Braxton Taylor
Trump’s costly deportation drive
The United States has at least temporarily stopped using military aircraft to deport people, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing cheaper civilian alternatives that have been known about publicly since at least late January.
For the record: “The DoD has not received a request from the Department of Homeland Security to transport [undocumented immigrants] since March 1, 2025,” a senior defense official said Wednesday. “Military airlift is only one option available to DHS to relocate illegal aliens and the DoD stands ready to continue support with additional fights if they are requested.”
Who’s counting: “The Trump administration has conducted roughly 30 migrant flights using C-17 aircraft and about a dozen on C-130s,” with destinations that include India, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, Honduras, Panama and Guantanamo Bay, the Journal reports. “Three deportation flights to India cost $3 million each,” and “Some flights carried a dozen people to Guantanamo at a cost of at least $20,000 for a migrant.” Those C-17s cost about $28,500 per hour to fly, with C-130s costing as much as $20,756 per hour.
By contrast, “A standard U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight costs $8,500 per flight hour,” but “former ICE officials told the Journal the figure is closer to $17,000 per flight hour for international trips.”
Another consideration: The U.S. military aircraft can’t use Mexican airspace, which adds to costs. That’s because at least so far, “Mexico and some other countries in Latin America haven’t allowed the military flights to land and have instead sent their own aircraft or arranged for deportees to travel on commercial flights,” the Journal reports.
Other possible changes on the horizon: Fewer migrants at Gitmo, and more at Fort Bliss. Rising cost estimates at Guantánamo are forcing the White House to rethink its plans to host detained migrants at the military’s detention facilities in Cuba, NBC News reported Wednesday. Given C-130 transport rates, “for a trip of five to six hours, it cost the Pentagon $207,000 to $249,000 round trip, or $23,000 to $27,000 per detainee,” NBC reports.
Compounding matters for Trump, “the space planned to hold the 30,000 immigrants is far from ready” at Gitmo. As a result, “A scaled-down version of Trump’s Guantánamo plan seems the likeliest outcome,” U.S. officials predicted.
Other stateside sites would likely be available sooner, and those include the sprawling facilities at Fort Bliss, northeast of El Paso, just across the U.S.-Mexico border. Read more, here.
Relatedly, Trump’s active-duty troop deployments to the U.S.-Mexico border region will cost somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion this year, and—if past is prologue—the deployments may have already hurt unit readiness, CQ Roll Call reported Tuesday, citing Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, ranking member on the Armed Services Committee.
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 and Ben Watson. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1945, the Nazis launched their last major offensive of World War II. Just 57 days later, Hitler would be dead while his Third Reich rapidly collapsed around him.
Around the Pentagon
Donald Trump’s decision to pause sharing U.S. intelligence with Ukraine will affect the embattled country’s planning and operations, a Ukrainian military official told Defense One’s Patrick Tucker Wednesday. Neither the duration nor the extent of the pause are clear. A source with knowledge of the decision told Defense One that it applies only to intelligence collected over Russian territory, not on Russian forces in Ukraine.
That means Ukraine “may not have real-time warning when Russian bombers, missiles, and drones start taking off,” one military analyst said. And even if the pause only extended to intelligence sharing on Russian soil, Ukraine’s operations in Kursk would surely be affected, said a former White House official. Read more, here.
Relatedly, “Trump plans to revoke legal status of Ukrainians who fled to US,” Reuters reported Thursday. For what it’s worth, the White House said Thursday that no decision has been made just yet, according to Newsweek.
New: The Pentagon is prototyping an artificial-intelligence program to help plan military campaigns, test battle scenarios, anticipate threats, and more, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker and Jennifer Hlad reported Wednesday.
It’s called Thunderforge, it will be made by Scale AI with help from Anduril and Microsoft, and it’s intended to enable commanders “to navigate evolving operational environments” using “advanced large language models (LLMs), AI-driven simulations, and interactive agent-based wargaming,” the Defense Innovation Unit said Wednesday in a statement.
The final product will go to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and U.S. European Command to help with “campaign development, theater-wide resource allocation, and strategic assessment,” according to DIU. Read on, here.
Space Force hopes it gains from Hegseth’s budget shift: The Space Force’s vice chief hopes his service gets upgrades with some of the $50 billion per year that Pentagon leaders want to shift around in upcoming budgets, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported from the Ronald Reagan Institute’s National Security Innovation Base Summit on Wednesday.
“We are woefully underfunded in ‘protect and defend’” systems, Gen. Michael Guetlein, the vice chief of space operations, told the audience. Meantime, officials are trying to assess which existing systems can be replaced or discarded “to make sure that the capabilities that we deliver at the end of the day are going to be the most optimal, most effective,” he said.
Simultaneously, the Space Force is also bracing for personnel cuts. About 5,400 Defense Department employees are to be fired in the first step in what will ultimately be a five-to-eight-percent reduction of the civilian workforce.
“We haven’t let anybody go yet, so we haven’t felt the impacts, but there will be some impacts,” Guetlein said. The Space Force is made up of about 9,500 troops and about 5,600 civilians. “So any hit to that small 15,000 workforce is going to be felt.”
Additional reading:
DOGE and its discontents
Oklahoma Republican Sen. Lankford is sounding the alarm over Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts to probationary employees at Tinker Air Force Base and the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant.
“Tinker cannot operate if we lose 600 civilian employees there,” Lankford told state reporters in a phone call Wednesday. “We will not be able to keep aircraft in the air long term for the Air Force. That is really important for us to be able to have. The same thing in McAlester. If we remove a thousand civilians there, we won’t be able to operate.”
A more organized precedent: Lankford cited previous major defense cuts under POTUS42 in the 1990s, saying, “I still go back to President Clinton when he was reinventing government back in that time period, they removed 400,000 federal workers and jobs. But they were doing it in a way that’s pretty strategic and a little bit at a time—they did it out over eight years,” he said. The Trump-Musk mass firings, by contrast, have taken place over just eight weeks.
He also said agency secretaries are now trying to prevent Musk cuts that could mean people have to be rehired in the not-so-distant future, saying, “Just because a person’s in that seat and they’ve been in that seat less than a year doesn’t mean that they need to be removed.” Read more at Oklahoma’s KFOR news, here.
Related reading:
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