The D Brief: Protestors ‘a foreign enemy’; DOD DOGE team, ID’d; Trouble for USAF radar plane; Robot navy?; And a bit more.
Standing before troops, Trump called protesters in Los Angeles “a foreign enemy” and “animals” during a speech at a North Carolina Army base Tuesday.
“We will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy, and that’s what they are,” the president said to an audience of soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., Tuesday. “These are animals, but they proudly carry the flags of other countries but they don’t carry the American flag,” the president said. “We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again.”
Worth noting: “President Donald Trump made a series of false claims” during his speech to troops Tuesday, CNN’s Daniel Dale reports in an annotated fact check. “Trump lied again about the 2020 election. He repeated a long-debunked story about a Minnesota National Guard deployment in 2020. He again distorted the history of his first administration’s fight against the ISIS terror group. He revived a fictional tale about immigration during former President Joe Biden’s administration. And he exaggerated the military’s recruiting challenges under Biden. In addition, Trump made a series of vague assertions about the protests in Los Angeles for which he presented no evidence.” More, here.
Mission photo op: Trump’s Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth posted an image of soldiers—unclear precisely who—protecting what a caption claims are immigration officials during an apparent arrest recently, and wrote, “This We’ll Defend” beside the photo Tuesday on social media.
Update: The Pentagon claims its LA deployments will cost $134 million and last 60 days. The deployment of some 4,000 California National Guard and 700 Marines will be funded by the Defense Department’s operations and maintenance budget, acting Comptroller Bryn MacDonnell told lawmakers at a Tuesday hearing of the House appropriations’ defense panel. Military Times has more.
Evolving tasking? The National Guard federalized by Trump over the weekend were originally ordered to protect federal buildings. However, “the Pentagon plans to direct the California National Guard to start providing support for immigration operations,” which “would include holding secure perimeters around areas where raids are taking place and securing streets for immigration agents,” the Associated Press reports.
Developing: Trump officials plan to expand their “tactical” immigration raids to New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, and northern Virginia, MSNBC reported Tuesday.
Coverage continues below the jump…
Welcome to this Wednesday 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 1944, the USS Missouri (BB 63) was commissioned, the last battleship to enter U.S. service.
Trump “is turning the U.S. military against American citizens,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement Tuesday. “Yesterday, we filed a legal challenge to President Trump’s reckless deployment of American troops to a major American city,” he said in nationally-televised address Tuesday evening. “Today, we sought an emergency court order to stop the use of the American military to engage in law enforcement activities across Los Angeles.” A judge set a hearing date for Newsom’s request on Thursday.
“If some of us can be snatched off the streets without a warrant, based only on suspicion or skin color, then none of us are safe,” said Newsom. “Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there.”
A second opinion: “This Is What Trump Does When His Revolution Sputters,” historian Anne Applebaum argued Wednesday for The Atlantic. “The bloodiest, most damaging revolutions have all been shaped by people making the most extreme choices,” she writes. “When the Bolsheviks ran into opposition in 1918, they unleashed the Red Terror. When the Chinese Communists encountered resistance, Mao sent teenage Red Guards to torment professors and civil servants. Sometimes the violence was mere theater, lecture halls full of people demanding that victims recant. Sometimes it was real. But it always served a purpose: to provoke, to divide, and then to allow the revolutionaries to suspend the law, create an emergency, and rule by decree.”
The bigger picture: “Trump’s henchmen have a set of radical, sometimes competing goals, all of which require fundamental changes in the nature of the American state,” Applebaum writes. “The concentration of power in the hands of the president. The replacement of the federal civil service with loyalists. The transfer of resources from the poor to the rich, especially rich insiders with connections to Trump. The removal, to the extent possible, of brown-skinned people from America, and the return to an older American racial hierarchy.”
“But their revolutionary project is now running into reality,” she notes. “More than 200 times, courts have questioned the legality of Trump’s decisions, including the arbitrary tariffs and the deportations of people without due process.” What to watch for now? “At each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier. If not stopped, by Congress or the courts, the Trump revolution will follow that logic too.” Read the rest (gift link), here.
New: Trump ordered Confederate names back on more U.S. Army bases. Service officials raced to comply, accidentally mixing up the name of one Virginia base (Fort Anderson-Pinn-Hill for Fort A.P. Hill) in their announcement Tuesday.
The order covers seven installations, and follows the recent re-re-namings of Forts Bragg and Benning in North Carolina and Georgia, respectively. As with those two bases, administration officials dug through U.S. military history and decorations to find individuals who happen to share last names with Confederate generals including Pickett, Lee, Hood, Gordon, Polk, Rucker, and Hill.
Rewind: Those bases were renamed for various veterans and values in the shadow of the George Floyd protests of 2020. But growing support for the effort began three years before that, in the wake of a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., whose marchers circled Confederate monuments while shouting racist slogans such as “You will not replace us!” In the summer of 2020, the Army began the process to consider new names for the bases. Congress used its 2021 defense policy bill to launch a bipartisan process that convened a panel of experts to consider new names, and those recommendations were announced in 2022 and implemented several months later. But not long afterward, Trump used the 2024 election campaign to proclaim his adoration for the Confederate names, and others in his administration—Pete Hegseth, in particular—joined him in calls to restore those names at all of the affected installations, which are located almost entirely in southern states.
About the newly-recognized veterans: The Army says “Five of them received the Medal of Honor, three received the Distinguished Service Cross and one received the Silver Star.” Read over the entire list of the seven affected bases and their new namesakes, here.
And the discarded names? The Army ignored them in their press release Tuesday. But they can be found in this archived report from the Pentagon before Trump began his second term and launched his campaign against diversity across the federal government.
Silent on these reversals: Congress, including GOP Rep. Don Bacon who told Politico in October, “The law was you had to get rid of the Confederate names, and the commission was to determine what those names should be,” said Bacon, who spearheaded the legislation authorizing the renaming panel. “The law was passed, it’s not going to go backward,” he said just eight months ago.
Update: 76% of Americans (including 52% of Republicans) oppose Trump’s military parade this weekend in Washington. But Trump is unbothered, and in remarks Tuesday even threatened to order the use of force against those who protest during the Army’s parade, which coincides with Trump’s birthday.
Related reading:
Around the services
US Air Force’s nascent radar plane faces the axe. The service’s plan to buy 26 Boeing E-7 Wedgetails may be discarded to fund a Pentagon shift toward space-based ISR, SecDef Hegseth said at a Tuesday hearing of the House appropriations defense subcommittee hearing.
The service has already spent more than $1 billion to develop and begin production of its first two E-7s, which it has long argued are the more capable, more survivable successors to the decades-old E-3 AWACS needed for airborne domain awareness in the Indo-Pacific. Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports, here.
Speaking of Hegseth: NBC News reports that the White House “is looking for a new chief of staff and several senior advisers to support Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after a series of missteps that have shaken confidence in his leadership, but it has so far found no suitable takers, according to four current and former administration officials and a Republican congressional aide.” Read on, here.
DARPA, admirals offer glimpses of the Navy’s robotic future. Navy leaders have often tempered expectations around replacing manned vessels with uncrewed ones. In 2020, for example, acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly suggested that autonomous capabilities might actually increase the need for manned surface vessels. But the pace of technology and the realities of U.S. industrial capacity are opening naval minds.
“I could imagine the battle group eventually becoming completely autonomous,” said Greg Avicola, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, outlining a vision of a Navy strike force built not around an aircraft carrier, but of a “heterogeneous” mix of robotic assets of varying size, role, and capability. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has more, here.
Meet DOGE’s team inside the Defense Department. ProPublica has identified four men installed by defense contractor Elon Musk at the Pentagon:
- Patrick George, 42, a venture capitalist and a Marine, is the DOGE lead at the U.S. Navy, according to emails seen by ProPublica and a person familiar with the matter.
- Jim Hickey, 42, serves as a senior adviser to the defense undersecretary, according to his LinkedIn. He was most recently a director at Mitre, a government research firm.
- Mike Slagh, 40, is the founder of Long Walk Technologies, which aims to connect defense contractors with potential government clients.
- Yinon Weiss, 47, a former Army Special Forces captain, serves as a leader of a DOGE team at the DOD, according to a person familiar with his role.
Read more about each of these men at ProPublica’s DOGE tracker; filter by “Department of Defense” to see the short list.
Lastly today: USAF’s relaxation cubes. Air Force Times: “At dozens of bases across the Air Force, troops are undertaking tried-and-true relaxation techniques — biofeedback, meditation — in shiny mirrored cubes that can project light patterns and even galaxies. The experience, as one researcher put it, is more like a ‘Disney ride’ than a studio or clinical office.” Read on, here.
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