The D Brief: SecDef meets Ukrainian counterpart; West Bank fighting; GPS warnings; Army criticizes Trump campaigners; And a bit more.

Ukrainian military chief Rustem Umerov is visiting the Pentagon today for talks with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Umerov is expected to update Austin on Ukrainian developments inside Kursk, Russia, and they may do a little planning ahead of next week’s meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at Ramstein air base in Germany, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said Thursday. 

SecDef Austin spoke with his Polish and Romanian counterparts on Thursday. His discussions with Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz spanned Warsaw’s defense modernization, the war in Ukraine, and “the recent agreement between Poland and private industry to co-produce Patriot missile launchers,” the Pentagon said in a statement afterward. 

Talks with Romania’s Angel Tîlvăr spanned similar topics—e.g., “the U.S.-Romania bilateral defense relationship, our partnership within NATO, and Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine,” the Pentagon said separately.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, Jr., also met with his Dutch counterpart Gen. Onno Eichelsheim Thursday at the Pentagon. The two talked about the war in Ukraine, “shared interests in South America, and the security situation in the Middle East,” according to Brown’s staff.

Developing: The U.S. wants to sell Patriot launch system components to the Dutch for about $224 million. The Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency has details, here. 

Related reading: “Russia detains former deputy defence minister for suspected fraud as corruption probe deepens,” Reuters reported Thursday.

---

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2021, and capping two decades of an ultimately lost war, Army Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue boarded a C-17 cargo plane and became the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan.

As recently as last month, suspected Russian government hackers were discovered using iPhone and Android exploits designed by commercial surveillance vendors (read: spyware companies) Intellexa and NSO Group. Google announced the findings Thursday after noticing snippets of the related code on Mongolian government websites. The exploits appear to have been active between November 2023 and July 2024. 

If NSO Group sounds familiar, its Pegasus software was reportedly used to spy on the widow of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whom Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is believed to have ordered killed and his body cut into pieces six years ago. The Saudis also used Pegasus against Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul; however, according to Reuters, that operation “backfired, allowing researchers to uncover thousands of other victims and triggering a cascade of legal and government action.”

“We assess with moderate confidence the campaigns are linked to the Russian government-backed actor APT29,” Google’s Threat Analysis Group wrote in a blog post explaining their findings on Thursday. However, NSO Group’s exploit appears to have been altered slightly by the Russians, Google says. “For example, the NSO exploit was supporting Chrome versions ranging from 107 to 124, and the exploit from the [newly-unveiled hack] was only targeting versions 121, 122 and 123 specifically.”

“We do not know how the attackers acquired these exploits,” Google said. Their advice? “We urge users and organizations to apply patches quickly and keep software fully up-to-date for their protection.” More, here. 

ICYMI: Russian hackers recently launched phishing attacks against former U.S. officials and academics at think tanks, media organizations, and prominent Russian opposition figures-in-exile, according to a report published this month by investigators at Citizen Lab. In one instance, “former US Ambassador to Ukraine, Steven Pifer was targeted with a highly-credible approach impersonating someone known to him: a fellow former US Ambassador,” the authors write. 

Also: “We suspect that the total pool of targets is likely much larger than the civil society groups whose cases we have analyzed,” Citizen Lab said, and explained, “We have observed US government personnel impersonated as part of this campaign,” suggesting “the US government remains a target.”

Common method of attack: The target will receive an email asking to review a PDF that wasn’t yet sent. A follow-up email will send the PDF, which when opened, “displays what appears to be blurred text along with a link to ‘decrypt’ or access the file,” according to the researchers. “In other cases, the blurred PDF includes text saying that a preview is not available, again soliciting a click.” Read on for what happens next. 

Update: The FBI is struggling to dismantle a pervasive Chinese government-backed hacking group that’s been poking around America’s critical infrastructure, Deputy Director Paul Abbate said Wednesday in Washington.

“I think it’s a brazen aggressiveness on the part of the Chinese government that continues to escalate, and unfortunately, with all the efforts we’ve undertaken here, collectively, including through the law enforcement side, it just has not had the deterrent effect that we would want to see,” Abbate said  during an event hosted by the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance. Nextgov/FCW has a bit more.

Developing (though not fast enough): America’s GPS system needs a rethink, the Pentagon’s former space policy chief said this week in Washington. “We are falling behind. We aren’t modernizing constellation signals fast enough,” John Plumb said Wednesday at a GovExec Space Project event. He’d served for two years as the first-ever assistant defense secretary for space policy until he stepped down in May. 

“One of the things the [Defense] department is worried about is: you have 24 GPS satellites, roughly, providing all these signals for the whole planet, both commercial [and] civil signals, but also for the military,” he said. “That’s 24 [anti-satellite] missiles that remove that completely,” said Plumb. The right path forward for the U.S., he said, is a kind of mosaic GPS architecture that involves space-based systems and other versions of timing systems on Earth. 

“It’s just a question of, why are we so slow at it?” he asked. Defense One’s Audrey Decker has more, here.

Israeli forces continue raids in the West Bank for a third straight day, AP reports. At least 19 people have been killed, including—Israeli officials say—a senior Hamas commander in Jenin. “Such airstrikes, while common over the months-long Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, have been rare in the West Bank in the time since.” Read on, here.

New: The Pentagon is withholding $5 million from Lockheed Martin for each new F-35 fighter jet that isn’t loaded with the latest upgrades, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reported separately on Thursday. 

Background: The company resumed deliveries of the Technology Refresh-3 variant of the F-35 in July, one year after problems with developing the new software package led the Pentagon to stop accepting the latest version of the jet. Since the upgrade still isn’t ready, the Pentagon restarted accepting jets with an interim version of the TR-3 software. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters in July that Lockheed is trying to get TR-3 done “but we are using financial incentives to strengthen that a little bit.”

Pentagon officials still don’t know exactly when the actual combat-ready TR-3 package will be done, Decker writes. Lockheed officials say next spring, but admit that there’s “always risk” to the schedule. More, here. 

SecDef Austin just approved U.S. military support to the Secret Service “at various locations across the United States during the 2024 election campaigns,” Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said Thursday. 

Singh described it as “protective support” that “will continue through the election on November 5th, 2024, with anticipated continued support to the president elect and vice president elect through the inauguration of January 20,” she said.

And lastly this week: The Army on Thursday condemned the Trump campaign for breaking the rules at Arlington National Cemetery, and for a related altercation by campaign staff. In an extraordinary statement on Thursday, Army officials rebuked—though not by name—campaign officials for GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump who disregarded the federal law banning political activity at Arlington National Cemetery, then shoved an Arlington employee who tried to enforce it. “We really did not want to get involved in this, but what happened is not acceptable,” a U.S. military official told Reuters.

The altercation took place on Monday, when Trump participated in a wreath-laying ceremony. His staffers, who were warned in advance not to take photos or video, did so anyway. The woman they shoved “filed an incident report with the military authorities over the altercation. But the official, who has not been identified, later declined to press charges. Military officials said she feared Mr. Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation,” the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Despite the warnings, “A video was posted to Mr. Trump’s TikTok account featuring footage from the Section 60 visit and the gravestones from behind, with narration criticizing the handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021,” the Times wrote. 

The twice-impeached former president is noted for his disregard for military tradition and disparagement of troops and their service, from disparaging John McCain’s service as a POW, to calling Marines who died at Belleau Wood “losers” and “suckers,” to saying that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is “much better” than the Medal of Honor because those who receive the nation’s highest military decoration are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.” More, here.

Related reading: “Trump campaign filming at Arlington Cemetery Dismayed Family of Green Beret,” the New York Times reported Thursday.

Have a safe holiday weekend, and we’ll be back again on Tuesday!

Defense One