The D Brief: Austin to the Pacific; North Korean drones; Reforming how the USAF buys weapons; Suicides rise across DOD; And a bit more.
SecDef Austin’s last Pacific swing. Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin took off this morning for his 12th and presumably final trip as U.S. defense secretary to the Asia-Pacific region.
It starts with a visit to Darwin, Australia, for a trilateral meeting with Australian and Japanese officials—the latter of whom is expected to announce that Japan will start to integrate forces into U.S.-Australian exercises held by Marine Rotational Force-Darwin, senior defense officials said.
Then it’s over to the Philippines to meet President Bongbong Marcos and Secretary of National Defense Gilbert Teodoro and mark the opening of a new U.S.-funded intel fusion center.
Next is a visit to Laos for the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting Plus, a meeting that every U.S. defense secretary has attended since its inception in 2010, and finally to Fiji, to kick off negotiations for a status-of-forces agreement intended to lay the foundation for more defense cooperation. D Brief-er Bradley Peniston is traveling with the SecDef; stay tuned for more coverage.
North Korea has ordered “full-scale mass production” of so-called “suicide attack drones,” state run media KCNA reported Friday. The country’s dictator Kim Jong-un called the drones “an essential requirement in military aspects” and said North Korean production facilities have the “potentiality to produce and introduce various types of drones” in the months ahead.
At least three different kinds of North Korean drones were demonstrated Thursday, according to selectively blurry photos posted at the Pyongyang Times. One was a smaller fixed-wing drone; another was a larger model similar in appearance to Russia’s Ranchet 3; and the third, larger one was reportedly designed for long-range strikes, one South Korea-based analyst told the Wall Street Journal.
Rewind: “In July 2023, North Korea unveiled two types of new reconnaissance and multi-purpose attack drones at an arms exhibition and a military parade,” South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reports. “The North also sent five drones across the border with South Korea in December 2022, with one of them penetrating a no-fly zone close to Seoul’s presidential office.”
From the region:
And ICYMI: U.S. authorities uncovered “a broad and significant cyber espionage campaign” carried out by China-affiliated actors, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a statement Wednesday.
The operation hit “multiple telecommunications companies” and “enable[d] the theft of customer call records data, the compromise of private communications of a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity, and the copying of certain information that was subject to U.S. law enforcement requests pursuant to court orders,” according to the statement. That latter detail could refer to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which allows U.S. authorities to spy on the communications of individuals suspected of working for a foreign country.
“We expect our understanding of these compromises to grow as the investigation continues,” the FBI and CISA said.
Developing: CISA is under threat under new Republican leadership. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky, who is about to take over as the Chair of the Homeland Security Committee, which oversees CISA, told Politico he would like to “eliminate” it due to the work they do calling out foreign election interference particularly from Russia.
You may recall President-elect Donald Trump clashed with CISA over its monitoring of the 2020 election. (CISA has said both the 2020 and 2024 elections were secure, despite foreign influence efforts.) While Trump can’t just close CISA outright, Democratic lawmakers are reportedly worried he could weaken it through staffing decisions.
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson, Bradley Peniston and Patrick Tucker. 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 2012, Xi Jinping took office as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, beginning what has since become at least 12 years of consecutive rule.
The long-rumored prospect of a future U.S.-China war has prompted Air Force officials to change how they buy weapons, and that is driving defense companies to pursue new ways of making money, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reported Thursday. Since the U.S. military will need to operate thousands of connected systems across vast distances in a Pacific conflict, those dynamics are posing new challenges for the Pentagon’s acquisition community, Andrew Hunter, the service’s acquisition chief, said at an event hosted Wednesday by Defense One in Washington.
For example, the service is investing in the mission systems of an aircraft or platform first, and building direct relationships with suppliers instead of working through the major defense companies to manage suppliers. This means prime contractors, who have historically profited from controlling the entire architecture, are having to relinquish some control, Decker writes.
Consider: “Every time we persuade ourselves that, Hey, we found a program [where] the risk is actually so small that we can probably use fixed price contracting here, even during the development phase, we end up finding risks we didn’t appreciate,” Hunter said. He pointed to two Boeing programs where the service massively underestimated development risks: the T-7 trainer and the KC-46 tanker. Both fixed-price contracts resulted in huge losses for Boeing and delayed capability for the Air Force. Continue reading, here.
Suicides across the Army, Navy, and Air Force continued to rise in 2023, according to the latest annual report (PDF) published Thursday by the Defense Department. During that 12-month period, “523 Service members died by suicide, which is more than the previous year (493),” the Pentagon said. That included 363 on the active duty side; 69 in the Reserves; and 91 among the National Guard.
“Young enlisted males accounted for the largest number of suicide deaths,” and they most often used a firearm in the completed act, which is consistent with prior years, according to the report (poisoning is the most common way service members attempt suicide). The highest rates were among men under the age of 30; and overall, more than 9 out of 10 who died from suicide were men compared to less than 7% for females.
While the Marine Corps’ suicide rate did not rise in 2023, the service still has the highest rate among all the branches, U.S. Naval Institute News reports with accompanying slide data. However, “In short-term comparisons, between 2023 and 2022, no service was found to have had a statistically significant difference in suicide rates,” the report’s authors write. The Associated Press has more.
Additional reading:
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Report: Israeli forces struck an Iranian nuclear weapons research facility in October. Sources within the Israeli military told Axios that they hit the Taleghan 2 facility, some 20 miles south Tehran, during the October 25 strike on Iranian targets. US and Israeli government sources said that they began detecting new activity at the site earlier this year and the work “could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon.” The program was so secret that many in the Iranian government didn’t even know about, the officials said.
And lastly, DHS just released guidance for the use of AI in critical infrastructure. Nextgov/FCW report that the new voluntary guidance helps infrastructure operators design AI models for security and operation, deploy them and monitor them safely. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters the framework provides “specific recommendations that each participant in the ecosystem can and should implement to ensure the safe and secure deployment of AI in critical infrastructure.” More here.
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