The D Brief: ‘Painful’ 8% shift; US, Russia talk in Turkey; Army’s medical-corps gap; SecNav nom testifies; And a bit more.
Air Force: 8-percent budget shift could be “painful.” When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the services to find things to cut to free up $50 billion in the Pentagon’s FY26 budget, he suggested they start with “so-called ‘climate change’ and other woke programs” and “excessive bureaucracy.” But those things do not consume remotely so much money, and the Air Force, at least, is talking about what it will mean to find cuts elsewhere.
Quote: “As you look at where the Air Force has gone, we’ve protected the core [missions], which is homeland defense, strategic deterrence, and power projection. So there’s not many places where we can go now for these things. So an 8 percent cut to the Air Force, it’s going to be painful. It’s going to look really, really bad,” said Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, director of Force Design, Integration and Wargaming at Air Force Futures. Defense One’s Audrey Decker has more, here.
Looking to cut costs? Look at big weapons programs, watchdog says. The Pentagon reduced waste, abuse, and mismanagement in most “high-risk” areas over the past two years but is losing ground in weapons acquisition, the Government Accountability Office said in the latest edition of its biennial “High-Risk Series”of reports.
GAO describes “cost growth, schedule delays, or both” in big-dollar programs such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s Block-4 upgrade—and the risk of more in the Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD, program, where, it said, the Air Force isn’t being fully transparent about cost projections. The report also notes delays for B-21 stealth bombers, Columbia-class submarines, and Ford-class aircraft carriers. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports, here.
A new DEI purge adds to DOD’s growing administrative burden, the Associated Press reports: “Building lethality in the military may be the buzzword for the new Trump administration, but busywork and paperwork have become the reality at the Pentagon, as service members and civilian workers are facing a broad mandate to purge all of the department’s social media sites and untangle confusing personnel reduction moves.”
A Wednesday memo from the department’s top public affairs official, AP reports, requires “all the military services to spend countless hours poring over years of website postings, photos, news articles and videos to remove any mentions that ‘promote diversity, equity and inclusion.’ If they can’t do that by March 5, they have been ordered to ‘temporarily remove from public display’ all content published during the Biden administration’s four years in office.”
Meanwhile “the military services also are scrambling to identify probationary workers the administration has targeted for firing under its campaign to slash the government workforce. They are also trying to figure out how many civilian workers have agreed to leave under the government-wide buyouts and whether they have been approved,” AP writes. Read on, here.
Today on the Hill, Trump’s Navy secretary nominee John Phelan is testifying before the Senate Armed Services committee in a hearing that began at 9:30 a.m. ET. Livestream what’s left, here.
If confirmed, what would Phelan change about the Navy? He would like to bolster recruiting numbers, he told lawmakers ahead of Thursday’s hearing. But exactly how he’d do so is a bit of a mystery. “I would advocate for bold recruitment and retention reforms, cutting bureaucratic red tape and improving quality of life initiatives to attract and retain top talent,” he said, adding without specifics or much of an explanation how this differs from the past, “A key component of this effort would be reinvigorating the Navy’s marketing strategy, leveraging both traditional and digital platforms to better connect with today’s generation.”
And like most everyone in the U.S. national security community, he wants an improved shipbuilding industry. And he said he’d do so by advocating “for a more agile, accountable and flexible shipbuilding strategy by streamlining procurement, enhancing budget flexibility, strengthening partnerships with the defense industrial base, and holding contractors accountable for cost and schedule overruns.” Phelan also vowed to “drive operational modernization by leveraging emerging technologies, enhancing warfighter training through AI and simulation, and fostering a culture that prioritizes adaptability and mission effectiveness over rigid compliance.”
And for the challenges posed by China, for which recently-fired Navy chief Adm. Lisa Franchetti had proposed a tech-driven strategy called “Project 33,” Phelan vowed to “prioritize accelerating the development of a lethal, modernized naval force capable of countering China’s challenges across the conflict spectrum,” and to “focus on fleet modernization, maintenance, and sustainment to ensure readiness for prolonged conflict, if necessary.” He also said he would review “logistics capabilities in support of maritime and joint operations, and [address] any gaps found.”
Related reading: “Navy’s ‘Risk Averse’ Culture Hampering Shipbuilding, Ship Repair, Says Panel to HASC,” U.S. Naval Institute News reported Wednesday after an industry-focused hearing in the House.
The Army is trying to meet its recruiting numbers this year, but its new program for overweight applicants is medically under-staffed, according to a new Defense Department inspector general report (PDF). “This occurred, in part, because [Army Training Center and Fort Jackson] leadership did not assign medical resources, such as registered dietitians, to the program until May 2024, 22 months after the program started, because of medical personnel shortages across the entire Army,” the report reads.
What’s more, “The Army has been recruiting applicants who far exceed its body fat standards,” Military-dot-com writes off the IG report. Whereas “The normal Army standard is up to 26% body fat for men and 36% for women,” the Army’s preparatory course allowed applicants to be as much as 8% over those standards. However, “the inspector general found that 14% of 1,100 trainees between February and May 2024 far exceeded even those expanded limits.”
Worth noting: “Trainees have been allowed to join at up to 19% above the standard—meaning some male recruits may have had body fat percentages as high as 45% and female recruits reaching 55%, levels that would likely be considered morbidly obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” Read on, here.
Additional reading: “Here’s why garrison soldiers across the Army are swapping their shoulder patches,” via Task and Purpose reporting Tuesday.
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 Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1991, President George H.W. Bush ended Operation Desert Storm, saying: “Kuwait is liberated. Iraq’s army is defeated. Our military objectives are met.”
Trump 2.0
President Trump’s Pentagon will kick out transgender service members, according to a Pentagon memo submitted Wednesday, Reuters reports.
His previous executive orders blocked transgender Americans from joining the military; this new memo orders the removal of those that are currently serving, stating “the Pentagon must create a procedure to identify troops who are transgender within 30 days and then within 30 days of that, must start to discharge them from the military, according to Reuters.
The memo leaves open the possibility of waivers for affected troops, “provided there is a compelling government interest in retaining the service member that directly supports warfighting capabilities.”
For what it’s worth, “There is no requirement for transgender troops to self identify and the Pentagon doesn’t have a precise number,” Reuters notes.
Relatedly, scientists have shown “there are people who are neither male or female,” as a federal judge recently told Trump’s Justice Department during a recent hearing over the admissibility of Trump’s executive order banning transgender troops from serving. That order argued that there are only two genders: male and female.
“It’s actually kind of a really important point because this executive order is premised on an assertion that’s not biologically correct,” Judge Reyes said last week. She went on, “There are anywhere near about 30 different intersex examples. So someone who does not have just xx or xy chromosome is not just male or female. They’re intersex. And there are over 30 potential different intersex examples. We’ve got genetic differences. We have people with xxx chromosomes. We have androgen insensitivity, xy genetically, that may have female external sex characteristics and internally have testes. There’s a five alpha reductase deficiency that causes changes in testosterone metabolism, xy that may have female external genitalia or ambiguous genitalia.”
“The point being, and I’m happy to have you guys brief this more if you want, but I’m telling you right now that there are people who are neither male or female,” she explained, adding, “So the premise of the executive order is just incorrect.”
Another thing we learned this week: Trump’s efforts to curb the civil rights of LGBT+ Americans seems to be his only issue that has significant support from voters at +16, as we noted in Wednesday’s newsletter.
Developing: The Trump administration has given federal agencies until March 13 to deliver their plans to dramatically slash their workforces through layoffs as the Trump administration moves to the second phase of its initiative to cut federal employees, Eric Katz of Government Executive reported Wednesday.
Related developments:
Trump’s rapprochement with Russia, cont.
Russian and White House officials met for six hours of talks today in Turkey, Reuters reports. “There is a reciprocal mood to work to restore intergovernmental ties and to gradually resolve the huge number of systemic and strategic problems that have built up in the world’s security architecture,” Russia’s autocratic leader Vladimir Putin said in televised remarks Thursday.
“Ukraine is not on the agenda,” a State Department official insisted. According to Reuters, “In an example of judicial cooperation, the office of Russia’s prosecutor general said Dmitry Koshelev, wanted by Moscow on suspicion of stealing $1.5 million from a courier at gunpoint in 2014, was being deported from the United States on Thursday.”
New: North Korea has reportedly sent more troops to Russia, but it’s unclear how many, Seoul’s spy agency told Yonhap news on Thursday.
Rewind: North Korea sent about 11,000 soldiers to Russia in 2024. Between 1,000 and 3,000 more were sent in 2025. And now “South Korean military officials said signs of North Korea dispatching more than 1,000 additional troops to Russia this year have been detected,” Yonhap writes.
Related reading:
Etc.
And lastly today: The Treasury Department just widened sanctions on Iranian drone production, adding six entities based in Hong Kong and China. “These entities operate as front companies and facilitate the purchase and shipment of key components for the benefit of PKGB and NSMI, which serve as key suppliers for Iran’s UAV and ballistic missile programs,” Treasury said in a statement Wednesday.
Think-tank reax: “Tehran has not ceased creating front companies to illicitly procure western components for Iranian drones,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Therefore, Washington should not cease to use every opportunity to put the spotlight on these activities and thereby increase the hassle factor for Iran’s illicit procurement networks.”
“Alone, these sanctions are insufficient,” he added. “But nested into a larger strategy that devalues these weapons on the battlefield and exposes Iran’s defense industrial base and jurisdictions enabling procurement on their behalf like China, Hong Kong, and Malaysia to more pressure, they stand a chance.” Behnam wrote more on the issue two years ago; you can find that, here.
Jesus Christ is King
