The D Brief: China’s ‘rehearsals’ for war; Gitmo update; DOD preps for DOGE; Court unfreezes foreign aid; And a bit more.

By admin On Feb 14, 2025

China is rehearsing for war, U.S. Indo-Pacific commander says. Navy Adm. Sam Paparo used sharper words than usual to describe recent patterns of activity on Thursday.

The Chinese government is “on a dangerous course” and its military’s “aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan right now are not exercises, as they call them. They are rehearsals,” Paparo said at the Honolulu Defense Forum. The Chinese actions—which just this month have included sending multiple spy balloons, naval vessels, and military planes around the island—are “rehearsals for the forced unification of Taiwan to the mainland.”

And China’s “increasingly complex multi-domain operations demonstrates clear intent and improving capability,” he said. Defense One’s Jennifer Hlad has more from Hawaii, here.

Update: Trump officials are sending migrants with no criminal record to Guantanamo, despite the president’s vow to detain “the worst” and “high-priority criminal aliens” there, CBS News reported Wednesday. While some “high-risk migrants have been detained in cells at Guantanamo’s maximum-security prison, the low-risk detainees have been placed in a barrack-like facility known as the Migrant Operations Center that includes rooms with restrooms,” CBS writes, citing government documents and two U.S. officials.

Homeland Security reax: “All of these individuals committed a crime by entering the United States illegally,” a department spokesperson told CBS. Federal law makes it a misdemeanor to enter the country without authorization, and a felony to do it if you were previously denied entry or deported.

ICYMI: The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the federal government for allegedly “thwart[ing] access to counsel for immigrant detainees” at Guantanamo, the organization announced Wednesday. “Immigrants held at Guantánamo have effectively disappeared into a black box and cannot contact or communicate with their family or attorneys,” the ACLU said.

Rewind: Trump announced two weeks ago that he wants as many as 30,000 immigrants held at Guantánamo. The ACLU reminded the judge that U.S. “officials recognize that it will be an immense undertaking and logistical nightmare to prepare the isolated Navy base for tens of thousands of immigrants,” citing CNN reporting from the same day Trump announced his 30,000-detainee goal for Gitmo.

By the way: Two top ICE officials were reassigned this week “amid frustration among Trump officials that officers aren’t ramping up arrests and deportations fast enough to meet the president’s goals,” the Washington Post’s Nick Miroff reported this week.

Quota: “Caleb Vitello, the acting director of ICE, told the agency’s top officials last month that each of ICE’s 25 field offices should be making 75 arrests per day for a total of 1,200 to 1,500 nationwide,” Miroff reported Tuesday.

“On average, the administration has been arresting 826 people a day,” the Guardian reported Wednesday, citing the latest public data from ICE, which only runs up to 31 January. “If Ice continues to arrest people at this rate, the administration is on track to arrest nearly 25,000 in its first 30 days, more than any other month in the last 11 years,” the British paper added.

America will need a lot more missile sensors if it’s going to build an “Iron Dome,” NORTHCOM commander says. But a key part of the sensor integration could be done in less than a year with proper funding, Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, who leads of U.S. Northern Command and NORAD, told lawmakers on Wednesday. Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports, here.

With IVAS takeover, Anduril looks to build out its human-machine “ecosystem.” Tuesday’s announcement that Microsoft would relinquish the Army augmented-reality-headset program puts the eight-year-old defense-tech firm in charge of one of the military’s most important soldier-enhancement programs, and poises it to deliver not just new drones but also a key means of controlling them and the data they gather.

The headset will help tie Anduril’s various systems together in one “ecosystem,” company founder Palmer Luckey told CNBC, adding in a press release, “The IVAS program represents the future of mission command, combining technology and human capability to give soldiers the edge they need on the battlefield.” Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has more.

Mishap watch:

The aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman and a merchant ship collided Wednesday night in the Mediterranean Sea near the northern entrance to the Suez Canal. There were no injuries or flooding on the carrier, the Navy said in a press release.
Here’s a bit of dramatic video of the Wednesday crash of a Navy EA-18G into San Diego Bay. Both aviators ejected safely.

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2005, YouTube was launched.

Trump 2.0

DOGE inbound to the Pentagon: The military services are preparing lists of weapons programs they want to cut—but lawmakers do not—ahead of Elon Musk’s young team of developers tasked with cutting costs in the federal government, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Personnel from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are expected in the building as soon as today.

“There are several systems that we know won’t survive on the modern battlefield,” Army spokesman Col. Dave Butler said. The Army’s list reportedly includes “outdated drones and vehicles that have been produced in surplus.”

“The U.S. Navy is proposing cuts to its frigates and littoral combat ships,” according to the Journal. But the Air Force is staying tight-lipped so far. Read more, here.

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth is travelling in Europe with far-right activist Jack Posobiec, the Washington Post reported Thursday. “One [U.S. defense] official said the potential involvement of Posobiec, a Trump booster who is known for peddling conspiracy theories and trolling political adversaries online, has raised questions within the Pentagon about Hegseth’s judgment and what he aimed to communicate to U.S. allies if he were to allow a polarizing political figure to be by his side,” the Post’s Dan Lamothe reports.

Posobiec is a U.S. podcaster who has been known for boosting Russian disinformation on his social media feeds. “One of them, a website called SouthFront that U.S. Treasury sanctioned in 2021 and said ‘receives taskings from the FSB,’ regularly published disinformation on the war in Ukraine,” researcher Hannah Gais of the Southern Poverty Law Center noted Thursday. “For a decade, SouthFront has promoted pro-Russian narratives about the war, provided support for Russia’s ‘denazification’ narrative to justify the incursion on Ukraine, as well as boosted Russian nationalist channels,” she added.

One year ago: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely,” Posobiec said in a speech at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. “We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.” Read more, here.

A judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze U.S. foreign aid. “The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by two health organizations that receive U.S. funding for overseas programs,” Reuters reports; those organizations are the Global Health Council and the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition.

According to the judge’s 15-page ruling, the White House did not give “any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid, which set off a shock wave and upended reliance interests for thousands of agreements with businesses, nonprofits, and organizations around the country, was a rational precursor to reviewing programs.” The Associated Press reports “The funding cutoff has left contractors, farmers and suppliers in the U.S. and around the world without hundreds of millions of dollars in pay for work already done and forced wide scale layoffs among those enterprises.”

A second judge on Thursday extended his block on the Trump administration’s “plans to pull all but a fraction of USAID staffers off the job worldwide,” AP writes. “The judge said he plans to issue a written ruling in the coming days on whether the pause will continue.”

Developing: Three federal judges will decide later today if Musk’s young developers can access the Treasury Department payment systems “and potentially sensitive data at U.S. health, consumer protection, labor and education agencies,” Reuters reports.

Case 1: “In Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas will consider a request by Democratic state attorneys general to extend a temporary block on DOGE that was put in place on Saturday, which prevented Musk’s team from accessing Treasury systems responsible for trillions of dollars of payments.”

Case 2: “In Washington, U.S. District Judge John Bates will consider a request by unions to prevent the DOGE team from accessing sensitive records at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Labor Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”

Case 3: “At a third hearing on Friday, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss in Washington will consider a request by the University of California Student Association to extend a temporary block on DOGE from accessing systems at the Department of Education, which the students said would violate privacy and administrative procedure laws.” Read more, here.

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