Military officers must now meet with President Trump if they want to be promoted to four-star positions, the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing three current and former officials. “The move, though within Mr. Trump’s remit as commander in chief, has raised worries about the possible politicization of the military’s top ranks by a president who has regularly flouted norms intended to insulate the military from partisan disputes,” Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the Times write.
In case you were wondering, there are about three dozen four-star postings across the Defense Department.
Considerations: Personally interviewing each replacement will take more time than the process ordinarily demands, Pentagon officials said. It also risks creating the impression that “they’re political appointees selected on the basis of their personal loyalty and partisan alignment,” said Heidi Urben, a Georgetown University professor and retired Army colonel.
Developing: Pete Hegseth and his aides are angry at an inspector general report over the Pentagon chief’s handling of classified information, and his team “appears designed to undermine the inquiry’s legitimacy—even before its findings are made public,” Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Hegseth’s team calls the pending IG report a “witch hunt” and a “sham,” and blames “Biden administration holdovers.”
Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Jack Reed, D-R.I., was more even-handed. Reed and his Republican colleague, Roger Wicker, requested the IG report after the “Signalgate” scandal burst into headlines three months ago. Reed said in a statement, “Taxpayers and military personnel deserve to know the truth, and the Inspector General’s office has a responsibility to follow all evidence and report its independent findings.”
“The civilian leadership of the Department of Defense is not above the law,” Reed said in his statement.
Also developing: Pentagon officials are confused over Hegseth’s ban on officers speaking at certain think-tank events, Politico reported Monday. “The Pentagon said it made the move to avoid lending the department’s name to organizations and events that run counter to Trump’s values.” But “officials and experts warned cutting off employees’ access to such venues, which include major global conferences, gives the appearance of partisanship to the Pentagon, an institution intended as largely apolitical.”
Notable: “The decision follows other seemingly political moves by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, including firing top generals and numerous admirals, and attacking the ‘left-wing’ media.” It also “came a week after Defense Department officials pulled out of the high-profile Aspen Security Forum citing ‘the evil of globalism.’”
Reminder: “Transparency doesn’t happen on its own, and this will be the most transparent administration ever,” Hegseth said in a post on social media back in February.
New: NSA fires its top lawyer. The National Security Agency’s general counsel, April Falcon Doss, was removed from her post on Friday after far-right activist Laura Loomer highlighted Doss’ work in the GOP-led Senate intelligence committee investigation that concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Read coverage by the Times, Politico, and Nextgov.
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1866, a group of armed former Confederate soldiers and police attacked a crowd of mostly Black Union veterans demonstrating peacefully in New Orleans, killing at least 38 people, including 34 Black men. “The sadism was so wanton that men who kneeled and prayed for mercy were killed instantly, while dead bodies were stabbed and mutilated,” historian Ron Chernow wrote of the incident. The massacre helped galvanize support for the First Reconstruction Act.
Industry
Boeing downplays impending fighter-jet worker strike. The 3,200 union workers at three St. Louis-area facilities that produce fighter jets and munitions are an “order of magnitude less” than the 30,000 machinists who went on strike last fall in the Pacific Northwest, CEO Kelly Ortberg said Tuesday during the company’s second-quarter earnings call.
After union members rejected a proposed contract on Sunday, Boeing “activated our contingency plan” and is “focused on preparing for a strike,” Dan Gillian, Boeing’s vice president of air dominance and general manager and senior executive in St. Louis, said in a statement.
The workers build and assemble parts for the F/A-18, F-15, T-7 trainer, and MQ-25 drone. The facilities also will be a major contributor to the future sixth-gen F-47, which will be centered in St. Louis. Defense One’s Audrey Decker puts it all in context, here. See also the Wall Street Journal’s take on the call, here.
Could this be the year hydrogen power gets practical? The Defense Innovation Unit is betting that recent technological advances may turn the promise of hydrogen fuel-cells into reality, more than a century after they were first proposed. DIU has given a contract to engineering firm Pratt Miller to prototype a hydrogen-powered system for naval vessels. “If successful, the Expeditionary Hydrogen On Ship & Shore project, or EHOSS, could help fulfill a long-standing Pentagon goal of eliminating petroleum-based propulsion from military operations,” writes Defense One’s Patrick Tucker.
Update: A Fort Bliss detention camp is set to be built by a contractor that illegally hid undocumented workers from DHS. Last week, the Pentagon awarded a massive contract to build the nation’s largest migrant detention camp at the Texas base. ProPublica reported Friday, “Unmentioned was that one of the subcontractors slated to work on the project, Disaster Management Group, is owned by Nathan Albers, who previously co-owned a company that pleaded guilty in 2019 to a scheme to hire undocumented workers and conceal them from immigration authorities. Albers is a big-time Republican donor who has spent time at Mar-a-Lago.” Read on, here.
Europe
Germany’s defense industry is about to take off, with officials “preparing a wave of multi-billion-euro procurement orders, including 20 Eurofighter jets, up to 3,000 Boxer armoured vehicles, and as many as 3,500 Patria infantry fighting vehicles,” Reuters reported Tuesday from Berlin after Defense Minister Boris Pistorius briefed lawmakers the day prior.
About those systems: “The Eurofighter order alone is expected to cost between 4 billion and 5 billion euro…while the Boxer vehicles —built by KNDS and Rheinmetall— are estimated at 10 billion euro” and the “Patria vehicles are seen costing roughly 7 billion euro.” But that’s not all. More IRIS-T air defense systems are expected—especially given their effectiveness for Ukraine’s defense against Russia—along with “several hundred SkyRanger drone defence platforms,” Reuters reports.
Related reading:
Britain’s BAE Systems posted a strong first half of the year, with officials claiming Wednesday that they expect earnings “to rise 9% to 11% on last year’s result, higher than the 8% to 10% growth it had previously forecast,” Reuters reports from London. “The company is set to receive a new order for Eurofighter Typhoon military jets after an agreement between Turkey and Britain was signed earlier in July. Orders from Saudi Arabia and Qatar could also be on the cards.” More, here.
And Italy wants to tap the EU’s new defense fund for about 15 billion euros in spending through 2030, Reuters reported Wednesday in a short update from Rome.
Commentary: Who should coordinate Europe’s defense buildup? Asked Georgetown University’s Sara Bjerg Moller, writing Tuesday in Defense One. “This is a question not simply of resources but of institutional design and coordination,” she says. Without appropriate caution, “Europe risks squandering a rare window of opportunity where political will and financial commitment have finally aligned.”
Her suggestion: U.S. European Command. She argues that “as the theater command with responsibility for all of Europe—including non-NATO members—EUCOM is uniquely positioned to take a holistic approach, unencumbered by institutional and membership divides between NATO and the EU. Its reach extends to countries that belong to neither organization, a strategic asset that recently demonstrated its value: When the Germany–Switzerland–Ukraine Patriot deal came together in July, responsibility for executing it fell to EUCOM.” Continue reading, here.
From the region: “Why US plans to hit Russia with fresh economic penalties will have little effect,” two political science professors argued Tuesday in The Conversation.
Cyber
Monitoring: French submarine secrets have reportedly been posted online after an apparent cyber attack, BitDefender reported Monday. The alleged hack appears to have hit Naval Group, which builds ships, subs, and aircraft carriers for the French navy. “The data was said to include source code related to combat systems used on French nuclear submarines and frigates, weapon system software, simulation environments, network designs, user manuals, and internal communications.”
Naval Group said it was investigating the incident, and claimed Saturday that “At this stage, no intrusion into our IT environments has been detected and there has been no impact on our activities.”
Developing: CISA vows to publish 2022 telecom-security report to get its next director confirmed. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., had vowed to block the confirmation of Sean Plankey, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, unless it released a 2022 report on telecommunications industry security vulnerabilities.
Wyden has long sought the release of the report. “CISA’s multi-year coverup of the phone companies’ negligent cybersecurity has real consequences,” he said in April, citing sweeping Chinese intrusions into swaths of U.S. telecommunications infrastructure that was discovered around a year ago.
Now this: “CISA intends to release the U.S. Telecommunications Insecurity Report (2022), that was developed but never released under the Biden administration in 2022, with proper clearance,” CISA public affairs director Marci McCarthy said in an email to Nextgov/FCW. More, here.
Read the full article here
