The D Brief: Russia pushes deeper into Ukraine; N. Korea prepping nuke test?; DOD releases industrial plan; Fire at UK shipyard; And a bit more.

An estimated 3,000 North Korean soldiers have moved to western Russia, South Korean officials said Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. Seoul’s Yonhap news agency did not confirm that number, but did report Wednesday “at least 11,000 North Korean troops have been deployed to Russia, with some sent to Russia’s western region near the border with Ukraine.” 

U.S. officials haven’t yet confirmed the North Koreans are already fighting inside Ukraine, though CNN notes, “US officials did not confirm publicly that the troops were in Russia until weeks after South Korea first alleged it.”

Battlefield latest: Russia’s newest offensive, across a 40-mile front in the east, “has breached Ukrainian defenses in just a few days in many areas,” conflict analyst Emil Kastehelmi writes. “At the moment the Russians are struggling to expand their breach into a breakthrough. Even though the Ukrainians are losing many square kilometers, the defence hasn’t crumbled into chaos, and nothing extremely crucial has been lost,” he adds. 

Bigger picture: “The rate of Russian advances in Ukraine has increased in recent weeks but remains slow and consistent with positional warfare rather than with rapid mechanized maneuver,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War wrote Tuesday. “Russian forces have been making gains in eastern Ukraine recently, but comparing those gains to the initial deep Russian penetration into Ukraine at the start of the war misleadingly frames these most recent advances,” ISW cautions. 

Manpower update: Russia’s military “is recruiting around 30,000 men per month,” which isn’t quite “enough to meet internal targets,” but it’s believed to be enough “to cover even the gargantuan losses of recent months,” NATO officials told the Economist this week. 

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Boom times

Russia’s military says it “practiced launching a massive nuclear strike in response to a nuclear strike by a simulated enemy” on Tuesday. As part of the drills, the Russians launched a Yars intercontinental ballistic missile from a base near Alaska, submarine-launched ballistic missiles northeast of Norway and north of Japan, and dispatched Tu-95 strategic bombers firing air-launched cruise missiles.

The nuclear tests are “a reliable guarantor of the sovereignty and security of our country” and “solve the problems of strategic deterrence, as well as maintain nuclear parity and the balance of power in the world as objective factors of global stability,” Russian leader Vladimir Putin said in a statement. 

Context: Russia’s “focus on weapons of mass destruction is aimed at offering reassurances to a domestic audience amid the uneven performance of Russian troops in Ukraine, and at deterring Western nations from providing more advanced weapons to Ukraine,” the New York Times writes. 

South Korea’s military says the North is on the brink of conducting its seventh nuclear weapons test, though it’s unclear if it will occur before or after Election Day in the U.S. on November 5, the Associated Press reports from Seoul. 

“It appears that preparations are nearly complete for an ICBM-class long-range missile, including a space launch vehicle,” South Korea’s Defense Intelligence Agency said Wednesday, according to Yonhap. “Preparations for a transporter erector launcher are complete, and it has been deployed to a certain area,” but no missile has been loaded yet, two lawmakers said. 

Rewind: This would not be the first time Russia and North Korea have carried out nuclear exercises close to U.S. presidential elections. Eight years ago, North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb less than two months before the election, and Russia announced “nuclear-bomb survival drills” the following month. 

By the way: South Korea’s military chief Kim Yong Hyun is visiting the Pentagon today for talks with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his team. Similar talks—under the banner of a U.S.-ROK Security Consultative Meeting—occur nearly every year, including last November with Seoul’s previous defense minister. 

Industrial strategy

The implementation plan for the Pentagon’s defense-industrial strategy was rolled out on Tuesday, and includes six “initiatives” for fiscal 2025, starting with improvements to the missile and submarine industries. The unclassified, nearly-100-page document precedes a classified “annex” to come, Laura Taylor-Kale, who leads Pentagon industrial base policy, told reporters Tuesday. 

The strategy, which was itself rolled out in January, broadly aims to bolster supply chains to make weapons securely, faster, and en masse. The Pentagon spent about $39.4 billion on the strategy in fiscal 2024 and asked for $37.7 billion in 2025. More than three-quarters of the funds—about $60 billion total—will go toward missiles and munitions, followed by $3.3 billion for the submarine industrial base and $500 million for the Defense Department’s Replicator initiative.  

What could go wrong? Well, Congress could fail to pass the 2025 budget bills before the continuing resolution runs out in December, Taylor-Kale said. “It creates a lot of challenges in procurement, in general, and also in planning for us, when we have these continuing resolutions.” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams has more, here.

The best way to make sure the Pentagon gets the quantum sensors it needs is to increase R&D spending across the federal government, a new industry-backed report argues. Currently, the U.S. government spends about $900 million on quantum sensing each year, most going to the Defense Department. An increase is needed, according to the report, which was produced by the industry-driven Quantum Economic Development Consortium with funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

By boosting the nascent quantum-sensing industry and its efforts to serve domestic markets from aeronautics to energy, the report argues, these increases will help answer defense leaders’ years-old calls for new instruments—quantum magnetometers, gravimeters, and clocks—that don’t rely on vulnerable signals from space to provide navigation and timing data. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports, here.

Europe

Developing: A fire at Britain’s nuclear shipyard put two workers in the hospital. The blaze broke out early Wednesday morning in BAE Systems’ six-acre assembly hall at Barrow-in-Furness, where the UK’s four Dreadnought-class missile boats and an Astute attack sub are being built. The Lancaster Guardian and BBC have a bit more.

And lastly: Spain has deployed 1,000 soldiers to help evacuate people from flash floods that have killed at least 64 people so far. The military’s emergency unit posted videos of some rescues by airlift. Read more at the New York Times.

Defense One