The D Brief: Crash update; May or June for next budget?; Navy’s nimble combat tuneups; China’s big new military HQ; And a bit more.

By admin On Jan 31, 2025

DC helo collision update: Investigators are beginning to assess the collision of a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and a passenger aircraft near Reagan National Airport on Wednesday evening. All 67 passengers and crew perished in the country’s deadliest civilian aviation disaster in decades. More than 40 bodies have been retrieved from the Potomac River so far, authorities said Friday.

“The cause of the collision is unclear,” the Associated Press reports. And the National Transportation Safety Board “said it was too soon to speculate and pledged to release a preliminary report within 30 days,” AP writes.

That didn’t stop President Donald Trump from blaming the Army pilots, declaring on social media Friday morning, “The Blackhawk helicopter was flying too high, by a lot. It was far above the 200 foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???” Trump wrote in a post on his own social media platform.

The president also blamed Democrats and diversity policies in remarks that the New York Times called “misleading.” Here’s a transcript of his Thursday exchange with reporters, courtesy of AP:

Q: “Are you saying this crash was somehow caused as the result of diversity hiring? And what evidence have you seen to support these claims?”

TRUMP: “It just could have been. We have a high standard. We’ve had a much higher standard than anybody else. And there are things where you have to go by brainpower. You have to go by psychological quality, and psychological quality is a very important element of it. These are various, very powerful tests that we put to use. And they were terminated by Biden. And Biden went by a standard that seeks the exact opposite. So we don’t know. But we do know that you had two planes at the same level. You had a helicopter and a plane. That shouldn’t have happened. And, we’ll see. We’re going to look into that, and we’re going to see. But certainly for an air traffic controller, we want the brightest, the smartest, the sharpest. We want somebody that’s psychologically superior. And that’s what we’re going to have.”

Q: “I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash.”

TRUMP: “Because I have common sense. OK? And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t. We want brilliant people doing this. This is a major chess game at the highest level. When you have 60 planes coming in during a short period of time, and they’re all coming in different directions, and you’re dealing with very high-level computer, computer work and very complex computers.”

Trump even published a memo Thursday blaming the crash on former Presidents Biden, Obama, and diversity hiring programs. Without evidence, he alleged “problematic and likely illegal decisions during the Obama and Biden Administrations that minimized merit and competence in the Federal Aviation Administration.”Related:

Worth noting: Staffing at Ronald Reagan National Airport’s air traffic control tower was “not normal” during the time of the accident, with one controller performing work normally handled by two controllers, the New York Times reported Thursday, citing an internal preliminary Federal Aviation Administration safety report. “The tower there was nearly a third below targeted staff levels, with 19 fully certified controllers as of September 2023, according to the most recent Air Traffic Controller Workforce Plan, an annual report to Congress that contains target and actual staffing levels. The targets set by the F.A.A. and the controllers’ union call for 30,” the Times reported. More, here.

Historian reax: “There is a larger story than that of Trump’s attempt to blame Democrats for a disaster that happened on his watch,” writes Boston College’s Heather Cox Richardson. “His administration seems to be trying to replace the government Americans have created through their representatives over centuries to promote the interests of all Americans with a group of white men who can operate as they see best, without restraint.”

Related reading:

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 1945, the Nazis forcibly marched 3,000 mostly Jewish prisoners from their Stutthof concentration camp and eventually into the Baltic Sea, where they were executed with machine guns.

Around the services

2026 budget submission in May or June? USNI News: The Navy’s top budget officer says he expects the Trump administration to send the Pentagon’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal to Congress in May or June. Vice Adm. John Skillman, deputy chief of naval operations for integration of capabilities and resources, spoke at the WEST conference in San Diego.

Related reading:

Some of the targets of Hegseth’s new anti-DEI task force don’t actually exist. The SecDef’s Wednesday memo assigns five goals to the “Restoring America’s Fighting Force Task Force,” starting with ensuring that the department does “not consider sex, race, or ethnicity when considering individuals for promotion, command, or special duty.”

DOD has no policies that determine promotion or selection for a job based on anything other than merit. Indeed, under the first Trump administration’s Defense Secretary Mark Esper, selection boards stopped receiving photos in promotion packets so they couldn’t take into account a service member’s physical appearance when making advancement decisions.

Nor are there quotas. Another target is the “elimination of quotas, objectives and goals” for sex, race, or ethnicity in organizational composition, academic admission, or career fields. “Mark that one done as well,” writes Defense One’s Meghann Myers. “While the department has striven to attract a wider pool of applicants to military service in the post-segregation era, there are no quotas regarding any demographic, whether in recruiting, leadership, or otherwise.” More, here.

Trump 2.0

Ranking member Rep. Connolly’s top secret warning. The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, submitted a letter on Thursday (PDF) to White House counsel David Warrington conveying his “grave concern regarding President Trump’s recent action that would endanger our national security by allowing the White House Counsel to grant Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearances to individuals without appropriate vetting.”

“This extraordinary and unprecedented action sidesteps law enforcement, the Department of Defense, and the Intelligence Community without regard to insider threats or other national security threats,” Connolly said. And so Connolly has requested three things from Warrington, including “Any records or documents of current or prospective [White House] employees with foreign contacts, conflicts of interest, history of financial impropriety, or have attempted the violent overthrow of the US government.”

Gabbard and Patel hearings display diverging views of reality, history along partisan lines. Senate confirmation hearings Thursday for two top intelligence jobs—Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Kash Patel to lead the FBI—revealed a growing gap between Trump administration nominees and Democratic lawmakers, not just in terms of policy, but in perceptions of reality. Arguments about facts and history crowded out discussion of how the United States intelligence community should adapt to the threats posed by adversaries. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has examples, here.

See also: “Trump Administration Shocks Senior F.B.I. Ranks by Moving to Replace Them,” via the New York Times, which writes, “A handful of senior F.B.I. employees have been told to resign in a matter of days or be fired, as the Trump administration moves to shake up the agency’s upper ranks, according to people familiar with the discussions.” The FBI has just one political appointee—the director—which makes this hands-on reshuffle unusual. Read on, here.

Trump’s ‘Iron Dome for America’ plan would put weapons in space, at a big cost. His Tuesday executive order to create a “next-generation missile defense shield” that can “defend its citizens and critical infrastructure against—any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland” is technically and budgetarily difficult at best, experts said. Tucker reports, here.

SecState Rubio uses Putin-like annexation logic to argue Greenland should belong to the U.S. rather than Denmark, or as an independent nation. In a podcast recording Thursday with SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that a hypothetical Chinese military attack on Greenland would require Denmark to ask for U.S. help. And so, America’s top diplomat alleged, the U.S. should acquire Greenland now to “have more control over what happens there.”

“Denmark can’t stop them. They would rely on the United States to do so,” Rubio said. “And so [Trump’s] point is, if the United States is on the hook to provide as we are now, we have a defense agreement with them to protect Greenland, if it comes under assault, if we’re already on the hook for having to do that, then we might as well have more control over what happens there.”

“This is not a joke,” Rubio insisted to the former Fox TV host. “This is not about acquiring land for the purpose of acquiring land. This is in our national interest…President Trump’s put out there what he intends to do, which is to purchase it,” Rubio said. The Hill has more.

Related reading:

Leftover links this week

China is building a new military command center that’s “10 times the size of the Pentagon,” the Financial Times reports behind a paywall.

“DeepSeek’s Chatbot Works Like Its U.S. Rivals—Until You Ask About Tiananmen,” the Wall Street Journal’s technology correspondent Joanna Stern reports;
“Norway Seizes Russian-Crewed Ship Suspected of Cutting an Undersea Cable,” the New York Times reported Friday from Oslo and London;
Video: “Russia’s New Naval Base Threatens to Drag Georgia Into Ukraine War,” via WSJ;
“North Korean Troops No Longer Seen on Front Lines Fighting Ukraine,” the Times reported Thursday;
“Swedish PM says shooting of anti-Islam campaigner may be linked to foreign power,” Reuters reported Thursday from Stockholm;
And “Gaza Checkpoint to Be Staffed by U.S. Special Forces Veterans Hired by Private Security Firm,” Reuters reported separately on Thursday.

That’s it for us this week, which felt particularly long—but we’re getting used to the new administration’s pace right out the gate. Thanks for reading. And you can catch us again on Monday!

Defense One