Air Force reorganization put on hold. One year after service leaders announced changes intended to serve great power competition, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told them to put things on ice until a Trump-appointed secretary and undersecretary can review the plans. The order came on Feb. 6, a service spokesperson said.
The pause won’t reverse actions already taken under the effort. But it will halt planning for a host of new initiatives, including a modernization command and a huge exercise to test its new deployment model.
No confirmation hearing has been set for Troy Meink, the former National Reconnaissance Office official tapped to lead the Department of the Air Force, or for Matt Lohmeier, Trump’s pick for undersecretary. Defense One’s Audrey Decker has more, here.
Report: Meink “arranged a multibillion-dollar contract solicitation in a way that favored Elon Musk’s SpaceX, according to seven people familiar with the contract,” Reuters reported Monday. The NRO’s inspector general looked into the 2021 contract, but it “isn’t clear whether the inspector general concluded a report or if any investigation remains underway,” Reuters wrote, adding that the White House press office didn’t respond to questions. More, here.
Also on hold: parts of the Air Force’s way-over-budget ICBM replacement effort. Service leaders told Northrop Grumman to stop working on the command and launch segments of the Sentinel program, according to a service statement released on Monday. Northrop continues its work on the engineering and manufacturing development contract—but the scope of that work could change. Last year, Air Force officials floated the idea of saving money on the Nunn-McCurdy-breaching program by stripping out some construction work and opening it up to competition. Decker reports, here.
Another thing: The Air Force doesn’t have enough desks for everyone in the DC area to return to work in person, Acting Secretary Gary Ashworth said in a memo (PDF) posted Thursday. As a result, he said he’s exempting select civilian personnel, Airmen, and Space Force troops “that cannot currently be accommodated” from adhering to Hegseth’s in-person mandate, which went into effect Friday.
“I am also approving the use of alternative work schedules as an alternative means to fill 100% of existing space,” Ashworth said in his memo. “These measures are deemed necessary due to a shortfall in suitable office space and will be in effect until additional capacity is achieved,” he added. Read more, here.
FEMA has a desk shortage, too, and may have to resort to flipping coins to figure out who gets to return where, The Bulwark reported Tuesday, citing agency guidance.
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1794, the U.S. Senate opened to the public for the first time.
Trump 2.0
SecDef Hegseth was booed and heckled by about two dozen military family members when he arrived at European Command headquarters in Germany on Tuesday, NBC News reports.
“The demonstrators at the short protest repeatedly chanted ‘DEI,’ apparently in a reference to the recent ban Hegseth has placed on some books in defense department schools,” NBC’s Courtney Kube writes, noting, “Protests by military families against a defense secretary are extremely rare, although it’s not the first time Hegseth has been demonstrated against.” More, here.
For what it’s worth: “There are no plans currently to cut anything” in terms of U.S. troops abroad, Hegseth told reporters during a brief exchange Tuesday in Germany.
Hegseth also said the U.S. special operators will continue to “do counter-terrorism effectively over the horizon” for the foreseeable future, continuing a Biden-era label for downsizing the Pentagon’s footprint abroad as it continues fighting terrorists around the globe.
Q. Where could Elon Musk find cuts at the Pentagon? In “climate”-related offices, Hegseth suggested; however, he did not elaborate on possible numbers of personnel or approximate cost savings. Hegseth also said he welcomes Musk and his team of young men and any potential cost savings they might find while searching through Defense Department files.
Additional reading: “Military Families Think US Will Be Involved in ‘Major Conflict’ Soon,” Newsweek reported Monday, citing a survey from Blue Star Families published last week.
Hegseth just ordered North Carolina’s Fort Liberty Army base renamed as Fort Roland L. Bragg. The Defense Department announced the change during Hegseth’s travels to Europe this week. Hegseth announced the change in a memo he signed shortly before landing in Stuttgart, Germany on Monday, Press Secretary John Ullyot said in a statement.
“The new name pays tribute to Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a World War II hero who earned the Silver Star and Purple Heart for his exceptional courage during the Battle of the Bulge,” Ullyot said.
Reminder: Trump and Hegseth are forbidden by law from giving military assets a Confederacy-linked name. Both men have said publicly they want to restore the names of military bases—largely across the American south—that had previously been named for treasonous Confederate soldiers. Those include places like Forts Lee (for Robert E. Lee), Bragg (Braxton Bragg) Hood (John Bell Hood), and seven other traitors to the Constitution.
“The law was passed; it’s not going to go backward,” Nebraska GOP Rep. Don Bacon said last fall of Trump’s name-changing ambitions.
“The values of the Confederacy—those are not our values,” retired Army Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule, professor emeritus of history at West Point, told the Wall Street Journal in late January. Seidule served on the panel that Congress created to rename those 10 military bases.
“The greatest moment in U.S. Army history was freeing four million men, women and children from bondage, preserving democracy and saving the United States of America, and that’s what we should be honoring,” Seidule said.
Related reading:
Update: Trump-Musk’s gutting of USAID is making it harder to monitor aid sent abroad. The Trump administration has decimated the U.S. government’s ability to spot fraud and abuse in the flow of aid to other countries, according to a Monday memo from the inspector general of the lead foreign-aid agency.
Context: The Trump administration is working to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and sideline its workers, even as it continues to send at least some funds abroad, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports. The memo also comes amid continuing calls by Trump’s political allies for more investigations, not fewer, into the distribution of U.S. foreign aid.
Memo: “USAID’s existing oversight controls—albeit with previously identified shortcomings—are now largely nonoperational given these recent directives and personnel actions,” the document reads. That means there is little way to oversee some $8.2 billion in obligated but undisbursed humanitarian assistance funds, according to the text.
Inside POV: One official from the inspector’s office who spoke to Defense One on background said “staffing reductions are really going to hurt the [United States’] ability to keep tabs on a lot of this stuff, whether it is something technical, like generators for energy-security projects in Ukraine, or if it’s food assistance and making sure food assistance is getting to where it needs to go.” Continue reading, here.
Update: Judge extends pause on Trump-Musk ‘deferred-resignation’ offer. A federal judge on Monday extended his order blocking the Trump administration from implementing Trump and Musk’s controversial “deferred resignations” program, just hours before the new deadline for federal workers to accept the offer by Monday night, Erich Wagner reports for Government Executive.
The American Federation of Government Employees, who filed the lawsuit against the program, have argued that the plan violates the Administrative Procedure Act due to its shifting legal justifications and chaotic rollout.
Fine print: Unions and congressional Democrats have warned employees not to accept the “deferred resignation” deal because of draft agreements promulgated by the Office of Personnel Management that require employees to waive their right to litigate their departure, as well unions’ right to represent them. Read the rest, here.
Industry
L3 unveils new low-bandwidth, high-autonomy drone swarm tech. A new drone swarm piloting program from L3Harris allows a single operator to control multiple drones across several vehicle types in different domains during government-managed tests.
The development comes as the Pentagon struggles with how it could manage swarms of drones in a conflict rife with electromagnetic attacks on communications, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Monday.
How it works: “For example, you designate a search area and you say, ‘Hey, search this area.’ You draw a polygon with basic points,” Toby Magsig, L3Harris’s vice president and general manager for enterprise autonomous solutions, explained. “They receive that. They say, ‘Hey, we just received the command to search. I’m over here. I’ll search this area.’ The other one receives a message and says, ‘Okay, I’ll search. I’m right here. I’ll do this.’ And then you iterate through this process.’” Read the rest, here.
And ICYMI: The Pentagon announced more than $7 billion in arms sales to Israel on Friday, including over half a billion in Hellfire missiles and the rest ($6.75 billion) spread across several different air-launched weapons like GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bombs and Joint Direct Attack Munition Guidance Kits.
Beneficiaries include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, West Virginia’s ATK Tactical Systems Company LLC, Cincinnati’s L3Harris Fuzing and Ordnance Systems, and Oklahoma’s McAlester Army Ammunition Plant. Read more here and here.
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