The D Brief: DOD shakeup expected; Russian barrage; N. Koreans fight near Kursk; Navy fires ethics leader; And just a bit more…
How Trump may shake up DOD, according to Chris Miller, who was the last person to occupy the U.S. defense secretary’s office during the first Trump administration, and whose name tops the defense chapter of Project 2025. The retired Special Forces colonel wants irregular warfare to have a larger, even predominant, role in implementing U.S. policy in South and Central America and Africa—and a smaller one in the Pacific.
“Let Special Operations Command, irregular warfare command, handle Latin America and AFRICOM. Let them compete against whoever it is out there. Let the services just focus on INDOPACOM and the Russian bear,” Miller told Defense One’s Patrick Tucker in June.
Miller also wants more money to flow to innovative ideas, particularly ones that come from operators, and downplays fears that Trump will withdraw from alliances. “Everybody is concerned that he means a wholesale pullout of NATO or other organizations. I find that probably a stretch. The ultimate point is better burden-sharing.” Read on, here.
Trump’s record and own words suggest much bigger changes are coming, “amid fears that the once and future commander in chief will follow through on vows to deploy the military domestically against American citizens, demand fealty from key leaders and attempt to remake the nonpartisan institution into one explicitly loyal to him,” writes the Washington Post, with plenty of links out to previous coverage.
Project 2025 and the GOP party platform also highlight culture-war issues, The Hill notes in its own article. The next administration will also try “reducing wasteful defense spending and decreasing the number of generals in the military, although it also includes less divisive measures, such as enhancing nuclear strategy, prioritizing China and building a resilient military.” The article links back to the GOP party platform, which says: “We will invest in cutting-edge research and advanced technologies, including an Iron Dome Missile Defense Shield, support our troops with higher pay,” the platform reads, and “get woke leftwing Democrats fired as soon as possible.” Read, here.
Quote: “The greatest danger the military faces” under a second Trump presidency is a “rapid erosion of its professionalism, which would undermine its status and respect from the American people,” said Richard Kohn, a professor and military historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Mr. Trump does not have a real understanding of civil-military relations, or the importance of a nonpartisan, nonpolitical military.”
A spokeswoman for Trump, Karoline Leavitt, said that with Tuesday’s vote, the American public had given him “a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.”
Meanwhile: Pentagon puts a dent in cyber workforce vacancies. The department is still short nearly 30,000 cyber workers, but “The civilian vacancy rate is now down to 16 percent—that is a 4.8 percent decrease from last year,” Mark Gorak, principal director for resources & analysis, the Pentagon’s office of the chief information officer, told reporters Thursday. “In order to get there, believe it or not, we had to hire about 14,000 additional civilians, and we lost or turned over about 6,000 civilians” to jobs outside the department. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports.
Additional reading/viewing:
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson and 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 1923, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis tried but failed to overthrow the German government. Ten years later, Hitler and the Nazis did indeed take full control.
Russians in Ukraine
Russia lost another general to its Ukraine invasion, the eighth since 2022, the BBC reports. His name is Major General Pavel Klimenko, and he was reportedly killed Wednesday inside Ukraine under circumstances that aren’t clear just yet.
Klimenko was just promoted to general this past May. Several months ago, he was accused of “setting up a torture camp in Donetsk where, according to media reports and relatives of victims, Russian soldiers were tortured and had their salaries taken away,” the BBC reports. Read on via Google translate for more on the other seven generals killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
On the other hand: Retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt explains how Ukraine’s military is “bleeding out” against Russia in an eight-minute video published Friday by the Wall Street Journal.
Early-morning Russian missile and drone strikes across Ukraine killed at least nine people and injured more than 60 others Friday, President Volodymir Zelenskyy said on X. Ukrainian troops claim to have shot down four missiles and around 60 drones from the overnight barrage. “Air defense, long-range capabilities, weapons packages, and sanctions against the aggressor—these are the actions required, not just words,” Zelenskyy said.
Update: The lame-duck Biden administration still has $4 billion in Presidential Drawdown Authority for Ukraine and another $2 billion from the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. However, it’s not clear exactly how much more support the U.S. military can provide before Donald Trump takes office in mid-January.
“Some things can arrive within days and weeks. Some items in those packages take longer,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters Thursday. “It does matter what’s available on our stock, on our shelves. You’re going to see us continue to draw that down pretty frequently. Could there be things that go out beyond Jan. 20? I can’t say for certain right now.”
Related reading:
North Koreans in Russia
Developing: Russian and North Korean troops have allegedly begun their counteroffensive to recapture territory in Kursk, the region Ukrainian troops entered in a surprise offensive of their own back in August. According to one official on Ukraine’s Defense Council writing Thursday on Telegram, “DPRK troops have been deployed to the contact line in Kursk,” and are “embedded in Russian units fighting on the Lyubimovka-Novoivanovka line, as well as near Pogrebki.”
According to Ukrainian military chief Rustem Umerov, a “small group” of North Koreans were first attacked earlier this week in the vicinity of Kursk, South Korean media reported on Tuesday. An anonymous U.S. official confirmed the allegation to the New York Times on Tuesday, and said North Koreans were killed in the incident, but no date for the actual incident was provided.
More North Korean casualties could be coming soon, the Ukrainian defense official said. That’s because “the positions of the Russian units, in which the North Korean troops are present, regularly come under artillery fire. Our UAVs engage them, too,” he said Thursday on Telegram.
New: South Korea says pro-Russia hackers have stepped up cyber attacks against military, government, and judicial websites, Yonhap news agency reported Friday. Those attacks seem to largely involve distributed denial-of-service efforts, which have so far caused “temporary delays or disruptions,” but little else.
Related reading:
That does it for us this week. Thanks for reading, and you can catch us again on Tuesday.
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