]

[Category: Science & Tech]

[*] [+] [-] [x] [A+] [a-]  
[l] at 1/3/25 11:06am
Early last year, then-candidate Donald Trump promised that when he got back into the Oval Office, he’d authorize the U.S. Navy to build more ships. “It’s very important,” he said, “because it’s jobs, great jobs.” However, the companies that build ships for the government are already having trouble finding enough workers to fill those jobs. And Trump may make it even harder if he follows through on another pledge he’s made: to clamp down on immigration. The president-elect has told his supporters he would impose new limits on the numbers of immigrants allowed into the country and stage the largest mass deportation campaign in history. Meanwhile, the shipbuilding industry, which he also says he supports and which has given significant financial support to Republican causes, is struggling to overcome an acute worker shortage. Immigrants have been critical to helping fill the gaps. According to a Navy report from last year, several major shipbuilding programs are years behind schedule, owing largely to a lack of workers. The shortfall is so severe that warship production is down to its lowest level in a quarter century. Shipbuilders and the government have poured millions of dollars into training and recruiting American workers, and, as part of a bipartisan bill just introduced in the Senate, they have proposed to spend even more. Last year the Navy awarded nearly $1 billion in a no-bid contract to a Texas nonprofit to modernize the industry with more advanced technology in a way that will make it more attractive to workers. The nonprofit has already produced splashy TV ads for submarine jobs. One of its goals is to help the submarine industry hire 140,000 new workers in the next 10 years. “We build giants,” one of its ads beckons. “It takes one to build one.” Still, experts say that these robust efforts have so far resulted in nowhere near enough workers for current needs, let alone a workforce large enough to handle expanded production. “We’re trying to get blood from a turnip,” said Shelby Oakley, an analyst at the Government Accountability Office. “The domestic workforce is just not there.” In the meantime, the industry is relying on immigrants for a range of shipyard duties, with many working jobs similar to those on a construction site, including on cleanup crews and as welders, painters and pipefitters. And executives worry that any future immigration crackdown or restrictions on legal immigration, including limits on asylum or temporary protected status programs, could cause disruptions that would further harm their capacity for production. Ron Wille, the president and chief operating officer of All American Marine in Washington state, said that his company was “clawing” for workers. And Peter Duclos, the president of Gladding-Hearn Shipbuilding in Somerset, Massachusetts, said the current immigration system is “so broken” that he was already having trouble holding onto valuable workers and finding more. There is no publicly available data that shows how much the shipbuilding industry relies on immigrant labor, particularly undocumented immigrant labor. Both Wille and Duclos said that they do not employ undocumented workers, and industry experts say undocumented workers are unlikely to be working on projects requiring security clearances. However, reporting by ProPublica last year found that some shipbuilders with government contracts have used such workers. That reporting focused on a major Louisiana shipyard run by a company called Thoma-Sea, where undocumented immigrants have often been hired through third-party subcontractors. The story reported on a young undocumented Guatemalan immigrant who was helping build an $89 million U.S. government ship for tracking hurricanes. When he died on the job after working at Thoma-Sea for two years, neither the company nor the subcontractor paid death benefits to his partner and young son. ProPublica also reported that executives at Thoma-Sea, which declined to comment, had made tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to Republican candidates. However, if Trump’s last time in office is any guide, the shipbuilding industry wouldn’t be exempted from any future crackdown. One of the final workplace raids under Trump’s first administration was conducted at an even larger shipbuilder in Louisiana called Bollinger. In July 2020, federal immigration agents arrested 19 “unlawfully present foreign nationals” at Bollinger’s Lockport shipyard, according to a story in the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate. Immigration and Customs Enforcement refused to provide information on the raid. According to Bollinger’s website, that yard produces U.S. Coast Guard and Navy patrol boats. Five of the workers arrested were sent to an ICE detention center and 14 were released with pending deportation cases, according to the news report. Bollinger denied any wrongdoing following the raid. Four years later, there’s no evidence in publicly available federal court records that Bollinger executives faced any charges in connection to it. Meanwhile, federal electoral records show that the company’s executives donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican elected officials last year, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, both Republicans from Louisiana. The company did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. President Joe Biden’s administration ended workplace raids like the one at Bollinger, saying that it would instead focus on “unscrupulous employers.” Department of Homeland Security officials did not answer questions or provide data on how many employers had been prosecuted since then. However, Trump’s designated “border czar,” Tom Homan, has signaled that the incoming administration will return to carrying out the raids. When asked how the second Trump administration will increase shipbuilding while limiting immigration, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team only doubled down on the president-elect’s deportation promises, saying they would focus enforcement on “illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers.” A few days after Trump won the election, a group of undocumented shipyard welders leaving a Hispanic grocery store near the port in Houma, Louisiana, expressed a dim view when asked what they thought lay ahead. One man, who declined to provide his name, broke into a nervous laugh and blurted, “Well, we could be deported.” Another man, a welder from the Mexican state of Coahuila who’d been working in the U.S. for about two years, also declined to give his name but said he worried about losing the life he’d managed to build in this country. “When they grab you,” he said, “they’ll take you, and you’ll have to leave everything behind.” Do you have information about undocumented immigrants in the workforce? Contact nicole.foy@propublica.org or reach her on Signal 661-549-0572. .ProPublicaThis story was originally published by ]]

[Category: Policy]

As of 1/12/25 9:09pm. Last new 1/10/25 12:37pm.

Next feed in category: Understanding War