Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth is skipping the latest meeting of Ukraine’s allies at NATO headquarters in Brussels. That’s a first since the group was set up three years ago, the Associated Press reports. Hegseth will not join via video call-in, U.S. defense officials said.
“It is the latest in a series of steps that the U.S. has taken to distance itself from the Ukraine war effort,” AP’s Lita Baldor writes. While Kyiv defends itself from three-plus years of gradual Russian military invasion, the Ukraine Defense Contact Group has provided Kyiv with an estimated “$126 billion in weapons and military assistance, including over $66.5 billion from the U.S.,” according to AP. But “Hegseth has upended that position by stepping away from a leadership role, providing no new military aid and now abandoning the gathering altogether,” Baldor notes.
Hegseth’s team says he won’t arrive in Europe until Wednesday evening, coming off a trip last weekend to Singapore. The Pentagon chief is planning to attend a meeting of NATO military chiefs in Brussels Thursday and later for D-Day commemorations in Normandy, France, on June 6. “The Secretary will deliver a message at the defense ministerial focused on advancing President Trump’s call for NATO allies to commit to spend 5% of their GDP on defense and refocusing NATO on collective defense and deterrence,” Hegseth’s spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement Tuesday.
One big lesson from Ukraine’s recent surprise drone attack on Russian airbases: The U.S. could be attacked in the very same fashion and the results could be similarly devastating, three different major U.S. news outlets warn today—the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. The latter leverages the attack to argue that critics of President Trump’s sprawling and costly Golden Dome missile-defense architecture are naive, at best, in our current and evolving era of drone warfare. (To be fair, the Times notes Golden Dome as currently conceived would not have prevented an attack like the one Ukraine inflicted on Russia over the weekend.) The Journal’s editorial board also makes the case for “hardened aircraft shelters” and more defense spending. The Post extends that thinking to “strategic missiles and silos, or strategic nuclear submarines at port,” as well as “U.S. energy grids, transportation hubs and shipyards.” And Bill Hennigan of the Times branches out still more to include U.S. “military bases, ports and command headquarters peppered across the globe.”
Hennigan: “Congress is poised to set aside about $1.3 billion this fiscal year for the Pentagon to develop and deploy counter-drone technologies. This is a good start. But the Pentagon’s most ambitious and expensive plans fail to address the threat,” he argues.
Stay tuned: Just this morning, Defense One recorded a discussion on drone warfare and some innovative training across both Europe and Africa featuring the U.S. Army’s Col. Joshua Gaspard, who commands the Italy-based 173rd Airborne Brigade. We plan to have that posted in the next day or so.
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 1944, the U.S. Navy captured an enemy vessel at sea for the first time that century when Nazi submarine U-505 was detected, attacked and seized off the coast of French Morocco. Fifty-eight captured crew members were detained under strict secrecy in Louisiana; they were reportedly not returned until 1947.
Trump 2.0
Despite Golden Dome, Space Force budget would shrink again under 2026 spending plan. The young service’s budget would shrink for a second straight year under the Trump administration’s 2026 proposal, which experts said would force the Pentagon to rely on the yet-to-be-passed reconciliation bill to fund the Golden Dome missile-defense project and other space priorities.
The White House is requesting $26.3 billion for the service, according to budget documents released on Friday. That’s about 13 percent less, in real terms, than the $29.4 billion requested by the Biden administration for 2025. Defense One’s Audrey Decker has more, here.
What will DOD civilians do at the border? The Pentagon won’t say. After releasing a Monday memo about sending some civilian employees to support the Homeland Security Department with the southern border mission and “internal immigration enforcement,” Hegseth’s office has declined to provide any further details, including how many people are going, what their job backgrounds are, and which missions they will be fulfilling.
This is in stark contrast to nearly seven years of ongoing DOD support to the DHS border mission—including during the first Trump administration—when the Pentagon routinely released troop levels and descriptions of their activities.
It’s likely that the jobs will be largely administrative, according to Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more, here.
Related reading:
And lastly: USAID–State merger proceeding without key plans, IG finds. State Department leaders set hiring goals without a strategy, began the merger without finishing the plan, and is slated to dismiss an oversight board before the effort is complete, the inspector general found in a report issued on Monday. Sean Michael Newhouse of Government Executive reports, here.
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