The D Brief: Hegseth’s town hall; Trump: annex Canada; Purge reaches academies, schools; Full-year CR?; And a bit more.
Autocracies like China and Russia have an advantage over the United States, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Friday in his first Pentagon town hall. The leaders of those tightly-controlled countries can lay plans that stretch far into the future without “the pesky people problem of voting and ballots,” Hegseth said.
China and Russia “can plan 15, 20 years and then drive that plan without consequence to their own population, which does have strategic advantages,” he said. “I think you’re going to see a defense strategy coming out of our office that tries to look that far down the line…and rapidly field and look at systems that are not about congressional districts or budget line items.”
American caveat: Congress controls spending, which means executing Hegseth’s vision will require persuading lawmakers to buy into it.
Some history: The backbone of modern defense resource allocation is the Program Objective Memorandum, or POM, part of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports. Instead of a multi-decade grand strategy, the POM operates on a rolling five-year window, aligning budgets with the National Defense Strategy and shifting priorities to match emerging threats. The National Defense Strategy, which often refers to longer-term time horizons and goals, is generally updated every four years.
Individual services often plan much farther into the future. For example, the Army’s 2021 modernization strategy looks to a 2035 endstate, while the chief of naval operations’ recent NAVPLAN envisions the fleet of 2045.
In other ways, Hegseth echoed Biden-administration arguments and efforts, noting how the battlefields of Ukraine have shown the value of inexpensive, quickly iterated weapons. He vowed to expand support for offices like the Defense Innovation Unit that focus on “experimentally, rapidly fielding new technologies and then finding a way to make sure they’re funded so that they can be scaled and tested, even in real time out with combatant commands, as opposed to an 18-month testing process to move things.”
Hegseth hinted that he does not expect large defense-spending increases. Instead, he said, his office will look across the department to find “systems, hierarchies, layers” that can be trimmed to cut red tape and costs. Read more, here.
The livestream of the town hall ended abruptly as audience Q&A began, which a DOD spokesperson said was not an accident or technical glitch. “That was predetermined,” the spokesperson told Defense News. But after they and other outlets noted that Hegseth had vowed at the beginning of the broadcast to “be transparent with you,” his press office released a transcript and video of the entire event.
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Bradley Peniston and Ben Watson. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1962, captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel was exchanged for captured American U2 spy-plane pilot Gary Powers and Yale University doctoral student Frederic Pryor.
SecDef’s Euro trip
Hegseth is traveling to Europe this week for talks with officials in Germany, Belgium, and Poland. According to his press team, Hegseth plans to “emphasize the importance of strengthening alliances, increasing defense readiness, and ensuring that American warfighters remain the most lethal force in the world by demonstrating peace through strength.”
He’ll also visit NATO headquarters for his first meeting with the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, formed under Biden, in Brussels. You may recall Trump campaigned on the promise to end Russia’s nearly three-year-long Ukraine invasion during his first day in office. Trump and his aides eventually learned that was not possible, so they’ve stopped saying such things. Instead, Hegseth said he would use the trip to “reiterate President Trump’s commitment for a diplomatic end to the war in Ukraine as quickly as possible.”
Opinion: Trump should strengthen Ukraine’s position in negotiations by continuing to arm the beleaguered country and adding sanctions on Moscow, argue Mark Montgomery and John Hardie of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in an op-ed for Defense One.
Prep for Hegseth’s trip by reading a global public-opinion poll from the European Council on Foreign Relations. “A new survey for ECFR reveals people in many countries around the world are upbeat about the second Trump presidency,” the group wrote in a summary. “Many think Trump will not just be good for America but that he will bring peace or reduce tensions in Ukraine, the Middle East and US-China relations. In contrast, US allies in Europe and South Korea are notably pessimistic about the incoming president—suggesting a further weakening of the geopolitical ‘West’.” More, here.
Hegseth’s press team evicted more traditional news outlets at the Pentagon to make room for more than a half dozen conservative outlets, according to a memo released Friday by John Ullyot, acting assistant to Hegseth.
Out: The New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, CNN, Politico, The Hill, The War Zone, and NPR.
In: The New York Post, Washington Examiner, One America News, Newsmax, HuffPo, The Free Press, The Daily Caller, and Breitbart audio services.
Second opinion: “Instead of reconsidering its approach after good faith outreach this week from more than 20 news organizations, the Defense Department appears to be doubling down on an unreasonable policy toward news outlets that have covered the U.S. military for decades,” the Pentagon Press Association said in a statement Friday.
As far as we can tell, Hegseth could have given HuffPost, The Free Press and The Daily Caller their own desks at the Pentagon without kicking anyone else out. There’s plenty of space. TV and radio services, however, present more of a challenge.
Related reading: “Trump’s Blueprint for Bending the Media Has Nixon Written All Over It,” Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times reported Sunday.
Trump says he wants to disrupt the military service academies, where he claimed on social media Monday that he has “ordered the immediate dismissal of the Board of Visitors for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard.” The president alleged those academies “have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years,” and that “by appointing new individuals to these Boards” he can “make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”
It’s not immediately clear whether Trump aims to purge just the boards’ six presidential appointees or also the eight congressionally appointed members. The order follows Biden’s own unprecedented dismissal in September 2021 of the 18 board members appointed by Trump.
Politico: Trump’s government-wide DEI purge “has begun to extend to the nation’s service academies, where Republican lawmakers have long complained that so-called ‘woke’ literature is seeping into the curriculum.” And: “The Washington Post reported on Friday that the U.S. Defense Department had begun restricting access to some books in its school systems.” More, here.
Developing on Capitol Hill: CR for the rest of the FY? Lawmakers are considering “just keeping the government operating on a continuing resolution for the remainder of the fiscal year,” which for the Pentagon “has never happened,” CQ Roll Call reported Monday morning.
It could be part of yet another upcoming short-term spending plan out of a closely-divided congress. The current CR being drafted would add $175 billion for border security, $17 billion for the Coast Guard, and $150 billion for generic defense, according to the GOP-led Senate Budget Committee.
Immediate forecast: A short-term CR appears to be an easier challenge than regular fiscal 2025 spending bills. Read more in the CQ Defense newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
Trump’s imperial tilt, cont.
The president insists he’d like to annex at least one sovereign country during his second term, and it’s starting to look like he prefers America’s treaty ally Canada. The president spoke with Fox personality Bret Baier in a seven-minute interview recorded Saturday at Mar-a-Lago and which aired just before the Super Bowl.
Baier asked if Trump’s desire for Canada to become the 51st state of the U.S. is “a real thing,” as Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reportedly told a private meeting of business professionals last week. The U.S. president replied, “Yeah, it is. I think Canada would be much better off being a 51st state because we lose $250 billion a year with Canada and I’m not gonna let that happen,” he said. “It’s too much. Why are we paying $200 billion a year, essentially, in subsidies to Canada? Now if they’re a 51st state, I don’t mind doing it,” he said.
Fact check: Trump is wrong about those alleged subsidies to Canada. It’s not $250 billion; not even close. “The U.S. trade deficit in goods with Canada was about $63 billion in 2024,” PolitiFact reports, and clarifies, “The overall trade deficit with Canada falls to about $41 billion when factoring in a U.S. surplus in services.”
And for the record, “A trade deficit is not a subsidy,” PolitiFact notes. “Rather, the money going from the U.S. to Canada is to buy goods and services with a monetary value,” they add.
Trump also claimed Elon Musk will find “find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse” at the Pentagon. Reuters notes that Musk’s aides “have sought access to confidential information in computer systems at various government agencies” in an effort critics say is “likely illegal, risk[s] exposing classified information,” and appears aimed at “gutting entire agencies without congressional approval.”
Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said the U.S. shipbuilding industry could be next on Musk’s list. “Everything there seems to cost too much, take too long and deliver too little,” Waltz told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“We do need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process,” Waltz said—while failing to address the fact that, as Reuters notes, “Musk’s companies also hold major contracts with the Pentagon, which has raised significant conflict of interest concerns.”
For your ears only: We explored what’s ailing the U.S. Navy shipbuilding industry, as well as America’s civilian shipbuilding industry, in a recent podcast series in late November. You can find those here and here, respectively.
Related reading:
Jesus Christ is King
