The D Brief: Hatch Act violations; ICBM costs are a ‘collective failure’; Fiscal-year-end negotiations; Taiwan’s anti-invasion board game; And a bit more.

Navy secretary violated prohibitions on political activity, federal office finds. Carlos Del Toro broke the Hatch Act during an official trip to the UK in January, the federal Office of the Special Counsel announced Thursday. In an interview with the BBC and while responding to questions after a London speech, Del Toro advocated for the re-election of President Joe Biden and implicitly criticized Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. GovExec’s Sean Michael Newhouse reports, here.

Among the offending quotes: “The United States and the world need the mature leadership of President Biden,” Del Toro said in response to a question after giving a speech at the Royal United Services Institute. “We cannot afford to have a president who aligns himself with autocratic dictators and rulers, whose interpretation of democratic principles is suspicious [at] best.”

Del Toro himself reported his remarks to the special counsel several days later. Now the Pentagon is reviewing the matter, spokeswoman Sabrina Singh  said Thursday. The Associated Press has a bit more.

Budget watch: Anticipating that lawmakers will fail to pass the fiscal 2025 defense-spending bills before the current fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, the White House has sent Congress a request for extra funds to keep various programs moving, USNI News reports. 

The request includes nearly $2 billion for two attack submarines, which would bring the total amount to be spent on the under-construction pair to $11.3 billion. We don’t know how much each of the Virginia-class boats cost, but one of them is heavily modified to support special operations forces and seabed warfare. Sources told USNI News that the Navy’s initial 2024 budget request for the two subs was based on cost estimates that did not consider post-pandemic inflation. Read, here.

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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 1915, the world’s first tank prototype took its first-ever test drive in England. 

ICBM cost overrun a “collective failure” of USAF, Northrop, DOD, according to the Air Force’s chief buyer. Critics who say the Sentinel program busted its budget largely because the Biden administration allowed Northrop Grumman to purchase one of the two major U.S. producers of rocket motors are wrong, Andrew Hunter said earlier this week. Instead, the problem was that the competition was set up to focus too much on the missiles themselves, neglecting the complex infrastructure to launch them, the assistant Air Force secretary said, adding that this “failure” started with the Air Force but also belongs to Northrop and the Pentagon. D1’s Audrey Decker has more.

ICYMI: ICBM program offices to merge. Last week, the Air Force announced it will merge the separate directorates that were overseeing Minuteman III and Sentinel into a single Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Systems Directorate under Brig. Gen. William Rogers. A bit more, here. 

One more nuclear matter: Former Pentagon space policy wonk Vipin Narang is joining MIT to direct a new Center for Nuclear Security Policy. MIT News reported Wednesday. Narang was a professor of nuclear security at MIT before joining the Pentagon in March 2022. His published works include 2014’s “Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era,” and “Seeking the Bomb: Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation” in 2022. Read more, here. 

Update: Special Operations Command officials still haven’t justified their desire to buy 62 cropduster attack planes, the Government Accountability Office said in a five-page report published Thursday. 

Background: “SOCOM seeks to acquire an aircraft capable of conducting strike, close-air support missions in austere environments, and some intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions” for its Armed Overwatch program, GAO explained. SOCOM is planning to spend more than $2 billion on the program through FY2029.

There were three reasons GAO said it wasn’t yet convinced: “First, because SOCOM decided on the size of the fleet before conducting required analyses. Second, SOCOM did not assess how changes in the aircraft’s capabilities could affect the number needed for operations. And third, that SOCOM has not reevaluated its needs despite changes to operational missions.” Find the full unclassified report (PDF) here.  

Former U.S. Coast Guard Academy students seek $130 million over alleged sexual assaults. Reuters: “More than a dozen former U.S. Coast Guard Academy students who say they were victims of sexual assault filed complaints on Thursday seeking $130 million in damages, accusing the school of allowing sexual violence to go unchecked.” The suits come after decades-long efforts to cover up such assaults were exposed in the service’s Operation Fouled Anchor investigation. More, here.

Exposed: Two soldiers in the Virginia National Guard lead an armed anti-government group known as the Campbell County Militia outside the city of Lynchburg, Steve Beynon of Military.com reported Thursday. “It’s a seemingly contradictory set of roles that likely runs afoul of new Army rules that explicitly prohibit anti-government behavior — for soldiers both on active duty and in the Guard,” Beynon writes. 

Background: “In 2020, Campbell County’s board of supervisors officially recognized Abbott’s militia in a six to one vote to serve ‘as a barrier against a tyrannical government.’” But “The organization’s social media presence also features a steady diet of anti-immigrant rhetoric and suggestions of impending violence.”

“Our own government is the greatest threat to our safety and security,” said militia leader U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Daniel Abbott at an event earlier this year. Read the rest at Military.com.

In a rare appearance at Ramstein air base, Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy attended the latest Pentagon-led Defense Contact Group meeting of allied defense ministers on Friday. Zelenskyy is seeking more air defense systems to protect against Russian attacks as well as permission from allies to strike deeper into Russian territory in order to reduce the number of missile and drone strikes across Ukraine’s cities and energy infrastructure ahead of the winter. 

“We need our partners’ determination and the means to stop Russia’s aerial terror,” Zelenskyy said on social media Friday. “We also need strong long-range decisions from our partners to bring closer the just peace we are striving for.”

Developing: The White House is up against a Sept. 30 deadline to use up to $6 billion in military aid for Ukraine, and so officials are engaging with lawmakers on Capitol Hill about how best to proceed, Reuters reported Thursday.  

What’s going on: “Most of the $7.8 billion in [Presidential Drawdown Authority] in the bill Biden signed into law in April has not been used,” Reuters writes. One solution could be “to attach an extension of the PDA authorities to a Continuing Resolution…that the Senate and House of Representatives must pass this month to avoid a Sept. 30 government shutdown.” It’s not officially clear why the hold up in delivering weapons via the PDA, but allegedly “supply chain issues” are at least partly to blame. Read on, here. 

In video: Follow Ukrainian refugee and professional climber Jenya Kazbekova as she struggles to compose herself and compete en route to the Olympics while her friends and family remain in Ukraine at the mercy of Russia’s ongoing invasion and missile attacks. Kazbekova is one of several pro climbers featured in a new four-part documentary series from National Geographic entitled, “The Crux.” Details here. 

Additional reading: 

Top U.S. and Chinese commanders are set to speak sometime in the next few weeks, U.S. ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said Thursday in Washington. That includes Indo-Pacific Command’s Adm. Sam Paparo and “a southern theater commander of the People’s Liberation Army,” Burns said at an event hosted by Foreign Policy.

“We’ve got to have that connectivity, so that if there is an accident or a misunderstanding,” Burns said, “our military leaders can meet to lower the temperature, divide any parties that have collided, or are arguing, and make sure that we have a rational way to resolve problems.” Reuters has more.

And lastly this week: Taiwan filmmakers have already made a TV show about a Chinese invasion. Now there’s a board game about it. Set in the year 2045, the game focuses on the “final 10 days” of such an invasion, Taiwan News reports after speaking with the game’s developer.

“It’s definitely not the case that players must defend Taiwan in this game,” he said, adding, “it’s every player for themselves.” 

“Taiwan might be divided, but people might also show solidarity; there are all different kinds of outcomes that might happen,” he said. Read more, here. 

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