The D Brief: Houthis resume ship attacks; ‘Put [feds] in trauma’; Israel readies laser interceptor; SASC chair’s warning; And just a bit more.
After an 18-day lull, the Russia-supported Houthi terrorists in Yemen targeted another commercial vessel in the Red Sea on Monday. British maritime authorities confirmed the attempted attack, but said the vessel—Liberia-flagged bulk carrier Motaro—was unharmed after three explosions occurred close to the ship as it transited the Bab el-Mandeb strait.
The Houthis also claim to have attacked two other ships in the Arabian Sea, but offered no proof to support their claims, the Associated Press reported Monday.
Israeli officials say a drone launched from Yemen landed in the coastal city of Ashkelon Tuesday. “The impact caused no injuries but sparked a small fire,” according to the Times of Israel.
Related reading:
Welcome to this Tuesday 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 2004, Qatar-based Al Jazeera broadcast a video of Osama bin Laden condemning President George W. Bush and claiming responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. He said the attacks were motivated partly by the 1982 Lebanese Civil War, and that he intended to bait the U.S. into wars that would bankrupt the country.
Emerging tech
New rule aims to stop U.S. investors from backing Chinese research into AI and quantum science. Issued Monday by the White House, the rule “prohibits U.S. persons from engaging in certain transactions involving semiconductors, quantum and artificial intelligence. And second, it requires U.S. persons to notify [the] Treasury [Department] of certain other transactions involving semiconductors and artificial intelligence,” a senior White House official told reporters ahead of the release.
How much do U.S. investors pour into Chinese military tech? From 2015 to 2021, they pumped $40.2 billion into 251 Chinese AI companies, accounting for 37 percent of the $110 billion raised by all Chinese companies working on AI. That’s according to a February 2023 paper from the Center for Security and Emerging Technologies. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has more, here.
Related reading:
Space Force’s effort to bring in new launch providers hasn’t worked yet. Officials aren’t surprised. Last year, the service launched a competition called National Space Security Launch Phase 3 with two categories: “Lane 1,” for less risky missions, and “Lane 2,” for more challenging missions. The idea was that new entrants to the space launch market could get a foot in the door with a Lane 1 mission. But nothing bars established giants like SpaceX from competing in Lane 1, and on Oct. 18, the Space Force announced that SpaceX won $733.5 million for the first set of launches in that category.
“I don’t look at it as a failure at all. We fully anticipated it. I mean, everybody knows who’s launching right now. We knew it was going to be a very limited set, but we knew we had to start somewhere,” said Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space. Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports.
Future of American democracy
Trump’s former OMB director: “We want to put [federal employees] in trauma.” A key ally to former President Donald Trump, Russell Vought, has plans that track closely with Trump’s campaign rhetoric about using the military against domestic protesters, or what Trump has called the “enemy within,” ProPublica reported Monday after obtaining video of Vought’s private speeches over the last two years. In those appearances, Vought described his work crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions.
As OMB chief, Vought sought to use Trump’s 2020 “Schedule F” executive order to strip away job protections for nonpartisan government workers, ProPublica reminds readers. But until these private speeches were made public, he had “never spoken in such pointed terms about demoralizing federal workers to the point that they don’t want to do their jobs.”
Why bring it up: “Vought is widely expected to take a high-level government role if Trump wins a second term. His name has even been mentioned as a potential White House chief of staff,” according to ProPublica.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma,” he said. Continue reading, here.
View from Capitol Hill: If re-elected, Donald Trump will behave “like a fascist” and “destroy the Department of Defense,” warned the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Chairman Jack Reed of Rhode Island, in a conversation with reporters Monday. Reed called the meeting to bring attention to what he described as “Trump’s dystopian threats to misuse the military and trample on the Constitution.”
“What Trump wants is power—power to first dismiss the legal cases against him, then power to accumulate more and more,” Reed said. “He wants to create chaos and a dysfunctional non-government, actually, because there in that context, he has more power.” If he returns to office, Trump “will destroy the Department of Defense,” the senator cautioned. “He already demonstrated at the end of his last term his willingness to essentially fire the civilian senior defense employees to his Schedule F episode. That’s been replicated in the Project 2025 report, and it’s going to be something he does. He will create chaos, and he will force many, many of our best officers, frankly, to decide whether they continue to serve or they must leave the service.”
“Why is it that men Trump once called ‘my generals’—men like Gen. [John] Kelly, General [Mark] Milley, General [Jim] Mattis, General [H.R.] McMaster, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and more, everyone who worked closely with him, even his own former Vice President Mike Pence—why is it they all believe Trump is unfit to be president?” Reed asked.
Citing the recent work of historian Heather Cox Richardson, Reed said that a March 1945 U.S. Army publication, Army Talks, “tried to explain to most of the troops what fascism was. And one of the lines from the document said it is ‘government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.’ And that sounds a lot like Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the gang all plotting to take over and get special powers and to go after enemies and do things like that.”
Citing that Army publication, Reed reminded reporters, fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…they maintain themselves in power by the use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate and by false promises of security.’ [That] Sounds like a Trump speech,” Reed said. “So I’m very concerned that he would, regardless of the definition of a fascist, act like a fascist.”
But Reed wasn’t entirely lacking in optimism. “I have faith in the leadership of the military that if they detect people who are acting contrary to the law and Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, that they’ll take steps and correct that; that’s their job,” he said. However, “The question that becomes much more difficult is, if he assumes office, then I think he has powers that can basically purge the military of people with conscience and replace them with his cronies. That would be a disaster” since “people would be there not because they’re the best strategist, tactician, etc. They’re there because they’ll do whatever [Trump] says. And frankly, I don’t think he has a very good grasp on many issues affecting the world.”
- Learn more: Review the eight-page 1945 U.S. Army publication in its entirety, here.
Related reading: “How Autocrats Game the Rules of Democracy,” (gift link) via Amanda Taub of the New York Times, writing Tuesday from London.
See also: “Fascism, Fear and the Science Behind Horror Films,” from WNYC’s “On the Media” podcast, posted Friday.
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