The D Brief: DOD’s Replicator program advances; Nuclear forensics in Idaho; Austin, Milley defend women in combat; Intel watchdogs resign; And a bit more.
New: Russia fired a large ballistic missile at Ukraine. The Ukrainian air force claims it was an intercontinental ballistic missile targeting the city of Dnipro early Thursday, which—if true—would be a first.
Claim: “An intercontinental ballistic missile was launched from the Astrakhan region of the Russian Federation,” Kyiv’s air force said on Telegram. Russia also allegedly launched one of its hypersonic Kh-47M2 “Kinzhal” missiles at Dnipro from a MiG-31K fighter jet flying over Russia’s Tambov region. An additional “seven Kh-101 cruise missiles were fired from Tu-95MS strategic bombers,” the air force said Thursday morning.
The allegedly large missile’s “speed and altitude suggest intercontinental ballistic capabilities,” Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy said on social media Thursday. “Investigations are ongoing,” he added.
Others aren’t so sure. The U.S. is still assessing the situation, but the missile was not of intercontinental range, a Western official told reporters on the sidelines of the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting Plus in Vientiane, Laos.
Initial damage assessment: The salvo reportedly hit a medical rehabilitation center, Ukraine’s regional governor for Dnipro said on Telegram. “The biggest destruction is in the boiler room,” but “Miraculously, no one was hurt in the institution” as “staff and patients who were there managed to get to the shelter.” Reuters also reported “emergency power cuts in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk regions following the air alert.”
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson, Lauren C. Williams 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 1970, the U.S. military carried out a dangerous and secretive mission to rescue prisoners of war from a camp in North Vietnam. Poor intelligence, however, informed the mission’s planners, who were unaware that the prisoners had been moved to a different camp closer to Hanoi more than four months prior.
Around the Defense Department
Pentagon orders linchpin software for Replicator drones. The Defense Innovation Unit picked Anduril Industries, L3Harris Technologies, and Swarm Aero to build prototype software needed to automate and control swarms of potentially thousands of drones, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Wednesday.
Background: Replicator news thus far has largely centered on buying the drones themselves. But making sure the software component can be seamlessly integrated and upgraded is equally important—and challenging, Aditi Kumar, the deputy director of strategy for Defense Innovation Unit, told Tucker.
“We are buying this capability independently of the hardware systems, and so we need to be able to have open architectures, government-owned architectures, to ensure that the software that we’re bringing in is one being upgraded and then integrated into all manner of hardware systems, which may then require their own hardware fixes to enable that,” Kumar said. “We are going to demonstrate their integration with the other systems in the Replicator portfolio across multiple domains, and we’ll be able to test that out.” Read more here.
Related reading: “U.S. Military Selects Little-Known Utah Supplier for Drone Program,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday regarding Utah-based manufacturer Teal Drones.
ICYMI: Ukrainian soldiers visited Idaho to learn nuclear forensics. Several Ukrainian troops recently spent a week at the Idaho National Laboratory to study how to trace a nuclear device’s source material. “The point of this [exercise] is to build the capability for collecting high-quality samples for analysis,” said C.J. Johnson, senior adviser to the Department of Energy’s NNSA Ukraine Task Force. “Until two years ago Ukraine had no capability of this kind.” Paul Menser and Corinne Dionisio explain the program in greater detail at Defense One.
SecDef Austin defends women in combat
Asked about Pete Hegseth’s resistance to women in combat roles, Pentagon chief and retired Gen. Lloyd Austin rejected the view espoused by the former Army major who is Donald Trump’s announced pick for defense secretary. “You know, I see things differently, and I see that because of my experience, and that experience is extensive,” said Austin, who has commanded troops in combat as a one-, two-, three-, and four-star general. Speaking Wednesday at a press conference in Vientiane, Laos, Austin recalled his service as the 3rd Infantry Division’s deputy commander for maneuver when it led the seizure of Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “I was at the front edge of the battle,” he said. “In my command post were several very courageous and very proficient women who did amazing things to support our effort and support their colleagues. And in my three tours—three long tours to Iraq and then one tour in Afghanistan—every place I went, there were women doing incredible things, and they were adding value to the overall effort, whether they were pilots, whether they were operational experts, or they were intel experts.
“I think our women add significant value to the United States military, and we should never change that,” he said. “I would tell them that, you know, we need you, we have faith in you, we are appreciative of your service, and you add value to the finest and most lethal fighting force on Earth. Other than that, I haven’t thought much about it.”
In numbers: As recently as 2022, women made up 17.5% of the U.S. military’s active-duty force and 21.6% of the selected reserve, according to a November 2023 Defense Department report.
Related reading:
Trump 2.0
Plans for “mass” federal layoffs are underway in the name of government efficiency. Co-heads of the Trump administration’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are planning to slash regulations to justify shrinking the federal workforce, The Hill reports.
Musk and Ramaswamy announced their intentions in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, saying the move “provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.” The pair bolstered their reasoning, saying that the existing statute allows for mass layoffs as long as specific employees weren’t targeted: “But the statute allows for ‘reductions in force’ that don’t target specific employees. The statute further empowers the president to ‘prescribe rules governing the competitive service.’ That power is broad.” More, here.
And lastly: Two intelligence watchdogs exit ahead of Trump’s return to the White House. The inspector generals for the intelligence community, Thomas Monheim, and CIA Robin Ashton, are leaving their posts in the New Year. The resignations precede an anticipated purge of Biden administration officials in key positions. In 2020, President Donald Trump fired five inspector generals, including Monheim’s predecessor Michael Atkinson. Read more from Government Executive, here.
Jesus Christ is King
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