The D Brief: SecDef seeks $8B shift; Trump’s Ukraine plans, decried; Quantum chip breakthrough?; Warship maintenance goals; And a bit more.
SecDef’s funding switch
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth has directed Pentagon officials to redirect about $50 billion—about 8% of the expected total of roughly $850 billion—in the Biden administration’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports.
The funds are to come, in part, from “so-called ‘climate change’ and other woke programs” and “excessive bureaucracy,” and go toward Trump-administration priorities such as building an “Iron Dome” for the U.S., ending diversity-related programs, and improving security along the Mexican border, according to a statement Wednesday evening from acting deputy defense secretary Robert Salesses.
That statement followed a Tuesday memo from Hegseth, which the Washington Post reported called for “cuts,” but which might be similar budget rearrangements, over the next five years. The memo listed 17 priority areas, including the ones in Salesses’ statement plus such things as submarines, one-way attack drones and other munitions, and new ICBMs and nuclear bombers and subs. The memo also called the Indo-Pacific Command region a budget priority.
Fine print: Certain efforts are exempt from cuts, the memo said, such as fighting international criminal organizations and preparing for a Pentagon audit. Read on, here.
Rewind: The fiscal 2025 Defense Authorization Act, passed in December, adhered to the Biden administration’s topline request of $849.9 billion for the Pentagon. But negotiations on the appropriations bill are still ongoing, more than five months into the fiscal year.
Worth noting: While it’s common for new administrations to adjust the budget proposals of their predecessors, an 8-percent shift is more than usual, Decker reports. Read on, here.
For what it’s worth, here’s Nebraska GOP Rep. Don Bacon, a member of the House Armed Services Committee and a retired Air Force intelligence officer, speaking about potential defense spending cuts on Friday in Honolulu: “We’re spending 2.9% of our GDP on defense. It’s inadequate. That’s the lowest we’ve been spending since 1940. It’s not enough to modernize the three legs of our [nuclear] triad, [or produce] fifth- and sixth-generation fighters. It is embarrassing that we’re producing 1.2 attack submarines a year. That’s unacceptable. If I’m President, or SecDef, or in the HASC [which he is], we’ve gotta fix that. It’s not adequate in deterring China. We just gotta be candid about it. The level we’re spending and what we’re putting out in capabilities are not good.”
A second opinion: “President Trump should seek to increase defense spending by 3 to 5 percent above inflation each year and ensure that any such increase amounts to at least a 0.1 percent GDP increase each year,” said Brad Bowman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, based in Washington. “If the Trump administration does not request increased funding for defense, Congress should embrace its Article 1 constitutional authorities and responsibilities and ensure our military has the resources necessary to defend our country,” he wrote on social media Wednesday evening.
By the way: Hegseth “is considering firing a slate of military generals and flag officers as early as this week,” nearly a half-dozen U.S. officials told NBC News on Wednesday.
“Most of those on the list have been closely associated with former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who served all four years of the Biden administration, have worked on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives or have voiced opinions that Trump’s allies viewed as politically out of line with his agenda, the officials said.” There’s not much more to know about the development yet; but you can read more at ABC News.
Related reading: “Defense officials fear impending Pentagon firings could break law and hurt military readiness,” CNN reported Wednesday.
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston and Jennifer Hlad. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1943, Hollywood movie studio executives agreed to let the federal government’s Office of War Information to censor movies.
Uproar in Europe
A former top general in NATO slammed the Trump administration’s approach to Ukraine. In the latest episode of the BBC’s “Ukrainecast,” posted Tuesday, a former deputy Supreme Allied Commander, British Gen. Richard Shirreff, talked about the administration’s recent efforts to forge some sort of end to Russia’s Ukraine invasion—without anyone from Kyiv at the negotiating table.
“A failure to understand what Russia is about.” Shirreff said recent public statements in the U.S. and Europe by President Trump, SecDef Hegseth, State Secretary Marco Rubio, and Vice President JD Vance display no recognition that “what Russia is about is removing Ukraine from the map as a sovereign state, about incorporating Ukraine, either physically annexing it in terms of the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, and installing a puppet government in Kiev, so Ukraine becomes a sort of client state rather like Belarus. Because that’s deep in the Russian DNA. And I think any American negotiator who doesn’t understand that and thinks there can be a durable, lasting solution with a sovereign Ukraine, and that Russia will accept that, is deluding themselves,” the general said.
Shirreff continued: “What does this all mean for Europe later and the rest of the Western alliance? Well, what it means after last week’s pronouncements in Munich, firstly Trump’s announcement that he’d had the 90-minute call with Putin, that he was setting up peace talks over the heads of the Ukrainian government, and then we heard Hegseth and Vance’s pretty strident words. What this means is the Pax Americana is finished, that America has effectively abdicated its leadership of the free world because with leadership comes the responsibilities…”
In terms of a precedent for Trump seeking a Ukraine peace deal without Ukraine, consider this, said Shirreff: “Trump did the deal with the Taliban in 2020, over the head of the Afghan government, which resulted in the complete collapse of the NATO mission in August 2022.”
Host: “So maybe he’s learned from that?”
Shirreff: “I think it’s highly unlikely. And the second point I’d make is that I don’t believe Trump has any understanding of the real nature of Russia. And he’s kidding himself if he believes that he, the master of the deal, can sort this one out. The only way, the only way there will be peace long term, in Ukraine, in Europe and against a revanchist Russia determined to rebuild another Russian empire is through a strong NATO deterrent presence from the Baltic to the Black Sea, incorporating Ukraine as a NATO member, which requires every NATO member, America included, to lean in and as a start, put together a strategy to support the Ukrainians in defeating Russia, because that’s the only way Russia is going to be stopped. Anything less than that, which is what we’re seeing now in spade loads, is merely starting the unravelling of European security, which could so easily end in catastrophe…
The outlook for Ukraine is now exceedingly dismal, said the general. “If Russia gets a bloody nose and finally realises it is not going to succeed, then there is a possibility of a durable and lasting peace. But as I said earlier, only if Ukraine is properly backed up by a strong NATO, with America 100% behind it, and as we’ve heard, that is not going to happen.”
Recall that Trump’s officials offered Ukraine a bold and apparently one-sided plan that would have given the U.S. access to half of the revenue from extracting Ukraine’s minerals “in perpetuity.” Trump suggested that could net as much as $500 billion, though it’s unclear how he arrived at that figure, which economist Paul Krugman said “seems like a wildly exaggerated sum.”
Ukraine’s President Volodymir Zelenskyy rejected the plan. “Some observers have compared the Trump proposal to the reparations the victorious allies demanded from Germany after World War I,” Krugman wrote this week.
“Trump’s vision reminds me more of old-fashioned imperialism, in which powerful nations tried to seize the wealth of less-powerful nations just because they could,” said Krugman. “This doesn’t look to me like Weimar Germany in the 1920s; it looks like the Belgian Congo in the late 19th century, a personal possession of King Leopold which he brutally exploited for its rubber and ivory.”
“Trying to carry out that kind of exploitation in the 21st century, in a nation that, once again, has been fighting for our freedom, is just depraved,” Krugman wrote, and added, “it seems almost inappropriate to point out that it’s also deeply stupid.” That’s because it seems highly unlikely the U.S. could ever actually access those magical funds that for Trump add up to $500 billion. “If Ukraine were to lose, and Putin takes over, he wouldn’t honor the deal,” Krugman predicted. “If Ukraine were to survive, its populace would be even more enraged than the Germans after World War I, and they wouldn’t pay either,” he added.
But perhaps more notably, “The price of this depravity would be to mark America irrevocably as a rogue nation, one nobody will want to deal with and nobody will trust to honor its promises,” said Krugman. Read more at Substack.
Trump lashed out at Zelenskyy again on Wednesday, describing him on social media as “A Dictator without Elections” who had “better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”
Several European leaders rushed to Zelenskyy’s defense, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said “it is simply wrong and dangerous to deny President Zelenskyy his democratic legitimacy.” He added, “The fact that regular elections cannot be held in the middle of a war is in line with the requirements of the Ukrainian constitution and electoral laws. No one should claim otherwise.” British and Swedish leaders spoke similarly in Zelenskyy’s defense on Wednesday.
Germany’s top diplomat said, “If you look at the real world instead of just firing off a tweet, then you know who in Europe has to live in the conditions of a dictatorship: people in Russia, people in Belarus,” said Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.
Worth noting: European VIPs inbound to WH. French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer are scheduled to visit Trump at the White House early next week to discuss Ukraine and Russia.
Even Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence objected to Trump, asserting in a clarification Wednesday on social media, “Mr President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives.”
Trump’s former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley objected to Trump as well, writing on social media Wednesday that Trump said “Exactly what Putin wants” when he alleged Zelenskyy started the Ukraine invasion, which Haley called, “classic Russian talking points.”
Related reading:
Industry
Microsoft’s quantum-chip breakthrough? Researchers at Microsoft, with support from DARPA, say they’ve designed a quantum computer chip that could lead to artificial-intelligence tools that use far fewer computer resources and energy, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Wednesday.
The gist: Microsoft says it has developed a new way to check the state of a quantum computation without disrupting the delicate information underlying it. This technique, called interferometric single-shot parity measurement, was tested using a special combination of indium arsenide and aluminum, or InAs–Al. They’ve used that to create a chip, the Majorana 1, which Microsoft described as “the world’s first Quantum Processing Unit, QPU, powered by a topological core, designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip.”
If confirmed, the breakthrough would be especially useful for a type of quantum computing called topological quantum computation, which is designed to be more stable and resistant to errors. Quantum chips could have big implications for artificial intelligence as they allow for the processing of very large amounts of data in parallel, taking far less time and using fewer computer resources than traditional methods, Tucker writes. Continue reading, here.
And lastly: Stop treating shipyards like the “corner garage,” says former Navy acquisitions chief. If the Navy is to reach its goal of having 80% of its surface warships deployable at any given time, it will need better plan for ship repairs—and make them shorter and more frequent, said Nikolas Guertin, now a senior research fellow at the Virginia Tech National Security Institute. “We don’t plan out availabilities for multiple years at a time. We pat ourselves in the back if we put out a contract 120 days in advance,” Guertin said during a Hudson Institute event on Wednesday.
Improving maintenance systems was a focus of the previous chief of naval operations, Adm. Mike Gilday, and remains so to current CNO Adm. Lisa Franchetti. In January, the Navy released a new enterprise strategy that aims to get ships into maintenance every six years, rather than the current 10 to 12, with quicker turnaround times. Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports, here.
See also: “This robot-ship startup wants to bet ‘billions’ on a new kind of shipyard,” reports Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams.
Jesus Christ is King
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