The D Brief: New CJCS; Contracts, cancelled; Europe pledges Ukraine aid; Report: China avows Volt Typhoon; And a bit more.
After a two-month vacancy, President Trump has secured his preferred top military advisor. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan Caine was confirmed as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a 60-25 late-night Senate vote. Caine has extensive F-16 piloting experience, and he served as a counterterrorism advisor under President George W. Bush as well as a special operations commander in Iraq after Bush’s 2003 invasion.
The president fired Caine’s predecessor, Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr., in February as part of Trump’s crusade against diversity. “Trump appointees have said diversity policies by the Biden administration had resulted in promoting unqualified officers,” the Wall Street Journal reports. But despite Caine’s experience, “he does not meet prerequisites for the [Joint Chiefs] job set out in a 1986 law, such as being a combatant commander or service chief,” the Associated Press reminds readers. As a result, Trump had to submit a waiver to congress claiming “such action is necessary in the national interest.”
“The Senate’s lopsided 60-25 vote approving General Caine, who is retired, was expected,” the New York Times reports. This is because “the majority of [Democrats] appeared to view him as perhaps the best possible option, given the circumstances.”
New: As part of its cost-cutting efforts, the Pentagon just terminated more than $5 billion in “non-essential” IT contracts with Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton and others, the Defense Department announced (PDF) Thursday.
“The contracts appeared to be wide-ranging cuts to consulting services for the Navy, the Air Force, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Defense Health Agency,” Reuters reports.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth now wants the Pentagon’s rattled and shrinking civilian workforce to handle the IT work, he instructed in a memo. The job will fall to the Defense Information Systems Agency, which has in the past been targeted for elimination due to growing budget costs, and whose largely civilian—and very technical—workforce could conflict with Hegseth’s efforts to shrink his department.
Hegseth also said he cancelled “another set of 11 contracts across DoD components for consulting services that support Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Climate, Covid-19 response, and non-essential activities.” According to Hegseth, “these terminations represent $5.1 billion in wasteful spending,” he said in his memo.
Related:
Hegseth declined to attend today’s meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which was co-hosted by the UK and Germany in Brussels. Trump’s Pentagon chief instead chose to watch virtually.
Background: “U.S. leadership of the contact group had provided a lifeline of arms and materiel for Ukraine’s armed forces, but…[t]he Trump administration has not announced any new aid for Ukraine since Inauguration Day, even though roughly $3.85 billion remains untapped, according to the Pentagon,” the New York Times reports.
The Brits announced about $580 million in more military aid to Ukraine, Reuters reported from Brussels. “The funding will provide repairs and maintenance to vehicles and equipment as well as radar systems, anti-tank mines and hundreds of thousands of drones,” the wire service writes.
And Ukraine’s European allies together pledged more than $20 billion in military aid on Friday, the Associated Press reports from Belgium. For what it’s worth, “NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said last week that Ukraine’s backers have provided around $21 billion so far in the first three months of this year,” and “European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Friday that more than $26 billion have been committed,” AP writes.
Occupation watch: “Children throughout occupied Ukraine are taking part in the ‘Zarnitsa 2.0’ military-patriotic game—a revived Soviet-era war game aimed at training youth in basic military skills in eventual preparation for service in the Russian military,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War reported Thursday. “‘Zarnitsa 2.0’ is part of a wider Russian ecosystem operating throughout occupied Ukraine with the explicit purpose of militarizing Ukrainian children, indoctrinating them against their Ukrainian identities, and training them to fight for the Russian military against their fellow Ukrainians,” ISW writes.
New: Trump’s Ukraine envoy Steve Witkoff “traveled to Russia on Friday and is expected to meet President Vladimir Putin” ahead of a possible meeting with Trump sometime later, Axios reports.
Related reading: “Plunge in Oil Prices Threatens Russia’s Vast Spending on Ukraine War,” the New York Times reported Thursday from Berlin.
The U.S. military just fired its Greenland base commander just hours after Military-dot-com reported she had recently “sent out an email to the base distancing it from [Vice President JD] Vance’s criticism of Denmark and its oversight of the territory” during his shortened visit on March 28.
Pentagon spox: “Actions to undermine the chain of command or to subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated at the Department of Defense,” SecDef Hegseth’s assistant Sean Parnell said on social media.
Rewind: During his visit on March 28, Vance was joined by second lady Usha Vance, as well as Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah. The five Americans “visited the Pituffick Space Base, the northernmost U.S. military installation, in Greenland” on a visit that had to be “scaled back after an uproar among Greenlanders and Danges who were not consulted about the original itinerary,” CBS News reported at the time.
“While there, the vice president blasted Denmark for its handling of the island, saying the U.S. base in Greenland is less secure than it was decades ago because of Denmark’s stewardship,” according to CBS. The next day, Trump told NBC News, “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100 percent,” and added he would not rule out the use of military force.
Reaction: “Col. Susan Meyers, the commander of the 821st Space Base Group who also oversees the Pentagon’s northernmost military base, sent a March 31 message to all personnel at Pituffik seemingly aimed at generating unity among the airmen and Guardians, as well as the Canadians, Danes and Greenlanders who work there, following Vance’s appearance,” Thomas Novelly of Military.com reported Thursday.
In her email, Meyers said she’d “spent the weekend thinking about [Vance]’s visit—the actions taken, the words spoken, and how it must have affected each of you. I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the U.S. administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base,” Meyers wrote.
Space Force reax: “Commanders are expected to adhere to the highest standards of conduct, especially as it relates to remaining nonpartisan in the performance of their duties,” unnamed service officials said in a statement linked to Parnell’s social media post.
Additional reading:
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 with Bradley Peniston with Lauren C. Williams. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2001, China released the detained crew of a U.S. Navy EP-3E ARIES II signals intelligence aircraft that had been forced to land in Hainan, China after a collision with a J-8 interceptor aircraft over the South China Sea 10 days earlier.
Trump 2.0
Supreme Court rebukes Trump administration, orders efforts to return deported migrant. Ten days after U.S. officials blamed the transport of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to prison in El Salvador on “administrative error,” SCOTUS issued an unsigned but apparently unanimously supported order seeking his return. “To this day,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “the government has cited no basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison. Nor could it.” (NYT, Reuters)
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Chinese President Xi Jinping just fired his army’s second-highest-ranking officer in what the Financial Times described Thursday as “the most dramatic act of his military anti-corruption campaign and first firing of a general in that role in six decades.”
China admitted to hacking U.S. infrastructure in a secret December meeting. At a Geneva summit with outgoing Biden-administration officials, a Chinese official reportedly acknowledged “that Beijing was behind…years of intrusions into computer networks at U.S. ports, water utilities, airports and other targets,” the WSJ reported on Thursday.
The admission “startled American officials used to hearing their Chinese counterparts blame the campaign, which security researchers have dubbed Volt Typhoon, on a criminal outfit, or accuse the U.S. of having an overactive imagination.”
Why admit now? “The Chinese official’s remarks at the December meeting were indirect and somewhat ambiguous, but most of the American delegation in the room interpreted it as a tacit admission and a warning to the U.S. about Taiwan, a former U.S. official familiar with the meeting said.” More, here.
Lastly this week: Haiti is using armed drones to fight gangs. Washington Post: “With the capital of Haiti on the cusp of falling to gangs, authorities in the crisis-racked Caribbean nation” are using lightweight armed drones, whose “emergence has also alarmed analysts, aid workers and other rights groups, who say their use in Haiti’s densely populated capital, Port-au-Prince, adds fuel to a combustible conflict, endangers civilians, complicates the delivery of aid and may violate international law.” Read on, here.
Jesus Christ is King
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