Government Executive - Defense

Trump vows to find ‘leaker’ who publicized search for second downed airman in Iran

Meghann Myers — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:00:00 -0400

President Donald Trump said his administration is going after the news outlet that first reported a second Air Force officer was missing after an F-15E Strike Eagle went down over Iran, he said during a press conference Monday. The officer was rescued Saturday.

Trump said Iran wasn’t aware until the news report that the fighter jet’s weapons systems officer was still in hiding after U.S. special operations forces quickly recovered the pilot following a crash on Friday. He did not specify which outlet he was speaking of, though both Channel 12 news in Israel and The Associated Press reported Friday that one crew member had been recovered and another was missing.

“We think we'll be able to find it out, because we're going to go to the media company that released it, and we're going to say ‘national security, give it up or go to jail,’” Trump said, suggesting the Justice Department will subpoena for the identity of a reporter’s source. “Because when they did that, all of a sudden, the entire country of Iran knew that there was a pilot that was somewhere on their land that was fighting for his life, and it also made it much more difficult for the pilots and for the people going in to search for him.”

The downed airman spent more than a day “scaling rugged ridges while hunted by the enemy,” before he was able to activate his emergency transponder to let his chain of command know he was still alive, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at the briefing.

A team flew seven hours into Iranian air space to rescue the weapons system officer, Hegseth said, one day after an earlier mission rescued the pilot.

“We control the sky,” the secretary said. “Iran did nothing about it.”

But during the pilot's rescue, Iran shot down one of the A-10 Warthogs that was supporting the mission, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the briefing. The A-10 pilot ejected over Kuwait, Caine said.

“This pilot continued to fight, continued the mission, and then upon exit, flew his aircraft into another country and determined that the airplane was not landable,” Caine said.

Hegseth said the U.S. on Monday launched the largest volume of strikes since day one of the war, back on Feb. 28.

“Tomorrow, even more than today,” he said. “And then Iran has a choice.”

The briefing took place one day after Trump threatened to target civilian infrastructure in Iran, via Truth Social post on Sunday, if the country doesn’t agree by Tuesday to stop firing on ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

Asked during the press conference whether he stands behind his recent statements that the war is winding down, or equally recent statements that he intends to escalate it, Trump left things up in the air.

“I can’t tell you. I don’t know,” he said. “Depends what they do.”

Trump then asserted that the Iranian people would be fine with the U.S. striking their bridges and power plants, even saying that he’s gotten “numerous intercepts” from Iranians begging the U.S. to continue bombing them.

“They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom,” he said. He did not offer details of how the war would secure freedom for Iranians.

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Nearly 200 employees could move to Alabama this year under a Space Command plan

Lauren C. Williams — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:07:29 -0400

Space Command aims to move about 200 people from Colorado to its new headquarters in Alabama by year's end.

“I'm happy at the progress that we're making, and that progress will continue over the next couple of years as we work to get a significant portion of our staff there, even while the permanent headquarters is being built,” Gen. Stephen Whiting, who leads U.S. Space Command, told senators during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday.

The command’s move has been a matter of hot political debate. In his first term President Donald Trump pushed to move the command to a 60-acre site in Huntsville, Alabama. The Biden administration in 2023 reversed the original decision to move the headquarters to Alabama, but Trump reversed it again in 2025.

Right now, Space Command has a small, 20-person office in Redstone Arsenal, with plans to increase that number tenfold by year's end.

“By the end of this year, we are targeting that number to be closer to 200 people that will be working from Redstone, from our headquarters, of course. That will be paced with the delivery of interim facilities that are appropriate to the security classification level we need, and that we have all of the appropriate IT networks,” Whiting testified.

The command is updating existing facilities, with plans to open a top-secret facility that can accommodate up to 80 people in April, Whiting said. Then the plan is to start moving people who work at that classification level.

To hit that 200-person target, the command is offering workers incentives.

“We are offering relocation incentives for our workforce in Colorado to consider moving to Alabama,” Whiting said. “We also are offering retention incentives, because I need my workforce to stay with me in Colorado until their function is ready to move.”

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The Pentagon built a blueprint to avoid civilian war casualties. Trump officials scrapped it

Hannah Allam, ProPublica — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.

Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.

Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.

Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.

Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.

Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.

Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”

Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several news outlets have concluded that the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, told reportersMarch 7 that it was “done by Iran.” Hegseth, standing next to the president aboard Air Force One, said the matter was under investigation.

The next day, the open-source research outfit Bellingcat said it had authenticated a video showing a Tomahawk missile strike next to the school in Minab. Iranian state media later showed fragments of a U.S.-made Tomahawk, as identified by Bellingcat and others, at the site. The United States is the only party to the conflict known to possess Tomahawks. U.N. human rights experts have called for an investigation into whether the attack violated international law.

The Department of Defense and White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive U.S. administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials eager to shed the legacy of the “forever wars” have periodically called for better protections for civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work that had begun under the first Trump presidency.

Formalized in a 2022 action plan and in a Defense Department instruction, the initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often shortened to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 personnel were assigned to the mission, including roughly 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination hub near the Pentagon.

The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of the civilian presence in an area and in-depth analysis of the risks. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would prompt an assessment or investigation to figure out what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.

By the time Trump returned to power, harm-mitigation teams were embedded with regional commands and special operations leadership. During Senate confirmation hearings, several Trump nominees for top defense posts voiced support for the mission. Once in office, however, they stood by as the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.

Around 90% of the CHMR mission is gone, former personnel said, with no more than a single adviser now at most commands. At Central Command, where a 10-person team was cut to one, “a handful” of the eliminated positions were backfilled to help with the Iran campaign. Defense officials can’t formally close the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.

“It has no mission or mandate or budget,” Bryant said.

Spike in Strikes

Global conflict monitors have since recorded a dramatic increase in deadly U.S. military operations. Even before the Iran campaign, the number of strikes worldwide since Trump returned to office had surpassed the total from all four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Had the Defense Department’s harm-reduction mission continued apace, current and former officials say, the policies almost certainly would’ve reduced the number of noncombatants harmed over the past year.

Beyond the moral considerations, they added, civilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.

U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based group that verifies casualties through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds more deaths are under review, a difficult process given Iran’s internet blackout and dangerous conditions.

A mourner holds a portrait of students during a funeral held after a school in Iran’s Hormozgan province was bombed. Thousands attended the ceremony. Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images

Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the Iran campaign, on top of dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens dark chapters from the “war on terror” that had prompted reforms in the first place.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government a few months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ — every day we’re just killing people and making more enemies.”

In 2015, two dozen patients and 14 staff members were killed when a heavily armed U.S. gunship fired for over an hour on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan, a disaster that has become a cautionary tale for military planners.

“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building,” the international aid group said in a report about the destruction of its trauma center in Kunduz.

A U.S. military investigation found that multiple human and systems errors had resulted in the strike team mistaking the building for a Taliban target. The Obama administration apologized and offered payouts of $6,000 to families of the dead.

Human rights advocates had hoped the Kunduz debacle would force the U.S. military into taking concrete steps to protect civilians during U.S. combat operations. Within a couple years, however, the issue came roaring back with high civilian casualties in U.S.-led efforts to dislodge Islamic State extremists from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

The aftermath of the U.S. airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed 42 people. Najim Rahim/AP Images

In a single week in March 2017, U.S. operations resulted in three incidents of mass civilian casualties: A drone attack on a mosque in Syria killed around 50; a strike in another part of Syria killed 40 in a school filled with displaced families; and bombing in the Iraqi city of Mosul led to a building collapse that killed more than 100 people taking shelter inside.

In heavy U.S. fighting to break Islamic State control over the Syrian city of Raqqa, “military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground; too often waved off reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong,” according to an analysis by the Pentagon-adjacent Rand Corp. think tank.

“Do It Right Now”

Under pressure from lawmakers, Trump’s then-Defense Secretary James Mattis ordered a review of civilian casualty protocols.

Released in 2019, the review Mattis launched was seen by some advocacy groups as narrow in scope but still a step in the right direction. Yet the issue soon dropped from national discourse, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and landmark racial justice protests.

During the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized and said the department would “endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”

That incident, along with a New York Times investigative series into deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred the adoption of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response action plan in 2022. When they established the new Civilian Protection Center of Excellence the next year, defense officials tapped Michael McNerney— the lead author of the blunt RAND report — to be its director.

“The strike against the aid worker and his family in Kabul pushed Austin to say, ‘Do it right now,’” Bryant said.

The first harm-mitigation teams were assigned to leaders in charge of some of the military’s most sensitive counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations: Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida; the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.

A former CHMR adviser who joined in 2024 after a career in international conflict work said he was reassured to find a serious campaign with a $7 million budget and deep expertise. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Only a few years before, he recalled, he’d had to plead with the Pentagon to pay attention. “It was like a back-of-the-envelope thing — the cost of a Hellfire missile and the cost of hiring people to work on this.”

Bryant became the de facto liaison between the harm-mitigation team and special operations commanders. In December, he described the experience in detail in a private briefing for aides of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who had sought information on civilian casualty protocols involving boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea.

Bryant’s notes from the briefing, reviewed by ProPublica, describe an embrace of the CHMR mission by Adm. Frank Bradley, who at the time was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In October, Bradley was promoted to lead Special Operations Command.

At the end of 2024 and into early 2025, Bryant worked closely with the commander’s staff. The notes describe Bradley as “incredibly supportive” of the three-person CHMR team embedded in his command.

Bradley, Bryant wrote, directed “comprehensive lookbacks” on civilian casualties in errant strikes and used the findings to mandate changes. He also introduced training on how to integrate harm prevention and international law into operations against high-value targets. “We viewed Bradley as a model,” Bryant said.

Still, the military remained slow to offer compensation to victims and some of the new policies were difficult to independently monitor, according to a report by the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank. The CHMR program also faced opposition from critics who say civilian protections are already baked into laws of war and targeting protocols; the argument is that extra oversight “could have a chilling effect” on commanders’ abilities to quickly tailor operations.

To keep reforms on track, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would have to break through a culture of denial among leaders who pride themselves on precision and moral authority.

“The initial gut response of all commands,” Bryant said, “is: ‘No, we didn’t kill civilians.’”

Reforms Unraveled

As the Trump administration returned to the White House pledging deep cuts across the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response framework.

At first, CHMR advisers were heartened by Senate confirmation hearings where Trump’s nominees for senior defense posts affirmed support for civilian protections.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote during his confirmation that commanders “see positive impacts from the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote that it’s in the national interest to “seek to reduce civilian harm to the degree possible.”

When questioned about cuts to the CHMR mission at a hearing last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating the ideas as “part of our culture.”

Despite the top-level support, current and former officials say, the CHMR mission didn’t stand a chance under Hegseth’s signature lethality doctrine.

The former Fox News personality, who served as an Army National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disdains rules of engagement and other guardrails as constraining to the “warrior ethos.” He has defended U.S. troops accused of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL charged with stabbing an imprisoned teenage militant to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.

A month after taking charge, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, who provide guidance to keep operations in line with U.S. or international law. Hegseth has described the attorneys as “roadblocks” and used the term “jagoff.”

At the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the staff tried in vain to save the program. At one point, Bryant said, he even floated the idea of renaming it the “Center for Precision Warfare” to put the mission in terms Hegseth wouldn’t consider “woke.”

By late February 2025, the CHMR mission was imploding, say current and former defense personnel.

Shortly before his job was eliminated, Bryant openly spoke out against the cuts in The Washington Post and Boston Globe, which he said landed him in deep trouble at the Pentagon. He was placed on leave in March, his security clearance at risk of revocation.

Bryant formally resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of the administration’s defense policies. In columns and on TV, he warns that Hegseth’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and civilian protections is corroding military professionalism.

Bryant said it was hard to watch Bradley, the special operations commander and enthusiastic adopter of CHMR, defending a controversial “double-tap” on an alleged drug boat in which survivors of a first strike were killed in a follow-up hit. Legal experts have said such strikes could violate laws of warfare. Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.

“Everything else starts slipping when you have this culture of higher tolerance for civilian casualties,” Bryant said.

Concerns were renewed in early 2025 with the Trump administration’s revived counterterrorism campaign against Islamist militants regrouping in parts of Africa and the Middle East.

Last April, a U.S. air strike hit a migrant detention center in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 61 African migrants and injuring dozens of others in what Amnesty International says “qualifies as an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”

Operations in Somalia also have become more lethal. In 2024, Biden’s last year in office, conflict monitors recorded 21 strikes in Somalia, with a combined death toll of 189. In year one of Trump’s second term, the U.S. carried out at least 125 strikes, with reported fatalities as high as 359, according to the New America think tank, which monitors counterterrorism operations.

“It is a strategy focused primarily on killing people,” said Alexander Palmer, a terrorism researcher at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Last September, the U.S. military announced an attack in northeastern Somalia targeting a weapons dealer for the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. On the ground, however, villagers said the missile strike incinerated Omar Abdullahi, a respected elder nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker” for his role as a clan mediator.

After the death, the U.S. military released no details, citing operational security.

“The U.S. killed an innocent man without proof or remorse,” Abdullahi’s brother, Ali, told Somali news outlets. “He preached peace, not war. Now his blood stains our soil.”

In Iran, former personnel say, the CHMR mission could have made a difference.

Under the scrapped harm-prevention framework, they said, plans for civilian protection would’ve begun months ago, when orders to draw up a potential Iran campaign likely came down from the White House and Pentagon.

CHMR personnel across commands would immediately begin a detailed mapping of what planners call “the civilian environment,” in this case a picture of the infrastructure and movements of ordinary Iranians. They would also check and update the “no-strike list,” which names civilian targets such as schools and hospitals that are strictly off-limits.

One key question is whether the school was on the no-strike list. It sits a few yards from a naval base for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The building was formerly part of the base, though it has been marked on maps as a school since at least 2013, according to visual forensics investigations.

“Whoever ‘hits the button’ on a Tomahawk — they’re part of a system,” the former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they hit that button, they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”

If the guardrails failed and the Defense Department faced a disaster like the school strike, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would’ve jumped in to help with transparent public statements and an immediate inquiry.

Instead, he called the Trump administration’s response to the attack “shameful.”

“It’s back to where we were years ago,” Bryant said. If confirmed, “this will go down as one of the most egregious failures in targeting and civilian harm-mitigation in modern U.S. history.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

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Record-smashing $1.5-trillion spending proposal will fund only the ‘most essential things’: comptroller

Lauren C. Williams — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:23:56 -0400

Virtually all of the giant reconciliation fund has been doled out, the Pentagon’s acting chief financial officer said Tuesday.

“Everything except for $1.3 billion in the $153 billion that's been given to the Department of Defense by the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act has been apportioned and [has] been released to the services and program managers. And so that money is all starting to flow,” Jules Hurst, who is performing the duties of Pentagon comptroller and chief financial officer, said at the McAleese annual defense programs conference in Arlington, Va.

As Hurst spoke, lawmakers are mulling a $50 billion supplemental to pay for U.S. strikes on Iran and Trump-administration officials were finishing its 2027 budget proposal.

Asked about reports that some offices hadn’t received reconciliation funds yet, he said, “It's all been released to the services of the program offices. Sometimes it takes time for money to trickle down.”

Hurst declined to preview any details on the upcoming White House budget request, which will reportedly ask for $1.5 trillion in defense spending—half again as much as the current year’s record budget.

But he did say the entity known as DOGE, was still “alive and well” in the Pentagon.

“They've been a great partner for comptroller, in particular, as we just try to figure out where we have fat,” Hurst said. “We have robust [operations and maintenance] accounts in the FY27 budget, but they're focused on readiness. And so wherever we could, we looked through accounts and services inside the department and we tried to get rid of things that are no longer really necessary…and DOGE is very helpful for that.”

When asked if the Pentagon could feasibly spend $1.5 trillion in one year, Hurst said yes and that a lot of things were left out to keep the number down.

“We had to cut down significantly to get to [$1.5 trillion]. We had more ideas and more concepts on how to spend the money, and then we had to deal with. And so we took a long time to trim that down to the most essential things,” he said.

Hurst declined to provide specifics on how the budget would be broken down but said the proportions would mimic the Reagan administration, including “a massive investment in procurement and research development.”

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Hegseth orders ‘ruthless’ review of JAGs. Some see an attempt to evade accountability

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:36:00 -0400

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday ordered an overhaul of the military’s civilian and uniformed legal offices, raising fears among current and former members of the judge advocate general corps that he will gut legal oversight of the administration’s actions.

“I'm directing the service secretaries, the Army, Navy, and Air Force through their general counsels and JAGs and the [staff judge advocate] to the commandant to execute a ruthless, no-excuses review,” Hegseth said in a video posted on Wednesday. “Scrub it clean, cut duplication and bureaucracy, clarify roles, and reporting. No more moral ambiguity.”

Members of the military’s legal community who spoke to Defense One said they are as skeptical of Hegseth’s message as they are of his timing.

The call to reorder the “current allocation of legal resources and functions” of the Defense Department’s civilian and uniformed lawyers comes as the U.S. is fighting a war with Iran—a conflict some experts have claimed is illegal, and which has involved an airstrike on an Iranian elementary school that left 175 people dead. The investigation into that airstrike is going on now, and early evidence reportedly points to the U.S. as the responsible party.

Hegseth posted his latest video a little more than a year after he fired the Army, Navy, and Air Force’s top lawyers, claiming they were “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”

Steve Lepper, a retired Air Force lawyer and a member of a group of former JAGs that has spoken out about the administration’s military actions, said Hegseth’s words on Wednesday were at odds with his actions as secretary.

“I think it’s probably one of the most hypocritical messages he’s communicated in his tenure at DOD,” Lepper said. When Hegseth fired the top JAGs, he said, “His message was clear: ‘The law and lawyers should have little influence over the military and its operations’.”

A defense legal insider said there was talk of potential changes among lawyers on Tuesday, but many had expected a memo, not a video, outlining the reforms. As of late Wednesday evening, no formal memo outlining the effort had been widely circulated, sources told Defense One.

On Thursday, Defense One reviewed a copy of the memo, dated March 11 and addressed to the service secretaries, JAG corps, and general counsels, which it said “are best positioned to enhance the war fight, and that our general counsel personnel are best positioned to execute non-operational, supporting functions of the Military Departments.”

The memo included a suggested split of duties between the JAGs and the general counsel offices. Civilian general counsels were advised to take on business, acquisition, real estate, patent, medical, and “litigation before non-military administrative boards and federal courts and coordination with the Department of Justice,” among other areas.

The memo suggested JAGs remain in the realm of military justice, national security, operational, military administrative, claims related to military operations, and procurement and fiscal law in operation settings.

Both the uniformed and civilian lawyers must also cover “any other legal subject area prescribed by the respective Secretary concerned or otherwise required by law or regulation.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how Hegseth’s reforms may affect the many civilian employees who answer directly to each service’s top judge advocate general, or TJAG, nor the general counsels of each service.

The memo set a deadline of 45 days for reports on any overlap between the service’s civilian and military legal departments to the Defense Department’s General Counsel with full changes expected within six months.

A Defense Department spokesperson declined to answer questions about the memo and its intent. “We have nothing additional to provide beyond the Secretary’s video,” they said.

The insider said leaders of the department’s various legal offices had spoken in various ways about Hegseth’s latest action. Some said it would be an opportunity for civilian general-counsel lawyers to detangle any functions that may overlap with uniformed Judge Advocate General work.

But: “Some of them made it clear it could be a seismic shift in how things are done,” the insider said. “Subtext-wise, I think myself, and a few of the people that I've talked to, we're pretty sure this is just a way to reduce accountability” for Hegseth and other Pentagon leaders.

The general counsel for each of the military services is a political appointee chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate. While the TJAGs are similarly chosen, they must also be “recommended by a board of officers,” and the Defense Department must not interfere with “independent legal advice” given to service secretaries, according to U.S. law.

“I think it's probably a way to put more legal decisions on the [general counsel] side, because I think they think that's probably more responsive to a direct civilian political nominee rather than a uniform TJAG, who's gonna have had quite a bit of experience,” the insider said.

Overworked and stretched thin

Hegseth claimed in his Wednesday video that “legal shops across the services have grown bloated, duplicative” and are in need of reform.

“They've muddied lines of authority and pulled critical judge advocates away from what matters most: advising commanders in the fight on operations in deployed environments where seconds and minutes count,” the secretary said. “But right now, military lawyers are sometimes stuck doing civilian side work that belongs to general counsels instead, and that drains readiness and leaves gaps where we can't afford to have them.”

Ever since Hegseth fired the Army and Air Force’s most experienced TJAGs, military lawyers have been thrown at some of the administration’s largest legal hurdles—including taking on civilian duties.

Last year, the Trump administration approved the temporary assignment of more than 600 JAGs to work for the Justice Department as immigration judges. And in January, Defense One reported that dozens of military lawyers had been temporarily assigned as federal prosecutors to support law-enforcement surges in Minneapolis and other cities.

Assigning those often-inexperienced military lawyers as special assistant U.S. attorneys has been met with legal criticism. An Army lawyer serving as a federal prosecutor was held in contempt of court last month when a man was released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody without his identification documents.

On Monday, former JAG officers called for an end to the practice in an amicus brief filed in federal court in Minnesota, writing that they were “deeply concerned that deploying JAGs to prosecute civilians in federal court in cases without a substantial military nexus erodes vital democratic norms, harms military readiness, and impermissibly inserts the military into civilian law enforcement’s core functions.”

Lepper, who joined the amicus brief, said Hegseth’s message is also at odds with these frequent civilian tasks.

“If he’s so concerned about JAGs doing their jobs, why does he continue to detail them to the Department of Justice to perform immigration judge roles for which they are not qualified and special assistant U.S. attorney roles in cases that have absolutely no military nexus,” Lepper said.

By the numbers

In December, Defense One asked the Army, Air Force, and Navy how many uniformed lawyers and civilian employees were assigned to their respective JAG corps.

The Air Force reported that it had 1,236 JAGs, about nine more than it had the previous year, while civilian staffing had been cut to 996 from 1,022, an Air Force spokesperson told Defense One.

The Navy said it had about 1,030 JAGs as of November, up from about one thousand the previous year, but that its civilian staffing had been cut from some 700 people to roughly 550, a spokesperson said.

The Army did not return multiple phone calls and emailed requests from Defense One seeking staffing figures.

Last year, Hegseth ordered his department to shrink its civilian workforce. About 110,000 of the department’s roughly 795,000 civilians quit, retired, or were laid off, although some 30,000 jobs deemed essential to national security were subsequently re-filled. Many workers across the department said have since reported their offices have seen lowered productivity and performance, Defense One reported this week.

The legal insider said due to the administration’s heavy reliance on JAGs after the workforce cuts, many offices were authorized to rehire for key jobs.

“For the last year now, we've been bleeding people and the work hasn't slowed down,” the insider said. “Lots of offices were getting crushed, and they've been able to make their case and get approval to hire back and fill those positions.”

Aaron Brynildson, a former judge advocate and a law professor at the University of Mississippi, said some deconfliction of JAGs and general counsels could be beneficial.

“I agree with Secretary Hegseth’s sentiment that JAGs sometimes perform work better handled by civilian attorneys and that more clear lines of responsibility with the service Offices of General Counsel are needed,” Brynildson said. “I hope we do not reduce the number of JAGs, but place them closer to commanders.”

He also suggested that more JAGs be trained to provide legal guidance for space and cyber domains.

Members of the former-JAG working group, which was formed after the firing of the TJAGs last year, have continued to speak out against the administration’s actions, including the continued strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and the ongoing war in Iran—both of which they claim violate U.S. and international law.

Lepper and the other former military lawyers in the group have said that if proper legal guardrails were in place, many of the administration’s actions wouldn’t have taken place.

“If Secretary Hegseth is truly concerned about the law, he should try following it. If he’s concerned about letting judge advocates provide legal advice, he should listen to them,” Lepper said.

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Senator eyes updating NDAA with AI use guidance

Alexandra Kelley — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:50:01 -0400

Lawmakers are considering updating the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act to address how artificial intelligence systems are used in military operations following the fallout between Anthropic and the Department of Defense, one elected official said this week.

Speaking on Wednesday morning during a conversation at the Brookings Institution, Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., said he and fellow elected officials have been examining how effectively current legal operating frameworks are governing advanced AI technologies and how AI should be safely used alongside warfighters. The results of this analysis could potentially update governance provisions in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act.

“For this next NDAA, I've been working with some of my colleagues already on this and how do we address this issue within Anthropic,” Kelly said. “Obviously, rules of engagement is something every military has, they change over time.”

Kelly’s office further confirmed to Nextgov/FCW that he is working on solutions to address AI usage in military operations in this year’s defense bill. His office declined to comment further.

Kelly acknowledged that combat demands flexibility and speed, and said, “We're going to have to make exceptions” to having a human in the loop for autonomous offensive systems. He also said contractors and agencies looking to use advanced sensitive technologies should be having discussions “up front” on how both parties intend to use the technology.

“I think it is a reasonable thing to expect from any contractor that there are things we should and shouldn't be doing within the U.S. military,” Kelly said. “We’re not Russia, we're not China or North Korea. We have to have a certain level of standard. And I think those standards actually help us. It helps us with our allies, and at the end of the day, I do really think it makes us stronger and more effective as a military.”

Kelly’s comments come amid an ongoing dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon following the company’s refusal to relax its safety standards for defense operations that could include surveillance of U.S. citizens and using AI in autonomous lethal weapons. The situation further escalated when President Donald Trump ordered all federal agencies to shed their contracts, resulting in Anthropic suing multiple federal agencies alleging illegal retaliation.

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Hegseth leaves Iran war’s timeline in Trump’s hands

Meghann Myers — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:52:00 -0400

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has narrowed the U.S.’s objectives in Iran to three, scrapping President Donald Trump’s recent calls for “unconditional surrender” and a “great and acceptable leader” to replace the assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The U.S. military is entering day 11 of its campaign to destroy Iranian missile capabilities, destroy the Iranian navy and “permanently deny Iran nuclear weapons forever,” Hegseth said at a Tuesday press briefing at the Pentagon.

Asked about the White House’s quickly shifting timelines—Trump said on Monday that “the war is very complete”—his defense secretary hedged.

“So it’s not for me to posit whether it's the beginning, the middle, or the end,” Hegseth said. “That's his, and he'll continue to communicate that.”

The war isn’t “endless, not protracted, we’re not allowing mission creep,” he said, adding that Tuesday will be the “most intense” day of strikes inside Iran yet.

So far, the U.S. has hit more than 5,000 targets, including dozens of 2,000-pound bombs dropped on underground missile launchers, said Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“We also have struck several one-way drone factories to get at the heart of their autonomous capability,” Caine said at the press conference. “And of course, alongside our regional partners along the southern flank, continue to execute intercepts against one way attack drones using fighters and attack helicopters.”

Iranian ballistic missile attacks are down 90 percent and drone attacks down 83 percent, Caine said, giving same figures as U.S. Central Command boss Adm. Brad Cooper gave at a press conference last Thursday.

Asked about Israel’s strikes on Iranian oil facilities, Hegseth said, “that wasn't our necessary objective,” but added that Israel is not leading the U.S. deeper into war.

“The president has made clear to those concerns that we're not getting pulled in any direction,” Hegseth said. “We're leading. The president is leading. He's determining where we want to go, what the outcome will be, what the end state is, with a very keen eye.”

After Trump accused the Iranian military Monday of using a Tomahawk missile to strike a girl’s school on Feb. 28, Hegseth reiterated that the U.S. is investigating the incident.

“No nation takes more precautions to ensure there's never targeting of civilians than the United States of America,” he said.

However, Hegseth last year gutted a congressionally-mandated Pentagon office that sought to reduce civilian harm in U.S. air strikes, created in response to thousands of civilian deaths during the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

“From the boat strikes in the Caribbean, where every single strike is assessed, to this campaign here, no nation in history of warfare has ever attempted in every way possible to avoid civilian casualties, and frankly, that's a point that just isn't appreciated enough,” Hegseth said.

However, experts have questioned the legality of the administration’s attacks on suspected drug smuggling boats, determining that the people on board are indeed civilians until Congress authorizes military action against suspected drug cartel activity.

Asked what the administration’s next steps will be after achieving its goals in Iran, Hegseth offered no specifics about Iran’s future leadership or any future deals that would control its ability to rebuild its conventional or nuclear weapons capabilities.

“Ultimately, the aftermath is going to be in America’s interests,” he said.

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A year into Hegseth’s cuts, Defense civilians report ‘degraded performance’ and low morale

Meghann Myers — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:30:00 -0400

A year after Secretary Pete Hegseth launched a hasty effort to reduce the Defense Department’s civilian workforce by up to 61,000 people, employees are reporting gutted offices, lower productivity, and pervasive uncertainty.

“The climate, at least in my immediate organization, has shifted from fear to stress,” said an Air Force civilian who spoke with Defense One. “The fear of imminent [reductions-in-force] is not something we talk about much anymore because, while the threat of it persistently looms in the air, it is not in our best interest to constantly worry about it. Frankly, I'm too exhausted to keep thinking about it.”

All of the DoD civilians who shared their thoughts for this story requested anonymity to prevent retaliation by their employer.

Within weeks of taking office last January, Hegseth ordered voluntary and involuntary cuts, along with a partial hiring freeze that forced managers to rescind untold numbers of job offers—untold because Pentagon officials have refused to say how many of those positions disappeared in the process. The freeze has also blocked the movement of thousands of employees to new roles, although some are now moving via a cumbersome exemption process.

In total, nearly 110,000 of the department’s roughly 795,000 civilians departed last year, about 80 percent more than Hegseth’s goal. Some 30,000 jobs deemed essential to national security were subsequently re-filled.

Those numbers come from a Daily Wire story that Pentagon spokesman Jacob Bliss forwarded as a response to eight questions about the cuts and their effects. Bliss and other spokespeople did not respond to follow-up requests to answer the remaining questions.

The Office of Personnel Management’s workforce data confirms that DoD’s civilian workforce sits at just above 694,000.

Bliss declined to say whether there is a planned end to the hiring freeze; to provide examples of job titles that have been downgraded or merged in accordance with Hegseth’s March 28 directive; and to explain what, if anything, the department has done to address loss of productivity.

According to Pentagon data obtained by the Daily Wire, 14,606 of last year’s departures were involuntary. One of the department’s first moves was to dismiss 5,400 probationary employees—generally, people on the job for less than a year—for purported “performance issues.” Lawsuits delayed but ultimately did not block these firings, although a judge compelled Pentagon leaders to admit that the “performance” rationale was a lie.

In September, Hegseth signed another memo laying out a path for the quick firing of “low performers.” Bliss declined to say how many employees have been pushed out under that framework.

Then there were the voluntary resignations: 94,835 in total, according to the Daily Wire. That included 49,991 through the Deferred Resignation Program, which allowed employees to leave their jobs while being paid through the end of the fiscal year. This number is several thousand below the 55,000 figure provided to Defense One at the end of September.

Another 6,600 long-serving employees took an early-retirement offer: some 6,100 by August and the rest later in the year.

‘Beginning to drop primary functions’

“I would say overall the DoD civilian policies over the past year have resulted in degraded performance and capability downgrade overall due to the loss of critical skill sets,” one department civilian said of the resignations, adding that the vacated jobs in his shop have largely remained unfilled or been converted to dual-status Title 32 National Guard jobs.

That has increased wait times and decreased IT services to the Pentagon organizations that depend on his shop, the civilian said

With the hiring freeze now entering its second year, the civilian held out little hope that any of the lost capability will be restored.

“There are a lot of unfilled positions that will remain vacant for the foreseeable future. For the most part, managers know not to ask for new staff,” the civilian said. “I would not say processes are becoming more efficient. Probably the reverse, with a lot of offices reducing hours and services.”

The Air Force civilian described his office’s manning shortfall as “severe,” with just one in three civilian core-operations staff remaining.

“My small organization has been hit disproportionately hard and is beginning to drop primary functions because we can no longer support them,” he said.

His organization’s leaders have asked for exemptions to replace lost workers, but they’ve gone unanswered or been denied.

“Morale is as low as I can remember in the three-plus years that I've been there, primarily due to being overworked with just a 1 percent raise in salary for FY2026,” the civilian said. “The end-of-January bonuses announced by Hegseth have not materialized.”

Trapped overseas

For civilians working overseas, the ongoing hiring freeze has added another wrinkle: They largely can’t return to the U.S. unless they take a demotion or leave their jobs.

Every permanent change-of-station move, which is treated as a new hire, requires an exception-to-policy signed off by a military department head or equivalent leader, meaning that department civilians who may have signed on to take a promotion overseas with the intent to return stateside in a few years are effectively trapped.

The Pentagon is only hiring for specific positions, which include jobs related to public safety, immigration enforcement, and technicians at shipyards and depots. The department has hired 29,347 people who fall into those categories, according to the data provided to the Daily Wire, but an overseas civilian who wants to move back stateside for one of those exempted positions still has to have an exception-to-policy approved.

“I only know of one that was approved and it took nine months just to approve the ETP,” an Army civilian told Defense One.

The Army has created a sort of workaround for this problem. The Department of the Army Voluntary Reassignment Program is a repository of resumes posted by civilians who are interested in a transfer. Offices with open positions can search them for a possible candidate, but only if it would be a lateral move—no promotions are allowed, and they still require the Army secretary to approve an exception to policy.

The only other option is to exercise one’s return rights, an emergency out for employees who began their careers stateside before taking a position overseas. But that means reverting to their previous job, even if it’s a demotion and a lower pay grade.

“Part of Russ Vought's plan to make federal employees miserable as a whole, it seems,” the Army civilian said, alluding to the Office of Management and Budget director who, during the Biden administration, made speeches about his desire to put federal workers “in trauma.”

One in three federal employees works for the Defense Department—as of Thursday, 707,378 of the 2,074,649-strong federal workforce. Even so, DOD bore an outsized share of last year’s Trump-administration cuts, losing two of every five federal jobs eliminated, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.

That means forty percent of the departed workers had been directly supporting the military.

“We are all collectively stereotyped as the proverbial lazy admin assistant at the local DMV, without realizing a large chunk of DOD civilians are in remote locations, in harm’s way, part of the intelligence apparatus—or in my case, 20 kilometers from the [Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea] undergoing the exact same challenges and living conditions as our uniformed counterparts,” the Army civilian said.

Still, the Army civilian said, there is some optimism—that the Pentagon’s trajectory will become unsustainable and require a correction, whether it’s during this administration or the next.

“I believe in time the machine will break and then the situation will improve, but until then, we work with what we have and hope our servicemen and women do not pay the price because we cannot support them sufficiently,” he said.

The Trump administration has sent mixed signals. Continuing to reduce the size of the federal government and its workforce remains “priority number one,” Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director for Management Eric Ueland said March 5 at a government efficiency conference in Washington. But: “We probably have some skills that we now need to hire back, quite frankly,” Scott Kupor, the head of the Office of Personnel Management, told the Washington Post, which adds that the new hiring push “is unfolding under new rules designed to give the White House greater influence over the government’s 2 million-person civilian workforce.”

The question also remains whether Hegseth’s cuts have actually streamlined department processes. Pentagon officials have declined to say what came out of the secretary’s March order giving his senior leaders less than two weeks to submit proposals to shrink and reorganize their commands, agencies, and departments.

And last May, when the acting Pentagon personnel chief withdrew the much-derided requirement that civilian employees submit a weekly list of five things they did, he told everyone to send him a suggestion to “improve Department efficiency or root out waste.”

Bliss declined to say which, if any, of those suggestions have been implemented.

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The Pentagon’s investment deals draw congressional scrutiny

Lauren C. Williams — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Lawmakers have questions about the Pentagon’s increased keenness to take partial ownership stakes in companies, demanding details from defense officials while they weigh the need for legislation.

Government equity investment adds pressure on companies to “stimulate growth” and production without “pursuing control,” Michael Duffey, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, said Wednesday during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the defense industrial base. “We view equity investment as an important tool—amongst a range of tools—that we can apply to build resilience and reduce fragility within the defense industrial base,” Duffey said.

Those other tools include grants and loans, he said, but taking a financial stake in a company has extra benefits, including encouraging companies to put up more of their own funds. Those taxpayer funds can also be returned, unlike grants, which Duffey called a “sunk” cost.

“It creates a partnership with industry, an opportunity not only for the government to provide capital to lead to the kind of growth that we need, such as in the [L3Harris solid rocket motor] deal, but it also crowds in additional private capital. Part of that deal was for L3 to put their own billions of dollars against what we saw as a very high demand for growth within the solid rocket motor industrial base,” Duffey said.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon announced it would put $1 billion into L3Harris’s solid-rocket-motor business to spur production. L3Harris will spend money alongside the government, Duffey said of the deal. The more “skin in the game” vendors have, he said, the more likely they are to increase production capacity.

“We haven't seen the kind of investment that we need in terms of modernizing manufacturing, developing the workforce. We believe [that] equity investment, in some cases—in many cases—in partnership with additional private capital, creates that incentive for better attention to how those dollars are deployed to expand our industry partners’ capability,” Duffey said.

Additionally, each deal “comes with clear milestones” and timelines to “ensure that investment is stimulating the growth that is required,” Duffey said. “We are looking at this as an economic stake in the company. We are not pursuing control.”

Many of the equity investments the Pentagon has made recently relate to critical minerals production. So far, the second Trump administration has invested $2.3 billion on critical minerals supply chain deals since Jan. 20, 2025, buttressed by the Defense Production Act, Duffey testified.

“The Defense Production Act, DPA, is a key component of this investment strategy. The DPA provides the President with the authority to ensure the availability of industrial resources to meet our national defense requirements,” Duffey said in prepared remarks. “We have recently used DPA authorities to make significant investments in critical sectors. For instance, we awarded $29.9 million in September 2025 to develop a domestic supply of gallium and scandium, and we have also used DPA authorities to invest $36.6 [million] in late 2025 in germanium production and $43.4 [million] in September 2025 to establish domestic capability for antimony trisulfide, addressing two of the most pressing critical mineral shortfalls facing the defense industrial base today.”

Duffey also noted that $149 million in DPA Title III funds have gone to eight entities to expand the solid-rocket-motor industrial base.

But lawmakers in both chambers, and across party lines, questioned exactly how the Pentagon was going to monitor and execute equity investments.

“The department's making significant equity investments in companies to ramp up their capability to manufacture. Not a new concept. It's been around, I think, forever," Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., said. "How are you monitoring the use of that investment? And ultimately, what will you, will the department be doing with the equity that it has acquired as a result of those investments?”

In opening remarks, HASC Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., welcomed the Pentagon’s use of new financing tools to strengthen supply chain resilience,” because “the status quo was not working. However, Congress needs clearer answers on when equity investments are the right approach.”

During a Feb. 24 hearing on critical minerals supply chains, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi, praised the Pentagon’s “use of innovative financial tools,” but noted that “little law currently exists” with respect to equity investments.

“I believe these equity-based investments make good strategic sense in many cases, particularly where no free market exists and where we've seen aggressive Chinese economic warfare. However, opinions range [widely] between and within our two political parties,” Wicker said in February, adding the committees have been mulling legislation on the matter.

“While not public, Ranking Member Reed and I had a long series of discussions with our House counterparts, last year, about legislation regarding equity investments. I anticipate that conversation will continue in earnest this year. This legislation is both important and urgent because rebuilding America's critical mineral supply chains will take more than a decade.”

In that same hearing, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said the Defense Production Act doesn’t explicitly name equity investments.

“I have questions about the legal basis, financial terms and strategic rationale for these transactions. The legal basis, in particular, appears questionable,” Reed said. “The department has argued that the Defense Production Act provides the authority for these investments. However, while the Defense Production Act does authorize the purchase of industrial resources for government use, it does not mention equity investments at all. The fact that the Trump administration's Office of Management and Budget has subsequently requested a legislative proposal to explicitly authorize equity investment suggests that the administration, itself, recognizes the current authority is uncertain. And that should give us pause.”

Michael Cadenazzi, the Pentagon’s head of industrial base policy, fielded those questions and others, saying the deals are designed to provide “performance outcomes” for companies and that equity stakes will be used as an “alternative to other financing mechanisms,” such as direct grants.

Equity investments prove the department’s commitment to “solving these problems, which are outsized relative to our normal focus on it” and “equity is a necessary tool for us to make that commitment,” he said.

“Our goal is not economic returns. We're not trying to excise long-term ownership of these companies. The goal is not to have a stake forever. The goal is to achieve our outcome, execute some sort of exit strategy as appropriate to the moment, and then continue on with the next set of problems,” Cadenazzi said. “Ideally, we wouldn't be spending much time on minerals.

We feel compelled to do so as a result of the situation in the market.”

Duffey and Cadenazzi left their hearings with a little homework at lawmakers’ request: submit details of the equity deals and legal justifications, respectively.

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Why the US went to war without a plan to evacuate DOD civilians, contractors, and others

Donald Heflin, The Conversation — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:00:00 -0500

As the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, American citizens living in or visiting the Middle East found themselves stranded in countries facing bombing attacks by Iran. The State Department on March 2, 2026, urged Americans in 14 Middle Eastern countries to leave via “available commercial transportation, due to serious safety risks.” But commercial air travel and airports were shut down in many of those places and the U.S. wasn’t offering to evacuate its citizens.

Media reports featuring frustrated and frightened Americans stuck in places where danger was mounting, as well as growing criticism that the U.S. hadn’t handled the situation well or according to normal procedure, led the State Department to scramble and send charter flights to evacuate U.S. nationals from a handful of countries.

The Conversation’s politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed former ambassador Donald Heflin, a veteran diplomat who now teaches at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, to understand how such situations are normally handled – and how the current situation diverged from longstanding practices.

What is the customary way that the United States and the State Department deal with U.S. nationals who are abroad in an area that becomes dangerous?

Over my 35-year career, I was ambassador to a small country and I worked a lot on African affairs. But most of my time was spent in consular affairs, which is the part of the State Department that does this work. And over the last 20 or 30 years, we’ve made a lot of progress. We’ve developed a model that works pretty well.

When you’re in a country with instability, what you want to do is to get the population of Americans down as small as you can. So the first thing that happens is you have some instability, and you tell Americans, “Listen, we advise against traveling here.” See if you can discourage everybody except missionaries or people whose employers really want them to go there to make money or people visiting family members, but get rid of the casual tourist.

Then, a little more time goes by and things start to get bad, and you say, “You should consider leaving.” And then, a little while later, the embassy gives its own employees and their families what they call “authorized departure,” which is, “It’s OK for you to go back to the U.S., and in fact we’ll help pay for it.” And we tell the public that, and we hope that that’ll help spur more people to leave.

And the step after that?

Next step: We order departure, where we tell parts of the embassy, “You’ve got to go home. You can’t make the decision to stay here, you and your kids go home.” And we tell the public that, and hopefully that makes the number of Americans remaining in the country smaller and smaller.

Then – and it doesn’t always happen – the last step is we evacuate. We say, “We’re getting our people out of here on planes, we’ve got space for you on the planes, you should have listened to us before.”

That’s the standard model. Unfortunately, it didn’t get followed very well this week.

What did you see this week, and how did it diverge from the normal procedure?

We went from zero to 60 very quickly. Look, the Mideast is unstable on a good day, but there had not been a new instability where people should be getting scared and going home. And then what happened was we launched the attack, and all of a sudden there was that instability.

Logically, you would think, there were two places that Americans should be getting out of. One was Iran, where we’ve told people not to be for many years. The other was Israel, because Israel is going to be attacked.

But no, the Iranians attacked over half a dozen countries. So now, all of a sudden, you’ve got Americans who feel unsafe in places that have never really been considered unsafe, like Oman, Cyprus or Turkey.

So now you have a long list of countries where you want to encourage Americans to leave and where they want to leave. There’s some demand, and you haven’t got that drawdown, where it makes things smaller, and also you haven’t done anything about arranging charter flights or military flights to get them out. So they’re going to have to stay where they are and feel unsafe for X number of days.

That’s when this started generating news stories.

This led to lot of people calling a member of Congress, a lot of people talking to the press, saying, “We got to get us out of here.” That’ll continue until the evacuation is arranged. There’s a bit of an analogy to COVID. When COVID first took off, we had a lot of Americans stuck overseas. They wanted to get home to their families. They figured U.S. health care to be the best that’s available, and it took us awhile to arrange charter flights. It was a very expensive process to get everybody home. They just kind of had to hunker down. That’s where we are right now.

Do you think this problem that’s being faced by Americans in the Middle East now should have been anticipated by the State Department?

Yes and no. I think a big part of the problem here was that the Trump administration kept the knowledge of the impending attack to a very small circle of people for operational security reasons. You can’t launch a surprise attack if half of Washington knows about it.

You can see a scenario by which a very trusted State Department officer has to eventually talk to a charter plane company about chartering a whole bunch of planes. They’re going to figure out pretty quickly what’s going to happen, and then you’ve got a security leak.

At the same time, I think going back weeks and months, maybe people should have been arranging charter flights and military flights, kind of on spec so that you could flip the switch and get that going right away. They’re kind of starting from scratch this week.

You’ve got people who are stranded, afraid and can’t get on with their lives. What should happen next?

All these Iranian strikes, the casualty numbers aren’t high. So objectively speaking, I think that very few of the Americans over there are in actual, real danger.

But casual tourists do get afraid, and they don’t travel overseas that much. This may be their first time in the Mideast, and all of a sudden this is happening. They want out bad. They’re scared, whether, objectively speaking, they have a good reason to be scared or not. And it’s better for everybody – the U.S. embassy, the host country, for people in Washington – if we get them out of there and get them home.

This will sort itself out. There will be planes, we’ll get all the people out who want to get out, but it’s going to take at least a few days, maybe a week.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Fake DOD memo about ‘compromised’ apps shows swift spread of deceptive messaging

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:51:24 -0500

A purported U.S. Cyber Command memo claiming that multiple apps were “compromised” and could be revealing servicemembers’ locations is fake, a DOD official confirmed to Defense One.

“The command did not issue messages to U.S. service members to turn off location services on their electronic devices and did not issue messages that applications had been compromised,” the official wrote. “Due to operational security concerns, U.S. Cyber Command does not comment nor discuss cyber intelligence, plans, operations, capabilities or effects.”

The fake message claimed that Uber, Snapchat, and Talabat —a Middle East food delivery service— were compromised and could reveal the location of service members. Some versions circulated also appear to say that locations of service members within the continental U.S. were also compromised.

Uber late Sunday said there were no indications of compromise. A Snapchat spokesperson echoed that sentiment. Talabat did not return a request for comment by publishing time.

The message began circulating in military service member chats, social media groups on Sunday evening, one day after the United States and Israel began attacking Iran. It was also shared in non-public Defense Department channels.

Some servicemembers familiar with standard military communications and dissemination protocols were skeptical of the message, another official told Defense One. But its wide dissemination made it difficult to initially ascertain its veracity.

The message was just part of a wave of false information that flooded social media platforms after the bombing began. The episode highlights the speed at which inauthentic information can gain traction during active conflict, especially when it reaches those serving in the military.

Iran has been known to generate and amplify misinformation and disinformation to sow confusion and chaos. It’s not clear at this time whether this particular memo is tied to Iran.

Thomas Novelly contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to better clarify the services offered by Talabat.

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Strikes on Iran will test US cyber strategy abroad, and defenses at home

David DiMolfetta — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:16:56 -0500

Coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets are putting renewed focus on how the United States integrates offensive cyber capabilities into the battlespace — and how prepared federal agencies are for retaliation at home.

Iran has shown a tendency to respond to overseas threats with cyber means, from defacing websites to spying on U.S. and allied targets. Tracking such actions and alerting the U.S. government and public is a job of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has been operating with sharply reduced staffing due to a funding lapse for its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security.

“This is a bad time for Washington’s cyber agency to be operating with limited staff,” said Annie Fixler, director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security think tank.

That funding lapse comes after Trump-administration moves shrank CISA’s workforce by about one-third last year and degraded public-private collaboration mechanisms. This “limits the ability of the federal government to provide timely cyber threat information to the private sector,” Fixler said.

In the wake of the U.S. and Israeli airstrikes, American companies could see a “barrage” of low-level attacks like website defacements and distributed denial-of-service attacks, said Fixler. “Iran might also see some limited success against targets that do not have proper cyber hygiene — exposed edge devices with default passwords, for example.”

Other cyber experts said the U.S. should prepare for a mix of distributed denial-of-service campaigns, ransomware and hack-and-leak operations meant to send a message.

“While it’s not operating at the same technical level as China or Russia, Iranian-linked groups have carried out disruptive attacks against U.S. financial institutions, infrastructure providers and private sector companies,” said Tom Pace, a former Marine intelligence specialist and CEO of NetRise, a cybersecurity supply chain firm.

The conflict will likely see a surge in state-sponsored hacking activity, “specifically targeting operational technology and critical infrastructure through the exploitation of internet-facing industrial control systems and vulnerable [programmable logic controller] hardware,” said Brian Harrell, a former CISA official.

“Threat hunters should be working overtime right now. By combining disruptive attacks with psychological operations, Iran will seek to erode public trust in government institutions and project domestic strength during periods of heightened conflict,” he said.

Elisity CEO James Winebrenner echoed that advice. “We should be vigilant in protecting exposed [industrial controls systems] and expect heightened retaliatory activity in the coming days and weeks,” he said. In late 2023, Iran-linked hackers digitally defaced U.S. water treatment equipment.

Tehran may play up the effectiveness and scope of their cyberattacks, said Cynthia Kaiser, a former FBI cybersecurity deputy director who leads the Ransomware Research Center at Halcyon. Industry research has documented these theatrics.

“They’ll turn [an intrusion] into an information operation, and say, ‘Look, we compromised this entire facility,’ even though they compromised just a machine,” Kaiser said.

Asked about the diminished DHS and CISA workforce, Kaiser said other national security elements across the government like the FBI and NSA are still able to track and respond to cyber threats in full. “People marshal themselves together to focus on a big threat” even if there are resource shortages, she said.

Matt Hayden, a former DHS infrastructure security official, said CISA would continue its standard threat-hunting procedures as if the government was fully operating. “While there are operators that are working without pay, they are still working,” he said. Hayden is now vice president of cyber and emerging threats at GDIT.

Defense One has asked CISA and DHS for comment.

The U.S. has likely deployed a powerful toolset of cyber and electronic operations against Iranian targets, said Charles Moore, a retired three-star general and former U.S. Cyber Command official who is now a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University’s Institute of National Security.

“I would suspect that anything that Iran is using to communicate, anything they’re using to keep situational awareness or visibility on the battle space, and any systems they’re using to try to defend themselves, all those types of things — would be targets that would be of interest from a cyber perspective,” Moore said.

The U.S. and Israel are also likely intercepting communications to aid in its operations. “In general, signals intelligence of any type, is something the United States is very interested in and is very adept at gathering. And so I have no doubt that those types of efforts will continue,” he said.

Internet connectivity in Iran has also been heavily reduced. The exact cause of this decline is uncertain. While the U.S. or Israel may have played a role, Iran frequently restricts internet access during periods of unrest, such as anti-regime protests.

In coming days, there may be public indications that Cyber Command played a role in U.S. components of the operation, said FDD’s Fixler.

Influence operations have played a role in the efforts. Israel notably hacked a major Iranian prayer app, aiming to fuel uprising against the regime. But its effectiveness may be limited, said Maggie Feldman-Piltch, CEO of Iceberg Holdings, a firm that helps private-sector entities prevent IP theft.

The infiltration of a prayer app with those messages is “a wonderful example of not knowing your audience or understanding what happens when you don’t,” said Feldman-Piltch, who formerly led the digital and electronic portfolio at the Wilson Center.

A simple message finally calling for uprising ignores years of already documented protests against Iran that have resulted in civilian killings, she said.

The U.S. and its allies will have to stay vigilant. The operation “has destroyed Iran’s conventional military options, making cyber operations the regime’s sole remaining instrument of asymmetric retaliation,” says a threat intelligence report sent to Defense One produced by cybersecurity firm Anomali. Iran-linked cyber units were “activated and retooling before the kinetic trigger,” it adds.

“Geography provides no protection against a cyber-enabled adversary,” said Tatyana Bolton, principal and head of Monument Advocacy’s cybersecurity practice. “Iran possesses some of the most creative and dangerous cyber operators in the world, and with the current escalation, their incentive for restraint is significantly reduced.”

“They don’t need to win a naval battle in the Gulf to hurt the U.S. — they can simply hold our power grids, water systems, and hospitals hostage from halfway around the world to force our hand at the negotiating table,” Bolton said. “We must recognize that in 2026, the front line isn’t just in the Middle East — it’s in our own backyard.”

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The clearance system is mission infrastructure. Treat it like one

Lindy Kyzer — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 07:00:00 -0500

While Washington is busy reforming government, I’m worried we’re about to repeat one of the oldest mistakes in the national security playbook: treating the security clearance system like a back-office inconvenience instead of mission infrastructure.

You can reorganize offices, trim headcounts, rename initiatives and declare victory from a podium, but if the trusted workforce pipeline is brittle, everything downstream breaks. Contracts slip. Programs stall. Talent walks. And corners get cut in ways that should make every security leader wince.

Recent fake remote IT worker cases highlight just how serious the issue is – when workforce and security become secondary, critical positions become filled with adversaries, not trusted workers. Last year, the Department of Justice described coordinated efforts by North Korea and ones that successfully infiltrated the ranks of the military industrial base.

This isn’t just a “classified comms” problem. Sometimes the issue isn’t someone writing code for a sensitive network, it’s agencies allowing contractors to touch government systems before the proper security determinations are complete. A number of GSA and inspectors general reports have noted ongoing issues of workers supporting national security or sensitive work without the requisite vetting. Those are just the reported cases. With a push for solutions, and not always security, the problem of vetting is too often falling into the margins, not the mission.

Different agencies. Different contexts. Same underlying dynamic: When clearance timelines and requirements don’t align with mission urgency, the system quietly incentivizes risk rather than minimizing it.

I keep coming back to a point Brett Mencin, president of personnel vetting at Xcelerate Solutions, expounded on in a recent op-ed outlining the critical juncture we’re currently seeing in Trusted Workforce reforms: “Implementation still varies widely across agencies. Some have embraced automation and data-driven adjudication. Others remain anchored to legacy workflows, manual reviews and conservative interpretations of risk. The result is a system that is technically modern, but experientially inconsistent.”

We’re not in the “pilot program” era anymore. The policies are here. The architecture is here. The expectations are here. What’s uneven – sometimes painfully so – is execution.

And execution depends on leadership.

Right now, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, arguably the single most important operational engine in the clearance ecosystem, doesn’t have a permanent director at the helm. Justin Overbaugh has been serving as acting director since November, after Director David Cattler stepped down in September.

At the same time, DCSA is in the middle of a genuine overhaul: reorganizing its personnel security mission and, hopefully, aligning to Trusted Workforce 2.0, with more internal realignments anticipated as part of wider government reform efforts. DCSA leadership has also described being “in the midst of a personnel vetting mission transformation” and emphasized the need to align that transformation with NBIS deliveries and TW 2.0 milestones.

Then there’s NBIS itself – the enterprise backbone that’s supposed to modernize investigations and case management. The Government Accountability Office has been blunt: NBIS has faced delays for years, and the Defense Department now projects major development completion by the end of fiscal 2027. GAO has also stressed that sustained leadership is critical to achieving personnel vetting reform.

Another piece of this conversation that rarely gets public attention but quietly determines whether reform sticks or fizzles is the role of the security executive agent within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The SecEA isn’t just a policy author; it is the connective tissue that keeps the personnel security system coherent across agencies, contractors and missions. When the executive agent role is strong, guidance is consistent, reciprocity is real and agencies are less tempted to improvise their own rules under pressure. When it’s weak, fragmented or sidelined, the system drifts – standards diverge, timelines vary wildly and accountability blurs.

I don’t disagree with the need to modernize and optimize the government. I disagree with the idea that clearance reform is somehow optional or “nice to have” or something we can return to after the dust settles, rather than pushing with a similar emphasis and focus as broader reform moves forward.

The clearance process is not a sidebar. It’s the front door to national security work.

If that front door sticks, leaders don’t just lose time, they lose trust:

Trust from cleared professionals who can’t plan their lives around an unpredictable process.
Trust from contractors who can’t staff programs without gambling on start dates.
Trust from agencies that are trying to deliver capability fast but are boxed in by uneven reciprocity and inconsistent implementation.
And public trust, when the system appears arbitrary.

Here’s what security clearance reform needs right now, even amid broader government shakeups:

Treat DCSA leadership stability as mission-critical. Acting leadership can keep the lights on. It can’t carry a multiyear transformation at the scale we’re asking for. When a new director takes the helm, that leader should be poised to run, not walk, as they implement the latest reforms.
Make “no uncleared work on cleared requirements” a real enforcement priority, not an occasional scandal. False Claims Act cases throughout the past decade should have been a lasting warning. More recent GSA findings should be a forcing function. Instead, too often, they become trivia questions at conferences.
Measure what matters to humans, not just dashboards. If average timelines look better but outliers are wrecking hiring, that’s not success – it’s optics. Mencin’s point about modernization being real but inconsistent in practice should be taken as a mandate to standardize execution, not just celebrate policy milestones.
Demand an engaged security executive agent. In an era of Trusted Workforce 2.0, continuous vetting and shared services, the security executive agent is what prevents reform from becoming a patchwork of well-intentioned but uneven practices. If government reform efforts overlook or under-resource this function, we shouldn’t be surprised when the same clearance problems resurface over and over again.

Government reform is a worthy project. But if it sidelines the clearance system and treats the trusted workforce like an administrative afterthought, then every other reform effort is building on sand.

We don’t need another tagline. We need sustained leadership, consistent implementation and the courage to admit that national security doesn’t run on organizational charts. It runs on cleared people doing cleared work the right way, every time. It runs on the trusted workforce. And we need to operationalize Trusted Workforce 2.0 reforms if we want to achieve true government efficiency.

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Some Army civilians worked during the shutdown—and were told to say they didn’t

Eric Katz and Thomas Novelly — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:16:29 -0500

Some Army civilian employees who were supposed to be furloughed during the recent shutdown went to work anyway, then were instructed to fill out time cards stating that they had not. Now the workers fear that this violated standard procedures and forced them to break the law.

When a shutdown looms, government agencies typically tell each employee whether they are “excepted/exempted”—that is, allowed to work during the lapse in annual appropriations—or “non-excepted,” and therefore barred from working.

In an email to staff on Monday, Feb. 2—the first weekday of the four-day shutdown—the Army’s Installation Management Command told its employees via email to proceed with “normal operations,” adding that “all command battle rhythm events will occur as scheduled.” The email said that Army headquarters had issued no formal guidance for the shutdown, and therefore employees should continue conducting their normal work.

That struck at least some staff as a violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act, the law that restricts federal spending to only what Congress appropriates.

“I don’t know how anyone in the Army can have non-excepted employees currently work with no appropriation,” said one IMCOM employee who was slated to be furloughed but who was told to work anyway. “Someone needs to be held accountable.”

Later on the evening of Feb. 2, IMCOM officials again emailed the command's civilians, instructing them to report to work on Tuesday, Feb. 3.

They did. But late on the morning of Feb. 3, workers deemed non-exempted received furlough notices, and consequently stopped working.

Later that day, command leaders sent an email instructing non-exempt workers to code their timesheets as having been on furlough all day on Feb. 2 and Feb. 3.

Government Executive and Defense One reviewed copies of the emails.

The IMCOM employee noted that federal workers must certify their timesheets are true and accurate before submitting them.

“This is neither true or accurate,” the employee said of the timesheet they were told to submit. They suggested the directive was a “CYA,” or cover your ass, move by the command’s leaders after having employees work who were not supposed to do so.

Nicole Wieman, an IMCOM spokesperson, declined to comment and directed questions to the Army.

Asked about the matter, Army spokesperson Christopher Surridge sent this statement: “The U.S. Army shutdown [sic] when directed by the Department of War.”

Spokespeople for the Defense Department declined to comment.

Something similar happened at a different Army office. An email sent on the morning of Feb. 3 advised civilian employees to “ensure their time and attendance is recorded for Feb. 3-6, 2026, with furlough time” even if they worked when they weren’t supposed to be.

An Army civilian who received that email said no shutdown guidance was provided to the office during regular work hours on Feb. 2.

“It’s very frustrating,” the civilian said. “We’re all just sitting on the edge of our seats, waiting. Are we going to get sent home? Are we not going to be sent home?”

The shutdown ended on the evening of Feb. 3, when President Trump signed a spending bill. The following day, employees were back to their normal duties.

Just before the shutdown began, Defense Department officials released guidance that around 55% of its 740,000-plus civilian employees would work through the funding lapses, while the rest would be placed on furlough. The guidance made clear that federal employees were not permitted to work once they completed their “orderly shutdown activities,” which, per the Office of Personnel Management, can take “up to four hours.”

“Federal agencies generally may not accept services from employees, whose salaries are set by law, without the obligation of appropriations for their compensation, except for emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property,” the guidance stated.

The furloughed employees were, by definition, not excepted for the protection of life or property and were therefore ineligible to continuing working all day on Feb. 2 and into Feb. 3.

The Anti-Deficiency Act is enforced by the Government Accountability Office, which noted violations during the first Trump administration.

On Thursday, GAO spokesperson Jessica Baxer said that the law prohibits agencies from accepting “voluntary services” from its employees.

“As such, when a shutdown occurs, the act requires agencies to generally stop their operations,” Baxter said. “While there are exceptions, we have noted that the ongoing, regular functions of government may not continue during a lapse in appropriation.”

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JAGs are becoming federal prosecutors in Minneapolis. Experts warn it’s new territory

Thomas Novelly — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:23:38 -0500

Dozens of military lawyers have been temporarily assigned as federal prosecutors to support law-enforcement surges in Minneapolis and other cities, a novel arrangement that is stretching an overworked judge advocate general corps and drawing concern from legal experts.

This month alone, the Justice Department requested about 40 lawyers, a U.S. official told Defense One.

"As special assistant United States attorneys in Minneapolis, department JAGs will provide crucial legal support in Minnesota, and help our interagency partners as they deliver justice, restore order, and protect the American people," Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said in a Jan. 16 news release.

Wilson gave no numbers, but her press release followed the Jan. 7 announcement that 20 JAGs were being assigned to prosecute violent crime in Memphis, Tennessee, where federal agents and National Guard troops have been patrolling and making arrests since September, when President Trump ordered a surge.

Similar orders have sent 20 other JAGs to federal prosecutors’ officers in Washington, D.C., where National Guard troops continue their patrols.

There is precedent for military lawyers to help prosecute civilians, but not at this scale nor in these types of roles, experts said.

“The government has used JAGs to help prosecute offenses unrelated to military bases in a handful of cases over the years, but we've never seen JAGs used at this scale in civilian criminal cases with no military connection,” said Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor. “Not only does the scale raise serious concerns about taking JAGs away from their regular duties, but it also raises the question of why the Department of Justice is having so much trouble trying these cases itself.”

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on the exact number of JAGs assigned to serve as special assistant U.S. attorneys and the types of roles they are taking on.

“The Department of Justice is laser-focused on protecting the American people from violent crime and rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We have charged dozens of defendants from Minnesota who’ve defrauded the American people, and our whole-government approach to combatting these issues will continue until all fraudsters and violent criminals are brought to justice.”

DOJ policy once barred JAGs from serving as assistant U.S. attorneys outside military bases.

“While the military interest in aiding the civil authorities in connection with these prosecutions might in some cases warrant the assignment of regular military officers to assist civilian prosecutors, the duties performed under such a detail could not be such as to require them to act as statutory or constitutional officers of the civil government,” read a 1983 memo from DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, adding that “regular JAG officers may no longer be authorized by this Department to perform the duties in question.”

Vladeck said Congress later changed existing laws to permit such assignments, and in 1986 the Uniform Code of Military Justice was altered to allow military lawyers to represent the U.S. government “in civil and criminal cases.” Further legal analysis from that same year also said the arrangement does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which outlaws the use of the military for federal law enforcement.

Some military legal experts disagree with that analysis. Steven Lepper, a retired Air Force judge advocate general, said he has serious doubts about the administration's new use of the military lawyers.

“That proposal is inconsistent with the typical way in which military lawyers have been used as special assistant U.S. attorneys in the past,” Lepper said. “The fact that there is no military nexus here between the kinds of cases that JAGs serving as special assistant U.S. attorneys are going to help prosecute essentially puts these JAGs in a role where the fundamental question ought to be whether doing that is a violation of Posse Comitatus.”

Lepper added that these lawyers are still subject to the UCMJ, making it harder for them to challenge certain actions. After the deaths of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis during immigration-related law enforcement operations, several federal prosecutors resigned from their roles.

“It takes military lawyers who are less likely to say no, or for whom it becomes more difficult to say no, and puts them in a position where they essentially are being asked to follow orders that others wouldn’t,” Lepper said.

The moves are a burden on the judge advocate general corps, which is already overworked.

Eric Carpenter, a retired Army lawyer who is now an associate professor of law at Florida International University, said “there’s no fat to cut” in the JAG corps. He added that given how understaffed many JAG offices are, it’s unlikely that special assistant U.S. attorneys who’ve been working on cases tied to military bases would be reassigned to the new roles.

Carpenter also said those who get sent to U.S. cities for those roles are likely to face a steep learning curve.

“I think most of the people getting [mobilized] or tasked for this aren't going to have any federal prosecution experience,” Carpenter said. “So they're going to be just jumping in and trying to figure it out as they go.”

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I ‘did not expect to be told to build a battleship,’ Navy’s surface warfare director says

Meghann Myers — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:57:03 -0500

The Navy was not planning to unveil a new class of ship last year, much less two, but November and December brought the cancellation of a frigate program, the launch of another, and the comeback—at least in name—of a type the service had largely deactivated by 1947.

The nascent Trump-class “battleship” will basically be a next-generation guided-missile destroyer “on steroids,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, said Wednesday during the Surface Navy Association symposium outside Washington, D.C.

It caught the service by surprise.

“I did not expect to be told to build a battleship when I got this job,” Rear Adm. Derek Trinque, the Navy staff’s surface warfare director since June, said Tuesday.

But as the service was trying to figure out how to best equip the DDG(X), they were running out of space on the ship, having to make the choice between outfitting it with the new Conventional Prompt Strike missile and a tried-and-true gun system.

“And so when national leaders announced that they were interested in building a battleship, this was a great opportunity for us,” Trinque said. “So the battleship will have Conventional Prompt Strike. It will have an incredible amount of offensive strike capability. It will have power for directed energy and future rail guns. It will give us capacity that we don't have in any surface ship right now.”

It will also be the centerpiece of what the Trump administration has dubbed the Golden Fleet, which will include today’s submarines, destroyers, and aircraft carriers and newcomers such as the Marine Corps’ long-awaited medium landing ship.

“I love the Arleigh Burke class. We're gonna keep building them, but we just don't have any more payload volume on it,” Caudle said. “So the battleship took the DDG(X) concept and it's put that on steroids, under the assumption that the counter-targeting efforts of the Navy will protect it and make it survivable.”

That’s an assumption many experts outside the Navy deem implausible in an era of shipkilling ballistic missiles and ever-cheaper, more capable anti-ship drones.

The National Security Strategy, and the forthcoming National Defense Strategy, may have also opened up an opportunity for the Navy’s much-maligned littoral combat ship, which was originally envisioned to operate in shallow water along coastlines abroad.

With destroyers focusing on “high-end” missions, Trinque said, there’s room for the LCS to do the less involved work of countering narcotics trafficking, which has shot to the top of national security priorities in the past year.

“If it's defending the territorial integrity of the United States against illegal trafficking, counter-narcotics, if it's controlling sea lanes in a lower threat environment, then a small surface combatant should be in your toolkit,” Trinque said.

The Navy has 27 LCSs, having decided in 2023 to stop buying them and start retiring its earliest hulls. But the ones they have are still being put to work.

“We have grown in our ability, in our dedication to those classes of ships, those two variants,” Trinque said. “We're investing in lethality and survivability and sustainment in those ships.”

The plan is to back them up with the next-generation frigates, announced in December, with plans to have the first ship in the water by 2028.

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US spy agencies contributed to operation that captured Maduro

David DiMolfetta — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:45:00 -0500

U.S. intelligence agencies supported an overnight operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, the nation's capital, which also included strikes against several military sites throughout the city.

Multiple U.S. spy offices stood up crisis action teams that provided intelligence to Special Operations Command and Southern Command throughout the operations, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the matter.

The National Security Agency, which monitors foreign signals and communications, also oversaw geolocation support to gather intelligence used to aid in the operation, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to communicate sensitive details.

NSA also used its capabilities to conduct indicators and warning support, which monitors communications and signals that help specify if a foreign adversary orders troop movements or intends to activate radar systems, the official added.

Joint chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine said in a press conference that the CIA, NSA, and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency were involved in the mission. The NGA uses imagery and mapping data to support military activities.

In the months leading up to the operation, U.S. intelligence agencies built a granular portrait of Maduro’s daily life, tracking how he moved, where he lived and traveled, what he ate and wore, and even details about his pets, Caine said.

Multiple reports indicated the CIA aided the Army’s elite Delta Force in tracking and locating Maduro, though Defense One could not independently confirm this by publishing time. For months, the CIA has been conducting covert operations in Caracas, using assets that are among the U.S. intelligence community’s most protected secrets.

Lights in Caracas “were largely turned off due to an expertise that we have,” President Trump said at the Saturday press conference. He did not elaborate on the capabilities and methods that allowed the U.S. to shutter lights in Venezuela’s capital city.

U.S. Cyber Command, which is authorized to carry out offensive cyber operations, participated in the operation, Caine said, though he did not elaborate on what actions the digital combatant command took.

Maduro and his wife are now bound for New York, where he is expected to face narco-terrorism charges. President Donald Trump said the U.S. will run Venezuela for now, and will not rule out having additional U.S. servicemembers on the ground.

The operation drew opposing reactions from the top Republican and Democrat leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“This is a U.S.-indicted drug trafficker. Such people will never have safe haven no matter where they are or what they call themselves,” said committee Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark. in a Saturday appearance on Fox & Friends. “It’s just a reminder to adversaries around the world of what our military is capable of when we have a commander-in-chief with the strength and resolution to deploy that military when necessary to defend vital US national interests,” he later added.

In a statement, Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., said Maduro is a corrupt authoritarian leader, but the overnight action could give a runway to foreign adversaries who want to take similar actions against their neighbors.

“If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership?” Warner said. “What stops Vladimir Putin from asserting similar justification to abduct Ukraine’s president? Once this line is crossed, the rules that restrain global chaos begin to collapse, and authoritarian regimes will be the first to exploit it.”

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Pentagon preps to enforce ban on companies with ‘indirect’ ties to China

Lauren C. Williams — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:32:28 -0500

The Pentagon wants to eliminate Chinese military companies from the defense industry’s supply chains, so it’s preparing to alert contractors next year of any possible ties before a Congress-mandated ban takes effect, a defense policy official said Wednesday.

The Defense Department keeps a public list of banned “Chinese-military companies,” which it updates periodically. But avoiding companies with indirect ties can be more challenging than avoiding companies on that list, particularly since some prime contractors don’t know the affiliations of their subcontractors.

“There's a lot of firms that are doing business, either knowingly or unknowingly, with firms that are connected to [banned] firms,” Michael Cadenazzi, the Pentagon’s head of industrial base policy, said during an Atlantic Council event on Wednesday. “We need to illuminate those challenges and those connections. We need to connect with the programs and the firms that are likely affected by this. And we need to [make] a direct effort to go ahead and remove them.”

Congress prohibited the government from doing business with certain China-based companies directly, as part of section 1260H of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, and indirectly, as part of section 805 of the 2024 NDAA. Enforcement for the latter is expected to take full effect by June 30, 2027, according to the bill text.

“People need to get ahead of it, because if you're starting to ask for a waiver starting in [2027], I think that's going to be a painful process for everyone,” Cadenazzi said.

That banned list is the basis for enforcement, and starting next year it will be consequential, according to a formal defense official.

“Being on the 1260H list is a flag and it may make a contracting officer look twice as to whether this is a relationship in which they want to engage,” the former official said.

Starting in June 2026, the Pentagon will be banned from directly entering into any new or renewed contracts with companies on that list. And in June 2027, the Defense Department won’t be able to contract—even indirectly— with end-products or services developed by entities on the 1260H banned list.

That indirect ban has a nuance in that it doesn't apply to components, but it’s not clear yet how the Pentagon will address that.

“In DOD procurement, there's a difference between a component and an end item that's ready to be used immediately,” the official said. “The components of that car—the spark plugs and the gas cap and the engine, perhaps. Those components are not affected by this indirect procurement ban. So, it'll be very interesting to see how DOD interprets that to give this indirect ban teeth in a way that matters, while at the same time not requiring DOD to go under the hood of the car…which is not usually feasible.”

The plan dovetails with the Pentagon’s inaugural defense industrial strategy and implementation plan published in 2024, which called for assessing supply chain vulnerabilities and onshoring critical production capacity over the next several years.

“Diversifying supply chains through domestic investment will bolster resilience in the most critical supply chains, which currently rely partially on sources outside of the United States,” the implementation plan states. “Securely producing the defense products, services, and technologies needed now and in the future at sufficient speed, scale, and cost requires a host of measures to mitigate or eliminate critical supply chain vulnerabilities, including single or sole sourcing and supply chains linked to adversarial actions. The most urgent of these measures address supply chain visibility, on-shoring and ‘friend-shoring,’ sole sourcing, cyber security, and bulwarks against sourcing materials and capital from adversaries.”

Next year, the Pentagon plans to help companies track their subcontractors’ affiliations using “available supply chain illumination data” to identify risks, notify partners, and then find “a mechanism by which we can track it over time,” Cadenazzi said.

The move will likely push companies to look for alternative suppliers, which could, in turn, create domestic supply chains and potentially rely on those of allies and partners.

“We think it's going to be a great opportunity [for] us to shift investment into domestic firms and increase the amount of demand,” Cadenazzi said. “And that's a key part of the acquisition transformation strategy itself…increasing the demand signal for firms. So, anything we can do to increase demand is a great thing. We think this will be a key enabler of that.”

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Pentagon will cough up summaries of 3 years of safety investigations, per NDAA

Thomas Novelly — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:01:39 -0500

The Pentagon will have to provide summaries of nearly three years’ worth of internal safety investigations under the annual defense policy bill, a provision inserted to force transparency amid a rise in military aviation mishaps.

The provision, contained in a committee report attached to the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, would give the Pentagon’s Joint Safety Council and the military services an April 1 deadline to give the Senate Armed Services Committee “executive summaries for Safety Investigation Boards conducted from January 1, 2022, to July 1, 2025” and “summaries of any corrective actions implemented in response to the Board’s findings.”

That timeframe would encompass high-profile incidents such as the deadly Jan. 29 collision of an Army UH-60 Black Hawk and a commercial airliner outside Washington, D.C., and several V-22 Osprey crashes that killed a total of 20 service members.

The provision was added by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

“The Pentagon owes transparency to the families of service members killed in these crashes,” Warren told Defense One in a statement. “I'll keep fighting for accountability and to make sure the V-22's safety defects are addressed so no more military families lose their loved ones in preventable accidents.”

The NDAA has passed the House and Senate and is expected to be signed by President Donald Trump. Warren’s win in securing the provision comes after her office raised concerns about the rising rate of military aviation mishaps. Pentagon data reviewed by Defense One shows that deadly and costly “Class A” military aircraft mishaps rose 55 percent from fiscal 2020 to 2024.

“The committee is very concerned that the Army, Air Force, and Navy continue to report near record rates of serious Class A flight mishaps,” the NDAA report language reads.

After aviation mishaps, the Pentagon often creates two reports: a public-facing Accident Investigation Board report and an internal Safety Investigation Board report. The AIB’s purpose is to record “factual information for claims, litigation, administrative or potential disciplinary actions,” the Air Force has explained, while an SIB, however, is “used solely for mishap prevention and is restricted from release outside.”

Details in an SIB include testimony and more detailed information as to what may have led to a mishap. For example, following the crash of an Air Force CV-22 Osprey off the coast of Japan in 2023, an accident investigation report pointed to the fracturing of a high planetary pinion gear. The SIB said that the part failure was "similar to those seen on seven previous failures in low-speed planetary pinion gears” going back to 2013. The Pentagon had reportedly been warned of the potential issue in 2014.

Those longstanding and mechanical issues with the V-22 have been consistently unaddressed by the Pentagon’s Joint Program Office, reports from the Government Accountability Office and Naval Air Systems Command revealed last week. Some recommended mechanical fixes won’t be in place until the 2030s, NAVAIR said.

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Trump rebrands troop housing subsidy as ‘warrior dividend’ bonus checks

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 09:04:08 -0500

President Donald Trump’s $1,776 checks for 1.45 million troops announced Wednesday come from Congressionally-allocated reconciliation funds intended to subsidize housing allowances for service members, a senior administration official confirmed.

During a primetime TV address, Trump said he was “proud to announce” that “1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call ‘warrior dividend’ before Christmas” adding that to honor the nation’s founding “we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that. And the checks are already on the way.”

The senior administration official told Defense One in an emailed statement late Wednesday evening that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to “disburse $2.6 billion as a one-time basic allowance for housing supplement” to all eligible service members ranks 0-6 and below.

“Congress appropriated $2.9 billion to the Department of War to supplement the Basic Allowance for Housing entitlement within The One Big Beautiful Bill,” the senior official said. “Approximately 1.28 million active component military members and 174,000 Reserve component military members will receive this supplement.”

Top Congressional leaders have repeatedly pushed Pentagon officials during confirmation hearings to commit to lawmaker guidance for the more than $150 billion in defense priorities identified in the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” reconciliation legislation. The $2.9 billion meant to subsidize the basic allowance for housing, the monthly payment to cover off-base expenses such as rent, mortgage, and utilities known as BAH, comes as some service members have struggled to make the most of the benefit. A Jan. 27 Rand report examining the adequacy of BAH for Army personnel said the Defense Department should better assess methodology amid rapid changes to the housing market.

“BAH is generally adequate for Army personnel, though not necessarily when the housing market is changing rapidly and dramatically, as it has in recent years,” the report read. “Furthermore, while our analysis of housing choices and expenditures among military

personnel and of their locational amenities points to an overall positive picture with respect to BAH, a substantial, though minority, share of members report dissatisfaction with BAH.”

Active-duty, and reserve troops on active-duty orders 31 days or more in duration as of Nov. 30, 2025, are eligible for the benefit if they’re an 0-6 or below, the senior administration official said.

“President Trump’s administration recognizes the hard work of our service members with this one-time Warrior Dividend, which places funds directly in the hands of our military members and their families, helping to improve their housing and quality of life,” the senior administration official said.

Last week, the Defense Department announced the 2026 BAH rates, which are set to increase by an average of 4.2 percent as of Jan. 1, 2026.

During hearings, Senate Armed Services Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., has said “much of the funding of the defense reconciliation bill is unspecific and will technically be at the discretion of [the Defense Department].” He has repeatedly asked nominees if they “commit to follow the Congress' spending recommendations and defense reconciliation, unequivocally.”

Others, like SASC Ranking Member Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., have reportedly expressed skepticism that the Pentagon will follow intended plans for the funds.

“My sense is they already have an idea of what they want to do, and they’ll try to do it,” Reed said. “Some of it will be consistent with what we’re doing, but some things, I think inevitably, will be their own initiatives, their own sense of what’s important, even if we don’t agree or don’t support it.”

Spokespeople for the Senate Armed Services Committee did not immediately return a request for comment.

Some lawmakers have been scrutinizing the Trump administration’s reallocation of military funding. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., issued a report last week highlighting $2 billion diverted away from the Defense Department and Homeland Security Department for border enforcement—including redirecting funds for barracks, maintenance hangers, and elementary schools.

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There’s a divide within the Space Force. Congress is forcing the service to address it

Thomas Novelly — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 10:52:25 -0500

A year ago, the leaders of the House Armed Services Committee put the Space Force on notice. The service, they said, was putting too much focus on its operators and not enough on its acquisitions corps—an imbalance that might ultimately harm the U.S. military's ability to preserve its edge in space.

“We fear a divide that elevates operators at the detriment to other core functions of the Space Force will have negative impacts, potentially not immediately, but as we look to 2030 and beyond,” Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers and ranking member Rep. Adam Smith wrote in a December 2024 letter to the service. Later that day, Rogers told a think-tank audience that “for the Space Force, and the joint force to succeed, we must have guardians that are just as comfortable operating in space as they are breaking down a requirements document.”

Since then, the divide has only gotten worse, according to lawmakers, guardians, and others in the defense, policy, and Congressional spheres. One military policy expert described the split between operators and acquisition officers as “an ongoing fight for the core culture of the Space Force.”

This week, the House passed the compromise 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which contains a section requiring the Space Force to train and assign an equal number of operations and acquisition officers.

“Things have not improved,” a source familiar with the committee process told Defense One. “A year later, this being in the NDAA indicates that there's still an issue.”

A service divided

It’s an issue that long predates the Space Force itself, which will celebrate its sixth birthday later this month.

In 2001, the “Rumsfeld Report” suggested that merging at least some of the military’s far-flung space-related organizations would enable leaders to better set priorities and seize opportunities. The acquisitions-focused Space and Missile Systems Center was consequently removed from Air Force Materiel Command and placed under Air Force Space Command. That made AFSC the only one of the service’s nine major commands to house both operators and acquirers.

“You had a tension built into Air Force Space Command, right from the start, which was ‘what voice really matters?’,” said Paula Thornhill, a retired Air Force brigadier general-turned-professor at Johns Hopkins University. “This tension has always been there.”

The tension was perceived as a danger to the military’s ability to maintain its edge in space.

“There was this historical chip on the shoulder and the belief that ‘operators were supposed to be the kings and acquirers are supposed to be the servants’ and that is, unfortunately, not how space works,” one Space Force insider said.

In 2019, Air Force Space Command became the Space Force, in large part to unite space-related acquisition and operations workforces under a service branch—and to merge the tribes.

“When we were first standing up Space Force, a primary goal was to establish a culture without the tribalism often seen in the other services, while still developing the demanding technical skill sets needed to be an effective warfighting force,” said John Shaw, a retired Space Force lieutenant general and former deputy head of Space Command.

Initially, leaders had visions of “badgeless” officers who could handle both acquisitions and operations, but this never came to fruition, defense experts and service insiders said.

Part of the problem was that the troops who made up the Space Force in its earliest months and years came not just from the Air Force but from space-related units all over the military. Another part was that several space-related functions remained in the Air Force proper or in the newly reconstituted U.S. Space Command, a combatant command. Both hindered the development of a single culture within the new service branch.

“The establishment of the USSF, U.S. Space Command, and other changes in how DoD organizes for space…will continue to affect the development and fielding of space capabilities and forces, the execution of operations, and how services and combatant commands unite service components into a joint force,” RAND researchers wrote in 2024. "These major organizational changes are still unfolding and will have implications for the [Department of the Air Force]. DAF senior leaders will have to navigate and understand these changes to inform its approach to long-term air-space integration.”

In September 2024, the Space Force opened a new Officer Training Course, a 12-month program for officers joining the service. Officials hailed it as a unifying experience where “officers learn to be a guardian first and specialist second.”

But the course has an operational bent, with acquisition largely left for subsequent specialist training, insiders said. And the first assignment for OTC graduates is in operations; officers who want ultimately to pursue careers in acquisition must wait.

"I know what I'd do if the [Department of the Air Force] paid for my shiny new engineering degree, then sent me to a year of non engineering training then a tour of non engineering work. I'd leave as soon as it's over," read one post on a Space Force subreddit.

One defense expert said the tilt was widely perceived to reflect the priorities of the service’s top officer: Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman, a career operator who has served as an ICBM launch officer and a National Reconnaissance Office satellite controller.

In his December 2024 speech at CSIS, Rogers praised Saltzman and his predecessor, Gen. John Raymond—another longtime operator. But the HASC chairman pointedly warned that acquirers need a voice in leadership as well.

“The Space Force has to be led by more than just operators,” Rogers said. “They must recognize the contributions of all career services if it is to be successful. A deep understanding and connection with technology is at the core of the Space Force. Operators, acquisition, intel, and cyber professionals must all be on equal footing. The future of the Space Force will depend on its ability to both nurture these unique specialties and tribes, while also creating a unified fighting force.”

2025

Saltzman has vigorously answered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s calls to “restore a warfighting ethos” across the military. In public remarks, policy documents, and memos to the force dubbed “C-Notes,” the CSO has urged guardians to embrace an operational focus and warfighting identity. In June, he left his Space Operations Badge off for his official military portrait, a deliberate move intended to convey the idea that all Space Force troops are operators.

“Contesting a physical domain is a complex endeavor—it takes a purpose-built service to do so effectively,” Saltzman wrote last month. “It also requires service members who have a deep understanding of military operations specific to their domain.”

Thornhill, the Johns Hopkins professor, said those shifts are unsurprising, given Hegseth’s purges of top officers.

“If that's what the Secretary's pushing, and you want to keep your job in an environment where you've seen a dozen flag officers fired, you better be talking about lethality and war fighting,” she said.

In May, the acquisition corps lost a key voice atop the Space Force, seemingly bearing out Rogers’ warning. Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein, an acquisition specialist, was transferred to a new Pentagon job: implementing the sprawling vision of the Golden Dome missile defense system.

“There has been a growing animosity between the operators and the acquirers, and that friction kind of reached its apex between Saltzman and Guetlein,” one defense expert said.

Guetlein’s replacement, Gen. Shawn Bratton, has an operations background: he has served as Space Command’s deputy director for operations and the first head of Space Training and Readiness Command.

“The problem is now you have two folks who were both heritage operators,” a Space Force insider said. “So, now you don't have anybody who represents the acquisition side of the service in the front office.”

Guetlein departed just as the Space Force’s acquisition corps was beginning to reel from Hegseth’s hasty push to shed tens of thousands of Defense Department civilians in the name of efficiency. By May, the service had lost 14 percent of its civilian employees, many of whom worked closely with the uniformed acquisition specialists. In September, Saltzman estimated that Space Systems Command alone was likely to lose 10 percent of its workforce.

Industry has taken notice of the strain.

“You can tell that they’re stressed,” Kay Sears, a Boeing Space vice president, said at a think-tank event last month. “You can tell that they’re overworked.”

But the Space Force insider said Saltzman has some reason to be frustrated with his service’s acquisition performance.

“Certainly the acquirers in the Space Force haven't done a great job of doing well by him either,” the insider said. “They can't deliver anything on time, which is a whole different problem.”

The Space Force’s next-generation Overhead Persistent Infrared missile warning satellite, first announced in 2018, has slipped its initial 2023 launch date estimate to March 2026. The decades-long and multi-billion dollar Next Generation Operational Control System program for GPS has been highly scrutinized as a “poster child for broken space acquisition programs.” The Space Development Agency’s missile warning and tracking satellites have experienced repeated delays.

Efforts to fix the divide

The Space Force has made several changes to increase cooperation and make peace between the acquisitions and operations camps.

In August, it created Systems Delta, a new command structure meant to increase communications between program offices and operations-focused mission deltas.

In September, Saltzman announced that graduates of the Officer Training Course who choose a career in acquisition can attend a 10-week “first of its kind” Acquisition Initial Qualification Training course.

The CSO also took pains to tout his acquisition corps.

“The Space Force, by percentage, has by far the largest acquisitions workforce of any service. Uniformed guardians in acquisitions roles make up over 49% of our officer corps,” he said in his speech at the Air & Space Force Association conference. “Space acquisitions is one of the most intricate professions on – or off – the planet, and it can take years to master. At the pace the Joint Force is demanding our capabilities, we will need an expert workforce to deliver.”

Last month, nine operations officers from intelligence, cyber, and space backgrounds graduated from the first AIQT course, a service spokesperson said. Those officers will be assigned to program and engineering technical management roles.

And more acquisition coursework is being added to the one-year OTC course, which currently spends two weeks on the topic, Maj. Kaitlin D. Holmes, an Air Force spokesperson, confirmed to Defense One.

“The Space Force continues to iterate the OTC curriculum to increase the acquisitions segment and better integrate all segments, as opposed to teaching all segments separately in silos,” Holmes wrote.

What comes next

On Thursday, the House passed the NDAA with the section requiring the Space Force to train and assign an equal number of operations and acquisition officers. The bill now awaits passage by the Senate and signature by President Trump.

Once that happens, the Air Force secretary will have two months to submit a report giving the number and percentage of the service’s officers in both career fields and detailing “any identified shortfalls or imbalances in acquisition manning relative to operational manning in the Space Force; and actions taken or planned to achieve and sustain comparable manning levels for billets in acquisition and operations,” the NDAA reads. New versions of the report will be due each Oct. 31 through 2030.

The bill also requires quarterly briefings by the secretary to the HASC and its Senate counterpart on these topics and on “the development of the curriculum” to balance acquisition and operations focus.

Shaw, the former deputy head of Space Command, applauded the changes to OTC and called for more efforts to give equal attention to operations and acquisitions.

“The challenge will be developing effective career paths for officers and enlisted that continue to grow needed expertise in space operations, intelligence, cyber, and acquisition, while avoiding tribalism,” he said.

All this will not be quick or easy, but it must remain top of mind for service leaders, the Space Force insider said.

“Until we fix this, we are going to continue to fall behind,” the insider said. “This is not a problem we're going to fix easily. This is something we have to focus on over the years in order to go ahead and correct.”

Air Force and Space Force spokespeople did not respond when asked about the NDAA language or the implications of a divide between the service’s operators and acquirers.

A Space Force officer told Defense One that the space force has talented service members, and hopes that prioritizing a like-minded mission will create unity, no matter what background or experience a guardian comes from.

“We can do both [missions] even better than we are today, but we do both well, and that cultural aspect of building space-minded guardians who think about these things from the beginning of their career is going to pay long-term dividends,” the officer said. “We need to grow people that think about the domain differently, and we can do that both in acquisitions, engineering and operations under the Space Force.”

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Pentagon would have to explain future JAG firings under NDAA provision

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:07:00 -0500

Nearly a year after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth purged the top judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, lawmakers are poised to require an explanation if it happens again.

A provision in the compromise version of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act would require the defense secretary to provide Congress with notice and a reason for the removal soon after a top JAG’s dismissal.

“If the Judge Advocate General is removed from office before the end of the term … the Secretary of Defense shall, not later than five days after the removal takes effect, submit to the Committees on Armed Services of the Senate and the House of Representatives notice that the Judge Advocate General is being removed and a statement of the reason for the removal,” the provision reads.

The provision was originally inserted in the Senate version of the NDAA, which passed in October. It appears in the 3,000-plus-page version agreed by House and Senate negotiators, which was released late Sunday evening and could see a House vote within days.

Three days after Hegseth fired the services’ JAGs in February, he said that the lawyers were “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”

The top JAGs—sometimes called TJAGs—are the principal legal advisers to leaders of their service branch.

Fears are growing within the national-security legal community that military legal guidance is being ignored, especially as seemingly unjustified airstrikes on alleged drug boats continue.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, inserted the language into the Senate’s version of the NDAA this summer.

“Secretary Hegseth’s attack on independent legal advisors doesn’t make anyone safer. I’m fighting to rein in this abuse of power and ensure transparency from this administration,” Warren said in a July news release.

A Warren spokesperson had no further comment on Sunday evening.

One former JAG said the language was a notable development, but was skeptical about how transparent the Pentagon would be about such removals. Military branches have often offered no more than some variation of the phrase “loss of trust and confidence” in explaining the dismissal of officers from top leadership roles.

“I hope that this helps. My fear is that the Department of Defense will cite generic rationale for removing the individual,” the former JAG said. “My other hope is that we never see a future TJAG removed in a way that this current administration has done it.”

The Air Force’s top legal role has remained vacant since Hegseth fired Lt. Gen. Charles Plummer on Feb. 21. Maj. Gen. Rebecca Vernon, who had served as the service’s deputy JAG, became acting TJAG earlier this year but stepped away from the job in October and is set to retire by Jan. 1, Defense One first reported. An Air Force spokesperson said there’s an acting TJAG but the deputy JAG position remains vacant.

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Hegseth hints at higher defense budgets as OMB says another reconciliation bill is possible

Lauren C. Williams — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 14:39:00 -0500

SIMI VALLEY, California—Last summer’s $156 billion one-time boost for defense spending through the reconciliation bill is likely “only just the beginning,” the defense secretary said on Saturday.

“The President has said, and continues to say, he's committed to rebuilding the military, and that requires spending, and substantial spending,” Pete Hegseth said during his keynote address at the Reagan National Defense Forum Saturday. “Just this week, and I was with some of you, was there in the Oval [Office] having these very discussions about FY26 and FY27. And all I can say today is the President is committed to ensuring that our services, our great companies, our industries, have what is needed.”

That funding, he said, will be key to “supercharging” the defense industry—one of the Pentagon’s four “lines of effort,” along with homeland defense, pushing allies to increase defense spending, and deterring China without engaging in conflict.

“We received a historic boost in funding last year, and believe that is only just the beginning,” Hegseth said, alluding to the $156 billion boost from budget reconciliation on top of the DOD’s proposed budget for 2026. “We need a revived defense industrial base. We need those capabilities. We need them yesterday. And so, resource-wise, I think this room will be encouraged by what we'll see soon—but I don't want to get too ahead.”

U.S. defense spending has risen in recent years from $812.1 billion in fiscal year 2017 to $870.7 billion in fiscal year 2021 to $895.2 billion in 2025, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis. But defense hawks argue that inflation tempers any real growth in national security spending.

Hegseth added that budget and resource concerns are “what keeps me up,” along with military operations.

His comments come just days after the White House released its National Security Strategy, which put some emphasis on defense production.

“We want the world’s most robust industrial base. American national power depends on a strong industrial sector capable of meeting both peacetime and wartime production demands,” the document states. “That requires not only direct defense industrial production capacity but also defense-related production capacity.”

Some analysts had noted that the one-time reconciliation boost could lead the Pentagon to launch programs that would be unsustainable without further spending.

The White House is considering asking for a second reconciliation bill next year, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said Saturday at the event.

The reconciliation funding, much of which is marked for use during 2026, “allowed us to get all of these priorities—Golden Dome, shipbuilding, nuclear modernization—in a mandatory account that now has certainty. So, that's not subject to the highs and lows of the appropriations process,” Vought said. “Have we made a decision yet on another reconciliation bill? No, we have not. We will make sure that we continue to grow. There will not be a hole there. But I think it is a paradigm shift that we're excited about.”

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Hegseth broke rules, DODIG concludes, even though he said Yemen strike details were ‘safe to declassify’

Meghann Myers — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 16:03:55 -0500

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the inspector general investigators looking into his alleged use of Signal to share classified strike plans that he determined the details he shared either weren’t classified to begin with or were “safe to declassify,” according to a written statement included in a report released Thursday by the Defense Department’s independent oversight office.

Though Hegseth had the authority to make that decision, the IG found he was still in violation of department policy for transmitting information that could have put service members in danger—in this case, the Navy pilots who were flying the March 15 mission to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen—by taking sensitive details about time, place and manner and sharing them on an unapproved messaging platform via his personal cell phone.

“The Secretary sent nonpublic DOD information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those strikes,” the report found. “Using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send nonpublic DOD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DOD personnel and mission objectives.”

The report finds several issues with Hegseth’s communications, namely that while declassified, the strike plans were still very much sensitive information, and that he used an unapproved app on his personal cell phone to communicate them, then did not take care to retain what is clearly official correspondence.

“The United States military has successfully managed operations for two and a half centuries without the use of an instant messaging application, and why the secretary felt the need to use that application—while sitting in the SCIF and with access at his fingertips to the two more appropriate communication tools—he chose to use this unapproved tool is mysterious to me, right?” Greg Williams, the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight, told Defense One.

The move calls Hegseth’s judgment into question, as the declassification of information doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s fit to be broadcast in a group chat whose members, it would appear, were not all accounted for as intended recipients.

“It's like buying something inappropriate on your expense account and claiming that because the expense account was approved, or didn't violate any written rules, that the expense was necessarily prudent,” Williams said.

Hegseth’s spokesman on Tuesday posted on X that the report is a “TOTAL exoneration.”

That’s not what the report says.

“Because the Secretary indicated that he used the Signal application on his personal cell phone to send nonpublic DOD information, we concluded that the Secretary’s actions did not comply with DOD Instruction 8170.01, which prohibits using a personal device for official business and using a nonapproved commercially available messaging application to send nonpublic DOD information,” the report reads.

Additionally, DOD officials are required to keep all official correspondence. The IG had to use the Atlantic’s transcript of the Signal chat because the messages in Hegseth’s phone had auto-deleted.

The IG recommends that U.S. Central Command, which sent the classified email from which Hegseth pulled the details, review its classification procedures to ensure it prints classification warnings after each paragraph of a document, instead of just at the top of it (as was the case with the March 15 plans).

A separate IG report recommends further training on the use of personal devices, as well as a department-wide review of their use to conduct official business.

Hegseth’s written statement to the IG, given in lieu of the requested sit-down interview, provides some of the first insight into the decision-making that went into sharing strike plans on the Signal group chat, which included national-security officials, but also fatefully, the editor of The Atlantic.

In public statements, both Hegseth and his spokespeople have insisted that he shared no classified information, but have never included the explanation that Hegseth had thoughtfully declassified the information before he shared it. There is no official process for a defense secretary to declassify information, so Hegseth deeming it so is as legitimate as anything else.

Hegseth vs. IGs

Inspector general reports are not in the business of handing down punishments, so it will be entirely up to President Trump whether Hegseth faces any repercussions.

As of press time, the secretary had not made any public statements in response to the report’s public release. Spokespeople for the secretary did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But Hegseth has already taken steps to constrain his department’s IGs, though he has stopped short of adding to the Trump administration’s unprecedented firings of IG at nearly two dozen other agencies. During his Quantico speech to flag officers in September, he said the independent investigators had somehow been “weaponized.”

“I call it the ‘No more walking on eggshells policy,’ ” Hegseth told the auditorium full of senior leaders. “We are liberating commanders and NCOs. We are liberating you. We are overhauling an inspector general process, the IG that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver's seat.”

His guidance to the service secretaries included tightening the threshold for opening IG investigations, requiring frequent written updates, and creating a system for tracking “serial complainants”—a problematic step because IG hotlines are anonymous.

“It was not clear to me then, and it is still not clear to me now, whether Hegseth intended for that to apply to the military branch IGs, the DOD IG, or both,” Faith Williams, who directs the Effective and Accountable Government Program at the Project on Government Oversight, told Defense One.

So far, Hegseth has only issued orders to the military departments to overhaul their local IG processes. In the case of his own department IG investigation, it was requested by the heads of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“But I think regardless of who he ultimately intends those changes to impact, what was really clear reading through that memo was this kind of dripping disdain for whistleblowers and for the work that an inspector general office does,” Williams said. “And I think we can all agree that, let's work together to make improvements to IG processes and procedures and make sure we have the best people serving in those roles. I am interested in that, too. I'm not saying IGs are above reproach, but that memo just really dripped with hostility toward whistleblowers, and it does beg the question, ‘why?’”

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NSA has met 2,000-person workforce reduction goal, people familiar say

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:00:00 -0500

The National Security Agency recently achieved its goals to shed around 2,000 people from its workforce this year, according to three people familiar with the spy agency’s posture. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the milestone has not been made public.

The reductions include a mix of civilian employees who were terminated, voluntarily left or took deferred resignation offers, where they agree to leave government service early while still being paid for a set time period.

The figure marks a historic staffing reduction for the spy agency, one of the largest in the U.S. intelligence enterprise, and reflects monthslong pressures from the second Trump administration to downsize the federal government and clean out alleged bloat and politicization in its spy offices.

The Washington Post and The Record, the news unit of cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, first reported the NSA’s and the broader intelligence community’s downsizing goals in May.

Employees at the nation’s various spy agencies were initially extended deferred resignation offers in February.

The exact number of people remaining at NSA this year is not clear. The signals intelligence giant’s full workforce numbers are classified from public view so foreign adversaries can’t use the information to assess how the U.S. devotes resources to spying activities.

A 2024 document hosted by the State of Maryland, where the NSA is headquartered, says the agency has around 39,000 civilian and military employees across the enterprise.

An NSA spokesperson declined to comment.

The NSA specializes in hacking and foreign eavesdropping and is deemed a “combat support agency” that faces oversight from both the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Defense Department. Other combat support arms include the Defense Intelligence Agency — which focuses on military intelligence — and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which captures and analyzes imagery from space.

The NSA’s positioning potentially subjects the agency to further reductions as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seeks to reduce DOD’s budget by some 8% per year over the next five years.

The agency has also been reorganizing some of its mission priorities, two of the people said, though one of them stressed this is not uncommon when new presidential administrations enter.

That said, workforce concerns have prevailed. Throughout this year, Lt. Gen. William Hartman, NSA’s acting director who also leads U.S. Cyber Command in a dual-hatted role, has held multiple all-hands calls with the agency’s workforce, where limited Q&A was allowed, said the second person.

Hartman has led NSA and Cyber Command in an acting capacity since April after the firing of Gen. Timothy Haugh, which was fueled by far-right activist Laura Loomer. The NSA’s top lawyer, April Falcon Doss, was also let go after Loomer advised that she leave the agency. Those events unfolded as leading officials from the agency and the combatant command have voluntarily departed this year.

Army Lt. Gen. Joshua Rudd, the deputy commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, has surfaced as the White House’s leading choice to head the agency and digital military command, two other people familiar with the matter said. The Record first reported Rudd’s emergence as top contender for the position.

The NSA has been facing waves of internal strain and lower morale across its workforce amid a mix of leadership gaps, program cuts and recent extensions of deferred resignation offers, Nextgov/FCW reported last month.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct the rate of planned DOD budget cuts and add details about NSA staffing numbers.

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