The D Brief: Musk, Putin talk; Trump’s record; Houthis’ satellite help; Submarine production to slow; And a bit more.
The rich man and the despot: Elon Musk has been in secretive contact with Russian leader Vladimir Putin for the past two years, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday (gift link). The private talks between the world’s richest man and the world’s most nuclear-armed autocrat reportedly “raise potential national-security concerns” among U.S. officials since conversation topics have included denying Taiwan access to Musk’s Starlink service (“as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping”) and Musk has blocked Ukraine from using certain Starlink terminals in its defense against Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Recall that “Musk has forged deep business ties with U.S. military and intelligence agencies, giving him unique visibility into some of America’s most sensitive space programs,” the Journal notes. For example, “SpaceX, which operates the Starlink service, won a $1.8 billion classified contract in 2021 and is the primary rocket launcher for the Pentagon and NASA.”
Musk’s duplicity doesn’t end there: “Through the first months of the year, Musk said he would refrain from backing any presidential candidate while at the same time holding private conversations discussing how he could get Trump elected,” the Journal reminds readers. But that changed in July when Musk endorsed Trump and began campaigning on his behalf—an effort that has since morphed into a possibly illegal scheme of handing out millions of dollars to incentivize citizens in battleground states to vote so long as they sign a Trump-aligned pledge.
Trump is also alleged to have been in contact with the Russian despot. Citing a Trump aide, journalist Bob Woodward reported in a new book that there have been “maybe as many as seven” conversations between Trump and Putin since the former left office in 2021.
For details on Musk’s contract with, and influence over, the federal government, see this New York Times report from earlier in the week.
Musk has been doing Trump’s work in the online information space this year, too. That includes spreading misleading claims about immigration and conspiracies about alleged voter fraud, which are his most popular topics to tweet about, according to an analysis of Musk’s writing on X published Thursday by Bloomberg.
The analysis covers more than 13 years of Musk’s posts, which changed noticeably as the election season got underway in 2024. And as November 5 has gotten closer, “Musk’s effort to popularize his views on voting and migrants has become relentless — and more effective in terms of engagement,” Bloomberg reports.
Why it matters: “In Musk, the former president has found an influential ally who is willing to launder a false conspiracy theory for the masses, helping lay the groundwork for Trump to once again dispute the results of next month’s election, should they not be in his favor, according to Melissa Ryan, founder of CARD Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation.”
But perhaps most importantly, “as the most-followed account on X, Musk is the platform’s single most important influencer,” and “He is still the most widely read person on the site today,” Bloomberg reports. Read over the full analysis (gift link), here.
Reminder: If re-elected, “Donald Trump says he will order mass deportations, use soldiers against citizens, prosecute his enemies, abandon allies, and play politics with disasters,” the New York Times Editorial Board writes in a multimedia presentation published Friday.
“Believe him,” the editorial board cautions. “The record shows that Mr. Trump often pursues his stated goals, regardless of how plainly they lack legal or moral grounding,” they write. In contrast to his first term, “Trump has learned from that experience to surround himself with supplicants who would instead obey his wishes and bring his words and ideas to life even if they contradict facts, the public interest or the Constitution.”
Using his own words, the board encourages readers to “take the painful step of imagining America were his plans and promises to come to pass, to imagine the impacts to our culture, to our economy, to our security, to our shared commitment to the rule of law.” Dive in (gift link), here.
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 1945, the Japanese ended 50 years of control over Taiwan.
North Korean soldiers are expected to begin arriving in Ukraine “combat zones” as early as Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy said Friday, citing intelligence officials. “North Korea’s actual involvement in combat should not be met with indifference or uncertain commentary, but with tangible pressure on both Moscow and Pyongyang, to uphold the UN Charter and to hold them accountable for this escalation,” Zelenskyy said.
The first tranche of North Korean troops arrived in Russia’s western Kursk region Wednesday, Ukrainian intelligence officials claimed the following day. “North Korea has transferred roughly 12,000 North Korean personnel, including 500 officers and three generals, to Russia and that Russian Deputy Defense Minister Colonel General Yunus-Bek Yevkurov is responsible for overseeing the training and adaptation of the North Korean military personnel,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War wrote in its Thursday assessment, citing Ukraine’s Main Military Intelligence Directorate.
South Korea’s military chief described the North Korean troops as “mere cannon fodder mercenaries.” North Korea’s soldiers are “being disguised with a Russian uniform and acting under Russian military command without any operational authority,” Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun told parliamentarians Thursday in Seoul. “Kim Jong-un has sold his people’s army for an illegal war of aggression,” he said. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency has more.
New: Russia helped the Houthi terrorist group attack commercial vessels in the Red Sea and along Yemen’s coasts, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing “a person familiar with the matter and two European defense officials.”
The help consisted of Russian satellite data that was “passed through members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who were embedded with the Houthis in Yemen.”
Why it matters: The targeting data “shows how far Russian President Vladimir Putin is willing to go to undermine the U.S.-led Western economic and political order,” the Journal writes.
Related reading:
More bad news for the U.S. Navy’s submarine-building efforts. Electric Boat announced that it will slow construction on Columbia-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines and Virginia-class nuclear attack boats due to “major component delays,” USNI News reports off General Dynamics’ third-quarter earnings call with investors on Thursday. CEO Phebe Novakovic: “Given the recent projections from the supply chain on deliveries, we need to get our cadence in sync with the supply chain and take costs out of the business if we are to hope to see incremental margin growth.” Read that, here.
Background reading from Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams:
CBO reacts to the Navy’s 2025 shipbuilding plan. “The service’s budget would need to grow significantly in real terms for the service to buy, sustain, and operate a larger fleet,” writes Eric Labs of the Congressional Budget Office, for a presentation he delivered on Tuesday at a recent NDIA event. That’s no surprise, but perhaps this is: “Although the Navy’s 2025 plan calls for buying more ships and costs more than the alternatives in the 2024 plan, the capability that it would provide is in the middle of the range of the capabilities that would result from those alternatives.” Read the slides for yourself, here.
Northrop expects next B-21 production award by year’s end. That would be Low-Rate Initial Production Contract 2, the second of five annual LRIPs that are expected to total 21 aircraft—and to cost the company a total of $1.2 billion. The Air Force expects to pay roughly $780 million per LRIP aircraft—officially, $550 million per plane in 2010 dollars—based on its overall plan to buy at least 100 Raiders.
Northrop executives say the program will eventually be profitable. The company has negotiated a higher cost ceiling for the 19 aircraft that will follow the first 21. Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports off CEO Kathy Warden’s Thursday third-quarter earnings call with investors.
Lastly today: Problems with a German railroad contract slowed U.S. munitions to Ukraine, IG says. Shipments were delayed in December 2022 and January 2023 because of problems with a U.S. European Command contract with Germany’s Deutsche Bahn railways, according to a Defense Department Inspector General report. In at least one instance, “no rail service was available to transport the ammunition.”
The problem was eventually solved by chartering boats to deliver it instead, at a cost of $1.6 million to the United States. The report was released, in much-redacted form, to Defense One on Thursday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
The delays hit around the same time Ukraine began to run out of U.S.-supplied ammunition—making it one of several instances in which U.S. aid shortfalls have affected the Ukrainian military since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Defense One’s Sam Skove has a bit more, here.
That does it for us. Thanks for reading; have a safe weekend, and you can catch us again on Monday!
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