The D Brief: More DOD cuts; Trump’s Putin pivot; N. Korea’s failed launch; Qatar’s gift, accepted; And a bit more.

Space Force is losing 14% of its civilian workers to SecDef Pete Hegseth’s hurry-up effort to cut Pentagon headcount. That’s a higher proportion than the rest of the Defense Department, whose overall civilian workforce Hegseth is trying to cut by five to eight percent in ways that have caused widespread uncertainty and fear among federal employees.

The loss of civilians is a “large hit” because the service heavily relies on them for acquisition, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Tuesday during a Senate Armed Service committee hearing. “I’m worried about replacing that level of expertise in the near term as we try to resolve it and make sure we have a good workforce doing that acquisition.”

Service officials had anticipated losing about 10% of their roughly 5,600 civilians through Hegseth’s early retirement and voluntary-resignation programs. Defense One’s Audrey Decker has more, here.  

The Pentagon’s IT agency expects a 10% cut to its own civilian workforce—and is asking for permission to rehire crucial workers who have already left. The commander of the Defense Information Systems Agency offered an optimistic take on Wednesday: “It’s giving us an opportunity to ruthlessly realign and optimize how we are addressing what is an evolving mission,” Lt. Gen. Paul Stanton said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. 

But Stanton also appeared to suggest the cuts have ejected some people that DISA really needs back. “Things like the multi-partner environment and initiatives like DoDNet are driving our workforce to perform roles that they hadn’t previously,” he said. “And so we are doing a realignment, and we’re going back to the department to ask for what we refer to as a surgical rehiring. We need to hire the right people back into the right positions to then lead us forward.” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports, here.

It’s apparently official: the Pentagon has accepted the gift of a Qatari jet for President Trump’s use, “despite bipartisan concern that accepting a foreign government’s plane is both dangerous and unethical,” Decker reported Wednesday. The $400 million 747 from the Qatari royal family is expected to cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to search for bugs and upgrade for use as Air Force One. 

Don’t forget: This afternoon OpenAI, Scale AI, and representatives from U.S. European Command will join Defense One’s science and tech editor Patrick Tucker to reveal how large language models and other cutting-edge AI tools are reshaping the U.S. military’s approach to China, Russia, and beyond. 

The first installment of Genius Machines 2025 launches today at 2 p.m. ET. For more details on the agenda and registration (which is required, but it’s free), go here.

And this evening, Space Command’s Gen. Stephen Whiting is scheduled to speak in a “fireside chat” at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. That’s slated for 6 p.m. ET. Catch it live on YouTube, here. 

Related reading: 

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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. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1968, the nuclear-powered submarine USS Scorpion (SSN-589) was lost at sea in the North Atlantic for reasons that remain a mystery.  

Trump 2.0

Months after telling voters he would end Russia’s Ukraine war in 24 hours if elected, President Trump is now telling European officials in private that he doesn’t think Vladimir Putin wants to end his invasion and occupation of Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. 

Why it matters: “European leaders had long believed this—but it was the first time they were hearing it from Trump,” European officials told the Journal. “It also ran counter to what Trump has often said publicly, that he believes Putin genuinely wants peace.”

The view from Kyiv: “We need to know who we can count on, and who we can’t. A support package from Europe is coming, and it will be a strong one,” President Volodymir Zelenskyy said this week. “As for the package from the United States—that’s a different story.”

In other White House developments: 

Etc.

North Korea suffered an embarrassing setback during the failed launch of a new warship in front of dictator Kim Jong-un at the northeastern port of Chongjin Wednesday, state-run media reported in an unusual public acknowledgement. “A serious accident occurred in the course of the launch of the destroyer,” KCNA said Wednesday. 

What happened: During a side launch, which Reuters reports was risky given the size of the vessel, North Korea’s “newly built 5,000-ton-class destroyer became unbalanced and was punctured in its bottom sections after a transport cradle on the stern section slid off first and became stuck,” according to the Associated Press, which paraphrased KCNA’s reporting. 

No photos are known to have been released yet, but “South Korean military officials, who were monitoring the ship’s launch with the help of satellite images, said on Thursday that the ship was lying on its side in the water after the failed launch,” the New York Times reports. 

According to KCNA, “After watching the whole course of the accident, the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un made [a] stern assessment, saying that it was a serious accident and criminal act caused by sheer carelessness, irresponsibility and unscientific empiricism which should never occur and could not be tolerated.”

Expert reax: “It’s a shameful thing. But the reason why North Korea disclosed the incident is it wants to show it’s speeding up the modernization of its navy,” Moon Keun-sik of Seoul’s Hanyang University told AP.

Just last month, North Korea launched a similarly-sized ship from its western coastal port of Nampo. That one was “the biggest navy ship North Korea has ever built” and “appeared to have been built with Russian technology,” the Times notes. More, here. 

From the region: In a break from recent tradition, China’s defence minister is expected to miss this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue, hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies next week in Singapore, the Financial Times reported this week. 

And in a big-picture take, the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported on China’s recent rapid advancements in robots, satellites and AI, and how “in some cases [China] is catching up with the U.S.” 

Lastly today, an intriguing read from the world of espionage: “As the Soviet Union Fell, Did the K.G.B. Leave a Gift in Brazil for Today’s Spies?” the New York Times asks after presenting some compelling evidence from a series of reporting trips to Brazil, the U.S., and several countries in Europe. 

At issue: The delicate task of creating a false identity, or rather many of them, for later use in a long game of spycraft and geopolitics. The Soviets appear to have arrived at one particular tactic that turned out to be too good to pass up in the decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Read more about the latest wrinkle in Moscow’s so-called “illegals” program, here. 

Defense One